Forest of the Damned

by Lee Mountford

  So they took care of nature’s calling—where no one was assaulted by an unseen presence this time—and said their goodnights before retiring to their respective tents.

  Ken curled up in his sleeping bag and closed his eyes. The bag kept him warm enough, but he could still feel a cold chill on his face. However, given he was fairly experienced with camping, it was a sensation he truly did not mind.

  Ken tried to quiet his mind and push all their current success from his thoughts. He didn’t want to overthink things, instead preferring to take them as they came and not get ahead of himself, which he had become close to doing earlier after seeing the footage from the previous night.

  It was promising stuff, certainly, but it still needed to be thoroughly scrutinised, and that could only be done in the environment of the editing room, not out in the forest where they were right in the thick of the excitement.

  If he was to finally get the evidence he craved—evidence that proved beyond doubt there was an afterlife—then it had to be irrefutable. And this proof wasn’t for other people, either. Not really. He wasn’t doing it so his peers would laud his work.

  Ken needed to know for himself. There had to be more than just this life.

  There had to be.

  The last thing he remembered before drifting off into a deep sleep was a light rain pitter-pattering down onto the roof of his tent.

  Ken was in the Black Forest. It was night time. He sat on the wet ground, completely naked, with the sloppy mud seeping up around his buttocks. A blanket of rain descended, coating his shivering body.

  He was utterly alone, and the sky above was completely black. Starless. It was as if someone had hidden it with a blank canvas that stretched on forever, trapping him underneath.

  Ken didn’t know what to do. He was lost and alone and scared.

  Then he heard something that made him jump. Somebody off in the distance cried out. A short, sharp sound that cut to his core. He knew instinctively who it was. The voice was young, female, and clearly scared. It was someone in imminent danger.

  Instantly, Ken was up onto his feet, sprinting through the forest towards the noise that could once again be heard. The trees around him were almost as black as the blank sky overhead, making traversing through them dangerous. But he could not afford to stop.

  A cry for help sounded. The same voice again. Ken couldn’t speak or shout back, and he wasn’t sure why. He had no voice. The air burned in his lungs while he pushed on as hard as he could, ignoring the pain in his muscles.

  Hold on, just hold on. Please. I’ll save you.

  But then the screaming started. Genuine, prolonged screams. The pained, terrified wailing of someone young in absolute agony.

  In the throes of death.

  No! No, no, no.

  Ken was desperate and knew he was too late. Still, he pushed on… and ran right into a downed branch, the jagged edge puncturing his chest. Ken was moving fast enough that the thick, strong spike pierced through his entire body, emerging out of his back.

  The screaming continued.

  Ken could still make no sound; he could yell no words of comfort in response or even vocalise his own, tremendous pain.

  He had failed. Slowly, he felt the life drain away from him.

  Then, ahead, a figure made its way out of the dark. Thin and skeletal, with glinting yellow eyes. Scraggly black hair clung to its skull-like head. A haunting cackle emanated from it.

  The sky above then erupted into life. Stars blinked into existence, swirling around, pulling into a point to form something like a cosmic eye that surveyed everything beneath.

  What was this hell?

  The figure before Ken continued to laugh as the landscape around him changed. Nightmarish pillars of cylindrical black—gargantuan things—thrust upwards and pierced the sky. Monstrous shrieks sounded all around him. The very ground beneath him seemed to seep a viscous red liquid.

  This couldn’t be real. It had to be a nightmare.

  Finally, he was allowed to scream.

  Ken’s eyes opened wide. Had his throat not been so dry, the scream lodged there would have erupted from his mouth.

  Disoriented, he quickly sat up, confused at the light that seeped into his enclosed surroundings. Then the fog of sleep began to clear, and he remembered where he was: in his tent, clothed, and perfectly safe.

  He let out a breath and felt a layer of sweat coat his body. Nightmares had been a recurring theme for Ken in recent years, but he had never had any so surreal and vivid as that one.

