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# The Two Men: New England Strange Fiction
- URL: https://www.tebeforejitsu.com/the-two-men-new-england-strange-fiction/
- Published: 2026-09-17T16:35:44.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-17T16:35:44.000Z
- Description: New England Strange Fiction - the first part of this story is a real childhood memory. The rest is fiction.
- Author: Adam Lamagna
- Tags: Writing

Strange things happen in the woods, especially in New England, and even more so in the old farmland of Bozrah.

Bozrah means *enclosure*.

I didn't know that when I was eleven years old. I didn't know much of anything about the place beyond what every kid in our neighborhood knew: if you went deep enough into those woods, eventually you would find the devil worshippers.

Nobody knew who had actually seen them. Nobody knew exactly where they met or what they did once they got there. That didn't matter. When you're eleven years old, information doesn't need a source, it just needs a spark. Some older kid tells another kid whose brother tells somebody at the bus stop, and by the time the story reaches you it has become documented fact. 

There were devil worshippers in the woods. You knew that as an eleven-year-old in Bozrah.

They came out at night. They did things to animals. They painted strange symbols on trees. And somewhere far beyond where any of us were supposed to go, hidden among the old farms between Norwich and Bozrah, they had built a temple….deep in the woods.

My best friend Matt lived a few houses away from me on a horseshoe-shaped street called Knollcrest. There was no knoll and very little crest. Knollcrest hung off Mountainview Drive like a monkey dangling from a tree branch with both arms, which made the whole neighborhood sound much more mountainous than it actually was. In reality, it was a quiet suburban loop of lawns, driveways, basketball hoops, and kids on bikes. But behind those houses, the land still belonged to an older Connecticut. At the top of the horseshoe, the backyards simply stopped and the woods began.

Those woods were enormous to us.

They weren't really wilderness. We know that as adults. There were houses somewhere beyond them, old farms, roads, power lines and probably a dozen places where we could have walked out if we'd continued long enough in the right direction. But an eleven-year-old doesn't experience distance that way. Once the roofs disappeared behind the trees and you could no longer hear a lawn mower or a car door slamming, you might as well have been a hundred miles from any civilization. As eleven-year-olds, we were on our own. 

The woods stretched through forgotten farmland toward Bozrah, crossed by streams and old cart paths and stone walls that seemed to have no reason for being there. We'd been exploring them for years, although "exploring" usually meant going a little farther than we had the time before, getting nervous, convincing ourselves we weren't nervous, and eventually turning around.

That summer, traversing through the woods and finding the temple became our mission.

We didn't call it a mission every day, but every time we went into those woods, we thought this might be the day we'd find it. We still did eleven-year-old stuff. We'd throw rocks at things for no particular reason, find sticks that looked enough like swords or rifles to become one for the afternoon, follow streams just to see where they went, climb things we probably shouldn't have climbed, and argue intermittently about whether either of us actually knew where we were. But somewhere in the back of our minds, we were always looking for that temple.

But every trip took us a little farther. And every trip ended the same way.

No temple. 

Then came that Saturday in August.

It was one of those bright New England summer mornings when the sun is already high and hot before you've figured out what you're going to do with the day. I remember the thickness of the green everywhere. The trees were fully leafed out, the undergrowth high, the mosquitoes relentless in the damp places. I remember meeting Matt in his backyard and looking toward that familiar opening in the trees. The trailhead we had taken so many times before.

Neither of us told our parents where we were really going. We were going farther this time. That was the plan.

For the first hour or so, nothing happened.

The woods were the woods. The ground rose and fell beneath us, sometimes soft with years of pine needles and leaves, sometimes hard-packed where deer or people had made narrow trails. We followed paths we recognized until they branched into paths we didn't, splitting and narrowing like arteries in a human body, carrying us farther into the woods. Occasionally we'd find evidence that somebody else had been there—a beer can crushed beneath the leaves, an old glass bottle, a cigarette pack bleached nearly white by rain and sunlight—but eventually even those things disappeared.

