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There was a house in a forest. IT was quite a remote place, bordered on all sides by high-reaching trees and on a bit of a hill, wedged between earth and sky. It was a two-story house, on the second story of which was a balcony, an overlook: if someone was to stand there, they would see a hundred thousand trees on a hundred thousand stony ridges, and no other houses. It was beautiful - if not a little unnerving - to know that, here, there was so much everything and yet so much nothing. The sunrises were always beautiful, as were the sunsets; a million million stars invisible anywhere else could be seen at night's peak, silent companions in loneliness; the days were always clear and fair, temperatures never rising too high or falling too low.

This was the kind of place where everyone wanted to be and where nobody ever was.

There was a wolf that lived in that house, just a normal everyone who somehow had the luck to actually own the place. Each morning, he awoke alone; each day, he spent his time alone; each night, he went to sleep alone. The nearest town was at least five or ten miles away. He had been alone since he first moved here who-knows-how-much-time ago, and he had a lurching feeling that he would remain alone for who-knows-how-much-time longer.

This morning was one just like any and every other: he awoke to a silent bed; he took a lukewarm shower; he got out and made himself breakfast; and then he went out the back door and just stood there, taking in everything. He did not sacrifice companionship and living interaction for nothing, though: in return, he got a fantastic view from his backyard - though, there was no fence, so who was to say the whole world wasn't his backyard? From his back porch stretched out a bright green lawn, at the opposite edge of which was a line of trees: there was a break in the trees that led down the side of this hill and down to a calm river. From both here and that river, a look up revealed a peak of this area's hilly ridges, formidable and snow-capped; that was somewhere the wolf had never been. In his spare time, he liked to explore the wilderness he had been given - and nowadays, it seemed all he had was spare time.

He went back inside and grabbed a book he had picked up the last time he had gone down to the nearest town. He sometimes forgot that he was alone; that was when he knew he was content. Yesterday, he had gone down to the riverbank, leaned against a tree, and read until the sun was on the other side of the sky, every once in a while taking a dip in the water or going back to the house to get something to eat. That was what he did yesterday, and it was what he had planned for today. That seemed like a good plan.

Book under his arm and glass of ice water in his paw, he once more closed the back door behind him and crossed the lawn to the break in the trees. Every time he passed from the warm embrace of the sun to the shadows beneath a leafy roof, he felt a bit uneasy - why, he didn't know, but it happened each and every time. He cast a look around, at the low-lying shrubs and bushes to the deep-brown trunks to the lower branches, and then off into the distance through the trees; eventually, it got to a point where the shadows swallowed everything and he could so no further. He continued on his way.

The sounds of nature and the forest soothed his heart, and soon, he had forgotten all about his silly nervousness; he was afraid of the dark only as a child. The reflection of the sky off the sleepy ripples of the river created a sense of pastoral calmness, making him feel safe and happy. He headed over to the same tree he was at yesterday and slumped against it, then slid down to the ground and opened the book in front of him.

~ ~ ~

The turning of pages and the falling of leaves both sound about the same. After a while, the wolf set the book to the side, stretched his arms over his head, lavishly yawned - and heard something behind him. He turned and looked: the far-up treetops swayed in a gentle breeze and shook off a few leaves. He just dismissed it as a twig hitting the ground and picked up his book again, forcing himself not to think about it too hard. If anything, it was just some feral animal, and nothing more.

He got up; the sand and smooth stones of the riverbank felt nice under his feet as he approached. Today, the water was a bit colder than what he would have expected, and because of that, only stepped in to where his ankles were underneath. Not much had changed down here since he had first found this place - sure, a few rocks and stones had been moved by the current, and maybe a tree had fallen in a bad storm once or twice before, but really nothing much more than that. He looked down at the water: there, a black-furred wolf with green eyes looked back at him. Sometimes he wondered what it would be like if his reflection was the one alive, and he was just the reflection; that made him feel the same way as when he first considered that maybe he wasn't looking up at the stars while being held down to the ground and instead was actually looking down at the stars while being held up to the ground.

