‘Why are you here?’ Nora asked. I guess there’s no reason­able answer, or maybe it’s too horrifying to admit the truth, so we prefer to lie to ourselves about it. I just shrugged and didn’t answer. I knew she understood what I meant.

The bus stopped without any warning, throwing many passengers off balance. We heard a loud bang from inside the vehicle, and the driver stepped on the brakes instantly. The old man behind me slammed into the back of my seat.

‘Goddamn this idiot!’ he hissed in German.

The driver crawled out of the cabin cursing in his peculiar language. He fished out a wrench and a flashlight from under the seat and jumped off the bus. He hit the side of the bus with the wrench. Several people jumped in fright at the sound. Some saw him crawl under the bus.

We never saw the bus driver again.

Fifteen minutes later some of us got off to see what had happened. We couldn’t find him under or around the bus. There was no sign of the wrench and flashlight either. We tried to start the engine but it didn’t even cough. It was
dead.

From then on, we continued on foot.

The attack

In a certain sense, everyone is already on their own at this point. What happened to my group might never happen to anyone else, while different horrors we never had to face could be awaiting others.

The bus was devoured by the fog and gloom as we followed Jufus down the road and then into the woods as the road narrowed and disappeared. We could feel eyes on us from among the trees, from under the ground, from the cover of the fog. Some of us quietly burst into tears. Jufus, on the other hand, cheered up more with every step, flashing his white teeth ever more often. The more we feared what was to come, the more content he seemed to be.

I grabbed Nora’s hand and didn’t let go of it.

The trees embraced us tightly, their branches clinging to our clothes over and over again.

You can stumble upon the most curious things in the forest. On this particular trip we were in the woods just when the antlers were in bloom, so we had the chance to see the Garden of Antlers, where they grow from the soil in dense confusion. They say an ancient god sleeps under the earth, and the earth here is merely the excrescence of its skin. From under the skin, when the time comes, antlers break out, they grow and grow, until they shed their skin. Then they fall down and turn into reptiles nobody has ever seen and lived to describe.