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No, you wouldn't get me to go into the wood. Not now, not now. And I would advise you to avoid it too. Its not for nothing that they fenced it in. Leave it alone and it won't do anyone any harm. It's been left alone all these years, and its best left that way.
No, I'm not saying that there's anything in there. New Species? No, its not a thing, nothing you can put in a zoo or photograph. There's no glory in looking for it. Its a presence. A ghost if you like. Scoff all you like, the Indians knew of it and they wouldn't go there. White men tried. One in particular, him and his kin owned the land between here and Arkham. But his folks are all dead. The folk round here keep the fence in good repair, even though no-one claims the land now. If you want to picnic round here there's Miller's Hill. That's very nice this time of year.
I'm not hiding anything! I've been tolerant with you. Now be on your way!
Hubert! Where did you hear that name? Whose been saying things to you about Hubert? I'll tell you about Hubert! He's dead. Dead these thirty years. He went into the wood and he's dead!
We were just kids, in the hot summer of '46, and we used to skip school, Hubert, Seth, Clyde and me, to wander the land and fish the streams that run through the hills, or walk to the neighbouring villages. Once we cycled to Arkham and down to the beach at Cairn's Point, but it was pretty dead, even then.
The folks were not long back from the war that year and the fence had been allowed to decay more than was proper. Well, the group of us found a patch where we could squeeze through. It was cool in the wood, shaded from the burning sun, and the air was cool and earthy, dappled with shafts of light through the trees. We didn't go far on those first trips. Just out of sight of the road and the grown-ups. We pretended we were Indian Scouts. We found apple trees, untended for God knows how long, laden with fruit, fit to burst. They were sweet, like the fruit in the Garden of Eden must have been. But maggots had got into some of 'em, so we ate them with care. We didn't take any back with us in case the grown-ups asked were we got them from.
We played through those long summer days. With our pen-knives we made weapons of wood, and hollered among the boughs. They were good days, at first.
But the more time we spent in the wood, and the deeper we got, the more we came to believe that we were not alone. It was little things at first and they added spice to our adventures, rather than curtailing them. We had built a fire in a clearing, though we hadn't lit it for fear that someone would see the smoke. When we came back the next day the wood we had pilled-up was spread out over the clearing as if something had run through the center of it. Then there were the animal trails, and whatever took the fallen apples. Perhaps there were deer in the wood? When we found half eaten carcasses and fish bones we revised our theory to a bear.
When we started to hear the sounds things changed. I think we had been hearing them for some time, but had passed them off as caused by other members of our group, hiding among the trees, or something. I think we all felt we were being observed from time to time also. Some intellect from the dense undergrowth seemed to be eyeing us. Yet none of us would voice the fear. But occasionally we would catch one another off-guard and see fear in his face. Seth had even seen a black shape, humped like a bear further in the wood. When we got there we found only broken twigs and strange foot-prints, which we could not identify. But on that occassion we were all sitting round having a pow-wow when it dawned on us that we were truly not alone. It came from the deep wood, were the light struggled to penetrate. It was like a dragging sound, the snap of branches and the rustle which was not the rustle of leaves. The cold of the wood closed about us as we looked from one to the other.
"What was that?" I asked.
"It's the bear!" whispered Hubert, a light shinning in his eye.
Clyde and Seth caught Hubert's excitement.
"A bear! Lets go and hunt it," Seth almost shouted.
The three of them clambered to their feet and picked up their spears and bows.
"Bears are dangerous," I stuttered, but it was not this rational thought that caused me to pause. It was an inkling that something was very wrong. Something I could not put into words then, but which I realised later. There was nothing normal about that wood - not the gnarled trees, not the cool in the height of summer, and certainly not the silence - the silence which had made that one noise stand out so sharply. For not a single bird sang or cricket chirped in that wood. There was only us and the thing.
"You're yella," Seth said, matter-of-factly.
"No, but we ought to be careful."
"We're scouts, aren't we. It's a chance to practise our tracking on something other than a clod."
"Yeah," piped up Hubert, "Perhaps we'd be better off without him."
"No, I'll come," I said, just to prove them wrong.
We headed off through the boughs at running pace, our little feet hardly patting the grass under us. Soon we had to slow as the forest thickened and the air darkened. We paused to get our bearings as our eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom. Soon the ragged boundary of daylight blazed brightly through the boughs of thre trees far behinds us, and our eyes picked out dark roots and fungi clinging to the boles of the trees as they twisted. The branches thickened and almost scraped the ground as if seeking for some indefinable thing they lacked but which they might catch by chance.
The sound had not grown much louder and it was our guess that it was moving across in front of us. I think the thrill of the chase must have been carrying us along, for Seth and Clyde had started to glance back toward me as if they were having second thoughts about tackling a bear in near darkness armed only with a sharpened stick. But when our eyes met, he looked away. He could not back out now.
The four of us came up short as we turned the corner of a great tree which must have grown there before White Men had even dreamed of America. I said the branches were low, well, here a path had been forced through the branches, a path that was circular, about eight feet high by my reckoning, though that's based my memories as child. Certainly two of us could have stood on each other's shoulders and barely touched the top of it. But strangest of all was that its edge was defined by strands which stretched from branch to branch along the length of this "tunnel". They were almost like giant funnel-spider webs, or perhaps a membrane, such as covers sheep's guts. The ground of this tunnel was sticky with something, which conjured strange thoughts. Looking behind me I saw that this was the junction of a network of such "tunnels" through the dense forest.
