So there had been a hunting accident years ago and it had involved Charlie’s brother Billy.

Five years, but every time the season started up again, Charlie had to make that lonely six hour drive by himself up to the cabin.

That was when all those bad feelings came creeping back with the sunset and the dark. The closer he got, the more vivid they came to him.

Back then he’d hunted differently. There was a group of them – old friends – good guys, mostly. They were the kind that you didn’t mind being trapped with for two whole weeks.

And they’d hunted with rifles back then. It just made for cleaner kills, and more dead meat to bring back to the city to give out for Christmas - to your family, or your boss, or whomever.

But there had also been drinking. A whole lot of vodka mostly, because it was easiest to drink straight and they liked to pack lightly.

Charlie never knew where all that drinking came from. They’d been going to the cabin for fifteen years at that point. Everything had been about the hunting until it wasn’t. It was like the vodka had been poisoning all of them slowly in a spiritual way.

All of them.

After Billy passed, Charlie did things differently. There were no more guns or booze or old hunting pals. It was just Charlie and his bow. It was harder but it was better. It made him harder and better too.

Or so he liked to think as a way of dealing with what had happened to Billy.

Billy had shot a buck.

It was one of the cleanest head shots that Charlie had ever seen but for whatever reason the beast stayed upright.

Wounded it and it had fled into impossibly thick undergrowth.

And like drunken, competitive fools, they’d all rushed to get the clean kill and the whole scene had quickly descended into a miasma of chaos and confusion and rifle fire.

Charlie was as guilty as anyone. He’d taken a blind shot and then moved forward like an idiot with the rest of them.

In the aftermath, it was Billy that they’d shot. He was just lying there in the pine needles with a bullet wound that had gone through his right eye and then blown through the back of his head.

The buck deer they’d all coveted was gone too. And what pained Charlie the most was the fact that he still had the urge to chase after it. Even as he stood there with Billy’s brains steaming on the dead leaves of the forest floor.

While everybody else had gone to run for their cellular phones and some help, Charlie couldn’t stop thinking about the deer. It should have been the deer laying there at his feet.

After that, most of the guys had lost their taste for hunting and for communicating with one another altogether. That suited Charlie just fine.

All through the off-season, he’d done nothing of note except to conjure dreams in which Billy and the buck were one and the same. Both were missing their right eyes, both were still alive, and both were always just sitting at the corners of his mind. In that place where everything became a little muddled and a little unclear – like ghosts.

By the time that he arrived at the cabin, it was well past dark and he had to use the headlamp to find his footing in the woods. The cabin itself was nothing to look at. It was just a cheaply made shelter built of discarded plywood and lined with ancient newsprint. It was like a large outhouse with all the same amenities.

He got inside and set up the propane stove and his sleeping bag. There was an unusual amount of mouse droppings that year, and he made a mental note to bring the traps with him for the next time. The mice were a problem – they would eat his scant supply of food and chew holes in his clothing and his gear. He would have to keep an eye out for them.

When he was set up, he went back to the truck for the rest of his supplies. The cabin was situated along a ridge and was nestled in the midst of heavy tree cover. It meant that he had to park the truck a distance from it, so it was a bit of a hike through the woods going back and forth.

He walked back almost blind. It was so dark between the overcast sky that blotted out the moon and the stars, and the tree cover, that the headlamp was right beside useless.

So he stumbled through the dark with his hands and arms outstretched in front of him. He pushed through the branches and wished he’d left the house earlier so he didn’t always arrive so late at night.

There was the telltale snap of a twig a little ways from where he was standing, and he swiveled to meet it with his light. All his years of listening for prey in the woods still counted, even if he held no weapon in his hands.

The headlamp caught a flash of brown hindquarters through the branches, and then the deer moved to face the light.

In the brief instant that he caught its gaze in the headlamp, he could see that it was a carrion head – the hide was stretched so tightly that it looked more skeletal than not.

One red eye burned in its left socket, but its right eye was as dark and as empty as the void itself.

Then it was gone again, its visage disappeared as the creature bounded back into the darkness. It left him alone to wonder if he’d really seen what he had just saw, or if the nighttime, the onset of alcohol dementia, or the plague of nightmares he’d suffered from all year had merely conjured a hallucination.

Regardless, he continued to the truck, and by the time that he arrived, he determined that it had been his mind playing tricks on him.