  After he pulled himself round, Ken put on his boots and left his tent, breathing in the crisp morning air of the forest. He smelled the wet grass and mud. The ground beneath his feet was damp, but it was not the mud-bath it had been last night.

  He stretched out his muscles and checked his watch. It was a little after seven, and Ken normally woke a few hours before that. Then he looked over to the other tents next to his own. James’ and Roberta’s larger tent was quiet, with no one moving within. All seemed normal there.

  Tony’s tent, however, was different.

  The door was open. Not just unzipped, but ripped open completely—torn away, with the contents from within spilt out across the ground, as if the shelter itself had been gutted and its insides dragged out to be left on show.

  Tony’s sleeping bag, his pack, boots, and clothes were strewn about.

  Ken’s heart seized in his chest and panic hit him instantly. Something was wrong.

  Running over to the tent quickly, he poked his head inside. Other than the ripped door and state of Tony’s belongings, nothing looked out of the ordinary. Except that Tony was not there.

  Ken stood back up and turned to the forest.

  ‘Tony!’ he yelled. After waiting a short time for a response which never came, he screamed it out again. ‘Tony!’

  Ken heard a voice from behind.

  ‘What’s going on?’ It was James. Ken spun around and saw the younger man’s head sticking out through the entrance to his shelter. James’ black hair was a mess and he was squinting, trying to block out the natural morning light from his sleepy eyes. ‘Where’s Tony?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ken said, panic evident in his voice. ‘He’s gone.’

  13

  ‘What the hell do you mean, gone?’ James asked, incredulous.

  ‘Look at his tent,’ Ken replied, motioning to the shelter. James immediately understood. The ripped door and the fact Tony’s stuff was strewn about did indeed seem very wrong. A sense of urgency filled James as Ken began to scream his friend’s name even louder, hoping to get a reply. James quickly threw on his boots and started to lace them up. As he was doing so, he felt Roberta grab his arm. When he looked to her, he saw terror in her wide eyes, and tears that were still fresh on her tired, dirty face, staining her cheeks.

  ‘We need to leave here,’ she said in a whisper.

  James finished tying his boots. ‘Hun,’ he replied, ‘we need to find out what’s happened to Tony.’

  ‘But—’ Roberta started to say, though James didn’t let her finish. Instead, he got out of the tent. He didn’t fully understand what was going on, or where the hell Tony was, but he knew that time was of the essence here.

  ‘Couldn’t he have gone off to use the toilet again?’ James asked. Even as he said it, he knew that wouldn’t explain the state of the tent.

  Ken stopped yelling for a moment and cast James a look that made it clear the question was a stupid one. When he replied, it was instead to offer a plan of action.

  ‘We need to go and look for him,’ Ken said, speaking quickly. ‘If he isn’t responding, then he needs our help. We have to get to him, quickly.’

  ‘Okay,’ James agreed. ‘But where do we look?’

  Ken glanced around, frantic, clearly trying to come to an impossible decision. He then walked over to Tony’s tent and inspected the ground around the entrance. ‘Perhaps there are tracks or something.’

  ‘Tracks?’ James ec
hoed, and followed Ken’s lead, looking around as well. He hoped to find something that would offer some clue as to what happened, but felt woefully unfit for the job at hand. James knew marketing and media, not forensics and investigation. Ken, it seemed, was a little more in-tune with what they should be looking for.

  ‘There,’ he said, pointing to a flattened patch of grass outside of the tent. The blades fell outward, indicating to James that something heavy had been dragged across the ground away from the tent. He noticed Roberta’s head hanging out of the door to their own shelter; she looked apprehensive, but made no move to come out and join them.

  Ken and James followed the apparent drag marks a short distance to an area where the green and yellowed grass faded away, turning to muck and mud. Here, too, there was something to follow: indentations in the dark ground that appeared to James as if two parallel objects with some weight behind them had been pulled across the area, displacing the mud. Perhaps heel marks from a person being moved? These tracks, however, eventually disappeared completely. Despite searching extensively, neither man could find anything else after the drag marks had stopped.

