Devil Forest

by Jack Lewis

  I smiled. “It’s a work thing, but I didn’t count for the fact that the Slaughterman’s inn doesn’t open until 10. Just killing time until I can put my stuff in my room.”

  “You might want to stay in here until then,” she said, and there was a hint of something in her expression. Worry, maybe? Whatever it was, I didn’t like it. “I’m not trying to say that because you’re my only customer so far today; just, between eight and eight fifteen, it might be better to stay indoors. Since you’re not local, and all.”

  I was about to ask her what she meant when my phone rang. I checked the display, but it wasn’t Jeremiah.

  The café owner smiled and drifted away and back behind the counter.

  I answered my phone.

  “Morning,” said a northern voice. “It’s Dale from Kestrel Security. Is this Ella?”

  “That’s me. Have you been to my flat?”

  “Could I get your verification code please, Ella?”

  Verification code?

  Right; the four-digit passcode for use whenever I spoke to the security company. It had to differ from my alarm pin.

  “Sure, Dale. Could I get yours, too?”

  “4509.”

  “4509?” I said.

  “Bugger me, it’s 4508. Sorry.”

  That didn’t fill me with confidence. He’d told me the right code on the second attempt, and I guess the odds of him guessing the right code were ridiculously long, but still…

  Damn it, Dale. Damn your crappy memory.

  I’d just have to be on guard for the conversation; let him do the talking.

  “Is my flat okay?” I asked.

  “Your code, please?”

  “Dale, what’s my address?”

  He was silent for a few seconds. I had a stabbing urge to hang up. Call it instinct or paranoia, there was a fine line between them but the effect was the same. Different words for the same pressing dullness in my belly.

  “18 Foxdale Close,” said Dale. “I understand if you’re wary, but this back and forth could go on all day.”

  I could hear the tetchiness in his voice. It was born from having the same conversation again and again. Point of fact about alarm users: we’re a paranoid bunch.

  You either got an alarm system because you were scared of a break-in, or because you’d already had one. Either way, paranoia.

  Dale was just a guy who wanted to get off the phone so he could go onto his next house, and I was desperate to know if he’d seen anything. He was right; it was time to end the back and forth.

  “8828 is my code,” I told him. “What did you see?”

  “Your flat was empty. I checked the sensors and doors and windows contacts, but nothing’s wrong. There were no signs of tampering. In fact, the alarm was set when I got there.”

  “Is it an I.T. problem?”

  “I’d recommend having an engineer look at the system. I can ask Jill at the office to book you an appointment.”

  “Thanks. Did you see anything strange?”

  “Not my place to comment. I don’t know what’s usual for a person’s house, and what’s strange. The only thing I can say is there was nobody there, and no sign anyone had been.”

  “Thanks, Dale. Is the alarm set?”

  “Yep, I set it up when I left. You have any more problems, just call the office.”

  I hung up. The café seemed smaller now, and the air was hotter. A man and a woman had entered, got a drink, and sat down, and I hadn’t even registered them.

  I was completely out of it, but with good reason.

  Jeremiah was gone. My alarm system was going haywire. Then there was the café owner and whatever the hell she meant about not going out into the village between eight and eight fifteen.

  A labyrinth of questions with a minotaur at every turn.

  And then there was the notepad in front of me, where all the letters of the Ferryman’s comments strung together, forming a message.

  -9-

  Follow the eyes.

  Thirteen separate one-letter comments, just to write that. Whatever uncertainties I had about the Ferryman, one thing was for sure; the guy had time on his hands.

  When I’d started working for Jeremiah, cryptic stuff like that used to make my nerves taut. Things like finding notes on the floor of a bedroom of a derelict asylum, with something written on it like 'just ignore them, my angel. Idle hands wait for you.’ Yeah - that’s a real example, unfortunately.

  It was horror 101; the vaguer the statement, the creepier. In fifteen-plus investigations with Jeremiah, I’d only once seen phenomena that I could definitely say was paranormal. The rest of the things we saw fell into a few categories; willful believing, coincidences, or hoaxers.

  The willful believer twisted things. The shadow in their bedroom took on the form of a man, when really it was a coat. That kind of thing.

  The coincidences were obvious; random events happening in such a way they made people’s hairs stand up, but ultimately having nothing paranormal behind them.

  Hoaxers were a different story, because there was a maliciousness in what they did that wasn’t a million miles different from the poltergeists they usually pretended to be.

  So, what was the Ferryman?

  Willful believer and possible crackpot, a hoaxer with too much time, or - the least likely - was there something in this?

  To get to the truth, I’d learned something useful from Jeremiah; keep your mind open, but keep it sharp. I wasn’t ready to discount the idea that the Ferryman had something to say, but I would not look for eyes everywhere.

  I clicked on the Ferryman’s name above his blog comment. That brought up the profile he’d created so he could leave his cryptic messages.

  Name: Barry D’Alive

  Email: helpivebeenbarrydalive@yellowserver.com

  Bio: ‘That which is soon to be dead can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even you may die.’