Still, he found it mostly odd that a deer would be active in the dark, and be so brave as to be close to him while he stumbled his way through the brush. Maybe it was sick? The only other alternative he had was that it had been following him. That thought though, was as preposterous as its skull face had been.

He shook off his morbid thoughts and hurried back to the cabin with the extra supplies. He finished setting up haphazardly and did not fully unpack all of his belongings. The trip wasn’t about comfort or fun. These years, it was about being alone.

He went to sleep in the dark and woke up in the dark too. Not usually the type to wake early, the hunting trips changed all of that every year without failure. It was as if the environment change changed him too. Without fail, out in the forest, he always beat the sunrise to it.

Charlie made some weak coffee on the stove and ate a muffin that was still half-frozen from its package. Then he got dressed, took up his bow and quiver, and headed out into the forest for his kills.

It was still not quite light outside when he got the grouse. It was in a patch of the woods where the trees faded to an expanse of long grasses, and he killed her in one shot. The arrow passed clean through her breast and continued into the tree line at the far side of the field. It slumped, bleeding, and that was that.

It was a lucky shot. Killing with a bow was a lot more difficult than killing with a gun. You needed to be up close, and you needed to take the shot without hesitation.

All of that movement from your arms would scare animals quicker than if your finger only had to move and pull the trigger gently.

He checked the dead bird to make sure that it was really dead and then bagged it and hung it from his hip.

Once it was secured, he went to the trees to find the lost arrow. Sometimes they were broken and sometimes they weren’t broken. Sometimes they went missing forever and sometimes they were easily found.

He was crouched in the leaves and sifting through them with gloved hands when he heard a soft rustle from the foliage nearby.

Just as the night before, he swiveled towards the sound by pure instinct. This time though, he drew an arrow from his quiver and notched his bow. This was also instinctual, and so was the part where he took a blind shot at whatever had made the mistake of giving away its position to him.

What had made the noise this time, though, was not the stalking and skull-headed buck from the previous evening. No, it was his brother Billy standing there in the trees somehow. One of his eyes was as red as an inferno. His other eye was as black as the sky, with the stock of Charlie’s freshly shot arrow jutting from it.

Billy’s hands shot up to cover his face, and he whipped his body in a frenzy of pain. He shrieked and ran off into the dark like that, leaving Charlie shocked frozen in confusion and guilt from his crouching position on the forest floor.

A hundred thoughts ran through his mind.

-I’m going crazy – what did I just see – Oh my God I’ve killed my brother all over again - 

He stayed very still for a very long time. Long enough so that he lost track of time and the sun grew very tall into the morning so it was finally light again outside.

Then, very carefully, his missing arrow long forgotten, he got up and went to the place where he thought that Billy might have been standing.

There was no sign that anyone had actually been standing there. There were no places where the foliage had been disturbed and no tracks on the ground.

And although he realized then that he must have been seeing things. That it was some sort of stress-based hallucination brought on by the bad dreams all year and then coming back to the place of his nightmares.

Even though he knew he was probably going mad and he should have just gotten back into the truck and gone home, there was still the terrible pull in his heart of seeing his brother again.

That was what made him wander off in the general direction of where Billy had ran away in.

And he would regret his decision later.

#

Between day and night, the woods look different, as if there was some sort of sub-reality in which two forests were imposed atop one another and they switched in and out of one reality to the next between sunlight and moonlight.

Charlie didn’t know how far or how long that he had walked, but when the sun began to go down and he had not yet seen his brother or even another animal, for that matter, he knew that he needed to turn back before the forest turned with the night and then all of its pathways turned on him.

But he had walked for too long and too far. Soon it was dark outside and the landscape around him changed into the unrecognizable.

He didn’t have much food or water on him and he was tired from walking all day. He thought it best if he camped for the night rather than risk growing more lost or succumbing to exhaustion and hunger.

Nature could run a man down quickly and without mercy, and it was slowly creeping into his consciousness that only two days in the forest was starting to do it to him already.

He found a quiet place where the bushes and a single tall pine formed a grove. He managed to build a lean-to and start a small fire up in order to keep warm.

But he did not go to sleep right away. Despite the urge to get some much needed rest, he instead sat cross-legged with the bow in his lap and an arrow at the ready. If he was right about the duality of the forest, then he was right about the buck deer and his brother as well.