The farther we walked, the older everything seemed. That is the only way I can describe it.

The trees grew closer together. The undergrowth thickened. The sunlight that had followed us from the neighborhood became broken into narrow shafts that reached the forest floor in scattered patches. Even the air seemed different beneath the canopy, cooler and wetter, carrying the smell of moss and black earth and decomposing leaves.

Every so often we would come across another stone wall.

At eleven, I didn't understand them. I didn't know that much of Connecticut had once been cleared farmland, or that the forests we thought of as ancient had grown back over fields abandoned generations earlier. All I knew was that there were walls in places where walls shouldn't be.

They would emerge from beneath the leaves almost without warning—gray stones stacked waist-high, sometimes straight for hundreds of feet before disappearing beneath brush and trees. Some had collapsed into long piles covered in moss. Others were surprisingly intact, despite trees growing directly beside them that looked older than anyone I knew.

They divided nothing from nothing. Forest on one side. Forest on the other.

I remember wondering who had carried all those stones there. More than that, I wondered why.

I don't know how long we'd been walking when we found the fern.

That's the first thing I remember being wrong.

We had moved off whatever trail we'd been following and were picking our way through a low, wet section of woods. Ferns spread across the ground in every direction, hundreds of them rising almost to our knees, filling every open space between the trees. Their broad green fronds overlapped one another in layers, one on top of the next, until there wasn't a patch of forest floor left between them. It was as if they were trying to hide the ground beneath us, laying themselves across it to keep whatever was down there from probing eyes.

And then, in the middle of all that green, something happened.

There wasn't much wind under the trees. I remember that specifically because Matt stopped so suddenly that I nearly walked into him.

"Look at that."

At first I didn't know what he meant. Then I saw it.

Maybe fifteen feet away, in the middle of all those ferns, one plant was moving.

Not swaying. Not trembling. Moving.

Its palmed fronds were whipping violently from side to side as though it were caught in a hard wind. The stem bent nearly horizontal in one direction and then snapped back the other way. Its leaves fluttered and twisted so quickly that they blurred together.

But nothing around it moved.

That was what made it so strange. There were ferns touching it. They were perfectly still.

The leaves hanging from the trees above it were still. The brush beside it was still. I remember looking up toward the canopy expecting to see branches moving in a gust of wind, but the air against my face was completely calm.

Only that one fern moved. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Violently.

There are explanations for things like that. An animal underneath it. A vine caught on something. Some strange little current of air moving through the woods up from the ground. I've thought of plenty of explanations over the years.

None of them bothered me at eleven. At eleven, I simply knew it looked wrong.

Matt picked up a stick and threw it toward the fern. The stick disappeared into the greenery a few feet short of it.

The fern kept thrashing. We waited. Nothing came out. No squirrel. No rabbit. No bird.

Just that one green plant beating itself against the stillness of the forest.

Matt eventually laughed. Not because anything was funny. It was the kind of laugh you make when you're eleven and something scares you and you're not going to be the first person to admit it.

"Come on."

So we kept walking.

I don't know whether the smell came immediately after the fern or sometime later. That's the problem with memories this old. Some moments remain perfectly preserved while others seem to float around them, disconnected from time.

But I remember the smell. Even to this day.

It came faintly at first, mixed with the ordinary smells of the forest. Damp soil. Leaves. Moss. Rotting wood. Then something sweeter underneath it.

Not a good sweetness.

The smell reminded me of garbage left too long in summer heat, except there was something earthy mixed into it. Wet clothing left in a basement. Mushrooms growing beneath something dead. Meat just beginning to spoil.

It wasn't strong enough to make us gag. That almost made it worse.

We would catch it for a few seconds and then it would disappear. We'd walk another twenty yards and smell it again, slightly stronger this time, as though we were circling whatever produced it without knowing exactly where it was.

Neither of us said anything about it. Then we saw the wall.

