The Woods Beyond Margaret Street

By the time Thomas Grady turned sixty-eight, most people on Margaret Street had stopped taking him seriously.

They were polite about it, of course. Small towns tend to be. Neighbors waved when they passed his house, exchanged a few words with him at the mailbox, and listened patiently whenever he started talking about the woods. Then they went home and quietly dismissed whatever strange thing Thomas had said that day.

It hadn’t always been that way.

Years ago, Thomas had been an ordinary man. He worked hard, attended church on Sundays, and spent his weekends helping neighbors repair fences or clear storm debris from their yards. If a storm knocked down your fence, Thomas showed up with tools. If your truck wouldn’t start, Thomas was under the hood before you could call a mechanic. When his wife was alive, people often joked that there wasn’t a kinder couple in town.

Then his wife died.

After that, something changed.

No one could quite agree on what it was. Thomas became withdrawn and stopped attending community events. He spent more time alone, and conversations with him increasingly drifted toward subjects that made people uncomfortable.

Most often, he talked about the woods.

Margaret Street ended where the trees began. Beyond the final row of houses stretched several miles of dense woodland, broken only by hunting trails and abandoned logging roads. Children occasionally played there during the day, but nobody stayed after dark.

Thomas said they shouldn’t go in at all.

He claimed there were things moving between the trees at night. He talked about lights that appeared where no lights should be and voices carried on the wind. Sometimes he described seeing figures standing among the trees, watching the neighborhood from a distance.

People had theories. Some blamed grief. Others blamed loneliness. A few simply thought Thomas had spent too many years alone with his own thoughts.

Nobody knew for certain.

The only thing everyone agreed on was that Thomas believed what he was saying.

That was what made it unsettling.

He never sounded like a man telling ghost stories.

He sounded like a man describing something he had personally seen.

Over the years, Thomas filled notebooks with observations and maps. He collected newspaper clippings about missing hikers, strange animal attacks, and unexplained incidents from neighboring towns. Most people considered it an obsession.

Thomas considered it preparation.

He believed something lived in the woods, and he believed that one day it would come out.

Halloween arrived on a cold Friday evening.

By sunset, Margaret Street looked exactly as it should. Jack-o’-lanterns glowed on porches, plastic skeletons hung from trees, and artificial spiderwebs stretched across hedges. Children in costumes ran from house to house while parents gathered in driveways and talked.

Thomas sat on his porch with a bowl of candy in his lap.

A little girl dressed as a vampire stopped at the end of his walkway and waved.

“Happy Halloween, Mr. Grady.”

Thomas smiled.

“Happy Halloween.”

The girl showed off a pair of oversized plastic fangs.

“Best costume on the street,” Thomas said.

She grinned.

“They’re real.”

Thomas laughed.

“That’s what worries me.”

She giggled and ran off toward the next house.

Thomas watched her go. For a moment, he found himself smiling.

Then he looked toward the woods.

Something moved between the trees.

It was only there for a second, a dark shape slipping behind the trunks before disappearing completely.

Thomas continued staring long after it was gone.

Over the years, he’d learned to be careful with certainty. Sometimes shadows became figures. Sometimes sounds became voices. Sometimes they didn’t.

That uncertainty frightened him more than anything.

He remained on the porch until darkness settled over the neighborhood, then eventually went inside.

By eleven o’clock, most of the children had gone home. Porch lights began switching off one by one, decorations swayed in the wind, and the cheerful energy of the evening slowly faded into silence.

Thomas sat near his front window with a cup of coffee in his hands. Beyond the neighborhood, the woods formed a solid wall of darkness.

At 11:43 p.m., he noticed movement.

At first, he thought it was a deer.

Then another shape appeared.

Then another.

Thomas leaned forward.

Several figures were emerging from the trees.

The distance made details difficult to distinguish, but something about them seemed wrong. One appeared unusually tall. Another moved low to the ground. A third vanished behind a tree and seemed to appear somewhere else entirely.

Thomas rubbed his eyes and looked again.

The figures remained.

More appeared behind them.

A familiar feeling settled into his chest. It wasn’t simply fear of what he was seeing. It was the fear that he might not actually be seeing it at all.

Then a scream echoed from somewhere down the street.

Another followed.

Something crashed through a fence.

The hesitation vanished.

Thomas grabbed the rifle beside the door and stepped outside.

Chaos had already reached Margaret Street.

Shapes moved between houses and across front lawns. Some appeared human. Others didn’t. One crossed beneath a streetlight, and Thomas caught sight of what looked like antlers protruding from its head. Another crawled through a flower bed while something much larger moved between two houses farther down the street.

The screaming continued.

Thomas raised the rifle.

His hands trembled, not because he was afraid, but because he wasn’t sure.

The figure beneath the streetlight turned toward him.

