She first saw it as she parked her car in front of the old cottage. A tall monstrous figure made of vines-- at first she thought it was a tree-- looming in the shadows of the forest. She did a double take and it was gone. She shrugged it off as a trick of the light, and retrieved her suitcase from the trunk of the car.
The second time she saw it was through the kitchen window as she washed the dishes. This time, it didn't disappear when she looked away, instead seeming to grow larger the more she stared at it. She shuddered and closed the blinds, deciding she was done doing the dishes.
The third time she saw it, it was through her bedroom window on the second floor of the cottage. The figure loomed by the treeline surrounding the cottage, seeming to flicker with the shadows cast by the trees in the dim moonlight. She couldn't be sure, but she thought she saw it look up at the bedroom window, straight at her. Her breath hitched and she drew down the curtains, turning off the light and huddling underneath her three blankets.
Anika liked to think she was a rational person. She didn't believe in ghosts or monsters, or whatever the thing was that seemed to haunt the forest around the cottage. She wasn't scared.
That was a lie. But she couldn't let that stop her from fixing up the place. She'd inherited it from her grandmother, and she didn't want to see it go to ruin. She also wasn't sure that the figure meant her any harm. It could be a perfectly friendly, creepy, ominous figure that lurked in the woods.
The next time she saw it, it was right outside the low wooden fence that boxed in the backyard and vegetable garden. She'd been pulling up weeds that were threatening the vegetables when she felt a chill run down her spine. She turned to see she was mere feet away from it. She stared right into where its face should be, a spiral of vines that curled around the hole where an eye might be. The figure must have been eight feet tall, a huge mass of writhing vines and branches that seemed to grow out of the ground. Small pink and yellow flowers and green bulbs dotted the thing's body. Though it filled her with a sense of foreboding, she found it oddly beautiful.
She stepped forward. "What do you want from me?"
The vines froze and Anika got the sense the figure was staring at her. She stood staring back at it for several minutes, her eyes drawn to the dizzying spiral of its face. Slowly, it receded back into the shadows, disappearing among the shrubs and foliage. She saw a ring of mushrooms where the figure had stood. She went back to her gardening, trying to rid herself of the chills that ran down her spine.