By all accounts, twelve-year-old Hobson Doyle was a good boy. He did his chores without complaint. He turned in homework assignments on time. Around adults, he was polite and respectful, and around other children, he was kind, never bossy, never mean. In short, Hobson, unlike so many of his peers, never gave his parents reason to doubt the wisdom of entering into parenthood in the first place.

If there was one aspect of Hobson’s behavior that gave his parents pause, however, it was his sleepwalking, a phenomenon that began shortly after his twelfth birthday. Without warning, Leland and Miriam Doyle began waking during the night to find their son in various parts of the house. Hobson had no recollection of his nocturnal wanderings, and would wake in the morning rested and refreshed, while his parents would stumble into the kitchen, bleary-eyed and reaching for that first precious cup of coffee.

Hobson’s midnight ramblings left no impression on his memory until he found himself standing in the middle of a dark forest, shivering in his pajama bottoms and tee shirt. He was definitely not in his bedroom at home, tucked beneath a warm blanket. Surrounding him, and stretching out for as far as the eye could see, were blackened, leafless trees, the branches of which reached toward a gray marbled sky like the charred fingers of skeletons reaching up through the ground from hidden graves. He had no idea where he was or how he had gotten there. He assumed at first that he was dreaming, because no place he had ever been in his life looked so gloomy, but the cold muck into which his bare feet sank felt too real to be a dream, the stench of wood rot and decay too strong to be anything but exactly what Hobson perceived them to be.

As a boy scout with a merit badge in Orienteering, Hobson had spent hours exploring the woods around his hometown of Echo Hill, in the northwest corner of Connecticut, and he knew Willow Brook Forest as well as he knew the streets of his neighborhood. Nothing about this place looked familiar. He searched the ground around him for his own footprints, reasoning that if he could retrace his steps, he would find his way back to a part of the forest he recognized. From there he assumed it would be easy to find his way home again. Oddly, there were no footprints in the soft ground. How could that be? he wondered. 

If lost, a boy scout is instructed to pitch a tent and wait until daylight to find rescuers. Hobson had no tent, nor any supplies for that matter; he had nothing with him to survive a night alone in a strange forest. Panic crept like a slow cold trickle of ice water through his arms and legs, a knot tightened in his chest. Without a compass or maps, the task of determining direction was nearly impossible.

Whichever way he chose would be nothing more than a guess. So he scanned the desolate landscape, hoping to find something out there that could help him decide where to start. Up ahead the gnarled, misshapen trees thinned out where the land rose along the spine of a short hill. Maybe there were houses on the other side of the ridge, and whoever lived in one of those houses would let him use their phone to call his parents. That was possible, but what kind of people lived in such a horrible place? His feet remained frozen to the soft, muddy ground. Fairy tales were full of dumb children being led to some awful fate by a witch or some other monster who seemed nice and sweet at first, until the children were trapped in their cottage with no way out.

He pushed the thought from his mind. He needed to get out of the cold before he froze to death. Forcing his numbed legs to move, Hobson started out at a slow, labored walk, his feet making a soft sucking sound in the mud. He trudged along in this way for a good forty or fifty yards, before he picked up the pace, moving slightly faster with each step, until, finally, he was running. Though Hobson had never beaten his friend Kevin in a running race, and wouldn’t come close to that now, in his mind, he was practically flying.

His breath puffed from his mouth like the steam from an old-time train engine. He ran despite the cold, despite the stitch in his side or the cramp in his legs. He continued to run because that was all he could think to do at the moment. And because he ran more or less blindly, trying desperately to find someplace warm and safe, he got tangled repeatedly in silky tendrils which hung from nearly every tree.

Exhausted, pulling silky remnants of the stringy white rope from his arms, chest, and hair, Hobson stopped to catch his breath. He hadn’t been that winded since Mr. Reid, his Little League coach, had made the team run laps from home plate to the centerfield fence on their first practice of the season. Just as he was about to continue on up the hill, he heard rustling coming from somewhere nearby. He froze, listening. There it was again. Hobson looked frantically around him for the source of the sound. It seemed to be coming from more than one place. One of the trees to his right gave a sudden shudder, as if a flock of birds had taken flight, but not a single bird flew through the air.

“Hello?” he squeaked, his voice barely above a whisper.

More rustling. Whatever was out there was getting closer. It was coming toward him. Hobson shuffled away from the sound, thinking a bear or some other wild animal was stalking him. Defenseless against such an attack, fear drove his feet forward, adrenaline pumped through his arteries. Desperate to put distance between himself and that frightening sound, the thought of finding a friendly homeowner on the other side of the hill was all but gone from his mind. He was running scared and thinking only of survival.

He glanced once or twice over his shoulder. Nothing was behind him, and nothing but the top of the hill was in front of him. This did not, however, make him feel any safer. He was certain he was not alone. There was something out there, something he could not see, which motivated him to keep moving. When he finally reached the top of the hill, he stopped and looked around for his pursuer, but the woods had gone quiet, eerily so. All he could hear now was the rasp of his own breathing.

From this vantage point, Hobson could see the valley from where he had started – a grim, forbidding  forest of black and gray, as if every shade of green or blue or yellow had been washed out of it. He was glad he was up here, where the air, at least, smelled better. But that feeling quickly evaporated. Looking down the other side of the hill, where he had expected to find homes, he found only more damaged trees, spreading out for what looked like miles and miles. Far off in the distance a mountain rose from the devastated forest. At the top of the mountain stood some kind of tower. It was as black as the trees of the forest, but it stood in sharp contrast to the cement-colored backdrop of sky.