  No surprises he’d left a fake name and address - what kind of self-respecting hoaxer would use his real details? But there was something about the quote.

  It was an H.P. Lovecraft quote from The Call of Cthulhu, specifically mentioned as being from the fictional Necronomicon book that appeared in a bunch of his stories.

  I loved writers like him. Lovecraft, Poe, James, I couldn’t get enough old horror; horror becomes scarier the older it is. There’s just something about a story being set in a time long gone that makes me shiver.

  But the quote that the Ferryman used was wrong. It should have read: That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.

  Yeah, a small change from the original. It was either accidental, or there was some weird intent behind it. I didn’t know, didn’t care. What excited me was the fact the quote had been changed, and was used in the Ferryman’s profile.

  I used a search engine to look for the quote in the same way he’d written it, soon feeling a crest of disappointment as I went further down the search results. Most of them were for the quote in the way Lovecraft had originally phrased it.

  So, I used an advanced search site to only bring up results with the Ferryman’s weird version of the quote, and then saw three listings.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  There were three websites where someone had used that phrase in that exact way; a blog, and two forums. It was time to get to know the Ferryman a little better.

  My laptop started to slow, the cursor changing into an hourglass symbol that usually meant ‘give me a break, Ella. I’m a piece of crap laptop you bought in university. I’m the laptop equivalent of geriatric.’

  To give the poor machine a little breathing room, I closed some website browser tabs I had opened. One on the illuminati, another on parapsychology. Finally, one website showed a picture of Ashley Webb, the boy who had gone missing in the village, along with a report about how the police had called an end to the search.

  A tray slammed down on my table, startling me. The café owner wa
s looming over me, but she didn’t look as cheery now.

  “I’d like you to leave,” she said.

  “What? Why?”

  “You’ve bought nothing for thirty minutes. This isn’t your living room.”

  “You’re right. I’ll get another coffee then, please.”

  She shook her head. “Leave.”

  She almost growled that at me. I knew when to argue and when to leave it. Jeremiah would have gone toe-to-toe with her, but it was too early for that kind of pain in the arse, and as mornings went this had already been one of my worst. I packed up my stuff and left, and I felt her eyes on me the whole time until I was out on the street.

  Weird. Whatever it was, it sure as hell wasn’t about the coffee. Was it because of Ashley? I guessed his disappearance was a scar on the village, but one that would never quite heal. Every time someone even mentioned him, it’d be like ripping the skin open again and letting blood drip out. I’d have to remember to be careful who I spoke to about him. More importantly, I’d have to try to convince Jeremiah to be subtle. It would have been easier to convince a lion to become vegan.

  A bell rang from the church across the village, the sound cascading until it was the loudest thing around. A few people outside looked at the church, at its run-down tower that stuck up into the sky where the clanging came from.

  Most people stopped and were standing still, and that unnerved me. In a place like this, the bells would sound all the time. Probably once every hour. Hadn’t I heard them already? It shouldn’t have been anything worth stopping for.

  Yet on what counted for Blaketree’s high street, the early morning shoppers and walkers had just stopped what they were doing.

  I looked behind me through the café window, but the owner wasn’t behind the counter. I glanced at my laptop screen, then outside. I checked my phone; no calls or texts, but more importantly, it was eight am – the time she said I shouldn’t go outside.

  Soon the bells stopped. The stillness was jarring, and the moment became one of those rare times that I felt homesick for the city.

  At least someone had pressed the play button now – people were walking around again. Couples linking arms, a guy with a satchel around his shoulder and a bouquet in his grip, another man in blue overalls covered in smears, carry a tub of paint in each hand.

  It looked like a normal morning in a normal village, except for the utter silence. Nobody was talking. Even the people walking together weren’t saying a word to each other.

  I guessed I had two things to accomplish; find out what the bells meant so I could scratch that curiosity itch, and then convince a few people to give me some soundbites about the village and in particular, the well. Anything I could put in the blog later.

  After evaluating everyone around – approach enough strangers and you get a sixth sense about who’d be willing to talk to you and who would tell you to feck off – I zoned in on an old woman across the road, who was sitting on a bench and smoking a cigarette.

  As I approached her, I felt weirdly nervous. Like people were watching me, except they weren’t. In fact, the people aren’t pointedly weren’t looking at me.

  I shook it off. I looked at the woman. Narrow eyes, a round face, uneven teeth. Crisscrosses of worry lines on her face, but with approachable eyes. That was a hard thing to judge, but some people just had that indeterminable quality that said yeah, I’m happy to talk to a stranger.

  She looked fine, and I’d already done this plenty of times for the blog. Nobody had ever railed on me before, and there was nothing to be nervous about. So why was my stomach flipping?

  I cleared my throat. “Excuse me. I’m sorry to bother you, but-”

  The woman gasped. She stood up and then pointed a long finger at my face.

  Her eyes lost their friendliness and took on a blend of fear and anger, mocking my earlier judgement of her. It was so sudden a transformation that I stepped back, putting a distance between us.

  “Sorry to bother you, I’ll leave you alone,” I said. I’d never wanted to get further away from a person so quickly than I did then.

