He knew they were there. He saw them before, heard them beckoning to him from the woods. How many were there? Who knew? He felt unsettled by himself in his home surrounded by them.
He paced back and forth in the small kitchen of his one-story house. He stopped and turned suddenly, staring out the kitchen window. There it was again. Their words telling him to go out in the dark, into the thousands of trees. Into the woods. He heard them.
His old bones creaked. His old joints cracked, but he made his way slowly to the window anyways. He didn’t see anything…just the pitch-black trees against a dark background in the night, but he heard them. Their wails, their pleads for him to join them. Like always, they were ignored. He never listened to them. He turned and walked back to the reclining chair in the living room that creaked whenever he sank into it. After a few hours of watching late-night shows, he went back to his room and went to sleep.
The next morning, he waited for his caretaker to take him to his appointments for the day. He looked out into the trees of the surrounding woods. He thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned, nothing was there. They would taunt him ruthlessly morning and night with their desperate pleas.
He was asleep on the couch chair with the TV on yet again. It was late. He should have been in bed, but he wasn’t about to listen to the voices again. He turned the volume of the TV up. They had been pursuing him before he slept at night. He needed the TV, or anything to drown them out.
“You can’t get rid of us.”
There it was. The voice. It was right in his ear. He woke with a start, disorientation setting in until he realized that he was still not in bed and was in the living room. They were taunting him again. They were here…
“Come join us.”
Those damn voices were so persistent. Groaning with the effort of getting up, the old man scuttled to the kitchen window, peering out into the darkness. This was the last straw. He would confront them and tell them to leave him alone. Those damn voices needed to stop. This time, something was different. He saw them. For the first time, there they were. The ghostly figures were slowly approaching from beyond the trees. They kept appearing, disappearing, playing tricks on him. They would fizzle out of sight just like television static, then reappear somewhere else in his line of sight.
But there they were. He couldn’t see well enough to count them in number, but they were there. He blinked his eyes repeatedly in hopes that they would leave, but they were still there every time he opened them again. Some were even closer than before. He tried turning the lights off, closing the blinds, but every time he would look over, he would see them through the cracks in the blinds. They would not leave.
When they saw that his trivial ideas to get them to go away didn’t work, they motioned for him to come with them and said, “Come out and play.” It was innocent enough.
Children. They were children, pale and shimmering in the dark. They even looked innocent and sad, maybe even lonely. The old man turned to walk to the front door to see what they wanted, and a chaos of cheers exploded around him.
Hesitating, he slowly reached out for the doorknob. When he turned the knob, opening the door slowly, he saw them running, screaming in every direction. One approached him. It reached out and grabbed his hand, dragging him into the game of chase.
He didn’t know what else to do, but to run with the children. What would be the harm in it? He could trip and fall, break a hip, he was elderly after all, but he didn’t want to miss out on the fun. Plus, they wanted him, which was more than what he could say about anyone else. So, he ran out into the swarm of children. His hip was surprisingly fine, his joints didn’t do their usual creak and pop. In fact, he felt young again. He was young again. What was once an old, grumpy man who was stricken down by his woes was now young and innocent once again.
~ ~ ~
The nurse came to the door the following morning and let herself in. The house seemed eerily quiet as if no one had resided in it for a while. She searched all of the rooms, looking for the old tenant that she took care of daily. She gave up the search and went to the kitchen window. She looked out and screamed.
The New Jersey Police Department jumped on the case. They were at the old man’s house within minutes. They quieted the young, frantic nurse down and walked to the back of the house. What they found was a disturbing sight.
Out in the swampy backyard surrounded by trees was the old man lying face-down, shovel in hand. Surrounding his body was a circle of what looked like the remains of children, all in different stages of decomposition. An officer approached the scene and determined that the old man was as dead as a doornail. What an odd scene. All that anyone knew was that the old man lived by himself. No background, no story, no life. Now he was dead and gone.
He’d killed them in his younger years, then grew old off the radar, away from any communities, away from people. All who came by was the nurse that was assigned to him daily. He had no one. No friends, no wife, no kids. No one…and now he was off the hook. He grinned as he slowly dissipated into the woods…
– NotYourAveragePerson