It was different from the others. Or maybe that's just what memory has done to it.

The wall rose from the forest floor ahead of us, running perpendicular to the direction we'd been walking. The stones were larger than the ones we'd seen earlier, irregular chunks of gray granite fitted together without mortar. Moss filled the spaces between them. Dead leaves had collected against the bottom, and small roots disappeared between the stones as though the forest itself were slowly pulling the wall apart.

It stood about three feet high where we approached it.

I remember placing my hands on the top stones. They were cold. That surprised me because it was August.

Matt climbed over first. I followed. And on the other side of that wall, the woods changed.

I don't mean the trees were different. I mean something about the space felt different.

The undergrowth thinned. The ground became flatter. There was more open space between the trees, but somehow less light reached the ground. The forest seemed quieter there, although I can't remember when I first noticed the absence of sound.

We walked perhaps another fifty yards. Then we saw the building. Even now, that is the part I have the hardest time explaining.

It didn't come gradually into view.

There wasn't a moment when we noticed a corner of a roof through the trees and walked toward it.

One moment there were woods ahead of us. Then there was a white building. It seemed to have appeared fully formed between the trees.

We stopped. Neither of us spoke. 

It wasn't really a house.

It was too small and crude for that. It looked like something people had built from whatever materials they could carry into the woods. Sheets of plywood formed the walls. Pieces didn't quite meet at the corners. The roof looked nearly flat. Some of the plywood had warped outward from years of moisture.

And someone had painted the entire thing white. Not clean white.

The paint had weathered into the grayish color old bones sometimes have. Dirt streaked down the walls. Green moss or algae had begun creeping along the bottom where the plywood met the earth. In places the paint had peeled away in long strips, exposing dark wood underneath.

There were no proper windows that I remember. There were openings. Dark rectangles. And graffiti covered nearly every surface.

Some of it was ordinary. Names. Initials. Profanity. Things teenagers had probably spray-painted after discovering the place.

Other markings I couldn't understand. Circles. Crosses. Shapes inside other shapes. Letters or symbols that didn't look like letters.

I remember red paint. Maybe it was spray paint. Maybe it wasn't even red.

Memory changes things.

But that's how I see it whenever I think about the building. White walls. Black openings. Red marks. 

And the smell. The smell was stronger there.

That sweet, wet rot seemed to hang around the structure itself. It wasn't coming from any single direction anymore. It was simply part of the air.

Matt looked at me. I looked at him.

We didn't need to say it. We had found the temple.

Now, any sensible person would have turned around. Eleven-year-old boys are not sensible people.

We had spent most of the summer looking for this place. We had imagined finding it too many times. We'd probably bragged to other kids that we would. There was no possibility we weren't going inside.

We approached the opening.

The closer I got, the darker it seemed inside. My eyes needed a moment to adjust after the broken sunlight of the woods.

I remember standing at the entrance. I remember Matt beside me. I remember thinking that if somebody came out of those trees right then, we were in serious trouble.

Then we stepped inside. The floor was sand. That's one of the clearest things.

Sand. Not dirt. Not the dark New England soil we'd been walking over all morning.

Pale, loose sand covered the floor from wall to wall like a child’s sandbox. Our sneakers sank slightly into it, leaving clear impressions behind us.

I don't know why there would have been sand in there.

There was graffiti on the inside walls too. More symbols. More writing. Layers of it, some old and faded, some darker and newer.

And there was… stuff on the floor. At first it looked like garbage. Clothes. Rags. Plastic.

Then my eyes adjusted.

There was hair. Or fur. A clump of it. Something that might have been clothing was stuck to something darker underneath.

There were pieces of material I couldn't identify. Something pale. Something brown. Something that looked wet even though there was no water inside the shack.

I remember staring at that pile and feeling my mind trying to turn it into ordinary things. Old clothes. A dead animal. Garbage. Anything.

There was something else in the corner. Something larger.

Matt said my name. I turned toward him. 

