Walkers of the Dawnland

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window, my desperate beacon in the stillness.

Fingers fumbled to strike the fifth match, frozen and numb in the darkness, I called out,

“Lina, if you are there, please... the wards must hold.” Still, the silence of the dark.

Glowing flame twitched in agitation from my breath misting into the winter air. Her cedar cabin was as lifeless as the dead world. “Damnit!” I whispered into the shadows, candlelight bouncing wildly at icy strained breaths. They were close, They had to be. I closed my eyes, the nostalgia of the softwood and pine needles bringing me back to a summer long gone.

***

Somehow, I had lost my way in the woods, bounding through fields of sweet grass bordered with wild berries. Thirsty and breathless, with a cloud of black flies floating around me in an aura, I found a stone wall, green and tumbling with time. It was there that I met her.

My father and most of the neighbors would cut away the rusted barbed fencing that traced the walls, but she was pulling the rough fencing out of the earth; straightening it, and standing it back up. I approached her slowly. A stout old woman, with medium length curly gray hair, large round eye glasses, and a straw sun hat, she was hunched within the tangle of bramble and iron wire, bracing a boot on a stone.

“Hello.” I managed, timidly.

She stopped to wipe her brow with a cheerful smile, all radiant and wrinkles, the sunbeams peaking through the trees catching the twinkle in her eye. She looked so warm and inviting, and my heart had still not stopped fluttering like a bird from running around in a panic, trying to find my way. But the knots in my stomach began to untwist from her smile. “Did you get lost out here? Come on over and give me a hand.”

Without a thought, I jumped to the wall to help her, minding the barbs in the fence. I had stepped over the ones in the fields behind my home plenty of times, and carefully lifted and passed the pieces up to her as we worked.

“I'm Lina. You're very kind to help me.”

I remember staring at her face for a long moment, wondering why she had not asked my name. “You're like my Grandmother.” I blundered.

Her laughter was so bright that it made me giggle too. “I mean, you look like her! Kind of! Well you seem nice like her!”

“I will take that as a compliment dear. And where is your Grandmother now?”

It is very easy to tell strangers a loved one is gone.

Lina walked me home that day on the old cattle trails. She was very easy to talk to. She pointed to birds and told me their names. She stopped to admire a butterfly; pointing at the markings of its tiny amber striping and black rimmed wings. I watched her with fascination, soaking in the little facets of her knowledge. She even stopped to take a cutting of a very particular purple flower and tuck it away into a cloth in her apron. By the time we had reached the field behind my home, I had decided that I very much liked Lina.

But she would not bring me up to my door, to talk to my father or mother. She crouched down in the field before me and said, “A lot of people don't like seeing me around Abby, because I'm different.” She stroked my hair and made her way back to the woods. I walked inside and made excuses for being late.

I didn't have to tell my father who it was that had brought me home; watching his eyes narrow as they followed her silhouette to the treeline.

I remembered, that I hadn't told Lina my name.

Lina was standing alongside a pine, etching a symbol of something into its bark with a chisel when I discovered her again, some weeks later nearer my home.

“What are you doing?” I asked, trying to make out the carving in the side of the tree as I sidled up next to her.

“Just in case.” She puffed a bit as she chipped away.

I tried again for the answer that would make sense; “In case of what?”

She stopped to beam down at me, warm and gentle. Her voice a soothing quiet, “In case for winter.”

I felt that she wasn't explaining it properly, or that I wasn't asking it properly. Being a ten year old wasn't getting me anywhere. I opted to follow along and watch. And so I did, for as long as Lina allowed. For the rest of the afternoon we walked the woods, her chiseling symbols into trees, for what purpose I did not know, what symbols I could not say. But I followed and I remembered.

Each summer I spent my mornings ducking out into the fields behind the house, springing into the tall shadowy rows of pines, bounding down the lanes of pine needles, leaping over mossy stumps, chasing long rays of sun out into the meadows into Lina's flowery fields. Her wild gardens flush with vegetables and herbs; I would stop to pick something sweet or spicy to taste with the dewy grass between my toes, the humid sun and cicadas bearing down the full strength of the day while a hare would flash across my path, wild clover in its wake.

And then I would cross the trail over the cool brook, trickling into a shaded pond, where Lina would be tending to her main gardens. Where she would teach me the secrets of flora and fauna. It had been five years now. One day, we sat eating cucumbers from her garden beneath the tendrils of the willow while a Mockingbird sang it's whistling notes in between its mimics of the cicada calls.

“What do you think of the Mockingbird, Abby?”

