Short story 47

I’ve always had a weird group of friends. They all went into “manly” careers like logging, oil rig work, construction. I’m the black sheep of our little group of high school buddies. I went into IT. They give me shit all the time about working on nerd stuff and I give them shit back.

“Me no likey computer. Me dig holes.”

I’m an unlikely addition to their group of friends, but it works somehow.

So, there we are in a bar. This is one of those rare occasions when everyone’s back in town together and we’re getting drunk, swapping stories about horrors on the job. Someone talks about when part of their oil rig blew up, killing 3 people a few years ago.

Danny, an actual lumberjack, talks about seeing a guy working, not ten feet from him, get his arm torn clean off by a log line. Just a quick zzzzzip and a limb went flying. He held a shirt to the wound as the man bled out, babbling and whining in agony until a life flight came, two hours too late.

All the while I’m sitting there, knowing I’ve got a story. But it’s not the kind of story I’d usually bring up to a bunch of drunk sort-of-friends -- not the kind of story I’d tell anybody.

It’s the kind of truly unsettling memory that you worry, should you tell it, you might give it life. You might feed it somehow — make it more real. I carry it around in the back of my mind like a caged, dangerous animal, not considering letting it out. Until now. Everyone’s said something already, and I’m just sitting there. Looking sheltered. Looking obvious. So I ignore that voice in my head that says,

“Don’t.”

I ignore my dry, tightening throat.

“Don’t”

“I’ve got one.” My voice cracks, and they look surprised. I’m surprised. They all give me doubtful, amused looks. “Go on then” the looks say.

And so I do.

I work from home, on our 30 acres outside of a small town in Alaska. I live alone, no kids. It’s a college town. Just a small liberal arts college of a few hundred, but it’s the heart of the town. The campus is huge, with the natural beauty of the area being a big draw. Reservation land neighbors the campus and the tribe sort of acts like park rangers for the hundreds of miles of forest trails. My own land borders part of the campus on the other side.

One day I’m out at the edge of the cleared part of my property, right behind my house. It’s probably about 200 yards from the house. I’m watering a set of raised beds I have right near the tree line, just enjoying the scorching, sunny day — and that’s when something weird happens. There’s this sound like a record of someone speaking coming from a few hundred feet into the woods. It’s like someone talking to you through a bad cell connection, where only parts of the words are coming through and it’s just noise, but you can tell it’s supposed to be words.

“I --t he -- t-- ga— i-- h ga-.”

I just stood there listening to the noise, curious, but not afraid. I didn’t even turn the hose off. I think, looking back, that’s why it took me so long to get freaked out, to start taking it seriously. Weird things like that, supernatural things, happen at night, deep in the woods. Not at 1 o’ clock in the afternoon, while standing right in your backyard.

After about thirty seconds it just stops. I turn the water off then to figure out if it actually stopped, or just got quieter. Nothing. I file it away as a minor oddity. Something to be brought up later as a casual conversation token, or more likely, forgotten. That was my first regret.

Fast forward a couple of weeks. I’m on a hike at the back my property, on one of the trails I started last summer, which is pretty overgrown at this point.

I’m strolling, lost in thought beneath the tree cover, simply enjoying the gorgeous mid-summer weather. I’m pulled from my thoughts when I hear that odd sound in the woods. Far in the distance there’s the sound of garbled human speech. The forest around me though is oddly quiet. Now, I’m not much of a risk taker, and I generally prefer looking irrational, to looking dead. I casually turn and walk back towards the trail entrance, not wanting to encourage any large predators by fleeing suddenly. What the hell is making that sound anyway? I resolve to bring Danny along to check it out when he comes to visit in two weeks.

Two weeks later I’m back at the trail head. Alone, because Danny bailed on me. I told him that if I died I’d be coming straight to his apartment to haunt the shit out of him.

I’m looking down the seemingly innocuous forest trail. I steel myself. I check my pack, bear spray, and brand new bowie knife, which I have no idea how to use.

“It’s just a sound.”

I start down the path. A few miles, and about an hour in I hear the first signs of that odd sound in the distance. It’s maybe a hundred yards ahead and just off the side of the trail. The forest, however, moves and rustles with life in that familiar, reassuring way. I carry on.

As I approach the origin of the sound l put my hand to the hilt of my bowie knife. The source of the sound, now within 20 feet or so, is not immediately apparent. It’s the same stream of incoherent babel, but with a distinct crackling sound to it.

