Crown of Screams

I grew up in a small, out-of-the-way town. One of those places where folks only stop by to ask for directions. I know that’s how a lot of scary stories tend to start, but if you think about it, there’s a good reason for that. Before the internet, living in a remote town was like existing inside your own little world. You woke up every day and dealt with the same twenty or so people your whole life. You might catch something on the radio about what was happening out there in the world, but it all felt distant, like it could never touch you. You can debate whether ignorance is bliss, but the bottom line is this: when everything outside your little bubble feels foreign and threatening, it’s awfully easy to invent convenient ghost stories to explain away the unknown.

Rest assured, my story doesn’t involve ghosts, apparitions, or anything you could chalk up to a trick of the light. What I went through was real. At least, I think it was.

As I neared the old sawmill, the crowns of golden leaves flanking the structure stood in stark contrast to the industrial decay. Wildflowers peeked through the cracked pavement like they were trying to reclaim what the mill had taken from the woods. The place looked as abandoned as ever, a rundown relic from another decade, with peeling paint and broken windows that seemed to stare at me blankly.

The sun hung low, casting long shadows through the skeletal remains of the building. My heart felt heavy, each step squishing the damp earth beneath my sneakers. Finally, I reached the spot: a simple plank driven vertically into the ground, marking the place where my best friend lay buried. I knelt and brushed away the weeds that had tried to reclaim it. The air was thick with the scent of pine. And memory. I could almost hear him running through the tall grass, chasing something only he could see.

“Hey, buddy,” I whispered, tracing the letters carved into the wood. “I miss you.”

The wind rustled the trees above, and for a moment, I imagined his soft fur against my hand, his joyful spirit lingering in the quiet of the mill’s ruins. I closed my eyes, feeling the ache in my chest ease just a little, as if he were still here.

The memory of that day was as vivid as ever. We’d been playing in the yard, the sky clear and bright, his tail a blur of pure excitement. I turned to grab my bike, just for a second, and in that instant he spotted a squirrel darting across the street. I remember calling out, but my voice was swallowed by the rush of tires on asphalt. Panic gripped me as I turned back and watched him dash into traffic, oblivious to the danger.

The screech of brakes.

A sickening thud.

A yelp. And then nothing.

I squeezed my eyes shut, forcing back tears that threatened to spill over.

“I’m sorry,” I murmured.

My fingers shook as I laid my hand on that little mound of dirt, wishing with everything in me that I could rewind time for just one more day with him. My parents had floated the idea of getting me a new dog, but even after nearly a year I couldn’t bring myself to move on. It felt like they were asking me to replace my own brother. They had no idea I still came out here to visit his grave.

Ever since those girls went missing a few months back, we weren’t allowed in the old part of town anymore. There were all kinds of theories floating around about what happened to them, everything from them simply running off to whispers of a child killer hiding in our midst. Naturally, I figured something like that could never happen to me. I was a big, tough boy, after all. Just a few days shy of thirteen and already taller than my mom. Practically invincible, or so I thought.

The forest crackled with life around me. The trees were ablaze with fiery reds and yellows, the whole world looking like it was on fire in the best possible way. I liked autumn. Sure, school was back in session, but at least the mosquitoes were gone. Fair trade, as far as I was concerned.

I passed under the mill’s shadow and let my eyes wander over the area. The collapsed loading dock, the rusted-out chute where logs used to feed into the spinning blades, the tangle of blackberry brambles that had swallowed half the clearing. I’d walked this ground a hundred times, but something about it felt different that afternoon, quieter than usual.

I mean, it was always quiet. That’s why I came here. But usually you’d at least hear the occasional woodpecker working away at some dead trunk, or the croaking of bullfrogs from the nearby pond. Today there was none of that, and it was actually a little eerie.

I was circling around the back of the mill when I nearly tripped over something half-buried in the litter. I crouched down and dug it free. I was a small rubber ball. A pink one. Certainly wasn’t mine, or my dog’s. I turned it over in my hands. There was a drawing on it, something that might have once been Barbie, though the paint had faded into a washed-out silhouette. A girl’s toy, no doubt about that.

Was it possible that…

I never got the chance to finish the thought. Suddenly, a shrill scream sliced the stillness like a knife. My head snapped toward it. A pause, and then it came again, sharp and grating, unwavering in its pitch. By the third time I was already on my feet.

