Safety Line

Written by: Graham Smith

It was a crime scene — an especially bad one by St. Mary’s standards. The quiet village, nestled in picturesque cottage country, saw no more than thirty deaths per year. Rarely a single homicide. Three officers were dispatched to an earthy, two-story colonial, surrounded by tall spruce trees and autumn foliage. Youngest among them was Deputy Hendrix. Nicknamed Boots by accompanying officers Horace and Parks, Hendrix was still green, and more than a little jittery. He had never seen a homicide, and had to hold back his lunch when he saw what became of poor old Mrs. Darby.

“Boots…create a perimeter around the house,” Parks said. He and Horace began questioning the housekeeper and Mrs. Darby’s husband. Both were visibly shaken.

Hendrix nodded and began unspooling yellow tape from a clunky metal dispenser. It contained a thousand feet of POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS repeated over and over. He held it from the top handle and scanned the area.

Mrs. Darby was everywhere. Crushed fragments of bone lay in a semicircle. There was a dark green T-shirt lying on the floor with two straight lines of tiny holes running up the armline. Tangled up inside the shirt was a patch of loose skin, later determined to be parts of the neck and right shoulder. The carpet was splotched red, and there, sitting in the center of the room, was a severed arm with ligaments sticking out like pink weeds. There was no torso, and there was no head.

“She put up one hell of a fight,” Horace said. And she had. Not all the blood found was hers — some being dark and foul-smelling like motor oil — and there, on the northernmost corner of the room, was a broken lamp dripping with black goo. It was deduced that Mrs. Darby soon weakened and was dragged out of the house with no resistance.

Officer Parks got a version of the story from Taffy, the housekeeper. She was changing linens in the bedroom when she heard the crashing of glass from the next room. Mr. Darby, a retired lecturer at St. Mary’s University, went silent with shock, practically catatonic. When Taffy entered the room, the red oak armoire was torn to splinters, glass was scattered, and the pulpy mess that was Mrs. Darby stained all remaining furniture. The dog, a twelve-year old Jack Russell Terrier, was left alone. Tired, old Alfredo noticed the commotion and wandered off toward the bedroom, promptly falling asleep. The only other thing Taffy could describe was a rhythmic mewling, like a baby deer crying for its mother.

St. Mary’s was not local to bears or predatory animals of any kind. The usual suspects were Virginia opossums or fat raccoons, digging into trash and moving lazily on quiet roads. Whatever did this was a carnivore, some feral flesh-eater that Hendrix prayed he’d never meet.

Under the glow of porchlight he thought of his own parents — both roughly the age of Mrs. Darby —lounging in the living room, watching Jeopardy and drinking Diet Coke. He pictured their quiet evening being disturbed by some unknown threat. The thought was deeply troubling but he could not scrub it from his mind.

Hendrix wrapped the tape around an electrical pole and through the rim of an above-ground pool. It was drawn out in one continuous piece. Either he wasn’t aware the dispenser came equipped with a steel blade for cutting, or he believed that breaking the tape would land him in some kind of trouble. So the line stretched on.

He maintained a six-foot distance from the path of patchy grass and gore, brushing up against heavy branches on the treeline. It was a clear, cool night in St. Mary’s. A slow creeping breeze swept honey-brown maple leaves across the ground.

“Horace, how do I know when it’s completely secure?” Hendrix called out from the edge of the lawn.

Officer Horace turned and spoke sharply, with a militant tone “Jesus, use your head Boots. I don’t want any neighbourhood kids hopping a fence and sneaking on to my crime scene. Cut everything off.”

Hendrix did not ask for clarification. He wedged himself through the first row of short, spreading spruce trees, the tape trailing behind him like a tail. He trekked forward. The forest, named the Archlands after the peculiar way the crowns would bow to each other, was much larger than what appeared from the lawn.

The tape shivered in the wind, which only grew stronger as Hendrix approached the wilderness — a marshy terrain of tall shrubs and mature plantlife. His mind wandered.

He became entranced in the task, like zoning out on a highway, and the tough dirt soon became loamy soil in the undergrowth. The blood trail ended twenty feet out, but his boots carried him much farther. By the time he snapped back to reality the porchlight was gone. The view of the old colonial, telephone wires, the alternating red blue gleam of the police strobe, all gone. He found himself alone, with no compass to return other than the long yellow tape that had finally snagged at the end of the roll.

