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Before my grandfather was taken by Death, he built a trail into the woods behind his house in the hope that it would serve as some form of legacy for our family in the generations to come. My father, who loved my grandfather greatly, worked to maintain that legacy by carefully tending to the forest path and the house. By the time I was born, upkeep of the trail bearing my name was less of an option than a required tradition. Needless to say, I got to know the woods well. As a matter of fact, I was essentially taken out of non-existence and crawled onto the Timentes trail of the Yormind Forest, to the best of my abilities as a newborn.
The stale town we lived in might as well not have had a name it was so lifeless. Even still, someone termed it Endora, which in some foreign language must have translated to “nothing”. Endora was a station town that survived only through the lives of others who passed through occasionally, and when they were done passing through, it would go back into non-existence. At times, it seemed that the few people who stayed here were merely waiting to die. Last week, my father joined the select group of Endora citizens who had.
It wasn’t long before Dad was placed in the ground of the local cemetery, next to both of his parents, with whom he shared a tombstone. Beneath his name was my mother’s. She already had a section of the ground next to his picked out for herself for when her time came. Space had been left on the tombstone for my name as well.
When all of our relatives left for their long flights back home, my mother and I were alone in the house, now harboring the ghosts of our ancestors. With no intention to get to know them, I decided to take a walk in the woods. When I asked my mom if she wanted to join me, she said she was just fine where she was.
Smog seeped through October-colored trees on the bleak Sunday afternoon I stepped onto the trail. No snow covered the ground, but the calendar and the air alike would tell you Autumn was beginning to grow old. I could smell the first fires of winter lit in the hearths of homes nearby, a smoky odor that blew cold in the wind.
The canopies above acted as a barrier to the rest of the world, separating me from it with a range of colors filling the entire spectrum. Some of them were still green as the spring which had birthed them. Some of them as red as the dripping apples they bore. Some of them were a shade of yellow, so close to orange, they might be creamsicle. And some were even brown, many of which had fallen off the branches of familiarly bare trees and onto the ground, there to be stepped on by those who had forgotten entirely about the vibrant color they held while still alive.
Animals hid behind trees in the growing darkness of the forest, within them the potential to be both monstrous and loving. As they crouched, waiting to reveal themselves, I kept a slow pace that allowed my thoughts to wander. Though my father was on my mind, the natural beauty of Yormind eased the burden of his passing. I crossed a bridge, under which the stream grew quiet as I entered the heart of the trail. When I stepped into an opening of barren trees, an eerie silence fell over the forest. I glanced up through the lonely branches to see that the grey sky was beginning to turn dark. Night was coming.
Just before I felt it was time to turn back, I came upon a densely forested section of the trail. Like lit candles on the birthday cake of an aging man, more and more trees came out of the ground the further I went. Though it was growing hard to see, my slow pace stopped when I caught a glimpse of someone off the trail, hidden in the woods.
Rising from the misted dirt bed, seemingly coming from nowhere, a looming figure stood uncomfortably still between the darkness of the trees. Too far away to distinguish any facial features, all I could see was that the figure dawned a cloak the color of coal, the bottom of which was wildly tattered as if the teeth of ravenous bloodhounds had fashioned it. All of my instincts told me to run as fast as I could, but for some reason I couldn’t explain, I just stood there, paralyzed with fear. I did not know who they were, or what they would do, but whatever it was, I was sure it would be bad.
So, the two of us remained there in the same places we were when we first spotted each other, weighing crushed brown leaves further down into the dirt. Though my fear kept me from moving, my immobility appeared to correlate to theirs. My feet frozen to the cold forest bed, I prayed this nameless figure wouldn’t make the first move. To both my relief and dismay, they seemed to be using every second as an opportunity to study me. Without moving a muscle, the figure observed me, looking into my eyes so long that they may have slipped through them and glimpsed directly into my soul. I might have done the same if they had a pair of their own eyes I could’ve looked through. Whether or not they had a soul remained unclear.
It wasn’t until the black of night came that the figure disappeared completely into darkness. Even in the fractured moonlight, their dark silhouette was not visible. Once they were out of my sight, I regained control of my legs. I moved quickly, less so because it was nighttime but rather because I feared the thing was waiting for the shield of darkness to attack. I took no comfort in making it safely out of Yormind because even so, I still could feel the entity's soulless eyes on me, watching like a predator would its prey.
Even after my mother died and was placed beside my father, I felt compelled for some unknown reason to stay at the house in Endora. I married a woman and had two children of my own. I returned to the woods daily for the rest of my life, permanently unable to control my urge to return to the same spot where I saw the hooded figure for the first time. And they returned as well, just as they had the first time I noticed them, somehow still able to distill the same sense of fear into me every time I saw them.
It was only over time that I could see they were moving closer, ever so slightly at the rate of what must have been an inch per day. Even as they did, they remained a mystery. I noticed that they wore no boots of any kind. They walked on the forest floor with bony, dirt-covered feet. As they continued to get closer, though, I soon realized that there wasn’t very much dirt on their feet at all. They were a shade of greyish-black, unlike the feet of any human I had ever seen.
The moon fell, and the earth spun. The seasons changed again and again. Green leaves sprouted from empty branches, decorating the trees as they turned to yellow, then to red, and eventually brown, at which point the bare branches would wait for the cycle to start over again. And as the seasons grew, so did I. Just as the color of the leaves changed, so did my hair. My once young body cocooned into an old, fragile costume to conceal the paralyzed spirit inside of me.
One day, I walked into Yormind as I had done so often and felt the weight of an Autumn wind blow through me that I hadn’t experienced since the first day I saw the cloaked figure. The gust was so strong that it nearly knocked my decrepit body off its feet. I returned to the same spot I always did, only to find I was late. The figure, now only a few feet from me, was already there. Unlike me, they were untouched by the unforgiving hand of time. They looked the same as the first time I saw them—still a mystery.
Although we had seen each other so many times, we had never actually met. The figure carefully parted their hood, revealing only the grim hole in their face, which must have been their mouth. Oddly enough, despite the morbidity, I couldn’t help but recognize some of my father’s likeness in the ominous character. The figure paused for a second, and I felt my breath begin to drain from my body. It introduced itself to me as Death. It had come to put my name on my father’s tombstone.