Its eyes reflected the light.

Thomas fired.

The figure dropped.

After that, everything happened too quickly.

More shapes emerged from the darkness, and Thomas fired again and again. The rifle bucked against his shoulder while screams echoed through the neighborhood. Every glimpse seemed to confirm his fears while simultaneously creating new doubt.

The creatures looked monstrous.

They looked human.

Sometimes they looked like both at once.

Thomas couldn’t separate one truth from another. He only knew that people were screaming and something was moving toward him.

When the shooting finally stopped, Margaret Street fell silent.

Smoke drifted through the cold night air while bodies lay scattered across lawns and sidewalks. Thomas stood in the middle of the road struggling to catch his breath, staring at what remained of the things he had been fighting.

For several seconds, nothing moved.

Then something stepped out of the darkness.

It was larger than anything he had seen all night.

Its silhouette seemed distorted beneath the streetlights, and its face appeared to be nothing but eyes and teeth. Long arms hung almost to the pavement as it slowly approached.

Thomas raised the rifle and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

The weapon was empty.

The figure kept coming.

Thomas turned toward his house. His spare ammunition was still sitting on the porch.

He took three steps before his boot landed on something round.

His foot slipped, and he crashed onto the pavement.

Something bounced beside his head.

Thomas reached for it.

A miniature chocolate bar.

He stared at it for a moment before noticing another one several feet away. Then another.

Candy was scattered everywhere. Chocolate bars, lollipops, candy corn, gummy worms, and brightly colored wrappers covered the street among the leaves and spent shell casings.

Thomas slowly pushed himself upright.

The nearest body lay only a few feet away.

It wore a werewolf costume.

One rubber claw had torn off during the fall. It lay in the street beside a handful of candy.

Thomas’s gaze shifted to another body.

The antlers were foam.

A third lay near the curb with wires protruding from beneath its mask. A small battery pack had come loose, exposing the source of the glowing eyes Thomas had seen earlier.

His stomach tightened.

He looked farther down the street.

The enormous creature that had been approaching him was wearing sneakers.

The costume suddenly looked very small.

Thomas looked around.

Halloween lights still glowed from porches. Plastic skeletons swayed in the wind. Paper ghosts hung from trees, moving gently with each passing breeze. An overturned pumpkin bucket rested beside the curb.

Then he looked back at the bodies.

And recognized them.

The boy who lived three houses down.

The twins who rode their bicycles every afternoon.

The little girl in the vampire costume.

The one who had made him laugh.

Thomas’s rifle slipped from his hand.

“No.”

The word barely escaped his lips.

Sirens sounded in the distance, growing louder as red and blue lights appeared at the end of Margaret Street.

Thomas remained where he was. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t look away.

Police cars arrived within minutes, and officers rushed toward him with weapons drawn.

Thomas raised his hands.

“They were monsters,” he said.

An officer looked at the bodies, then at Thomas.

“Put your hands behind your back.”

“They came out of the woods.”

“Turn around.”

“They weren’t human.”

The officer handcuffed him.

Thomas didn’t resist.

Parents began emerging from their homes. Some screamed when they saw the bodies. Others stood frozen in their yards, unable to understand what had happened.

One woman pushed through the officers and dropped beside one of the bodies.

For a moment, she simply stared.

Then a sound escaped her.

A raw, broken sound that Thomas would remember for the rest of his life.

He looked away.

He couldn’t bear it.

Thomas looked toward the woods.

“They’re still out there,” he whispered.

Nobody listened.

Minutes later, Thomas sat handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser.

Margaret Street disappeared through the rear window while red and blue lights reflected across the wet pavement. Paramedics moved among the bodies, and parents cried in the street.

Thomas closed his eyes.

The little girl in the vampire costume appeared immediately.

He remembered her waving.

He remembered waving back.

He remembered thinking she was safe.

A knot tightened in his stomach.

Then he opened his eyes.

Someone was standing at the edge of the woods.

A small figure stood motionless beneath the trees, watching the cruiser pull away.

Slowly, it raised one hand.

Almost like a wave.

Thomas leaned forward.

His heart began pounding.

Then he blinked.

The figure was gone.

He sank back into the seat.

The officer driving never looked away from the road.

Thomas stared out the side window.

Something caught his eye.

A small handprint rested on the glass beside his shoulder.

He froze.

The print was faint, barely visible against the reflections from the passing streetlights. It looked like it could belong to a child.

Thomas stared at it for several seconds.

Then another set of lights passed across the window.

The handprint was gone.

He wasn’t sure if it had ever been there at all.

Thomas leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes.

The cruiser rolled through the darkness.

Rain tapped softly against the glass.

For a while, everything was quiet.

Then something scraped lightly across the outside of the window.

But Thomas didn’t look.

Credit: tresnoface