Devil Forest

by Jack Lewis

  “It’s not that.”

  “What is it then?”

  “You sure you want me to read this?”

  He nodded. He was gripping the edge of the table now. “Out with it.”

  I cleared my throat and read the title. “Ghost hunter; an optimist, a truth seeker…or deluded?”

  Jeremiah’s smile flattened. He urged me on, and I read every word of what turned out to be more of a smear piece than complimentary.

  She had painted Jeremiah as a fool, as a guy chasing ghosts, as an obsessive with poor social skills, a clouded mind, running after deluded dreams like a dog staring at the reflection of a bone in a lake.

  Jeremiah winced at every word. As much as I enjoyed goading him sometimes, it pained me to see him like that.

  By the time I had finished, he sat back with his arms crossed. There wasn’t thunder in his face – that would have been easier to take. Instead, he looked like an artist who’d just seen his life’s work compared to a pile of crap.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He arranged the paper printouts in front of him. “So like I was saying,” he began, his voice a little weaker than before. “These wells, they…”

  “She did a number on you. You can’t trust journos; what she wrote isn’t the truth, it’s just what she knew would get more people reading. Don’t take it to heart.”

  “Ella, if I let everything every doubter ever said about me sit on my shoulders, I’d have the stoop of a hundred-year-old man. I’m a duck, and the water’s running off my back. You see it?”

  I couldn’t see the imaginary water, but I could hear how forced his tone was. I almost thought about giving him his birthday present early just to cheer him up, but we were still two days away from our shared birthday.

  The best thing I could do was to play along and to hear him out about the wells and the surrounding narrative. I was a little nonplussed at the potential of this mystery, but I knew that Jeremiah chose his hunts carefully. He didn’t like to waste time chasing phantoms and urban legend; he was looking for something real.

  “Okay,” I said. “So they found one of these wells. It has the symbol on it?”

  He nodded. “Blaketree as a village has had its fair share of shit showered down on it. Like I told you about the others; over the years it’s had unexplained deaths, unexpected ones, accidents. All kinds of weird stuff that shouldn’t have happened. A few years back, a boy went missing. He used to walk home from school through the forest. Apparently he’d made a little den there, and he liked to hide inside and read comics and stuff. You know, normal boy stuff.”

  “I don’t like where this is going.”

  “You shouldn’t, because he disappeared one day. They looked everywhere, and had a bunch of villagers combing the forest for him. The village police only had four men and women working there, so they drafted some in from a town nearby. They searched for eight days, and there was no sign of him. And then they found the well.”

  “They didn’t know about it before then?”

  “It was hidden. A load of bushes had grown around it; you couldn’t see it. Since they were searching the forest so carefully, one of the police officers stumbled on it.”

  “And they must have thought he’d fallen down, or something?”

  Jeremiah nodded. “Right. They sent something down there - a camera with night vision, or something. When it hit the bottom they saw that the well was dry, and mud and stones blocked the tunnel. There's no way the boy could have been down there.”

  I was feeling a little dread about this. Most of the time paranormal events had a dark side to them, and almost every single time that darkness had human roots, not spectral ones.

  This was where Jeremiah’s investigations broached shadowy ground. He sometimes looked into things that were best left to the authorities. Murders, disappearances – that was a job for the police.

  “I don’t like this,” I said. “If a boy went missing, we shouldn’t be anywhere near it. At best, we’ll be intruding on the police work and, I don’t know, on grief, too, I guess. His parents, they…I just don’t think we should go out there. It feels cheap using it as a basis for your work.”

  Jeremiah took a scrap of paper from his pocket, unfolded it and placed it on the table. “It was the boy’s mother who wrote to me,” he said.

  I read the letter. The handwriting was messy and hurried; the words written so pleadingly that I almost wanted to hand it back to him.

  I carried on, finishing when I read the closing words of ‘please come.’

  “So she read about you on the internet,” I said.

  He nodded. “Poor woman. She was googling psychics, ghosts, that kind of stuff, and she found your blog.”

  “Your blog, you mean,” I said.

  “Well, you write it.”

  That was part of my job – not only did I have to follow Jeremiah around on his jaunts, but I had to take notes and then write them up when we’d finished. Jeremiah liked factual accounts, but I liked to spin the narrative. I wanted them to be readable, maybe a little entertaining.

  Now, though, I wished I hadn’t written them at all. They weren’t just the harmless accounts of a guy looking for ghosts; they’d taken on a darker role now, as a kind of grief magnet for a desperate woman.

  Her letter struck a pang in my heart.

  When the search for her boy ebbed, when the police made no progress and they couldn’t afford the resources to keep up the search when there was no sign of daylight, she had spent her life savings on a private investigator.

  The investigator had also turned up nothing, and now the woman was desperate. She was looking for mediums, psychics, anyone who could help.

  Not only that, but she wrote in the letter that she couldn’t get the well out of her mind. She visited it at night, staring into its depths, calling for her boy.

  And one night, she’d heard voices speak back to her.

  -6-

  Reading those words sent a chill through me. It was the idea of a well in the middle of the forest, a mouth of darkness with a grieving woman standing beside it, hearing her words echo back at her from the depths.

