The Green Man - Chapter One: The First Sightings

No one could agree on when the Green Man first appeared. Some said he had always been there, woven into the hedgerows and the damp shade beneath trees, watching from the corners of old photographs and half-forgotten memories. Others insisted he only emerged after the river flooded that spring, when the water crept into basements and left behind a stink of rot and algae that refused to fade. What everyone agreed on was this: once you noticed him, you could never fully look away.

The town of Alderbridge sat between a forest and a marsh, its streets bending in uneasy curves as if trying to avoid something beneath the ground. Moss grew thick on brick walls and crept along roofs, encouraged by constant drizzle and long, grey mornings. It was the kind of place where people learned to keep their eyes down and their doors locked, not because of crime, but because the town itself felt like it was listening.

The first sighting was dismissed as imagination. Old Mrs. Calder, who lived near the marsh, told anyone who would listen that a man covered in leaves had stood outside her window at dusk. She said his skin was green and cracked like bark, his eyes dark hollows filled with wet light. When she screamed, he tilted his head, curious, and stepped backward into the reeds without making a sound. Her family blamed age and fear, and the town doctor wrote it off as confusion.

Then children began to talk.

They drew pictures in school of a tall figure with vines for hair and a mouth full of thorns. They whispered about a man who stood at the edge of the playground, just beyond the fence, always smiling. Teachers scolded them for telling scary stories, but none of the adults could explain why the ivy along the fence had suddenly grown so thick it bent the metal.

I first saw him on a walk home from work. It was late autumn, when the trees were bare and the air smelled of wet earth. I noticed movement near the path, something too still to be an animal. He stood among the trunks, half-hidden, his body blending so perfectly with the forest that my eyes slid past him again and again. When I finally focused, my breath caught in my throat.

He was shaped like a man, but wrong in ways I couldn’t immediately name. His skin was mottled green and brown, textured like lichen. Moss clung to his shoulders and chest as if it had grown there naturally. His face was narrow, his smile wide and fixed, stretching farther than it should. When our eyes met, a chill ran through me, deep and instinctive.

He did not move. He only watched.

I hurried home, heart pounding, and told myself it was a trick of the light, a statue, a prank. But that night, as rain tapped against my windows, I dreamed of roots growing through my walls and hands pressing gently against the glass.

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model