I hope they’ll be kind
Short horror story, written in the first person in the style of a forum post. Originally posted on /r/NoSleep.
Manners are very important.
That’s my opinion, that’s my feeling on the matter — I like to think I’d feel that way even if I didn’t come where I come from, where having good manners is sometimes the difference between life or…
Or an unpleasant alternative.
I don’t think I should really say where I come from: if you know the area, I have no doubt you’ll recognise it from context clues, and if you don’t, that’s for the best. It’s not that I live in an unpleasant place — on the contrary, as cold and damp as English weather can be from time to time, particularly up here, I live in a beautiful area, and I’ve always felt very blessed.
Huge swathes of woodland are protected in trust near to where I live, and the village I’m from is a little ways up the mountain, a plateau cut out with paths that lead down through the woodland or further up and along, to join the public thoroughfares, the national walks. There’s a lot of wildlife, a lot of deer and birds, wild flowers, and the views are wonderful.
You have to walk sideways and take a few strange turns to make it down to us. It’s very easy for us to make our way out but not so easy for outsiders to make their way in — I would like to tell you it’s for their protection, or suchlike, but really it’s that outsiders have no manners, and resent the consequences that come of that.
I hope you don’t think I have a low opinion of you, presuming you’re an outsider, presuming you’ve never been here — I wouldn’t like to make assumptions. Unfortunately, it’s always the case that one bad apple spoils the fate of the barrel, and I admit, I’m not myself of late.
I thought writing all this out would help.
It starts with what you’d expect, good manners.
Say please when asking for something, say thank you when it is received. Greet those you meet politely and respectfully. Do not step over boundaries or into spaces where you are not invited. Never take the last morsel from a plate, or the last fruit from a bush. Don’t whistle or make a racket when people are trying to sleep.
Help others. Be kind.
Be thoughtful.
Manners are only local customs, you know — there’s nothing universal in them, in any of them, whether they’re ours or yours. What’s important is what the manners communicate — your respect for other people, and for your surroundings.
And here, we have the People.
We call them the People — there are other names for them, but they’re too direct, and the People are quite protective of their names and how they’re addressed or spoken of. That’s about respect, too, not bandying about their proper names without cause, even amongst ourselves, even to outsiders — it would be like gossip, or blasphemy, or something like a mix of both.
The People aren’t sacred, you understand — they’re not gods, and they’re not monsters. They aren’t harmful at all, so long as you treat them with respect. I used to be so frightened of them, when I was a child, and I used to cry when they passed us on the woodland paths and hide my face against my mother’s waist.
This was rude, but they never made anything of it, even though they would be well within their rights to.
I’m rambling: I’m sorry, it’s complicated, and as I said, I’m not myself.
The People are very tall, seven feet at the shoulder, and they walk on two spindly legs with pointed feet, balancing on them — I think they might be hoof-shaped, but they don’t make a sound when they move. They have more joints in their long limbs than we do, and far less torso to speak of: their bodies are thickly, densely furred, or at least, their three long fingers on each hand are, and their legs, too. They wear cloaks woven of tree leaves and wildflowers, or pieces of fir in winter, that hide most of their bodies and the backs of their heads, and masks.
The masks are unsettling if you aren’t used to them.
I don’t know what it is they make them of — they look soft to the touch, like rubber, but I don’t know that the People even know what rubber is. They’re normally pale pink, and roughly modeled on human features, with eyebrows and painted eyes and carved noses and smiling mouths. The smiles, in the People’s masks, are rictus smiles, every dimple and line in the resin expressions exaggerated, the eyes too wide and staring.
They’re not meant to be frightening.
The People wear them for our benefit — my mother says they know that they frighten us, even when they don’t mean to. They wear their masks to comfort us, so that we see them wear faces like ours.
It’s not their fault.
It’s what they think we look like — perhaps to the People, we are the ones with exaggerated proportions, with unsettling movements, with frightening appearances.
