Stories Not Quite Scary Enough To Tell In The Dark, But Still Nearly Chilling

Song of Shenandoah

"Oh Shenandoah, I long to hear you. Away you rolling river..."

It's nothing now, here with the fire, a friend or two. Well, not nothing, never nothing, but tolerable. I can makes sense of it, hang my thoughts to steam and dry before my minds eye as though it were only a story, a firelight tale and nothing more. But I have known them. I feel them still.

They sleep now, waiting. They keep their secrets, the kings and queens of the forest- in their dreams: their eyes shut. The earth keeps them now as they once kept it, coursing life giving water along its shores, as they wait, for the sun to return, but it was not always like this, and on warm nights with the harvest moon, when the crickets sing just so and the boggy marsh rolls over the hills...

"Oh Shenandoah I long to feel you, away you rolling river."

A pewter cup filled with Greek fire filled to the brim, I admit I found myself captured, not by her spell, it was her shadow that first filled me full of wonder.

It was not the first time. I had often felt her, heard her, on my late evening floats downstream as I straddled a branch, a makeshift raft tied with a hook and string, plumbing the river for something to fill my pan for supper.

Like the wind she came as always, prickling the hairs on my spine as she turned the leaves in the tree tops with curious laughter, always just just out of site behind a branch, just under a limb.

I can still touch the sorrow that filled me the night she first spoke.

"What is your name?"

A single star fell over head so bright that its reflection lit her perch from below and for one brief moment I gazed on her unearthly beauty.

"Oh Shenandoah, I love your daughter, Away you rolling river..."

"What is your name song giver?"

Another star, this one so close its roar split the darkness as it burned with white hot flame that engulfed the river like a sunrise before plunging again to darkness. Blinded, I felt my branch of a boat sink ever so slightly at her arrival. When my eyes adjusted again, she was perched in front of me. Not quite a woman, her skin as fine as birch bark, her hair a tussle of aspen, her limbs long, curled with the elegance of the yellowing ferns that lined the forest floor.

"You are beautiful..." I? As she spoke she inched so close I...

"Hold back!" I nearly stumbled off my log.

"I have watched you long now." This I knew but was not ready to admit to her.

"Now hold back there-"

"You sing with the sweetness of the-

"Hold back now I said!" She paused like a cat with her mouse, almost pleased it seemed at herself for my distress. We watched each other a while in silence as the water carried us in its silent babble. She leaned again, and as the tips of her fingers brushed my hand time skipped. Not a roll in the river, not a ripple, only the meeting of two souls in the moonlight. My fingers began to burn, her touch had sent a fire into my veins that inched its way up my arm like yellow camphor.

"In your heart you feel it! It flows from you into us with the sweetness of the rising sun."

"Excuse me?"

"Your music. You are one of us song-giver"

I dropped my fishing line, staring into eyes as green and full as life itself as she sang back the longings of my heart.

"The Trapper loves an Indian Maiden, Away you rolling river, with notions his canoe is laden..."

As she sang the camphor burned, gnarling its way through my flesh and bones. A strong current now took hold of my raft. My arms felt week, and with each struggling breath I could feel strength bleeding away through my fingers.

"What is this?"

"You are one of us song giver."

"What? "What are you talking about?" Now the burning had reached my brain, the world was spinning, and though I had never been afraid of the water before, I greatly feared that I might fall off of my branch and drown.

Another inch forward and her hand brushed my knee with the same stiffening and fire as before.

Swifter now we were pulled along the shore so that all was a blur. Was the current rising or was I stemming?

"Sing for my people."

A hard snag on the fishing line I had dropped caught the log and pitched me forward, smashing my face hard into the wet wood. I lay there I know not how long. When I at last lifted myself again, I could feel blood dripping from my face.

"Sing for my people!" She was in terrible earnest, so much so that her voice trembled.

Stars falling now like sand in an hourglass, the heavens rained and the river boiled with the fallen glory. My brain and body reeling as her yellow camphor tore through my very soul.

Suddenly it was as if all of the eyes in the forest opened at once, wide, staring, all bearing witness to a terrible fate. My own minds eye was transported back, back to a time before men, back to when the earth had been theirs and everything on it. A race of wooden men whose hearts were full, who grew fat with all of the good things that God could provide, a glorious civilization, who in their abundance forgot from where their very life blood sprang, allowed their wooden necks to harden, refused to raise their heads and sing. Chilled by greed, without music to draw him, the Sun fled, the earth cooled, and unable to harvest the needed strength, all were left to huddle in cold, ungrateful darkness until their chance might come again.

"SING FOR MY PEOPLE!"

I opened my mouth, gasping for breath, blood oozing past my lips: it tasted sweet, like the first run of maple in the spring.

Lifting my hand to wipe my face to my horror I found I could not budge for the very fingers of my hands were fused into the wood, and where my hands had once been now gnarled stubs of wood bore down holding me fast.

Like a bear in a trap, I threw my body forward and backward I tore, I chewed to no avail. I had to get away, had to swim, but even as I tried to jump, to swim for shore I saw that my legs had suffered the same fate as my hands, my knees now giant bulbous burls pinned fast to my log as if they had been growing there a score or more. I screamed and to my horror found my lungs unable to fill again.

The maid waited next to me silent, staring with that earnest patience, her eyes pleading, watching until I could move no more. At last she leaned down and with a kiss as soft as new moss on the riverbed whispered once more.

"Sing for my people."

I gazed up at her then, I do not know how long, my whole body a stump, and as the panic ebbed, I saw again the elegance, the wisdom in her face. Slowly, the intensity of her desire brought me from my passion. My heart calmed, and my mind cleared.

"Sing. Please."

As gently as before she caressed the leaves sprouting from my ears and I felt sweet breath return to my lungs.

"Oh Shenandoah, I love your daughter, away you rolling river

May all her beauty never alter"

Oh look away, I'm bound away..."

She smiled.

"I pray now Shenandoah for your fathers, Away you rolling river

May ere God's smile caress these waters."

Now look away, we're bound away"

'cross the wide Missouri."

...The intensity of her gaze and gratitude I shall never know again. Nor dare I ever return to seek.

The next day I awoke down shore, my log next to me, a shipwrecked sailor with a gash on his face, wet clothes steaming under the morning sun: my body restored to me, and a roaring hunger in my stomach to remind me that I had nothing but a broken fishing cord to chew for my breakfast troubles. I emptied the water from my boots, and as I stood and stretched, the strangest yellow tingling came over me as it had the night before, as it has every morning since. Only now it comes not as a camphor so much as a sweet tincture that calms my belly and fills me with the sun itself, and though nothing passes my tongue, I swear that just at its tip, each time the new sun greets me I taste again the sweet savor of maple in the spring.