Trenches

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Gerald wondered if it was only another one of his delusions when at first he noticed the unmistakable glow from his own cabin just down the way. He grew suspicious right away, knowing that the place was long abandoned. He supposed somebody could have purchased or inherited the property after all these years, but why now?

Nobody had so much as visited that cabin since he moved into his own five years ago. He wondered if anybody alive other than himself even knew it existed. He had visited the old, decrepit place once before to be sure that it truly was empty. The vines and thorn bushes creeping up its rotting wood exterior had been the first indication of abandonment. The smudged, cracked windows were the second. The thick green moss sprouting on its damp, caving roof the third. He needed to see no more to come to the simple conclusion: The forest had begun reclaiming the log hut long before Gerald had moved in down the hill. It had been uninhabitable even then.

Nature did have a way of taking things, Gerald knew. He knew it better than most. But so did people. The world takes all, he often mused. That, and Anything left in nature for too long will eventually be claimed by it. Ironically, people haunted like Gerald was often faced the challenge head-on, moving into some remote cabin in the woods to live out the rest of their days in seclusion.

The candle’s glow was muddled greatly by the state of the cabin’s windows, but Gerald could still make out exactly what it was. There was the heart of the flame, small and teardrop-shaped yet devastating if fed; and then there was its familiar flickering glow as the flame danced on the end of its wick.

Gerald knew he needed to investigate the light. Reluctantly, he slipped on his old combat boots and jacket, grabbed his solar-powered flashlight and his hunting rifle to be safe, and headed out into the starless, overcast night. Not even the beams from the full moon were penetrating the thick cloud cover. It reminded him of the war, being back in those trenches—nothing but the dark and the enemies within.

When he stepped outside into the crisp Autumn air, Gerald immediately grew uneasy for reasons he could not initially identify. He found it difficult to explain to himself the sudden feeling of dread that clung to the pit of his stomach. One moment he was eager to find out who was moseying around up the hill in the old run-down cottage. The very next, his gut was telling him to turn around and go back inside. Lock the door behind him.

No, he thought to himself. He had to see it through. A stranger was lurking too close to his property and he was going to get the answers he needed for his own peace of mind. Otherwise, he would never get any sleep tonight.

He took a deep breath, exhaled. One step forward. Inhale, exhale. Two steps forward. Despite the ominous darkness, he could still see his own plume of breath in front of him on the exhales. When he stepped on a twig—it’s snap may as well have been a gunshot it was so loud—he realized what had him so on edge. The silence. It was eerily quiet. Unnerving.

In all the years Gerald had lived alone out here he had never experienced such a complete lack of sound. Nature was always awake, humming with life and death. This was unnatural. Not a gentle breeze to rustle the foliage, not a single cricket singing its song; nor an owl screeching into the night; nor the chattering of bats chasing insects; nor the buzzing of those insects as they zipped by his ears into the flashlight’s beam. Nothing but that eerie silence. If not for the sound of his own two feet disrupting the cool, leaf-littered forest floor, he might have thought he was just going deaf.

Gerald had always heard the saying that when the forest goes quiet, it means that there is a predator afoot. He never believed it until now, when he was experiencing the phenomenon for himself. Much like when you are certain that monsters aren’t real, but as soon as the lights go out they begin to materialize in every corner; Gerald was beginning to believe that there was something in these woods with him that considered him prey. He gripped his rifle tighter.

The candle in the window continued to emit its soft, blurred glow through the dingy window panes. Gerald couldn’t take his eyes off of it, afraid that if he blinked for even a second it might disappear. It wouldn’t be the first time he saw something out here that turned out to be a product of his own overactive, lonely imagination. Isolation did have a way of driving people mad after all, he knew.

His heart rate was picking up with each new step he took that brought him closer to the deteriorated cabin. His lungs began to feel as though they could not expand all the way, could not take in enough of the brisk evening air. His stomach twisted into knots, telling him to give it up. Go back to his own hut. Worry about it in the morning when the forest was bright and loud and less dangerous.