Looking up, I see a small black speaker fixed to a tree about 10 feet from the ground. Huh. Fairly confident the speaker poses no threat, I take my hand from my knife and inspect it. Written on the side of the speaker, in white paint, is the name of the local college, and the words “FORESTRY DEPT”.

“Ah, a clue.” “And a reasonable explanation. Go figure. You jumpy prick.”

Content that I won’t have to stab anything or haunt any apartments this day, I head back home.

During a slow day the next week I call the forestry department of the college.

“Yes, I’d like to speak to the dean.” “No, I’m not a student.” “No, they don’t know I’m calling.”

The dean answered in a bored voice, but seemed eager to answer my questions, as if I were the highlight of an otherwise mundane day.

As it turns out, the speaker is — or was, a sort of live art project, in which students could write and record poems to be spoken aloud in the forest. It’s solar powered, but he suspected the connection to the speaker I found had gone bad. Once per semester someone was supposed come out and upload new mp3s to a water proof mp3 player near the base of each tree. He went on to say that they discontinued the project due to outcry from the nearby tribe.

Initially, he ignored their requests to take down the speakers, but the vice president of the college eventually stepped in when complaints persisted, worried about souring good relations with the tribe. They’d probably missed my station when they went to take them all down, he’d said.

Mystery solved. Hiking season passes without incident.

About a month after the snows finally melt I decide to go on another hike on the trail with the speaker. I’ve got some overnight camping gear with me and I plan to camp out near my turnaround point, a few hours away.

I almost miss the speaker when I’m about an hour in. It’s completely silent now. I stop to poke at the electronics a bit, but there’s nothing obviously wrong with it. The fraying connections appear to have finally worn out over the winter. I continue down the trail.

About two hours later I’ve set up my tent and prepared a simple camp. It’s late afternoon, but I’m restless, and with a few hours of daylight left I decide to walk ahead of my turnaround point for a little bit. I pick a little offshoot trail that leads upward, perhaps with the promise of a nice view.

Just a few minutes into the walk my mind is drifting. I’m just soaking up the late afternoon sun and basking in the first good weather of the season. I’ve picked the perfect time to explore.

“Damn, this is nice.” I think to myself.

And a moment later I hear that familiar, unsettling sound of speaking in the distance.

I pause on the trail, my brain still registering the noise as something innocuous. This sound is a little different, and even so far away I can tell that it’s a higher quality than the first speaker. I get closer, and have to go a little off the trail to make out the words. It’s definitely missing that crackly sound, so I can easily make out the words. It’s the sound of a woman reading poems, just as the dean said.

Less perturbed than I once was, I decide to sit on a rock near the speaker, pull out my water, and take a little break. I’m sitting there listening to the sounds of the forest, and the voice reading the familiar poems. It still feels a little eerie though, and after just a few minutes I decide it’s time to get going again. I toss my water bottle into my pack and stand to leave. That’s when I hear the other voice.

Someone nearby is babbling these crazy nonsense words. I perk up, curious, but not yet afraid. It has this strange, warbling sound like the natural rise and fall of pitch in a sentence, but in all the wrong places. Like someone turning random words in a sentence into questions. It’s the kind of sound you’d laugh at — if you weren’t alone in a forest, miles and miles from help.

The forest goes dead silent around me, as if flipping a switch. The sound begins trailing close through some thick brush in front of me. I’m totally frozen in place. Just listening to this ridiculous noise; like a giant, basso baby voice. I utter under my breath:

“What the fuck…”

I see just a glimpse of something coming through the brush, and then my trance is broken. My conscious mind is slammed to the back seat as my animal instincts send me sprinting back toward the trail. I’m already careening back down the trail before I even realize what I was running from. And then it hits me.

A wall of realization. A great towering cloud of cold, crippling realization. I actually stumble. My neurons fire in slow motion. The implications are forming in my mind like a slowly condensing water droplet, just before the release — and then the fall. My chest tightens and I take a sudden, sharp breath.

It was a hand. Some sort of elongated, grotesque hand reaching through the brush. A body to match that distorted voice. It’s then that I hear it again, on the path, right behind me.

“Whuu the fuuck”, it warbles.

Like it’s learned a phrase for the first time, and it’s trying it out. Only, it has this odd, pleading quality to it.