I don’t think so. I don’t think the People are frightened of anything.
The People are the reason our manners are so important. Our communication with them is limited. They don’t really speak, and I’m not sure they can, because the most I’ve ever heard of them is breathy, hoarse sounds that I couldn’t hope to replicate, and I wouldn’t try to.
The People walk in the same woods that we do. They must have settlements, I suppose, although I don’t know where they are, and have never come across one, and I couldn’t reliably tell two People apart, from one day to the next.
If you’re walking in the woods and you come across the People — they never walk alone, only in pairs or more — it is polite to greet them verbally, to smile, and to give a bow of your head. It doesn’t have to be a very deep bow — most of us just bow from our shoulders — but a bow is the done thing.
I usually bow first, but that’s not a sign of inferiority or anything — sometimes the People bow first, and that’s alright, so long as you respond in kind.
Most of the time, that’s the end of it — you keep walking one way, and the People keep walking the other way, and perhaps you won’t see each other again. They walk in strange ways, the People: their legs are so long and have such odd joints, peeking out from under their swinging cloaks, that it looks sometimes as though they’re about to topple, and it’s polite to keep a wide berth.
I heard of a boy once who was in a hurry because he had an exam at school and he was running in from his house and he was late, and he skidded to a stop when he saw the People, and he bowed and said hello, and then once they’d bowed back he started running again but instead of keeping to the side of the path he ran straight between the pair of them and knocked one of them over.
That was years ago — my parents went to school with him, and I don’t even know his name, only that he stumbled in for his exam three hours late instead of ten minutes and couldn’t remember his name, let alone any of the answers.
He was sick, and then he cried, but he didn’t cry like a teenager, didn’t even cry like a child: my mother said he cried in a desperate, confused way, his voice cracking and choking, making wounded desperate wails, scrambling for someone, something to hold onto, and she said you could tell just from looking at him that he had no idea where he was, no idea who he was, no idea what was happening.
He didn’t go back to school after that.
But maybe that’s just a story, about him knocking them over — maybe he littered, or took a shortcut he oughtn’t have. Perhaps he was rude in some other way.
Perhaps he wasn’t rude at all, and the People decided just by looking at him that he deserved it, but I don’t like to think about that. They’ve never done anything like that before, that I know of, and I don’t like to imagine they would.
I want to believe they’re kind, the People.
I remember when I was so small, sobbing into my mother’s skirt, and the way she tried to be stern with me, tried to tell me, “You have to be polite, say hello, honey, and bow, please,” and she’d been trying to keep the panic out of her voice, trying not to sound scared, and that just made me cry harder.
One of the People reached out and put its long, inhuman fingers on her shoulder, touched her in a gentle, undemanding way, and breathed out its hard, choking sound, and then the three People had walked on, and left us be.
I greeted the next ones, and it seemed to me that they were more pleased than they ordinarily were, because one of them clapped.
I wonder if they know who I am, me specifically, if they know that I was that same little child, once.
I don’t know if that would be good or bad.
It happened the day before yesterday.
I was walking with a friend of mine, Shelley, just a normal, socially-distanced walk through the woods. It was late in the morning on a Saturday, and although we’re in the same bubble, because our houses are right next door to one another and Shelley’s mother is very close to mine, we were both still wearing our masks. I’d stepped off the path to take a photograph of one of the new daffodils, making sure I wasn’t treading over any boundaries or stepping on any other flowers, and Shelley stuck to the edge of it.
She took off her mask to light a cigarette, which I didn’t care for, but smoking in itself isn’t so bad, and Shelley’s always good about carrying the butt with her once she’s finished, to toss in a bin, but today she dropped her mask — she wears paper masks still, because she sweats too much, she says, in the cloth ones — and because it had fallen in the mud she kicked it aside to pull another out of her pocket.
“Shelley,” I said when I saw her. “Shelley, you can’t do that.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she muttered, “it’s filthy, I can’t just put it back on, and my hands will be muddy if I pick it up, and it’s just a paper mask, what harm — ”
“Just wrap it in a tissue or something!”
