It Waits in the Woods

by Josh Malerman

claim the bridge had once been found buried—as if some unknown builder had tried to connect two locations underground.

Wat

There was, allegedly, an entity, a creature, the demon imp who owned the bridge and was certainly close by if ever the white-and-yellow carvings were seen through the trees. The legend said that it was not so much strong, but smart and cruel, and stalked its prey in the woods. The one constant description of it was this: it’d lost its face and longed to find a suitable replacement. The imp’s name was Opso,

OH

A hunter, Jonathan Hitchens, had been found dead in the UNF, his chest and neck ravaged, his face completely chewed from his skull.

Jeez

These dreams, these ideas, this theory all grew bigger as the months since Amanda’s disappearance became years. And by the time Brenda Jennings turned eighteen—her sister, Amanda, having been missing for almost three years—she resolved to look into the myth herself. Some stories simply rang true.

Oh lord

She figured if Larry had been good enough to fool the camera, he could convince whatever she might run into out there that she wasn’t stupid enough to go out alone.

Damn not a dummy

Gun. Linda Jennings’s gun. The one she’d bought six months after her daughter disappeared from the UNF.

Bruh

She picked up the phone, opened the camera app, turned the lens on herself, but not with the selfie function. No self-respecting filmmaker cared more about how she looked than the resolution of the shot itself. “Hi, Amanda,” she said. “Looks like you’re still the star of my movies.” She aimed over

This is crazy

Just then she heard a distant cry.

Oh no

Yet, now, out here in the UNF, all alone— A second cry pierced her thoughts. Closer now. Brenda went still, letting the camera do its own work. She listened. And the cry came again.

Lord

Brenda had walked farther than she’d planned. Looking back, she saw she’d left the wheelbarrow thirty yards behind. Someone was kneeling beside the barrow.

Omg

“Wait,” she said to no one. Because she’d realized it wasn’t a face. There was nobody kneeling. It was Larry, the mannequin head, stashed in the barrow.

Liar

Two days and two nights, Brenda pushed the barrow deeper into the forest.

Wtf

when she heard that distant cry for the third time. It was unmistakably the same sound she’d heard her first day in the UNF. Only this time it wasn’t just closer, it was close.

Bruh

It was a bridge. Made of wood, painted white. Ornate handrails once yellow, now chipped like the paint of a child’s toy from decades past.

CHRIST

As if cued, a sudden BOOM caused her to cry out, to raise her hands to the headphones and her ears within them. A second BOOM followed quickly, and she worried her hearing might be permanently damaged. Shaking, she lowered the volume and looked to the zoomed screen of her iPhone. It was there. Something like a hoof upon the white wood. A deer on the bridge?

Oh god

Hooves, yes, upon creaking wood. She could hear it all so clearly once she’d lowered the volume. And there was the unmistakable sound of an animal sniffing the air for threats. For opportunities. A voice came through the headphones. Sibilant: “Do you have my face?”

Bro

Yet when she went to view the footage, the video wasn’t there. She hadn’t been recording. And Brenda, on her knees behind the enormous tree trunks, more afraid than she’d ever been, knew she’d made an amateur’s mistake at one of the most important moments of her life; she’d forgotten to press record.

GIRL

. is someone there?” A voice came again. The plea for help. “Yes!” she called out. “Help! Please!”

Bro my hearts racing

She held the camera level. She advanced. She stepped on something round, something hard. Bones were everywhere on the ground.

Jesus

“Oh God,” she said. There were others. It was hard to decipher it all at once. An old woman, her white curly hair tight against her scalp, seated against the wall of the hole in the ground. Amanda was not there. She was sure of that. She looked closer and saw the skin on the woman’s face had been removed. She was long dead.

WHAT

“Hurry!” Kimberly yelled. “Okay, Okay, I . . .” But what did she have? “I have clothes. At my tent. I can make something out of vines. I can—” “Don’t go. Please don’t go.” “Where’s Amanda?” “Please don’t go.” “Do you know Amanda? My sister—” “She . . . she’s gone,” Kimberly said.

Omg

But before she decided to, Brenda was stepping back from the hole.

GIRL

But just as she saw the tent’s peak, something moved to her left and touched her arm. It felt like a branch, but there was no tree beside her. It was slender fingers. A hand.

EW

Amanda was crouched beside her. Her shirt and pants were covered in mud and looked barely kept together by the thread that had once held them tight. Her skin was covered in dirt, and her silent tears revealed streaks of pale deathly skin. There was something feral about her, something raw, but perhaps not yet broken.

WHAT

Then she grabbed her sister by the wrist and ran. “Brenda,” Amanda said. Her voice was hoarse, but the sound of her name from Amanda’s mouth made Brenda weak. “I got out,” she said. “He gets stuck if he looks in the mirror. Days, weeks. He can’t look away. He cries. I got out.” “Okay,” Brenda said, her mind close to caving in. “Okay. Run.”

Holy

“He’s gonna trick us,” Amanda said. And her voice was nearing hysteria; her voice was horror. “When I saw the bridge, it wasn’t where it is now. There wasn’t any cave. He’s gonna trick us.”

HOLY

Amanda screamed as the dummy stood, leaves falling from its shoulders and knees. Hooves protruded from the hem of the jeans. There was no face, no, but there was the suggestion of a mouth. Thin lips parted as the creature turned its head from Amanda to Brenda and said, “You have my face . . .”

BRUH

A thought came, as crystalline as a good decision on a movie set: Brenda dropped the gun and lifted the tripod. She fumbled with shaking hands, staring briefly at her own terrified image on the screen, then found the button to flip the screen away from her. Opso began to lunge.

OH SHIIIIIIIT

But he saw his own image, the blank face despairing in its nothingness, on Brenda’s phone and stopped. Brenda steadied her hand. Opso fell to his knees. The jeans splatted in fresh mud. His thin, vague mouth curved down at either end. “My face,” he lamented. “Oh, my face.” “Be ready to run, Amanda,” Brenda said. “Gone,” Opso said.

Thats kina sad

And her words were nearly drowned out by the unbelievable wailing from within the Ucatanani National Forest. Far off now, the sound was no less chilling. The unmistakable tone and timbre of misery.

Omg

“You came for me,” Amanda said. But even this far from the forest, Amanda’s words were interrupted, it seemed, by the shrieking, the crying, the longing of the thing in the woods.

Damn