1

Riley and Jim stood at the base of a cabin. It rested on stilts, twenty-five feet above the forest floor, facing west over the Beulah Valley.

“It’s gorgeous,” Riley said, looking up at the A-frame structure made of glass and pine. It was a marvel of architecture out in the middle of nowhere.

“Was it worth hiking all day to get here?”

“Abso-fucking-lutley. God, I love you.” She jumped up on him, wrapping her legs around his waist. Kissing him, she said, “I can’t believe Conrad and Stanley call this a hunting cabin.”

Jim laughed. “Those two old queens? Honey, they don’t come out here to hunt.” He kissed her again and put her down, spinning her by the wrist like a ballroom dancer.

“Come on,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Show me the inside of it.”

They climbed the two-and-a-half flights of caged metal stairs spiraling to the main deck that wrapped around the place.

The A-frame was tall, spacious, minimalist. It had a fireplace, a kitchen along the interior wall, a sitting area, and a bedroom that looked out over the forest. The entire façade was glass with panoramic views of the valley. It looked like a giant transparent tent. It was perfect.

In the bedroom, they put their rucksacks down on the king-sized bed. It was the only furniture in the room, save for a dresser and night table with a reading lamp on it. Riley kicked off her boots, sat on the bed, and rubbed her feet through thick wool socks.

“This is great, Jim. What a perfect place. I love it, and I love you.”

“I’m glad you like it babe. I was worried it was too far out.”

“Are you kidding? Look at this view.”

He never took his eyes off her. “Spectacular.”

“Pervert.”

“Yes ma’am, and then some.”

He scooped her up in his arms, spun around the bedroom, and kissed her passionately and deeply, the kind of kiss you give someone who means the world to you.

He threw the covers back on the bed, laid her down beneath them, and, kicking off his shoes, crawled into bed with her.

2

The bright pink glow illuminated the forest around the cabin. A soft breeze blew in the open windows. Jim and Riley sat on the deck looking up at the giant glowing bulb, sipping hot chocolate and nibbling energy bars, she in her black bra and panties, he in his American flag boxers. They warmed their hands with their cups, not a care in the world other than who was making breakfast in the morning —just a few hours away now.

“You ready to hit the hay? Big day tomorrow,” he said.

“And what do you have planned for us?”

“Well, my beautiful copilot, I have something very exciting, and dare I say adventurous even, waiting for us in the morning.”

“I love me a man of mystery. Do tell, Mr. Ford.”

“It’s a surprise. Don’t want to ruin it, but you’ll love it.”

“Party pooper.”

“Let’s go to bed. It’s late and we have to get up around six if we’re going to make it before the heat gets us.”

“Is it far?”

“It’s about a two-hour hike.”

“Okay, I’ll concede this one, only cause you’re so goddamn cute when you think you’re being clever.”

“Oh, I’m probably the cleverest person in the history of clever people.”

They laughed.

“Okay. Never do that impression again, deal?”

“Deal.”

3

“It just sprinkled, Riley. And it will make the surprise even better.”

“The rain?”

“Kind of.”

“This better be good, Jim. My feet are soaked.”

“You’re going to love it. We’re almost there.”

The lake was window-clear. You could see to the bottom of the deep cold water. She couldn’t wait to get in.

“Let’s go, Jim. Last one in is a rotten egg.”

“What are you, five?” He laughed and proceeded to strip. She was already naked. “Holy shit, you’re gorgeous, you know that? That water’s freezing, babe.”

She ignored him and ran into the water, diving under the surface once it reached her waist. Jim waded in after her, slowly, his fingers caressing the surface of the water, his body shivering.

They swam and splashed and kissed, holding each other as they treaded water, the pebbles on the bottom shimmering golds and browns and reds along the lake floor.

“Can you take me home please?” A voice from the woods. Small. Like a child’s voice. “I can’t find my way.” The voice quivered as if the child were going to cry.

