Why I Don't Go Hiking Anymore

"The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window.”

“Don’t bother.” I can’t help speaking up. How long I’ve sat here, listening to Augustus’s twaddle.

Augustus looks across the bar at me, all bull-faced and stern. The girls he’s been trying to impress pivot on their seats. Waiting in the wings, the other “gentlemen” of our Crossbones Club pike up. Someone dares to interrupt Lord Augustus at the start of another tedious story?

The gothic candles cast red light over us: the perfect ambience for my showdown with Augustus. This is overdue. Like wolves, young men of our station vie for dominance, impressing no one but their weaker friends, who then repeat the cycle. See, I understand the pointlessness of this exercise, but I’m not immune to nature.

“Sebastian speaks at last,” Augustus proclaims. He tries to laugh, but his eyes are narrowed on me. Demon-light makes his face scarlet. It makes his harem into witches.

The clubhouse is a basement under the university. When the first among us found it, it was a mildewy hole – a place only roaches could love. These last years, Augustus’s parents have contributed a significant fund to see his dream clubhouse realised. Now, the red light of our candles catches on antique suits of armour, the fangs of stuffed bears and boars, a shelf bloated with archaic volumes. All just dressings for Augustus’s role as master of the macabre. See, he fancies himself something of an expert in the unnatural.

He knows nothing.

I drink my beer, weathering his glare. The others are jittery. They’ve started their own rumours about me since that day I came back from the mountains.

They too know nothing. I’ve done an exceptional job of building tension. I’ve noticed them watching me at every meeting, expecting me to crack and reveal my story. No, instead, I’ve listened to their own vapid attempts at explaining the occult and the unexplainable. On nights like this, when Augustus invites girls here, the stories become even worse. It’s like he thinks women are incapable of reaching his intellectual level.

I digress. The frustration has been corroding away at me for weeks now.

“Maybe he has nothing to say after all,” Augustus says.

I clear my throat. Yes, it is time to reveal the truths I have seen.

“Pass me the sceptre,” I say.

One of the runts at the back hurries to me. Harrison, I think his name is. He hands me the sceptre – a long length of ivory, carved with the faces of demons, apparently excavated somewhere in Egypt by friends of Augustus’s family. The speaker must hold the sceptre. A tradition Augustus himself has been lax with of late.

I look at it blandly, but the members who snuck close to me flinch away. Augustus’s bullish smirk falters.

So, then, let me tell my story of the mountains. Let me tell you all why I shall never leave the cities and roads between them. I shall never again venture to the dark and forgotten corners of this world where we have forced the things we cannot comprehend.

The Motley Mountains are famous in our home state, though largely unknown beyond. I’ve grown up in their shadows, and many of my favourite memories involve the woodland that drapes down their slopes like a green cowl. This was all before my father committed suicide and my mother was imprisoned, before my brother, Isiah, ran away and never came back.

“Sebastian, I never knew…”

Hush while I tell the story.

When the holidays came, I would always hike up the mountains. I suppose I considered it a ritual – some form of tribute to my parents, who loved the wilderness.

I wandered in the shade of tall trees, and the shadows over me were like the eyes of my parents watching from heaven. I’d been walking in the woods for some time when my skin began to itch. Something was watching.

Ahead of me, the ground sloped gently upwards as the trees marched up the mountainside. On this day, a thin sheen of mist cloaked the bark and needles underfoot. And, as I walked, the mist thickened around my ankles.

I’m not prone to superstition or hysteria though. I kept on walking. A fine drizzle filtered down through the pine needles, and their aroma floated up from the earth. I don’t mind the rain either. Some of you might do well to treat nature as I do – not as a fickle ally or enemy, but as something utterly indifferent to humankind.

As I stopped for a drink from my thermos, I noticed a tuft of ashen fur clinging to the side of a tree. An albino deer? Or someone’s dog? Something about it made my stomach curl tight.

I forgot it almost as soon as I’d finished my drink. A mile or so further, the mist became a blanket, up to my waist now. I waded on, determined to hike another hour, hoping sunlight would return to chase the chill from my skin. I wasn’t scared, understand, but the mist seemed more and more bizarre by the moment.

It roiled around the tree trunks. Little waves crested over fallen logs. My foot slipped as I watched them. I landed on my elbows, stones grazing the flesh.

I thought I heard someone laugh.

My heart felt as if someone had it in a vice. I was on all fours, paralysed, and heat spread through my body. All around me, the fog writhed and slithered. I sprang to my feet, but it had grown thicker while I’d been down. I made the decision to head back.

An hour of walking later, and the trees began to look so similar to each other my heart dropped slowly into my gut. I told myself it was just that evolutionary unease humans have for the woods. Then my mind went on a tangent: just why were our ancestors so scared of the dark woods?

The fog rose to my chest. Damp permeated through my shirt, mixing with sweat. The scent of pine needles and soil was overwhelming now. The shadows falling over me no longer felt like the reassuring gaze of my parents.