  ‘Jesus, this looks like someone took him,’ James said, motioning to the marks they had found. ‘Just pulled him right out of here.’

  ‘But why do they stop?’ Ken asked.

  James shrugged. ‘Maybe whoever took him lifted him up off the ground.’

  ‘And why didn’t they leave any tracks as well?’

  James searched for an answer, but none was forthcoming. Again, he felt out of his depth.

  ‘We go that way,’ Ken said, pointing off in the direction the marks had been heading before they disappeared. ‘It’s our best guess.’

  ‘No,’ Roberta said from the tent. ‘We can’t just go running off into the woods. It isn’t safe.’

  There was something about her tone that troubled James. She wasn’t just scared—her shaking voice sounded absolutely terrified, and he could see that she was on the verge of tears. He didn’t get the chance to respond.

  ‘We have no choice,’ said Ken, raising his voice. ‘We can’t wait around and debate this. Let’s go.’

  ‘What about all our stuff?’ James asked.

  ‘Leave it!’ Ken snapped. ‘Let’s hurry up.’

  James nodded and turned to Roberta. ‘Come on, hun, we need to move. Get your boots on.’

  ‘I’m not going,’ she said with a shake of her head, then disappeared back inside.

  ‘Goddamnit,’ James sighed before turning to Ken. ‘Give me a minute.’

  ‘We don’t have a minute.’

  ‘Well I’m not going to just leave her,’ James insisted.

  ‘Then don’t,’ Ken replied. ‘Make sure she’s okay. I’ll be back as quickly as I can.’

  ‘Ken, wait,’ James called, but Ken was already on his way, marching from the campsite. Part of James wanted to follow, as sitting back and leaving their boss to go alone felt wrong… and dangerous. But he couldn’t exactly leave his girlfriend behind either. James suddenly felt a pang of anger towards Roberta for putting him in this position.

  Ken continued out between the trees, calling out Tony’s name before breaking into a jog. James turned and moved back to the tent, dropping to his knees and leaning inside. Roberta had moved to the back and had her knees tucked up to her chin. She was crying now, her whole body shaking as she sobbed.

  James felt immediate guilt for his earlier flash of anger. Could you really blame somebody for being scared at all that had occurred? After all, Roberta had warned them, insisting they needed to leave the forest before something happened.

  And now, with Tony missing, something had happened, and it appeared her ominous premonition was proven right.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, softening his voice, before crawling forward to put a protective arm around her. The poor girl looked exhausted. ‘It’s going to be okay. We’ll find Tony, and then we’ll get out of here. Everything will be alright.’

  Her crying just intensified. ‘It won’t,’ she said, pulling at her hair as if some invisible bug were crawling through it. James tried to force her hands back down. ‘It won’t be alright,’ she went on. ‘We’ll never find Tony.’

  ‘We will,’ James insisted, but Roberta spun her head round to look at him. Her wet, red eyes looked wild.

  ‘We won’t!’ she screamed. ‘Don’t you understand? We’ll never find him because she has him. She took him.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘You know who I’m talking about.’

  ‘Roberta,’ James said, trying to be gentle in his approach. ‘We don’t know what happened.’

  ‘I know,’ she replied, her voice cracking. ‘I know, because I saw it.’

  James paused, her words taking a moment to register. ‘What do you mean?’

  Roberta’s sobbing increased, and it took her a minute before she was able to form the words. ‘Last night. I woke up in the middle of the night and saw that… someone was opening our tent.’ James felt his blood run cold, but Roberta went on. ‘I saw her. She looked in here. I saw her face, James. Her horrible, inhuman face. Then she left. I didn’t want to watch, but with the tent open I could see her from where I was. She moved over to Tony’s tent…’ Roberta then started bawling completely, screaming out the next words. ‘She took him, James! I saw her take him!’

