u/Draegalian

“C’mon, your mom already said we could go!” I finished putting on my shoes, throwing the robe of my costume over my lap to tie the laces. Halloween night on a Saturday means no school in the morning. Which means we could hit the whole neighborhood. Maybe we’d even make multiple trips.
“Don’t go yet, I gotta get my scythe!” I called back as Ben was already hopping from foot to foot in excitement. Dusk had just fallen and that meant the porch lights were coming on and the other trick-or-treaters would be on the prowl. Mrs. Cottonwood three streets down always gave out full size Snickers bars to the first twenty kids to show up which meant we had to act fast. With my shoes on, I snatched the black handle of my plastic harvest tool and leapt out the door, the smell of rubber through the skull mask and the dim view through thinly stretched polyester eye holes completing my grim reaper ensemble.
Ben wore white space armor and a distinguishing white helmet with a blaster in one hand and a pillowcase in the other. He was really into that new Star Wars movie that came out a couple years ago. Mom didn’t want me using my pillowcase for fear of tearing it on the pavement or something so I had an old canvas bag. The loot was gonna be huge this year, I just knew it, so I’d planned ahead. 
“Terry, c’mere baby.”
Antsy to get out on the street, I jogged over the vinyl flooring to where my mom was sitting, my heart lurching a bit as I saw her pale complexion. She had already taken her medicine for the evening and I could tell she wanted to sleep but she was putting on a brave face for the other kids who would inevitably come around looking for candy just like Ben and I would be. 
“Yeah, mom?” I asked quietly as I came closer. She hugged me and I wanted to push away but I let her hold me anyway.
“Just be safe out there, okay Ter-bear? And get me some Smarties if you can.” She chuckled and it put my worries at ease. As much as I loved her, it hurt me to see her like this. Getting out and having some fun gathering candy would be a welcome bit of levity right about now.
“I will mom, we’re gonna go to Ben’s house probably to drop off some stuff, but we’ll be back before midnight, promise.”
“You do that. Have fun, baby!”
“Okay!”
I ran back outside to meet Ben on the steps of my tiny little home, surrounded as it was by parapets of tall, white, wooden pickets and under siege by the falling autumn leaves, forming a moat of damp crackles as we pushed out the gate and onto the cold evening sidewalk. We wasted no time in rushing down the way, passing by fairies, princesses, werewolves, ghouls, zombies, ghosts, and all manner of terrible costumes both quality and slapdash. One kid a few years older than us had just duck taped a bunch of cardboard boxes together and spray painted it silver, wielding two old dryer tubes for arms.
“You think she’s out of Snickers bars already?” Ben asked as we jogged our way over the pavement of the road, checking in no way for any coming cars. 
“Well last year she didn’t come out until 7 o’clock and it was only 7:05 when we left, so I don’t think so!” My breath fogged in the rubber mask as we jogged, the eye holes forming a cool inlet of air for each inhale I took. We didn’t have the breath to discuss further as we passed by the first road sign towards Mrs. Cottonwood’s crumbling hovel of a cottage.
By the time we got there, the sun had properly set behind the giant oak trees that dotted the neighborhood, leaving only the purple sky and orange clouds overhead, streetlights now lighting our way forward. Leaping down over the curb and up onto the next sidewalk, we found our way to the overgrown yard of the kindly old woman who was diligently sitting on her porch in an ancient swinging bench with a bucket and some plastic pumpkins glowing dimly with fake candles.
“Trick or treat!” We both said proudly through our masks as we approached. Mrs. Cottonwood feigned fear with a gasp and raising her bushy eyebrows, causing her wrinkly face to stretch in mock terror.
“Is it my time already, Mr. Reaper!?” She said aghast. I planted my scythe firmly in front and replied with a raspy tone.
“An offering might delay your judgement, m’am!” 
“Oh dear, then please accept this one, for it’s all I have this night!” She ceremoniously placed a full size Snickers bar in my ragged canvas bag and chuckled to herself. I waved to her as I stepped off the porch while Ben gathered his prize as well.
