The Stranger in the Forest
Part 2
The cabin was sparsely furnished; the furniture wood hewn. One wall of the cabin was made entirely of stone with a large fireplace in the middle. It seemed to be the sole source of heat and light for the cabin. There were no modern appliances. The cabin did not seem to have electricity. On each side of the massive fireplace was an iron rod, and each rod held three arms. The arms pivoted on the rod so that they could be moved into or out of the fire. A caste iron kettle hung from each arm. Some of the kettles were clearly empty and were positioned outside the fire. Two kettles, however, were positioned above the fire in the fireplace.
As I watched, she bent over to pick up a pot holder of some type and pulled one of the kettles from the fire. When the kettle was outside the fire, she picked up a ladle and filled a cup with hot chocolate.
She handed me the hot chocolate. “I can add some whiskey to it if you like,” she said.
I was so overcome by her beauty that I forgot about everything else around me. When I reached for the cup, I carelessly allowed my forearm to touch the iron arm that had just been in the fire, causing me to jerk back as my skin sizzled. For a second, I smelled the burning flesh from my own arm, and when I looked, I saw the long red line across my forearm. In a fraction of a second, the hot iron rod had burned deeply into my forearm. Then gently she took hold of my hand a blew on the fresh burn. Instantly, the pain went away, replaced by feeling of coolness and comfort. She looked into my eyes smiling once again. I had never been in the presence of a woman so perfect.
She led me to a sofa in the center of the room. I say sofa, but that word does not adequately describe the piece of furniture I saw. It was shaped like a sofa but was constructed of wood with no cushions or other type of fabric. Draped over the wooden frame were various animal pelts to a depth of several inches. It was comfortable to sit in, even more comfortable when she sat beside me.
I tried to place her age, but I could not. She may have been in her twenties, but she could have been twice that age. There was a timeless quality to her.
“Are you from around here?” I asked. It seemed like a foolish question as it escaped my mouth.
She explained to me that she had been born in the cabin. I took that to mean that her parents had lived in the cabin when she was born. Obviously, she had been born in a hospital. She told me that she had worked in Philadelphia and New York but that she had always wanted return to the cabin and that she had. She told me it was the only place when she had ever really been happy.
I ask some other questions, but she smiled and suggested that I was being impolite. Here she had invited me into her home, and I was giving her the third degree. As she sat beside me, she had the sweetest smell, and I found myself wanting to touch her, to caress her, but I had been married many years to a woman I loved. Even so, the immediate desires of my heart conflicted with a lifetime of true love. Rather than test myself further, I decided I had been there too long.
As I stood to leave, however, my legs suddenly felt like concrete mooring me to the cabin’s floor. I could force myself to move only with great difficulty.
In the faded light in the corner of the cabin sat a set of shelves, and on the shelves were maybe a hundred wine bottles. It was too dark to see the bottles clearly, but I could make out the dates in bold numbers. The newest bottle was dated 2014, four years ago. The script was too fine to read in the poorly lit room.
“I see you are a collector,” I said.
“Yes I am. These are part of a very special collection. They are the most valuable things here; maybe the most valuable things anywhere.”
The statement struck was odd, but no odder than the rest of the cabin. I looked at my watch and saw that it was 4:30 in the morning. When I had last looked at my watch just before entering the hollow, it has said 9:20 — somehow seven hours had passed. It seemed like only 30 minutes.
I said goodbye and thanked my host for her hospitality. She smiled coyly. “You’re not going anywhere.”
I walked toward the door of the cabin, passing closely to the wine collection. The script I had been unable to see when I stood up was more readable now. The script above the number was not the name of a particular label, as I had thought. Instead, they were the names of men.
My host walked up to me. “It’s not wine,” she said.
Before the Age of Man, the creature existed. It had been created for a special purpose, but instead of serving its Master, the creature became arrogant, proud and boastful. It possessed too much beauty and too much intelligence. Not beauty as humans would later come to understand the term, but a supernatural appeal and attraction that transcended what humans would later view as physical attraction. Its intelligence likewise far surpassed the feeble understanding men would later call intelligence. The creature was nearly perfect in every way, and the Master loved his creation.