  But maybe that was the answer.

  “Echoes,” I said. “She wasn’t hearing strange voices; she heard her own voice echoed back at her.”

  “She’s explicit that she heard voices, plural. A guttural one, too. A man’s.”

  “Yeah, I read that. But still…”

  “They used to call them Wells of Darkness,” said Jeremiah. “After I read about the well in her letter, after she sent me a photo by email, I saw the symbol.”

  “You used email?”

  “I’m not a complete Luddite.”

  “You use the tablet you bought as a coffee coaster.”

  “Ah, that thing. Swipe this, pinch here to zoom in. Give me a book any day.”

  “But you got over your technophobia enough to use email. I’m impressed, Jeremiah. I think this counts as personal growth for you.”

  “So I like simpler things. A nice book, a lovely view, nature. You can’t substitute real experience for photos on a screen. And anyway, it was books that helped me find something worthwhile. It was the symbol, you see. I knew I’d seen it somewhere, or something like it anyway, and it was nagging at me. And then I found it.”

  “Let me guess; some kind of occult thing, something demonic.”

  “Close; it was a ward. A symbol used to ward away spirits they associated with witchcraft.”

  “And we all know that witch-hunts were the epitome of truth, right? C’mon, Jeremiah, you know what they used to do to those women.”

  He nodded. “That’s as maybe, but when I dug around and found the other wells and the plague stuff, and the strange deaths that stopped when they filled in the wells. It’s worth looking into. Things have been dry lately. Kind of like the wells.”

  It didn’t sit right with me. I hated thinking this way, but deep down I knew that the woman was grieving, and the sadnes
s and the lack of clues or answers, the complete absence of any kind of hope, must have played with her mind. She wasn’t thinking clearly.

  That was what Jeremiah had taught me. Ghosts and things like that, they were usually inventions of people who couldn’t face the idea that the people they loved were gone. The idea of a world beyond our own was an anchor, keeping grieving people tied to the people they’d lost.

  If we dug around in this, we’d be giving her false hope. I knew that Jeremiah wasn’t doing this for money or publicity. Newspaper articles aside, he wasn’t a vain guy.

  But his obsession with proving that another realm existed was clouding his judgement, and I didn’t like it.

  “Tickets, please.”

  The voice broke me from my thoughts, and I saw the train ticket inspector standing beside us.

  Jeremiah nodded at me. “Tickets, Ella.”

  I took out my slip and handed it to him. The inspector turned it over, pressed the barcode against his portable machine, and handed it back.

  “And yours?” he said, looking at Jeremiah.

  Jeremiah nodded at me. “Ella?”

  “You were on the train before me. Didn’t you get a ticket?”

  “I don’t employ you just to scribble notes, you know.”

  “You really are something else,” I said, reaching into my rucksack for my debit card.

  Jeremiah smiled. “Thanks.”

  After my debit card took the hit, the inspector walked away. The train slowed, and the brakes whined, becoming a ghostly screech that woke the commuter opposite us from her sleep.

  It was then that I saw Blaketree for the first time; a lonely station, brickwork dark and dirty, a platform with not a single soul standing on it. I got the sense that nobody used this station, that Blaketree was a village that people didn’t want to visit.

  As the train stopped, and the doors unlocked, the man in our carriage folded his newspaper under his arm and exited the train.

  I got off and stood on the platform, waiting for Jeremiah.

  That was when I saw that he was still in the carriage, and the woman with her fancy headphones was blocking him from leaving. She’d unzipped her coat now, and I saw that she was wearing a suit.

  She held out something. An ID badge, maybe? Whatever it was, it made Jeremiah go pale.

  He gestured at her angrily, but she wouldn’t budge.

  Then the doors were locked, the train thundered to life and chuffed away from the station, carrying Jeremiah and the woman away and leaving me alone on the platform.

  -7-

  The train and Jeremiah were out of sight before my shock faded, leaving me out of sorts. The wind was hurling itself at me, so I moved away from the platform and tried to get things together in my head.

  First, a question: what kind of person detains someone on a train?

  Had to be the police. Or maybe MI5, or something like that. I wasn’t sure which shadowy government agencies really existed and which didn’t, but after my first taste of the spiritual world in Scotland I’d become a believer in all sorts of stuff.

  Except when it came to Jeremiah. Except when he had told me he was being watched.

  Damn it. I wasn’t sure what I could have done to stop it, but at least I could have given him a little air time.

  I couldn’t deny it now; he was right. People were watching him. With all the weird stuff he studied, maybe he stumbled on the wrong thing.

  Or maybe in his research, he’d used just the right keywords in a search engine to make a guy’s ears prick up in some secret government building.

  Whatever it was, Jeremiah would know what the deal was. He’d be talking to the woman now.

  I saw a movement to my left. The platform janitor began his rounds, smoothing over the stone ground with a giant brush and collecting cigarette ends and chocolate wrappers. He glanced at me a few times, huddled up against the wall.

  He was probably wondering if I’d gotten off at the wrong stop or something. Or maybe he was suspicious of me. I had done nothing wrong, but Jeremiah being stopped on the train made me feel weird, like I was being watched too.

