The Wicker Gate

The last thing I wanted was to be labeled a fool. But after the harvest failed and the animals grew restless, even the most practical farmers in Grey Hollow began to whisper about the grove north of our land. It was a place we had always avoided, a tangle of old oaks and thorny brambles where the light seemed to dim even at noon. My grandfather had warned me about it when I was a boy, but I had laughed, thinking it was just his way of keeping me from wandering.

When our sheep started vanishing, one every few nights, I finally agreed to walk the boundary with the old shepherd, Marcus. He was a stooped man with eyes like wet slate, and he carried a rusted iron cross he said his great-grandfather had forged.

‘It’s the Wicker Gate,’ he said, pointing to a spot where the undergrowth thickened into a crude arch of twisted branches and dried vines. ‘The door between our world and the one that should never have opened.’ He spat on the ground. ‘Your grandfather knew. He kept it locked with iron and salt. But when he died, who kept it? Your father? You?’

I had never even seen the gate until that moment. It looked like nothing more than a dead bush. But as we stood there, a cold wind curled around my legs, and I heard a sound like dry leaves skittering across stone—though the ground was wet and soft.

That night, I returned alone. I brought a lantern and a length of rope, thinking I could mark the gate or maybe burn it. I was a man of reason, a man of machines. I had repaired harvesters and built fences. What could a bundle of twigs do to me? I approached the gate and saw that the branches had shifted since this afternoon. They seemed to lean toward me, as if watching. I touched one, and it was warm—not sun-warmed, but the warmth of something alive, like a sleeping animal.

I stepped closer, peering through the gaps. There was nothing but darkness on the other side, darker than the night around me. I felt a pull, a subtle tug at my chest, as if something inside me was being reeled in. I jerked back, but the branch scraped my palm. I sucked the blood from the cut, and in that instant the darkness beyond the gate swirled, and I saw a shape—tall, thin, with arms like willow branches and a head that was a knot of twisted roots. It opened a mouth that was not a mouth, and I heard a sound that was not a sound, a vibration that ran through my teeth and into my spine.

I ran. I drove my truck back to the house, my hands shaking, my heart pounding. I didn’t tell anyone, not even my wife, Clara. I didn’t want to worry her. But the next morning, I found the lamb she had been bottle-feeding in the barn—dead, drained of blood, its body twisted into a shape that made my stomach lurch. The fence around the pen was torn, but not from the outside. The tear was on the inside, as if something had grown up from beneath the ground.

I tried to ignore it. I reinforced the barn, bought new locks, and kept a cross on the door. But every night, I dreamed of the gate. I saw it clearly, each branch, each thorn. And in the dream, I was standing on the other side, looking back at my own house through the gaps, watching myself sleep.

On the third night, Clara woke me, whispering, ‘There’s somebody in the garden.’ I grabbed my shotgun and crept to the window. The garden was empty, but the gate—I could see it from the bedroom window, a hundred yards away—was glowing faintly, a sickly green light pulsing through the woven wood. And standing before it was a figure. Not the tall one from before, but a smaller shape. It was a child, hands at its sides, facing away from me. I opened my mouth to shout, but the child turned. Its face was blank—no eyes, no nose, just a smooth oval of bark and moss. And then it spoke, in a voice that was not a voice, but the rustling of leaves. ‘You opened the way. Now we walk.’

I fired the shotgun. The sound was deafening, and the figure dissolved into a swarm of moths. Clara screamed, and I turned to see her standing behind me, her face pale. ‘What did you do?’ she asked, and her voice was wrong, layered with a second voice, like an echo from a deep well. I realized then that the thing had marked her too, that it had been inside her since the night it touched me, growing like a parasite.

We ran. We left everything—the farm, the animals, the house. We drove through the night until the gas ran out on a deserted highway. We’re in a motel now, the one with the flickering sign and the smell of mildew. I’ve spent the last week reading everything I can find online about the Wicker Gate, about the things that come through. I’ve learned that it was once a ritual site, a place where the old ones made bargains with the forest. My grandfather was the last to close it, using a ward I never found.

I’ve been speaking to people in online forums, people who believe, skeptics who mock. I don’t know which is worse. But I know one thing: last night, I saw a shape outside the motel window, tall and thin, its arms like willow branches. And Clara, she won’t stop humming a tune I’ve never heard, a tune that sounds like wind in dried leaves.

I don’t think it followed us. I think it was already here. I think the gate is not a place, but a thing that lives in the blood, passed down from father to son. And I think I’ve opened it inside myself. Tonight, I’m going to stand in front of the bathroom mirror and watch my reflection. If it moves without me, I’ll know it’s time. But I’m afraid, because when I blink, I see that child’s face, and it’s smiling now. It’s smiling with my smile.