That’s impossible, he thought. All one thousand feet, completely spent. He pulled it taut and looked around. The gentle breeze was now a mad wind striking against the tape, threatening to sever it.

Hendrix turned and began walking back to the crime scene. The tape fell slack and regrouped in the dispenser. He laughed nervously, ashamed of his own negligence. I’ll never hear the end of this one, he thought. There was safety in the embarrassment. He knew that he’d soon be free of the forest where the greatest threat awaiting him was mockery from Horace and Parks. That was all that kept him from the panic of not only being lost, but seeing no landmarks of any kind.

The sky itself was blocked off by the bending branches. The world around him appeared pitch-black, all moonlight strangled beneath the shrouded canopy of the Archlands.

He felt a wave of unease. On his belt was a police-issued flashlight with three settings. He switched on the highest intensity, creating a cone of light against the darkness. With the other hand he held the dispenser firmly, gathering tape, and following the reflective yellow path that floated like an arc between two strands of wire.

As he found a steady pace, he thought of the summers he spent wakeboarding in Bobcaygeon. His dad would take him out to the lake at dawn, driving his orange-rimmed sports boat maybe a little too fast while young Hendrix towed from behind. “Staying up is the hard part.” His father told him “Once I see you stand up, I’m gonna be hauling major tush at 30km/h. At that point, keep your arms locked as I pull you along, and don’t let go, not even for a second.” Hendrix’s arms were dictated by muscle memory. He stayed calm and let the gentle pull of the tape guide him forward.

The air was frigid now. He felt the chill from his ears to his chest, but nothing lower. The grass he walked on was untouched by frost. There was no water ahead, no meadows. Just blackish-grey trees, which emerged two-by-two as barkless pillars, each lacking the familiar, track-like ridges of a common tree. Trudging forward was like remembering a nightmare the morning after, with only scant details coming to the surface.

Without warning there was a scream from his immediate right. It bellowed in a sustained cry that startled Hendrix senseless. When it stopped the silence was horrible and felt tinged with an air of soft menace. Shit-scared, he pivoted swiftly. The flashlight was turned towards the direction of the sound, illuminating more trees. In the lightpath was a parallax of endless glade.

Another scream erupted, followed by another. The flashlight fell from his hands as he guarded his right ear from damage. Muffled slightly, the sound pummeled Hendrix into a half-fetal position until his left ear was pressed against the ground. He thought the scream could be an animal, maybe the crying of a scared ungulate, dying or on the verge of death. But there was something disturbingly human about it.

It gurgled with this watery mucus sound that swished in the mouth of each yelp — a sickening tone like no mammal he had ever heard. No mammal except one. It sounded like a person, a woman in fact, who was being prodded at by tools, as if in a dentist’s chair. Was it poor old Mrs. Darby, screaming for help? Don’t be stupid, he thought. She was long dead at this point, with most of her body dispersed back at the home.

He dropped the dispenser which started to drag away. When the noise ceased Hendrix rose to his feet and began racing, breathlessly, towards the yellow line. The flashlight laid behind him, still on, lying in a tuft of mossy soil.

The chase continued. Hendrix began losing sight of the fluorescent yellow line, which thinned in the night like white hair. He was aware at that moment that letting go of that line for even a moment was death, and here he was watching it slip out of sight. He wasn’t unathletic to any degree. He ran on weekdays before work, and played shortstop on the department softball team. But the combined panic of his unknown surroundings, and the clumsy, myopic way he avoided trees and exposed roots slowed him down. Finally his lungs caught up to him in a fiery wave and he staggered for breath. The last wisp of that canary-coloured stream faded into nothing behind the arms of a red cedar.

Each breath burned like a son of a bitch. His head throbbed. Sweat poured from his arms and his hairline, raining down on his muddy boots. Often, the best recovery position for runners is to slump over, hands placed on knees, which is just what he did. He waited for his heart to settle and his breath to return. After two minutes in the dark, Hendrix rolled his back up slowly and exhaled an even breath. Only then did he face what he dreaded from the first moment he passed through the forest wall. Complete isolation.

Behind him was blackness. There wasn’t a glint of light coming from the discarded flashlight. Ahead were the same faceless trees, but now they were only shapes, slender and pointed like antlers crossing into each other. They formed an impassible, skyless dome. Sight was all but impossible. His only desire was finding light, trapping it until he could find more, then more, finally unearthing moonlight, or even sunlight if his journey took him into morning. His hands brushed along the trees, quickly becoming his only method of navigation. Little by little he advanced, arms outstretched like a blind man.

