by Jack Lewis
“Look! The squirrel has a nut in its mouth!”
On any other day Loe night have enjoyed a walk in the woods, but she had no love for the trees near Harrow Hall. She just fixed her sights on the road ahead, torn between excitement and trepidation.
On the one hand, this walk would take a while, but it might lead them to Eldike village. In which case, everything was okay, and even though it didn’t explain what had happened the night before, at least it meant there was nothing sinister going on.
Then again, what if the same thing happened to them while on foot? What if they walked on and on, and never reached the village? How the hell would they explain it?
She’d deal with that if it came to it. Her Aunt Rachel used to say, ‘No point preparing for the storm that never comes.’ As a saying, it didn’t fully make sense, since it implied that you should never prepare for anything because you would never know if a storm was coming or not, but replaying the words in Rachel’s kind voice was comforting.
Thirty minutes into their trek, Jay’s early-morning energy was already gone, replaced with the hangover that he rightly deserved. Mag took a metal water bottle from her bag and handed it to him. “I was wondering how long it’d take you to need this. In fairness, you lasted longer than I thought.”
“Thanks, sis.”
Forty-five minutes into the trek, Altair had to stop. He rolled up his right jeans leg and rubbed his calf. “Old football injury,” he said. “Tore my muscle. It still aches sometimes.”
After an hour of walking through the woods, Loe began to feel like she’d lost all sense of direction despite them walking in a straight line and following the road. It wasn’t the road that was the problem, but the forest. The trees around her all looked the same, as if that one pattern had repeated itself over and over. There was no sign of Eldike in the distance. No houses, no other roads, no cars. No hint that the village even existed.
For as long as they could, none of them said out loud what they were all dreading. It was if speaking about it would make it true. Soon, though, there was no way they could hide from it.
“No. Screw that. No way, not happening. I must still be drunk,” said Jay.
Ahead of them was Harrow Hall. A blight on the landscape, a hulk of timber and nails, uncared for and unloved.
And it had no cars outside it.
Mag raced forward until she was standing where their cars had been. When Loe got there, she saw that the mud and leaves were completely undisturbed.
“It’s like they were never here,” she said.
Jay turned in a circle, eyes wide, face pale. “We walked in a straight line! All this way, we never moved even a fraction in another direction. Altair…tell me I’m wrong.”
Altair said nothing. He stared at the road, in the direction they had set off in an hour earlier, almost as if he was watching a visual echo of them setting out. It was as though he saw their past selves walking ahead of them, ghosts of their own flesh born just an hour ago.
Loe tried to find a rock of rationality to cling to but the tide of weird stuff was too strong, and she lost grip. Her chest tightened, her throat constricted. She felt a presence stir in her mind, a monster beginning to wake. It was Clive answering his summons, already stomping forth. The vibrations of his steps in her mind made her pulse pound.
Without a word, she took the metal bottle from Jay, unscrewed the lid, but not a single drop met her tongue.
“Loe? Are you alright?” he said.
The forest began to dim, as though twilight had crept out of its grave hours earlier than it should. Her legs were weak.
She hit the ground, feeling pain spring in her arse.
A hand squeezed her shoulder. She felt cool metal against her palm.
“…packed…just…case,” said a voice, but the throbbing in Loe’s ears made it hard to listen to.
It’s just Clive. Get a grip, you loser.
She took a deep breath and held it in.
Get a hold of yourself.
Inhale, exhale.
1…2…3…4...5…
Inhale, exhale.
When the moment passed, the forest came back in full color. It was richer than before, the ground scattered with blood-red leaves, the tree trunks oak brown. Mag, Altair, and Jay were staring at her.
“Sorry,” she said. “My blood sugar must be low.”
“Blood sugar, my arse. Are you okay?” said Mag.
“Honestly, I’m fine.”
She put her hand out, pushing away Jay’s attempts to help her up, and she got to her feet. Her cheeks burned in shame, even though she knew, deep down, that feeling ashamed of it was ridiculous.
The three of them kept staring at her, and she both appreciated and hated their concern at the same time. It’d been a while since anyone had looked at her with that kind of attention, and it was hard to know what to do with it.
So, she did what she always did. What always helped when she felt like this.
“Why are we standing around? Let’s get going. Did Stanway keep any maps?”
*
Before looking for maps, they tried to use their mobile phones. Predictably, they had no signal. When modern technology failed them, Loe sought out what was fast becoming a relic of the past.
“Aha! Here we go.”
“What?” said Jay, taking his face out of a bag of crisps.
“We might be okay, after all,” she said, pointing.
Stanway kept a landline telephone in his house, an old-style receiver that was screwed into his living room/kitchen/bedroom wall.
“Great!” said Mag. “Let’s call someone in Eldike.”
“Who?” asked Jay.
“The mayor, the butcher, I don’t care. I just want to hear that there’s still a world outside of this place.”
