The V of the Oak

The afternoon had been a gift, the kind that makes you forget the creeping dread that always seemed to lurk in the folds of daily life. We were in the rolling hills of Vermont, where the autumn leaves had just begun to turn, and the air carried the crisp scent of pine and damp earth. My partner, Liam, and I had decided to take a long walk along the old logging trail behind our rental cabin, hoping to find a quiet spot by the river. The sunlight filtered through the canopy, dappling the path in gold, and for a while, everything felt right.

We wandered past the last of the cabins and into the thick of the forest, where the trail narrowed and the trees pressed in closer. The river’s gentle murmur guided us to a small clearing where the water pooled against mossy rocks. We stood there, hand in hand, listening to the birds and the rustle of leaves. The breeze was light, almost teasing. Then, without warning, the forest went silent. The birds stopped mid-song, the wind died, and even the water seemed to hold its breath. A cold prickle ran up my spine, settling at the base of my skull. I looked at Liam, and his face had gone pale, his eyes wide. He felt it too—the heavy sensation of being watched.

Slowly, as if moving through molasses, we turned. About sixty feet away, where an ancient oak split into two massive trunks near the ground, something stood in the crotch of the V. It was tall, impossibly tall, with shoulders so broad they seemed to stretch the fabric of the air around them. The figure was dark, not just in color but in essence, as if it absorbed light. It had no face—a smooth, featureless expanse where eyes and mouth should have been. No hair, no clothes, just a black, muscle-bound torso that looked carved from obsidian. How it had gotten there without a sound, without disturbing the tangled undergrowth, was impossible to fathom. We stared, and the seconds stretched into an eternity. My breath caught, and the only sound was the frantic thudding of my heart.

Then, the figure tilted its head—a slow, almost curious motion—and I felt a voice in my mind, not words but a pressing weight, a command to step closer. My muscles twitched, as if they wanted to obey. Beside me, Liam let out a strangled gasp, and that broke the spell. He grabbed my hand, and we ran. We didn’t look back, crashing through the underbrush, branches scratching our faces, until we burst into the clearing by our cabin and collapsed, gasping, on the porch. The silence followed us, though—no birds, no insects, no wind. The forest had become a tomb.

That night, we tried to rationalize it. A bear, a shadow, a trick of the light. But we both knew what we’d seen. We packed our bags and left before dawn, driving through the dark with the radio off, afraid that any sound would draw it back. We never returned to Vermont, but it didn’t matter. The image of that faceless figure in the oak’s V is seared into my mind. And sometimes, in the quiet moments, I still feel the weight of its attention, as if it’s out there, waiting in the branches of every tree we pass, watching from the spaces where the light doesn’t reach.