Haunting You - Chapter I: Firewood

The small village of Hoitowara, during the season of fall, was often subject to the heavy rain that the southern winds brought with them, causing, as a direct consequence of the unfavourable weather, a much colder climate for those who inhabited the fishing village. It was because of this miserable precipitation and the resulting colder temperature that a young girl, no more than seventeen years of age, was sent by her busy mother to collect firewood from the Kisharwi Forest to heat their abode when the sun sank into the sea.

Kisharwi Forest, as the rumours of the locals went, was sheltering demons and it was this that set in the young girls mind as she went thither. As a result she travelled, barefoot, with much haste to the edge of the forest. She had courage, all else she would not have come, for one who was host to cowardice would perhaps of preferred to brave the freezing temperatures of the night instead. Alas, for what courage she did possess, it was not enough for her to venture pass the skirts of the great forest. Her eyes were riveted on the dark mass of the forest in front of her; her stance was one that would allow her to turn with great agility if one of the aforementioned demons were revealed to be real and decided to attack her. She proceeded to cautiously pick up small twigs, sticks and the odd log, the largest of which was not in excess of five inches in diameter.

She had with her, to help her with her burden, a basket woven from the reeds that surrounded a pond, which lay in the middle of the village, and it was into this vessel that she placed the firewood she found.

The girl worked as quickly and as quietly as she could, not wishing to arouse anything that may be dormant. Her hands were deft in their task; her dexterity a result of many years of learning the art of sewing which was attributed to the fact her father was a weaver in the village, though his profession was not exclusive to him in Hoitowara. This did allow her father to have time to relax, at the expense of wealth, as a rival weaver reduced his own income but did afford him the luxury of not being responsible for the attire of the entire population of Hoitowara.

Her large brown eyes flickered occasionally to the ground as she stood, some where between squatting and standing erect, feeling blindly for fuel, her fear did not allow her to look away from the forest for more than a second or two. Even as a child the tales she had been told, next to the hearth, by her grandfather had fascinated and horrified her. The girl, if she searched in her heart, would find that, in spite of her cynical nature to all things superstitious, she believed that the demons existed. It seemed illogical for them not to, for the whole village was built upon stilts that allowed the buildings to be two foot above the ground, the cattle were taken indoors as were pets, for if anything living was left outside when it became dark then it was unlikely it would remain so when the sun rose again. She had heard creatures, in the dead of night, shuffling along outside, hunting for meat. She could hear them dragging their large masses across the floor. She had not seen one as of yet but she had heard, and for her, when she sat quivering in bed, that was enough.

Satisfied she had collected enough to last the night, the girl departed from Kisharwi Forest and headed back to the village from whence she came, though she walked backward from the forest lest some demon should attack her when she turned her back. When she was far enough away from the forest to consider herself safe she walked daintily on the grass outside the village, her head held high, for she had braved the forest, or at least the skirts of it, and returned alive. Her bare feet flattened the little green blades below them and as she wandered back to her home her mind began to work an image of what these dreaded demons may look like.

Rain started spitting down from the heavens causing the girl to put her hand over her dark hair, in order to protect it from getting wet – she did not want to get back to the village with an unsightly appearance after all! Her dainty walk swiftly became something of a canter and skip, which steadily increased in speed as the rain became more vicious until it became a sprint. Indeed, within a matter of minuets torrential rainfall had befallen our heroine and her hopes of returning dry were dashed in an unsavoury manner by the resolute forces of the weather.

She arrived home, with wet firewood, soaked to her skin. Her black hair lay tangled on her forehead, dislodged by her running from its normal structure. Her clothes were in need of a change and her disposition was in need of being softened, for her mood, although not foul, was less merry than when she had left the forest triumphant. Her mother muttered impatiently as she ushered her daughter inside and looked disdainfully at the wet firewood. The girl went into her own room to change her clothing whilst the mother, after deducing there was nothing else to be done, cast a scowl at the lashing rain and piled up the wet firewood just outside of the hearth were the fire sustained itself for the moment on the remnants of the fuel from the night before. Her hope was that by the time the fire had consumed what dry wood they had in the house, the wet wood would be dry from the heat.

The daughter emerged afresh from her room, clothed in a jade robe. The mother had decided they had better cook dinner presently, rather than risk having no fire and thus no cooked food later on in the evening. She went into the back room and notified her husband, who was weaving a tunic; of the adjustments she had made and then took it upon herself to gut the fish that would form the main part of the family meal. She would throw in some beans that had been grown on a nearby farm, which belonged to a family friend and boil some rice, which would fill up the eager stomachs of her daughter and husband. She would add the spice ginger to the beans and for the fish, to liven up the flavour a little; she would soak it in the juice of lemons from the village orchard and add a finely chopped chilli to give it a kick.

‘O’ Mother,’ said our saddened heroine, ‘why must it rain so?’
‘The rain is good child; it washes down nutrients from the Osaikle River so the soil of Hoitowara remains fertile. You would long for the rain if you were starving.’
‘Where is Cebrebii?’ the daughter asked suddenly, longing for warmth after the drenching she had received.
‘I don’t know Anaya, she may be in my room,’ her mother answered swiftly, her mind fixated on affixing the gutted fish on an iron spit above the fire.

Anaya thusly left her mother to her cooking and entered the room adjacent to where her father was weaving. Lying on the sheets of her parent’s bed, with its head on its paws, was a black wolf. The wolf rose as Anaya entered and welcomed her with a bark.
‘Hello Cebrebii, have you missed me?’
Cebrebii, although being an intelligent creature, had no way of understanding her mistress’s tongue, but the twain shared a mutual understanding of what Cebrebii meant when she sat up and put her head forward slightly. Anaya laughed.
‘I’ll take that in the affirmative then,’ said she as she started to stroke the wolf on its head causing the wolf to open its mouth into a grin and rub its skull up against her palm.

After a while Anaya retreated to her room and lay upon her bed, which her father and the village carpenter had made – the carpenter had constructed the frame and her father had woven the cotton sheets. Cebrebii had followed her and curled up next to her mistress. Stroking her vacantly Anaya’s mind wandered, and it found its way into the skirts of Kisharwi Forest.

The Kisharwi Forest, that was in Anaya’s mind, was composed of matter that was mainly fictional, for she had seen very little of it and so in her dream, as she walked through it, nearly all of which she saw was unreal. Her mind was in distress as to what the demons may look like – for what do demons look like? Demon, she fancied, was quite an ambiguous word. It could be coined to describe a man, beast or bird or a personal problem that one faced, like an addiction to something and to overcome it you would have to beat your demons. She had heard them scrape the floor at night and so she supposed they were either slow, heavy creatures that had not the energy to lift their feet fully from the ground and thusly shuffled from place to place, like a weary homeless person, or they were some sort of serpent. Whatever they were, they were not tall for she had looked out of her window one night when she had heard them and could see nothing in the darkness – surely if they were large, she thought, she would see some sort of outline.

Anaya, as she dreamt of what the demons looked like, was naturally unaware that it was now dark outside and from inside her room, if she had been awake, she would of heard the noise of a large, nameless creature dragging its body along the floor as it looked for something defenceless to devour.