Devil Forest

by Jack Lewis

  Lester shook his head. “Eric, take care of this.”

  Eric took just one step, when a gunshot rang out. I saw Marion’s shoulders jerk, and smoke drifted from the rifle barrel.

  Eric staggered back, holding his chest, blood seeping over his robes.

  Marion pointed the rifle at Felicity. “Drop it.”

  The older woman sneered. “I know who’s the better aim of the two of us,” she said.

  Marion pulled the trigger. A boom echoed, and the bullet hit the wall far behind Felicity, denting the stone.

  Felicity fired her crossbow, and I heard Marion scream and then a thud as she hit the floor, but I couldn’t see her.

  The older woman locked a bolt in place and strained to pull back the crossbow trying to load it. Pain etched in her face as she struggled, but couldn’t pull it back. She winced as she clenched her fist. “Damn it. Withers, load it for me.”

  As the detective crossed the room, I ran to Marion. A bolt was sticking out from her chest. I grabbed the rifle. Holding it pointed at the detective, I realized I didn’t have a clue how to use it.

  That didn’t matter. I only needed to pretend I did. The threat would be enough.

  I pulled a lever on the side, heard something click into place. I levelled the gun at Withers. “Don’t move.”

  He froze. He looked at Lester. There was an altar behind the Effigia’s leader, and he walked toward it. Did he have something hidden in it? A gun?

  I squinted and aimed down the sights. Holding my breath, I pulled the trigger.

  The force knocked me back, and the rifle slammed against my shoulder. Holy hells, it hurt. It felt like it had dislocated my shoulder. It was everything I could do to keep hold of the rifle.

  As Lester staggered back, blood spreading over his stomach and staining his robe, I pulled the lever again. I held the rifle up, forcing myself to breathe through the pain.

  Felicity and Withers eyed each other, unsure what to do.

  I kneeled beside Marion. The bolt was too deep for me to pull out. Blood was spreading over her shirt, and flecks of it were on her lips. Her face was paler than any I’d ever seen. She was dying - no doubt about it. How the hell had it come to this? Even if we could call an ambulance, they’d never get here in time.

  Poor, poor woman. All of this, for nothing. All the years she’d spent searching for answers about her son, only to find half-truths in Lockpit manor.

  I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t bring Ashley back. The only comfort I could give her as she was dying was to give her closure about her son, or at least a semblance of it.

  But would it comfort her to know that her son had been used in a ritual designed to contact a demon? That he’d been in that dark gateway, alone and scared with the five-legged demon stalking the shadows? Was that the last image I should give her, let her die with that horrible knowledge?

  I couldn’t. I had to lie.

  “Ashley died in the well,” I told her. The lie burned my throat. “There was a small crawl space at the bottom. The searchers must have missed it. I saw his bones; his neck was snapped. He died when he fell down the well. It would have been instant, Marion. No pain.”

  Was that any better than the truth?

  I didn’t know. It seemed to be, to me. A quick death, as opposed to the terror he must have really faced.

  She squeezed my hand, and her breaths grew shallow, and the life left her eyes. I wanted to cry.

  A door to the right side of the atrium opened, and four more robed figures filed in.

  Holding the rifle, I knew this was our last chance to escape. I nodded to Nadine. “Untie your brother.”

  Nadine got Jeremiah free. That done, she ran over to Hannah and grabbed her, holding her tight.

  “This way,” I said, levelling the rifle at each robed figure in turn, letting them know that I’d shoot every single one of them if they moved.

  Jeremiah, Hannah, and Nadine backed out behind me and left the atrium.

  I nodded at the woman we’d saved. “Come on,” I said.

  She shook her head. She pointed at the duct tape covering her mouth.

  “What?” I said.

  She pointed at it again.

  Lester strained to sit up. Blood was seeping into his robes. “Don’t do it,” he said.

  “Do what?”

  The woman pointed at the duct tape again.

  “Jeremiah, hold the gun.”

  He took the rifle from me. I approached the woman and carefully pulled a corner of the tape free. “This will hurt,” I said. “Ready?”

  She nodded.

  I ripped the tape off. Her lips were pale and cut and had flecks of tape stuck to them.

  “You don’t know what you’ve done,” said Lester.

  The woman pointed at the door behind me.

  I nodded. “Let’s go.”

