Ronald

The children tended to avoid the woods when Ronald was down there, abandoning their dens and hideaways until the crazy old man had gone away. Their parents would warn against him, they’d say he was dangerous, and some would even bring curfew forward to keep the children inside when Ronald was around. That’s how the children knew to keep away from him.

Some of the children were brave though, or foolish, their curiosity getting the better of them. They would watch Ronald stumbling around the woods, wearing a black bin-bag like a cloak, with the hole in the top for his wrinkly head. They’d stand at a distance, of course, but when he saw them, he’d simply stare in the creepy way that he did, examining them until they became frightened and left.

And so they watched, as crazy Ronald walked around the woods, gathering sticks and fallen branches from the ground, bringing them together and arranging them into some strange shrine of sticks down by the river, that he likely used to burn the children that he captured on. One time, they saw him find an old rope, and for an hour he laboured over tying the rope to a tree, and the children spoke of how he would hang his victims from it, sometimes they’d even still be alive. Using some of his spare branches, Ronald sometimes blocked the waterflow in the river, changing its direction. Probably, the children whispered, to drown people in, and to wash away their bodies.

Ronald seemed to do these maniacal things every day, the same things down in those woods, with the sticks and the ropes and the water. He was a little bit crazy, probably a bum or a drunkard, the adults said.

Forty years earlier, a little boy used to visit those same woods. Ronald didn’t have many friends then, he was a quiet boy, but he enjoyed his own company and kept himself busy with just his imagination. He’d visit the woods outside his parents’ homestead every day, gathering sticks and fallen branches from the ground to make his dens. The dens were his fortresses, isolated and inpenetrable. He would steal a black bin-bag from his father’s shed, and wear it as a cloak, and pretend he was the Lone Knight, sworn to protect the people of his den. Ronald would use the spare branches to dam the river, to redirect fresh drinking water to his den, and sometimes he found old ropes which he would tie to the trees so he could climb them and keep watch.

Sometimes the other children watched Ronald, and so he stared and examined them until they decided to leave, calling him all sorts of names. But that didn’t really bother him, the people of his den loved him, and he was happy there. He imagined one day, when he was older, and a successful carpenter like his father, he would visit the woods then, and still he’d be the Lone Knight, founder of the dens, protector of the people, idolised by all.