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While I had the idea for this story a few days ago, I got a little bit stuck…and I want to thank a handful of you for providing prompts that gave this story an inspirational push!
I sent out an all-call for some prompt ideas at this Note, and a few of those ideas made it into this story, including one from
and one from . Thanks, y’all!If you like this little story, and you want to see more like it, please let me know with a like, comment, share, or restack!
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Sharp pain seized Mack from his left ankle all the way up to his hip as he limped through the woods, hands empty and shaking without his hunting rifle. He still couldn’t believe he had dropped it in the brush, back there. Dropped it and ran, like a damn coward. And now he was all turned around.
Stupid.
He was sweating in his gear, neon vest and thick camo coveralls still smelling store-fresh and expensive, and his unbroken-in boots squeaked as he pushed himself through the bushes, looking for any signs of civilization. Anything at all.
When he found it, it was not what he hoped, but it would do: an abandoned shed, boards missing like broken teeth and door hanging off its hinges, slouched in the gloom of the trees. Mack limped the last few yards, pushed his way into the creaking door, and closed it behind him, a thin protection against the impending night.
He took a minute to breathe, to let his heart slow, as he looked around the shed. It wasn’t difficult; the room was tiny, an old outbuilding smelling of mildew and loam, with a dirt floor and an upturned galvanized bucket gleaming dully, the only furniture.
Mack employed the bucket as a seat, easing himself down so he could carefully remove his left boot and sock and take a look at his ankle. It was terribly swollen, throbbing painfully, and already beginning to bruise. It had been quite the tumble he had taken down that unseen slope.
Stupid, he thought. So stupid.
He sighed, trying to think back to first aid classes, lifeguarding at summer camp when he was a teen. He needed ice, probably. An ace bandage? He had neither.
So damn stupid, he thought, again. He emptied his pockets, took stock: wallet with his hunting license, a stick of Nicorette gum—for good luck—a small bag of trail mix, his cigarettes—for bad luck—and his car keys. On his keyring was the small flashlight his brother had given him last year, with that strange piercing blue-white type of bulb that was just starting to catch on. Mack had thought the new LED bulbs were ugly as sin, but he was grateful for them now, tapping the button and finding that the little light did a passable job of illuminating his ankle, the area immediately around him.
The light landed on his boot, the stain of crimson swiped across it, still staining the sole. Not his blood. It was hers.
Mack swallowed harshly.
This whole thing, it was not meant to go like this. He couldn’t believe it had gone so wrong. When he had seen on a Forest Service map that there was a small deer-hunting swath on the tiny Ferris Island, he had figured it would be a better bet than trying to fight for space at any of the other more popular spots peppered across the state. It was almost too good to be true, and he hadn’t seen one single other hunter all day. Granted, he hadn’t seen any deer, either. Not until…
He cleared his throat, removed his fleece-lined hat so he could wipe his shaking hands through his lightly-graying hair. He thought about smoking. He thought about the gum. He couldn’t decide, so he left them both lying on the ground next to the bucket.
Mack tipped his face up to look through a hole in the boards. The sky was bruising purple in some strange sympathy to his injured ankle, and he sighed. The darkness was drawing in earlier these days. He didn’t relish the thought of hiking back through unfamiliar woods to the unmarked service road where he had parked his car. Thinking of his brand-new, pristine white Trailblazer sitting unattended on an abandoned forest road all night filled him with dread, but there wasn’t really an option at this point.
“Better make myself comfortable,” he murmured.
The night noises gradually drew in like the tide, the flutter of furtive wind through the trees. Mack eased himself down off of the bucket and onto the dirt floor, pushing carefully backward until his back was against what seemed to be a strong-enough section of wall. At least he had a roof over his head and his hunting gear was plenty warm. He crossed his arms, tucked his hands into his armpits, leaned his head back. It would be fine. One night, and in the morning he would find his way back to the car.
He closed his eyes. He wasn’t sure if he would really be able to sleep, but he could at least doze. He could do that.
Mack settled himself in, shuffling his butt around to find a comfortable position.
