The men in my town say they will pay me $1,000 if I can catch the evil spirit that has been killing our men. They would go after her themselves, they assure me, but this spirit hates men and men only, so it will be safer for everyone, including me, if I am the one to go after the spirit.
And around here, $1,000 is more than enough for me to take on a fool’s errand.
Only one man has seen the spirit and come back unscathed. He tells me that she is the scariest thing he has ever seen, but he is certain that she is a woman, nonetheless. She has black hair that falls past her shoulders all the way down to her knees. Hair so dark that it blends into the trees and the night, but he is sure that he saw it. Her eyes are not just bloodshot, but red. An inky, deep red that borders on black. Her skin looks like a sick person’s, pale and white and thin, like you could see right through her if you had the right light.
That is all the man saw before he turned and ran out of the forest. He had been accompanying a friend there. The friend said he was there to meet a beautiful woman whom he had been seeing for a couple of weeks, behind his wife’s back. The man, being the man that he is, was there to watch the whole thing unfold, like his own private show. Except the spirit appeared and took his friend, and he barely got out with his life.
He tells me the story in our local dive bar over a couple of tequilas, both belonging to him. As soon as he finishes the first, he takes the other and downs it in one gulp.
“That’s the way tequila is meant to be drunk.” He laughs and smiles at me, but I can see he’s scared. His hand shakes as he picks up his glass, and he keeps looking at the door, seemingly expecting the spirit to walk in at any moment and finish the job. “So, how do you plan on trapping her?” He looks at me with wide eyes, like I am the answer to all his problems.
“I don’t.” At this admission, his whole body starts to tremble. “I plan on speaking to her.”
He puts his head in his hands, and he leans forward, tired and heavy. “You can’t just talk to her. You have to do something, please. You’re the only one who can.”
I gesture to the bartender, who walks over. “A whiskey, please.” He nods and obliges me with the top shelf stuff – a couple months back, I gave a stern “talking” to his little sister’s shitty ex.
“Relax.” I take a sip. “I’ll catch her after I talk to her. But first, I need to speak to the woman he was seeing. She could have some answers.”
“I don’t know who that was.” I fix a stare on him, and despite the fact that I’m a woman, or maybe because of it, he continues. “I’m being honest. It could be anyone. You know how the women in this town are.” He shuts his mouth with a pop, and to his credit, he really does look like he regrets saying it.
“Well, maybe the women in this town are more capable than you think.” I finish my whiskey and get up from my seat. I wink at him and head to the door. “Have my one thousand ready.”
I head straight to the forest on the edge of town. I come the way I always do, with just a knife in my boot. I don’t believe there is a spirit; I think maybe there is a woman. Though a woman being a killer is unlikely, it’s not impossible. To ease the tension of the men in town, I’ll check out the forest and see what’s up. Then, I’ll start solving the real mystery.
The dying leaves crunch loudly under my steel-toed boots as I walk past tree after tree. It strikes me suddenly that everything in this forest is dying, and if she was real, a spirit would fit right in.
Night begins to come, first slowly, then all at once and after an hour or so, I am surrounded by total darkness. I am not afraid, though, I come prepared for this sort of thing. As the only lesbian in a small Southern town, you have to be ready for any situation. I take out my phone, which is almost fully charged, and turn on the flashlight.
Something moves out of the corner of my eye. I turn and see a black object tossing and turning in a pile of leaves. I shine my light and see two black eyes reflected back at me. A raccoon. I keep walking.
I look at every tree that appears in my path, take a peek in every spot of grass, but there’s nothing here. No clues and certainly no bodies. Whoever killed the man’s friend has moved the body by now. Turning back the way I came, I am preparing to follow my path and leave when a woman appears in front of me.
To put it quickly and say it instantly, she is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. “Wh-where did you come from? Are you okay? Are you lost?”
She puts one of her long fingers to her mouth to quiet me. My instinct is to apologise, but I force myself to stay quiet. The wind is out in full force tonight, but her long, black hair seems unaffected, staying perfectly still and coiffed. Her lips are red like roses, and before I can stop myself – not that I would want to necessarily – I am imagining what it would be like to have her lips on mine.
She takes several steps backwards and motions for me to come forward. Suddenly, I am following her, or maybe she is following me. Her presence is exhausting, exhilarating, and haunting. She stops. I stop. I lean against a dead tree and feel its seeping body collapsing under my weight. I let it collapse. I am about to collapse. If only I could touch her, let her feel my undying body, let her see how alive I am in comparison to everything in this forest.
