Devil Forest

by Jack Lewis

  “Grim. Was it some kind of ritual?”

  He nodded. “There were twelve of them there, all naked, all smeared with blood, all chanting in something that sounded like Latin. Twelve people, and Lester looked at me and said, "Here is our number thirteen.”

  I’d read a lot about cults recently. It was an occupational hazard that my internet sessions often verged toward the darker sides of the world. First hauntings, then exorcisms, then stuff like murder and suicide cults.

  One thing that stood out about cults was that symbolism was a big thing with those guys. Everything had to have a hidden meaning, and the meaning was usually something grim. Not only that, though, but the symbols were often something they could show in plain sight.

  Things like a shape they could paint on a building, or something they could print on their clothes. Cultists loved shoving their symbolism in people’s faces, basking in the fact only they knew what it meant. It was a kind of power, and if cults were about symbolism, then they were about power, too.

  Knowing how symbols were so important, it didn’t much surprise me that a cult of people were ass-naked and covered in blood. What surprised me was that they wanted to see Jeremiah naked, too. Not a nice thought.

  “So they wanted you to join their cult,” I said.

  “They saw how dedicated I was to the hunts, and they thought I was a believer. They thought they could use that to rope me into their games, their rituals. They’d been watching me for months, Lester said. Making notes on me. Writing everything I said, everything I studied. They thought I was a candidate for what the Effigia really were – a cult who worshipped Viseth, a demon.”

  “You really know how to get yourself involved in some crazy stuff, don’t you? I wish I could have seen your face when they told you.”

  “Is something funny?”

  “I bet you gave them hell.”

  “No, Ella. I was scared as hell.”

  That floored me for a second. Jeremiah admitting that they had scared him? No way. I had never once seen him show fear, not even when we were in the cellar of an old asylum and I had loaded a video on the internet of a little kid laughing and then played it.

  He’d flinched, sure, but he caught on within a second, and he’d just grinned.

  “Why were you so scared?” I asked.

  “Because that wasn’t the first time I’d heard the name Viseth,” he said. “Only, I didn’t know it was the name of a demon back then. See, my mum once told me that I used to have an imaginary friend. I would only have been five or six years old. By the time she told me I was a teenager, and I honestly couldn’t remember a thing about it. But can you guess what that imaginary friend’s name was?”

  “Viseth?”

  “No, it was Bob.”

  I felt the tension deflate from me. I punched his arm. “Jesus, Jeremiah. You almost had me then.”

  But Jeremiah wasn’t smiling. “That’s not the end of it. See, Bob had an imaginary friend, too. And his imaginary friend was called Viseth. So Mum told me, anyway.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “Your imaginary friend had an imaginary friend? What the hell is this, imaginary friend inception, or something?”

  Jeremiah shrugged. “Only telling you what Mum told me. Kids are weird as hell. But when Lester and his gang of naked occultists told me who they worshipped, I shit a brick and got out of there.”

  “What did they say after?”

  “Nothing,” said Jeremiah. “I stopped going to ghost hunts, stopped answering when they knocked on my door, I didn’t reply to any of the letters they posted through my letters box. You might say that I ghosted the ghost hunters, borrowing what I’m told is a modern phrase.”

  Jeremiah’s nose started to bleed again, so I wetted more towels and gave them to him. “So this woman, she was with the Effigia?”

  Jeremiah nodded. “When you got off the train, she stepped in front of me. Wouldn’t let me get by her, and I’m too much of a gentleman to push someone out of the way. The train moved, and then I found myself alone on the carriage with her.”

  “Okay, so what did she want?”

  “To tell me I had an admirer.”

  -13-

  After Jeremiah explained it, I found it hard to form a response. It was almost like someone had wedged a screwdriver in the cogs of my brain. I couldn’t believe it.

  Then I thought about it properly, and I saw the holes.

  “She told you that Viseth has been watching you?” I said. “Viseth, the demon who the Effigia worship?”

  “The very same. Probably watches me when I take a dump, too.”

  “What’s so special about this Viseth? There are tons of fake demons. Why worship this particular fake demon?”

  “The cynicism is dripping off you,” said Jeremiah.

  “Don’t tell me you believe it. Ghosts…okay. You know my feelings about them. But demons? They started out as a symbol of evil. Something to blame for bad things back when science wasn’t advanced enough to help people understand the world. Demons were figments people created to give themselves the feeling of control over things they really couldn’t.”

  “Well said,” said Jeremiah, nodding. “And that’s one explanation. The other is that some demons exist, some don’t. That some people could commune with real demons, and those who couldn’t do that created a complex myth around them. Sometimes, when people don’t understand something, they don’t make it simpler. They add another layer of mystery to it.”

  I found it hard to reconcile the fact that I believed in ghosts to my scepticism about demons. Surely if you believed in one, you should accept the other? Then again, I had seen a ghost once. I’d never seen a demon with horns on its head and a spiked tail.

  Jeremiah took his phone out of his pocket and tapped it. “Here,” he said. “This is Viseth.”