He could pick out the night noises as they rose around him. Mostly frogs, chirping unseen from marshy patches deeper into the woods, and the occasional rustle of underbrush as a small creature skittered through, a rabbit or a raccoon or a weasel, maybe. He heard the undulating chittering of bats, swooping down as they grabbed the last of the warm-season insects before autumn cooled the earth in earnest for winter.
Mack rested like that for a little while, the darkness deepening, just listening to the thick woods falling into their familiar patterns, uncaring of him and his intrusion. Old woods in a largely untouched place. It was almost soothing.
But then, Mack became aware of another sound. It was subtle. He probably would not have heard it at all if he wasn’t lying so still with his eyes closed in the gathering dark. It was a low, persistent trembling in the air. Mack tried to pinpoint it with his ears, tried to focus in on it. Only then did he realize that it was getting louder...because it was getting closer.
It was a low, groaning sound.
It sounded like…
Mack’s eyes snapped open, but he saw only the darkness of the shed with dusky holes where the broken boards let in the night’s ambiance. The groaning was faint, coming from everywhere and nowhere.
It could not be the thing he feared it was; that would be impossible. He decided that it was probably the wind off of the nearby sea, whistling strangely through old-growth trees. A trick of the ear and nothing more. He wasn’t used to sleeping outside. He was sure there was plenty of natural noise he was not accustomed to.
He tried to readjust against the wall, ignoring the sound. But it seemed to rise and fall in volume, to grow closer to his shelter, and it was difficult to ignore it once he had allowed his ear to land on it.
Then, as he closed his eyes again to try and sleep, he heard footsteps. Heavier than the small nocturnal creatures busying themselves in the bushes. Heavy, methodical steps, striding through the brush toward the back wall of his shelter.
Mack froze, listening, as the footsteps neared slowly. He didn’t know enough about this place to know what it could be. He couldn’t decide if an animal or a person would be worse.
His fingers itched for his gun. For his hunting knife. Both of which he had left behind.
Stupid.
He pushed this unpleasant thought away in time to hear a scraping sound as of an axe-handle being dragged across the outside of the wall.
Mack yelped without thinking, but the scrape hissed uninterrupted along the wall until the approaching figure had passed the shed, now rounding to the front entrance and the broken door. Mack saw only flickers of shadowy movement through the broken boards and his heart began to pound, his skin icy cold in the overly-warm hunting gear.
The figure stopped. Silence fell, agonizing. After waiting until he couldn’t take it anymore, Mack pulled himself forward to the corner nearest the door where a small piece of board was missing, and he peered out.
The high clouds had pulled away like a veil, revealing a swollen moon, and in the light of that moon stood an apparition of bone: a large stag, a skeleton, ragged ribbons of dried flesh and fur hanging from its frame, bristle-crown of antlers glittering with spider’s webs, empty sockets of eyes and cracked ungulate hooves.
But the teeth. The teeth were wrong.
The teeth were sharp. Like a dog’s teeth. Not like a deer, not at all.
Mack blinked, trying to clear his vision, trying to pretend it away. But the bone-stag was facing the shed, its empty eyes trained only on the door. The groaning sound had risen, a wailing in the gloom, coming from somewhere in the woods. Distant, yet closing in.
It sounded like…
Mack shuffled away from the door, cursing. He had no gun, no knife. He had nothing to defend himself with. He couldn’t even be sure if the thing was real, or if it was just a pain-induced nightmare.
The wailing was getting to him. He was starting to feel it under his palms as they pressed against the earth, vibrating in his skin.
It sounded like…
The bone-stag shifted forward on its strange legs, striding in another slow circle around the shed. Mack watched the giant shadow of it pass the broken boards as it traced a ritualistic clockwise path, skull lifted high like a ghoulish king, moonlight glimmering off of its antlers, pocked and scored with rodent gnaw-marks.
The groaning rose again, higher, an appeal. A call for justice, from somewhere in the woods. From the place where his gun lay, and his knife. A seeping of blood. An unholy offering from an unpracticed acolyte. A sacrilege.
“Is that it?” he said aloud in terror, surprising himself with his own voice. “Is that why you’re here?”
