Encryption

[Kemander]

Morning wakened her with what had become a habitual unsettled feeling, aware she'd had the recurring dream once again. Seemingly, no matter what she tried to fill her mind with before drifting off to sleep, apparently her dreams somehow always devolved back to the dream, or some version of it anyway, she'd first dreamt when she was only six or seven years old. Maybe even earlier.

As a little girl, she'd wake up screaming in the night, but the reactions from her parents made her feel as if there must be something terribly wrong if her dreams were disturbing her so much, and they would end up having to send her to some kind of brain doctor, which to her back then, sounded even more frightening at the time than her dreams. So she learned to swallow her *** down and repress the deep terror she felt, hiding her bad dreams from her mom and dad so she wouldn't be sent away to some terrifying brain doctor to have unimaginable things done inside her skull. At present, she herself was considering seeing a psychiatrist on her own, and wished she had back when her worried parents threatened her with sending her to one. They didn't seem as scary as her vague dream did these days, plus now she didn't view them as being nearly the threat losing her well being and sanity was.

But her parents were dead and gone now and the only thing she had left of them was the house she'd inherited after they died. She loved the old house, with all of it's warm memories from growing up here, the big yard sloping up to it and all the big shade trees, the beautiful flower beds and the garden out back in the sunny corner of the yard away from the giant old Oak tree, who's lowest thick branch still held the swing she used to swing on as a little girl when she got tired of playing with her dolls or making castles in the sand box.

Thinking of the swing, she reminded herself to go to the hardware to buy some new rope heavy enough to support her weight now, certain the old rope was probably so rotten it would break if she tried sitting in the swing now. Her mind working along these lines, she got up and started her day, showering after pouring herself a cup of coffee from the automatic coffee maker on the kitchen counter, then pulling on shorts and a T-shirt while mentally adding to her shopping list for things from the grocery, and reminding herself not to forget to return the books to the library and maybe pick up a couple more to read. It was sunny outside and looked like a nice day, so once her shopping was finished, she wanted to come home and do some weeding in the garden. She hated how the weekends always seemed to fly by far too quickly, and wanted to go back to work on Monday feeling like she'd accomplished worthwhile tasks to make her recent move back to her childhood home more pleasant and to turn it into the warm nesting place that suited her gentle personality.

After some toast and jam, she added the things she thought of to her shopping list and put her runners on, grabbed her purse and keys, and stepped out of the kitchen door into the garage, pushing the button to open the garage door and climbed in and started her car. As she was backing out she saw Tommy, the neighborhood kid she paid to mow her lawn, trundling up the sidewalk, pushing his mower, so she waited on him as she lowered her driver's window to speak to him.

When he'd closed the distance between them, she called out, " Hey Tommy, can I get your help when I get back from the store?"

"Sure, Ms. H., I'd be glad to help you."

"It isn't a big deal, Tommy, but I want to replace the old rope on the tree swing out back with a new rope and I need you to climb up and cut the old rope down and tie the new one to the branch in it's place."

"Okay, Ms. H., I'll probably be finishing up with your yard just as you're getting back. I'll see you then."

As she drove away she thought to herself what a nice kid Tommy was and then her mind turned to organizing everything she wanted to get done today. She made her first stop at the library, dropping off her borrowed books at the desk, taking a quick look at the list of new books available and then going into the romance section and finding a couple of fun looking novels from the stacks and checking them out back at the desk. Her next stop was the hardware store. The nice man there listened as she told him what she wanted and what her intended purpose for the rope was, then led her to the rope they had in stock. He asked how much she needed, but she wasn't certain of the height of the Oak's big branch, so she simply bought a hundred feet of one inch thick rope the man assured her would hold more than her body weight up, as he looked at her great figure appreciatively.

After leaving the hardware with her purchase she headed on to the grocery store and did her shopping, buying all the necessities on her list, plus a few items for desserts she planned on making, and some bottles of wine she didn't actually need, but which would be a nice treat for an evening of relaxing and reading, She was back home again in just under two hours, pulling into her garage just as Tommy was cleaning his mower off beside the driveway. Tommy helped her to carry the groceries into the kitchen, where she offered him a coke, which he gratefully accepted. They chatted for a bit as Tommy drank his coke and told her about his uncle, who he said built really nice decks for folks who wanted to have an outdoor area added on to their homes.

Having a deck off of her kitchen was one of her goals for the near future, so she wrote down the name and phone number of Tommy's uncle for later reference before they went back out to the garage and retrieved the heavy rope from her car's trunk. It didn't take long for Tommy to shinny up the tree to where he could scoot out onto the big branch, having tied some twine to the end of the rope so he could pull it up to him after he'd cut the old rope down with his pocket knife. It seemed she only needed about half as much rope as she'd bought at the hardware when the new rope was in place and she sat in the swing to test it out. Tommy shinnied back down from the tree, but dropped his pocket knife as he was doing so. The odd thing was, even though she saw where it landed, it wasn't there when they looked for it.

She thanked Tommy for his excellent help and promised him she'd buy him a new and better pocket knife to replace the one they couldn't find in the freshly cut grass at the base of the Oak, then took Tommy inside to clean and bandage a cut he'd gotten when he stuck his hand into a hole in the old Oak tree at it's very base between two of it's out spread roots. He complained, saying it was nothing, probably a cut from the sharp shell husks of some nuts squirrels living in the tree had left in the dirt inside the hole. She thought he was probably right, but she could remember the hole in the tree being smaller than the size it was now, big enough a raccoon could be living in there. She shuddered at the idea of Tommy having been bitten by a rabid raccoon and thought she'd look into having a tree service come seal up the hole for her.

