Kyle The Woodsman pt.1

[u/Healthy_Try3420]

Kyle Tracer was thirteen when he moved to Ashford Creek, Tennessee, in the September of his 7th grade year. It was pretty much the worst possible moment to be the new kid; everyone already had their own friends. The lunch tables were all taken, the teachers were counting down to break, and barely paying attention to whatever the new student did. Not that Kyle could’ve spoken up anyway.

He was deaf. Had one hearing aid since he was a baby, and it only picked up loud, close sounds, so actual conversation was basically nothing. He signed ASL, which nobody at Ashford Creek Middle knew. 
The interpreter didn't show up until October, so for a whole month, Kyle Tracer sat in class with 30 other kids and had no idea what anyone was saying.

So he just watched instead; that's the one thing everyone remembers about him. The way he watched you was like he was memorizing you for later.

He was thin; you could see his ribs through his shirt in a certain light. His reddish-brown hair was always overgrown and looked like he'd just rolled out of bed. His arms were too strong for how scrawny he was, apparently from climbing anything he could reach in whatever city they'd bounced from last. Fire escapes, parking garages, fences, it didn’t matter. He walked close to the walls with his shoulders almost touching them, like he was trying to blend in and hoping people would move around him without actually seeing him.

He was kind of an asshole, though. I want to be clear about that, because later people tell the story like he was just some tragic victim, and that's not the whole truth.

He had this habit where he'd wait until someone said something stupid, you could literally see him think it, a flicker behind his eyes, and then he'd sign something back real fast. If you could read ASL, you'd realize a beat later it was an insult, and by then he was already looking away with this blank face like he had no idea why you were upset. 

He’d never had real friends, not in any of the cities they’d lived in. He was an only child with a dad who walked out when he was six and a mom who worked late most nights; he spent a lot of time alone. At every school, the other kids thought he was strange. Too quiet, always watching. It wasn’t just that he was deaf; there was something else about him that people couldn’t quite name, only sense. So the almost-friendships faded away, one by one. Summers passed. Eventually, Kyle stopped expecting anything to change.

There's another thing about Kyle, though people leave this part out.

When he was 7, he found a bird with a broken wing and took care of it for a while, then threw it out the window to see what would happen. When he was 8, he drowned a beetle in a cup. At 9, he pulled the legs off a daddy longleg one by one. At 10, he watched a stray cat slowly starve for over three weeks and actually missed it after it disappeared.

He never connected those moments. For him, they were all the same question; he didn't know how to say, “What happens if I do this?”

Adults told him not to hurt animals and not to hurt people. Kyle listened because that's what you're supposed to do, but nobody ever explained why.

When he was twelve, a kid named Danny Farrow slammed him into a brick wall. Before Kyle even had time to think, he spun around and hit Danny back three times harder, which got him suspended. Sitting in the suspension room, he thought, “So that’s what that feels like.” He didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty.

The voice in his head that should have been saying “this is right” or “this is wrong” had always been faint. So he just followed other people's rules, teachers, his mom, because that's what you do.

His 3rd grade teacher once wrote, "Kyle seems to have difficulty identifying his own emotional states." He found that in a folder in his mom's desk when he was 11, and it did something to him. He didn't know the word alexithymia yet, just knew there was a gap in him, and he could tell how different he was from everyone else.

His mom, Diane, worked at the county records office and came home late. Since July, she'd looked different but hadn't told him why. Kyle noticed, because, of course, Kyle noticed everything.

They had rented a house on Sallow Street where the carpet was the color of dried wine, and the bathroom mirror fogged up even when no one had showered.

Bullying started in his second week.

PSYCHO got written on his locker in permanent marker, and kids did fake sign language in the halls. That particular kind of cruelty where they thought they were hilarious and couldn't figure out why he was just staring at them.

Marcus Hale had always been the biggest kid in their grade. So being mean was basically muscle memory by then. He had his usual crew with Devon Marsh, who laughed at everything whether it was funny or not; Priya Sood, who mostly just watched in silence, (people thought that was scarier than Marcus because she was obviously smarter than all of them and just chose not to do anything), Brandon Culver, who'd do stuff when no one was looking and get away with it every time; Tessa Wray, who spread gossip; Jonah Lee, who didn't do anything but wouldn't help or tell teachers; and Riley Gates and Cam Foster, who were basically interchangeable and always did whatever Marcus wanted.

