The thin shadows of the forest that ran snugly alongside the walkway were cast in haphazard bars across the path, reminding her of the way wool looked beneath her microscope. The thought of her newest toy brought a little twitch of a smile to her face as she considered what she might look at next. Maybe she could even grow a culture from some of Clerise’s skin cells. That would probably gross her out enough to make her leave her alone for a few days.

She took careful steps, because everything in life had to be calmly calculated and deliberate, avoiding the uneven bits and opting to not step on any cracks. She wasn’t superstitious, but it seemed rudely premature to ‘break her mother’s back’ or whatever correlation her classmates had given crack-stepping this week.

One of the ‘cracks’ moved directly into her path, her foot falling on it before she had the chance to change its trajectory. It might have gone unnoticed, had she been just a little more careless.

The ground just didn’t move like that. Not without the shifting of tectonic plates and widespread vibrations, which she was certainly not experiencing. Frowning, Mimsy leaned down to inspect the walkway, assuming that she would just find some sort of snake or worm or elongated Myriapod. Instead, the crack - which was now very clearly proving to be a shadow - curled around and seemed to reach towards her foot, giving her own shadow a little tap before retreating to the nearby shadow of a sapling.

She was sure she had been drugged. Panic set in. How was she supposed to tell her father? She couldn’t remember taking any candy or drinks from strangers, and nobody was around her. Heart racing, her gaze darted to the forest.

Something felt wrong, and the wrong was coming from there.

“Hello?” she called, arms wrapped across her chest as she hugged herself. Her fingers traced the straps of her backpack, nervously picking at the stitches. She didn’t expect anyone to answer, because in the stories nobody ever answered, but it was worth a shot. Everything was worth testing.

Holding her breath, she took one stiff step towards the trees, and that was all it took for the trees to answer her.

The branches were moving, just like in The Wizard of Oz, reaching to take her into the forest and never let her go. She couldn’t be positive about any of that, but she knew it with some certainty, because it was here and she was seeing it with her own eyes and nothing could explain that, except--

It wasn’t the trees at all. It was shadows again, swirling and coiling around the bark of small birch and pine, stopping just at the edge of the light to beckon for her to come inside.

Her braids wobbled from one side to another as she shook her head, determined to decline this macabre invitation in one way or another, but the brief twitches and shifts of the shadows didn’t seem to understand any language she knew. Still, she found herself moving closer, her own curiosity betraying her logic.

She wasn’t sure how long she had been standing just inside the treeline when she saw it. She just knew that she saw it and felt it and that it had all been so very, very real.

The thing was a hand like a man’s, but impossibly thin and pointy with the joints in all of the wrong places. It emerged from shadow itself, she thought: too dark to make a good observation of what the hand belonged to.

She didn’t blink for a very long time, wide eyes fixed on the clawlike appendages reaching out towards her.

It seemed to move with such timid curiosity that she feared a sudden movement might scare it into hurting her: those fingers looked awfully pokey. When one outstretched finger finally touched her cheek, so sluggish that it might have been moving through water rather than air, she fought to not flinch, her eyelashes fluttering and sticking together with frightful tears. It was cold as it tenderly traced the path of one escaped teardrop down her cheek, trailing down, resting briefly at the artery on her neck before setting itself in motion again, one claw snagging on the plasticine material of her backpack strap.

The ‘hand’ jerked back. Startled, so did she, snapping a twig and slipping on the bed of leaves beneath her feet. She landed hard, the breath knocked from her lungs, but still heard something in her mind screaming at her to get away. Teeth clenched, she shut her eyes as she tried to push herself back up, opening them to see something much worse than that awful hand ever could have been.

It was a face. Maybe. The skin was pale and appeared to be stretched over the bone structure that should have made a face, but there weren’t any eyes, or a real mouth, or anything that she knew made a face a face. Somehow, in spite of that, it moved, its brow area shifting when it saw her own motions, its ‘mouth’ twisting into some terrible, terrible mockery of a smile.

She ran until she skinned her knee and threw up, but it still didn’t feel like she’d put enough distance between herself and...the what? The hallucination? The tree-creature? The strange man she’d never seen before? The story she crafted was purposely vague when she recounted it to the expectant father who met her at the door, but she failed to filter out the part about there being a man-that-wasn’t-a-man in the woods.

That was when everything changed.

She watched as her father called her neighbor with a hand covering the receiver. She tried not to protest when she had to walk home with the boy next door who liked to put boogers and gum in her hair. She slept fitfully with a rocket-shaped nightlight on and woke up in a cold sweat, night after night. She didn’t like the sight of wool under the microscope very much anymore.

She stopped trying to smile, because now she knew the thing out there that might smile back.