-Entry 2: Lights-

I slept unease during the nights that followed the incident with the static.  It wasn’t because I was having nightmares, it was just that I simply couldn’t fall asleep.  Sure I felt tired, but for five days, the peaceful embrace of deep sleep never came.  To add to that, I would occasionally experience a faint ringing in my ears.  You know how when things are just so quiet that you start to hear a high pitched ringing?  It almost seems like your body’s natural reaction to a complete absence of sound.  Almost like humans have a biological reaction to complete silence.  Aftering doing some research I eventually came across the phenomenon known as “The Silence.”  Essentially, you could be in a place where you expect to hear ambient sounds, like a forest for example.  This is changed however when without warning, everything just goes completely quiet.  No wind rustling the trees, no birds chirping, and no dirt crunching beneath your feet.  So in the days following the static incident, it seemed like I experienced The Silence every couple of hours. 

During that five day period, I got very little work done.  I was constantly tired and felt like each day was blending into the next.  Wake up, eat breakfast, shower, brush my teeth, get to work and so on and so forth.  Coffee was my temporary remedy and it didn’t help that I already had what I’d describe as a raging caffeine addiction.  The end result of this cycle was increased stress and anxiety.  I was worried about falling behind in my work and frightened by what I’d experienced out in the woods.  Every little noise from the treeline conjured vivid images of slavering creatures all too eager to drag me off into the night.  So considering the sleepless nights combined with the stress from work and the confusion over the static incident, it would be an understatement to say I was a little tense those five days. 

On the 6th day however, I was surprised to awaken feeling refreshed and well-rested.  I’d finally gotten a good night's sleep.  To make things better, I didn’t experience a single episode of static or silence that entire morning.  Feeling like things were finally returning to normal, I decided  to catch up on all my work that day.  After eating breakfast and taking a quick shower, I sat down at my computer to get started.  The sound of birds chirping flowed through the window I’d opened and reminded me of why I’d bought this cottage in the first place.  It was a writer's paradise. 

Upon opening my computer, I saw that I had a couple unopened emails.  One was a random news article and the other was from Julie, my twin sister.  When I saw her name attached to the email, my mood soured slightly.  I already knew what it was about before I opened it. This is what it said:

Hi Will,

Thought I’d reach out and say hi.  Mom told me you’d finally moved into that house in the woods you kept mentioning.  Hope it’s nice and peaceful for you, I know you were growing tired of city life and all that.  How’s work?  Have you been writing lots of stories and articles?  Anything that’s been recently released?  I try to keep up with your work, but I’ve been busy as of late. I guess we both are preoccupied with our writings huh lol? 

I know you probably need some space and I know that you said you wanted me to drop all the stuff surrounding Dad.  Believe me I understand, but I’m telling you that I’m on to something!  I know what happened!  I was researching disappearances in forests and national parks last week, and it turns out things like what happened to Dad are more common than you think!  In fact, it happens all the time. There are tons of people, every year, who go missing without an explanation.  This one guy wrote a book about them.  I’ll send you the link.  I have a feeling what happened to all these people is the same thing that happened to Dad!  They never found a body or anything remember?  All they found was his flannel shirt.  The same goes for lots of the others who disappeared.  They never found a body.

I know you probably don’t want to hear this from me, and I know you are trying to move on, but I just need you to hear me out.  There is something happening out in the forests and woods, something strange, and I know Dad is involved somehow.  Please get back to me as soon as you can. 

-Julie 

I remember just staring at her email with a mixture of anger and sadness.  Julie is my sister and I love her, but at the same time I was done with her nonsense.  Dad was dead.  At this point there was no question about it.  It had been years since he vanished, but Julie was still going on about her crazy conspiracy theories.  It had consumed her entirely.  She stopped going out with friends and would spend days on end in her room.  When she wasn’t in school or studying, she was looking for answers in books and on the internet.  She became a full on recluse.  Mom and I had at first entertained her ideas, but after a couple weeks of fruitless search efforts, we accepted the grim reality that Dad was gone for good.  Julie however, refused to believe he was dead.  