  She shook her head. “Just you.”

  “What?”

  “Leave.”

  A cold feeling seeped through me. Her accent – I knew it! I’d heard it before. It was Slavic, I didn’t know where from, exactly, but I knew I’d heard it on the tape.

  She was the witch who’d spoken the spellword into the Dictaphone. She must have been the witch who the Effigia used to make the ritual work, and obviously against her will since she was kept prisoner.

  “Get out,” she said to me.

  Jeremiah grabbed me. “Listen to her,” he said. “You don’t want to be here when she really starts talking, trust me.”

  All of us left. Giving one last glance at the atrium, I shut the door, leaving us in the corridor.

  I heard muffled voices from behind the door. I heard a word spoken aloud in a Slavic accent, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

  The atrium was then filled with agonised screams. Half a dozen of them, an orchestra of agony, each cry rising and mingling with the others in such a chorus of utter terror and pain that I couldn’t listen to it anymore.

  I turned to see the others way down the corridor, by the manor’s front door.

  Nadine beckoned to me. “My car is outside,” she said.

  As the screams of pain grew louder and louder from inside the atrium, I followed the others, feeling the chill of the night-time breeze as I left Lockpit Manor.

  -34-

  After what the local newspaper later dubbed as the ‘Massacre at the Manor’, we stayed for another two days in Blaketree, sleeping in Nadine’s house. She and Jeremiah spent almost every second together, taking walks in the countryside around the village. They had invited me to go with them but I stayed with Hannah instead, preferring to spend my time with her and let the brother and sister patch up old differences.

  By the time we caught a train out of Blaketree to go home, they were inseparable. Nadine gave Jeremiah and me a hug, and we left.

  The first morning after what happened in the atrium, we had decided that we couldn’t tell the police the truth. It was too unbelievable a story, and the police wouldn’t be willing to believe tales of demons and witches. If they knew that we had been in the atrium and we were the only ones to escape alive, they would have come to one conclusion.

  Instead, we told them that we had found Hannah in Blaketree woods, lost and scared. There was nothing to link us to Lockpit manor, and not only could we provide alibis for each other, but we had found Hannah. That seemed to be proof enough that we had been searching for her, as we’d said.

  So now Jeremiah and I were leaving Blaketree at last. I felt tired, sick, and like I could sleep for a month. No matter how much I slept, though, I knew that my memories of what had happened would be waiting. Some things stayed with you.

  The train doors hissed, a horn sounded, and the engine thudded to life. As the train left the station, Jeremiah hefted his travel case onto the table. He unzipped it and pulled out a box covered in gift-wrap.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  He smiled at me. “Happy birthday.”

  “You got me a present?”

 
“You think that I’d forget?”

  “You’re full of surprises.”

  I ripped open the wrapping and pushed it to one side, revealing his present to me. My heart swelled.

  It was a box. A box exactly like that one that had been stolen from my flat, the one I had filled with photographs of my real family.

  I opened it, and my breath caught as I saw what was inside. Photographs. I couldn’t help but look at Jeremiah in amazement.

  “I paid a genealogist to research your family tree. He got more than I’d thought,” he said.

  “These photos are real?”

  He nodded. “He tracked down a bunch of them. Not just your parents; your grandparents, aunts, great uncles, everyone. They aren’t the photographs you lost, but at least you have something.”

  Tears well in my eyes as I looked at each photograph in turn. I put them back in the box and closed the clasp.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He squeezed my shoulder.

  “Do you think we did the right thing, lying to the police?” I asked.

  “We had to. Do you think they’d have bought the truth, even for a second?”

  “I know, but what about the witch and what she did to them? You don’t forget screams like that.”

  “That’s why they put duct tape over her mouth. They were terrified of her. But you read the report; they found her body with the rest of them. She must have killed herself when she used her powers. Anyway, the Effigia are gone now. Hannah is safe. We can’t bring back Ashley, but it won’t happen again.”

  “Where did they find her? The poor woman. I can't believe they were keeping her in that cell.”

  He shrugged. “She isn’t the only witch around. I never used to believe in them, but now…” He leaned forward and pounded the table. “Damn it. If only I had proof.”

  “Funny you should day that. I have a present for you,” I said.

  I put the Dictaphone on the table.

  “You saved it? I thought we’d left it behind.”