“Thank you Mrs. Cottonwood!” I said as I bid farewell. Best old lady in the whole dang neighborhood. As I looked out above the treelines, I could see the looming shadows of the mountains in the distance, the road leading up to them distant and dark, and beyond that the forest. Echoing between the houses and the trees, I heard a far away howl.

The chirps of morning birds greeted me as I awoke in bed. Through the scattered blinds, bright light poured into my room. I rubbed my eyes on the yellowing pillowcase and rolled onto my side. 10:28 am. Groaning, I got up out of bed and pulled my jeans off the clammy carpet, made a quick bowl of cereal, and got ready for my day. Hopping into the driver’s seat of a beat up old Chevy, I rumbled my way out of the parking lot of my apartment and headed off to work.
As I drove off to the hospital, I flicked through the radio out of boredom. Several stations ran by in quick succession.
“-candidate Bill Clinton is making big waves in polls this week- can expect to see scattered storms- hikers have gone missing in-”
Furrowing my brow, I switched the channel back from the dulcet tones of the Beatles.
“-park as part of a continuing string of odd disappearances surrounding Brookshire County. Authorities and park rangers are urging people visiting the park to stick close to one another and use a buddy system even in small wooded areas. Brookshire County Police Department commissioner-”
I turned the dial again. The smell of old cigarettes brushed past my nose and I focused on work again. As I pulled into the parking lot of the beige and white building, I took a deep breath, knowing what awaited me inside. I put my badge on and threw on the teal shirt. I wasn’t a nurse or anything, more of a glorified janitor, but they made me wear a sterile shirt over my normal clothes anyway.
I hated working in the hospital. Having to clean up after patients was more than disgusting. The most vile biohazards of every color and foul odor you could imagine to be mopped up and sanitized by yours truly, every damn day. The only thing that made it worth it was the time it afforded me to spend with her.
The hum buzz of fluorescent lights and clacking of gurney wheels over tile was the background noise of me with mop in hand and mask over my face, cleaning up yet another “spill” of some non-descript bodily fluids, dragging the bucket away to a mop sink so old and stained the white plastic had turned a ruddy brown, and dumping the contents down the drain. The smell alone, an odor that brought back memories of that night, turned the cereal in my stomach and threatened to add its contents to the sink. The mask helped, but only enough.
When I was finally on my break time, I washed up as best I could in the bathroom and headed up to the care unit she was housed in. The heavy wooden door creaked open and I peered inside to see her, looking out the window at the rolling hills far below in the midday light. The sun illuminated just how pale her skin was, her sallow, clammy features almost ghostly amidst the white and blue bedding she was laid up in.
I approached again, my footfalls following the same path to her side as it had dozens of times before, so closely that I could tell exactly which of the multicolor linoleum tiles my heel would land on next.
“Hey mom,” I said with my hand in my pocket, “How ya holdin’ up?”
She turned to look at me with a weak smile. “Hey Terry. Same old, same old.”
I placed my hand on the side of her bed and glanced up at the small black tv above her bed. “You want me to put anything on? I hear they’re puttin’ on reruns of I Love Lucy.”
She shook her head, her long, silky brown hair having not been cut in months now. “Nah, thanks. Window’s good enough for me.”
I nodded and put my hand on hers. It was so soft and frail, marked with small red blotches on her otherwise white skin. “Doc says you shouldn’t be in the sun too much.”
“Oh, what difference does it make?” She said as her smile turned down. I gripped her hand tighter as a lump formed in my throat.
“You can beat this thing, I know it.” I assured her for what must have been the hundredth time. We thought she had beaten it the first time. Doctors called it remission. This time she didn’t even want the chemo. My mother, the woman who had taught me to be thankful for everything, who had told off teachers for discouraging me from drawing things during class, who had raised me all by herself after dad left, who had gone through this wasting disease once before, looked so tired. She’d given me everything and seemed to have nothing left.