Riley and Jim spun around, craning their necks. Where had the voice come from? Frantically, they scanned the tree line, but the beach was empty save for their clothes and packs.

“There,” Riley exclaimed. “Up in the trees, just past our stuff.” She pointed a trembling finger.

Beyond the shore, where the forest began pushing back, was a small boy, sitting cross-legged in a small clearing, staring directly at them with his hands folded on his lap. “Can you take me home, please? I can’t find my way.” His voice was timid and shaky. It sounded…not of here? Like an accent but different. Like he was speaking from there and all around at once. The trees echoed his small voice, sending it to Jim and Riley in waves that made them nauseous.

“What the hell?” Jim asked.

“Where’d that kid come from? We’re a day and a half from town.”

“Beats me. I thought it was all mountains for days.”

“Can you take me home please?” the boy repeated, this time raising his right hand to wave to them, his body rigid.

“What is he wearing? A garbage bag? Jesus,” Riley said.

They swam to shore.

In minutes, Riley was on the beach and squirming into her jeans and T-shirt. Jim sat on the sand, pulling on his boxers. The boy was several hundred feet up the bank and into the tree line. He must have been frightened when he saw them swimming and splashing naked.

Leaving their packs on the beach, they ran to the child, kneeling in front of him when they got there. The kid looked like he had been wandering around all night. His long hair was wild and in knots. The black trash bag he wore as a poncho was ripped and wet with the rain. Concern for the boy washed over Riley and she reached out for the boy. Jim knelt beside her, in front of the child.

Riley froze.

Jim grabbed her arm. She pulled it away.

They fell backward onto their butts, crab-walking away from the child, who now wore a vicious grin on his face. Hundreds of small points, like piranha teeth, filled the boy’s mouth.

“Can you take me home, please? I can’t find my way.” He spat, his tongue playing with the points of his teeth. A trickle of blood ran down his chin.

They turned, got to their feet, and ran back down the beach.

“Grab our packs,” Jim yelled as he scooped up the rest of their clothes. “Fuck that kid.”

“That wasn’t a kid, Jim.” She ran beside him, kicking up sand as they sprinted across the beach.

“Whatever that is, we’re out of here.” He was already out of breath, his adrenaline spiking then plummeting. He felt like he was going to pass out. Had to keep going. Run.

They ran hard until they thought their lungs would burst.

“Which way, Jim?”

“To the cabin? Back that way, but we can circle around if we don’t get too far into the woods. Keep the lake behind us and we should be okay.”

“Should be? What was that fucking thing, Jim? I mean it wasn’t a kid, was it?”

“I don’t know, babe. It looked like a kid, but did you see those teeth? And the garbage bag? Maybe he was a mountain kid, huh? Lives up here in some little shack somewhere with his folks. Maybe. Hell, I don’t know.”

They were bent over, hands on their knees, fighting for breath. Jim pulled his water bottle from his pack. “Here, babe.”

She took it, drank greedily, and gave it back to him half empty.

He finished it.

“Can you take us home, please? We can’t find our way.”

Another voice, this one deeper.

Clearer.

Closer.

“What the fuck?” Jim exclaimed. He spun around. Riley grabbed him by the bicep, pulling herself into him.

“Where’s it coming from, Jim?”

“Can you take us home, please? We can’t find our way.”

A different voice. A little girl. Sounded like she was right behind them.

They ran.

The lake was on their side.

“Where are we going, Jim?”

“Anywhere is better than here. Just keep running.”

“Who the fuck are they?”

“Beats me, and I don’t want to find out —do you?”

“No way.”

Again, they ran until they were out of breath, their lungs burning, their mouths dry.

The late day sun peeked through the canopy in little daggers of light that knifed down through the trees. Earwigs scurried beneath rocks and fat gray squirrels chirped in the treetops as Jim and Riley stood beneath them panting, their heads swivels, looking in every direction at once. Gnats and deer flies feasted on their sweaty flesh.

