Changeling

by Matt Wesolowski

  Often when people talk about Wentshire Forest, it comes with a strong dose of local folklore – the witch especially.

  There are a number of eyewitness accounts of strange things in the forest: lights and sounds, odd animals and apparitions. But no more than any at other site of tragedy or intrigue. And unfortunately, there is no real corroboration of any of these sightings. Only rumour and speculation. And now the Wentshire Air Force Base stands guard over those woods.

  Callum Wright could be easily described as a sceptic – a working-class Scouser who doesn’t suffer fools. He has no interest in the paranormal, and in the short time that I speak to him, does not appear to be interested in the tall tales of Wentshire Forest.

  —All I can tell you, mate, is what I seen. No more than that. And I’d like to say, on record, that all that witch stuff is just there to sell stuff. At least it was, when you could still go into those woods.

  Throughout the build-up to this interview, Callum has been very clear that he doesn’t want to sound ‘disrespectful’ about what happened with Alfie Marsden. And despite what he claims happened to him on the Great Escapes site, he doesn’t want to seem to be trying to explain what happened to that little boy in 1988.

  —I tell you one thing, mate: it’s stuck with me, it has. That poor kiddie. No wonder the father’s the way he is. I was there; and I helped with the search, when all the machines were failing. I was stood in the dark, in the rain, trying to make those lights, which had worked no problem up until then, come back on again.

  Callum recalls the initial search for Alfie that night. He says even then it felt futile. He can’t explain why, but he knew they’d never find the child.

  —And he’ll never be found now, will he? Breaks my heart, stuff like that.

  —What do you think might have really happened?

  —You know, if that poor little lad hadn’t gone like he did, what I’m here to tell you would just be some mad story – one of those tales that you tell in the pub. But now, after all these years, here I am in a pub, about to tell you that story.

  I feel as if Callum is hedging in order to avoid having to start telling his tale. So I assure him that so long as he’s sincere and tells his side of things, no one will accuse him of disrespecting what happened to Alfie Marsden.

  —Why don’t you just tell me about what you saw and experienced when you worked on the Baxter’s site?

  Callum takes a huge gulp of his pint. He sighs and shakes his head.

  —So, the first morning I went down there to graft, it was a bit of a clean-up job. They’d just felled a load of trees, made some space and that, and we were there to get it ready for the diggers. We’d been bombing along the country roads in the back of this van for fuckin’ hours. I felt like I was going to vom. We stopped for a breather about halfway, and we were on this track in the middle of the wood – just one set of ruts in the earth really. The trees were packed all around us. You couldn’t see nothing. I remember everyone kept their voices down, and there was just this huge silence. And then, all of a sudden, there was this big rush of wind, hissing through the trees, and everyone jumped. It was like that fuckin’ place was laughing at us. I was scared. We all were, but no one wanted to admit it.

  Callum describes the site as being in its infancy. None of the diggers and excavators had arrived yet. There was a perimeter, made up of hoardings, keeping the public out, and there were a few shipping containers, Portakabins and storage boxes for tools. The crew of young builders ate their meals in the vans. Later, some Portakabins and Portaloos would arrive. The builders had been given the opportunity to stay over in the Portakabins so the work could be done quicker. Callum was game for staying, as were some of the other younger lads.

  —I was all good with that. They were gonna provide us with a free brekky, sleeping bag and that. It was going to be a laugh.

  There were also, Callum says, remnants of a few older buildings on the site.

  —I have no idea what they were. Barns or something, maybe? One of those overnight places for people who do hunting and that? Some stones and bricks, half a wall here and there. There was a phone box, though; we called it the Tardis, cos it looked proper mad, just sat there in the woods all on its own.

  —What was the work like in those early days?

  —It was dark and it was cold and it was quiet. It was like the day had only got started then it was over. The first job was shifting all the old bricks from them old buildings into this massive skip. Each time one of them bricks hit the skip, the clang sent a little shiver through us. And whenever anyone started trying to chat, the conversation just sort of died. Like, no one wanted to speak. You could feel the trees all around you, pressing you in. The foreman had this boom box that he tried to get working – the radio and that, you know? He gets it plugged in but all he can get is static. The volume was fucked as well, it was dead loud, just this blasting static for ages while he tried to get it working. Must have been the trees. No signal or whatever.

  So we’re about halfway through that clearing job. Me back’s aching, me hands are hurting despite them gloves, and I’m sick of me life. We’re all stood about with our fags and that, glad for the break…

  —Did something happen?

  —Yeah. Must have been out the corner of me eye, I seen something move, so I looked round.

  —What was it?

  —It’s gonna sound daft, this: it was like an animal. Of course there was probably loads of animals in the woods, but this wasn’t like any animal I’d ever seen. Never seen nowt like it since. Never want to either.

  —No?

  —So, anyway, after them bricks were done, we had to do some digging. Getting rid of roots and that from the trees that’d been felled. The digger was due and the gaffer was going off his nut cos it was late. He spent half his time in the Tardis – that phone box – shouting and swearing and kicking the door.

