Porters Forest
Donald knelt in the wet grass and dragged his fingers through the water pooled beneath the pines. He lifted them to his mouth.
Rust.
He had tasted it twice now. The first time he told himself it was the cold — iron pipes somewhere uphill, groundwater. The second time he couldn't explain it. He spat hard into the darkness and stayed crouched a moment longer, listening. His fingers left dark prints in the soil where he'd pressed them.
Above him, clouds rolled over the moon, swallowing what little light the forest offered. Wind moved through the pine needles with a thin whistling sound that reminded him of distant voices.
He reached for the flashlight on his belt and thumbed it on. The beam cut across the clearing. Snowflakes drifted through the light.
Donald slowly turned in a circle.
He stood in the middle of a patch of open grass surrounded by endless rows of pine trees. Beneath them, the forest floor was thick with dead needles stained dark red by rain and rot. No trees grew inside the clearing itself. That bothered him more than he wanted to admit.
North of where he stood, gravestones rose from the earth in crooked rows. He smiled.
· · ·
From his shoulder he lowered a weathered duffel bag stitched with the faded patch: O.P.I. — Ohio Paranormal Investigations. He removed a camera fitted with a large lens and began photographing the cemetery from every angle. Fast. Excited. Careful not to let his own shadow fall across the graves.
Tonight mattered. The others at O.P.I. tolerated him, but tolerance was not respect. Two years chasing stories through abandoned houses and backwoods churches and he still had nothing worth showing them. No proof. No evidence.
But Porters Forest was different. Every story led here eventually.
Donald crouched beside the largest headstone and adjusted the camera focus. His fingers pressed into the ground.
Too easily.
He frowned and pushed again. Mud. That made no sense. The ground everywhere else had been frozen solid for weeks. He walked toward the tree line — beneath the pines the earth was hard as iron, frost gripping the roots, snow dusting the needles. He looked back toward the clearing.
Soft ground. Warm ground
A slow grin spread across his face
Back at the bag, he pulled free a shovel. The blade slid into the earth with almost no resistance. He dug harder. Faster. Mud splashed his boots and jeans. Sweat rolled beneath his flannel shirt despite the cold. Three feet down the shovel struck wood with a heavy thud.
Donald froze. Then laughed under his breath.
“Found you.”
· · ·
Vincent Mapleton. Sorcerer. Murderer. The townspeople had come for him more than a century earlier. They said he could speak to the dead. Curse crops. Poison children. When they stormed his home, Mapleton ordered the doors barricaded and set the house ablaze rather than surrender. Some claimed he burned alive inside. Others claimed something else walked out.
Donald pried open the coffin with a crowbar. The smell hit first. Then the body. Burned black. Skin melted tight against bone. Yet somehow preserved.
Donald stared. His camera hung forgotten around his neck.
Then he heard something move in the trees. A twig snapped. He spun, flashlight cutting through the darkness. Nothing. Only pines bending in the wind.
He turned back to the grave and stopped.
Footprints. Fresh ones, pressed deep into the mud beside the coffin. He stared at them long enough to feel ridiculous — long enough to construct an explanation. An animal. Another hiker, some idiot who'd wandered in from the road. The prints were narrow, though. Barefoot. And they came from nowhere. He followed them back toward the trees where they continued briefly through the snow before ending. Just ending. He stood over the last print for a full ten seconds. Then he looked down into the grave.
Snow had fallen from the corpse's foot. Not dusted off. Knocked off. Recently.
Donald’s shadow stretched across the clearing. He noticed it before he understood why it was wrong. There was no moon. No light source behind him. He turned. Nothing. He turned back. The shadow had not moved with him.
He watched it. His hands had gone very still. He told himself his eyes were adjusting. He waited three seconds that each felt like something being peeled away. Then the shadow moved on its own — a quick, low dart across the clearing, toward the trees, purposeful — and Donald was running before he consciously decided to run.
Branches whipped at his face as he tore through the pines. Behind him came a sound on the wind — not words at first, just a shape. A rhythm. Then close enough to hear:
“There he is. There he is.”
He crashed through row after row of pines, losing all sense of direction. The footsteps behind him were unhurried. They didn’t speed up when he did.
Then he saw it. A house. Old. Dark. Sitting crooked on a hill. He sprinted for it.
He hit the porch and grabbed the railing, catching himself. The boards were dry. No snow on them — none, despite an inch of snowfall through the trees. The front door stood slightly open, which it hadn’t been a moment ago, or had it? A single candle burned in the corner of the room inside. He thought: someone is here, someone lit that candle, someone can help. He went inside anyway. He threw the deadbolt behind him.
“Help me!”
Dust hung thick in the air. Only silence answered.
Then came the sound above him. A footstep. Heavy. Slow.
Donald dropped to his knees. “Oh thank God—”
Another footstep creaked across the floorboards overhead. Then another. A figure appeared at the top of the stairs.
One burned foot descended into view. The skin was cracked and black, the toes fused partly together, and between them — packed into the crevices of ruined flesh — was snow. Clean white snow.
Donald did not move. He understood then that he had been inside this house before. Not him — but the story. The story had been here a hundred years ago. The story ended here. It had been waiting for someone to walk back through the door and finish it.
The second foot descended.
Then the voice came. Deep. Cracked. Wet with smoke.
“Barricade the doors.”
Donald screamed and lunged for the lock. The deadbolt would not turn. Outside, whispers gathered all around the house. The smell of smoke thickened. Heat spread through the walls. Orange light bloomed beneath the doors as fire raced through the old timbers.
Donald clawed at the deadbolt until the skin split from his fingers.
Behind him the footsteps continued slowly down the stairs.
No one came to save him.
And far from town, beyond the forest and snow, no one heard him burn.