And then—

I was standing in Matt's backyard.

For most of my life, I've convinced myself there has to be more to that memory.

Of course there is. There has to be. We ran home. That's what happened.

We saw something disgusting or frightening inside that shack, panicked and ran all the way back through the woods. An hour block of time in an eleven-year-old's Saturday disappeared because childhood memories aren't video recordings.

That's the rational explanation. I've repeated it to myself for years. Except I remember standing in Matt's backyard.

And I remember being out of breath. Not a little winded.

My lungs burned. My shirt was wet against my back. My legs felt weak beneath me, the way they did after sprinting as hard as I could.

Matt was breathing just as hard. Neither of us said anything. We stood near the edge of his yard looking back at the trail.

And the woods looked completely normal.

Bright green leaves. Sunlight. Birds. I remember wanting to ask Matt what had happened. But I didn't. Maybe he didn't want to ask me either.

Then... two men came out of the woods. We froze. They were older.

At eleven, anyone over thirty looked old, so I couldn't tell you their ages. They both had long hair and wore jeans and T-shirts. One was taller than the other.

They came through the same trail we had just come through. Or thought we had.

My first thought was immediate: devil worshippers.

Matt and I crouched near the edge of the yard, trying not to be seen.

The men never called to us.

The taller one didn't even look in our direction. He just kept walking toward the neighboring properties as though he knew exactly where he was going.

But the shorter man slowed.

I remember that. For years I didn't. But I do now.

He turned his head slightly toward Matt's yard. Toward us. 

There was something strange about the way he stood. Something about the slope of his shoulders. The way his right foot turned outward slightly when he walked.

Something familiar that my eleven-year-old brain couldn't place.

Then he followed the other man between the houses. And they disappeared.

Matt and I never went looking for the temple again.

---

Thirty-four years passed. That's a long time to carry a hole in your memory.

For most of my adult life, I rarely thought about that Saturday. Life fills itself. School becomes work. Friends move away. Parents get older. Houses change hands. The places that seemed enormous when you were a child become small when you drive past them as an adult.

But every few years something would bring the woods back. The smell of wet plywood. An old Connecticut stone wall. A patch of ferns beside a trail.

And suddenly I would remember that little white structure sitting among the trees.

I'd remember the sand beneath my sneakers. I'd remember looking down at that pile.

And then — Matt's backyard.

I hadn't spoken to Matt in years when I found him online. We exchanged the usual messages. How are you? Where are you living? Remember this person? Remember that person?

Eventually I typed:

*Do you remember the devil worshipper shack?*

The little dots appeared immediately. Then disappeared. Then appeared again.

Finally:

*Yeah.*

I stared at the screen for a while before typing again.

*Do you remember what happened inside?*

This time there were no dots. Five minutes passed. Then ten.

Finally my phone buzzed.

*No.*

Another message appeared immediately.

*Do you?*

*No.*

I typed the question I'd wanted to ask since I was eleven.

*Do you remember walking home?*

Nothing.

Then:

*No.*

I called him.

We talked for almost two hours. His memory was nearly identical to mine. The fern. The smell. The stone wall. The white building. The sand. The pile on the floor. Then his backyard.

And the two men.

"I always figured we ran," he said.

"So did I."

"We probably did."

"Probably."

Neither of us believed it. That's when Matt said something I hadn't thought about in years.

"Do you remember the two guys?"

"Yeah."

There was a pause.

"Something about that day was off and those two guys coming out of the woods seemed like they were following us."

I laughed. Then stopped. Because I was thinking the exact same thing. 

---

Three weeks later, we went back. We were old enough now to know better, but apparently that doesn't help.

The neighborhood had changed, but not as much as I'd expected. Some houses had different siding. Additions had been built. Trees that had been saplings when we were children now towered over rooftops. Driveways that had once held bicycles were crowded with SUVs and mid-size sedans.