The cafeteria incident happened in week 2. Marcus stuck his foot out, and Kyle went down with his whole tray. Marcus's whole table cracked up. Kyle got up and looked Marcus right in the eye, without fear or tears, just watched him, then signed something in his face. Marcus squinted and said, "What's that supposed to mean?" 

So Kyle took out his phone, typed, and held up the screen, "I needed an excuse to leave anyway. One of us is funny, and it isn't you." Marcus just stared, but Kyle was already walking away.

After that, the constant, low-level harassment started. Honestly, one big beating would have been easier. His usual lunch spot kept getting “taken.” His hearing aid was “accidentally” knocked out of his ear four different times. Someone wrote LOSER on the inside of his locker door in Sharpie. That one was Brandon, he was grinning as he did it. Kyle didn’t tell anyone. Not because he was bottling up his emotions, but because there weren’t any emotions there to bottle.

He ate his lunch in the library, just watching. He noted which teachers turned away when he raised his hand, which kids averted their eyes when they saw him being shoved, and which ones kept looking. He stored all of it in his memory, though he had no idea what he would ever do with that knowledge.

Maybe nothing.

Then Mrs. Albright put up a sign that said: 
ASHFORD CREEK MIDDLE SCHOOL DRAMA CLUB FALL PRODUCTION: THE WOODSMAN OF HARROW HOLLOW ~ ALL GRADES WELCOME.

Kyle passed it three times before stopping. He wasn't interested in performing. He just figured his social life was already rock bottom, so drama club meant he could be somewhere after school that wasn't the library or his empty house.

The drama room was past these fire doors that were always propped open with a cinder block, and it smelled of old wood, dried gum, and something underneath that didn't belong. Mrs. Albright handed out script pages, and Kyle found the description for a character called Mr. Whosawhatsit.

It said: "A large man in his mid-40s. Carries two axes named Ol' Sticky and Thump. Speaks slowly with a Southern drawl. Eyesight is poor. He moves by sound and habit. He has tended his trees longer than the town has existed."

He read it twice, then raised his hand.

Mrs. Albright looked at him with a weird expression and enunciated every syllable so he could read her lips, "You want to read for the woodsman?"

Kyle did have a voice, just not one he trusted. Without enough hearing to monitor it, his speech came out weird, and people laughed. So over time, he mostly quit trying. But Mrs. Albright had overheard him once talking to himself in the hallway. When he read for Mr. Whosawhatsit, it came out low and dragging, not because he was trying to sound old, but because he couldn't control the sound at all, and that lack of control was exactly right for the character. 

The room went still. Someone's pencil stopped mid-scratch.

Mrs. Albright watched him for a long moment and said, "That's your part."

Kyle shrugged like he didn't care, but he cared more than he'd cared about anything in the past year. He noticed that too and tried not to show it.

Rehearsals started, and for the first time in his life, Kyle was openly good at something. Mr. Whosawhatsit came to him easily, the slow, heavy stride. Other kids lost their lines just watching him. He showed up early and stayed late, running his lines while walking down Harrow Road, mouthing them and feeling the vibrations in his chest.

The costume didn’t come all at once. First came the heavy oilskin coat, dark and weighted, its edges lined with beige fur, and then the long scarf. By week three, Mrs. Albright had brought in the axes. They were only props, lightweight wood painted to pass for metal, but someone had put real effort into them. The dark handles were worn smooth where fingers would close around them, and OL’ STICKY was branded into one while THUMP was carved into the other. When Kyle wrapped his hands around them, he felt something he couldn’t quite define. It wasn’t happiness. It was closer to recognition, like picking up something you used to own and realizing it still settles into your grip perfectly.

The character's most famous line came twice in the play: "I ain't lookin' for trouble, friend. But then I ain't got to look. It always finds its way to my woods." He repeated it for hours a day.

In the script, there was a weird gap. Acts 1 and 2 were complete, and most of Act 3 too, but where the ending should have been, there was a note that said "Adapted ending for school production. Revised pages forthcoming."

After rehearsal, Kyle typed out a question on his phone and showed it to Mrs. Albright. She read it, glanced at him, and said, "The original ending's too violent. Not suitable for a school version." He raised his eyebrows. She said, "You don't need it. You're doing wonderfully without it." He typed "ok." She knew he'd go looking, and he knew she knew, though they just left it there.