This forest wasn’t like the ones he knew out east. Those were dense with small trees bearing full green foliage, each one gently blending into the next. While the Archland trees eventually met seventy, maybe eighty feet from the ground, they started far apart, like islands, each containing their own guarded world. Hendrix pushed. His legs were still rubbery from the run so he took on a calm, deliberate pace.

The wind had changed, picking up and bringing with it light drops of rain. At the fifth tree he had stumbled across in the full dark, Hendrix thought he saw the moon. Sweat had poured over his eyes and the veil of leaves had eclipsed the universe, and yet there was this unmistakable, off-white ring that materialized before him. It danced faintly as a pale replica of the moon — the same moon that had, up until this point, been long since absent. As he forged ahead on broken roots and hidden pitfalls, the white glow turned yellow and the circle fell away into a drifting ribbon. The tape. It was there, intact, about six meters away and fifteen feet up, caught on a weak branch.

Where was it catching light? There was no source he could locate. Strangely, he could clearly read the text POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS without difficulty. The words floated in space high above as if they were sky-written. The dispenser was gone. From the branch the shining line rose and fell, slick with rain. It continued onwards into the void, a welcomed sight for Hendrix.

He climbed the tree which appeared, from first glance, to be the one that seized his tape. He used the crook of his elbow to hoist himself onto the first bough, a dry branch, brittle and ready to snap. Now in the air, he realized the tape was pinched by a twig on an adjacent tree. With blind impulse he pushed off from the frame of the bough, leveraging himself forward with a fistful of rigid needles. The tape caught in his fingers before he plummeted into the underbrush.

Hendrix landed with a thud on a small grouping of shrubs that quickly yielded to his weight, swallowing him up in a net of English ivy. He rolled with the bush like a sniper in a Ghillie suit and arose to find the tape wrapped about his knuckles. Relief. After a strong tug, he felt the tense limits of the line where he had last secured it in the Darby’s yard. The wind had ceased and other than a few nightjars calling for each other (a rattling tune - virpp chik chuk), the night was quiet around him. No further cries were heard from the creature that lurked outside of his vision.

At one arm-length at a time, Hendrix walked back with the tape, kicking up clumps of muck with his shoe. The trust he felt in the yellow strip was like nothing he had experienced before. When wakeboarding, if he ever let go of the foam handle connected to his rope, there would be a jolt of fear, followed by a wipeout in the choppy waters —more embarrassing than painful— then finally the sound of his dad’s rusty orange ProStar turning around to come get him. Here, there was no boat and the closest thing he had to a handle was a thread of flimsy plastic.

The tape was wound around his right hand thrice-over and he followed it through every bend and turn. He tried to push away any lingering doubt but it soon began to take root. He couldn’t actually recall making any turns when he first laid down the tape. On this walk back, there were sharp rights and lefts that wrapped around tree-trunks, and weaved through dead logs, none of which was familiar.

The plant life around him was thickening. Overgrown rootstock had fossilized in an archaic formation of wood and stone. He found less patches of free space between the trees and more cushiony, plush leaves that loomed throughout. He stepped on fat, black tubers, which sprouted like ulcers bursting on the body of a sick man.

At every repetition of POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS, Hendrix knew there was something wrong. It was all so alien to him, like neither himself or any human being had walked this path before. And yet, even when he had to squeeze himself through layers of yew that felt strange, almost primordial, he did not yield from his mission. Don’t let go, not even for a second his father’s voice rang in his ears.

Resting underneath the silence were street sounds, rural cicadas, the muted sound of music from a park or amphitheater. It was life and civilization, clearer than he had ever heard before, boisterous and inviting. His face was grazed by an awning of thorns overhead. The pain was sharp but he stayed the course, alternating his grip, tugging slightly, feeling that the end of the line was near. He only realized how right he was when the tape began tugging back.

Horace, maybe Parks, had found the long, polyethene strand that he had left behind. They were sending him a signal. To Hendrix, this was the boat turning around. His pace increased and he followed the rhythmic pull of the tape, reassured that the nightmare was over. The sounds increased, pulsing against the wind.

