There are beings that live in the dark shadows of the trees of the world's forests. They are like bogeymen, in a way. Always out of sight, and just out of reach. They creak on floorboards when they lank into your home and snap twigs when you are alone in one of their vale's. But there they stand, tall and hunched just outside your perception, looming and dextrous. I have seen them, their dull eye sockets pitted with dark eyes. Their mouth's thin, and their noses a single hole, like that of a skull.
I saw one first when I was six, living in a small town in Appalachia, where I would explore the woods on my parent's five acre property very frequently. Building forts with my sister, playing army with my friends, collecting firewood in the autumn and winter with my father and finding leaves to press with my mother. But at age six, on a stormy autumn night. I could not sleep. I tried to wake my parents and see if I could crawl in between them in bed for comfort. Though I could not rouse them from sleep, and my sister was sawing logs as she did every night. I was, and to a certain degree have always been, deathly afraid of thunder storms. Living in the mountains, the thunder rolled through the valleys like a tide, and the lightning cracked and forked in unsettling ways against the horizon. I have never forgotten that night, where I stepped out onto our screened in porch and looked out into the forest and the mountain above, hoping to tame my fear. I looked up at the mountain, it was grand and old, I followed it down to it's roots behind our house and there standing in the faded light was someone tall, taller than anyone I'd ever seen, and skinny, oh so skinny. Emaciated like Siddhartha beneath his Bohdi Tree. The person vanished as the clouds in the sky whipped about and the trees lost leaves by the barrel full knocked off by wind and rain and debris. The next thing I knew, this person...this thing...was closer. It had moved without sound halfway into our backyard without so much as a whisper. In a flash of lightning, it's skin looked purple, it's eyes looks as black and as shiny as oil, and it's skin was tight...so tight against its frame you could see it's bones. I tried to get back inside but I had locked myself out, when I looked back it was closer, smiling with a closed mouth and thin lips, its hole of a nose flaring in the flash of lightning that came next. Then darkness. I remember seeing it standing there, wet and gangly, stoic against the wind and rain, smiling at me it's eye sockets like inkwells only H.P. Lovecraft would have dared use. I huddled up and faced the door, wishing for the thing to be gone, or that my mother would come outside and save me from this thing that I thought had every intention of hurting me. The world grew silent, no thunder, no rain on our tin roof, not even the sound of lightning flashing. I could only hear my shaking breath, the sound of the wood creaking beneath my feet as I huddled next to the house covering my head and my ears and my eyes. I heard the screen door open with a creak, a long moaning and rusty noise, and the scratch of fingernails on the wires of the door as it opened. The floorboards creaks...and then nothing...the next thing I knew I was in bed waking up with the smell of petrichor and ozone on the air, and the sound of bacon being cooking on a hot iron skillet.
The next time I saw one was when I was thirteen, living in the same house, and in blissful denial about my first encounter with these creatures that I had named Stringy Men after their long spindly arms and how much they reminded me of a marionette. The phrase later matured to Puppet, but I never could say the word "String" without shivering a bit, so for all intents and purposes, we will be calling them String Men as if to bridge the gap between child and adult.
Like I said, the next encounter was when I was thirteen, living in the same house with my parents, only my sister had moved away to go to college, leaving her dear darling sibling to get all the attention I so rightfully deserved. It was the night of a middle school dance, needless to say I did not have a date, I wasn't very fond of dancing and no one ever danced with me to begin with, so I just assumed it was the dancing and not me. I returned home on my bike around eight. The sun was setting, the crickets were chirping, and the lighting bugs were floating about in the cool early spring air. Mom and dad were inside, they didn't seem to be very happy, and when I heard the shattering of glass, I didn't dare go inside. Though my father came outside smelling of beer, his car keys jingling, mumbling something I couldn't catch. I don't think he saw me, because he ran over my bike with his truck and peeled out down our long gravel drive way, turning into the last night I would see my father until his funeral twenty years later. The String Man was at the edge of the woods by the time my father's headlights left sight. It stood there, smiling in the shadow of the forest on the north side of my house. I was stunned and fell backward, scrambling back toward my house. It stepped forward and the lightning bugs seemed to pass through it as it walked so gently through the tall grass toward my front porch. It's arms swayed very little, and I could see nothing about it that was remotely human, or alien. It was a hunter, an animal of unquestionable natural place on this earth.
I never told my mother, or my sister, I did not want to cause more undue anxiety as they dealt with my Father's abandonment. This isn't to say I didn't take it well, he was my father after all, and I always loved him, no matter how much my mother hated him.
