He's in jail because he tried to kill me, but I know now he was just trying to be nice.
A year ago, my in-law tried to kill me. He had it all planned out. The trip up to his family’s cabin in the woods, the pushing me into a dried up old well, the pickpocketing of my phone. He left a gun in the well. He gave me the choice to kill myself instead of starve to death. I guess that was his version of mercy. He would have gotten away with it. But he didn’t count on a lost dog. He didn’t think a couple would show up looking for a dog that ran after a deer. Or that they would find me half dead from hunger and thirst, holding the gun in my hand, seriously considering suicide after nearly three days in the well knowing full well that I would die of thirst before I died of starvation. It hadn’t rained for days.
I woke up in the hospital with my wife Sam by my side, holding my hand, and her beautiful face was wet with tears. I was in physical pain, but all I wanted was for her to stop crying. I gently took her hand and, with great effort, raised her hand to my lips and kissed it. “What happened to you?” she asked, her green eyes filled with tears. The nurse came in and checked my vitals. She told my wife to let me sleep. I was glad she had saved me because I knew that if I told my wife what had happened to me, her heart would be broken forever. Her father was always her favorite person.
Three years ago, I met Sam at work. She was a marketing executive where I worked as a software developer. Both of us were in our late 20s. In the first ten minutes of our date, I knew I was going to be married to her. She was smart, funny, and smart. Plus, she was stunning with her bright green eyes and her long red hair.
After four months of dating, she introduced me to her family. I grew up in a large family. My parents had four siblings and then they had five kids. My parents and siblings would always have at least twenty people over for Sunday lunches.
My family adored Sam. She fit right into our family like she was the missing piece in a puzzle. Things were going great until Sam decided that I needed to meet her father, her only family member.
John Lewis was a large, burly man dressed in lumberjack garb. He resided on the outskirts of the suburbs, near a large, sprawling forest. A shudder shot through me as he stiffly shook my hand, his blue eyes ice cold.
The fact that there were no images of Sam's mother should have been the first red flag when we entered into the two-bedroom house behind him. Not a single one. In fact, if I'm being honest, Sam never really talked about her mother. I should have inquired about her more, but I guess I always assumed that the issue was too painful for her.
The first time I believed her father was attempting to murder me was a momentary idea during that visit. I clearly heard Sam inform her father over the phone that I had a nut allergy, but as we sat down to eat, my throat began to swell. Sam's father watched me cough while chewing his food carefully. Of course, we had an epipen with us, but if we hadn't, I might not be alive right now.
Then there was the occasion shortly after our wedding when he knew I couldn't swim and pushed me into the lake when the three of us were on the docks admiring his boat.
However, the third time was the charm. I'm sure I would have died in that well if those hikers hadn't spotted me.
You may be asking why I chose to travel to that cabin with a man I suspected of attempting to murder me. Because I didn't believe he was trying to murder me. My brain maintained that I had misread or misheard the scenario, and that both instances could have been unintended consequences. Sam was also interested in her father and husband. And I couldn't possibly shatter her heart.
The ride to the cabin is something I'll never forget. My father-in-law was a quiet man. So when he decided to tell me a story, I almost exhaled with relief since it meant I wouldn't have to keep talking to fill the silence between us.
Maintaining his gaze on the road, he said, “Once upon a time, there was a boy. He and his three brothers and his parents and his grandparents and all his aunts and uncles and all of his cousins lived in the woods. He knew little of the world outside his family home, but he did a thousand things in the woods, so he never thought about it. For a while, he and his family were happy, living off the land and hunting and prospering. One day on his 19th birthday, he saw a woman in white standing in the shadows of the trees, shimmering and white-glued. When he went to his mother about it, she said to him, “Don’t go near that woman,” meaning nothing good will come out of the wood on a black moon night.
As we neared the cabin, I felt a sudden chill run down my spine, like something bad was about to happen. The boy had listened to his mother and had not gone looking for the woman for two days. The third night he was outside the house, walking into the woods, when he saw the woman. Her golden hair shimmered to her knees, and she had ice blue eyes and a beautiful face that radiated an eternity his mortal brain could not comprehend. She offered him her hand, and he was entranced, so he took it. He parked and switched off the car's engine, but still refused to look at me, staring ahead into the depths of the forest while he told me this strange story.
