Emma K. Leadley
About the Author
Emma K. Leadley (she/her) is a UK-based writer, creative geek, and devourer of words, images and ideas. She began writing both fiction and creative non-fiction as an outlet for her busy brain, and quickly realised scrawling words on a page is wired into her DNA.
Emma has always had a love of putting words together but only more recently developed the confidence for those words to reach further than gathering cyber-dust on her hard drive. Since early 2019, she’s had multiple fiction stories published (or are upcoming) online, in eBook and in print, ranging from 100 words to 2000 words. They’re mainly speculative tales: fantasy or horror with some science-fiction thrown in.
The biggest surprise to Emma was a new-found love of writing horror: she is a total wimp when it comes to watching anything with even the vaguest hint of horror — yes, that includes Doctor Who, Stranger Things and Buffy the Vampire Slayer — unless it’s animated or in book form and consumed in daylight with the curtains open.
Visit her online at her blog where she talks about writing, books and other topics: autoerraticism.com; her author website for new and upcoming publications, emmaleadley.co.uk; or on Twitter @autoerraticism.
The Thing In The Woods
D. R. Smith
We found it in the woods behind my house. My friends and I were playing hide-and-seek when Austin tripped over it, doing a faceplant in the mud. It sat under a birch tree, black and steaming like some weird, volcanic rock belched out of the earth.
It fascinated us.
All its surfaces were smooth, flat, and gleaming. Yet it shimmered, it stirred, even as it sat motionless amid the weeds. It warned us away, yet tempted us to touch it. It was everything boys like us dreamt of finding in their treasure-hunting forays into the woods, all of the wonders of the world in one odd thing. And it was a nightmare. A strange, beckoning nightmare, a horror for which we had no response except to stare at it.
“What is it?” Justin asked, wandering over from his hiding spot.
I glanced at my friend. “I don’t...” I started to answer, but my throat dried up. “HellifIknow,” I spat out as a single word.
Austin brushed the leaves and mud off his clothes. “Why does it look like that?” he said.
“Is it alive?” Justin asked.
We crept up to it for a closer look.
The rock, for I had no better word to call it, seemed to shrink and expand imperceptibly, as though it drew quick, shallow breaths. Its angles and lines morphed into curves and corners almost at once, like a weird trick of the light. But that didn’t make sense, because the sun was hidden behind the clouds. There was no wind to speak of either.
Something else, then.
The rock stared back at us, though it hadn’t the eyes of a living thing. Yet living it was, living and watching, as if it had been waiting patiently to be found for a thousand years.
Waiting for us.
“What do we do with it?” Justin asked.
“What can we do?” Austin replied. He reached out to poke it and then jerked his hand away. “It’s hot!”
Justin stuck his own hand out and touched it. “Freezing,” he said matter-of-factly. “Like ice.”
Both of them turned to look at me.
It was my turn. I slowly reached out and brushed my fingertips along its unexpectedly silky surface. “Warm,” I told them. I was about to add that they were both crazy, but how could I? The rock was crazy. It shouldn’t have been there. It belonged on another planet somewhere.
I was convinced of that fact, but not enough yet to share my theory with my friends.
“What do we do with it, Mike?” Austin sucked his burning fingers and looked at me.
It was a fair question. My family owned the woods, so the rock was on my land. It made sense that it fell to me to decide. Only I wanted no part of it. No part of the thing, the rock, or whatever the Hell it was. No part of this whole weird day. My stomach hurt and bile bubbled up my throat as my eyes strained to focus on the thing’s constantly churning surface.
“Kill it,” I heard myself say.
We stared at the rock.
Austin had his slingshot with him. We all did when we played in the woods. We called them our peacemakers, but we were really just looking for squirrels to target.
He pulled back on it now and launched a sharp-edged stone at the rock from only three feet away. He shouldn’t have missed, but the missile sliced harmlessly into the tall grass behind the rock, which had shifted in the weeds in the blink of an eye to avoid the projectile.
Austin took a step back, startled. “Did you see that? It moved!”
We saw it, Christ Almighty.
Justin fired a shot; same result. The rock jigged to the side again. The thing was now six inches from the spot where we’d originally found it, quivering, gleaming, smirking at us. Somehow I knew the rock was mocking us. Daring us.
“It won’t work,” I said, sighing. “It’s been waiting too long, and now it has what it wants.”
“What’s that?” Justin asked.
“Us.”
A sudden urge told me to pick it up. I was twelve; how could I resist? Boys our age have urges coursing through their bodies all the time, usually about girls, but this one was different.
This one was coming from the rock.
“Let’s take it with us.”
Austin looked at me like I was insane. “What do you mean, ‘take it with us?’” He was almost in hysterics. “What for!? Why? C’mon, Mike, what are you going to do with it? I mean, it freaks me out.”
“I don’t know yet.” I walked up to it and placed both hands on it. I felt a thrumming vibration deep below the surface of the thing, as though energy cells were heating up.
“Help me,” I called over my shoulder. I tried lifting it myself, but
