Phantoms

Milo George

I told myself that I’d gone back for the wolf. I didn’t tell anyone I was going, I just got in the car and drove. I didn’t check the directions once. It seemed like I’d buckled the seat belt and then a moment later I was at the old house.

The boom of the car door slamming behind me was lost to the wind. No cars were parked in the driveway except mine, but there was a soft warm light pulsing through closed curtains. The very same curtains I had when I owned the place hung in the windows. I hadn’t bothered to pack them. I was in too much of a hurry and I needed blackouts now, something to block out the city I’d moved back to. I walked beneath the clothesline where billowy white sheets whipped in the wind. The gray skies above threatened rain, but that kind of taunt was nothing new. Down below, the ocean crashed against the cliffside, spraying salt water that smelled like home. Despite everything, this place still felt like mine.

But I didn’t have a key. Not anymore. There was nothing for me there. 

So, I left the house behind and began the climb up the grassy dunes. Whenever I glanced back the house looked more like the one that I’d left two years ago. I stopped noticing the faded white paint job and the sunken roof or even the brown carcasses of plants I’d once tended to. This house in the distance was the one I recognized. The one that was always just out of reach in my nightmares.

I kept trudging. At some point I stopped standing atop of every dune I climbed to glance backward, making sure my car was still there, making sure there was still a way out. Up ahead the woods unfolded. I could almost hear the howl of the wind form the sound of my name as it tumbled through the trees. The spongy green floor was marred by a trail of indents leading up to the tree line. The prints were the size of my feet. I found myself matching the tread of my shoe to the tread of the print and was carried all the way to the edge of the woods.

  At the forests’ edge I could see the faded trail kept going, but I didn’t. I stalled, the wind tugging at my hair, my jacket and the sleeve I’d tied into a knot. I reached upward to my right shoulder with one shaking hand. My gloved fingers tenderly pressed around the empty socket and felt absence. The phantom limb reached out towards the forest. It ached to return. I clutched my shoulder tightly, trying to still my lone shaking hand. With a short, bracing exhale I righted myself and pressed forward.

By stepping into the woods I stepped into the gaping maw of a beast, headed straight for its belly. The forest was dense, crowded, and labyrinthine. Trees towered above, skinny and skeletal with bare branches. They were toothpicks for giants that had lined up like soldiers, completely uniform. The birds that flew over the cliffside were missing from the branches. None of the woodland creatures scampered through the brush. The green of the grass was the only glimpse of life.

I couldn’t tell if it was morning or evening as gray shapeless clouds blocked out time overhead. I kept following the old steps and somehow knew that this would lead me back to two years ago. I moved forward, closer and closer. At some point I’d gone far enough that even the wind hadn’t followed. Everything around had frozen in place, as if immortalized in a snowglobe. I could almost see the snow swirling around.

At last I could see the deadened branches of the berry bramble. They’d been ripe with fruit this same day two years ago. They weren’t now. The world was blurry around me as I pushed onward, stumbling into the little clearing. Both phantom and real limb were reaching out now. I could see both arms, reaching and searching for the bitter fruit.

The swirl of my finger print grazed the brush. Blood, bright and red like the juice of a berry dripped down my finger. That was when I heard the low growl. I turned too late, the teeth had already latched into my shoulder. My arms reached up to throw the assailant off of me, but the jaw dug deeper, yanking and tearing. Its fur brushed against my face, dark and coarse. My head turned and met yellow eyes. The pupils were slits. I found no mercy hiding behind them. The seams of my coat snapped. The tendons in my arm did too. 

Blood sprayed the wolf’s maw, patches of white drenched in red. I felt the warmth of it splash my face and watched as flesh was cleaved apart. I couldn’t recognize it as my body, my arm. It was the wolf’s now, if it had even been mine before. Still, I was screaming. The forest swallowed up the sound. The wolf did not listen. It did not let go.

I was on my knees, clutching my pricked finger to my chest. My nose brushed against the grass and hot tears slipped from my eyes into the earth. There were no claws scraping my back or teeth in my shoulder. Not now, not anymore. The arm had been gone for two years. The wound wasn’t fresh, but the ache remained.

Nobody had believed me about the wolf. “You lost a lot of blood.” They had said. There’d been a trail all the way from here to my house. I asked them how it had happened then. They didn’t have an answer for that. Wolves were hunted to extinction in Ireland. It wasn’t a wolf. It couldn’t be. Instead they asked me where I’d left my arm. They couldn’t find it in the forest. 