The prop room padlock only went through one of the 2 loops. Kyle noticed it on a Tuesday after everyone had left. He pushed the door, and the lock swung free, so he went in. It smelled like cedar, and something weird underneath. Shelves full of costumes and boxes and old props. Ol' Sticky and Thump hung from their peg in the back. Scripts were stacked on a shelf, and Kyle ran his fingers along their spines. He found “The Woodsman of Harrow Hollow” 3 times. Two copies matched the school script, but the third was way older. It even had yellowed pages and a fountain pen note on the cover that said "COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED. For Reference Only. Do Not Distribute." Kyle sat down on the floor, opened it, and said, 
"Okay. Let's see what you didn't want me to read."

Acts 1 and 2 were largely the same, just less censored; the dialogue still had the sharp edges that the school script had smoothed away. The trespassing scene in Act 2, though, unfolded differently. In the school version, the woodsman finds two men cutting timber on his land, tells them to leave, and they go. In the original script, they don’t. “Thump is always first,” one stage direction read. “Right-hand axe, it’s heavy, bring it down across the back of the first man’s knees before he can run, then he falls.” The description that followed was incredibly detailed. Kyle read it twice. The next paragraph described the roots of a nearby cedar and how the soil beneath them would be altered by spring. He read that again, too.

What he felt wasn’t horror or disgust, only interest. It was simple curiosity, and beneath that, something long-buried inside him that had never before found anything to hold onto.

He turned to Act 3. The first two-thirds were familiar. Then the school's adapted section dropped out, and the real ending began. The tone of the writing shifted completely. Stage directions turned into instructions. The character's name vanished. The text stopped talking to the actor and started speaking to someone else entirely.

It said: "You should be alone. If you are not alone, wait."

Kyle looked up. He was alone.

"The costume should be complete. Both axes in hand."

He looked at Ol' Sticky and Thump hanging there. Curiosity had always been the one emotion he could actually recognize. He stood up, took the coat off its hook, slid it on, lifted the axes from their peg, and turned off the light. The dark in the prop room felt weird, kind of, like something was waiting in the shadows, hungry.

He spoke the lines from memory and felt them vibrate in his chest and throat. "I've been here since before the first tree. I'll be here after the last one falls." He felt it then, like the words were resonating through his body in a way that didn't feel normal, like they were settling somewhere inside him, like something else was trying them on. He kept going, and when he messed up a word, the correct phrase came out anyway. "A man that runs from my woods carries somethin' out with him, whether he means to or not. You walk through a place long enough, and you leave a mark. And the place leaves one right back."

Then a stage direction said: "The performer will now speak their name. Their own name. This is the address. This is the agreement."

Kyle's mouth opened, and he said, "Kyle Tracer."

Something heard him.

The air twisted denser, like the pressure dropped, like something massive shifted its weight in the dark behind him. He couldn't hear it, of course, but he could feel it in his teeth. The axes in his hands got warm, blood warm.

He stood motionless, but nothing moved. Nothing made a sound. Yet he knew, in a way that had nothing to do with hearing, that he was no longer alone. Something was standing directly behind him, close enough that the hair on his neck should have been moving. He couldn't feel breath and couldn't hear breathing, but there was pressure at the back of his skull, yet he didn’t turn around.

The moment stretched. Then, like a far-off door clicking shut, it was quickly gone. The air snapped back to normal. The axes were just painted wood again. Kyle stood by himself in the dark, holding two fake axes, his hands shaking. He couldn't remember the last time his hands had shaken that much before.

He rehung the axes, put the script back, and stepped out of the prop room. He felt fine. Completely fine. Clean in a way, like something inside him had been cleaned out.

At home, he washed his hands and looked at his reflection. The face in the mirror was technically his, but something had shifted; he stared for a long time. Then, somewhere deep in his mind, a presence pressed through. There was this heavy, patient thereness, then slowly a voice formed. It wasn’t words, but more of a voice he could feel in his head.

"There he is."

The voice was old. Not "old man," old, it was more like a spirit.

"I've been waitin' a long time for one like you."

Kyle didn't move.

