The Calling in the Pines – Short Story
It is waiting, out there in the pines.
It always is, but today it is especially waiting.
Felicia doesn’t know that, though. She doesn’t really need to. She is more focused on preparing for today’s hiking trip, walking her first trail in this new town. She has water, snacks, bear spray, bug spray, a backpack, and hiking boots on both her feet. Back in New York she never really got the chance to go on walks in the woods like this, but out here in a small town at the foot of a mountain in Washington, she absolutely can.
Slinging her backpack over her shoulders, she sets out with adventure on her mind. The sky is grey, but it is always grey in Washington, and it’s the kind of grey occasionally shot through with warm patches of gold that reminds her that the sun is a real thing that exists above the cloud cover. It is fall, a few days after Thanksgiving, and the air smells beautifully damp.
She is lucky to have bought a house with the woods right in her backyard. It’s her first house she’s ever owned, and she wakes up every morning to a pretty view of trees and a winding little trail leading up into the pines from her backyard. She doesn’t know who put it there or why, but Felicia has never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Thunder rumbles exactly once across the sky, but there is no lighting and no rain. The pines seem to shake with it, and then the roar subsides and they still again, only their branches swaying softly in the gentle breeze.
It exhales softly, letting the cool air wash over it, feeling it thread through its fur.
Felicia exhales too, letting the current of the moving air tousle her long brown curls and toss them just a little onto her shoulders.
Then, her booted feet get to work on carrying her up the slope of the admittedly poorly-defined trail. She weaves in and out between towering trees and fern-filled undergrowth and silver clouds above, listening to the sounds of the forest around her as she goes. It’s quiet today – or maybe it’s just the clouds making her feel that way – but the silence is broken by the occasional rustle in the undergrowth or little sliver of birdsong coming from places unknown. A woodpecker drums out a rhythm that echoes through the forest, then falls silent.
It closes its eyes and lets out its equivalent of a resigned sigh. This is going to take a while, but it is patient.
After all, it is waiting, out there in the pines.
Local legend talks of something shapeless wandering the woods. The very few tourists and vagabonds who blow through the town and then away with the wind call it a cryptid, but anyone who has lived there for longer than a year knows it is real. Most of them hear it calling from the mountain with a sound no one else seems to hear, singing through the rain and streets to them no matter where they are. Its voice weaves through the telephone poles and their wires, brushes past street lamps, whispers their names against their window panes. When the sky is only clouds and every home is bathed in either silvery light or the warm glow of a lamp, it can be heard. Someone always hears it. Always.
For most of them, all they will ever know of the thing that lives among the pines is its voice. Ancient, ethereal, eerie, beautiful in the way that something that cannot be put into words is. For most of them, they will never see its face, never get close enough to touch it, never be able to actually make out the words it is trying to say. These people are the lucky ones. The normal ones.
Some are not as lucky. Sometimes, on very rare occasions, the call grows strong enough for one person that they venture into its domain. Nobody tries to stop them, they know that it’s no use. If the creature that calls the forest home wants someone, it will have them no matter what. It’s better to let them come to it than have it come down from its mountain to fetch its chosen. The last time it came that close, half the town was away in the first World War.
It did not go well. It never goes well when it feels the need to approach the town. The townspeople do not want it there, and it does not seem to enjoy leaving the pines for any reason, no matter how determined it is.
The ones who wander into the trees find it out there. They walk and walk and walk until they meet its face, look into its eyes, hear what it has been whispering to them this entire time. Sometimes they return, sometimes they do not. The ones who make it home come back… changed. They have encountered something out there, something they don’t wish to describe. They never describe its appearance to anyone, never repeat whatever words it told them.
Sometimes they live out the rest of their lives normally after that. Sometimes disease takes them, or they take themselves.
It is not known whether the ones who don’t come home live at all.
Felicia thinks this is a beautiful day for a hike. She’s made the right choice, listening to that little pull that began in her mind last night and urged her to venture into the trees. The chill of the November air nips at her nose and fingers, but her jacket is warm around her body, and the movement keeps her legs feeling as though she’s home with a blanket in her lap. She pauses, takes a drink of her water, and looks around for a moment.
Something catches her eye.