But the opening to the woods was still there. Narrower. Overgrown. Waiting between the yards of Matt's old house and the neighbor's.

We stood at the trailhead for a while. "This is stupid," Matt said.

"Absolutely." I echoed in agreement.

Then we went in.

At first neither of us recognized anything. Thirty-four years changes a forest.

But there was something strange about being back beneath those trees. Smells and sounds returned before memories did. Damp leaves. Pine and mud. Birds chirping. The coolness of shaded ground beneath the August heat.

We had maps on our phones now. GPS. Satellite imagery.

All the things eleven-year-old boys didn't have.

We knew exactly where we were. At least we thought we did. 

We walked for nearly an hour, then our phones lost service. That wasn't particularly strange, but what was strange was that the GPS stopped moving.

We kept walking. The little blue dot did not.

"Great," Matt said.

I put my phone away. A few minutes later we entered a low wet section of woods and I saw the ferns before I understood why they frightened me.

They covered the forest floor. Literally, thousands of them. Every frond perfectly still ... .except one.

About fifteen feet from the trail, a single fern was whipping violently from side to side.

I stopped. Thirty-four years completely disappeared. There are moments when memory doesn't feel like remembering. It feels like being physically returned somewhere. I was eleven again. I could feel the August heat. I could hear Matt saying, *look at that.*

The fern bent nearly to the ground and snapped upright again.

Back. Forth. Back. Forth. The plants surrounding it remained perfectly still.

Matt stood beside me. For several seconds neither of us spoke.

Then he whispered:

"No."

And that's when the smell reached us. Sweet. Wet. Rotten.

I felt something tighten in my stomach. I had forgotten how accurately the mind can preserve a smell.

Wet clothing. Earth. Spoiled meat. The forest suddenly seemed darker. And honestly, we should have turned around, but instead we kept walking as if we were our 11 year old selfs. 

Maybe curiosity doesn't disappear when you grow up. Maybe it just gets better at making excuses.

The stone wall appeared through the trees. Gray granite beneath green moss. Three feet high. Collapsed in places. Roots like veins still trying to rip the wall apart, running through the forest in both directions until it disappeared.

Matt stopped. Neither of us needed to say anything. I put my hands on the stones. They were cold. Just as I remembered.

We climbed over. And the woods went quiet. Not gradually. One moment there were insects and distant birds and the faint movement of leaves overhead. The next there was nothing. 

Ahead of us, through the trees, something white appeared.

My stomach dropped as the building stood exactly where memory had left it. White plywood. Peeling paint. Dark openings. Graffiti.

Thirty-four Connecticut winters had passed since we'd last seen it. Thirty-four winters of snow and ice and rain. Thirty-four springs of thawing ground and falling branches.

The structure should have been gone. Instead it hadn't aged a day.

Matt stood beside me staring at it.

"That's impossible."

I didn't answer.

The smell was stronger now. And then, from somewhere inside the white building, we heard children talking. Matt turned toward me.

I knew those voices. One was his. The other was mine.

We moved closer. Slowly. Through a gap in the plywood, I saw two boys standing inside.

One was staring at something on the sandy floor. The other stood beside him.

I recognized Matt's hair. I recognized his shirt. Then I recognized myself. Eleven years old. Standing inside the temple.

Matt grabbed my shoulder.

"Back up."

I couldn't move.

The younger version of me turned. For one impossible second, I thought he was looking directly at me.

Then everything went black.

---

I was walking. That's the next thing I remember. Walking through the woods.

Matt was several yards ahead of me.

My lungs hurt. My legs hurt. There was sweat running down my back.

"Matt."

He didn't stop.

"Matt."

"What?"

"Where are we?"

He turned. His face was pale.

"I don't know."

We kept moving. Then sunlight appeared between the trees. Houses. Backyards. The neighborhood. We stepped out of the trail.

Matt bent over with his hands on his knees. I stood there trying to breathe. And that's when I saw them.

Two boys were crouching near the edge of the yard. Watching us.

