by Nikki R. Leigh
(985 words)
“I reckon you’ve seen him?” Jamie said, leaning forward on her elbows, digging grooves into her thighs. “Skinny and brittle. Seen him turn while walking and he all but disappeared. As crisp as a fallen leaf. As flat as one too.”
“I saw him, once, last week,” Angela said quietly. “He was looking through my window, eyeing my husband and me. His eyes…so round, so stark white against his skin. The color of autumn. All of him. The color of autumn.”
“That’s him. The Fall Man. He took my Mindy, just last year,” Jamie continued, spit wetting the edge of her lips. “Heard him first, the crackling of leaves underfoot, moving like the rustling of dry trees on a quiet night. We were walking the woods, just minding our business. He was too, minding us. He left me in the woods, lost, without her. I could have sworn the leaves turned, all at once, in that moment.” A somber expression pasted across her features. “Let’s go. The air is crisp tonight. He’ll want to watch you. I want to watch him.”
Jamie felt a pang of remorse as she tucked in her chair and exited the library with Angela. She had sought Angela out, her house at the edge of the woods where Jamie and her wife had been walking. She roped Angela in on her plan—most of it at least—to stake out the window where the man was last seen. To follow him back to his place in the woods where he had taken her.
Bundled in a sweater and scarf, she watched and waited. No movement yet, just the rustling of trees, still green from summer. She pondered the leaves, wondering how they knew when to turn. Why they went from green to yellow to red to dead and on the ground and broken to pieces underfoot. She wondered why in the small town of Susurration, buried deep in the Pacific Northwest, autumn seemed to spring forth all at once, a tidal wave of reds and yellows.
She wondered why the wind rustled the trees and the noises echoed across every surface. She wondered why the Fall Man sounded just the same. But most of all, while staring at the green forest, hearing the humming of the leaves, she wondered why the Fall Man had taken Mindy and what he had done with her.
She kept thinking, kept dwelling in the sounds of the leaves when a new rustling caught her ear and traveled over the gentle breeze. Jamie saw the light in Angela’s window, watched as a man, naked and the color of fallen leaves appeared like a moth to flame. His movements crinkling in the air, he peered through the window, enraptured with his prey.
Jamie watched him do something that looked like breathing, air fluttering through his almost paper-thin flesh, rippling at the edges.
Angela appeared on the other side of the pane, transfixed by the Fall Man, expressionless. She moved to unlatch the lock and raised the window, to which the autumn-colored man offered a fragile hand. She took his hand, and Jamie saw his fingers crumble to leaf scraps before growing again, over and over, a leaf perpetually broken and reformed.
His arm draped behind him, leading Angela to the forest, silent except for the rustling of dry wind on his skin. There was no resistance. Angela was just disappearing into the night, like Mindy. Jamie hoped Angela’s husband would find peace someday.
Again, the guilt struck Jamie, like a bowling ball to her gut. Angela believed Jamie would step in, that she would confront the Fall Man and keep her from his grasps. All part of the spoken plan. But Jamie’s unvoiced decision stood—there’d be no intervention, at least until the Fall Man reached his destination in the woods.
He seemed to be getting close. His footsteps slowed and a chill struck the air. A gust picked up as he approached a tree, larger than the rest, as thick as a sedan, its leaves bright green.
Jamie gasped from her space a dozen yards behind him as Angela wordlessly hopped on the Fall Man’s back. He spread his arms, delicate webbing stretching from his hands to his pits and sides.
He took to the air, crackling with the wind. He flew to the top of the tree, hovering above its rounded top. Angela shifted to his frontside, a balanced ballet, before the Fall Man took her between his hands and tore her in half, a jagged awful noise, following her spine down the center like kids ripping apart a leaf at its vein.
Crimson showered the tree, painting its leaves red. A mask, at first, but then, as Jamie watched, the leaves absorbed the liquid. She was disgusted but fascinated as the leaves changed from green to red before her eyes, cascading through the rest of the forest in the blink of an eye.
Autumn had arrived.
Jamie’s heart leapt as the Fall Man shook out Angela’s last drops of blood, sank to the middle section of the tree, and stuffed her body into a hollow. She knew now where her wife remained. He flew away, a leaf on the wind.
Jamie climbed.
She reached the hole, peered inside, saw Angela’s fleshy lump and just beyond that, a more withered body, almost a pile of bones and desiccated skin.
She reached for her wife. The dry and brittle branch, no longer full of the summer’s life, crackled beneath her feet.
With one final push she snagged nothing but air, the branch breaking and tumbling to the forest floor below, taking Jamie with it.
She crashed to the ground, striking thick limbs on her way down. She lay, body shattered, nothing left to do but fade.
As Jamie lost consciousness, she wondered if her bones, white as snow, would herald the turn to Winter.
END
Nikki R. Leigh is a queer, forever-90s-kid wallowing in all things horror. When not writing horror fiction and poetry, she can be found creating custom horror-inspired toys, making comics, and hunting vintage paperbacks. She reads her stories to her partner and her cat, one of which gets scared very easily.