They hadn’t seen the beast die, but that didn’t mean that it hadn’t died. Nobody had given chase after they’d shot Billy. Nobody had seen the deer that had been shot through the eye, but everybody had seen the dead Billy, also shot through the eye. It was day and night. He knew that the deer was out there somewhere, and it was likely watching him too.

He knew then that he was going to have to try and kill it all over again, just like he was going to have to find his brother and apologize for the very same thing.

As he waited for it, there was a kind of wet gurgle sound from near where he was sitting. The nylon bag with the dead grouse in it began to move, and bleed anew. He killed it for a second time by shooting an arrow directly through the bag at a very close range as to pin it to the ground.

When he was certain that it was dead again, he returned to his place by the fire again to wait, but also to ponder how he had become caught in such a strange dual landscape between life and death, and how he was ever going to escape such a place.

He did not have time to ponder long, for soon the buck was there lurking at the dark perimeter of his firelight. It was quieter than the last time he had encountered it. He only knew that it was there because he was expecting it this time, and he had his bow with him.

He wasted no time as he did not want it to present him with its death’s mask for a second time. He fired into the dark with poor visibility and mostly guided by feeling. The arrow hit it in its front and pierced through its chest first, and then through its heart. He killed it cleanly, as he should have killed it the first time.

The corpse did not stay, however. It was an old kill from many years before, and it belonged only to time and not space. He watched one half of the thing that had menaced him for so many years dissipate into the darkness like his own cast shadow might vanish if he stepped beyond the firelight.

It left only a pair of arrows behind. They were jammed vertically into the ground side-by-side at perfect distance.

He decided that he was satisfied with this and would worry for his sanity at another time and place. He left the arrows where they stood upright in the forest floor and did his best to sleep. It was restless and uncomfortable, and he had the same dreams that he always had. This time, however, he dreamed only of Billy. The buck had vanished from his nightmare in the same way that it had vanished from the forest itself.

He got up late and it was already light outside. One of his arrows had disappeared while he slept and he left the other one standing in the ground as if it was a bad talisman that he no longer wanted to keep. He left the twice-killed grouse too. It was also bad, or so he felt.

In the daylight, he could find his way back to the cabin easily. But it was a draining journey. He had not slept well the night before, and he was hungry from lack of food.

By the time that he got back, the sun was setting speedily so that everything basked in an orange-yellow hue. He knew that he had little time left, so he packed up his things and got them into the truck with great haste.

When he was ready to go, the sun was just a slivered ember along the distant tree line. He hurried back into the woods, taking with him only his bow and a single arrow. It was all that he had the time to take with him. He had to hurry before it grew dark.

He made it in time.

Billy was waiting for him, of course. He was standing over his own desiccated bone pile. The skeleton lay untouched and undisturbed but for the scavenging animals and insects that had picked it clean and moved it about a bit.

But mostly, Billy had lain out there, forgotten and alone, for all those years. He’d laid exactly where they’d all ultimately decided upon leaving him.

“I’m pretty sorry, Billy.”

The sound of his own voice surprised him after three days without saying a word. And in the final dying light of the day, it hardly sounded like his voice at all. It was almost as if a second Charlie was imposed over the first. Just like the forest, and just the Billy and the deer.

That didn’t surprise him either. For it was almost dark outside again.

#

He returned to the truck at dawn and began the long and gray drive back home.

Things felt different, but it wasn’t quite the same as relief.

A man goes into the woods with just himself and the barest of weaponry left to protect himself with. Yes, protection. At some point the bow no longer represented the hunt. Everything had shifted over with the passing of day to night, and night to day again.

So a man goes into the woods like that and fights his ghosts. Win or lose, Charlie figured, he was going to come out different. He’d be changed and maybe renewed no matter what.

But you take something away and you have to leave something behind. Wasn’t that what Billy had told him?

Charlie left the bad behind, somewhere in that dark night.

He turned out onto the highway and drove as fast as he could away from the forest and the trees. He felt marginally better to be free from the woods, so to speak.

But even as the morning skies darkened gray and the first drops of rain began to hit the truck’s windshield, he couldn’t help but wonder what might wait for him in the night when he came back next year.

Worse, he wondered if that bad part might decide not to sit around waiting.

Like night and day. Like two sides of the same coin.

He had a feeling it would come seeking in the dark, just as he had come seeking to the forest for all those years.

Yes, he was certain it would come.

And it would carry with it both a bow in its hands and murder in its eyes.

___

Michael R. Colangelo is a writer from Toronto.