Fuck. I’m running. Fuck fuck fuck. I’m barely touching the ground, feet flying down the tight forest trail in the late afternoon sun. Tree branches are slapping at me as I barrel down the path, careless, mindless.

My nerves are on a knife’s edge for the entire sprint back to camp. Ears pricked, skin covered in goosebumps, I enter a clearing, and slow to walk cautiously into camp; my hand hovering lightly over my bowie knife. I see my tent in the small clearing, where the main trail splits into these smaller tributaries. The tent sits in the shade, flap partially open. I stop, staring at it. It would take about 10 minutes to pack it up.

I contemplate it for about half a second.

“Nope.”

I’m moving again, back on the main trail now. I’m holding a sustainable jog, but after about thirty seconds later I slide to a stop because I hear something new. I hear … nothing. A quiet deeper than anything before. No distant birds. No rustling leaves. No quiet breeze or chirping insects. There is only complete and unnatural silence, almost suffocating. It’s like having a giant glass jar dropped around me. One second there’s a rich blanket of forest sounds, and then the next — Thhhhoomp! I’m in a vacuum.

I freeze. I can feel my heart pounding out of my chest, but otherwise I am as silent and still as the forest around me. The air is hot, still, and dead on my sweaty skin. Like standing in a silent, summer attic. An odd thought occurs to me. An intuition that I shouldn’t move. People always get that feeling like they’re being watched, but this isn’t quite like that. It’s not like being watched. It’s like I’m being … examined. And my gut is telling me to blend in; to do what the bugs, and the birds, and the trees are doing. Sit the fuck still and wait. Do as they do. This isn’t something you run from. Do as they do and survive.

So I wait. Frozen in an awkward position mid-stride, mid-breath. Refusing to even blink or look around.

I stand there, like a store mannequin in the closet, watching through wooden slats as something very bad looks back through the slats at me, trying to figure out if I am actually a mannequin, or just something pretending. We look at each other like that, this force and I, for ten seconds. My head is swimming with terror.

Twenty seconds.

My lungs are screaming for air and my heart is pounding a frantic drum. Still it examines me.

And suddenly, the gaze is broken. Its focus on something else. My vision narrows to a pinpoint because my brain is clamoring for oxygen.

Far off I hear a rustle of leaves. So slowly, it comes my way. Not the rustle of a creature, but a great, collective exhale from the forest. The sound of the forest returns in great sweep past me. I bend, put my hands to my knees, and join in with a heaving gasp of my own.

The rest of the trip back is a barely restrained panic. I jump at every twig snapping, but I'm in a forced calm, because the logical part of me knows I can't run forever. I set my pace at a brisk hike for two hours, into the early evening. It’s getting dark by the time I get back to my property.

In the bar, my friends are all statue-still, faces slack. No one has touched their drink in five minutes. My whole body is shaking as I absentmindedly run the fingers of both hands up through my hair.

“It was like … it was like I was staring down the barrel of a gun. A gun I couldn’t see, but I knew — I knew that if I had so much as twitched, I wouldn’t be here right now. It would have known I was there. It would have known I was real.”

“And I never went back for that tent” I say, taking a sip of my beer and taking a little grim satisfaction in my friends’ stunned, distant faces. They let out a few half-hearted, nervous chuckles at my attempt to lighten the mood, but otherwise everyone seems intensely interested in their drinks, the table, or the floor.

“Shit, man” One of them says eventually. “Yeah.” I reply, “… Yeah.” We’re all pretty quiet, and unusually pensive until we pay our tabs and leave the bar. On the way out, one of my buddies pulls me aside and asks:

“Was that really true? All of it, I mean.” I just sort of squint and look up at the star strewn, Alaskan sky. Eventually the words I’m looking for come to me.

“There’s shit out there that no one can explain. Things that don’t have names,” “And I think, every now and then someone will come across one. The smart people -- the lucky people, like me, are the ones who get to tell their stories”

He looks me for a moment longer, then, seemingly content with my answer, he nods and walks to his car.

“Night” he says. “Night.” I say.

Of course, I don’t tell him there’s more. I don’t tell him it wasn’t some ethereal, invisible force staring me down in the woods; it was a monster. A lanky, horrid, yet somehow human thing. It was in the shape of a man, but it was no man. God gave me two gifts that day. The first was sparing my life, and the other was keeping that creature in the periphery of my vision.