I never forgot how I had taken off once my arm had been severed. I could see the house just beyond the trees. I was running, but I was running too slow. My head was spinning, blood was soaking my side. I didn’t want to look back, I didn’t, but when I did the wolf was still in the little clearing. In its mouth my arm hung from bloodied lips, limp. The wolf just looked at me, yellow eyes unfeeling and dropped the torn limb to the ground.

At the time I had thought that meant that it was going to come after me, chase me down and kill the rest of me. I’d only looked back once more before I left the forest and saw that the wolf had disappeared. The arm still lay in the clearing. It wasn’t there by the time I’d returned from the hospital to pack up the house.

Somehow I thought that when I came back I would find it here. Unfurling from my crouch, I looked around, thinking I might see a finger bone sticking out of the dirt. My hand sifted through the soil for a moment, growing more desperate by the minute. The blood from the finger prick seeped into the earth, I hardly noticed. At some point I began to dig. My nails scratched at the dirt, tearing up grass and streaking lines through the loose earth. The phantom hand was digging too. Dirt was kicked up in the air, throwing enough into my eyes to make them start watering again. But I kept going, prying up earth and rock. Digging and scraping, digging and scraping. It had to be there, it had to. 

“Hello?” The voice knocked me into stillness. My hands were buried in the dirt, my eyes were still bleary. “What are you doing?” 

Slowly I turned to look up. Standing in front of me was a woman. In her hand was a basket perfect for berry picking. She wore a big olive drab coat and her face was half tucked behind a scarf. For a moment I just squinted up at her with stinging eyes.

“You looking for something?” She asked, shifting the basket to hang from her other arm.

I blinked and then glanced back down at the hole I’d dug. It was still fairly shallow. I kept blinking and then rubbed my sleeve across my stinging eyes.

“You alright?” The sound made me look away from the hole and back to her gaze. That was when I stopped breathing. Hurriedly I got to my feet, stumbling backward as I did. My vision was clear. I could see her features now, not just her shape.

“You’re - you’re me.” I said and it was true. She was who I saw in my reflection. Those were my features on her face. She had my dark hair, although hers was shorter and that was my coat too. “How are we the same?”

The woman that was also me looked to my shoulder where my arm was missing. “We’re not the same. Who even are you?”

I let out something like a laugh. “I’m you, clearly. We’re just alike. But you’re me from before - well before I lost my arm.”

“I’m not you. I don’t recognize you at all.”

“How can you not see it? We have the same face!”

She shook her head slightly, but firmly. “No, I don’t think so.”

I closed my eyes, opened them and still saw myself standing in front of me. “Okay, well if you’re not me then who are you?”

She squinted at me, skeptical. It was strange to see what my annoyance looked like for other people. “Diana. My name’s Diana.” 

“I’m Diana. We’re both Diana. We’re the same person.” I’m sure I looked insane to her, gesturing wildly with only one arm, covered in dirt.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, but my arm was bitten off by a wolf right here in this forest at this very spot. I’m used to things not making sense.” 

Something about what I’d said seemed to stir something in her. “Right here?” She asked, at last appropriately spooked.

“Yeah,” I looked around us. “Right here.”

She couldn’t quite look at me, but finally said “I woke up here once. Alone and naked. Somehow I had lost three days in the forest. I didn’t know what to think.”

“How…” I swallowed against my burning throat. “How long ago was that?”

I saw my own frown appear on her face. “I don’t know. Maybe a couple of years.”

“Do you remember anything before that?”

“Oh yes, just not those three days. I remember everything before that.” 

Then she told me that she’d lived in the house for six years, only two more than I had and that she’d grown up in Cork and she’d had a pet dog named Pepper. So had I. This other Diana had lived my same life, everything was the same. Until two years ago today.

“Can I see your arm? Your right one.” The question felt weird, but I couldn’t help myself.

The other me was resigned. Maybe she half expected me to ask. “Okay, fine.” She began to unbutton the coat and then pulled her arm from the sleeve of her shirt so that her shoulder was also fully visible. The arm was familiar, smooth and unblemished. Whole.

I stepped closer, like I was drawn towards it by some sort of magnetic pull and reached out to touch the arm. At the moment of contact, I could feel my hand on an arm that was mine but no longer a part of my body. Somehow it had found a new shoulder. Yet, I could feel my own touch on the skin of her arm. The other me didn’t react, just watched with a cynical gaze.

This was my arm. Somehow it was hers too.