Looking back, there was something off about those screams. Well, apart from the obvious. They were too regular. Almost mechanical, lacking any real feeling behind them, like the indifferent wail of a car alarm. Stupidly, I made myself known.

“Hello? Anyone there? Do you need help?”

Silence. I took a few cautious steps toward the tree line, my heart thumping louder than the twigs crunching under my feet. Even the wind had gone quiet. Just as I turned to head back, half convinced I’d scared off whoever was making that awful sound, the scream cut through the woods again, closer this time.

My stomach dropped. I squinted into the thicket. My blood went cold as I watched entire saplings get shoved apart, snapping like matchsticks. Something big was coming through, and it was coming fast.

Adrenaline flooded my veins, and I sprinted for the husk of an old logging truck, diving behind it and pressing my back against the cold metal. Through the gaps in the decaying frame, I watched the tree line convulse, branches snapping and folding back on themselves, until finally it broke into the clearing.

A bull moose, easily seven feet at the shoulders, its antlers spanning so wide it looked like it belonged in a museum diorama. Its coat was matted and filthy, streaked dark in places, and its breath came out in ragged heaves. I’d seen moose before, plenty of times, grazing in roadside ditches from the window of the school bus. There was something different about this one, though. There was something in the way it carried itself, too controlled, too aware. It hadn’t wandered into that clearing looking for anything green to eat.

Then it got worse.

The animal stopped and turned its skull, and that’s when I saw what was tangled in its antlers. Not moss, not leaves, not vines, not even a piece of brush, but a human head, lodged between two of the points, as if it had sprouted there on its own. Its mouth was still stretched open in a scream that never seemed to end. Except it did end, and then started again, only the second time it wasn’t coming from that same head. It was coming from another one, wedged just below the first.

There were at least five or six of them altogether, a grotesque procession of faces strung up across the animal’s crown. The moose’s low, guttural bellow braided together with their cries, and the sounds fused into something that made me physically ill. Each face had the same half-lidded, glassy stare, the skin gray and sunken, and still they kept crying out, one after another, over and over.

Tears blurred my vision. This was it, I thought. Soon my face would join theirs, caught in some hellish loop, reliving my last few seconds as that thing stomped the life out of me. I couldn’t outrun something of that size, I was almost sure of it, and it was only a matter of time before it caught my scent.

My breathing came fast and shallow. I was hyperventilating. I patted down my pockets, hoping against hope I’d find something useful. Instead, I found the granola bar I’d shoved in there earlier that morning. It was worth a shot.

With as much steadiness as my fingers could manage, I peeled back the wrapper and lobbed it, feeling like a wounded soldier tossing his final grenade at the encroaching enemy. I didn’t see where it landed, but the rustle of bushes off to my left told me it had worked, at least for a moment, and the animal turned and lumbered off toward the sound.

I didn’t wait to see if it lost interest. I started tiptoeing my way toward the edge of the glade, every step an internal battle with my instincts, as my body screamed at me to run.

I risked a brief glance over my shoulder. There it was, a mountain of muscle and brown fur, its attention diverted but not, I knew, for long. I gathered what nerve I had left and took another slow step, praying the tall grass would keep me hidden. It didn’t. The moose lifted its skull, snorted, and in one heart-stopping instant, its eyes found mine.

Time seemed to stall. Whatever composure I’d been holding onto evaporated, and a raw scream tore out of my throat before I could stop it.

My legs took over. I crashed through the underbrush, branches raking at my arms and ankles, my whole world narrowing down to the ground in front of me. I zigzagged between the trunks, hoping to buy myself a few seconds, though I never slowed down long enough to find out if it had. The snapping of wood behind made it clear the thing chasing me could carve its own path just fine.

Through the blur of autumn color, I caught sight of a strip of gray ahead: the back road that snaked through the woods and connected the old part of town to the highway. Hardly anyone used it anymore, but it was the only shot I had. I swerved toward it, my calves burning with every stride. Behind me, the ground shook harder, closer, until I swore I could feel hot breath against the back of my neck.

I burst out onto the asphalt, tripped over my own feet, and rolled back up just in time to keep moving. A dozen or so riders in leather jackets were parked along the swerve, engines idling, a few of them huddled over a paper map spread across a gas tank. I found out later they were part of a volunteer search group. Bikers from three counties over who’d been combing the back roads on their days off ever since those girls went missing.