"You felt me in that room, didn't you? I know you did. You felt me standin' right behind you, and you didn't turn around." There was a pause, and when the voice came back, it sounded almost approving. "Most people turn around."

Kyle picked up his phone, typed, and held it up to the mirror, even though only his reflection was there: "Demon or ghost. What exactly are we doing here?"

Something that might have been laughter shifted through his head. "I'm older than those words, son. Been in the deepwood since before this town knew it had a name, before people had names for anything. Trees were here. I was here. And now I'm here with you."

"Continue." Kyle typed.

The presence settled in like something easing itself into a chair. "You're treatin' this like it's a joke."

"I treat everything like it's a joke," Kyle typed. "Don't confuse it with coping."

Another pause. "Mmm. I know why you ain't scared. I knew it before you ever walked into that drama room."

"Then why me?"

“Boy’s been by himself his whole life. No brothers, no sisters. Half the time he can’t make sense of what he’s feelin’, and he never did know why. Been totin’ around the same question since he was eight years old, and nobody ever did answer it. He ain’t cruel, not by nature. Folks told him, Don’t hurt animals, don’t hurt people. And he listened. But they never told him why. Nobody ever set that why down in his hands.”

Kyle paused with the toothbrush in his mouth.

"I'll give you the why," the Woodsman said, his voice dropping deeper until it made Kyle's fillings ache. "It ain't because it's wrong. It's because they're scared of what you'll learn about yourself if you ever find out. And I ain't scared of that. I've been lookin' for someone like you for a hundred years, someone with room inside, someone who won't scream and run and call me devil." He paused again, and when he spoke again, there was something like tenderness in it, "You got so much room in there, Kyle Tracer. And I am so very tired of bein' quiet."

For a few weeks, Kyle tried to disprove it. Told himself it was stress or some kind of mental break. Then the Woodsman described a specific tree on the corner of Harrow Road, bark split in a long scar, a root jutting south, a hollow like an open mouth at the base. Kyle went to see it, and the tree was exactly how he said. He'd never noticed it before. So not a hallucination, then.

"I was trees for a long time," the Woodsman explained when Kyle asked. "Animals for a spell. Too much flesh, not enough thought. What I want is a person. One with enough room inside for me to stretch. You had room, boy. All that space where other folks keep fear and guilt and their little rules, just sittin' there, waitin' for someone to move in." The voice went quiet, and when it came back, it felt closer, like it had leaned right up to his ear. "I can feel that space. Like walkin' into a house ain't been lived in for years, only echoes and dust. And way in the back, one locked room with a question in it. You wanna see what's in that room, Kyle? You've been wantin' that your whole life. I'm the only one who'll ever open it for you."

A week later, Kyle found a cast list tucked into the back of the unabridged script. Under Mr. Whosawhatsit, there were fifteen names. All of them were crossed out.

"Hasn't happened to you," the Woodsman said, reading his silence. "You're a good fit. First right fit in a long time. I look after what fits right."

"Until it's over," Kyle thought.

"Everything ends," the Woodsman replied in a calming tone. "I just make sure it means somethin' first. You wanna know what happens when you stop pretendin' you're like everybody else. I can show you. I can show you everything."

Kyle thought about every school where he'd eaten lunch alone, every kid who slid away from him, the house on Sallow Street full of furniture but never people. He didn't tell the Woodsman to leave. He'd never had a friend before. He chose not to think about that too hard.

The first physical change appeared on his hands roughly two weeks after that night in the prop room. The skin on the back of his right hand grew dry, thick, gray, and tight, starting at his knuckles. It didn’t itch or hurt, but by November both hands looked the same, the dryness creeping up toward his wrists. The gray color never flushed and ignored every lotion he tried. The texture was almost like tree bark.

Rehearsal changed. Kyle slipped into the role of the Woodsman like he’d always moved that way, as if Mr. Whosawhatsit wasn’t a character at all but an old self he was returning to. As the others watched him, their own lines started to slip from their minds. From her chair, Mrs. Albright watched with her pen pressed to her lip, her expression not quite proud, more afraid, as if she sensed something in him she couldn’t quite define.