My mouth was full of cucumber. “Huh? They're really interesting aren't they? They're actually quite pretty.” I glanced up at it, listening for a moment. “ I like their song.”

Lina nodded, studying me,“Which song?”

I thought for a moment. “I think both. Their own song is pretty, but their mimicry is so neat.”

She looked at the Mockingbird with me, “I suppose you're right.”

Lina passed me more slices of the cucumber on a wooden board. It was so crunchy, fresh from the garden, and smelled so refreshing. I stretched, admiring the splash of wildflowers across the water and the blue sky overhead, “Mmm, I don't ever want this to change Lina. Things are so perfect like this. I love it here.”

“But you know I will have to go away sometime, Abby.” She said grimly, looking somewhere that I couldn't see, eyes lost in whatever emotions she was feeling. I wasn't ready for that conversation.

“Not for a long time, okay?” I held her hand, it was wrinkled, but still warm. She patted my hand on hers and smiled.

***

I had tried to keep up with her gardens when she disappeared. I had tried to find relatives. But no one in the community would help, not even my parents. I learned the rumors as I had grown up. Crazy Hag, Old Witch in the Woods. The Embden Witch. But all she had ever shown me was kindness. She knew more than they did; a lonely old woman with lonely old thoughts. And now she was gone. I clutched at the tightness in my chest, my vision blurred again, temples aching.

I couldn't remember the last time I had slept.

And all she wanted to do was protect this ungrateful little town. I kicked something aluminum in the stillness of the dark cabin, shaking me back to the present. It rattled and rolled. “No no no.”

The cracking of trees in the distance; large thudding and booms, quick and splitting in the cold. Crack, split, thwack. Moving in a straight line to where I stood in the candlelight before the black windowpane covered in frost. Frozen in place and breathless I thought, what would she would do. Her ghost whispered in my ear, strained and panicked, “Cover your ears Abby, Now!”

I crouched down, balling up the army green nylon sleeves of my jacket, stuffing as much material as possible into my ears with tight fists to muffle the sound coming, and shut my eyes. The howl was terrible; a hellish beast's roar, maddened and echoing. I could feel the cedar splitting around me. I trembled in a ball as the roar penetrated the winter, the warding symbols cracking in hazy vision behind closed eyes as my world went black.

***

“So, what are they, then? These things you're marking the trees for and stuff?”

Lina glanced over her shoulder at me, then cast her eyes away in thought, deciding on her words. She set her watering can down and dusted her hands on her knees, straightening to stare at me.

“An old evil. Something that has always been, and most likely always will be.”

“How do you know so much about these things? Everything?” I followed her through the garden as she tended to pruning through the path.

“I am old, you know things when you're old.” She had said it so matter-of-factly, but I fought back, “Mr. Zimmerman down the road doesn't even know to put his chickens in at night and he's seventy seven, Dad said he was complaining about owls again.”

“Yes well, just because we have time doesn't mean we know how to make the best of it” Lina sighed and patted my head, “a good lesson to learn now.”

We tended the mint in peaceful silence for some time. But the questions rolled in my mind. “What are they called, what do they look like?”

Lina hesitated while she plucked some leaves into the the woven basket on her arm, and continued pruning for awhile. Finally she spoke again, “It doesn't matter what they're called. The Wabanaki people have given them so many names. They all mean the same thing.”

She quieted again as we walked to the yew tree behind her cabin, its thick base twisting into complicated boughs and branches of bright poisonous needles, and beneath it the ground painted with the butter yellow of St. John's Wort with its soft sage stalks. Here she stopped to run her hands gently through the flowers, thoughtfully.

“They are lost souls, Abby. What once was human is gone, tainted. What is left is only evil.”

I watched her hand on the flowers, “But how did it happen, where do they come from?”

“Some say that they are cursed, cannibalization, greed for flesh. Ice giants come from the north, perhaps from cursed evil Shamans of the old tribes. But they are here now. And so am I.” She paused, looking at me in concern. “Do you understand why I'm telling you this?”

I nodded solemnly. I didn't know if I believed it or not, but she never gave me a reason not to trust her. She had become family to me. “You called them The Ones that Walk in the Woods.”

“That's right.” She stared at the yew tree, its boughs holding a quiet shade over us. “There are woods you must never walk in, in winter.”

***

My hands felt cold, pain searing into them from having gone numb. Someone was shouting. I felt the biting air at my skin. My eyes fluttered into focus, I could see a dim orange light cracking through a broken window pane that sat in empty space, the walls of the cabin splintered and exposed to the sky.