But the creature rebelled against the Master — an act of intense foolishness for a being supposed to be so perfect. The rebellion ended in the twinkling of an eye. Rather than destroy the creature, which the Master loved, the Master banished it to earth. No one ever knew why the Master didn’t destroy the creature. Perhaps it was because the Master wanted his creature to see the errors of its ways and return to the service of the Master. If that was his purpose, the Master failed. The creature was too proud to humble itself before anything, and so it dwelt in the forests and the mountains of earth alone for millennia. The entire time is was alone, its nursed a grudge that grew larger and larger. It plotted ways to exact revenge on the Master, but it was powerless in its banishment to do anything.
When mankind arrived on the surface of the earth, the creature saw an opportunity to exact its revenge. As they spread across the surface of the earth, it watched them, learning how they thought and how they felt. Feelings were a difficult aspect of humanity for the creature to understand, and it studied them for centuries. Not that the creature could every learn to feel; it couldn’t. It could and did understand how feelings made humans act and how they caused humans time and again to turn from the Master. Every time a human turns its back on the Master, the creature felt pleasure.
Eventually, the creature took on the appearance of a human in the way a hunter might put on camouflage to hide his identity. The analogy is not perfect. The creature actually put on the form of a human and was human in every physical way but not human at all in any way that really matter. In its human skin, the creature inserted itself into human civilization at the dawn of history. It refined its appearance over the centuries to become more appealing to the humans. It learned how to persuade people: what lies would be most effective. The creature learned the power of sex, though it had no meaning and gave no pleasure to the creature. It assumed the form of a beautiful woman and became a seductress.
She chose the form of a woman because of the weakness men. Using her body, she could control the men who thought they controlled the world. She was a queen in Babylon and Persia. As power shifted to the Greeks and the Romans, she was the consort of kings and emperors. She watched the games where humans feed other humans to animals and encouraged the slaughter of the innocent and guilty alike. When Rome fell, she threw herself into the dark ages with enthusiasm. She was at times a queen and at other times the mistress of popes and bishops. She cultivated power and encouraged death.
By the time of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the Creator had enough, and his creature, in female form, was once again banished to remote area in the New World, where her ability to spread deceit and foster discontent was once again limited. She found herself confined to a mountain valley so remote from the powerful Court of Europe that she thought her punishment unbearable. Human inhabited the region, but they had been warned to avoid the valley. They did. It was a century of isolation.
Her isolation ended when a religious community of sorts moved into the valley. Led by the Reverend Allen Cornish, a man with no religious education and even less interest in God, forty settlers left the civilization that clung to the coast and traveled through uncharted forest and mountains into the creature’s valley. They sought freedom and liberty; the right to live their lives free from the dictates of others. Reverend Cornish was a charismatic leader, and he taught persuasively even though his “religion” had no basis in anything. There was only one rule: any man or woman was free to do as he or she wanted.
The society soon became completely debauched. There was no marriage and no limitations to sexual desire. Even children and animals were initiated into the sexual rituals of the cult. In time, Reverend Cornish initiated the “blood sacrifice”, a ritual where children, usually captured Native American children, were ritually murdered. Sometimes their flesh was eaten.
The creature/seductress, now called Emily Wright, found a new home with the group. Her contributions to the moral demise of the group were great. She was named first a priestess and then the Most-High Priestess of the Lord. She refined the religious doctrine of the community making it progressively more evil as she thought of more and different ways to subvert the virtues of the community until, in time, no virtue was left. It was during this time that the community built her home. She had found purpose once more.
Evil can only exist for so long, however, and in time, the Master was compelled to act. It was a terrible judgment that fell upon the community. Disease killed every member of the community — not a single person survived. The creature, Emily Wright, also suffered judgment, although, once again, she was not destroyed. Instead, she was imprisoned in the small hollow that surrounded her cabin. Powerful, supernatural warriors stood guard at the borders of the hollow to prevent her from ever leaving. The hollow was also hidden from humans. It was covered with a ceiling of earth and trees so that the humans who walked upon it had not idea that a hollow lay below them. They could never enter into the abode of the creature, and the creature could never enter into the land of the humans.
There was one exception. Every four years for a single night, a single human would be permitted to enter into the hollow.
You can read Part 1 here:
