Leachwood

by Dusk Soul

The darkness was immutable, all save for the light of the electric torch. The batteries were near dead. The light casted flickered and faded in and out of existence with every motion the hand carried out. The aluminium metal was cooler than the man’s hand. 

The man blinked with repetition through the newly spun spider’s web, as it collided in a whisper with his face. Its creator scurried across his cheek. He flicked it into the brush. Only after a moment, did he wonder whether or not the spider was poisonous. 

A pause. He drew a breath, inhaled, he held it, he exhaled. He blinked. He wiped at brow and face.

It was three in the morning. He could not sleep.

He shuffled along the well worn path. The path he often took, all until he came to the fork. The right path he knew so well? Or the left path, he had yet to take? The left path, if you could call it as such, is more of a game trail. He knew it not. 

He took his first step into the brush and overgrowth which crackled and snapped underfoot. He had made his choice. He had begun his way down the left path, through the forest’s dense foliage and verdure. A forest that was alive with the noises of the night. The twigs snapped, the unseen wildlife scurried. The bats chirped and the sound of their leathery wings flapped over head. The haunting echoing of an owl, as it hooted. The sounds commingled in an effect that raised the hairs lengthwise on ones skin. He trudged forward. He was not as spry as he once had been. The pain in his back indicated a change in weather. 

A storm? 

Perhaps he should turn back, he thought to himself. His insomnia disagreed. A mosquito bit at his hand in a sharp sting. They were large and numerous in this part of the woods; a local variety. Their bites tended to be painful, and felt more akin to the bite of a horse fly. Left behind a nettling sensation that burned at the flesh, and needled at the skin. Several more flew about his face. Blood dribbled down the skin of his hand, and dripped, drop by drop, onto the emerald fern’s leaf. He walked forward into a swarm of the insects.

He swatted at them with little effect. They bit at his flesh without mercy. He zipped up his storm coat. Pulled the hood above his skull. He moved forward with more haste, as he tried to impart more space, between him and the swarm. He tripped over a root and recovered in a stagger. Now he panicked, and broke into a shambling jog. 

A breeze picked up rippling through the countless forest leaves. All at once they, the mosquitos, were gone. He stopped on the path. Eerie. Something had changed. The forest. The night. The night had become mute, where there was once sound. The absence of sound, where there should have been a profusion.

There was a dark presence there, something was amiss. He spun about, tried to alleviate his worry, his worry that there were eyes on him. Something watched. Something waited. Something in the dark void, which inhabited the spaces. The spaces in between spaces. The liminal.

The shadows of tree trunks lengthened and wavered in the feeble light of the torch, as its spun about wild in his outstretched hand. It searched out the cause of the silence. The quiet overshadowed the forest. The forest which should have been alive with sounds of wildlife. 

The forest now near soulless. 

Even the profusion of mosquitos had abated. It is as though he was alone in the night. Alone in the wood. Though an eerie sensation, one which crawled under his flesh told him otherwise. He stepped forward with the aid of the weak electric torch into a small clearing, only to shudder at what he saw. 

Leachwood.

Someone had cut down a leachwood tree. Its stump in an occultist’s circle, so called, because it is local knowledge that occultists would practice magic there. They would use the stump of a leachwood, as an altar to God knows who, or so the story went.

Leachwood was peculiar. Leachwood was regional. It grows no place else on earth, and its wood was hearty, yet flexible. However, to cut down a leachwood tree would be to kill off part of the forest. For leachwood, was known to have a toxic effect on the surrounding soil when harvested. 

It is thought to spread this toxin approximately 23 feet; in a radius, from the remains of the tree, when timbered. 

The toxin would kill off all surrounding vegetation, hence the occultist’s circle.

He shined the dim light and dispelled the darkness to a lesser degree. The leachwood stump, appeared sinister in the faint light. It was gnarled and its bark sinuous. It showed no signs of rot. He noted that no fungus grew on the leachwood. He shivered, as he looked down.

His left foot was already in the circle. It is local superstition that this would bring misfortune. 

He tried as he might to shake off the feeling of dread as it built in his heart. He could not. He cursed under his breath at the stump, as though this might do any good. He spied that the path; the game trail, continued on the other side of the circle. He tried to muster every ounce of courage he had left to cross the circle. He instead resolved to stick to the perimeter of the circle, and work his way to the game trail opposite.

He didn’t want to approach the leachwood stump. He wanted to keep as much distance between himself and that accursed thing as he might be able. That… that… blight. That… that… altar. 

He bore to the left and crossed along the periphery of the circle’s bounds. At that moment, there came to be a snapping sound. His heart stopped, on horror’s pulse. It had broken through the silence of the night. It had come from the circle’s center. It had come from the leachwood.

He ran.

He grunted with exertion. The pain in his back radiated down his spine, with each and every foot fall. He arrived at the game trail. He followed down it in panic. He broke into a quick jog. 

He went to step down the trail only to find there was no earth there. Only darkness and his first thought was that he’d been consumed. Consumed by the leachwood. Instead gravity took hold. All at once, he found himself falling end over end, as he cartwheeled down the steep hill. 

His hands flailed, yet his death grip on the electric torch; his source of light, was absolute. The source of light that went on and off, with each and every impact of the earth. The strobing of the light flickered images of the trees overhead, the ground, the leaves, the roots, until it was replaced by complete and utter darkness. The ground pitched, and leveled. He kept rolling with inertia. His head bumped something. He at last had stopped, landed, collapsed in a heap, the wind knocked from his lungs.

He drew one painful breath after a short eternity. His eyes blinked in the night, as it seeped into his eye’s sockets. He felt his hand clasp around the electric torch, the light now extinguished. Something, a tree had stopped his rolling. He felt a creeping sensation though. His left hand felt at loose soil, and he couldn’t hear nor feel any foliage.

A sound. A single sound. 

A snapping sound from the tree that had stopped his fall. The sound is short and quick. He was slow to stand, and his arms and legs shook. His limbs screamed run, although they felt as though they were filled with lead. He couldn’t seem to breathe, he had forgotten how, and his panicked lungs sent out the alarm to his brain.

Adrenaline shocked at his every nerve and vein. Spiked his mind with answers to unseen fears. He tried to convince himself that its his imagination; his mind playing tricks on him.

Silence, he has yet have drawn another breath. His forgotten lungs were in agony.

At last he gasped a sharp inhale. He is most afraid. For now, the answer renewed, the answer to the question “Am I alone?”. He knew, he is not alone in these woods. It emanated in a shudder throughout the woodland forest.

That, of branches being ripped asunder. A rending creaking groan of protest from a trees trunk could be heard the forest over. In the blistering darkness, he knew the source of the cacophony. He was at its epicenter. And the sounds of snapped branches came from 23 feet away. 

He took out his lighter, the one he had forgotten to refill for sometime. He can’t say what he dreads more, the unending blinding and sharp dark void that is the night, or the revelation of the sound’s source with the flame’s light. He knows he was helpless as he stood there without it. He looked down where he could feel the lighter at his hip in his left hand, the unlit electric torch in his right.

So, he flicked the wheel, it sparked against the flint, yet the flame did not light. Worse still, cast in the illumination of the wheel’s sparking, he saw movement; a snaking movement near his heel. Whilst he stood frozen in fright, he could feel, yet not fully discern that which is revealed. For something was slithering around his heel.

He wound up his arm. The centripetal force compelled the lighter fluid, from the base of the lighter to the wick. He flicked at the wheel. 

In dismay, he watched the forest floor flash weakly into existence; as the strike of sparks emanated from the wheel and flint. No flame. He saw a sinister something wrapping itself around the boot of his right foot.

He dropped the electric torch in utter shock and surprise. The electric torch came back to life, its beam weak, as it impacted the forest floor. Revealed, to the man’s horror, the snaking root of…

Leachwood.

He took a step back in terror. The leachwood tendril searched out where his right foot once had been. He saw he was in the middle of yet another occultist’s circle, and the tree that stopped his fall is not a tree. It is a leachwood stump.*

The light from the electric torch revealed the leachwood stump, and from it, going out in all manner of directions; were vines. Vines which choked at the surrounding forest. He stooped, he picked up the electric torch. The tension building on the vines increased and the snapping sounded resumed once more. There was no path and he ran as fast as he could into the forest.

Away. Away from the terrifying scene. Away from the leachwood.

He ran until the pain in his back became too much, and he was on the verge of passing out from lack of breath. The light of the electric torch faded, dwindled, and flickered; all before it extinguished altogether. He walked twenty paces into the night. He stopped. He could go no further. Not without the aid of the torch.

He sensed he was on the edge of a vast clearing. He fumbled with the torch, he unscrewed the top. He extracted the batteries. He replaced them. He heard the sounds of tree branches as they broke and snapped behind him. 

He shuddered.

He screwed the top back on the electric torch. He tried the switch. Light.

He screamed. 

For the clearing, it seemed had once been a forest.

A forest that stretched from horizon to horizon.

A forest now harvested.

A forest of leachwood.