The sound of the beast came ahead of us. Clearly it was using these trails to travel quickly through the wood.
"We can catch it!" Whispered Hubert.
"No, its too dangerous. What if we get caught in these tunnels by it?"
"Yeah, we can set a trap for it along one of these trails,' suggested Clyde, 'we don't need to follow it."
I smiled at him, grateful for his support.
"No, we've got it now. Were's the sense in letting it go just to build a trap for it?"
Hubert had a point, sort of.
We padded forward slowly, eight eyes searching out danger. Our breathing shallowed and our hearing sharpened. We all felt that we were now within the beast's domain. At the edge of the wood the trees were under the influence of Man and they were like any other forests Man had conqured. But here, where no man had walk for centuries, where no wood was cut and no fire lit, here the wood was shaped by the beast. It was twisted, or perhaps it was our straight lines that were abnormal and here it was, by its nature, what it was. It had a right to be here and the beast had a right to walk here as it had done for all those centuries, under those same trees. This was its wood.
The sounds ahead almost reconciled themselves into several distinct elements. There was a slapping, squelching sound, then there was the shift of a bulky object, dragging, or sliding across moist soil. Lastly there was the snapping of brittle objects.
We found that the tunnel lead up to the top of a ridge, where it ended. Other branches of similar tunnels also converged here, suggesting that he had tracked the thing to its lair. It was almost lightless and yet there was a faint glow ahead. Stepping cautiously forward we peered ahead, down into the bowl.
I do not know how long we looked into that recess. My guess is that it was mere moments, but it might have been hours. We lost track of time somewhere. It was a place where time didn't matter a jot.
I still remember it clearly; in nightmares, when I close my eyes. The ground below us was thick with leaf-mould, which glowed gently. Scattered over this mould were wind-fall apples, animal remains and half-devoured fish. To the left side of the indentation there was a cave mouth in among the tree roots of an earth bank. It was certainly big enough for a bear's den. Around the wall of trees, which were also cocooned with the web-like substance, were the entrances of other tunnels. The horror lay on the leaf-mould - in the apples! Worms! Hundreds of worms writhed and crawled, and the slapping, squelching noise was their mandibles feeding on the rotting fruit pulp. But they were big. Some were small, so small they might have passed for maggots, but some were big as cats, sticky with mucus. Then it dawned on me that the white strands which cocooned the edge of the pit, lined the trees, lined the tunnels was dried mucus.
God! Something moved in the cave. Something larger than a bear and pale, moved towards the opening! It could have been mist, I do not know. We all felt that if it touched us we would die. It was the guardian of the wood and we had eaten its apples and killed the maggots inside. God, I dare not think of that!
We four ran, without thought of caution we turned and ran, screaming back the way we came, as the white mass streamed from the cave. It is a half memory, that run. A memory dominated by the sounds that followed us. The squeezing slimy sound of a great bulk; of our mad, slipping dash along those "tunnels". When we were out of the tunnels, in the wood proper, thorns ripped at us, but fear dulled our pain. When I looked back, flickering among the trees, setting the branches swaying, a pale shape ran, hunched like a bear. It would surely overtake us unless we got back to the safty of the road. Somehow I knew it would not walk on man-laid tarmac, could not bring itself to come into sunlight. But we were lost! The band of sunlight below the canopy had faded into dusk-light and we could no longer tell if we were heading for the road or merely along the woodland.
Then I saw our clearing, and I sighed with relief. I knew the way from here. I looked back and called to the others. As I had been at the back on the way in, I had been first out. Hubert, conversely was last, and he was fading. The beast was indefaticable. Its body seemed to slip through the trees, so that they did not impeed it.
I paused as Seth and Clyde ran past me, down to the gap in the fence.
"Come on, Hubert!" I screamed.
The beast gained on him. Its shadowy bulk now resolved into pale waxy flesh, and I saw how it had closed so quickly on us. Hubert turned slightly, raising his spear to fend it off, but he stumbled and lost balance. A black circular hole, or a parting of the mist, appeared in the top of the beast and it descended on top of Hubert as he flailed on the ground. There was a snapping sound which might have been the spear breaking.
I turned away, knowing there was nothing I could do, so I scrambled out onto the road and we three ran for help, bloody and crying.
Men went to the wood to look for Hubert and they took an old Indian with them. The Indian spoke to me about it. He called the beast by a name, said it was a Manitou, said it was the Spirit of the Trees, called it 'The Worm in the Wood'. After a day the men came back, grim and silent, carrying a small sealed coffin. That week the men went right round the wood, rebuilding the fence. Hubert's body was buried the week after. There was an inquest, but it isn't a story you can tell a court, not without causing even more trouble. So we told that he had died by falling on his spear as we played. The grown-ups backed us up.
To my knowledge no-one has ever been in that wood since and they have given us no more trouble. Now I'm one of the men who repairs the fence.
I have been to Arkham since, and have had cause to look in at the library. I think I know what it was we found that day in the wood. But you don't need to know that. If what I saw that day is a guide to their numbers then there are lots of them in there now. But they like the dark and the soft soil - they are creatures of the prime and want nothing from Man, so I'll trust in the fence and in common sense. Don't go in the wood.
Now, I'll bid you good day. You'll get to Miller's Hill up that-a-way. Me, I've got my orchard to tend. There's always a call for apples in these parts.
Copyright © 1997 Peter A. Worthy
"The Worm in the Wood" © 1997 by Laurence J. Cornford
