Nine years ago I had a car accident. It was around October 16th or 17th in 2010…whatever, it was late at night on a Sunday, I remember that. Because as I drove down the winding dark road that would take me past Empire and the handful of smaller towns that lay between me and my bed, I was talking to myself, saying how stupid I had been to come all this way for Jeffery’s Halloween party, especially when I had work the next day.
My cousin Jeffery is a good guy, and he’s always been a good friend to me. But he’s also always had it easy—his part of the family is wealthy, and his idea of work is telecommuting from home a couple of days a week while goofing off the rest of the time. He doesn’t live in the real world, and so when he wants to throw an elaborate Halloween party, he not only does it in the middle of the month, but he does it on a Sunday when he should know a lot of people he invites are going to have to drive a long way.
Because Jeffery lives in Jessica’s Resolve, a little town in the middle of nowhere. I’m sure he’s a rock star there, with his money and his parties and his revolving door of beautiful girlfriends, but out in the real world, you have to work for things. Stuff isn’t just handed to you—you have to take it.
But if I’m honest, I’ve always been a bit jealous of Jeffery. He’s never bragged about his money, and I’ve never seen him be shitty to anyone. But that hadn’t stop me from finding reasons to resent him or find fault with whatever he did. And of course, I didn’t have to go to the party in the first place. I went because, for at least a little while, I got to pretend I was part of that brighter, prettier world.
I had left that world once I pulled out of his long driveway well past midnight. The roads were all black and coiled, and my limited familiarity with the area wasn’t much help on that dark and cloudy night. The worst part was how tired I was. It had been a busy weekend, and I’d stayed longer than I’d intended talking to a girl Jeffery introduced me to. At the time it seemed very important, but now I can’t even picture her face.
So I talked to myself to stay awake. I started off monologuing about the woman I’d met, but as I got sleepier and more resentful of how far I had left to go, I shifted to talking about how dumb I was to have stayed so late. How inconsiderate Jeffery was to throw his party on a Sunday. How tired I was going to be the next day when I finally made it home.
And then I woke up as I was plunging off the road, the back of the car seeming to float for a moment before slamming back into the gravel shoulder and picking up speed, pulling me further down the embankment and into the darkness of the trees waiting below.
There was no time to stop or change course, and I barely managed to close my eyes as the world around me exploded. Glass, metal and wood collided and protested as the front of the car slammed into one of the wide tree trunks at the bottom of the hill. I felt a band of fire flare across my chest as my seatbelt held me in place, but for whatever reason, the airbag never deployed. I tried to slow my head’s forward momentum, but my forehead still struck the wheel with enough force to split the skin and send a thin ribbon of blood down into my eyes as I sat back and began trying to look around.
A large tree branch stretched out next to me, impaling my empty passenger seat and making my stomach loosen as I realized how close I’d just come to dying. Instead, I was surprisingly okay. My chest and head hurt some, and I was very shook up and a bit woozy, but all things considered, I didn’t think I had any lethal injuries.
I couldn’t get my driver’s side door to open, so I clumsily climbed out the other side. I intended to just walk away, but my knees began to buckle as soon as I stepped out of the car. Catching myself, I crawled some distance away before stopping to rest and check my phone. It was dead. I had meant to plug it up when I started driving, but I guess I was tired and just forgot. Either way, it was looking like I’d have to make my way up to the road and just try and flag down the next car that came by. Despite being near the outskirts of Empire, I didn’t remember seeing many cars on the road before the crash, so I might be waiting a while.
It’s as I got unsteadily back to my feet that I noticed an orange glow in the distance. Not in the direction of the road, but deeper into the woods. I didn’t like the idea of venturing further into the dark, with thoughts of snakes and other wild animals crowding for position in my mind. But it looked like firelight. Maybe someone was camping or had a bonfire near by. If so, I might find help a lot sooner than waiting by the road.
So I stumbled forward, and yes, it was clearly some kind of firelight. It was a bit farther away than what I had first thought, and between my unsteadiness and the uneven ground, I was making very slow progress, but I was getting closer. After what felt like hours but was probably just a few minutes, I had made my way into the center of a large oval ring of giant oak trees and found the source of the flickering light.
It was a small torch, set just below one of the oaks. At first I was more focused at looking around the clearing itself—there were no people there, or signs of them for that matter. The ground was largely scraggly grass and bare earth that did have the appearance of possibly having been traveled or walked on recently, though I couldn’t have said by what. All I knew was that in the orange circle of light the torch provided, I could see various scrapes and cuts in the earth as though something had been done there, and not too long before.