  The website on the screen showed a black drawing on a white background. It was hideous. A demon with a squat face, dirty, knotted hair, and slit eyes. It was a face that would crack mirrors, one that would invade dreams after you’d seen it. Its face wasn’t the worst part, though.

  Its torso seemed to be hidden by its bush-like mass of hair, and the strangest thing was that it had five legs. They weren’t on the ground though; only two legs were on the ground, and the other three were spread out on its torso, making it look like a fleshy windmill. Its legs were crooked at the knee and capped with black hooves.

  I could almost imagine the way it walked, rolling so that each crooked leg scuttled over the ground in turn. Something about it sat heavy in my stomach.

  “Viseth is the deal maker,” said Jeremiah. “One good turn for another. He’s also a trickster.”

  “Why do the Effigia worship him?”

  “It supposedly stared centuries ago, when one of their founders contacted Viseth and made a deal with him. What that deal was, nobody knows, and it’s all bullshit, anyway. The only thing that can’t be denied is that a few hundred years ago, a peasant somehow became rich enough to own a house called Lockpit Manor.”

  “The house your friend owned.”

  “Lester. Right. He’s just following family tradition, though it’s hard to say how much he actually believes anymore. Like I said; it’s pure hokum.”

  “And the womn on the train said that Viseth is watching you? I’m sorry, but that sounds like bullshit.”

  “Maybe, but that’s what she told me. You see, they think they can speak to him. They communicate with him and he gives them help. Tells them things.”

  “And he told them that your life has become his favorite TV show? I don’t buy it.”

  “She wasn’t selling – she told me for free. I don’t see what she had to gain by lying.”

  I wasn’t so sure. Someone always had something to gain. Gaining things or avoiding loss government 99% of human behaviour.

  It was hard to know. Coincidences are a strange thing. Sometimes they’re true. They really do happen. That’s why there’s a name for such a thing, right? But s
ometimes people use them as a crutch. They see something happen that they don’t like, that they can’t explain, and uttering the words it’s just a coincidence is like a safety blanket.

  Say there has been a spate of burglaries in your area. People are scared, but that kind of thing only happens to others. And then you’re going home from work one night and you put your key in your front door lock, and it feels different. The handle feels a little loose. Nothing obvious, but strange all the same.

  What do you do? Let a whole wave of dread crash through you? If you admit that this is pretty damn strange, what with all the break-ins, then suddenly you become a potential victim. You become a person who something bad will happen to.

  But if you tell yourself it’s just a coincidence, then those magic words trick your brain and you’re not a potential victim anymore. All the fear drains away.

  Sometimes, though, coincidences are lies.

  A boy with an imaginary friend who by some crazy chance also had an imaginary friend, who shared the name of a demon who an occult group worship? A group who he wouldn’t meet for another ten years, when he was in university?

  Not only that, though. The name of the demon, Viseth, was one I’d never heard of. It sure as hell wouldn’t be on the list of top 50 baby names. That meant it probably wasn’t something he’d heard as a kid then subconsciously named his imaginary friend’s friend.

  I looked at Jeremiah and wondered if he was thinking the same thing. As I stared into his hard, brown eyes, I knew what he was thinking.

  What the woman had told him excited him. He wanted to believe it.

  But maybe that was what she’d counted on.

  “Jeremiah, do you think maybe this woman knows you? Or does she know what you are and how you think? She knows you’re looking for something paranormal, and she’s using this as bait to reel you in?”

  “I’m not a fish. What would she want to do that for?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But it just seems…”

  “She asked nothing of me. She didn’t want me to meet with the Effigia, or anything like that. She just told me about Viseth and then she left for another carriage. The exchange lasted a few minutes, tops.”

  My instincts were blasting out the siren of my bullshit alarm. Then I remembered Scotland and that poor little girl, and I knew that I wasn’t someone who could just discount things anymore.

  “Does it worry you? If it’s real, then you have a demon stalking you. What’s he like? Dangerous? Evil?”

  “Don’t get bogged down in any of that,” said Jeremiah. “The Effigia are full of crap. A person can believe something that’s false, but still not be a liar. That’s the key. They fully believe in Viseth, but belief doesn’t mean fact.”

  “Jesus, I don’t know what to think.”

  “Me neither. And when that happens, I turn to things I do know. The first is that there’s a woman in town who thinks she hears her missing son talking to her from the well, and we saw a man dropping something down that same well. That’s not wishy-washy; it’s something concrete we can investigate.”

  I could see the conflict in him now. His desire to believe, mixed with the frustration that he just didn’t know where to start. If getting out there and doing something made him feel better, then that was what we’d do.

  “Okay,” I said. “So we meet with the mother, and we see what was in the well. But there’s something I need to tell you.”

  “This sounds serious.”

  I shrugged, trying to downplay it, but I still held the memory in my head and it sent shivers through me.

  Sitting on the bed, I told Jeremiah about the blog, about the Ferryman and his comments, and about the villagers pointing at me. Upon hearing the last part, Jeremiah broke into a smile.

  “You broke the Window of Solitude,” he said. “It’s nothing to worry about. Look deep enough into villages like this, and you’ll see they all have weird customs that have been passed down through the years. Like, in some places, they do something called Soulcaking before Halloween, when they perform plays thinking it’ll protect their village from spirits. The silence and the pointing, it’s just one of those things.”