She looked at me with a scowl on her face, crossed her arms at me all defiantly, as if I were her mum and I was telling her what to do. She’s always been like that, sometimes, just hates to be told what to do, would argue with the moon if it told her it was made of moonrock. It annoyed me so much. I was impatient. “I don’t have any.”
“Well, I do, but it’s shitty to just drop it like that, Shell,” I muttered, and because I was angry I was in a rush going through my back to try to find my tissues, and I dropped my phone, and it slid down the hill.
I ran to get it.
I heard Shelley say hello from where I was rummaging through a patch of wild garlic to find it, and I heard the sharpness in her tone, and I heard the harsh, breathless noise of one of the People. My stomach dropped even as my hand clasped around my phone, and I half-crept up the hill again, trying not to disturb any leaves or sticks or stones, barely even daring to breathe.
From behind a heavy bush I could see the tops of the two People’s heads as they stood over Shelley, and from the angle I was at, they were facing away from me, because this was where the path curved.
I could hear how loudly Shelley was breathing.
“Oh, um, no, no, I just dropped it by accident,” she was saying, “I obviously wasn’t going to leave it here, I just dropped it in the mud, I was only trying to kick it into the water so that it wasn’t so — No, no, you don’t have to do that, you don’t have to do that, please, it’s — ”
She trailed off and made a sort of sobbing noise, and I realised why because I heard the sort of… It was a horrible sound. The masks must have been harder than I thought, because it made a kind of crackling, gory sound as it was peeled off of its face, popping wetly, and I could hear Shelley crying more softly now.
I couldn’t see its face, but I saw a glimpse of the mask in its hand as it pulled it away, the thick, congealed purple-redness that dripped away from the back of the humanesque features held in its hand, and I could hear Shelley’s breathing quicken even more, hear the sobbing noises she made, the heaving, gagging sounds.
I don’t know if the second one took its mask off.
The thing is, the pandemic’s actually made it safer, not that it’s normally a danger, usually, but…
But the thing is, it’s manners, right?
It’s manners.
She was sobbing so loudly it cut right through me, and I feel awful for running, but I couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear the sound of it ad the idea of the both of them looking at her, but I just ran a ways along the hillside before rejoining the path, and I sprinted into the house and locked the door and didn’t go out again.
It’s manners.
It’s only polite, if one of the People removes their mask, to remove your own.
They found her yesterday. She was still alive, and they got her to the hospital, and I don’t know if she’s making sense, because from what I heard, she was still gibbering and crying, but I tried to tell her, I did, and she should have known anyway.
They’re going to have to do reconstructive surgery, and maybe after that, she’ll be alright, I don’t know.
I don’t know.
My mother isn’t home. She’s coming back tomorrow, she’s just been helping my grandfather for a few days, and I don’t want to call her because I’m so bad on the phone, I’ll never know how to say it, but I’m so frightened because it was rude, and I know it was rude, and wrong of me.
I should have stopped to explain, I should have picked it up for her and said I was just getting my tissues, I should have tried to help, but I was scared, I was frightened, and it wasn’t my fault, none of it, and I didn’t want the People to blame me.
What should I do?
Should I do anything? Is there anything I can do?
I know you don’t know. I don’t know either. I don’t think anyone knows.
As I finish this post, I can hear our doorbell ringing.
There’s no one who’d be coming to visit me, not with Shelley’s parents at the hospital, and our deliveries wouldn’t come here either. There’s no one. There’s no one, except…
And a knock, now.
I have to let them in, I’ve already left it too long.
It’s good manners, to greet guests, to invite them in, to offer them food and drink, and I’m so scared I can feel my heart in my throat, but I have to.
I wonder if they’ll remember me. I wonder if they’d be merciful twice over, but I’m not a kid anymore, and being scared is no excuse.
I hope they’ll be kind.
I hope so.
Leave a Reply