“I just want to see the mountains again, Ter-bear. I don’t want to be laid up in this bed until it’s over.”
“You won’t be.” I assured myself. I knew she’d already accepted her fate but that didn’t mean I had to. The money my grandfather had left behind when he died was more than enough to cover her treatment but she wouldn’t have it. “Come on, just tell them you want the treatment, okay?”
She shook her head in resignation. “I can’t keep tying you down like this, Terry. You can’t just stay in this town your whole life. You’re too bright for that, you know it. ‘Sides, if I get the damn treatment it’ll just come back again.”
“You don’t know that.” I said with a tremble in my voice.
“I do know it, honey. My mother and my grandmother had the same thing, this isn’t something I can escape by just pumping myself full of chemicals.”
It wasn’t the first time we’d had this conversation, in fact we’d gone over it several times in the past two months. How could I possibly accept it? I shook my head and looked out the window with her. I’d already shed my share of tears over the sad state of our family so all I had was a familiar tightness in my chest as I brushed my thumb lovingly over her cool hand.
“Where would I even go?”
She shrugged, the banality of her slowly approaching demise having set in long ago. “Anywhere. Hell, go up to New York and become a big shot artist or something. You’ve got what it takes, you’ve already sold some paintings.”
I scoffed. “Yeah, I don’t think paintings of Spiderman from 8th grade will go far in New York.”
“Why not? Ain’t Spiderman from New York?”
“Touche.”
We shared a small chuckle. It was a quiet, fleeting moment, the beeps of the hospital equipment the only thing keeping the room from being dead silent once it passed. I kissed her on the cheek.
“Seeya later.”
She watched me go as I finished my shift, returning to the wretched work. It wasn’t more or less bearable, but it felt different with new thoughts on my mind. By the time I was thoroughly exhausted, arms tired from swinging brooms and mops and rags all day, I finally got the chance to drive back home. I tossed my badge and dirty work shirt on the couch of my meager apartment, threw some leftover pizza in the microwave, and looked to my little tv and vcr player. Moving some old movies aside, I grabbed an unmarked tape and pushed it into the slot, listening to the machine whir to life.
I set up the mini easel I had and fished through the kitchen drawers for my painting supplies as an episode of The Joy of Painting came onto the screen and the soothing voice of that afro’d man taught me how to paint a mountain. I didn’t just paint any mountain though. On the last leftover canvas I had from years ago in high school, I painted the holler on the edge of my old neighborhood.
Sweeps of green and brown foliage in the afternoon sun shaded by the hill on one side and the long, narrow expanse of sparse woodland stretching out into the distance. My heart thumped in my chest as I painted, the image of the mountains coming to life with every stroke my brush made along the canvas. The memory of that night filled my heart with dread but I pressed on, painting lines of color into a still snapshot of the very woods that had broken me. Even still, my mother loved those woods. If only she knew.
When I had finished, I set the painting out to dry, ate my now lukewarm pizza, showered, and went to bed. The night wasn’t any respite from life. I dreamt of flashes of brown and black, the snapping of branches, and horrid, grasping claws affixed to limbs of impossible length and shape. Yellow eyes. White hair stained red. A blackberry bush.
My eyes flew open again as I groaned to life once more, my sleep feeling so shallow and quick that I barely felt rested. The dreams of the night faded just as quickly and left me with a sunken, muddled pain. I was almost feeling normal as I lay awake in my bed and letting the terror pass until I heard a light tap at my window. I looked over and saw a red breasted robin tapping at the glass. The moment I sat up, it flew away. For whatever reason, it felt threatening almost. Like it wanted to come in. I went about my morning routine again and this time I took the painting with me.
The drive to work didn’t feel so bad this time. Politics and news on the radio. Drivers going past on their own ways to who knows where. Silently I knew I could never take that long highway out of town to newer, greener pastures. It just wasn’t in the cards for me. I didn’t have ambition like Ben did. Though I’d never admit it to her, I only learned how to draw, how to paint, because it made my mom smile. To be honest, I hated how frustrating the process of painting could be. The result was all I cared about; seeing her brighten up made it worth it.