There is a rabbit across the trail from her, perfectly still, watching. It is as brown as the dirt and pine needles beneath her feet, marked with little flecks of grey and black, with a little white tail.
It’s the eyes, however, that make the encounter more than just a wildlife sighting.
It is looking into her eyes with its own; black, shiny, bottomless, somehow full of knowledge she does not have. It seems to say something, seems to issue information somewhere between a warning and a fact, but there are no words. Simply a feeling.
She is not as alone out here as she may think she is.
She should not be here, and yet she is, and she is supposed to be.
Then the little animal looks away and dashes off into the ferns in a blur. The space it leaves behind feels unreal, like there was never a rabbit there to begin with.
One mark.
It keeps a careful tally, as it always does on days like this. Special days.
There is exactly one account anyone has ever given of the thing in the pines – more specifically, its appearance – and it is tucked in a manilla folder somewhere in the very back of the community library where no one ever bothers to look. It is written in scrawling handwriting and pen, from the era of lumberjacks and log cabins, with numerous words crossed through.
Black fur, or perhaps just a very dark brown. Eyes as pale as twin moons, but illuminated like the sun. No numbers can be put to how large it is. The account says it is only the size of a beagle at first, then as large as the trees themselves. There are antlers, and what may or may not have been wings.
Its teeth are flashes of white against the dark. Its jaw opened when it spoke, but made no further movements despite the words that were coming out.
Part of the paper has been torn off by frantic hands. The words there are lost to time, but one can easily assume they were the same words it spoke.
Nobody needs to know the exact words to know that whatever it said was horrible.
The thing in the pines bides its time for Felicia, watching as the mist begins to roll in. The weather patterns here have always been slightly off, even in its opinion. It should be nearing the late morning now, and yet the fog is only just arriving.
Still, weather patterns are far from its highest priority. It is busy waiting.
Waiting for Felicia.
Waiting for Felicia, who is beginning to get a little turned around and perhaps a little nervous.
The part of the forest she is in has open sky peeking down through the trees, but somehow feels claustrophobic and uneasy. The mist blankets the ground and wraps around her legs, yet the rest of the world is clear. She is lost, even if she won’t admit it yet, but she keeps moving like her legs know where she’s supposed to be going.
The pull from yesterday is stronger in her head now, but the thrumming song is still soft and wordless in her mind. The melody seems to make the trees all lean closer, as though they’re trying to listen in.
And then there is the single raven in the distance, perched on a branch that always seems to change trees, watching. Like the rabbit, it looks into her eyes the second she stops moving.
Like the rabbit, its gaze carries a factual, wordless warning. This time, her subconscious mind pieces it together, even if the rest of her doesn’t.
It is waiting, out here in the pines.
It. Simply it. No gender, no name, just the impersonal, hollow pronoun that holds an unusually ominous weight to it.
The second tally ticks into place as Felicia watches the pitch-black bird suddenly go limp and fall off the tree, dead. She strains her ears against the silence, waiting to hear the sound she’s sure it will make when it hits the ground, but it never comes.
Was the bird even a real bird?
IT WAITS is written in white spray paint on the back of an old brick building in town. It is the red brick building that feeds people – it has always served food of some kind. The color is stark against the dull reds, easy to see and read if you happen to live in the dinky downtown and happen to be able to view the alleyway that contains the establishment’s dumpsters. It’s hard to miss, scrawled just to the left hand side of the navy blue back door while the dumpsters sit on the other.
Someone wrote it there, probably between the 1960s and the early 2000s, but nobody has any idea of who or why. Like every other cryptic statement regarding the thing that calls the mountains and the pines its home, the townspeople regard it as fact. Where it comes from is irrelevant, because everybody knows that it is true. It waits.
The waiter leaning on the wall out back for his smoke break tries not to put any part of his body against the paint. It feels wrong to do – even more wrong than just turning around to look at it – so he rests uncomfortably against the corner where two walls intersect and stares at the apartment building across the way. Someone has their TV on in one of the windows and is playing a video game. As far as he can tell, they aren’t very good at it.
The wind picks up and the rain begins to fall, and the voice whistles through the alleyway, reminding all who hear it of the old, old thing that watches from the pines.
He hopes the song is just a hum this time. Hopes that nobody feels the pull. The last time someone went missing he was six. He hoped, as children may do, that they would come back, but he is twenty now.