Maybe he could compile all of these abstract thoughts into a collection and publish it. That seemed like the kind of thing a lonely person would do.

He stepped out of the river and went to get his book, then cast another glance out at the forest and began to head back up the hill towards home.

~ ~ ~

Night fell. Here, that period of half-light between afternoon and evening seemed to last only a few minutes, and because of that, the wolf could never time anything right. That was why he usually started his way home in the early afternoon, so he wouldn't have to stumble up the wooded slope in darkness. He had gone home early today partially because he was tired, and partially because he needed something to eat.

By now, he was full and sleepy, and a look at the clock hanging above the fireplace in the living room told him that it was around 8. He lounged back on the sofa, one leg crossed over the other, arms behind his head, eyes closed, perfectly comfortable. He could fall asleep here if he wanted to.

Which he didn't. There was just something about this house at night he didn't like - it was too dark, too open, too silent. He sometimes wished he could move into a big city, where it was always loud and night never truly fell, but then he always remembered why he had come out here in the first place.

Outside, another gentle breeze blew by; he could tell by the rustling of the trees, audible in the still silence. He sat up and looked around, eyes lingering for a bit over each room that had the light turned off. On second thought, he didn't really want to be here right now. He rose off the couch and left the living room light on when he climbed the stairs.

Once upstairs and in his room, he slipped into bed - somewhat uneasily - and closed his eyes. It took him a while to get to sleep. It always did.

~ ~ ~

Upon awakening the next morning, the wolf yawned, rubbed at his eyes, and then paused: did he close the door to his room last night? Right now, it was open one, maybe two inches; he couldn't remember, though, and shoved that concern into the back of his mind with the other things that may be important but probably weren't.

Then, he went downstairs, and froze: he knew something was wrong. He couldn't tell exactly what, but he knew something was wrong - maybe it was how no breeze whispered through the trees, or how a lamp he thought he had turned off was on, or how... well, something just felt off. It's the house, he told himself; I need to be outside. There's nothing to do inside anyway, and besides, it's lonely and it's quiet.

Once more, he tucked his book under his arm and headed out the door. He tried to swallow those childish feelings of fear and nervousness at being alone in a quiet house - there wasn't even anything to be afraid of. Whenever he woke up in the middle of the night from a bad nightmare or from a feeling of being watched from the window by his bed so intense that it carried over into his sleep, he told himself that he was being silly. Just because he was alone didn't mean he had to be scared. He was just being silly. After all, his bedroom was on the second floor; the only thing that could be watching him was a bird.

He lounged back against his tree once he got down to the river and opened his book, resting it against his legs. He just needed to take his mind off of everything else: in books, there was no darkness. Well, there was, but it didn't feel quite as... alive, quite as malevolent, as it did in real life. Sometimes, the wolf thought that, maybe, his life was all just part of some story, another chapter in a long novel penned by a higher form of life that he could only know as Fate. That was something else interesting to think about.

He rested the book on his chest after a while and intertwined his paws, looking up at the peaceful, happy clouds that kept on drifting by. He thought about the sky reflecting those clouds from the ocean and other bodies of water instead of the other way around, and closed his eyes.

~ ~ ~

He woke up to almost-darkness; how long had he been asleep? This wasn't good. This wasn't good at all. He stumbled to his feet and looked around for any sign of the trail back up to the house - oh God, it would be terrible once he did find it. He wouldn't be able to find his way around in the darkness and he'd have to go by his memory; he'd get distracted by looking out at the dark forest and wondering if anything was out there staring back at him. He always felt that way when going home in the dark.

Once he had found the trail that led to the house, he kept his eyes down. That was something his mother told him to do when he was younger if he couldn't stay focused - she told him that he had an overactive imagination when he shared stories of things he saw and heard that nobody else did. She said that was something every child did; eventually, he stopped telling her, and she thought he had 'finally grown up'.

He looked up to see where he was going and then looked back down. These sights and sounds had begun to diminish in frequency around the time he had entered high school; then, his mother died when he was sixteen, and they all came back. That was several years ago. Now, it was all just fodder for bad thoughts.