There is a little known being of terrors and night sweats, a tiny beast in size, but an evil of monstrous proportions with a malevolence it bends toward mankind with a vengeance. The Native American people it shared the forests with were, at one time, friendly toward it. That is, until those canny warriors saw through this monster's façade intended to disguise it's true purpose. You see, it had no female counterpart in it's race of beings, and thus wanted nothing more than to propagate it's race by the means of reproducing with human women, taking the resulting innocent, but hideous offspring to raise and train in the ways of their atrocities, as one of their own.

Yet it's cruelty and utter lack of compassionate feelings were rapidly discovered as the poor native maidens it kidnapped and cohabited with escaped to tell the stories of their *** and horrible ***s at the hands of the evil minded little freaks of Nature, whose barbarous tendencies blanched even the very worst cruelties attributed to the Native Americans in the battle heat of their hatred for their enemies. This creature is a cryptid. A chthonic, or earth-dwelling elemental, and in this case, an ugly little demon spawn known in ancient American Indian myths as a pukwudgie. This word was translated by Henry Schoolcraft as "little wild man of the woods that vanishes".

The pukwudgie is a man-like creature said to be anywhere from about a foot tall to as much as three feet tall and much like the old world gremlins and gnomes, except these are known to use magic, to create fire, appear and disappear at will, lure people to their deaths, to kidnap people, women especially, to push people off cliffs, attack their victims with short knives and spears, to use sand to blind their victims, and who would launch poison arrows to kill a person.

Unknown to our heroine, there was one of these ghastly, deformed whims of Nature living inside the ancient Oak tree, who'd made this tree his home since before the time of the coming of Europeans to the New World, and who had been coveting her since she was a spindly legged five year old, when he first noticed her playing in the yard. He made it a practice afterwards to corrupt her dreams whenever she slept in her bed at the house she grew up in, preparing her for his nefarious plans he'd plotted for the debauched perversions he planned for her carnal *** and perpetual ***s, and thus give him all of the hideously infernal infants, which the French call Cambions, -- Enfans des Demons, as his to raise and regale in for all of her foreseeable future of ***d sexual slavery to him.

Thus it was that after Tommy put the extra rope and the twine back in the garage and left, wheeling his lawn mower home, she spent the remainder of the day weeding in the garden, then trimming the rose bushes, from which she cut several blooms for a center piece on the dining room table. She finally went back inside and fixed herself a nice meal as the Sun dipped toward the West, having a glass of wine with it. One glass turned into two more as, after cleaning up the dinner dishes, she spent some time in the back yard as the sun tipped to rest on the Western horizon, swinging gently a little in her swing as the evening breeze cooled the air, while she surveyed her good day's worth of accomplishments in her lovely garden, which was beginning to take on the peaceful and beautifully pleasant aura she envisioned for it. As darkness began to loom, she went back inside and spent the rest of the evening reading one of the new romance novels she'd borrowed. Going onto eleven, she closed her book and headed off to bed, giggling to herself that she was probably too tipsy and full of naughty fantasies now to be visited by her nasty nightmares.

She awoke to find herself naked, staring around in horror, trying to place where she might be and why. She finally realized she must be inside of the hollow Oak tree, not knowing it was the lair of the pukwudgie. But she could see the grotesque little monster beneath her, tying off twines he'd tied to her big toes and then used to spread her dangling legs wide apart to accomplish his plot for whatever he had in mind to do to her. He was brown, filthy and looked shriveled up, and maybe two feet tall, but with a bulging hump in his back.

He wore nothing at all but long scraggly hair on an oversized head and some kind of amulet on a thong around his neck. He was ugly to look at, with a malevolent face dominated by a long, wide nose, big, beady, glittering black eyes, and a huge overbite caused by jagged teeth looking far too large to fit in his mouth. He had cruel, thin lips stretched over them, but what bothered her the most was the obviously oversized dimensions of his penis, dangling between his legs and, although limp, nearly half of his height in length.

She was strung up from some point above her by her hair and what she thought may be the extra rope from the tree swing he'd apparently stolen from where she'd had Tommy put it in the garage, and tied around her just underneath her arms. Her wrists were bound together behind her back, thus making her naked breasts jut out before her. She gazed around in *** at the glimmering blue and green flickers of light which she thought, as a little girl, were faerie lights, but learned in her education were probably glow worms, the icky larvae and adult larviform females of beetles that glow through bioluminescence. They are but tiny predators, which eat millipedes and other arthropods occurring in soil and on decaying dead organic matter and any decaying woody vegetative litter, such as what occurs on the inside surfaces of a hollow tree trunk as the wood slowly rots and deteriorates due to insect and bacterial infestation.

Somehow her dreams from early childhood on became suddenly clear in her mind as she experienced total and lucid recall of them. It was for this reason she knew she dare not make a sound or offer the least bit of resistance if she wanted to live. But for mercy's sake, what hell, what brutish vulgarity and inhumanity, what molestation, *** and *** must she endure before this demon killed her or released her? If only she could imagine, her life of more constant and repeated terrors was only just beginning.