Sweat was brimming on his forehead and under his arms by now. His hands were clamming up and trembling as he traipsed further onward, to the point he started losing his grip on the gun and the light. He had to stop for a moment to wipe his hands off on his pants. He then balled them into fists, digging the nails into his palms to stop the shaking, to center himself. He was already halfway to the old cottage, he couldn’t turn back now. Besides, he had confronted far worse foes than a candle lit in the window of a deserted lodge.

He re-shouldered his rifle, held the flashlight over his other shoulder. It would be difficult to aim the weapon accurately one-handed, but what other choice did he have? It was pitch black out there.

Finally at the top of the hill, Gerald noticed the light in the old cabin’s derelict windows had started to change form it seemed. His skin went cold as the flame metamorphosed into an unnatural shape. He called out into darkness Hello, but the only response was the dead silence. He strained his ears listening for something, anything to make a sound.

It was when he heard his own voice recited back to him Hello, that Gerald froze, paralyzed by a feeling of impending doom that anchored him in place, his heart weighing ten tonnes in his chest.

It hadn’t been like any echo, as if shouting into a void and having reverberation bounce back through the emptiness. No, this was different. The voice was his but not his and it wasn’t an echo, but a mimicry. There was something inhuman to the pitch. Like the way you can tell the difference between a human saying hello and a parrot saying hello. There is a discernible difference no matter how closely the bird is able to replicate human vocal patterns.

The catalyst that eventually unmoored Gerald from his fixed position was what he witnessed next in that window. The flame’s shape shimmered and contorted until it looked almost human—almost—before it was snuffed out in an instant before his eyes. Gerald’s flashlight died in the same moment.

He took a step back, stammered out the words who’s there, and after the briefest pause was hearing his voice an octave higher repeating back to him, who’s there? Something about the sound was so disturbing that it gave him gooseflesh and turned his sweat cold. Screw this, he thought to himself as he about-faced and took off back towards his own cabin in the total darkness. He dropped the now useless flashlight so that he could utilize both hands for his rifle. Whatever was out here with him, he had a feeling he couldn’t afford to miss if he had to take a shot at it.

As he stumbled through the brush down the hill, Gerald felt an unseen presence just behind him. His own mind began to work against him, taunting him with images of what might be pursuing him in the darkness, sending his heart rate into the two hundreds. He didn’t dare turn around. He almost tripped several times, unable to see much of the ground beneath him. His legs felt as though they could not run fast enough, reminding him once again of the war—of all the soldiers he couldn’t save because he was not fast enough and all the ones he killed because he was.

When he reached his cabin, Gerald practically fell through the door. He slammed it shut behind him and slid the locks into place, his chest heaving uncontrollably. He heard a sound in the corner behind him and whipped around, rifle raised and finger poised on the trigger. His mouth was dry, his knees weak. He squinted into the thick dark, but could not make out any shapes in the empty room.

What was alarming was that there were no shapes in the room at all. Not his furniture, nor any of his other belongings. The smell was off as well. Mildew and rot replaced what had been cedar wood and old leather mere moments ago. His breath caught in his throat. The hut was empty, devoid of any personal prefects Gerald had possessed. He took a step forward and the floor gave way, his foot crushing through the rotten wood up to his ankle. He caught himself before he fell to the floor, noticed half of the ceiling was hanging down in front of him in shambles. He didn’t know how it was possible, but he believed he was inside of the old abandoned lodge.

A light suddenly came on outside and Gerald ran to the window, confused and afraid. The window was difficult to see out of. He wiped at the glass with his jacket sleeve, but it didn’t do much to clear away the years upon years of grime and lack of upkeep.

It did enough though. Gerald could faintly see outside now, the dark out there not quite as thick as the dark within the cabin. That was when Gerald was faced with a horrifying sight. The light outside was a flashlight—the one he had dropped to the ground as he fled. It was drawing nearer to the window he was at with each passing second. He couldn’t pry himself away. He watched as it came closer, closer, until it was inches from the window. The flashlight was then lowered and Gerald saw the thing he had been running from. His jaw dropped involuntarily, almost into the shape of a scream. His eyes bulged from their sockets. Every drop of blood froze in his veins.