  “And they do that every day here?” I said.

  “No, only on the eighth day of November, on the eighth hour. And it always lasts fifteen minutes. Traditions are a weird thing, Ella. They survive by word of mouth. They start with a reason, but over the years the reason erodes or disappears, and then people still carry it on without knowing why.

  Take dancing around the maypole. Harmless stuff, right? Especially when you’re a kid. You get dressed up, grab a ribbon, and skip around the pole. But if you trace it back, it’s grim as hell. It was a pagan ritual, where a village would choose their best-looking girl, have the other girls dance around her, and then sacrifice her to keep the gods smiling.”

  “You’re not making me feel better about the pointing,” I said.

  “Relax. The Window of Solstice is harmless now. I should have told you about it before we got here, but we were interrupted, weren’t we?”

  Maypole stories aside, I was feeling a little better about it. Finger pointing, I could take. It beat thinking that the villagers were all crazy.

  “So what does it mean?” I said.

  “Could be a couple of things. There’s not much online about it, and the library wasn’t too helpful either. The best I could find was that one reason dates back to when people were still drowning innocent women and calling them witches. There was a witchfinder in Blaketree who had a pretty novel way of turning over stones to find the people he was looking for.

  Basically, he set up a hanging gallows in the village centre, and then he lined up all the women and girls. Anyone between the ages of four and ninety. If you could stand upright, you had to take part. Then he’d force them to stand still and quiet for fifteen minutes while he read a passage to them. Some kind of ritualistic one meant to draw out evil. If any of the women made the slightest sound – bam!”

  “They were chosen as witches?”

  “Correct. And the witch finder never, ever failed to uncover a witch. All the women cottoned on. They knew he wouldn’t be happy unless he found a witch. So, they started turning on each other. When they were all lined up, they’d listen out. If one of them sneezed, the others would pounce on it and they’d all point at the poor lass who’d caught a cold, and was soon gonna be swinging from a rope.”

  Just like that, I felt a sense of gloom about what I’d seen. I could picture the faces of the people around me as they’d pointed at me. Accusatory and almost hateful.

  “Surely they can’t still believe that?” I said.

  Jeremiah shook his head. “Most people don’t follow paganism, either, but the Maypole dance still happens. It’s just a custom, Ella.”

  “What about the second reason? You said it might be something else.”

  “The other theory is even stupider. It dates back to the middle ages – to around the time of the black death, as it happens. They say that even though Blaketree had no casualties in the plague, there was still a person who used to push a cart around the village every morning, like most places.”

  “The guys who would say bring out your dead?”

  Jeremiah nodded. “Only here, there were no dead bodies to take away. But he’d travelled from London, and he thought he could make money by travelling from village to village taking away their corpses. Stupid bastard was probably spreading the plague everywhere he went.”

  “Except here.”

  “Yup. He was told he wasn’t needed or wanted here. But he’d seen the carnage in London, and he couldn’t believe that this place was safe. The villagers told him to piss off, and so he disappeared for a month.”

  “Maybe he caught the plague.”

  “Nope. He returned a month later, but with friends from London. See, he told them about this little village up north where the plague hadn’t reached, and they came here to see if they could live here, too. Wh
atever protected the village, would protect them. The villagers didn’t like that. Can you blame them? But what they did next…”

  “I’m guessing they didn’t welcome them with open arms.”

  “Nope. More like with axes. They slaughtered the four Londoners and buried their bodies in the woods. They did it to protect Blaketree, but the guilt weighed heavy with them. So, on the anniversary of the massacre, between eight and eight fifteen when it happened, they held a period of silence. And since the silence was to atone for their sins – and later their ancestors sins – breaking it wasn’t taken kindly.”

  “Either way, it’s something that started centuries ago and still carries on today. Weird.”

  “Weird? Not so, Ella. If you’ve ever blown out the candles on your birthday cake, you’re upholding an eighteenth-century German tradition. Things prevail, and we should be glad for it. If tradition wasn’t a thing, then before we learned the written word, humans would have had no way of passing down survival skills. Customs, traditions, and story kept us going, and they still do.”

  Even though either explanation was gruesome – witchcraft or atonement for a massacre – I felt a little better. I’d broken the silence, and I wanted to kick myself for that, but I hadn’t known about it. What’s more, the café owner could have told me. Or they could have stuck flyers up to let tourists know about the tradition.

  At least there wouldn’t be any repercussions further than a memory that would make me bolt upright at some random night to relive the awkwardness of it.

  “So what now?” I said. “Go and visit the mother?”

  “No, I want to see what that guy dropped down the well, first. I don’t think he’ll risk going back yet. We spooked him.”

  “I think it was the other way round,” I said.

  “You don’t punch a stranger and then run away unless your flight response has kicked in. We spooked him, and he won’t go back to the well yet. That gives us enough time to find out what he dropped.”

  “I’ll go back to my room and change into my boots,” I said.

  “Good. Did you get batteries, like I asked?”