I did tireless research after that incident in the forest. I found out about a missing homeless man, and the dismembered corpse the cops found in the woods. Parts of a corpse, anyway. And I found out about something called the Akadixeeti. A follow up call to the dean from the nearby university got me that, and it got me a meeting with the grandson of the shaman who asked the university to take the speakers down. I met with him the very next day.

“I don’t know how well I can explain it. I don’t think of it the same way my grandfather does.” Ida says.

I follow up immediately — eager.

“Try me”

“You know how everything that’s alive today has some of the same DNA? Like, if you go back far enough we all have a common ancestor. Even really different things like germs. Well, I don’t think the Akadixeeti are in that family tree. I think they come from something else.” He sort of trails off, perhaps expecting skepticism from me. Two days ago, maybe. But he doesn’t know that I have good reason not to be a skeptic.

“These things aren’t a joke, you know.” He tells me, fingers wrapped around a frappucino. “People at the college think my grandfather is crazy. They only listened to him because he’s respected in the tribe.

… but even though they respect him, most of the tribe thinks he’s crazy too.”

“Do you think he’s crazy?” I ask him.

“About the Akadixeeti?”

He looks grave, and the sudden seriousness from such a young man surprises me. The weight of his stare hints at a wisdom beyond his apparent age, and somewhat flippant appearance.

“No. He’s not crazy. He’s not crazy, because I saw one.”

"This was like 5 or 6 years ago and I was maybe 13. I was out in the woods on my ATV, just weaving through trees and going too fast. I was a stupid kid then. I did a lot of stupid shit.”

“Anyway, I’m in some pretty sparse woods, so it’s easy to see far off, and I see this animal laying down in the distance. I turn my ATV to get closer and I can tell it’s a deer. As I’m pulling up to it I cut the engine and just roll to a stop about 20 feet from the thing.”

“ I think it must be hurt or something, because its back legs aren’t working and it’s pulling itself along by its front legs. Thinking I’ll need to kill it I go to pull out my knife. As soon I reach down this thing’s head just snaps towards me. And I don’t mean it heard a sound and sort of looked around, then saw me. It just immediately jerked its head right towards me.”

“It uh…” He is clearing his throat, clearly choking up a little. “It didn’t look right. It was like someone tried to make a deer, but didn’t have all the right parts. It was all twisted and gangly, with these nasty, swollen eyes just staring at me. And I got this feeling like it was trying to figure me out. Trying to figure out what I was. Completely still. “

“And then a couple seconds later it just turned and kept dragging itself away.”

“Wow” I say, with real awe.

“I pushed my ATV as fast as it would go back to the house. That’s when my grandfather told me about the Akadixeeti. He said they were bad spirits that spawn deep in the forest. They’re attracted to signs of life. Noise, sight, stuff like that. And when they find something alive they sort of copy it, but they disassemble it first. Once they’ve copied something they try and find more of it to make a better copy. I don’t really know why. This is just what he told me. Most of the time they’re harmless. Every now and then one shows up in the shape of a deer, or dog, or something, and then the shaman go out and take care of it. ”

“Huh,” “So what did they do about the one you saw?”

“They went out to find a deer — a real deer. When they caught one they brought it to the Akadixeeti. The only way to kill them is to make them copy something already dying.”

We sat in silence there for a moment, drinks forgotten.

“I saw one.”

“What?” He says, surprised.

“And I think I know why your grandfather wanted the speakers taken down. What he was afraid of, it happened.”

“Wait, slow down. What are you talking about?”

“There’s a human Akadixeeti out there.”

A few hours later we’re standing at the trailhead behind my property. It’s turning into evening now, with only about an hour of real daylight left. There is a group of men nearby from Ida’s tribe, shaman, talking to each other in hushed voices. Behind them are a dozen or so women and children, and some of the women are crying.

“Ida, what’s going on?” I ask, in whispered tones, but he motions for me wait as the circle of shaman breaks up.

An older man, in his early sixties, who I assume is Ida’s grandfather walks over to us at the entrance to the trail. He doesn’t stop to talk to us, but just nods his head in our direction, and continues past us down the trail. He has a wiry sort of strength to him, despite his age, and the feathered garb and war paint on his body lend him an air of danger. I can see an ornate stone dagger on his belt as he goes.

Eventually, I speak.

“When is he coming back?” And Ida just gives me this flat, mournful look.

“He isn’t coming back.”

And then Ida’s words from before ring in my ear:

The only way to kill them is to make them copy something already dying...