CW: Paranoia, death, murder/gore, abuse, fire, alcohol abuse
During the blazing summer of ‘96, the Rogers family made the impromptu decision to go for a trip to Lake Catherine State Park in Arkansas and to visit family which nested in Bentonville. Toby was early in his boyhood at nine years old when he found himself lost deep within the forest that surrounded the lake. Though it was only afternoon when the young boy had found himself misplaced, the woods were dark and cold. Was it evening already?
It took eight long hours until the search party brought him safely back into the arms of his mother who was worried sick about her troublesome son. He was first discovered in an unresponsive daze, staring off into the wilderness as though he was looking at something in particular. There wasn’t anything there. It wasn’t spoken of since, and soon the family, and the boy, began to forget all about the strange situation.
Though the ordeal had long slipped his mind, the aftereffects stayed. Toby had found himself plagued with random coughing fits, nosebleeds, strange dreams and violent intrusive thoughts. Slowly, he felt himself rotting away from the inside. On some occasions, the young boy would wake up behind his home late in the night, having sleepwalked to the forest edge that bordered his backyard.
It seemed as though tragedy followed Toby like a stray dog. When he was 17 years old, he fell victim to a sudden, violent car crash that took the life of his elder sister, Lyra, who was driving her brother home from a doctors appointment. The force of the steering wheel crushed her and she died on impact, while the boy was left with a broken arm and concussion. The last imagine Toby had of his dear older sister was her bloody body mangled, and the awful sound of life escaping her through a gruesome series of groans and wheezing.
Throughout his life he wore strength like a golden medal that he held in between his canine teeth. But on that godforsaken day, his knees fell weak, as so did he. Life slipped through the cracks of his scarred hands and from the moment he stepped out of the wreckage, he hadn’t felt real.
From that moment forth, a sure decent into insanity grasped his now fragile mind. He felt a sickness take hold of him, far heavier than any grief that struck his sore heart. Through the midst of despair and loss, he lost all sense of what to do with himself. The stress proved to be too great for the boy who’s medal of strength was crumbling under the weight of the world. He was angry. Angry at his father for not being there, angry at his peers for their rejection, angry at the world for turning its back on him. Angry at himself.
But hating himself did nothing but prove Dan right, and so every fibre of that hate he directed towards the outside world. And his “me against them” mindset only strengthened its resolve as he lost the only person in his life who treated him as a human being. Now she was gone, and no amount of screaming and yelling and begging could get her to turn around from that pearly white staircase and come back to him. Now he was as alone as he’s felt his entire life.
Nobody taught Toby how to bear the burden of loss. He spent his entire life destroying everything through a rough series of fury and malice, that he was at a disadvantage when something left his life not of his own doing. Every semblance of control he mustered up over the years slipped through the cracks of his fingers like murky water, and he began searching for solace in liquor. Alcohol became a familiar coping mechanism for him, stealing booze from his father which prompted more violence in the unsteady household. His days for the next couple months would begin to consist of him running away from home, fighting with his parents, or drinking in the forest behind his house.
On cold, lonely nights he would sit on the edge of those woods in his backyard with a bottle held in his busted knuckles, and he would wonder if any fire could burn hot enough to rid that house of its sins. If anything could stop the war from raging on, if some day he could lay down his arms.
Over the next few burdensome months after the funeral, a bizarre, creeping feeling of being followed would begin to drape over Toby like a blanket of paranoia. It started off small. He would sometimes see things out of the corner of his eye, peeking around corners or standing amidst the trees that would disappear when he blinked. Then he’d begin to experience face blindness, or something of the sorts, where he could catch glimpses of people in crowds with no faces. And when the sleepwalking found itself back to the boys nights, he felt as plagued with disease as he did when he was 9 years old.
It had gotten to the point he would spend hours staring out his bedroom window at the woods behind his house, only being interrupted by his concerned mother noting that his nose had started bleeding. The trees had eyes, and they were watching him. There was something waiting for Toby in that forest. Something that would begin to torment the boy with nightmares and haunting visions of his deceased sister. Sometimes, late in the dead of night, he could swear he heard that terrible groaning and wheezing coming from outside his bedroom window. It beckoned him.
It was a cold November evening when the boy killed his own father by bludgeoning him to death with a baseball bat. After an early morning altercation with his father, Dan had been drunk and aggressive, and Toby was hanging on a very thin thread that inevitably snapped.
There was something primal within the younger as he brutally attacked his dear old dad, mercilessly battering the elder until his face was nothing but unrecognizable mush. The familiar scowl was the last thing he saw of Dan Rogers. Toby looked into the terrified, furious eyes of his creator as he beat him down, and in his fathers eyes the boy only saw his own reflection.
Toby lost everything that day. Or rather, he gained everything. He had nothing to lose to begin with, and now he was free from the chains of that house. And the visions of that warzone of a home being engulfed in flames only became true as he left the battlefield with gasoline and blood soaked hands. Dazed, and coming off of a rage-fuelled adrenaline rush, Toby thoughtlessly made his way to the forest he had been called to for weeks. The smell of smoke began to heat up the chilly autumn night, and as the fire grew, it accompanied the moon in lighting up the dark sky.
The last thing he remembered from that fateful night, one that was a long time coming paved through years of abuse and torment, was the feeling of flames on his skin and rough smoke in his lungs as the forest he sat silently in became a victim of the housefire. As the heat engulfed his surroundings, his vision went blurry and his head felt full of static.
This was the death of Tobias Rogers, the boy born of forest fire.
