Time For An Urban Legend

A group of teenagers went drinking in the woods one night and eventually found their way to an old oak tree that had acquired the usual history old trees acquire.

Someone had been hanged from it.

Nobody knew who. Nobody knew when. Naturally, everybody knew it was true.

One of them had read about a ritual that was supposedly meant for places like this. The instructions were simple enough to be convincing. Stand in a circle beneath the tree. Hold hands. Close your eyes. One person walks around the outside reciting an incantation, one line at a time. The others repeat each line back.

There was some debate about whether they should do it, which meant, of course, that they were going to do it.

They formed the circle.

One of them was visibly uneasy. This improved the mood considerably.

The boy leading the ritual told everyone to switch off their flashlights.

That changed things.

There is a difference between knowing you are standing beneath a tree and standing beneath one in absolute darkness. The oak seemed larger now. The woods quieter.

He began walking around the circle.

A line spoken.

A line repeated.

His footsteps moved through the leaves behind them, disappearing and returning as he made each circuit.

The nervous kid asked how much longer this was supposed to take.

Nobody answered.

By now the boy leading it had mostly forgotten about the ritual. He had discovered something better. He knew exactly how he was going to end it.

He slowed as he came around behind the nervous one.

He spoke the final line.

The circle repeated it.

Then he stopped.

For perhaps two seconds there was nothing at all.

He lunged.

He grabbed the nervous kid by the shoulders and put his mouth against the place where the neck meets the shoulder, pretending to bite down.

The scream was immediate.

So was the collapse of the circle.

Hands tore apart. Someone fell. Someone else ran straight into the tree. Flashlights came on one after another, throwing wild pieces of the woods into view until eventually several beams converged beneath the oak.

The boy who had performed the ritual was standing there.

He wasn’t laughing.

Blood covered his mouth.

At first this seemed explicable. Then they saw his face.

He looked as frightened as anyone.

He touched his lips and stared at the blood on his fingers, then looked down.

The nervous kid lay at his feet, convulsing, both hands pressed uselessly against a wound from which blood was coming in bright, rhythmic bursts.

For several seconds nobody moved.

The boy beneath the oak kept staring at the blood on his hand.

“I didn’t bite him.”

Nobody answered.

“I swear to God. I didn’t bite him.”

Later, nobody could agree on the words of the incantation.

They did agree that the boy had only meant to frighten his friend. That somehow he’d become an instrument of the thing he didn’t even believe in.

And they agreed on one other detail.

The old story never said the man had been hanged from the oak.

It said he’d been hanged under it.