  “I kept it. I mean, it isn’t proof of anything, exactly. On its own, it’s just a woman speaking a strange word into a tape.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” he said. “This is a spellword, and we know that it opens gateways. The power of this thing…we need to keep this to ourselves, Ella. There’s no telling what it can do. We need to take it with us on all of our investigations from now on. Play it in every haunted hospital, school or house. We might finally find something.”

  “Let’s just leave it a few weeks before we take on another case, yeah?”

  We stayed in our own bubbles of thought for a few seconds then, before something occurred to me.

  “Jeremiah…”

  “You sound like you’re about to ask me one of those questions that I don’t like to answer.”

  “Maybe. You never told me what you saw back when Lester invited you to his house and you walked in on a ritual.”

  Jeremiah scratched his chin. “Uh, yeah. Let’s just leave it. We’ve had enough about rituals for now.”

  I folded my arms. “Come on. Out with it. You know I’ll keep asking until you tell me.”

  “Fine,” he huffed. “It was a sex thing, okay? I walked in and I found them all naked, painting weird shapes on their chests and their arses, and they wanted me to join in. That was why I left. And if I’d known what kind of weird shit they would eventually start doing, I would have reported them. I just thought they were a harmless bunch of paranormal-seeking swingers.”

  “I wish I hadn’t asked,” I said. “Why do you think they did it? Why did the Effigia need to see Viseth so much that they’d sacrifice a child?”

  “It wasn’t about seeing him,” said Jeremiah. “When they crept up on me when you were in the well and clubbed me over the head, I woke up in Lockpit Manor. Lester was crazy with excitement. He told me everything. It all comes down to one thing. The reason a lot of people do anything.”

  “Which is…”

  “Greed. See, Lester and his gang of arse-badgers didn’t create the Effigia. They’re the caretakers of a cult that has been in England for centuries. Back during the Black Death, they knew more about witchcraft, and in particular about the wells. They made a deal with Viseth; while the plague was wiping out half the population, he’d keep villages safe if they gave him a gift.”

  My stomach turned. “Children.”

  “Right. He’s a real bastard.”

  “So what about the wells? Were they always there?”

  Jeremiah shook his head. “In villages where there was a sect of the Effigia, they dug deep into the ground and then had local witches use their spellwords to open passages into Viseth’s gateway. Then they built a well on top, so that it looked inconspicuous. In those days, wells were everywhere.”

  “Why now, though? There’s no plague anymore. Nothing wiping people out. Why do they still do it?”

  “Because it isn’t about that now, Ella. Lester and the others wanted gifts from Viseth, but selfish ones. Money. Power. Fortune in all its different kinds.”

  “Senseless. Those rotten, rotten bastards.”

  I thought back to the atrium now, to the door closing, leaving the witch in the atrium with the Effigia. The word she’d spoken, and then the screams of pain.

  Human life was precious, but Lester and the others weren’t human. They didn’t meet the requirements.

  A few days later, I wrote a blog post about Blaketree. There was no mention of demons, cults, witches. Instead, I wrote that the investigation was a dud. It felt wrong to paint it that way; I felt like I was doing Marion a disservice. But Jeremiah was right; some things were left buried. As long as it was over, that was as much as we could ask.

  I was strangely lethargic for the next few days. I think my brain was still trying to process what I’d seen, but those things were impossible to set straight in my mind. It went beyond what should have been possible. There was no point trying to settle my thoughts; I just had to accept them and hoped the memories began to fade.

  The only thing I could find the energy to do was to get an engineer to check my alarm system, and he soon found the source of the activations on my security app - I had a visitor.

  A mouse. Or mice, actually. There was a family of three who had been scuttling in my flat when I wasn’t there. As things went, knowing vermin had infested my home was actually a relief.

  It was four days after our return from Blaketree that I was working on Jeremiah’s website, writing a post about an upcoming ghost hunt he was hosting in an old saw mill. As I hit publish, a red ‘1’ appeared on the notification section of my website admin panel.

  Clicking on it, I saw some text that read, 'one new comment on post: Haunting (or not) of Devil Forest.'

  Clicking on the post and scrolling to the bottom, my throat started to close up.

  There was a single comment.

  It wasn’t the comment itself that made me shiver, though.

  Comment from user: The Ferryman.

  The End of Book 2