He was glad that he had left the porch light on once he found his way to the house - otherwise, he probably would have walked right past and gotten lost in the forest. The door was unlocked - again, as he had left it - and as soon as he stepped inside, he remembered exactly why he had left. He paused in the living room, and then went upstairs. Something still felt wrong, and he still didn't know what. He sat on the edge of his bed with the lamp on, staring out the window at the black beyond, and then slipped under the covers.

~ ~ ~

He awoke in the middle of the night, sweating and shivering; he clicked the lamp on and sat up. He had a bad dream, like the ones he used to have all the time; he always went to his mother for comfort, but as he got older, she more often told him to get over it and grow up than provide any actual comfort. Tonight, he had dreamed that he was still at the river at this time of night: the water was thick and black, and the sky the same. He had felt uneasy, so he went to pick up his book and head home - but when he bent over to grab it, he froze. The book was open to the page he had last read: all the text before then just said "regret" over and over, and after that - the part of the book he hadn't gotten to yet - was all blank. Now, he sat up in his bed with the lamp on, arms wrapped around himself, casting nervous occasional glances over to the dark window, unable to get those words - that one word - out of his mind: regret, regret, regret.

He swallowed and ragged his paw over his forehead; there, cold sweat gathered. He needed to move around, needed to distract himself somehow. He stood and pushed past the open door of the room, flicking on the hall light as he left. He figured out what to do while stepping down the stairs: he'd go through that book to be sure it was all just a dream. It was just a silly dream.

He turned on the living room light, and kept his paw on the switch. He had left the book down by the river, having neglected to grab it in his panic to get home. He slumped down onto the couch and rubbed at his eyes, silently cursing himself - he wasn't getting back to sleep now, and there was no way he'd go all the way back there at midnight to verify it was a dream. An overactive imagination, he told himself. Just an overactive imagination.

The clock above the fireplace read 2:13. He went to get a drink of water and try to get back to sleep, leaving the lights on. Once in his room, he closed the door behind him - just like he did every time he went to sleep, as a habit remaining from his childhood because he couldn't bear the darkness of the hall staring at him and all the things his mid put into that darkness.

He pulled the covers up to his chin and drew comfort from seeing the little beam of light between the bottom of the door and the floor. He was alone, but at least he had light.

~ ~ ~

He woke up late the next day, probably around noon or so based on the amount of light that came in through the window. He hadn't had another dream, and felt fairly well-rested. He took a shower and then went downstairs, turning off the lights he had left on overnight in the face of the bright sunlight.

It was somewhat cooler than yesterday when he went outside, but that didn't matter much; it was still nice. He trekked down the path to the river, and once down there, felt this feeling of contentment at a good morning bleed out of him. IT was too quiet here: there was no breeze to rustle the trees, and even though the river still flowed, it did so almost silently. He grabbed the book - which was where he had left it - and turned right around, taking no time to look around and let his mind wander. He wanted to spend as little time here as possible.

On his way back up the slope, he tripped over a protrusive root; the book leapt from his paw and landed a few feet away, open but with the pages facing the ground. He wanted to put off looking at it as long as possible, but found his curiosity was stronger than his willpower: he turned it towards him when he picked it up, then dropped it right back to the ground and quickened his pace home.

The back door locked easily behind him when he tried, as did the front door. He would stay at home today, and wouldn't go back out. He'd leave the book wherever it fell, and maybe he'd find it again in the future, rotten and eaten to the point where it couldn't be read.

Even then, though, it would still be fairly easy to tell a blank page from one filled with the same word over and over again.

Or, he could burn it - not today, though. Maybe tomorrow, or the next day. Perhaps this was all just another trick of his mind, and when he went back to get it, those pages wouldn't say "regret", "regret", "regret". This sometimes happened to him, because of his overactive imagination. Sometimes he saw things, sometimes he heard things. It was all just his imagination. It had all been his imagination since he was six.