  So we got a load of spades out one of them storage boxes, and we start digging around them tree stumps. It’s dead sticky and awkward, full of roots and rocks and I’m working up a bit of a sweat when I get this nasty feeling.

  —What sort of feeling.

  —Me nan used to talk about a ‘goose walking over your grave’. It was that sort of feeling.

  And I know without looking that something’s watching us. I go a bit slower, not letting on that I’ve noticed. I can feel all the hairs on the back of me neck rising up, and I’m sort of playing this game with meself. Like, I’m trying dead hard not to look. Every time I want to, I don’t. And somehow, somehow, whatever is there, behind us, in the trees, knows that I’m playing this mad little game.

  —And when you did finally look…?

  —I nearly shat meself, cos I thought it was a wolf. A dirty great wolf stood there not five feet behind us. I remember I must have jumped or gasped or something, cos one of the others who was working next to us, he follows me gaze.

  ‘What the fuck’s that?’ he says. I remember, in that moment, I wanted to give him a hug.

  —Why?

  —Cos it meant if someone else had seen it, I wasn’t losing me mind. We both watched whatever it was slinking away, back into the dark.

  —What do you think it was now?

  —See, that’s the funny thing. The other lad, he reckoned it was a boar. He said they look more like wolves than pigs. But I remember it wasn’t shaggy like a boar, it was … sleek. Smooth haired, like a dog.

  —Was it only the two of you who saw something? Did you tell anyone else?

  —Yeah just us two that day, and no, we didn’t say nothing. Not then anyway. Remember this was only a few days in. It was time for dinner then anyways, and nothing else weird happened. Not till the next day anyway.

  This is when Callum tells me about seeing the old woman – the account you heard at the beginning of the episode. He didn’t tell a soul about what he’d seen, convincing himself that it was a dream or a hallucination.

  That same afternoon, the digger appeared
to help pull out the stumps of the trees. But it worked sporadically, sometimes the engine was chugging away, sometimes it was dead. The work seemed to take an age and in the weeks that followed, very little progress was made.

  —We were all getting bored, pissing about like school kids. That nervousness hadn’t gone away and everyone was buzzing. People started talking. They started joking around and that: ‘Watch out for the cat that’s sat up the branches’, that sort of thing. You were trying to make your mate jump, like. ‘Hey, Cal, you seen that six-legged pig over there?’ Trying to make each other turn round. If you did, everyone’d laugh. Then – I can’t remember when – everyone started saying that they did see stuff in them woods, like me and that other lad had.

  —And these weren’t just jokes?

  —No one was laughing. When we were sat having a brew and that, people started talking about the animals they’d seen in the trees while we were grafting. They’d just ‘appear’ – a dog, a goat, and this divvy lad said he’d seen this massive black ram with curly horns and red eyes that stood there, glaring at him and growling. You would see someone look behind them and you’d look too, just to see a flash of something vanishing into the trees.

  —What were people’s reactions to these sightings?

  —We were funny about it. No one laughed, no one took the mick. Cos it rattled us – we didn’t want to hear stuff like that anymore.

  Especially me. I didn’t see her again – that old woman – but there were times when I thought I could hear her. Always whispering, always saying something I couldn’t quite hear. So if anyone talked about stuff they’d seen in the woods, I just put me head down and got on with it.

  —Was there any kind of consensus about these sightings?

  —Not really. It was like … like everyone was waiting for someone else to say something. Like at school when something bad happens and everyone waits for the teachers to take control. Except no one was. But then, one morning, the foreman put us all in a line – like when someone goes missing, you know?

  —You mean he was having you sweep the area?

  —Yeah, but he was vague about it. He just told us to look for ‘anything that shouldn’t be there’.

  —And was there?

  —No. Of course not. It was just trees and roots and rock and bracken. No wolves, no sheep, nothing like that.

  —Did the sightings stop?

  —Well, by then we were a few weeks in, and the rest of the stuff had started to arrive – the toilets, the Portakabins, all the machines. It was becoming more like a proper building site, well, sort of. It wasn’t like any building site I’ve worked on since. It was a comedy of errors that place, a proper mess.

  Callum goes on to tell me about how even basic tasks seemed hampered. Deliveries of materials simply didn’t show up; machines kept losing power or else seemed to move of their own accord. This was becoming a safety risk and many of the lads on the site began to quit. Some just called their dads or their mates, asking them to pick them up. Some of them just walked off. That’s when the press began to cotton on and started printing stories about what was happening.

  —We all knew it was the lads who left who went to the papers. For a little while I thought it’d be a good thing, you know? Might shame the bosses into getting their fingers out, sort out some decent kit for us.

  —And did it?

  —It was the exact opposite, mate. The papers started taking the piss, calling it ‘The Witch’s Curse’. They were laughing at us – listing everything that was going wrong. The whole thing became a joke. But for those of us who were actually there, it was horrible.

  Things became desperate on the site. Costs were increasing daily and the completion date for the project was looking increasingly unrealistic. It certainly explains why, when Sorrel Marsden drove his son through Wentshire Forest on Christmas Eve, Great Escapes was still a building site.