After reading her email, it hurts me to say that the sadness I felt for her was overshadowed by anger.  She needed to grow up and accept what happened.  She could not reopen the wounds of what happened and drag me into her fantastical world of ghouls and goblins or whatever.  I was just about at peace with Dad’s disappearance and didn’t need her dragging me back down into the misery and sorrow of the past.  I closed her email without responding and buried myself in my work for the rest of the day.  I was gonna move on with my life with or without Julie.

Around about 7:00 pm, I’d finished my work and was feeling rather proud of myself.  I’d managed to finish everything I’d fallen behind on and figured that I deserved a nice and relaxing evening as a reward.  There was an oven-bake pizza in my freezer that I’d been planning to eat and a fireplace that I had yet to use since first moving in.  Thinking that hot pizza and a warm fire sounded like the perfect combo, I started heating the oven and headed outside to where I kept logs for firewood.  The email from Julie had been completely forgotten.

As I stepped outside into the crisp night air, I inhaled deeply, letting the scent of pine trees fill my nostrils and sooth my mind.  The sun had set at this point and the surrounding woods were bathed in thick darkness.  As I walked around the side of the house, I turned to face the wall of trees that separated my property from the dense forests beyond.  I couldn’t help but feel a sense of unease as I gazed into the inky blackness.  The trees seemed taller than usual in the darkness, and the rhythmic swaying of their branches in the night breeze made it seem as though they were dancing.  Everything about them produced a feeling that was both eerie and awe-inspiring.  I would almost describe it as entrancing.  It was at that moment that a gust of chilly air snapped me back to reality and reminded me of my quest for firewood.  Turning away from the dancing trees, I knelt down to pick up some logs.  

I gathered up two large pieces and was turning to head back inside when I saw them.  Off within the trees, I was shocked to see three orbs of orangish-yellow light floating silently between the branches.  They didn’t seem to move in any specific direction, but rather they shifted and changed direction without any pattern or logic.  It reminded me of the erratic way that a moth flies.  

Despite the strangeness of the situation, I wasn’t afraid of the orbs.  Instead, I felt strangely calm looking at them.  The way they danced between the trees was beautiful, almost as if they were performing some otherworldly ballet.  They also reminded me of flashlights.  Particularly, the times I’d spent in the woods of my hometown playing flashlight tag.  

On weekend nights and during the holidays off from school, my friends and I would grab our flashlights and head off into the woods to play flashlight tag.  We split up into teams of two, with one team being “it” until they located and shouted the names of the kids on another team.  Julie and I were always on a team.  Everyone was afraid of being caught by her because they knew she liked to scare the people she found.  If she spotted you, she’d turn off her flashlight and sneak up on you under cover of darkness.  She’d then pounce from behind, slapping her target on the shoulders and loudly exclaim, “You’re it!”, after which she’d race off into the trees laughing like a maniac.  I missed those days.  I missed that version of Julie.  Those happy memories always made me feel warm inside.  Lost in past memories, I was jolted back to the present when I stopped feeling warm and started feeling uncomfortably hot.

 The lights had changed.  They were hovering in a triangular formation and had left the treeline.  Now they were about three feet away from me and seemed to be slowly moving closer.  Their light had grown painfully bright and suddenly I felt very uneasy looking at them.  Then the static returned. 

Panicking, I sprinted back through my front door, locked it behind me and dropped the firewood on the floor as I rushed to close the window blinds.  When I looked outside however, the lights were nowhere to be seen.  Confused and terrified, I backed away from the window and collapsed into an armchair.  That was the second weird experience I’d had since moving in. Was I going stir crazy out in the woods?  That seemed unlikely since I’d hardly been out there for a week, and it wasn’t like I was without the internet or any form of outside communication.  Still, my mind struggled to come up with a rational explanation.  I had never believed in the supernatural and was content to live in a world of logic and facts.  But nothing about those lights made any sense.

It was then that I started to smell smoke.  It wasn’t overpowering, but more like someone was burning something in an oven.  Following my nose, I was led to the front door where I’d dropped the firewood.  Upon closer inspection, I discovered the source of the smell.  The logs I’d been holding as the lights danced towards me, were slightly charred.  Small embers could still be seen glowing on the wood’s surface.  As I stared at the singed logs, I was startled by the oven beeping to indicate that it was done heating.  I didn’t feel like pizza anymore though.