He went into the kitchen and started to cook something, just for the sake of doing something. He always stocked up whenever he went into town to shop, and because of that, he had a lot of options. Every once in a while, he paused in what he was doing and looked up: he was still alone. The doors were still locked. Everything was still how it was supposed to be. He turned back around and took some meat from the refrigerator, working on that for a while.

He looked up again after finishing a pot of soup: the clock read 2:13. That seemed about right. He sighed and wiped his paw across his forehead - his mother's birthday was the thirteenth of February. Kind of an interesting coincidence; however, he paid it no mind, and decided this soup he made would be tonight's dinner.

~ ~ ~

The wolf spent some more time going around the house cleaning things, organizing the shelves, doing really anything he found. The sun eventually dipped down below the horizon and painted the sky with its beautiful colors before surrendering it to the cold hands of night. He warmed up his soup and sat down at the table, painfully aware of his solitude: he had inherited this table from his mother after her death. It was intended to seat eight people, and he sat at its head.

He tried not to think about the day while he ate. The nightmare, the book, that feeling of being watched down at the river - it was all too much. That river had been one of the few places he enjoyed being: it used to be a place where he could just relax and let his mind wander without the restraints he had to force whenever there were people around.

Sometimes, though, he couldn't tell whether the people he saw were real or just in his mind. His mother - and his friend in high school who chose to major in psychology - told him it was best to ignore those people in such situations.

He spat out a chunk of meat and held it up to the light - was that... hair? Or fur? Something like that, something puffy and white. Mold, probably. He cursed himself for not noticing that earlier and stood to dispose of the soup, along with the rest in the pot. In the middle of this, he looked over at the clock in the living room: 2:13. Still. He put the pot down and went over to it, leaning in close to see if he could hear any of its ticks - he couldn't. That was a little bit strange: after all, he had put in new batteries just five days ago. Oh well. Now he knew not to buy those batteries anymore.

Still, though, he found it a little unnerving how the clock stopped working after he had awoken from last night's dream, and at such a time, too: not only was 2/13 the day on which his mother was born, but it was also the day on which she died. He could remember that day. Well, parts of it.

He brought the clock down and removed the batteries, setting it down on the table in front of the couch. The spare batteries were upstairs; he threw away the ones in his paw and went to get some more, subconsciously turning on lights as he did. No breeze blew tonight, and the temperature had further dropped from earlier in the day.

new batteries in one paw, he stepped back down the stairs and headed over to put them into the clock - and choked on a gasp, heartbeat suddenly jumping into his throat. On the table next to the clock rested an open book, pages slightly discolored and crumbled by moist soil: one page read, simply, "regret regret regret regret" over and over, and the opposite was blank. The wolf look over at the back door; the latch for the lock was sideways, which meant it was unlocked, and the door was open a few inches. Beyond was the cold darkness of night.

He then did what he should have done when this first started. He struck a match from the kitchen, lit the corners of the book, threw it into the fireplace, and then shut and locked the back door and headed upstairs. He knew very well that he probably wasn't going to get much, if any, sleep tonight. He didn't care. He didn't even bother to close the door of his room he curled up under the covers: that way, he could hear the faint crackling of that damn book burning. When that faded into silence, he allowed himself to relax a little, and soon drifted off into uneasy sleep.

~ ~ ~

His mother leaned over a table, writing something on a sheet of paper. There were no walls, no floor, no nothing: just darkness. She hummed softly as she wrote, white fur shining in some light that had no source. Her paw seemed to run in the same motion, over and over and over again. The black wolf, her son, looked over her shoulder at what she was writing.

Regret. Regret. Regret.

"Mom," he said. "Mom. I'm sorry, Mom. I love you."

She didn't seem to hear him and went on writing. Regret. Regret. Something started dripping onto the unseen floor: he thought it to be ink from her inkwell at first, but then saw it was a deep red. "Mom," he began; she went on writing. His eyes followed the droplets up: they came from the side of the chair she sat on. Her white fur was lined with crimson rivers on the front of her body, all coursing down from her neck. Still she hummed, and her son saw the date at the top of the paper: February 13. A drop of blood fell from her open throat and covered the 3.