The third time was when I was 22, while living in Germany. A semester abroad from my time at Longwood University in Farmville Virginia, where I was studying, as you've probably guessed, creative writing. By now I had seen therapists and discussed the String Men, they referred me to psychiatrists who never went as far as prescribing me drugs, but did recommend that I continue therapy. I did as they advised, I even found a very good therapist while living in Berlin who was very good with matters of childhood trauma, as this was what we, me and my doctors, all thought the String Men were, hallucinations brought on by the abandonment of my father, and the fear I had for thunderstorms. The next encounter would be during a visit to the Black Forest, a day hike with friends ending with a night at a small bar in some small nearby town and inevitably a restful night in a local inn. The hike was wonderful, our guide was fluent in German and English so everyone could keep up, and he was very knowledgeable of the terrain and history of the area. But, during a rest, in the heat of mid-summer, I walked off to a nearby stream to wash my face and wet my bandana that I had wrapped around my neck to keep me cool. In the ripples of the stream I saw another String Man, looming just above me. I looked up, and there it was, clear as day on the other bank in the shadow of a tree, never fully entering my perception. I fell back into the rocks and began sobbing, covering my mouth to hide my screams. It just stood there next to a tree, one long arm bent so that its spindly fingers rested unsettlingly along the bark; almost sensually. A friend of mine, Maria came and found me in the wet rocks of the creek, I looked away for a second and the String Man was gone. Maria didn't know how to help me, I tried to play it off as I was seeing things, that I'd just remembered something horrible, anything but the String Men. But that's when I saw two hands, with terrible boney fingers wrap around Maria's head. She was facing me, crouched in the shade of a tree on a small patch of moss. I saw her shiver for a second, but other than that she did not notice the ashen hands moving slowly to her neck. I was paralyzed, I was stunned as I looked up behind her and there it was crouched, but still looming over us, caressing Maria's cheeks and neck, with her none the wiser to what was obviously danger, real and immediate danger. She mentioned something about feeling unsettled, cold, a little nervous, but laughed it off and helped me up assuring me it was probably just the stories our guide was telling us that was getting to our heads. I walked back, shaking in fear at every broken twig, every rustle, even the sweat dripping from my face. When I returned to school back in the States, I was different, reclusive, and afraid of the shade beneath trees. This led to my hospitalization at Tucker Pavilion in Richmond, Virginia, and many long nights and days, some spent in the isolation chamber of my own volition because I wan't them to see when one of them showed up, I want them to see on the camera in my cell, the animals that stalked me, that I learned later that stalked us all in their own way.
Five years later I was working as an editor for a big time book agent named Harold Rice, a man who liked his cigarettes like he liked his women. Thin, white, and easily disposable. I detested Harold, but he paid well and even gave good critiques on my own writing. He said he'd never send it off to a publisher though. He called my work, "Redundant". He never said it was bad, and he would always ask when another piece of mine was going to be done so he could read it. A short story I had written was published on an up and coming online magazine, and in print in a compilation of up and coming authors released in January of 2011. The book was entitled, "Authors to Keep an Eye out For." and it actually show cased two of my short stories, one at the beginning about a man living in perpetual fear of his shadow, and another I had shown only Harold, a story about living in the shadow of someone who left his family behind. Harold smiled the day the book came out, and handed me a hardback copy and told me to flip to the final story. This man, became my agent from then on, and as it turns out, had been using my work as something to gain more authors under his crooked wing. He claimed that the work I was doing, was another author of his who he would use as a selling point for other authors, a standard. Both disgusted and flattered he and I worked together to produce some of my best work and he assured me I would be a success. I, unfortunately, was.
Three books out by age 30, and two well received short story collections. I had my confidence back, but still...the String Men haunted my dreams. Their ashen skin tight and wrinkled in the shade of trees, their thin lips curled into smiles. Their eyes, blacker that the bottom of the sea. My most recent run in was not too long ago, a trip to Maine for a photoshoot for an upcoming book. We found ourselves on a grey shingle, where they would take headshots of me, as well as get the cover of the book. Standing in the grey sand was a bleached bone tree, gnarled and old, twisted and wicked. The sky was grey and no shade laced our frames. But for an instant the sun came out, the moment our photographer was waiting for, when light juxtaposed dark on a grey setting. The tree cast a shadow, and from behind that tree emerged a String Man, old, withered, skin dark and wrinkled. It looked at us hungrily. I froze, looking at the beast wild eyed. My photographer snapped several photos with the String Man right in the frame. The creature and I stood looking at each other with some sort of respect. I could see it, and it could see me, and in that moment I had a revelation about the String Men. I smiled, and the String Man smiled back and stepped into the sunlight. In an instant, is began burning, it's skin turning to char as my photographer and several close friends looked over the photographs and commented on the dark and the light, the eeriness of the photo, and how it seemed to unsettle them. I watched the String Man, this Puppet, Stringy Man to my younger self, stand stoic in the sun, on this shingle that had, at one time, had may trees for them to hide behind. It was old, and hungry, and tired. It smiled as the last bits of light left its button eyes, and the body, towering over us turned to ash, and settle into the dark grey sand without as much as a whisper. I began crying, and fell to my knees, in hysterics. A friend came over and comforted me, asking me what was wrong. I said. "The Beach is so beautiful isn't it? A wonderful place for something to end." To which she replied, after a moment of pause, yes.
This why I am putting this down into words. Finite, concise words. They are in the shade of the old trees of the world in the forests many call home. You can only just see them and some, with the will and the right mind, set can lay eyes on their full form. They feed off of us, not out of hatred, but necessity. The String Men are lonely, and they have learned to feed off of fear, the only thing that is given too them. In that moment three years ago on that shingle, I did not feed that String Man fear, it knew that I saw it, and I did not run, I did not hide, I just let the old one be. Then I felt...compassion for the creature. I saw in it's eyes, its deep eye sockets that end with a pupil as dark, clear, and calm as a mirror...I saw gratitude, I saw it was fed with the best food it had ever tasted, a meal for a king after God knows how long a fast...and it chose to die, never wanting to be alone again.
So the next time you are walking through a forest and hear the crinkle of leaves behind you, just beyond an old oak tree where you think eyes are. Do not fear. Go against every base instinct you have and feel and know that you are being guided through someones home. Something scary to see, but graceful and natural. Do not feed the lonely beasts fear,it will only want more because fear will never satisfy their hunger. Fear never satiates the solitude and loneliness of living in the shadow of such tall trees for eons. Feed them words, and smiles, feed them a brisk pace, a playful snowball, a game of hide and seek. Because only compassion can satiate something so unequivocally natural, as loneliness.
The String Men are real...
Go Into the Woods...
And Cherish the Shade.
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