It was a warm and sunny autumn afternoon. A light breeze whisked through the trees, and caused a few leaves on the ground to curl around in a dance of color and dreams.
James ran outside, finally getting to enjoy fresh air for the first time in days, as the rain and chill had kept him indoors due to his asthmatic nature. He joined in with the other neighborhood children, playing and chasing and laughing through the grass and scattered leaves that had begun to fall.
It was then he saw it. A giant pile had been raked together on the lawn of the old, battered house just a few doors down. This was a house that all the neighborhood children knew. It was a forbidden house. Dark, foreboding. The rumors were that it was abandoned, yet strange noises could be heard on dark nights. That lights could be seen where no lights should be able to shine. James knew these stories, and believed them with the fervor that only an 8 year old boy could, yet something caused him to remain there, staring at that pile of leaves.
That pile. James stood there alone, the other boys he had been with long since running off down the street in a game of tag, and tilted his head. The fears of the house draining from him as water through a sieve. A step, and then another, towards the pile. His mouth grew slack, his arms dropping to his side like a rag-doll as he went closer and closer. To someone watching from afar, they would be reminded of a zombie stumbling towards it's prey in a bad B-Movie, but nobody was watching.
James reached the pile, and a grin spread on his face, almost absently. With a shout that would have shocked a sane person into a massive heart-attack, James suddenly leapt into that leaf pile and sunk up to his neck. For a few moments he lay there, that silly grin still upon his face. Then, with a crackling, shushing noise, the pile pulled him under, without his ever uttering a single sound.
The search the next day only ever revealed two things. A scattered tossing of leaves that was nowhere near any tree in the area with a tattered piece of cloth among them. |
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