The moment he took the hand, the creature took him. A year later, he was found on top of the mountain in a cave. He was naked and mutilated. He was speaking a strange language in a language that must have been made up. The most frightening thing was that both of his legs were gone from the knees down. The wounds were cauterised, and it was obvious that someone or something was feeding him. Parents brought him home to try to help him regain his mind. Doctors put prosthetic legs on him, which he kept hidden. The boy was never the same. When he slowly spoke again, he described a woman who had a skull for a face and a long skeletal crone's body with fangs for teeth. There were clumps of pale white hair falling out of her hair and milk-white eyes-the eyes of a dead woman. Finally, there was an ear-piercing scream.
He was quiet for a while, and I was so worried I asked him, "What's wrong with him?"
My father-in-law broke out of his daze and looked at me with an expression I could not read. He said, "I'll teach you how to hunt."
The trial was brief, but my father in law was found to have my phone and other items that showed what he was up to. His internet searches showed him a lot of different ways to kill people. When John Lewis was put in jail, my wife would cry herself to sleep for a month. She would blame me for what happened, even though she never said anything. She would stare out the window of our apartment towards the forest that we could see perfectly. She started to forget things, wouldn't go to work, slept all day, didn't even brush her hair some days.
Her face was getting more and more exhausted, and sometimes when I would see her in bed naked in the moonlight I would swear I could see her ribs through her transparent skin. Her grief was consuming her and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
I came home one day and she wasn't there. I looked all over the house. I don't know how I knew she'd be at the cabin, but somehow I just knew. I jumped in my car and drove there at full speed. I didn't care if I had to pay a speeding ticket. It was just before dark, and I saw her. She was lying on the bed with her back to me, facing the forest.
I got out of my car and called out to Sam, but she didn't answer. She was just standing there, her red hair blowing in the wind. I called out again, feeling a chill run through me. “Sam,” I said. She slowly turned around, and then I saw her. A skull, a distended jaw, and an ear-piercing scream. My hands clapped over my ears as I tried to shout my wife's name, but all I heard was the scream that was beginning to sound like someone was trying to stab me in the brain.
My vision blurred and I staggered backward. A dozen figures loomed out of the trees, all with skull-like faces, grotesquely elongated jaws, and the same milky white eyes that replaced my wife's bright green.
They walked toward me, and I didn't even think to stop myself. I got in my car and turned it on. My ears were bleeding from the screaming. I ran as fast as I could.
It was two days later that I was couch-surfing at a friend's house after the doctors diagnosed me with a perforated eardrum. They said I was lucky that both my ears hadn't burst from the volume I'd been listening to music. I just nodded and went along with it. I had a ringing in both ears that wouldn't go away no matter how hard I tried.
I couldn't tell them what had happened in the woods. I'm waiting for the phone to ring and my headache to subside before I go out again. This time, I'll take a gun and find her. I've already talked to the police, but they're not as motivated as I am.
The phone rings and I pick it up, careful to hold it to my ear. It's a collect call from prison, but I accept it because no one else can give me any answers.
"It happened, didn't it?" my father in law's gruff voice almost made me drop the phone. I swallowed hard and said, "Sam's gone. She's back where she belongs."
He said, "You're in luck. She was my wife, and your daughter."
"How am I in luck?" I asked.
This creature was not a daughter or a wife. It was able to imitate human behavior. It would take pieces of you and keep you alive in order to take pieces of those you loved. It would feed off your pain as you lived out your own version of a nightmare.
I came home from the woods a few months after the creature was an infant and killed my parents. It then went on to kill everyone else related to me. It wouldn't let me die or even kill me, and I didn't understand why until I realized it needed me like a parasite needed its host. Eventually, when all my loved ones were dead and buried it needed more prey, and it found you.
Did he really mean that I told you this story? Was he really suggesting that I was the boy from a dark fairytale?
You are being *cruel* to me, disowning my daughter and trying to kill me. You should listen to me, boy.
I swallowed hard, he was out of his mind. What on earth was he trying to tell me?
If I was you, I'd take all my stuff and run away, leave the state, leave the country, never look back, ever.
He hung up abruptly, and I wish I'd listened to him. I wish I hadn't decided that I had to save my wife at all costs. Instead, I'm sitting in the dark inside my old cabin, staring out the window with my fingers wrapped around my hunting rifle. The sickle moon glows silver, the only illumination in the pitch-black night, and there in the darkness I see a shimmering figure. From where I'm standing, it almost seems like my wife.
Just like that, her entire skeletal jaw begins to shrink, and she starts to scream.