It was then that the tape wrenched. He fell, dragged by the arm. The hand that was still woven in the tape began turning a purplish-red as the tape strained violently, locked to his fingers. He was pulled forward along the damp forest floor. Saplings stained his clothing. Coarse alders broke off on his body and tore into flesh. The pain was immense. Just as abruptly as it began, the tugging came to a full stop, leaving Hendrix sprawled and gasping.

There was pain everywhere. He looked at his hand which he had already suspected to have been permanently mangled. His fingers wiggled gingerly. A small victory. He laid flat on his belly, using his uninjured hand to prop himself up to a mountain climber’s pose, one leg raised and bent. When he finally angled his head toward the path of the tape, he saw That.

It was the great That. That which pulled him forward, That what had made the horrible sound from earlier, and That which had almost certainly killed Mrs. Darby.

From where he lay, the creature was cloaked in darkness. All that shone in the closed-cover of the forest were two alabaster horns. They were interlaced like fingers on a flat blade of bone above the forehead. In the mesh of antlers was the tape, bloody and strung up in the core many times over. It dripped black, syrupy liquid.

The thing approached Hendrix. It trotted forward like a proud pronghorn, lacking many of the friendly features that made that animal, at least in Hendrix’s eyes, endearing. Where there should have been fluffy white-brown fur there was gooseflesh, rough, like the skin of a basketball. The beast brought with it the smell of musty towels, blooming with mold.

It sauntered forward, slow and weightless — and while it walked on four limbs, its hind legs were unusually strong, as if at any moment it could choose to stand upright. Just like a man.

Then Hendrix heard a wail. From the beast’s mouth came a sound that terrified him to no end. Not in its strangeness, but in its uncanny normalcy. Buses. It was the squeal of a city bus, the kind common at night in St. Mary’s, pulling to a stop nearby. Underneath it was the chatter of passengers, the buzzing of street lamps, and soft evening breeze filling gaps of silence. The thing closed its mouth and all sound stopped. It guided me here, the fucking thing. It was hunting me and I walked right up to it.

He was right about one thing. Letting go of the tape was death. He thought back to his first stumble: the scream, the tape vanishing. Finding it again was more than a miracle. It was a trap. The creature, which now in the closeness of his vision resembled a skinned deer, bowed its head to Hendrix. An unexpected moment of gentleness before the kill. In his final moments, Hendrix felt eerily calm, almost docile, looking into the large eyes of his hunter.

Yards away, Horace idled by the outskirts of the Darby yard. He was calling out Boots! BOOTS! and signaling to Parks with all four fingers held together, pointing into the forest. Parks nodded and radioed another officer for backup. The caution tape was tethered through an iron fence which had burst open, and was left swaying in the fall breeze. Horace felt a warm flush fall on his ruddy face as he lurched past the gate. He was irritated, no doubt, by the rookie officer who got himself lost, possibly hurt, during what might have been the most important case in St. Mary’s modern history.

Further along the line, Horace got lost in his bitterness. Scenarios floated into his mind — all negative. Mrs. Darby’s killer fleeing into the night, a case turning cold before his eyes. All due to some stupid kid who couldn’t follow simple instructions. Unable to focus on anything else, Horace trusted the slim sliver of tape with his journey, grazing it with his hand as he moved forward.

His crime scene faded behind him, leading him into a new one. By the time Horace realized where he was, or how far he had traveled, all light, artificial or natural, was snuffed from sight. He was alone in the heart of the Archlands.

It was only then that a strange wetness hit his fingers. It was slimy, warm and oddly tubular. Horace went white. He ran his fingers along the line, shaking with fear. The ropey line bounced with each touch. Elastic. What he couldn’t see in the suffocating darkness was that the tape had ended twenty feet back. What trailed in its place, neatly tied to the end, was the full length of Hendrix’s large intestine.

Graham Smith is a writer and filmmaker from St. Catharines, Ontario, now based in Toronto. A lifelong fan of horror, his work is heavily influenced by genre literature and pop culture, both classic and contemporary. He draws particular inspiration from authors like Lisa Tuttle—especially Nest of Nightmares—Eric LaRocca, Joyce Carol Oates, and, of course, Stephen King.

After a decade of writing scripts for fellow filmmakers, Graham is currently editing his directorial debut short film, After You Squish Them. He is also working on his first novella, The Skillet, with plans to complete both projects by March 2026.