I peeled myself off the floor to my knees to gawk at the sky above me, a light mist of snow dropping into my hair, new dawn's light illuminating Lina's cabin, wrecked by the terror that came for me.

Most of her belongings were still in place. The desk sat intact in front of the window, still locked. I still didn't know where the key was. For four years I had been too scared to ask myself if there was truth in her stories, or worse, if they had been the death of her.

The shouting in the distance broke my train of thought as he called out again. Teetering to my legs, I looked over the wreckage of cedar planks that once were walls, searching for the voice, and found gashes that raked through the wood of the cabin. Monstrous in size, they were violent scars that spanned the remainder of the building. My mind whirred as I tried to make sense of them; stepping closer towards the deep carvings tracing down the inner wall, I brushed my fingertips along the line of the raked out cedar. Was it hot to the touch, or were my hands freezing, I wondered.

“Hey didn't you hear me? Are you alright? Jesus, What the hell happened to this place?” Ben Gaffers came into view, visibly exasperated, with snow wetting his dark blonde hair and the cold on his red cheeks apparent. He had graduated three years before me and had gone to a different school district; we were practically strangers, but I was relieved to see him.

“Ben? Hey, uh yeah I'm not really sure... Guess it was in rough shape.” I lied. There was nothing I could say to anyone other than Lina about what was going on, not right now.

“Well you probably shouldn't be out here anyhow. It's twenty degrees now and I saw your mom at the gas station, she seemed pretty worried about where you were.” He had his hands in his Carhart jacket and was peering over what was left of the wall, inspecting the damage of the cabin with increasingly curious eyes. “I uh, know the Old Witch was important to you Abby, I'm not trying to be...”

“Well you are. Her name is Lina. Why are you even out here.” I climbed over the wall in a huff, ignoring the claw marks on the outer side, and walked past him stiffly.

“I was heading out to the lake to check traps, figured you might be out here.”

“So you brought your sled?” I asked, walking past the frozen pond, the crust of the snow making it hard to keep a straight path.

“Yeah it's back up on the main trail, gotta walk a bit but it's not too bad. Are you okay?” He was a few feet behind, but caught on to my ragged breathing, my unsteady gait.

“I'm good, just had a bad night. And I think I'm over winter.” We passed the frozen brook, its faint trickle masked in delicate icicles glossing over its edges.

He let out a chuckle. “What, you gone soft? No more crashing ski doos into brush piles?”

“That was one time!” I felt my cheeks grow hot, pushing an overreaching sapling on the trail out of my way, letting its elasticity snap back at him in defiance.

“Or the time with that tree...” I had wanted to defend myself, but the sudden dread that welled up was stronger than the cold. In the dead of winter, even the trees creak, the black caps follow with calls of their fee-bees and a tufted titmouse echoes its harsh tiska- say in the rustling of the pines. But all had become still.

“Ben we should get moving,” I turned to him, but he was gone. The light of the dawn was gone too.

***

“So what do these symbols mean?” I had drawn them on some of the sketch paper on Lina's table in front of her window as the sun went down while she kneaded dough on her butcher block.

“They mean to stay away. They are warding symbols for the Old Ones. As long as I'm here, those will hold.” Lina continued to press her thumbs into the dough, folding, in and out. I admired her for a few minutes.

“You're so strong Lina. What would we do without you!” I rested my chin on my fist, beaming at her. But she stopped so abruptly that I dropped my hand, dumbfounded by her change. Her face suddenly somber, she disappeared to the back of her cabin, returning with an unassuming key, bringing it to her desk. When she sat down in front of me, she held a black candle. She bit her finger, bright red blood rushed from the wound and fell to the candle, beading burgundy tears from the wick onto the wax. I remember thinking of the pain it must have made for her to do that to herself, but her face was stone. As she set it on the sill before her desk at the window, she looked back at me, a fierceness in her wrinkled face.

“When I am gone, Abby, that candle is the last ward you have. Remember what I have taught you.”

She disappeared that winter.

***

Every part of what she taught me screamed for me to run. But I saw the crimson on the snow where he had stood, and couldn't help but to call out; “Ben!”

I was answered with a sound that made me feel as if though my stomach were stretched inside out. An awful crack, like a tree splitting, but it was not a tree. It was Ben. I looked up.

Dizzy. I was so dizzy. I saw his leg. But where was the rest of him.

Heavy thuds in the path before me. Once more I felt the chills colder than the winter air.

There are woods you do not go in, in winter.