“You don’t feel that?” I asked when I pulled away and still felt sensation from that missing arm. I could feel the jacket pressed up against the skin. I could feel the wicker handle of the basket my other self carried.

She inclined her brow. “Feel what?”

My thoughts were racing. “Have you seen any wolves here in these woods?”

“Wolves.” Her voice was flat, unreadable.

“Yes, you should watch out for them. A wolf attacked me. I think somehow you grew from the arm it tore off.” I began pacing, at some point adrenaline had kicked into overdrive.

“That’s insane.”

“I don’t need to hear my own self say that to me when so many others already do.” 

“Look, I’m sorry. Weird things are happening here, but we’re not the same. At least not anymore.” 

I stopped my frantic pacing to look over at her. In that moment the way she was looking at me was unrecognizable. I sighed, but nodded. “You’re right. Not anymore.”

“It’s getting late.” Diana said. “It’ll be dark soon.”

And it was. I hadn’t noticed, but the sky had gone from gray to an even darker shade. The light was dim and the air had become even more chill. The forest was a snowglobe no longer. The glass had cracked, the water spilled out. Every fallen twig was a shard I had to be careful not to cut myself upon.

“We should head back.” She said with slightly more insistence.

“Alright.” I dusted myself off, shaking the dirt away. “Let’s get back to the house.”

The two of us - the two of me - began heading down the trail. Both of us were silent as we walked. I was lost in thought, head spinning. Diana walked behind me. I could feel my right hand - our hand - swinging the basket.

I couldn’t see the house in the distance. The forest had begun to curve inward, closing around us like a tunnel. I could only glimpse the grassy dunes ahead through a pinhole. The end of the path was a circle that shrunk ever smaller, the only source of light. The branches overhead tightened around us, constricting as the tunnel closed in.

The sun had slipped under the horizon when I felt my hand let go of the basket. I heard it land on the ground. I had only just turned to look back when I felt hands - one of them my own - wrap around my neck. Nails dug into my throat, cutting off the scream I was about to unleash. My left hand reached up, trying to rip the hers off of me. 

Diana was trying to hold me in place but I jerked against her. Her grip on me was slipping and she cried out as my teeth bit into her left hand. Still she didn’t let go. I tried to rear my head back to knock her in the face, but she just ducked and tightened her hold. The end of the tunnel of trees was closing.

“Stop,” I tried to cry out. “Stop, please.”

She didn’t listen. My lungs couldn’t get any air. I could feel my right arm squeezing, could feel it squeezing the life out of me. I tried to kick out, tried to do anything, but this past version of me had the advantage. She kept on squeezing and squeezing. My own hand tightening and tightening and it was as if I was the one gripping with all of my strength. It was my hand tensed and my hand that was crushing my windpipe. 

It was my hand to let go. 

It took a moment for Diana to realize that she’d lost control of our hand. She realized too late that I’d used this shared limb of ours to free myself enough to get a gasping breath of air. I jerked out of her grasp as soon as it was loose enough and spun around to face her.

She was breathing heavily, face pink. She was holding her right arm out in front of her, away from her body. I glanced backward, the tunnel hadn’t closed shut. There was still an opening. I looked back to her. Her eyes held no mercy. I couldn’t recognize her anymore.

Her body lurched forward. She was ready to chase me, she wasn’t like the wolf. With our right arm I swung a punch so hard I think it broke the thumb. She careened to the side, not quite falling down, but that gave me enough time to ram her into the ground. We both slammed to the forest floor, me straddling her body.

With both hands I reached out. Her eyes widened, big and horrified. I gripped her neck.

“No, please, no.” She strained to cry out. I heard her pleas. I kept squeezing.

Her left hand reached out to scratch me, pulling at our arms, lashing out at my face. With one knee I slammed down on it. It didn’t take much longer for her to stop moving after that. I watched as her eyes slipped closed, the fight in her body giving out. I kept my hands around her throat, waiting, making sure. Then my right arm went limp and cold and dead.

Slowly I stood up. I stared down at myself. Or who I was once. She lay still. I didn’t see myself in her features anymore. The phantom limb was gone too, laid to rest at last.

I pushed the hair out of my face, my brow sticky with sweat. When I finally looked up from the ground, my gaze met a pair of yellow eyes glowing in the dark. I waited, breath held. It didn’t come closer, just stared at me a moment longer before retreating into the forest. The trees unfurled. The tunnel opened up. 

It was time to leave the woods behind.