The forest swam. Riley fell to her knees, exhausted, spent.

“We just can’t keep running blind like this, Jim. Try your phone.”

He took his phone out of his pack.

“No signal. We need to keep moving.”

“Where to?”

“Back to the cabin. We’ll climb up there, lock the cage, and call out on the radio Conrad uses when he’s up here.”

“Yeah, sounds good.”

“Can you take me home, please? I can’t find my way.”

They jumped and stood straight to face a young man in a tattered black suit jacket split down the back, black slacks, and shoeless. His long brown hair was slicked back and looked wet in the sporadic light. But it was his eyes that stood out like beacons on his smooth face. Black as coal, set deep into sockets that had begun to rot.

“Take me home, please.” He smiled at them, licking his lips with a tongue too long to fit in his mouth, his maw a cabal of razor-sharp teeth like two bear traps set inside each other. He looked like a chainsaw that could talk.

“Fuck me,” Riley said, turning to run.

“Holy shit,” Jim muttered as he followed her out of the clearing.

They ran faster with the lake on their left, side by side, neither leaving the other behind nor letting the other out of their sight. They were in this together, and together, they would make it back to the cabin.

As they sprinted through the forest, dodging saplings and limbs and ducking beneath overgrown shrubs and branches, they could hear voices on either side of them asking, Take me home, please. So many distinct and different voices echoed from all around —above, in front, behind them, from everywhere.

Every now and then, Jim and Riley could see children scurrying in the woods beside them. Children of all ages, dressed in flour sacks, garbage bags, suit jackets, and fishing bibs tore through the underbrush like charging bulls. Some wore rubber boots —others wore nothing at all. They swarmed the forest like feral creatures, climbing up trees and crawling down headfirst, like rodents. They clawed at the bark and swung from branches.

The forest was overrun.

Jim and Riley sprinted back to the cabin without stopping. It took them almost an hour of navigating, between the thick underbrush and sweltering heat. As they reached the tree line delineating the forest from the small clearing surrounding the cabin, the sounds of the children fell silent. Birdsong and the buzzing of insects returned. Even the sun still shone brightly overhead.

In the trees, the children watched. Dozens of them, milling quietly about, perched on limbs, squatting beside the trees, some standing sentinel, the older ones, arms hanging limply by their sides. Mouths wide. Teeth sharp. Eyes black.

4

Jim tried the walkie in vain. It wasn’t the shortwave radio that Conrad had alluded to, or maybe Jim had presumed it was a shortwave, or a ham radio. He had formed a picture of the two old queens in his mind, sitting on the couch drinking wine and pranking truckers.

The walkie squawked.

“Hello? Is anyone there? We need help,” Jim pleaded.

“Jim? That you?”

“Conrad?”

“Yes, what’s wrong?”

“Where are you?”

“We’re home.”

“Jesus, call the police. We need help out here.”

“Are you okay?”

“We’re pretty fucking far from okay out here. We need the cops or the Army or somebody out here now. They’ve completely surrounded this place.”

He had begun to whisper and didn’t even know it. Riley was at his side, gripping his arm.

She kept an eye on them, outside, down below, surrounding the place from within the trees. They were like ants, and Jim and Riley were the picnic.

“Call the cops,” Riley screamed into the walkie, never taking her eyes from the windows.

“Well, about that.” Was that hesitation in Connie’s voice? Sadness? Remorse?

“Call them. There’s no signal up here.”

“Can you take us home, please? We can’t find our way.” The children spoke in unison, their wet and sharp voices like gargling broken glass. The sound came from all around the cabin. It poured in through the vents like cheap dollar store wine, permeating every molecule of space and time.

Jim and Riley were being swallowed by the din of the voices.

“Call the police, Conrad. They’re everywhere. They chased us in the woods.”

“They’ve surrounded the cabin, Connie. Please call the police,” Riley cried, sobbing. Jim stared out the front window at the children gathering in the clearing.

