I Don't Know What It Was

A Story by Izzy Psychs

This is actually a true recount of something I experienced in the woods outside of my house. It might sound fake to someone, but this is what I remember happening.

I don’t remember when exactly this happened. It was either during the weekend or during the summer when we weren’t in school. Me, my younger brother, and my partner who I am now engaged to. My partner now uses they/them pronouns so that’s how I’ll refer to them. I live in the middle of nowhere, right in front of a National Forest. Me and my brother, Andrew liked to run around in the woods, but we would never go so far that we couldn’t see the end of the treeline near the road. A lot of the trees had fallen down and were just beginning to rot away, so they were still a lot of fun to climb around on. My partner stayed at my house a lot and when it was warm, we would always want to go into the woods. It was even more ideal when my brother didn’t want to go with us, or couldn’t go with us. He was the pesky kind of younger sibling that was obsessed with stuff us teenagers were into. We've lived here for years and none of us had ever experienced anything out of the ordinary; we never even got caught by surprise by a rainstorm.

I’m an absolute coward when it comes to a lot of things. I’m afraid of the dark, I’m afraid of strangers, I’m afraid of gas station bathrooms. I have social anxiety, and regular anxiety, so I don’t have many friends and almost no one knows my name unless they pay too much attention to roll call in class. I go into anxiety attacks if my parents are a few minutes late getting home, or when we get to an intense part in a novel in my English class. All this being said, whenever we go out exploring I make sure that there is no sign of rain, and that the sun hasn’t even begun to go down yet. I make sure my parents know where we’re going and they don’t set out a time limit to how long we can stay out because they know how cautious I am.

I have never felt anxious in those woods. I’ve never even come across any of the dangerous creatures native to the area. But one thing has happened that I can’t explain, and I hope that it never happens again. Some time that year, or maybe the previous year, my partner suffered the tragedy of losing their mother to suicide. It had absolutely devastated them, and like every son or daughter or such, they blamed themselves for it. Luckily they were slowly recovering, but we always avoided the subject. This event is important to remember for the end of the story.

One day, they were staying over, and it was nice enough and early enough in the day for a walk. We hadn’t planned on going into the woods, just down the road and back, but on the way back, they stopped. I asked them what was wrong, or what they were looking at, but I didn’t get an answer. My brother, who was somewhere between eight and ten years old, I don’t exactly remember, asked too, and he didn’t get an answer either. Then, my partner started into the woods, without a word. We followed, repeating our inquiries, and still didn’t get an answer. They were going far ahead of us, almost across our invisible border where we couldn’t see the road. This is when I became scared.

I kept telling them to stop, asking what was wrong, trying to get them to turn around, but they wouldn’t answer. My brother was trying too, and they wouldn’t answer him either. Eventually they stopped, leaning against a tree. I grabbed their arm and they looked at me, calmly. They seemed confused as to why we were both so worried. I repeated my questions. What’s wrong, what did you see, what’s happening. They answered me.

“I… Feel a presence…” When they saw the look on my face, which was probably terrified, they smiled calmly.

“Don’t worry, it’s good… I feel safe.” Immediately my heart dropped and something screamed in my head “This is a trap.” I tell them that we should leave, and they ask me why. I don’t want to tell them, I can’t form the words and I repeat that we should leave. My brother realizes my fear and starts joining me in convincing them to come back, telling them that they’re really scaring me. Again they ask why I’m afraid, and I still can’t get the words out. After ages of begging, they eventually look into the expanse of the woods, and turn around, coming back to us, and then walking passed us back to the road.

The trip back home is quiet, with them speeding ahead of us and my brother looking between me and them, wondering who he should follow closer. I keep my head down, and my partner keeps walking. They won’t look at us. We hardly say a word to our parents as we head back to our rooms, my partner closing the door to mine before I can get in. We stay silent as we go back to whatever we were doing on our computers before we went outside.

They stay silent for at least two hours, and I don’t try to initiate conversation. I’m not good with consoling people, and whenever someone is upset, my instinct is to make a joke, unless the air is so thick that a joke would turn everyone involved against me. This was one of those moments, so I just let them be until they’re ready to speak. Eventually they do, and what they say only worsens my suspicions.

“The presence I felt in the woods… It felt like my mother, like she was looking after me. I’ve never felt so safe before, It felt like she wanted to see me, to check up on me. Why didn’t you trust me?”

They look at me with tears in their eyes, and I can only make out a half-hearted excuse, something like:

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s that I don’t trust anything else.”

I still couldn’t tell them that everything about this event felt evil, like a trap, like something trying to lure them, and in turn, me and my baby brother, away from the familiarity of our tiny rural community into a wilderness that we couldn’t come out of. I felt danger, a wrongness, like the wrongness felt by the only intelligent character in a horror movie, the one that survives. I’ll admit, I watch too many paranormal shows, so maybe this was just paranoia on my part, but I’ll be damned if I let my partner walk right into the arms of something with ill intent by doubting my own gut.

I still don’t know what we all felt out there. Maybe it was the spirit of my partners mother, trying to let them know that they still love them and are looking after them; maybe it was something hungering for the souls of a couple teens and an elementary school boy. We still go out exploring in the same woods, and we still don’t stray very far from the road. And neither I, nor my partner have felt anything like we did that one afternoon ever since.