It Waits in the Woods

by Josh Malerman

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.

Opso, however it got its name, was a vain creature, the story went, who lamented its lack of a face. It waited in the woods, by its bridge, impatient for an unsuspecting person it could trick into following it across, hungry for a fresh face. Some warned that when a particularly strong beam of sunlight reflected off a surface deep in the woods, it was the demon’s mirror.

Talk of Opso especially came on the rare occasion a grisly event occurred. A hunter, Jonathan Hitchens, had been found dead in the UNF, his chest and neck ravaged, his face completely chewed from his skull. Police identified the cause as a wild-animal attack, but at Hitchens’s closed-casket funeral, people whispered.

Most myths have one foot in a reality so distressing mythic decorations are necessary to hide a greater horror, even as they keep the story alive.

one particular child went missing in the UNF without any logical explanation. A fourteen-year-old girl named Amanda Jennings.

One of the things she overheard that day was a brief story about a demon named Opso. An old legend, Brenda understood, concerning a bridge and a mirror deep in the woods. A demon’s mournful cries, a lament in the moonlight, the clip-clop of demon feet on weak, eroded wood. An entity, Brenda heard, with a strange name and an even more unsettling goal: to find a face to replace the one it was missing.

I think some movies work because you believe they’re really happening. I don’t even know if a writer can set out to make something feel so real. It doesn’t have anything to do with a realistic story. No matter how unbelievable they are, some stories ring true.

And what could she encounter out there that could be any worse than what had already happened?

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? It was near the head of the bridge, so that Brenda could see only its leg, its hoof. And its steps had nearly deafened her.

Freaky!

“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.

Eek! What a creepy way to end the book.