Panic took hold, mind swaying; what was so large that its footsteps reverberated, yet made no sound at all. Forcing myself to turn, all of the stories came to life in the figure too tall to be human or animal, pale and unnatural before me.

Where were its eyes, what were its eyes, I kept thinking. It moved slowly across my vision, walking as a shadow, its deep pits of unnerving eyes fixated in my direction. Locked in place, the consuming grip of fear choked me. The creature's silence became more terrifying than its roar. Red dripped from a grotesque lip, and then it was gone.

I couldn't decide how long I had stood there, or how long I should have stood there, whether it was still nearby, lurking in the shadows, or coming back for me. But when I finally took a step, I ran. I ran to the trail, fighting back tears of terror that turned to ice in the corner of my eyes. I stumbled, catching the hard outer crust of snow on my wrist, feeling the sting of the wind bite into it as I propelled myself off of the icy ground, pushing myself forward in a clumsy sprint. I didn't know where that unnatural creature was, but I was certain that it was a devil, surrounding me in its awful, cold silence.

I had told myself that Lina's old warding trees, now broken as if a storm had destroyed them while the other trees stood intact, had been a good enough reason. That the gruesome murder of the four teens in the woods last month, left without any evidence or leads, was a good enough reason. The frozen tears blurred my sight. No, those were my excuses. I had just been searching for Lina, for the truth, I wanted to see for myself if her stories were real, if the stories were why she disappeared. And it had cost Ben his life.

I reached his Bearcat with fire in my chest, nearly burning away the fear in my gut, shakily reaching for the ignition. “No...”. There was no key, of course there was no key. It was probably in his pocket.

I looked back from where I had come, shadows and something darker looming behind, my head fuzzy from the night blurring to the clouded day. The Pines around me creaked, ominous and black in their dense green needles. I couldn't go back there, to that horror, but it wasn't just the key to the sled that I needed. It was the key to the desk. The Walkers in the Woods were real, and the answer had to be in Lina's desk.

“Shit. Shit Shit!” I whispered, anxiety bubbling up, shivering furiously.

I walked back down the path I had run from.

Every sound sent me on edge, twitching my head to the darkness, apparitions dancing in and out of the trees. Sensing the hollow eyes of the beast watching me. Crunch Crunch Crunch.

Each of my footsteps seemed to mask the steps of another. Blood raged in my temples.

Fear dilated time so that each step was gripped in slow agony, and I was unsure I would ever make it anywhere. But when I reached the dip in the trail by the pond, all that was left was the faint stain of red on the packed snow, and a crow pecking at it. He screamed at me, and disappeared. There was no jacket, nothing left of a body in the tree. I circled the ground, searching for the key to the snowmobile. I fell to my hands and knees, feeling the frozen earth for a piece of metal, begging for the freedom to whisk me far away from the isolated hellhole that was once my paradise, and found nothing.

Lina's cabin was warped, with the walls and roof torn off, claw marks down the walls inside and out. There had been a trap door to the ceiling in her bedroom with its single window and modest twin bed, but it was gone now, torn asunder unto the sky. I searched what was left of the walls, but they were only half cedar logs. Then the floors, planks made of pine. The one beneath the bed that met the wall gave way. I lifted it out. There was a little brass key, her desk key I was sure. And a bright red cloth. I unfolded it; it was not not unlike the symbols Lina had used, in red, yellow, black and white, bear paws on one side, a deer on the other. It held intricate patterns of triangles and circles, and beneath it all, seven feathers. Wrapped within the cloth were letters.

Lina had been right, the tribes of the Dawnland all had names and legends for Those that Walked in the Wood. The letters were not in her writing. Many were written in Algonquin as I had recognized some from her teaching, and others in the Northern tribal languages that I could not understand. I felt hope growing; some of the accounts dated back to the 1800's, when the stone walls were first built. The Micmac of the North called the monsters Chenoo, writing that their frozen hearts could be turned back if they were tricked into eating salt. In the Midwest, they were called Wendigo, consumed by their own greed for flesh as Lina had told me beneath the yew tree all those years before.

But as I flipped through the pages more and more I only felt desperation, so much of it seemed like lore. Medicines that could be given to make them vomit up their evil souls, destroying their bodies by cutting them into pieces, nothing felt tangible. The flash of red ink scribbled over Abenaki writing caught my eye. I squinted to make it out.

The Giwakwa may be tricked, either to give up its soul, or to be accepted as family. Beware of the Giwakwekwa, The Ghost Witch.