  I took out my phone and dialed his number. It rang twenty times before cutting to voicemail. I tried again, and this time it got to fifteen rings before Jeremiah spoke.

  “This is Jeremiah Lasbeck. Leave a message and my PA, Ella, will return your call.”

  PA??

  Forget it, it's not important right now. File it away for later.

  “Jeremiah, call me as soon as you get this.”

  Damn it. I tried to sound calm, in control of the situation, but the wind sucked my breath away when I said, 'as soon as.' When he heard the message, he would think I was more worried about him than I really was.

  Alone and with nothing else I could do, I decided I better go see the rooms he’d booked for us. When he made his way back to Blaketree, that was where he’d go.

  I headed toward an alcove that led out of the station, when the janitor swept his big brush in front of me, blocking my way. The suddenness made me flinch. There was a look in his eye; sort of knowing, like he was sizing me up.

  I was suddenly aware of how in a station like this, there was no one else around.

  It was the dead hours of the morning. October; it was still dark even when the birds woke up.

  I reached into my jeans pockets with my right hand. I felt keys, an old mint, and then a cylinder.

  This bastard says anything I don’t like, he gets a blast of pepper in his weaselly eyes.

  Then I heard a sound behind me.

  I flinched and backed away so I could look while keeping the janitor in my sights. Relief flooded my chest. It was just a rogue crisp packet rolling with the wind.

  The janitor pointed to my left. “This way is closed. Loose bricks. You will need to take the long way out until it’s fixed, love,” he said, gesturing at another exit and flashing a smile that showed two silver teeth caps.

  “Thanks.”

  I walked away, feeling a little shitty for my presumption. Worse, I was one step away from squirting a stream of liquid agony into the guy’s eyes.

  My shoulders felt tense now. My footsteps were too loud. But the loudest thing was the thought swimming in my head.

  I’d tried to act tough after the break-in, but it had hit me deep.

  With twin streams of agony and adrenaline rushing into me, I walked out of the train station and toward the village. To distract myself, I thought about Jeremiah, and what I could do.

  I’d already left a message. Stopping a second, I sent him a text, too, in case he couldn’t listen to my voicemail.

  What next?

  Calling the police was an option, but what was I going to say?

  Yeah, my friend missed his stop on the train. Send an armed response unit.

  Even if I told them about the woman, I had nothing. She was just an old woman on a train, and yeah I saw her blocking the door, but she could have just been rude. Hell, she could have been one of Jeremiah’s old flames or something.

  Nope, I had nothing to tell the police.

  I brought up the train route on my phone. There were two more stops after this one, the next being a place called Adton, 50 miles away.

  It wasn’t worth it going to meet him there, since the next train was in an hour. If I got a taxi, then he’d probably have left by the time I made it to the town.

  I searched for the number of Adton train station. A woman picked up and spoke in a gruff voice. “Adton trainline, good morning, how may I help you?”

  “I’d like to leave a message for friend…”

  I walked through Blaketree. Nice place. Quaint shops that hadn’t updated their appearance since the fifties and looked all the better for it. A cobbled road in the village centre where cars were prohibited from driving on for most of the day. I could imagine taking a weekend break here.

  Set in the swell of a valley, it was easy to think nothing existed but this place. If you forgot about the train
station and ignored the single lone road that led out of the village, you could imagine this was the only place on earth.

  As cozy as that was, it made me shiver a little. Maybe it was being here so early, so alone.

  I was ready to get a coffee and lay on my bed in my room and wait for Jeremiah to call. Just rest a little.

  The doors to the Slaughterman’s Inn were closed. A wooden sign above the door swayed in the wind, the joints whining. Painted on it was a bearded man in a white apron, blood splattered down it and a pig hanging from a hook behind him. And the smile on his face; wide, almost like a clown. A guy who really took pleasure in his work.

  Maybe there was a slaughterhouse nearby. Or used to be. Inns got their name from somewhere, that was something I had learned from working with Jeremiah.

  Every name has a meaning. Every word has a beginning. You want to find out what something means, look at its roots.

  And that gave me an idea.

  I chewed my lip and looked at the inn. The windows were dark, there was no sign of life. I looked at my reservation email, but check-in wasn’t until ten. Damn it, no bed for me.

  I wandered the streets until I found a café that was open. After getting a flat white coffee I settled into a table at the furthest wall where I could see the door.

  And where my laptop screen was out of view.

  I navigated to my blog – well, Jeremiah’s blog – and went through the archives to the oldest post.

  If you wanted to know the cause of something, check its roots. The woman who had stopped Jeremiah leaving the train?

  Most likely she’d seen the blog, and something in there had set this in motion. What had Jeremiah and I investigated that would have done that?

  So I started from the first post, where we’d gone to visit a supposedly haunted church in East Anglia. It was pure crap. The only thing haunted was the look on the priest’s face when Jeremiah told him what he really thought about religion.

  Just before I clicked on the next post, I noticed something.

  A name in the comments section.

  This was notable for one reason – people hardly ever commented on Jeremiah’s blog. But now, someone had found his oldest post and left a comment.