One was Matt. Eleven years old.

The other was me. I couldn't speak.

The boys looked terrified.

Young Matt whispered something. Young Alvin stared toward us.

I remembered this moment. I remembered hiding in that yard. I remembered watching two long-haired men emerge from the woods. Jeans. T-shirts. One taller than the other.

I reached up and touched my hair. Matt straightened.

"What?"

I pointed toward the boys.

"Do you see them?"

Matt looked.

"See who?"

The boys were still there. Young Alvin, young me, was staring at me, old me.

And suddenly I remembered what I'd thought when I was eleven. There was something strange about those two men walking out of the woods.

Something familiar. The way one of their shoulders hung. The slight turn of his right foot.

My walk.

Matt started toward the neighboring yard.

"Come on."

I didn't move. Because something else had occurred to me. For thirty-four years, I had remembered that the two men hadn't seen us.

But standing on the other side of that memory, I finally understood.

One of them had. The shorter man had stopped.

He had looked directly at eleven-year-old Alvin.

Just as I was doing right now.

I wanted to walk across the yard. I wanted to tell that kid what had happened. I wanted to tell him that he was looking at himself.

More than anything, I wanted to tell him not to be afraid. But something stopped me. Because I suddenly remembered the white building.

The sand. The voices. And the part that was still missing.

Whatever had happened inside that structure thirty-four years ago had just happened again.

And I still couldn't remember it.

So I followed Matt. We crossed the neighboring yard. I looked back once.

The boys were gone.

---

We never found the building again. We tried. Not immediately, but years later.

We used property maps, historical surveys and satellite images. We found the old farmland. We found stone walls. We found trails that looked familiar enough to make my skin crawl.

But we never found the white plywood structure.

According to every map we could find, there had never been a building where we remembered it.

There was one other thing.

A few years after our second trip, Matt called me. He'd been going through an old box his mother had kept. School papers. Baseball cards. Photographs.

He found one from that summer. August.

His mother had taken it from the back deck.

Matt and I were standing near the woods.

Eleven years old.

We weren't looking at the camera. We were looking toward the neighboring yard.

At first, Matt thought there was something wrong with the photograph. Then he enlarged it. There were two men walking between the houses.

Long hair. Jeans. T-shirts. One taller than the other.

Matt sent me the picture. I looked at it for a long time.

Then I noticed something neither of us remembered. The shorter man wasn't walking away.

He had stopped. His body was half turned toward the backyard. Toward the two boys. Toward me.

And even though the photograph was grainy, I could see one arm hanging beside him. His other hand was raised.

Two fingers extended. Not waving. Pointing. Back toward the edge of the woods.

I called Matt.

"Did you see his hand?"

"Yeah."

"What do you think it means?"

Matt didn't answer.

Then I noticed something else in the photograph. Behind the boys was the trail.

Deep inside the darkness between the trees, almost too far back to see, there was a patch of white.

I enlarged it until the pixels broke apart. A wall. Maybe. Or a doorway.

And standing inside it was someone else...or something else. Watching all four of us.

I still think about those woods sometimes. I think about the building. I think about the smell. I think about that single fern thrashing wildly in a forest where nothing else moved.

But mostly I think about the missing time.

Because when Matt and I went back thirty-four years later, we thought we were returning to something that had happened to us when we were children.

I'm not sure that's true anymore. Maybe the two Saturdays weren't thirty-four years apart.

Maybe somewhere beyond that stone wall, there was never any distance between them at all.

And sometimes, late at night, I think about what Bozrah means.

*Enclosure.*

When I was eleven, I thought the stone walls running through those woods were remnants of farms. Boundaries built by people long dead to tell one man where his property ended and another man's began.

I don't think that anymore. I think boundaries can serve another purpose.

Sometimes you build a wall to keep something out.

Sometimes you build one to keep something in.

And sometimes the wall isn't meant for either.

Sometimes it's only there so you'll know when you've crossed it.