The Legend of Bush Man — Chapter 3: The Wooden Box

Chapter 3 of the Legend of Bush Man. Trapped in Chloe's house with the Bushman growing in the front lawn, Marcus learns why a house is just a wooden box built on top of the earth.

The thing in the garden did not move.

That was the worst part. Not the eight feet of black thorns where Chloe's mother's prize azaleas had been that morning. Not the pale, hollow eyes parted open in the foliage like wounds. Not the long shadow it threw across sunlit grass at ten in the morning, pointing the wrong direction entirely.

The worst part was how patient it was.

"It wants us scared," Marcus whispered. He could hear the forum thread in his head, the words he'd scrolled past at 2 AM and laughed at with his friends. Fear tenderizes the meat. "It's doing it on purpose. It's — it's marinating us."

Chloe didn't answer. She was still holding her phone to her ear, the speaker on, and through it came the slow crunch... swoosh... crunch of something enormous walking through dry leaves. She turned the phone over in her hand. The screen showed the call timer running.

00:47. Forty-seven seconds of a 911 call with no operator, no ringing, no dispatch. Just footsteps.

"It's in the phone," she said flatly. "It's not — that's not a recording, Marcus. I can hear it breathing between the steps."

Marcus looked from the phone to the window. The thorn-mass stood motionless in the center of the lawn. Its leaves trembled violently, though the air was dead still — every blade of grass in the yard hung limp and lifeless in the morning heat.

Only the Bushman's foliage moved. As if it were breathing in a wind that existed only for it.

"Back door," Marcus said suddenly. "The thread said it forms a tether when it locks eyes with you. It grew here. It grew in your yard, Chloe. It can grow anywhere we've been seen. We can't — we have to get out of Oakhaven. We can't let it see us again."

A sound cut him off. Not from the phone. Not from the window.

From underneath them.

A slow, wet creak ran through the floorboards of the hallway, like a ship's hull taking on water. Chloe's mother kept an immaculate garden, and an immaculate house, and the hardwood floors had never made a sound in the eleven years Chloe had lived there.

Marcus remembered the last line of the forum post with the clarity of a man reading his own autopsy report:

A house is just a wooden box built on top of the earth.

"Chloe," he said very quietly. "Don't look at the window anymore."

"Why?"

"Because I think it wants us looking at the wrong body."

The creak came again — closer now, under the living room rug — and with it a smell like turned soil and crushed green stems, rising up through the seams of the floor as if the earth itself were exhaling.

Outside, on the lawn, the pale eyes blinked.

And beneath their feet, something vast and patient began, very slowly, to rise.

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