There were dozens of them, ranging in height, weight, skin color, age. Some were teenagers, wearing tattered jeans and canvas high tops. They looked like they were straight out of a fifties paperback novel. Others were smaller, their clothes but sacks and bags, ripped pieces of plastic or tarp, but with mouths like chainsaws and their eyes black as coal. They weren’t children —Jim and Riley knew that somehow. They might have been children at some point, years or even decades ago, but now they were feral hungry things, and they have trapped Jim and Riley inside a stupid little cabin made of glass.

Whose idea was this?

“I am so sorry, but I can’t help you.” Connie sounded strange.

“Call the police, Goddamnit.”

“Now Jim, cussing me out isn’t going to make any difference.”

“I can attest to that,” Stanley chimed in playfully from the background. Conrad hushed him.

Riley sat on the floor, staring out the front window.

“Jim.”

Riley’s voice sounded strange, far away. Jim turned to look.

The children had formed a massive ring in the clearing below. They sat in unison, cross-legged. In the center of the ring was a large black figure made more of shadow than matter. It was bathed in black flames and loomed tall over the children, its lanky form shrouded beneath a ragged robe.

“That would be Elijah,” Connie said, his voice serious and steady. “At least that’s what we think he’s called.”

“What do you mean?” Jim whispered back into the walkie.

“Big guy? Tall? Black robe?”

“How do you know that?”

“I’m really sorry about this, Jim. We didn’t know what we were going to do this year. Stanley and I are getting older, and we can’t go traipsing around the woods like we used to.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Conrad.” A tear rolled down Jim’s cheek.

“It’s been seventeen years since the first, a little boy named Thomas Bradley. Sweet little boy. Dimples on his face you could hide a quarter in. It broke our hearts to do what we did to him.”

“What have you done, Conrad?”

“What we had to do.”

The children looked up in unison at the cabin. Jim knelt beside Riley, his hand on her shoulder as she sobbed.

“Who are these people, Conrad? What do they want with us?” Jim said.

“They want what they always want, more of what they need.”

“What do they need?”

“They need to eat.”

“What did you say?”

“I am so sorry for both of you, Jim, Riley. We didn’t know what to do and then you asked about the cabin. It was like a sign, you know. Like providence.”

“You’re insane.”

“We’ve heard that many times. You’re amoral, you’re going to hell. Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. It’s disgusting, Jim. Love is not a mental illness but an exultation of one’s values. Stanley means the world to me. I did what I had to do, don’t you see?”

“See what? What are they going to do?”

“Never could have children of our own. Elijah is like a son to us, and his children are like grandchildren. We’d do anything for those kids, Jim, anything.”

“They’re moving,” Riley whispered. “They’re coming.”

They heard the gate below rattle and bend, finally breaking off its hinges as it ripped away. The black-eyed children swarmed the staircase, pouring away from Elijah like wine from a bottle. They choked the stairs, their feet falling heavy on the metal steps.

Elijah stood in the clearing below, watching, commanding. He stood tall, his back arched as the children made their way into the cabin. He raised his arms in triumph. His skeletal fingers pointed up while the red moon shone down upon his emaciated face, growing plump as the children feasted on Jim and Riley.

Their sobs and screams soon died out as their lives faded. Jim reached out, grabbing Riley’s hand, her fingers chewed off at the knuckle. She was gone. Soon, he would be too. He felt a tug on his abdomen as entrails were ripped from his body. He lay his head down on its side, looking at corpse of the woman who would have been his wife.

She was beautiful.

He loved her until his dying breath.

About the Author:
Matt Scott is the author of more than eighty published horror stories. He has four stand-alone collections, with one on the way as well as a volume of poetry. He lives in southern Colorado with his wife, Heather, and their ever growing gaggle of furry friends. He loves to hike, play piano, throw knives, and paint, and enjoys spending time outdoors with his family exploring the beautiful state of Colorado.

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