When I got into the hospital again, I didn’t feel so bad about cleaning up the bile and shit and God knows what else. As the hours wore on, I took my break early and quickly went out to my car, wrapped the painting in my shirt, and brought it back up to that dull white room.
She was still there, same as before, looking at the sky as the clouds passed.
“Hey mom.”
“Hey Ter-bear.” She furrowed her brows as she saw the reflection in the window of my misshapen shirt. “What’s that?”
I unwrapped the canvas carefully and showed her. The sweeps and curls of browns, yellows, reds, and blues forming a splash of color in the otherwise sterile space. She gasped and reached a hand out as I walked it over to her.
“Oh, oh Terry, it’s wonderful.” She said as she took it in her hand and reached out an arm to hug me. I gently wrapped my arms around her. It felt like I could just lift her right out of bed she was so light.
“I figured since you couldn’t see the mountains so well from up here I’d come bring them to you.”
“I love it. Thank you.” She reached up and I leaned down so she could place a kiss on my cheek and hug me again. I brought an end table around from the other side of the room and positioned it up against the wall so I could set the painting where she could see it. The fluorescent lights didn’t do so well for it, but the sunlight that streamed in made the color pop against the otherwise featureless wall.
“How did you get all those little details so fast, this must have taken you all night?”
“Well, you can thank that Bob Ross guy.” I explained to her the way I painted it.  The more I talked the more I realized she seemed to get sleepy as if I were singing her a lullaby. For the first time in months, she seemed to genuinely find some peace. She soon started to drift off and I pulled the blanket up a little more. She held onto my hand before I could leave.
“I love you, Terry…”
“Love you too, mom.” I said as I headed back off to work. I took one last look at the painting before putting my shirt back on.
As I returned downstairs to the supply room, and before I could even gather my cleaning supplies to delve back into the filth, I could hear several people rushing off. Glancing in their direction, I saw them running down the hall to the elevator. I don’t know what compelled my thinking, but something in my chest tightened as I saw them. People ran off to handle codes every day, it was a big hospital, people were always having trouble. Nonetheless, I followed and sprinted back up the stairs to find them coming out on the floor where my mom was.
I prayed they wouldn’t turn down the hall to her room. When they did, I felt everything go cold. “No… no, no, no, no…”

“Hey man, you ever hear about the long-legged wolf?” Ben asked as he lugged a sack full of candy over the counter of his kitchen. “They say if you pick some blackberries in the woods on the edge of town and howl at the moon, it’ll come and make you part of its pack!”
“What, you like, become a wolf or something?”
“I think so. One of my math class friends told me about it. He said some of the 7th grade kids are gonna go up to the woods and try to find it tonight! There was a full moon just a week ago, but it should still work as long as it’s more than half full I think? Come on, we should go! We’ve still got a few hours before midnight!”
“Is it okay with your mom?”
Ben thought for a moment and then ran over to his mom on the porch who was waiting for more trick-or-treaters. They exchanged some words and he came back over.
“Yeah! She said it’s cool!”
“Mm, okay. We should take some flashlights though, and let me leave my mask here, I can’t really see through it very well.”
“Oh, good idea!” He said as he removed his storm trooper helmet, his locks of blonde hair spilling out, stuck together with sweat from running around gathering candy. We dug around in his kitchen to find the flashlights and made sure their batteries were full enough before running out the door again and down the road towards the edge of the neighborhood where we were already seeing some people heading.
By the time we got to the edge of the holler where the houses were sparse, we didn’t see anyone with us.
“Hey, should we, like, wait for someone?”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine, we can find some blackberries first and we have flashlights so people will find us pretty easily! We can just look for their lights too if we get lost!”