That afternoon, they’d been rechecking the old logging routes, which was lucky for me, but as they were about to find out, not so lucky for them. Their conversation died the second they noticed me, wild-eyed and sprinting toward them, barely able to breathe.

Two of the men crossed the road over to me, which turned out to be the worst decision either of them had ever made. The moose came crashing out of the trees a second later. Without thinking, I ducked between the two men, putting them squarely between the animal and me. They didn’t even have time to react.

One of them got caught by a swing of that massive rack and went cartwheeling into a ditch. The other wasn’t as lucky. The moose drove forward and pinned him beneath its front hooves, and I watched, unable to look away, as it lowered its head and gored him through the chest with one clean, brutal thrust. It wrenched its head back, and blood fountained across the pavement. The man’s scream was cut off somewhere in the middle, replaced by a dying gurgle.

“Move it, kid!”

I looked up and saw a woman with long dreadlocks reaching a gloved hand toward me from the seat of her bike. She hauled me up with more strength than I expected, and I wrapped my arms around her waist, holding on for dear life. The engine roared beneath us, tires biting into the gravel as we peeled away.

“Keep your head down!” she shouted, glancing back once, her dreadlocks whipping in the air like a nest of angry vipers.

She didn’t have to tell me twice. I buried my face against her jacket. It smelled like leather, gasoline, and the faint tang of woodsmoke. I was too wrung out to cry. All I could think about, absurdly, was how much trouble I’d be in once my parents found out where I’d been. Maybe that’s just how a kid’s brain deals with something too horrifying to process all at once.

Either way, I was alive, and in that moment, that was the only thing that mattered.

But it wasn’t over. The bike hadn’t gone twenty yards before I felt the engine’s vibration change, a harder shudder running up through the frame. I lifted my eyes just enough to see that monster charging down the road behind us, legs pumping, head lowered, that terrible crown of screaming antlers swinging back and forth with each stride. Somehow, it was keeping pace.

“It’s still coming!” I shouted into the woman’s ear.

She didn’t answer, just wrenched the throttle back and leaned us hard into the next curve. The bike fishtailed on a patch of dry earth, and for one gut-dropping second I thought we’d go tumbling. But she wrestled it straight again, and we shot forward.

We eventually hit a straightaway, the world dissolving into streaks of color on either side, the wind tearing at my ears. I couldn’t tell how close or far the creature was anymore, but little by little the bike settled into a calmer speed. If she felt comfortable enough to ease off, I figured we must’ve lost it.

Neither of us said a word for a long while after that. She just kept the throttle open until the woods gave way to the first scattered houses.

Not many people in town believed me, which I can’t say surprised me much. They believed the moose part, of course, but not the… other, less natural parts of my account. I never saw the woman who saved me again. She dropped me a block from my house and rode off, and that was that. I couldn’t blame her for not sticking around. She’d seen the same thing I had, and I imagine it stayed with her every bit as much as it did with me.

Days turned into weeks, then months, then years. I drifted through life in our sleepy little town, the memory of that afternoon still vivid but growing more distant with time. The locals never got their answer about the missing girls. A hiker found a shoe two winters later, a few miles past the mill, and after that even the whispering stopped, like everyone had silently agreed there was nothing left worth saying.

I stopped going out into the woods for a long time after that day. I told myself it was because I’d outgrown it, but the truth was simpler than that. I was scared, and I stayed scared for longer than I’d like to admit.

It took me years to work up the nerve to walk that path again. One afternoon, well into my twenties, I found myself heading down there without really meaning to. Sunbeams filtered through the canopy, and despite the old chill that still crept up my spine at the thought of what those trees had held, something in me needed to go back, if only to prove I wasn’t that terrified twelve-year-old boy anymore.

The mill was barely standing by then, most of it swallowed up by the forest for good. A birch tree had taken root right on top of my best friend’s grave, its white bark bright against the dark, rotted wood of the marker. I don’t know why, but it made me smile. The first smile I’d had out there in a long time.

I never did learn what that thing was, or where it went, or whether it’s still out there, hunting for other lost souls to add to its collection.

But standing there that day, watching a young tree grow up out of an old grave, I got to thinking that maybe you don’t really heal from stuff like this. Maybe you just keep living until the bad stuff takes up less space. The grief. The regrets. They never go away entirely.

They just stop being the whole picture.

Credit: Morning Owl

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