I could only see as far as you sit now, Augustus. The trees rose from the fog like the broken towers of an ancient civilisation. Further out, they became nothing but silhouettes. I took out my compass, drank from my thermos, but my hands were shaking.

The compass needle spun crazed. I took a few steps forward, and realised I was walking uphill again.

I stopped, the familiar chill sinking into my bones. Someone called my name from the woods.

I turned, and the voice called again, soft but insistent. I would’ve recognised it even in a roaring crowd. It was my brother.

“Isiah!” I called.

The voice called again, further into the fog. I tore after it, leaving my rucksack in a heap. My every thought turned to finding my brother. My imagination showed me how we’d embrace again, and I’d no longer have to be alone in the world.

My legs were sore, the muscles burning. I staggered against a tree.

“Sebastian!” Now, his voice was full of terror. “Sebastian, where are you?”

“I’m coming,” I said, and forced myself to run on, though the mist and drizzle made the ground treacherous.

In the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a figure peek from behind a tree. I ignored it as a figment of my imagination at first, because it was too tall to be Isiah, or any human.

“Sebastian, help me!”

I started to run again, slipping and scrambling on wet leaves and bark. My brother’s voice distorted, bouncing from the trees. He kept calling for me.

At some point, I heard the footfalls behind me. I ran, but they remained always a step behind me. My brother had gone quiet, and my heartbeat filled my ears. I didn’t dare stop.

“Why run?”

I fell. My face smashed down into the dirt. I sensed things moving around me.

When I looked up, the mist was obscuring everything, turning the sky alien. I couldn’t even see the trees of the mountain forest. What I did see were three figures looming out of the fog like pillars.

I’m not ashamed to admit my bladder let go when I saw them. I was paralysed on my knees, and these things reared above me. The fog hid them well, but I saw enough to tip me close to madness. These were things that shouldn’t exist, not in this world, not in this reality.

They were tall and gaunt, but robes of rotting leaves made them wide. The mist swirled around them like a veil. It was hard to tell where their bodies ended and the woods began.

I glimpsed faces close enough to human, terrifyingly inhuman at the same time. Their eyes were sunken holes. With the stench of pines and decay rolling from them came a primal terror. I have never felt so helpless. Not even when I found my father’s body.

They revelled in my fear. I knew it. I could sense their glee emanating from them.

“You are scared,” said the one in the middle, the tallest.

I could only gibber silently. They were pleased enough at that.

One of them stepped forward. It had my father’s face, but his smile was too wide for a human, and his teeth were jagged stubs. I recoiled, but couldn’t stand. My legs were frozen to the ground.

“Would you like me to forgive you, Sebastian?” My heart thundered as it spoke in my father’s voice. I could see the bullet glinting through the hole in his head. “I won’t, not until you follow me.”

“You are a coward, Sebastian,” said another thing, stepping forward with my brother’s face. “As if you’d really run to save me. You wanted me gone, remember?”

My mouth was dry. I could only make a gagging noise.

The third stepped forward, and I dropped my eyes to the forest floor. It wore no mask, and I didn’t want to see. God help me, I couldn’t bear to see!

“Let me tell you when you will die, Sebastian,” it said in its undisguised, rasping voice.

I look up at the members of the Crossbones Club. The girls have scattered, probably to find a better party somewhere else. Even some of the veterans of our club have left.

The rest stare at me, their eyes made into hollow pits by the flickering of our red candles. Some have their mouths open. Augustus has gone very pale. Then again, I’m probably the only one in the club who’s never said too much about his life outside of uni.

Looking around at them, I find myself weary of talking. Most likely, they’ll convince themselves it’s another scary story. They’ll lie awake, wondering if they heard something calling them from outside the window – probably the wind though, they’ll tell themselves – and they’ll pull the blankets tighter and sleep. Because humanity rules this world. Nothing unexplainable is permitted.

“That Sebastian tells a good story,” they’ll say. “Almost got me, that one about the things in the woods.”

Augustus might agree. But I don’t care for their opinion. There’s not much I care for now.

“Anyway,” I finish, “that’s why I don’t go hiking anymore.”

I can’t even walk near the edge of the woods. I feel eyes on me when I stray near enough, and sometimes I glimpse figures hiding behind the trees.

I ran before they could tell me the date of my death. I ran until I collapsed on the outskirts of town, and had to sit on a park bench for an hour until I got my breathing under control.

No one asks though. There’s some scattered applause, then Augustus calls an end to the night. He sidles up beside me as I take a long swig of beer. I pass him the sceptre, but he accepts it reluctantly, and is quick to throw it down.

“When is it then?” he asks.

I shrug. “I don’t know. I ran away.”

Augustus licks his lips. He pushes himself away from the bar, and there’s a slightly mad smile on his face. “I’m going to go look for these bastards.”

I don’t stop him. He’s drunk on the idea of encountering something truly unknown. With a final grin, he ventures out into the world.

I’m left alone in the Crossbones Club’s bunker. I’ve decided I’ll wait here a while, maybe crash on one of the mattresses down here for the night.

It’s been an hour since Augustus left. He just started calling to me from outside.