I wanted to explore more, but I was nervous about venturing past my newly found sanctuary of torch light. So instead I turned back to the tree itself. There’d been something there, right? I’d only half-noticed in my eagerness to look for people in the clearing, but…yes. Someone had nailed something, or somethings, to the tree just above the height of the nearby torch.
They were diamonds…or diamond-shaped pieces of meat. There were seven of them, all roughly two inches tall and one inch wide, and they were attached to the tree in two haphazard rows by…it wasn’t nails. I reached out my finger to the end of one of the long needles that protruded from the top of each diamond of flesh. I barely touched it, but I immediately brought my hand back with a small hiss of pain. When I looked, I had a pinprick of blood on the pad of my index finger.
They weren’t nails or needles, they were hairs…no, not hairs really. More like quills or something, I guess. And whatever they were, they were razor-sharp.
I felt my unease growing into fear. I didn’t know what was going on, but I could feel a panicked need to run away beginning to blossom in my chest. Trying to fight it back, I looked at the things hanging on the tree again. They were clearly cut out of something’s skin and it’d been done with precision—the clean lines and sharp angles reminded me of the diamonds you see on old playing cards. They also looked to be largely different from each other in color and texture. But I still had no idea what they really were, and I didn’t need to abandon the possibility of getting help just because I was spooked.
I thought I’d seen a shadowed shape between the trees on the other side of the clearing. Maybe it was a tent or some other sign of people. For all I knew, someone could be asleep over there. I just needed to be quiet and get a bit closer. Get a better look. With the night’s half-moon still buried in clouds, I decided I would have to borrow the torch. It took some effort, but I managed to wrench it from the ground after several tries, and holding it out in front of me for light and protection, I started toward the far end of the tree ring.
When the light hit the thing hanging between two of the trees there, it took several moments before my mind could fully register what I was seeing. It kept wanting to make it into something that made sense, something that wasn’t horrific, and so I kept staring at it, gasping like a dying fish, wanting it to not be as it was.
It was a man, or the remains of one. His head had been removed, as had most of his organs. What was left, the skin, muscle and bone, was tied at the wrists and ankles to the two supporting trees. Hung there, like a dead animal waiting for the butcher.
Just then I heard a sharp rustling noise nearby. I looked around before realizing it wasn’t behind me or to either side. It was above me.
The flame from the torch wavered as my hands began to shake, but I held onto it as best I could as I raised my gaze to the trees above. The peaks of these oaks were over sixty feet in the air, far above how high my meager firelight would go. But still, in the near black dark of the treetops, I thought I sensed something. Something large was perched up there, watching me. Deciding what to do.
It was as I was still peering up into the darkness that the rustling sound came again briefly, this time louder. And as if on cue, the thick clouds obscuring the moon began to part.
It…It stretched between three or four of the trees. It made me think of a centipede or a thick snake, though I saw several long arms or legs along its length. Even from such a distance, it was obvious it was massive, and I remember wondering how the trees could possibly support something that large on their upper branches. That and all other thought fled from me when it began to move slightly and the rustling began again.
It was the thing’s quills. I couldn’t make them out until they were moving, but all along its back were long quivering lines that I felt sure matched the dark needles embedded in the nearby tree. The noise, particularly after seeing its source, set off something primal in my heart. The same kind of instinctual fear I had always felt hearing a rattlesnake’s rattle or a mountain lion’s scream. The bone-deep warning that said danger. Stop. Get away.
I threw down the torch and began to run blindly, not caring where I was going so much as that it was away from whatever that thing might be. I remember running some distance and then…The next thing I recall is being loaded on a bodyboard into the back of an ambulance. A woman, I think one of the EMTs, telling me that I was all right, to just calm down. That they were taking me to Empire General Hospital and I was going to be fine.
And I was, at least for the most part. I spent the next five days in the hospital as they treated me for a concussion, a bruised kidney, two sprained wrists and one fractured ankle, and various cuts and bruises. Three different times doctors and nurses came and asked me what I remembered of what happened, and each time I told them that I didn’t remember much of anything after the accident. It was a lie, of course, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell them the truth.
One reason for that, of course, was because they would have thought I was either crazy or out of it because of my concussion, and either way it wouldn’t have helped anything. But the other reason was because I knew why they kept asking, why they were so curious about what I’d gone through that night. They wanted to know how, out of all my understandable cuts and bruises, sprains and breaks, I had also managed to get one very unique and specific wound on the side of my stomach just above the belly button. A quarter inch deep with clean, straight lines, it didn’t look like it came from a random gouge of glass or metal or wood. Even now, all these years later, the hollow of shallow scar tissue has retained its shape.
The shape of a diamond.
Like you might find on an old playing card. Or hanging from a tree in the darkest part of the woods.
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