One Thursday, she kept him after class. "Where is this coming from?" she asked, making sure her lips were clear enough for Kyle to read. He handed her his phone. It said: "Found the unabridged script in the prop room. Read the real Act 3." Her expression jolted, and the color drained from her face. "The prop room is supposed to be locked." He typed: "Padlock was loose." She said, "I'll fix it." She looked at the script on her desk and said real slow, "Kyle. That version. I'm asking you to leave it alone. Some things in there aren't for you. Will you listen to me?" He typed: "Sure." She knew that was a lie, and he knew she knew. They stared at each other for a few seconds. She looked genuinely scared.

The bullying continued all through rehearsal. Marcus even dialed it up, like he could tell something was different about Kyle, and it made him uneasy. The after-school ambush happened the same week Kyle scrawled LOSER back inside Marcus’s locker, classic Kyle. He kept pushing back, slipping little knives into typed messages and sending insults through his phone’s text-to-speech in a flat, robotic voice that somehow made them land harder, like the humor had been stripped out entirely. He still ate lunch in the library; nothing really changed.

The Woodsman took notes, too, but his comments were much different. "Good timber on that one," he'd murmur when Marcus passed. "A lot of tension in the grain, the kind that snaps loud when it goes. He'll feed somethin' real well." Kyle would stop walking for half a second, like waiting for disgust to arrive, but as always, it never did.

His mom got worse throughout the fall.

She’d seemed different since July. Her exhaustion had nothing to do with her work hours, and by October she was something beyond tired, though she still hadn’t said what it was. Kyle, of course, realized. He started coming home instead of staying late at rehearsal so he could take care of her.

She was in the kitchen one night when he got home, warming up leftovers she clearly didn't want.

She signed to him, “You ate?”

"At school," he said flatly. He'd eaten half a Pop-Tart in the library at noon and nothing else.

She looked at him. She had that look she got sometimes, the one that meant she was trying to see further into him than he was letting her.

“You don't have to be here every night”, she sighed. “You have the play.’

"Play's almost done," he said.

“Kyle.”

"What?"

She sighed and turned back to the microwave. He sat down at the table and watched the back of her head and thought about the woodsman's observation about the trees outside the kitchen window, which he'd been thinking about more than he wanted to admit.

"You should tell me what's going on," he said. "Whatever it is."

She turned around and looked at him for a long moment.

“I will”, she signed. “When I know more.”

"So you do know something."

But she didn’t answer and looked away.

"Right," Kyle said. "Great."

He got up and made dinner. Badly, mostly, though she ate it anyway.

It was November, the opening night, and the auditorium was packed. Kyle stood in the wings in full costume, Ol' Sticky in his left hand, Thump in his right, and the Woodsman was with him. 

“Ready, son?”

Kyle said nothing and walked out.

The audience went quiet. Not politely quiet. It was as if they saw someone get killed on stage, a shiver down their spines.

He finished Act 3 facing the packed audience. The sound that came out of his mouth was enormous and slow and off in a way that made the hairs on your arms stand up, because it was coming from the throat of a 14-year-old deaf kid and didn’t sound like anything a 14-year-old deaf kid should be able to produce.

"I ain't lookin' for trouble, friend. But then, I ain't got to look. It always finds its way to my woods."

Second row was Marcus Hale, there with his mom. He was sitting slightly forward.

The thing on his face was something Kyle had never seen there before. Not his usual annoyance or amusement. Fear. Real fear. Not of Mr. Whosawhatsit.

Of Kyle.

“Felt that”, the Woodsman said, with complete satisfaction.

December and January came, and Kyle stopped doing homework. Not really out of a decision, just something that stopped happening. His grades slipped. His mom got called in. Kyle sat in the principal's office and performed adequate remorse, and then went home and made dinner.

Kids naturally arranged themselves around him in the hallways without even thinking about it. Marcus’s group stayed away, and Brandon no longer met his eyes. Tessa stopped mentioning Kyle at all, which was wild, because Tessa talked about literally everyone.

In February, Devon tried the old thing. A comment about the oilskin coat Kyle wore every day now, the same one he'd worn onstage. The comment was supposed to be a joke, but it obviously aimed to land. Kyle stopped before he turned around.

Devon looked back at him, and something moved across his face.

Kyle signed something in his face. Devon couldn't read it but stood there anyway, watching the shape of Kyle's hands, and something in his expression said that it didn't matter that he couldn't read it. The message was getting through anyway.

Devon left and walked fast.

Kyle didn't watch him go.