"Mom!" Her handwriting was getting shaky and uneven now, and her humming shifted out of tune. There were pauses in the tune where she should have breathed, but didn't.

"I love you, Mom. I'm sorry."

February 13th was the day on which she was born, and also the day on which she was murdered.

~ ~ ~

The wolf jolted upright and panted heavily, heart beating, sweat coursing down his forehead. He hadn't had that dream in... two or three years, at least. Each time he had it, he was afraid of sleeping for two nights afterward, and kept every light in the house on for those two nights. His mother always hummed that tune to him whenever his nightmares woke him up when he was little, and it always calmed him down and relaxed him - now, it just made everything worse. God, he could still hear it...! Each note was off, each rhythm was wrong, and it kept his heartbeat and breathing frantic. He could still hear it. He regretted leaving the door open, for the humming was coming from downstairs.

He flicked on every lightswitch he passed, even those that were out of his way. From the top of the stairs, he could see that the living room clock had been put back - he didn't do that - and was still frozen at 2:!3. The back door was closed and locked, and a light on in the kitchen. The humming came from down there.

None of the other lights on the first floor worked. The wolf kept his eyes on the ground and away from the dark corners of the house, away from the places where his hallucinations bred. He kept his eyes down and followed the light and the humming. He knew he shouldn't be doing this. Everybody he spoke to told him to ignore his hallucinations and asked if he was on any schizophrenia medication: he always said yes. No medication every worked. The auditory hallucinations began when he was six; the visual when he was eight; and, finally, the physical when he was twelve. He didn't just see and hear things, no: he felt them, too. He couldn't tell what was and wasn't real by the time he turned fourteen, but kept all of that down because his mother didn't believe him.

He stepped into the kitchen: the humming was coming from the oven, the stove, the pantry, the refrigerator. He couldn't handle being around people - he couldn't tell who was there and who wasn't. He isolated himself here because he knew he was alone. He knew he was alone, and so he knew anybody he saw wasn't real. He had been punched in high school once, and told his mother; she couldn't see the blood dripping from his nose or the gash along his muzzle. He could not only see the blood, but could also feel it, smell it, taste it. She didn't believe him. She never believed him.

Inside the refrigerator was a pot, the one he had made soup in the previous day. He took it out - it was full - and set it on the counter. He had broken his paw once when he was out with the neighbor's son; when he had gone home unable to move three fingers and in great pain, his mother told him that the neighbor had no children. None of their neighbors did. He still had trouble moving two fingers on that paw.

Inside the pot was the same soup from the previous night, except all the meat had risen to the surface. All the chunks of meat had white mold - white hair - white fur. He had started to hear whispers among his friends at school when he was about fifteen, things he never fully understood but still went with. They started telling him things and asking him to do favors. He couldn't remember much about the day his mother died, but still remembered some.

He noticed a sheet of paper on the counter, folded up and charred. He opened it - inside, in his mother's handwriting: "Regret. Regret. Regret. Regret." He could remember how the knife felt in his bad paw. He reached for a wooden spoon and stirred the cold soup; the broth had turned a sickly brownish-red. He remembered whispering "I love you, Mom". He remembered how the spurts of blood from her throat started strong and then grew weaker, weaker, weaker. He picked up one of the chunks of meat and studied it in the light: it only had fur on one side, white fur streaked with red. He remembered his friends patting his back and murmuring their words to him. He remembered the knife sinking into still-warm flesh and scraping against bone. He remembered how her blood tasted slightly different than his own.

He looked at the paper again: the 3 of the February 13 at the top was blotched out. Regret, regret, regret. He stirred the soup again; a finger floated to the surface, and then an eyeball. Regret, regret. He remembered the silence of his mother's bedroom, the silence and the horrible, horrible darkness. He remembered finding his friends gone, his the only heartbeat in the room, in the house. He was alone. He was alone. Regret, regret, regret. He remembered the way her flesh felt on his tongue and in his throat when he first swallowed, and then again, and again, and again, each time cutting from a different section of her body. Regret, regret.

The light flicked off, and the humming shortly followed.