  She pointed again. Her eyes widened, she opened her mouth as though she was shouting at me, but no words came out.

  Screw this.

  It was bound to happen sometime. Approach enough strangers, and you will choose wrongly at least once and prod a hornets' nest. The best thing to do was just to get away from her.

  When I turned around, a sickening feeling of dread hit me with the force of a hammer.

  Everyone on the high street was staring and pointing at me. The interlinked couple, the guy with his satchel. The overall-wearing man had even set his paint down so he could point an accusatory finger my way. Behind him, the café owner was standing by her shop window with a finger outstretched in my direction.

  My instincts fired inside me. Primal ones, the same ancient fear that was hard-wired into every person. For some people, it’d tell them to run. Choose a flight response and get out of there.

  Me? I didn’t know what to do. I just knew if one of those bastards came near me, they were getting a smack in the face.

  Damn it, I wish Jeremiah was here now.

  Nobody approached me. One by one they stopped pointing and turned their faces away from mine. People got on with their day again with no threat made toward me. I wanted to ask what that was all about, but I knew better now than to speak.

  Whatever the hell this was, speaking made the people crazy. They might not have been shooting lightning bolts from their fingers, but there was something about it, something utterly sinister about a circle of strangers all focused on me with that mean glare in their eyes.

  After seeing what happened to me, the few tourists gathered on the street and kept their mouths shut. Smart choice.

  I settled on the bench vacated by Cigarette Lady and watched the people move in silence. Since there were no cars allowed in the centre of the village, the absence of voices made for a complete quiet.

  The only sounds were footsteps, birds, and wind rattling a satellite dish perched on a roof. There were two kinds of quiet – the peaceful kind where you could close your eyes and let it carry you to sleep, and the heavy kind. The forced silence.

  Easy to guess which kind this was.

  At eight fifteen am, a bell rang, and the conversations rose like the babble of a stream that had just been unblocked. Within a few seconds, the place seemed normal, like the pointing thing had never happened.

  I saw Cigarette Lady unlocking a bicycle lock that was tied to a lamppost. I had to know what was going on now, and hopefully this time I’d get more than finger-pointing.

  When I stood up, someone grabbed me from behind and tugged on my coat.

  The motion caught me off guard. In my mind I was reaching for my pepper spray, but all I did was turn around with my fists clenched.

  -10-

  “You look like you’ve missed me,” said Jeremiah.

  He couldn’t have just approached me like a normal person, could he? Nope, he had to do it in the most annoying way possible. I should have been angrier than I was, but I felt relieved when I saw him. I was glad to see his flushed face and his I know something you don’t grin.

  Not that I’d let him know that.

  It was pointless being mad. Jeremiah was Jeremiah; he didn’t know how to be anything else. It was refreshing, in a way, that he didn’t try to dress himself up to fit what people wanted to see. Few people did that. Not even I could say I did that.

  Besides, I guessed that he didn’t know about the finger pointing and the Ferryman. He didn’t know how on edge I was, and he hadn’t tried to surprise me on purpose.

  Jeremiah looked disheveled, and I wished I could blame that on his extra-long train journey , but he always looked a mess. There was something different now though. There was a cut on his face, a tiny welt that had been bleeding recently.

  “Where the hell have you been?” I said. “And did you get punched? Are you okay?”

&nb
sp; Jeremiah looked around, as if to check if anyone was watching us. “We better go somewhere private.”

  “We can’t get into our rooms until ten.”

  “I want to look around the woods, then. You know, scope out the general area. See if we get a feel for anything untoward.”

  “Really?” I said. “It’s a little early.”

  “What, the woods don’t open until ten, either? I can see you never had a dog, Ella. People have to go walking early sometimes.”

  The forest was just outside of the village. Even in the hours since I’d left the train, daylight hadn’t bloomed properly yet. Then again, it was late November and days were short, the nights long, and the sky was selfish with its light.

  This wasn’t the kind of creepy forest you’d expect to find all the way out in the sticks. There was no fog, no low-hanging mist. The trees weren’t especially crooked, and we didn’t see little wicker figurines hanging from branches.

  All the same, the forest gave me a plunging feeling of darkness, just a different kind. It wasn’t unease about anything paranormal, but something worse. Something realer than that. It seemed like a place where dark deeds could happen.

  A layer of leaves and mulch covered the ground. The trees looked ill, with their branches stricken bald so that they looked like malnourished shadows of themselves. Yep, there was something off about Blaketree Forest. This was the kind of place where people went missing. Where dog walkers found dead bodies. Where children wandered, only to fall down wells.

  The air was cold and almost wet, carrying a scent of pines and wet grass. There were no dog walkers around that morning but listening carefully, I heard forest critters snapping over twigs and I heard birds flapping away from branches.

  “Devil Forest,” said Jeremiah, walking with his thumbs pressed in his pockets and hands sticking out, like a country manor gent. It was something he’d started doing lately, but I knew that the affectation would pass, just like the week he’d spent wearing fedoras, and his fortnight-long habit of calling me Ella-Fant.