Outside, the bone-stag paused. It had not yet completed its circle around the shed. Mack could see it standing off to his left, through a hole at floor-level.
He was suddenly filled with a wild belief that confession was the only way out.
“Yes, I shot her!” he said. “It was me, dammit!”
All day. He had been at it all day, and he had been tired and frustrated. No other hunters, and no deer. Not until he saw her: a yearling doe in a grove of bright green ferns, absolutely perfect, bright-eyed and healthy, fur fluffed for winter. The only deer all day, as if the rest had been actively avoiding him.
The regulations had specified bucks, for this area. Not does.
But she was the only one he had seen all day, and he couldn’t go home empty-handed. No one would have to know, not out here. Not in this tiny place, with no one else to see.
He took the shot, but he was unpracticed and she jumped at the last second, spooked by the sound of his brand-new boot on a dry branch. He got her in the belly. Not a killshot.
When he approached with his knife out, her groaning and the spreading blood and the way her big brown eye rolled up to look at him, to indict him…
He had panicked. Dropped the gun, dropped the knife, and ran. Ran so hard that he wasn’t paying attention. He had slipped in a low spot, twisting his ankle, leaving the doe behind to die slowly, painfully. He was all turned around, lost in the woods.
He could still hear the groaning.
“Yes, I shot her!” Mack said again, louder, nearly shouting. “I’m…I’m sorry!”
The bone-stag shifted forward, completed its circuit around the shed. The groaning only intensified, deepened, nightmarish and low.
It sounded like the doe, yes.
But also like…
“Shut up!” Mack shouted, pinning his hands to his ears. He threw himself against the back wall and the shed creaked, but held. “Shut the hell up!”
He saw her, then, plain as day.
He saw her on the couch, staring up at him, big brown eyes. Doe eyes, people used to say. She’s got doe eyes, big beautiful eyes.
Those big brown eyes had welled with tears, fingers wringing in her lap around her wedding band as if she could wipe away the shame and the grief and the rage of it all.
“How long have you been seeing her?”
It wasn’t anything so cliche as lipstick on the collar or a stray hair or receipts from dinners she had not accompanied him on. He had gotten sloppy; she had seen them together, him and his lover, walking arm-in-arm into the movie theater. She had spotted them while she was at the mall shopping for maternity clothes to hold her changing body, her swelling belly. It was supposed to be a surprise.
In a way, it still was.
In the end, he didn’t remember any of the plot of The Mothman Prophecies; he and the woman he had met only a few weeks before had spent the entire two hours kissing and touching in the back row, illicit and profound, while his wife wept quietly in the fitting room of JC Penney, alone.
His wife, her doe eyes full of tears and her womb full of his child, stared up at him from the couch and asked, “How long have you been seeing her?” and he didn’t answer. He couldn’t even look her in the eye.
He just ran. Never looked back.
It was as if he had wounded her and left her to die. He could still hear the wailing, following him down the apartment hallway all the way to the elevator.
The groaning in the woods reached a fever pitch and Mack squeezed his eyes shut, tears of horror dragging down his cheeks, meeting under his chin.
“I’m sorry!” he shouted, his voice muffled by the hands clasped over his own ears. “I’m sorry!”
Slam. Something hit the wall of the shed and the rotten wood shuddered.
“No, please! I’ll make it right!”
He would call her. As soon as he got out of here, he would call her. It had been seven months, but maybe she would listen to him. He would make it right. He would fix it.
Slam.
“I’ll fix it!” Mack could hear the desperation in his own voice, the way his frightened cries harmonized with the groaning in the trees. “I promise, I swear!”
SLAM.
“I swear on my life!” he roared, his ears buzzing with the pained, harsh volume of it.
And then…all was still.
Mack held frozen for a time, hands still pressed against his ears. But then he slowly pulled them away. The groaning was gone, replaced by the usual night noises.
Mack inched his way to the nearest hole in the wall to look out. The moon had drawn the covers back over herself, pulling the clouds across her naked belly, a shroud. The bone-stag had vanished, and nothing remained except for heavy hoofprints in the autumn soil.