He knows better than to expect a return. Everyone does.
Felicia is definitely lost. The pines stretch endlessly in all directions, including upwards. Part of her wonders if the roots extend as deep into the ground as the branches do into the sky. Something about the feeling in her gut and notes playing on loop in her mind definitely makes her think so.
There is a very large deer standing maybe five yards away from her, peeking out from behind a particularly large tree and staring at her. It’s a buck, with a crown of proud antlers and eyes as fathomless as the previous two animals. Despite the ambient sounds the forest held at the start of her walk, Felicia is becoming acutely aware that the rabbit, raven, and buck are the only three animals she’s actually seen.
It, like the buck, watches her as she leans against a nearby tree and takes a few exhausted breaths. She’s almost there, almost close enough. Since she moved into that quiet little home, it has known she is the one. She is the one it needs to speak to, the one it needs to call for.
It feels maybe a little bad for calling her to it with such force when she’s only lived here for a week at most, but it had to happen eventually. She is the next it has selected, the next it wishes to impart its knowledge upon.
The third tally has been preemptively marked. When they get to the deer, it is always too late to turn back. She will only find the trail again when it has had its conversation and decided whether or not she is going home.
The buck turns, as with every other time, and it lets itself call louder.
It is time.
The house of Felicia Rose Edendale is empty.
It awaits her return with bated breath, as though it, too, can hear the conversation happening now in the woods. Thunder cracks across the sky again, rain pours down, and the trees and powerlines sway.
The book Felicia borrowed about the history of this little town rests on the coffee table, where she left it last night. The bookmark rests just a page before the section about local legend.
If she makes it back, she will never need to read that part. She already knows all there is to know.
Felicia stands in the dark pines, listening to the thunder roar overhead, even though the lightning never follows. It smells dank here. Dark. She’s not sure why she followed the buck, and she certainly doesn’t know where it suddenly ran off to, but she hears the voice clearly now. It has brought her here.
It has been waiting, out here in the pines.
She stares into the eyes of something that cannot be put to words. She’s like a deer in the headlights, except those headlights blink with the eyelids of a living thing. When it leans closer, it smells like dirt and petrichor and a little bit of smoke and rain and rot. Its jaw opens just a sliver, and she hears its words in both her ears and her head.
“Today is a special one, for both you and me.”
Felicia does not respond. She doesn’t know if she can.
“Listen carefully. I am the only one who will tell you this, and I will only tell you once.”
As it begins to impart upon her words so beautiful and yet horrible that it makes her fall to her knees and begin to weep, watching the way its antlers stretch like branches up into the impossible blackness above, all Felicia can truly register is the way its voice sounds. So many in one, women and men alike, reciting together like a monotone choir a speech that worms its way into the very fabric of her knowledge of life itself and settles there.
It is almost enough to make her start tearing herself apart in mad, animal desperation when it stops. She springs to her feet and finds herself rocketing back down the mountainside the way she came, not caring what bones she breaks or what parts of her bruise or bleed.
None of that matters when she knows exactly what it was that was waiting for her in the pines.
It is waiting, out there in the pines.
It always is. It always has been and always will be.
But Felicia is safe at home, bandaged up and sleeping off the shock of her fortunately recoverable injuries. The doctors said it was a miracle she hadn’t hit any vital organs on the way down. To her surprise, they never asked what happened. She couldn’t have told them even if she tried.
They called her one of the lucky ones, and the oldest doctor in the clinic – a man who seemed to be almost as old as whatever was in the mountains – filed away all the information in a cabinet simply labeled pines.
Now, she sleeps soundly to a nameless, wordless hum in her mind. If she were awake, she would find the sound filling her with a sense of dread, but it is confident that she will get used to it as she rests. The hard part is over. She has seen its face, and she has escaped. It hopes she will do something meaningful with the things it has told her. It knows all it needs to know about her, and it has told her all it needed to tell her. She has been determined, for reasons only it understands, worthy of such vast knowledge.
In time, another will heed the same call Felicia did, but for now its voice is only a twisted lullaby and quiet reminder of its presence. It will take awhile to find the next one, but it can wait.
It is always waiting, out there in the pines.