Staring back at him from the other side of the grimy old panes was his own face. A face that was his but not his. Not a mirror image, but an uncanny resemblance. There was something inhuman about the features. It was as if somebody had tried to replicate his face with clay and they almost nailed it, but didn’t. The other Gerald smiled at him from outside of the old, abandoned cabin. His brain tied itself into knots trying to comprehend what was happening. Then he remembered his old mantra. Anything left in nature for too long will eventually be claimed by it. He had been hiding out in these woods for too long, isolated from humanity, running from his past.

He hurried back to the door, but the locks were rusted shut, the door misshapen on its hinges from all its weathered years. He hammered away at them with the stock of his rifle. They clunked to the damp, mildewy floor and he wrenched open the door. It took a few good yanks before it came open and what was on the other side waiting for him made Gerald cry out in frustration. It was a wall of hard-packed soil. The Earth had already swallowed that side of the cabin.

He ran back to the window where he had seen the entity that looked like him but not on the other side of the glass. The light that had just been flooding through the window suddenly went out, so Gerald had to feel for the glass. His hands skimmed over the worn, splintering walls frantically. When he found the window with his hands, he smashed it with the butt of his gun. The shattering was deafening. Carefully, he felt for the opening he had just made. What he felt instead made his blood run cold.

The smell of deep Earth saturated the air as Gerald dug at the opening, his fingernails clogging with the damp subsoil that replaced his mimic on the other side of the window frame. He dug at the hard-packed soil until his nail beds ached and were surely bleeding—he wouldn’t know for sure because he couldn’t see a damned thing.

Once again he was reminded of the war. He thought about all of the dead soldiers on both sides. Enemies and friends, all just people fighting for the things they believed in. Neither side inherently wrong, he had come to realize, just wrong in each others’ eyes.

Some of the people he killed no doubt had families back home. They had hobbies, passions, dreams just like he did. They were convinced that they were fighting on the right side of history, just like he was. Now all he had was PTSD and a bad case of alcoholism. Two things that when paired can do irreparable damage.

All those people who went to war for a cause they thought was bigger than themselves—a just cause—either left that battlefield forever haunted or never left the battlefield at all.

The number of casualties from both sides could not be understated. There were already hundreds dead in those trenches and by the time the war was over there was not enough money left over to haul the rest of the deceased back home.

Gerald helped his remaining comrades haul the fallen into the trenches. He watched as friends were piled in with enemies, all dead for a cause that may have been their own or someone else’s. In the end it didn’t even matter, did it? They all ended up in the ground anyway.

The mounds of dirt that had once filled the trenches were bulldozed right back on top of all those bodies, covering up the mass grave. Back home, each fallen soldier buried at the bottom of those trenches was labeled as MIA, though Gerald knew the truth. They were not missing, they were just not seen as worth the cost and effort to bring them all home.

Gerald never told a soul about it. He simply packed up a few belongings and moved out into the forest, as far away from humanity as he could get. He always wondered if things could have turned out differently. If he had spoken up, refused to leave his fellow soldiers lying in those ditches, would he still have so much regret and self-hatred? He could never know the answer.

He would never be able to comprehend what was happening to him now, but he considered that it might be nature’s way of collecting the debt that Gerald believed he owed to his comrades. Eventually he would run out of oxygen down here. He closed his eyes and imagined he was back in the trenches with his brothers and sisters in arms, soon to be buried and forgotten by the world just like them. He had never seen true complete darkness before now.

Nature did indeed claim all things within it eventually, Gerald accepted, his old mantra ringing true in his final moments. All that was left was the hard-packed ground, the endless dark, and the memory of his own unnatural face staring back at him from the other side of the window. The same words repeated over and over in his head. The world takes all.