  —It was getting daft. The gaffer was kicking off, his boss was kicking off at him. He was never out of that phone box. I remember one afternoon, it had started raining – it always seemed to be raining there. Me and the other lads were in one of the new Portakabins, having a brew and that. Anyways, we’re chatting and dossing about when Clive, the foreman, comes in with his face all red, in a proper rage. He almost tears the door off the hinges.

  ‘Which one of you little pricks keeps doing it?’ he’s shouting, and we’re shocked, just looking at each other. No one knows what he’s on about.

  ‘Come on!’ he says. ‘Who is it? Tell me now or the lot of you will be out on your arses, and walking back!’

  No one said owt, and none of us laughed or anything.

  —What exactly did he think you had done?

  —We didn’t know for ages! We only found out later when one of the older fellas told us. Apparently, when Clive had been on the phone, in the Tardis, someone was knocking on the door and running away.

  —Did you know who was doing it?

  —No! I mean we were all young and a bit daft and that, but we weren’t that dumb. Besides, we were all in the Portakabin. And no one wanted to get kicked off site.

  Clive was on one after that though. You only had to look at him wrong and he’d go for you.

  The pressure from the press and the missed deadlines were getting to everyone. Nevertheless, the work continued. But, yet again, another problem arose. Callum explains.

  —We had to expand the site. There was some planning rule or other that meant we had to widen the areas around the cabins a bit. It was only a metre or so. But that meant clearing more of the trees.

  —But you were builders.

  —That’s right. We knew nothing about cutting down trees. But we had the lads coming to make the cabins in a few weeks. They were specialists coming over from Norway. Their kit had already arrived in a shipping crate. Anyway Clive told us young ’uns that we would just have to get on with cutting down the trees. I dunno what he was thinking; things must have been desperate.

  —So you young lads who stayed over at the site, it was down to you to clear some more trees.

  —Yeah. You couldn’t get away with it now. Basically what we had to do was get up when it was still dark, stick the big lamps on and work together, one tree at a time. Clive didn’t let us use the chainsaws or nowt like that, but there were axes and all sorts on site. It’s a wonder no one was hurt. But we just got on with it.

  And that’s when stuff started getting weird. Really fucking weird.

  Clive had us all up at 4 a.m. the next morning. He was in a proper stink, shouting and banging on the Portakabin. We made our way up to the edge of the site. Right to the tree line. I remember in that morning gloom, it looked so … solid. I remember thinking where would we even start with this. Clive’s just stood in front of us, swinging his torch. He’s grumbling and swearing and he starts giving it:

  ‘Right, which one of you little bastards was it?’

  We’re just dead confused. He just stood there, shining that torch in our faces and yelling about someone knocking on the door of his Portakabin all night. He looks like he’s not slept a wink. Then he starts handing out these axes, points to one of the trees and just tells us to hurry up. I remember walking past him and seeing his face; his eyes all bloodshot, he looked haunted. I said something to him about how none of us were doing any knocking on his door, and he just looked at me, uncomprehending, like I was something from another universe. Maybe that’s when I knew that there was something wrong with all this.

  Anyways, so we select this tree, the one nearest by. And as soon as we do, the wind starts up and all the trees start waving back and forth, we could hear the branches hissing, like a snake if you get too close. We’re all standing there, looking about, and Clive starts shouting, waving the torch. He gets a couple of the lads to set up the lamps and some of the others to pull some of the rope out of the shipping container and attach it to the tree.

  Dawn was breaking as the crew got set up and began to clear some of the forest.
Using the hand-axes, the group managed to get a rhythm going and felled two of the trees. The trees were then stripped and added to the piles that were to be used for the log cabins. Callum says it wasn’t too bad a job and after the initial unpleasantness from Clive, spirits were high.

  —When it got light and them two trees were down, we went to get something to eat. The rest of the lads were up and had breakfast going. It was cold so we all went back to the Portakabin to eat. We were just having a laugh and that, stuffing our faces with bacon butties, when it started…

  —What did?

  —The banging. I say banging, but I think that’s the wrong word. It was more like loud knocking.

  —Knocking on what?

  —The door, the windows, the walls. All over, I remember we just thought it was the other lads messing about. We were banging back at first, shouting all sorts, laughing. But it didn’t stop; it just went on … all this knocking on the walls. After a bit it started getting annoying. One of the lads stuck his head out the door and when he came back in, he was all crumpled up, confused. He said there was no one there.

  We all went out then, looked up and down, but he was right, there was no one. The other thing that really got to me that day was just how still everything was. Like, when someone’s messing on and that, you can almost feel this energy in the air, like you know they’re hiding behind something, laughing at you. Not this time.

  —You were saying that the banging didn’t sound like banging.

  —Like I say, it was definitely a knocking, but loud. It’s hard to explain. Like a tapping. With a finger or a knuckle rather than a hand or a fist. I tell you what, though, that knocking was what undid everything.

  —How do you mean?

  —Mate, that knocking. It. Never. Stopped.

  Callum’s entire body stiffens and his hand curls into a claw around his glass. I’m worried it will shatter all over the table. He lifts his other hand to the side of his head and the wrinkles around his eyes and forehead deepen.