Why was this crossed out, I thought, scrunching the furrow between my brow. It hardly seemed any different from the rest of the letters. I shoved the papers into my jacket pocket with the cloth, and checked the key in the desk. It was almost entirely empty, with scraps of dried herbs in the little drawer and a box of dried purple flowers. They looked like stars, almost violet in shade. I had never seen them anywhere except for that time as a girl. I wondered if they were a special species, and if she had been making them for a medicinal tea. Shoving them into my pocket as a keepsake, I left the cabin, breathing deep before plunging back into the path of shadows ahead.

All I could hear were my boots in the grit of the snow, the heaviness of my breath in my ears, and the overwhelming silence bearing down from all sides of the forest and the trail. As I reached Ben's sled once more, I slowed long enough to check that I hadn't missed the key to the Bearcat anywhere, but it was still gone. I pushed forward onto the open trail, the desperation for life pushing each foot in front of the other. The day had been overcast, wet, and freezing, but the sun was most definitely disappearing, and any light on the trail dimming.

I traced the symbols in my palm as I walked. Thinking of Lina, and the warmth of summer, I swallowed down the lump in my throat.

***

“What a weirdo.”

I was a holding a brightly colored inchworm, watching it crawl up and down my arm in the sunlight, when Talbot Bradford's shadow loomed over my crouching position in the dirt.

“Why would you touch that thing?”

“Because it's nice, see?” I tried to lift my hand to show him, and it was smacked away, the inchworm lost to the dirt and gravel on the playground.

“Don't talk to me. You're gross.”

At eight, they called me bug girl. After Lina, it was Bigfoot girl.

“Hey creep, where you going, gonna go summon some demons?”

The surrounding boys laughed as I pushed past them on the steps with my books.

“Don't you ever do anything normal?” They tussled with each other, I locked my jaw shut.

“Don't talk to her, she's a freak.” One of the girls barked, a friend in childhood, Jill Tadry, turned her back to me as I caught her eye. I forced back the sting as I lifted my head, reminding myself that I wasn't doing anything wrong.

“Lina, am I doing something wrong?”

She was walking beside me in the spring dusk, hands laced together behind her back in serene thoughtfulness.

“You'll have to be more specific than that dear.”

“I just, I feel like people hate me. You know, the other kids and stuff.”

“Ah.” She stopped to look at me directly, setting her hands on my shoulders. “They don't know who they are yet, and you do.” She laughed, the breeze laughed with her. “But don't worry, now isn't the time for making life long friendships with others, it's time to make best friends with yourself.”

She winked at me.

***

That sense of time standing still feels so much like the split second before an accident: before everything goes to Hell, where panic and adrenaline seize hold of every nerve before it shatters into the infinitesimal.

Lost in my thoughts, it had materialized before me, tall and pale in the dusk and fog, black eyes bearing hungrily into me. That grotesque mouth bloodied from having chewed its own bottom lip off. In some places, fine translucent patches of hair made it appear more spectral, in others it was fleshy gray skin. It seemed to grow taller, looming. Long arms dragged on the crusted snow, and blood pounded in my chest. The very survival mechanism that hammered into my veins threatened to give up the contents of my stomach and freeze me in fear. I had been clutching at the box of purple flowers inadvertently, white knuckled, and thumbed the box open, feeling the flowers fall out into my pocket. I clutched them tight.

Now was the time for making lifelong friends.

“Grandmother Lina plea...”A frigid shadow swept in, its frame snuffing out all the light. The creature on the path was gone.

In a moment, Lina was there before me, smiling.

“I... Grandmother Lina?”

She stood nodding, arms open.“You brought me my flowers, good girl.”

I reached into my pocket, shaking, and pulled them out, passing them to an upturned palm in the dusk. She was Lina, I thought, she had to be. Her arms reached out to embrace me, holding me in a warmth that burned, claws digging into my back, singing the song of another, just like the Mockingbird, I thought.

Thank you so much for reading my story!

And a thank you to these wonderful sources and first hand accounts, stay safe in the woods ;)

Burby, Tom, and Megan Burby. “The Kiwakwa (or Chenoo): Maine's White Walkers.” Strange New England, 23 June 2015, https://strangenewengland.com/2015/06/23/the-kiwakwa-or-chenoo-maines-white-walkers/.

“Cannibal Giants of the Snowy Northern Forest.” NEW ENGLAND FOLKLORE, http://newenglandfolklore.blogspot.com/2009/01/cannibal-giants-of-snowy-northern.html?m=1.

“Abenaki Legends, Myths, and Stories.” Abenaki Legends (Mythology, Folklore, and Traditional Stories), http://www.native-languages.org/abenaki-legends.htm.