Seemed reasonable enough. I tightened my robe and stuffed part of it in my pants so it wouldn’t drag on the forest floor as we trudged through the leaf litter, pointing our flashlights every which way. The canopy and shadow of the hills made the already darkened night sky a total pitch black outside the beams of our flashlights. Finding blackberries in this condition wouldn’t be easy, but I swore I could hear voices deeper in the woods, amidst the chirps and chatters of night bugs.
Traveling along the base of the holler wasn’t terribly hard. The woods here were already somewhat sparse, lacking dense bush and easy to see through since most of the foliage had fallen to the ground by now. Some spots were choked with vines that were impossible to get past, but it’s not like there would be any blackberries there anyway.
“Hey, do you even know where you’re going? We should stay by the spots where people usually walk, ya know?”
“It’s fine, I can hear a group up ahead.” I listened and indeed I could also hear what sounded like multiple hushed voices echoing through the trees. Every noise seemed magnified here, sounds carrying for hundreds of feet thanks to the wood and shape of the mountains on either side of us. What I didn’t see were any lights ahead of us. Just more pitch blackness.
“Hey, right here!” Ben said as he started rummaging through the bushes. He came back over with a small handful of berries, plump and ripe.
“Okay, so how does this work?” My heart was starting to beat faster. Were we really doing this? I didn’t even know what this long-legged wolf was supposed to be, let alone what might happen if this weird ritual actually worked. Robins began chirping in the trees.
“Um, you just eat a wild blackberry then you howl at the moon and wait and if the long-legged wolf hears you, it’ll come and offer to make you part of its pack. That’s what Jay told me anyway.”
“This feels kinda dangerous…” I was starting to get cold feet. I didn’t know about any urban legends like this but something in the back of my mind felt familiar about this story. Something my grandmother told me before she died. “Isn’t there like a Indian monster or something that’s out in the woods?”
“I dunno, Jay says he heard it from his grandad. What, you chicken?” He teased as he held a berry up to my face. I couldn’t hear the hushed voices anymore.
I grabbed it out of his hand and popped it in my mouth. He did the same a second later. The juice of the berry was tart and not as sweet as I was expecting. I’d never eaten wild blackberries before, but it wasn’t bad.  Once we’d eaten them, we pointed our flashlights up and tried to find the moon. The single glimmer of silver light just barely over the peak of the hill. We were deep in the holler now, but we held our hands up to our mouths and howled.
A poor imitation of a wolf, though we thought our pitch and tone was perfect. Our lips tinged with purple juice, we howled over and over for a full minute or so before we stopped.
“Okay, okay, now we listen!” Ben said in a hushed tone as he pointed his flashlight down. Silence… wait, weren’t there robins chirping a moment ago? In fact, even at night, usually the hoots of owls and yips of coyotes echoed through the holler, they would even reach our houses sometimes. I looked back the way we came. I couldn’t even see the lights of the neighborhood anymore. In fact, every which way I looked, nothing seemed familiar anymore. The trees almost bowed and the vines formed walls that filled the path we had taken.
Those hushed voices we heard off in the distance started up again, closer this time. Whispers of indistinguishable words being passed around in wide arcs through the trees all around us. I shook Ben’s shoulder and whispered to him.
“I think we should go!”
“Hold on, I think it’s working!”
“I don’t like this anymore, let’s go!” My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my ears. My flashlight whipped around but I didn’t see anything. I started to back away when I heard a distinctive question on the wind, a voice so ethereal in source it didn’t sound like any person or animal I’d ever heard.
“Join… my… pack?” It felt so loud that it threatened to shake the very ground we stood on, but it was so faint that I could barely even make out the words. I was completely scared now. This wasn’t real. No way this was real. Those 7th graders had to be messing with us somehow. I started to back away.
“Uh, um…” I stammered, but Ben seemed more fascinated than scared. Maybe he wasn’t taking it seriously or maybe he was taking it way too seriously. Either way, he responded.