  ‘Roberta,’ James said, firmly, feeling panic grow. ‘I need you to tell me everything you saw.’

  14

  Roberta had no idea what time it was when she woke during the night, but it was still pitch black outside, with no light coming in through the fabric of the tent.

  She wasn’t sure if it was the strange dream she’d been having that had woken her, or something else, but she was instantly wide awake with her body and mind on full alert. It didn’t take her long, however, to pick up on a subtle sound from outside the tent that made her body go rigid.

  At first, she couldn’t be sure she had heard it correctly and tried to convince herself it was something else, something more natural. But then it came again, echoing from a far-off place.

  A cackle.

  It was a horrible, sinister sound that drifted through the air towards her. The laugh then came again, only this time it sounded much, much closer.

  The final laugh she heard sounded like it was right outside the tent. Roberta wanted to scream, but the sound would not release from her throat, such was the fear that locked her body and vocal chords. She could do nothing but lie there and hug herself tighter from within the confines of her sleeping bag.

  Roberta then heard a scratching sound, as if something was being dragged across the material of the tent. Looking up, she saw—even through the dark—a thin divot in the cloth, moving from one side of the tent to the other, towards the doorway. A fingernail, perhaps?

  Roberta’s heart was pounding in her chest. She listened intently, and her fear peaked when she was treated to an instantly recognisable sound: that of the zip to the door slowly being pulled open.

  Frozen with fear, Roberta was unable to summon her limbs to move, or her voice to scream. She watched the zipper slowly move down, taking an agonising amount of time in its descent.

  And then the entrance was pulled open, revealing something that threatened to snap Roberta’s mind. The thing—an old, vile-looking woman—that poked its head inside smiled and locked its wild, yellow eyes with Roberta.

  Though the horrible thing Roberta now stared at did indeed resemble a female, Roberta knew it could never really be called human. Not given the twisted and horrific features it possessed.

  At that moment, Roberta was sure she was going to die.

  And not only that, but she felt she would lose her very soul to this… witch. Instead, the thing slowly moved away, backing out of the tent completely, leaving the doorway open just enough that Roberta could see it as it turned and drifted over to a different tent.

  Tony’s.

  The entrance to his shelter was quickly torn open in a flurry of a
ctivity, and the thing she knew to be Mother Sibbett disappeared inside. Items were flung from the tent before it reappeared soon after, dragging Tony along with it.

  Roberta locked her gaze with Tony’s as he was being pulled from his enclosure, and his eyes were wide open and frozen in fear, but he did not move. His head was turned to the side and the rest of his body was seemingly trapped in some kind of paralysis. The pleading stare on his face was that of a doomed man, but even though he could not move, she could read his expression well enough.

  Help me.

  But Roberta could not. She couldn’t move, scream, or even barely breathe, let alone run out to aid him. Whether it was her own fear that held her in place, or something more unnatural, Roberta could not be certain, but it didn’t matter. Tony was lifted up off the ground and pulled off into the darkness without even a scream.

  He would die soon, Roberta knew, and she did nothing about it. Instead, she spent the rest of the night focusing on that open doorway to her tent, unable to force herself to close it. She stayed that way until morning broke and she heard Ken calling Tony’s name. Only after James woke and rushed outside to speak with Ken did she feel her body relax enough to finally move.

  And she broke down sobbing.

  And that was the story she relayed.

  Of course, Roberta had not told James everything. How could she tell her partner that a witch had spoken to her in the night when it had poked its head in through the tent? Or even explain the vile, disgusting things it said to her that had turned her stomach… but only to an extent. While Roberta listened to the hag talk—mouth not moving, but the words still coming—she was aware that a small part of her mind actually found what she heard… enticing.

  And that part of her yearned to know more.

  15

  Ken pushed on, marching through the rising undergrowth that seemed to be getting thicker the farther he went. The air was cool and crisp, with the early sun bright. Under different circumstances, it would have been a fine morning in a beautiful natural setting.