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Extract Two
But to thwart him, because even when so young, she hungered to stay alive, to become a woman, to get married one day and have her own children, she steered well clear of the woodland paths long before daylight, besieged by long shadows, had resigned itself once more to inevitable defeat.
Having reached in good time the seemingly safe haven of her bedroom, for lack of any lock, she shut the door behind her as firmly as she could, as if to barricade herself from some menace that lay in wait outside and then, bound as it were by a sacred rite, she walked towards the window to take in the darkening forest that, in just a few hours, would be the stuff of her nightmares.
Closing her eyes, she made her way one December day through a white landscape, unblemished by any stain, its trees hung heavy with snow.
Transfixed by the beauty, so perfectly intact, that appeared before her, how could she have foretold that in minutes the scene would be obliterated by night and that, confounded by such a drastic change, she would take the wrong path and that, groping through the dense foliage, she would find herself face-to-face with a presence that, towering above her, must surely have been no mere mortal, but a giant out of some ghoulish tale.
It was not so much that she saw him, as a grudging moon shed only a meager light, as that she could feel the sheer height and bulk of the unholy force that blocked her way from her mother, her father, her family home, from all that she loved, and to which she craved to return.
And sensing that her adversary meant her no end of harm, and that all that she held most dear dangled by the most slender of threads, she clenched her fists to rain down blows on Boogy the Bogeyman, and it has to be said that, if only she could, she would have reduced his evil mass to a pulp.
But for all the charade of her resistance, that in truth was beneath his contempt, in one fell swoop he had her prone on the ground, his body pressing down on hers like a stone slab, and she knew that if she did not find the fight to cast him off, by break of day, she would be found there, a corpse.
In the battle, during which no truce would ever be called, between life and death, she raised her arms in a frantic bid to fend him off but, for all her convulsive writhing, her tombstone, for that is what it was, inched ever more remorselessly towards her.
And once in place, it would never be removed, for who of all those, as if stretched on the rack by the memory of her loss, would care to behold her pitiful heap of bones?
From the last ditch of her desperation, she flailed her knuckles, whitened by terror, at the fiendish weight that, crushing her into the earth, bore down on her fragile frame with hellish intent. And that would have extinguished her had she not, in a supreme act of will, awakened in a cold sweat, gasping for air.
And then there was the time, and she could not begin to remember if it had been that same night or some other, that she had heard her bedroom door being opened, and the dread-inducing tread of a well-built man moving towards where she had, until just a moment before, been sleeping.
She felt his icy hands running down her face towards her throat, to linger there, and knowing full well that if complicitous with silence, she would all too soon be dead, she rallied to unleash a howl that saw him flee to the dark forest.
A Dark Forest: Extract One
A Dark Forest: Extract Two
A Dark Forest: Extract Three
"The Power of Prose"
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