Work Text:
It was twilight dark when it happened. The kind of gloom where you can see shadows and silhouettes, and nothing else.
You were walking down the long road, silently. You never should have gone into these woods.
The air was heavy with dreadful anticipation. No noise disturbed the stillness, and you didn’t want to be the one to shatter the eerie glass quiet.
It was twilight, and the weathered wood and cracked windows of the broken-down house on the side of the road freaked you out. Your feet moved a little faster of their own accord.
You could feel it. That feeling, the one everyone gets at some point—someone’s watching you. Waiting for you.
You never should have gone.
The kind of feeling that makes you feel as though there’s a black hole in your stomach, sucking in all the light in you. Dread makes your head swim.
Can you picture it?
You’re walking down the road and everything is grey from the lack of light in the November sky.
The world around you is so silent that your heart beats faster and your every sense is searching for stimulation as desperately as a hungry man for food. There’s no one else around for miles.
Silence as deafening as if you were standing in the eye of the storm.
You want to look over your shoulder, make sure no one’s there. You don’t.
Do you ever go in the bathroom, and the shower curtain is fully drawn?
And you outstretch your hand, ready to open it, make sure nobody’s there.
But then you drop your hand and leave, because what would you do if there was someone?
You don’t look over your shoulder.
Instead, you move your feet as fast as you can without breaking into a jog—
And then everything explodes.
That’s how it seems anyway.
All you see before you’re knocked to the ground is a glowing pair of eyes.
Red eyes.
And then you’re slammed into the pavement, and you hear the thud of your body, followed by the hard crack of your skull against asphalt.
The noise rings in your ears, and you almost miss the silence.
You never should have gone into the woods.
And then teeth rip you apart.
The last thing you see before everything goes black is the full moon, half-hidden by a cloud.
You wake up in your bed at home, with nothing but a gaping wound in your side as a souvenir.
The wound heals within the day.
A month later, a boy with a crooked jaw approaches you, and tells you he’s sorry.
He doesn’t say what for.