“Yes?” It sounded uneasy, but the groaning that followed shook the trees and seemed angered by the answer. It was like a dog’s growl, or maybe a cat’s purr, but either way the voice came again, thrumming and distinctly coming from somewhere above us.
“Blood… must… pay.” 
I didn’t like the sound of that at all. “Come on man, let’s get out of here!” I said as I grabbed his arm and urged him to run. His feet were firmly planted as his flashlight beam illuminated something in the darkness ahead of us. I felt my breathing rush as I caught sight of what he was looking at.
It was a head. Or, a face? A long, terrible snout with white, wispy fur, sharp, pointed ears, and yellow, gleaming eyes. The split of its jaw went so far back it practically severed the visage in two. The ragged hair suddenly terminated midair as it seemed affixed to a vine hanging down from somewhere above the canopy. When I inevitably focused on it, I could tell it was actually a bare spinal column with far too many joints, hundreds of jagged fragments of bone forming a chain of gray and brown covered in decaying flesh that seemed to billow like grass in a lake.
As it hung limply there, staring at us with its horrible yellow and blood red eyes, the smell hit me. An odor of metal mixed with rotting meat, iron and sulphur stinging my nose and finding its way into my stomach where the pieces of candy I’d eaten hours ago churned angrily. I wanted to throw up, but I was too frozen to even do that.
“H-hey, if this is a joke guys it’s not funny!” I called out, hoping with every fiber of my being that it really was just a group of older kids messing with us. No response came. A sinewy snap came as the jaw of the head parted, a noise so sudden and loud that I jumped back in surprise. The  revealing maw showed a gaping chasm filled with jagged, gnarled orange teeth. Where its tongue should have been was nothing but a nest of leaves and twigs and out of its throat came the chirping of robins as a family of birds fluttered out from its mouth and flew off into the trees. 
Suddenly, one of the trees ahead of us started to lift out of the ground. The white bark of the birch, which was not a birch at all, snapped in the middle. It was a leg. Pockmarked and tall beyond reason with numerous bending ligaments, it lifted out of the leaf litter, dropping dark, papery leaves as it revealed a paw the size of a car tire with boney toes ending in black claws.
At this point, Ben’s fear took over his curiosity and he leaned into me as we felt the screaming instinct to run. We didn’t make it ten steps before a paw landed next to us. A powerful force wrenched Ben away from me as he shouted in abject terror, his throat releasing a guttural cry as he was lifted up into the air. I whipped my light around to see a single glimpse of his body in the jaws of the wolf. His plastic armor did nothing to protect him as the orange teeth pierced into him, the shiny white of his costume instantly becoming stained with running red. His cries of agony were interrupted by a loud pop, a snap, and a long, wet crunch. I couldn’t see the state of him as I turned and sprinted out of the woods, but I didn’t hear him make another sound.
A baleful, throaty howl followed behind me as I burst out of the bushline, impossibly ending up right back on the edge of the holler where I could see the dirt road becoming asphalt and the streetlights beaming down on the costumed kids going about the neighborhood. I sprinted towards the neighborhood.
It didn’t take long for someone to find me collapsed on the sidewalk, torn to shreds by thorns and branches, screaming and crying and unable to say what I had seen. Days later, police questioned me and though I told them about the creature in the woods they eventually settled on the idea that Ben and I had been attacked by an animal. Not unbelievable. As it turned out, the older kids had actually gone into the woods that night after I escaped and found pieces of Ben’s plastic storm trooper armor scattered around, ripped apart and covered in blood. His parents, understandably completely beside themselves with grief, led searches for weeks and months to find his body but turned up nothing.
I was never the same after that and I knew it right away. I stopped drawing unless it was for my mom. Strangely, she had recovered fairly well in the weeks after Ben’s death, she became my only solace in the world despite my giving up on myself. I never made friends in school again. I hardly even paid attention to my schoolwork and barely made it out of high school. Every now and then, even after I’d moved out of my old neighborhood to the town over, I would dream of the wolf.