To her, the world was endlessly loud, large and frustrating. School was filled with people telling her what she must do. Home was a place where she was told what she can't do. At least out here, in the forest between these two institutions, she found a brief reprieve from the drone of voices and the must of old air. Here the sun played in the spaces between the boughs, dappled warmth brushing her cheeks. The cooling air was heavy with the damp of the gold-red leaves that covered the track at her feet. But most of all it was free of voices and the annoying creatures attached to them.
She followed the old railway, long abandoned and serving as a convenient shortcut home. A solitary groove cut out of the soft earth, the tall trees made taller by their elevation on either bank. Their steepled branches formed a kind of tunnel roof far above her. An actual tunnel loomed just ahead.
It wasn't long, the tunnel, but it was dark. A slight, rightward curve blocked the light from the opposing end, making it seem all the longer. But the walk took no more than two minutes. The other children would play here from time to time, using it as a kind of den that they feared and mocked in the same breath. She had no such feelings about the place, she'd walked through it often enough to have any mystery about it washed clean from her mind. But today she stopped just short of its mouth.
For a moment, she thought she'd seen someone standing in the tunnel. No more than a silhouette in the dark, black on black, that was gone before her eyes had time to focus. She frowned.
How annoying, that someone should be lurking in the tunnels like that. An adult, no less. To shock her, how dare they? She wouldn't give them the satisfaction of shouting out. She would simply stride through the tunnel and ignore their childish games.
But she found her legs would not go. She simply stood there, staring into the yawning darkness. An unfamiliar feeling tugged at her tummy. Like falling from your bike, but the sensation of blind panic was stretched across a long time, like a note dragged from an unhappy violin.
So she decided to dash the feeling by picking up a stone from the track and hurling it into the tunnel. She listened to it click and clack as it bounced across stones and the old rusted rails. Then it fell still and the slight echo of its passage travelled down the tunnel, away from her. Then she was left with just the rock of the branches and her own, short breath.
The tunnel waited.
She leaned forward a little, peering into the sooty gloom. Nothing. No one. Not as far as she could see. But that was the catch, she couldn't see all of it. The heart of the sight before her was formless and entirely black.
Clank, clank, clank. A stone bounced along the track towards her and landed neatly at her feet. She stared at it. It had no right to be there. She had just thrown it into the tunnel. She eased her gaze up, back to the tunnel.
Something huge loomed there, astride the tracks, concealed by the darkness of the tunnel. It almost filled it's cobbled mouth. Something with a long head. With horns. Eyes. Watching her.
Come home, it said without words.
Paddy Dobson
13th October 2020