This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/DreamingofRlyeh on 2023-06-26 22:50:04+00:00.

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It happened when I was seven years old. I was spending the summer at my grandmother’s house, which was backed by a large deciduous forest. She often sent me to play in the woods.

The trees were my realm of make-believe, a kingdom of bark and moss and scattered leaves. They were a comfort to me, and I thought I knew them intimately, until that day.

It was a warm afternoon in early August. The sun shone through the green canopy, the gold filtering through to the forest floor, where I dug in the dirt with a stick.

I found it there. At first, I thought it was a buried root, but as I dug it out, I saw that it attached to a hard, round object. I spent the rest of the afternoon excavating my treasure, and after a couple of hours, I had uncovered the skull, upper arms and ribcage of some kind of animal.

Now, as a seven-year-old, I was far from an expert in biology, but I had seen depictions of human skeletons. They were on posters in the doctor’s office, in Saturday cartoons, all over stores near Halloween. So I knew enough to be aware this particular set of bones did not look right.

The skull appeared almost human. But the teeth were oddly-shaped, with the four in front larger than normal, and the back ones strangely shaped. And jutting from the top of the head were two horns, like those of deer. It was one of these that I had mistaken for a root.

The ribcage and bones of the arm were elongated. Whatever this creature had been, it was tall, taller than most adults. Nestled between the ribs was an arrowhead, prossibly what brought this strange beast down to the dirt where it now lay.

“Damian!” The sound of Grandmother’s voice broke me from my revery. The sun was beginning to set, and it was time to return to the house. I snatched at one of the horns, which snapped off of the skull easily, and ran toward my waiting grandmother.

That night, I tucked the broken antler beneath my pillow. Dressed in pajamas patterned with fire trucks, and tucked underneath a warm duvet, I drifted off to sleep.

My dreams were unusual. I was running through the woods, fleeing some invisible force. The sounds of heavy crashing and shouting pursued me. Then a sharp pain hit my chest and I fell.

I woke, crying. When my grandmother asked me what was wrong, I sobbed into her nightgown, not knowing how to voice the cause of my distress. The words “bad dream” seemed so inadequate for what I had experienced.

The next day, Grandmother took me to the local playground. It was an older one, with metal equipment, the bright paint worn and chipped, but for a child, it was great fun. There was a slide, four swings, two see-saws, a set of monkey bars and a merry-go-round.

I ran to the play equipment, where I quickly found myself engrossed in a game of tag with five other children. We chased each other back and forth across the playground for half an hour, laughing and whirling away from the tagger.

I was running from Shaun when I saw her. She stood at the edge of the woods that bordered the park, nearly blending in with the trees. Her skin was the color of tree bark, and her dress was mottled green. She was as tall as a basketball player. She was staring straight at me.

“You’re it!” I lost my balance and stumbled as Shaun shoved me in the back.

“No fair! I was distracted!” I cried out in indignation.

Shaun stopped running from me and tilted his head. “By what?”

“The lady!” I pointed at the treeline.

Shaun frowned. “What lady?”

“The one right there…” I turned to where she had been, to find nothing but the trees, branches gently waving in the breeze.

I began to see her all around town after that. She was always at the edge of the woods, unmoving, simply staring at me. Her outfit never changed, and as soon as I glanced away, she’d vanish. No one else ever seemed to notice her.

Had I been a few years older, I may have been frightened. As young as I was, I never thought to be. After all, she never made a move toward me, and never did anything but watch.

My nights were unpleasant. The dream of running through the forest, being hunted, became a recurring nightmare. Over and over, I fell, my chest burning with pain.

In late July, my grandmother looked at my childish scribblings, and realized there was a recurring image. “Who is that?” she asked in curiosity, holding up a sketch done in brown and green crayon.

I shrugged. “The lady.”

She frowned. “What lady?”

I didn’t answer. Scattered on the floor around me were probably about fifty drawings, in crayon, colored pencil and marker, all showing the woman.

On the last night of my stay at my grandmother’s house, early in August, the dream changed. I was back in the forest, but I was not running. I was laying down. The smell of soil and dead leaves filled my nostrils, and a great weight pressed down upon me. I felt cold, colder than I had ever felt before or since. I came to realize I couldn’t move, no matter how hard I tried, and when I tried to scream for help, no sound left my lips.

I woke with a shudder. My room was dark, and the house was silent. As I shivered and wrapped the covers around me, I noticed something amiss and turned.

Standing in the shadows at the corner of my room was the lady.

I had never seen her so close before. I could see details I had never noticed. Her dress was not cloth. It looked as though she was clad in the very moss that grew upon the trees. Her bare feet were mishapen, ending in two toes, tipped with hooves, like the feet of a deer. Her skin looked rough, and was speckled with brown dots. Behind her was a long tail, tufted with hair. And on her head was an antler, with its partner broken, ended in a jagged stump.

I am not sure how long we stayed there, silent and still, watching each other. It could have been seconds, or an hour. But eventually I blinked, and like always, she vanished.

I don’t know how to explain why I did what I did next. I do not know how the idea came to me, or whether it was my thought or hers. I reached under my pillow and grabbed the antler and the duvet from the bed, then tiptoed out of my room.

I crept into the bathroom and opened the first aid kit my grandmother kept under the sink. I pulled out the bandages, and walked downstairs, careful not to step on the creaky floorboard. I unlocked the back door and walked out of the house and into the forest.

At night, the familiar trees were made strange by the darkness and shadow. The wind rustled the leaves, sounding like whispers. An animal screeched and I jumped, scared. But I did not turn back.

I returned to the strange skeleton I had found two months before. I crouched down and brushed the leaves that had fallen since off of the body. In the darkness, the white bones seemed to almost glow.

Carefully, I placed the broken antler back where it belonged, and secured it to the skull with Spider-man band-aids. I took the arrowhead from the ribcage and threw it as far as my seven-year-old body could, memories of dreams of pain desperation giving me an unexpected strength. I placed the duvet over the skeleton, thinking of that unbearable cold.

There was a creek nearby, and I carried rocks from it, the stones worn smooth by the water, placing them over the body. Over the next few hours, I completely covered the grave, for that’s what it was. When the task was finished, the sun was just beginning to peek through the canopy, and I felt a sense of peace wash over me.

When I returned to the house, my grandmother was on the porch talking to two police officers. There were questions about what happened, where I’d been, but I answered none of them. I was severely scolded, then tightly hugged, and told I was in big trouble.

Eventually, life went back to normal. I never expected to see the lady again, and I never did. The dreams stopped, too. The rest of my childhood was normal, and I grew up to be a park ranger.

Earlier today, the memories came rushing back. Three particularly stupid teenagers decided to go traipsing through a forbidden cave on a dare, and were fortunate enough to be tracked down and rescued. But the beam of my flashlight illuminated something on the wall of the cave.

It was a cave painting. In it, a group of human hunters pursued a tall figure with bows and arrows. Their prey was humanoid, with the hooves and horns of a deer.