The Ogre of Bracken Wood

On harvest day, I decided that I would stay home. I told my parents I wasn’t feeling well.

‘You look well enough,’ said my mother.

My father looked at me suspiciously. ‘Lad, you’re eighteen now. When it’s your fields you’ll have to do it yourself, hale or sick.’

I replied, in my best croaking voice, that I was so ill I couldn’t rise from my bed. They both went off, shaking their heads, to the join the rest of the village bringing in the harvest.

It was a golden day in early autumn, the last hot day of the year perhaps. Why waste it toiling in the fields? Coming home scratched bloody by the stubble, exhausted, back aching? Not for me. I waited a decent amount of time until the villagers had left and then I headed down to the pond. The sun beat on my skin, warming me deliciously. I took my boots off and let my feet dangle in the cool waters of the pond and watched the lazy clouds’ meander across the pale blue sky. I daydreamed about Elsa, the girl in the village that I liked the most, of her milky skin, and what lay beneath her smock. I hoped that one day she might let me see. Perhaps even touch. A pleasant warmth grew around my crotch. Between that and the heat of the day, I felt my eyelids become heavy, and I fell asleep.

Sometime later, I awoke, and the warmth had gone.

A shadow lay across me, cast by a towering presence.

A face, twice the size of mine, peered down at me. Thick lips, eyes the size of fists beneath bushy overgrown eyebrows, a wart sprouting thick black hairs. It was the ogre. A wave of terror washed over me. I screamed for help knowing as I did that all the village, even the children, were miles away. The ogre’s huge hand slammed across my face, knocking the scream from my lips. He grabbed me and with one hand slung me over his shoulder. Easy at that, I was captured.

I tried to fight back, slamming a fist into his immense back, but the ogre squeezed my legs so tight I feared my bones might break, and I realised to fight him was futile. He strode off into the gloom of Bracken Woods. I watched the village where I had spent my entire life shrinking behind us, fear coiling in my belly. All my life I hated how small the village was, how boring. Now as the ogre carried me off into the woods for who knew what purpose I felt tears of longing and loneliness well within my eyes, run down my face and fall uselessly to the ground.

For hours, he carried me, one hand encircling both my ankles. In the other, he clutched a bulging bag, wriggling with chickens, stolen from the village. I bumped along over his shoulder, my head dizzy. I didn’t fall, though he had no other care for my comfort. Up close, my nostrils were filled with the animal stench of him, grimy and sweaty. I stopped crying after a while and began to wonder what my fate might be. Stories of the ogre were common in the village, used to frighten the children. A smashed window or a vanished goat would be blamed on the creature. If the destruction ever got too much, the men in the village would gather pitchforks and take turns taking watch. It was said he longed to feast on human flesh, though I had never heard of a person being taken before. As we bumped and banged into the woods, I began to imagine his teeth tearing into me. I only prayed that the end would be quick, and there would not be too much pain.

In the depth of the woods, the trees grew taller and the rare flashes of sunlight rarer. The ogre followed no path that I could see, heading deeper and deeper into the darkness.

Late in the afternoon, we came to a clearing on a small, treeless hill. On the crest stood a ramshackle two-storey house, as lonely and forbidding a place as I had ever seen. Its windows had no glass and its roof sagged to one side. No sign of life could I detect, apart from a pair of crows perched on a ledge. As the ogre pushed through the door into the cold darkness, I saw the crows take wing and disappear into the woods.

I had no time to take in my surroundings. The ogre dumped the sack of chickens in the hallway, then carried me up a set of stairs that creaked alarmingly under his bulk, and into a wide, tall room where stood a large bed, its ironwork frame speckled with rust. The window showed the treetops, and a rag of curtain flapped in the wind. 

He slung me from his shoulder and dumped me at the foot of the bed. I lay in a tangle, confused, dizzy and terrified. This was it. He would dash my brains from my head, I hoped, before he began to gnaw on me. Somehow, I found the courage to turn my gaze up to his face.

He was looking back at me, eyes narrowed. For hours we had travelled, I realised, but had not been able to see one another properly. He was more horrible than I remembered, with a huge, bulbous nose and a thinning thatch of pale, lifeless hair that dropped down either side of his misshapen face. His eyes were grey, and possessed of a strange, inhuman cunning. They regarded me for a time, and I trembled under his stare. 

I knew now that my death would not be quick, for there was a cruelty to the ogre’s expression. He hated us humans in the village, perhaps even feared us, forced to live in this lonely mansion, miles from anywhere, eating whatever scraps he could scavenge. And now he had one of the hated villagers in his grasp, and a young male at that, he had a chance to take revenge.

A mad thought occurred to me that I might dash across the room and fling myself from the window. But I knew that the ogre was quicker, and besides after hours of disuse, my legs felt like jelly.

I stared into the face of my death.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please...’ I did know if the creature could even speak my language. He said nothing. His lips twisted into a cruel smile. 

He pushed his breeches down. His naked legs were wide as an oak tree, and at the place where they joined, his enormous cock and huge, dangling balls hung beneath a patch of thick wiry hairs. He grasped his penis, perhaps the width and length of my forearm, and from it a hot stream of piss spurted out. I had no time to react before the steaming liquid was on my face, in my eyes and mouth, coating my face and hair and soaking through my clothes. It stank of meat. I shut my eyes and closed my mouth, but not before a decent mouthful of the viscous, foul liquid could get in, which I was forced to swallow. Soon I was drenched. He hadn’t stopped for a leak on our whole journey, and now he coated me with the contents of his entire bladder. I tried to stay brave, but I could not help a shuddering moan escape my lips as he soaked me. Then I felt the stream slacken, from a hose to a stream, then a final few drops. 

I opened my eyes. The ogre had already pulled his breeches up. He found a thick cord in the room, and with a few swift movements, lashed my hands to the bedstead. Then he strode out, and I was alone. 

I lay on the floor, arms tied above my head, legs curled into my chest. I could hear the creature clattering around beneath me, then the outside door slammed shut. 

No one would come looking for me. They would think I had run away, perhaps even accuse me of stealing the chickens. My mother would miss me I knew, but other than that, they would soon forget about me. Covered in the creature’s cold, stinking piss, I shivered. I was utterly alone.

END OF PART ONE