She turns around and looks at me, her eyes grey against the moonlight and darker as she walks towards me. With each step she takes closer to me, I decide that the men in my village are not worth saving. If she is what haunts them and she is an angel, then they are the ones who must be the devil. It is the only logical conclusion.
She is inches away from my face now, but I can’t feel her breath; it is like she has none. “You’re looking for me.” It’s a statement, not a question.
“No, no, I’m not.” I rush to correct her. “I’m looking for a killer, that’s not you. You-you’re beautiful.”
“It is me that you are looking for. Beautiful things can be killers too.” She reaches forward and tucks a few strands of my blonde hair behind my ear. I shudder at her icy, cool touch. She leans in even closer, and her lips are practically on mine. “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you.” She pulls away suddenly, and I miss her presence; I want it back so badly. My mind is racing with what I can say or do to get her close to me again. “But you have to stop looking for me.”
Her words remind me what’s truly at stake here: one thousand dollars and, secondarily, the lives of the men in town. “Look, you’re very striking, and I’d love to leave you to roam this forest as you please, but why are you killing the men?”
Pulling back her lips, she snarls ever so slightly. “Those men deserved to die. They were cheaters. They didn’t love anyone but themselves.”
It clicks instantly for me. “You- you’re the one they’ve been coming here to meet, aren’t you?”
Her snarl turns to a smirk. “Yes.”
“But the man who got away-” She scoffs at the reminder. “He said you looked terrifying. You look like a woman, not some spirit.”
She starts to walk back towards me. I’m elated at her return but terrified of what she could do to me, terrified of what I want her to do to me. “I can change my appearance. It’s easy.” She leans in again. “We women know something about changing up our look, don’t we?”
I start to reply, but she presses her lips to mine. She is much warmer now, and the heat coming from her begins to spread through my body. I contemplate for a moment that I am kissing a spirit, some Appalachian ghost caught between my realm and another, but I don’t care. I have felt so alone in this town my whole life. She is what I want.
“Lie down.” I obey her immediately and quake as my palms hit the ground. She descends over me, her dress spreading along the forest floor, pooling around our waists. I don’t want to make any sudden movements, so I let her lead, and she does. She leans down to kiss me, deeper and harder than before. Gone is the softness of her initial touch.
Someone gasps behind me and steps on a leaf loudly. I turn my head and see the man from the bar standing there, holding a gun. I struggle to rise to my feet, feeling heavy. I motion to him to get back, but he just stands there, pointing the gun at the spirit. “Get out of here. She’s not what you think she is.”
He begins to shake, but keeps his eyes on the spirit. I turn to look at her and stagger backwards in shock. She has transformed before my eyes into something horrifying. She looks just as the man described the spirit earlier. Finally, he finds the courage to speak. “I came to save you. I knew a woman couldn’t handle this on her own.”
My mind and heart are being pulled in so many different directions. I am mad at this man for ruining a perfectly good moment, but I’m also afraid of what she has transformed into. Before I can say or do anything else, the man starts shooting at her. “No!” I jump in front of her, and a bullet grazes my arm. The rest of the bullets just go right through her as I fall to the ground.
Staring up at her, I see her face flicker from horrifying to beautiful. I realise that she is whatever she needs to be at any given moment, and right now she can’t decide between showing me her beauty and attempting to frighten off this man.
She bends down and lightly touches my wounded arm. “Go, I’ll explain to him that you can’t be caught.” The man is out of bullets now and is staring at our interaction, mouth agape. I don’t expect him to understand. The men in this town – actually, all the people in this town – have never understood me. All they do is take and take, and they have taken her from me, too.
The spirit kisses my forehead lightly. “I suppose the men in this town have learned their lesson. I won’t forget you, hunter.”
I am trying to find the right words to say as she fades into the night.
The man runs over to me and tears off a piece of his jacket to tie around my bleeding arm. “Sorry I shot you, but what the hell was that?”
I blink back tears, both from pain and the feeling of profound hollowness in my heart. Maybe I will never get out of this town. Maybe I will never find anyone, and I will be stuck doing petty tasks for people I don’t care about my whole life. “She was a spirit who took the form she needed to. That’s who the dead men have been cheating on their wives with.”
“They’ve been cheating with a spirit?” He helps me to my feet, and we begin to walk out of the forest.
“Yeah.” I turn and take a last look. I see nothing but seeping darkness. I am surrounded by things that are dead or will die, and it was my mistake to think I could ever be anything but that.