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For some reason Hobson could not understand, he shivered at the sight of the tower. He felt afraid. He turned away from it, and as he did, something charged toward him from a copse of trees nearby. He had just enough time to leap behind a short wall of bramble, hoping it was enough to conceal him from his attacker. He crouched down, trying like mad to hold his breath. The footfalls grew louder. Within seconds, the thing that had chased him up the hill was only a few feet away. Hobson dared peek through the tangle of brush, watching and waiting.

To his relief, it was not a wild beast that came crashing through the trees, but a girl, about his own age, who went rushing past him. She ran headlong through thickets, stumbling, catching her balance, and continuing on as if something were chasing her.

“Hey, wait!” Hobson called and sprang from his hiding place.

The girl turned toward the sound of his voice. As she did, she tripped over a fallen branch and went sprawling to the ground. On hands and knees she scrambled through the filth of the rotten forest floor until she reached the trunk of a tree. Hobson ran after her. After some twenty paces, he caught up with this other child, who was clearly as lost as he was, and found the girl cowering with her hands over her face, her dress and leather boots caked with mud. Bits of sticks and dried leaves clung to the tangle of long auburn hair, which fell to her small, hunched shoulders.

“I’m lost,” he said. “Are you lost too?” He took a step closer.

The girl peeked at him through her fingers. What she saw was a small thin boy, not much taller than her, with a mop of brown hair and large brown eyes. His lips were turning blue from the cold. She lowered her hands slowly and looked up. “It’s come for me,” she said, her piercing blue eyes widening as she spoke. She shivered with fear and looked past Hobson’s shoulder, pointing at the branches above them. 

“What’s come for you?” 

Confused, Hobson turned in the direction the girl pointed and saw something in the tree. He was about to ask what it was, when it dropped suddenly from its perch and landed next to her. It looked like a man, although a very skinny and very pale man, whose skin was nearly the color of milk. This man, who had leaped from the tree branch and landed with the ease of an acrobat, was bald, and had long thin arms; his clothes, a sleeveless shirt and pants, were nothing more than coarse fabric, like potato sacks stitched carelessly by an unskilled hand.

The girl screamed and pressed herself against the tree trunk. “No! Please, leave me alone!” Tears spilled from her blue eyes and ran down her dirty cheeks, forming muddy streaks across her face.

The thin, pale man snatched the girl up in his long arms before she could get away. She tried to scream a second time, but he clamped a bony hand over her mouth. She struggled, but her effort was in vain; the man held her firmly to his chest.

“Put her down!” Hobson yelled.

The girl’s captor turned, looking over his shoulder. What Hobson thought was a man was not a man at all; in fact, Hobson doubted that it was even human. The shock of seeing its face made him back away a couple of steps. The thing barred its long, needle-like teeth, which protruded from swollen pink gums. It was hideous, something straight out of a horror film, or a really terrifying nightmare, the kind from which you wake screaming. Aside from its fangs, which were bad enough, the most unsettling aspect about the strange creature’s face, the thing that made Hobson’s knees buckle, was its eight coal-black eyes, six of which were on its forehead, in two rows of three.

Hobson stood rooted to the spot, unable to move, a scream frozen in his throat. The thing studied him as if committing his face to memory. Then it moved slowly, cautiously toward him. Hobson backed away another two steps. He spotted the tree limb, which the girl had tripped over, lying on the ground. He lunged for it, picked it up, and waved it threateningly at the creature.

Now it was the creature that backed away from Hobson. It seemed suddenly to regard him as nothing more than an annoyance, a trifle not worth fighting. Before bounding back up the tree, the creature looked over its shoulder at Hobson, the girl struggling in its grip, and hissed, a sound Hobson had heard only one other time, and that was when he and his friends Kevin and Kaylee had come across a feral cat in the woods. They had surprised the animal as it was dining on a mouse. It backed away from Hobson and his friends, its ears flattened against its skull, and made a sound that scared them nearly out of their shoes.

What came out of the mouth of that thing with the eight black eyes was worse, much worse...

Hobson sat up in bed, his heart racing. With wide, frightened eyes he looked around at everything in his bedroom, took in every detail. He clutched the sheets beneath him to convince himself that he really was home again. To his left was the window, through which early morning sunlight shone onto the hardwood floor. There was his desk and computer, his dresser, the drawers left open, socks, underwear and shirts hanging from each one; there was his bean bag chair, a light-up globe, and finally, his baseball glove, which he had hung from the headboard post the night before. 

Once he was sure he was safe, and that there were no lost girls or bizarre monsters nearby, he sat back against the headboard, the words it was only a dream repeating in his mind. He lifted the glove from the post and held it in his hands. He took comfort in its familiar leather smell, and with his fingertips touched the soft, well worn pocket, the webbing, and the rawhide ties. It was his baseball glove above everything else in his room that truly convinced Hobson that all was right with the world.

He was playing in his first Little League All-Star game, scheduled for later that afternoon, and had hung the glove on the post for good luck, a ritual he had done the night before every game he’d played in since his first season of tee ball. Now that the day had finally arrived, the game only hours away, he needed to focus, and so he pushed the nightmare from his mind.

He sat in bed watching the second hand on his Bride of Frankenstein wall clock tick off seconds and minutes for what felt like an eternity. The clock, along with several other items in his bedroom, was bought at a yard sale. Hobson and his mother had accumulated quite a collection of oddities over the years, like the clock, which had as its face a picture of Frankenstein’s bride caught in mid-scream. Both he and his mother had thought it was a hoot, and since it was only one dollar, she allowed Hobson to buy it.

It was a great clock, and all, but its second hand moved too slowly for Hobson’s liking; he had things to do, a baseball game to get ready for. As he pulled back the sheets, his excitement to start the day went out like a defective light bulb. His feet were covered in mud and dried leaves clung to the bottom of his wet pajama pants.