*******
When dawn paled the forest and peered in through the holes of the shed, Mack woke with the birds. His ankle was still throbbing but the daylight cheered him somewhat, filled him with a sort of hope.
He put his sock and boot back on, pulled himself to his feet, and left the shed behind, making his way through the woods as carefully as he could, slowly and steadily.
He did not look back.
As he walked, his mind was filled with the memory of the previous night. Of the stag, of the groaning, of his desperate confession. And the further through the woods he limped, and the higher the sun climbed in the sky, the less real it all felt. More like a dream, a nightmare that one wakes from and feels stupid for being so afraid.
Stupid.
In the cold light of day, the killing of the doe seemed a freak thing, but not something he could be held accountable for. Just an accident. And the thought of calling his ex-wife felt ridiculous, even insulting. Some vows, once broken, could not be repaired. It all seemed like too little, too late. And for what? To appease some forest-ghost that he probably imagined, anyway?
No atheists in a foxhole, he thought, with glum humor.
He found the trail, and within minutes the white Trailblazer bloomed into sight. Mack could have wept with the relief of it. He sped up, examining the vehicle from afar as he approached: no broken windows, tires all looked fine. He had lucked out.
He reached into his coverall pocket, only to find that the keys—the car keys—were not there.
He fumbled in both pockets, in every pocket. Pants. Vest. No keys.
He pictured them sitting on the dirt floor of the shed, where he had left them after emptying his pockets to take stock. The little LED flashlight keychain, pointless in the dust.
Mack stood there for a minute or two, staring at the car, letting the disappointment and exhaustion wash over him in numb, cold waves. But there was nothing else to do; he had to go back for the keys.
The way back to the shed felt shorter, easier. Maybe it was because he had a renewed purpose, single-minded. Maybe it was because he was fueled by his annoyance at himself, more overpowering than the pain in his ankle. It did not take long to find the shed, looking even more dilapidated in the daylight, choked with dripping moss and collapsing under the weight of rot.
Amazed that the roof hadn’t caved in on him while he slept, Mack pushed the door open. The keys were sitting right where he left them, beside the bucket. He limped to collect them, along with his wallet and gum and cigarettes and trail mix. He pocketed them and straightened up, and only then noticed that up high on the back wall of the shed was a skull, hung like a decoration. A stag’s skull, wide crown of antlers covered in cobwebs, empty eye sockets black and void.
But the teeth were wrong.
Was that there before? He swore that it wasn’t. It would have been right above his head, all night. He would have noticed. Right?
Mack saw a flickering out of the corner of his eye, movement outside the shed, and he turned to look through the nearest gap in the wall.
There was a doe out there, a yearling, with a crimson flower blooming on her belly, and her big brown doe-eyes were looking straight at him. The sun-drenched trees were visible behind her, through her, as if she was made of gauze.
She did not blink. She did not breathe.
Mack took in the sight for a moment. It was almost beautiful. Ethereal.
But it did not last.
There was a scraping sound along the wall, a groaning that filled the rotting shed, a portentous rattling of bone, and Mack turned back to the skull.
He looked straight into its empty eyes, and it gazed back.
Outside, the doe looked on unblinking as the shed filled with the wailing. She waited, unnaturally patient, until the wailing stopped.
Then, as if a silent prayer had been answered to her satisfaction, she leaped on ghost-light feet and vanished into the trees.
END
One thing I love about Ferris Island stories is how often redemption is genuinely offered. It's not always received, and when comeuppance arrives it always feels deserved -- but in a way it feels deserved specifically because the character clearly understood their wrongs and chose the wrong path anyway. It feels that much more grounded and satisfying, as opposed to someone who doesn't see what they did wrong or doesn't believe it was "that bad" just getting merc'd by some horror in the dark. Justice instead of blind revenge, I guess.
All of which is to say: I love this story, it's horrifying in the best way. Also shoutout to the Not Deer, my favorite scary cryptids. <3
This is very unnerving. we hope for some RIGHTEOUS justice on the pathetic hunter. I would have cracked and spelled out some awful demise but well done for the subtlety!