Loe picked up the telephone. Putting it to her ear, two things occurred to her.
One, there was no dial tone.
Two, the telephone was way too light. She pried it apart and found nothing inside. It was just an empty case.
“Damn it!” she said, throwing it. The phone casing hit the wall and was hanging from its chord, swinging back and forth like a pendulum.
So, no mobile phones, no landline. The idea that they couldn’t call anyone made Clive stir in her mind, so she quickly moved on.
“Let’s try and find a map.”
They found two maps of Harrow Hall and the surrounding woods, both of them in one of the disused rooms on the upper floor. One was an ordnance survey map that showed not just the woods but the whole area for miles around. To Loe, who relied on her phone for direction to an unhealthy degree, it was a complex maze of multi-colored squiggles.
The second map was far more interesting; it was comprised of two dozen sheets of paper taped together and then folded up. When Loe delicately unfolded them, she saw a map hand-drawn across the sheets. It looked like the kind of map you’d find at the beginning of a fantasy novel, with little symbols covering the face of it, like tiny little trees to represent the forest. In the centre of it, like a whirlpool in the middle of a lake, was Harrow Hall.
The woods spread out in every direction, and orbiting around the hall were lots of little landmarks. Ones you wouldn’t find on an official map, such as an old, felled tree, a pond, a hill with the words Hooknest Hill written. It looked like the map had been started by a child, and then added to for years afterwards.
“Every time we walk down the road, it loops back here, yes?” said Loe.
Mag nodded. Jay, hands in his coat pocket, stared out of the window. Altair stared at the map intently.
Loe carried on. “So here’s what we do. Let’s see how far we actually get before the loop happens. We’ll check in every direction around the hall. There’s the old well to the east. The felled tree in the west. If we go far enough north, we should come to the duck pond. Let’s use them as landmarks, and see how far beyond them we can get.”
“Alt and I will take the pond,” said Jay. “I always liked ducks.”
“I’d feel better if we all went together,” said Loe.
“That’ll take hours!”
“It just seems more sensible.”
“Come on! Fine, fine. No point arguing, is there? This is how I know you’re really are our sister. You and Alt are both worriers, and you’ve got Mag’s stubbornness. You’re just as bad as each other.”
“I’d trust her over the moron who got into his car after drinking all day,” said Mag.
Jay hung his head now, and Loe was glad to see him suitably ashamed of himself. She knew then that she’d won. They would follow her plan, and there’d be no splitting up.
*
The forest was relentless on all sides, Loe discovered. It didn’t matter which part of Harrow Hall you set out from, the woods stretched on and on, tree after miserable tree. She found herself fanaticising about concrete buildings. About brickwork, big glass windows, streetlights, neon signs. She’d never, ever moan about city life again.
Heading north, they hiked for two hours up a slope that started off gentle and then grew steeper and steeper. Her calves sang with aches, and judging from their whining, so did everyone else’s. If that singing had been literal, the cacophony of aching voices would have filled the forest.
Around lunch time, they ate sandwiches and drank thermos coffee under the biggest tree they had seen so far, one so big that it looked like it could be the father of all the younger, slenderer trees around it, if trees worked that way. While most trees in Harrow woods grew so close together that they competed for root space, no other trees seemed to dare grow too close to this one.
To Loe, there was something different about it. It didn’t give her the same sense of dread as the rest of the forest. Studying it, she found a love heart carved into the trunk, along with letters too weathered to make out.
“Let’s check our phones,” she said.
They all pulled out their mobile phones, but no luck. Mobile phone signal had deserted them.
Jay opened his sandwich, pinched a tomato slice between his index finger and thumb, and tossed it away.
“Jay!” hissed Mag. “Don’t waste stuff, and don’t litter the forest.”
“I hate tomatoes. I think you know that perfectly well, Mag. I have done since we were kids.”
“I think you should be grateful she made us sandwiches at all,” said Altair.
Mag smiled. “Thank you, Alt. I’m equally grateful you had the foresight to stock up on stuff in Eldike before you headed to Dad’s.”
“I didn’t expect him to have much in his cupboards.”
Jay muttered something under his breath.
“What did you say?” asked Mag, glaring.
Jay wilted under his younger sister’s stare. “Fine.”
He stomped off, picked up his piece of tomato, and came back. Loe watched with amusement. It was like seeing a time machine at work, sitting with the three of them. It appeared that Jay was regressing back to childhood much quicker that Mag or Alt were, but the years were rolling back all the same. It made her think of everything she’d missed out on.
“Can I ask you something, Altair?” she said.
“Shhcm” he said. Then he chewed his bread, swallowed. “Sorry. Sure you can.”
“What did the psychic say to you? You never finished telling us.”
He paused now, his jaw open ready for another bite. He set his sandwich on his lap. “That really doesn’t matter. They’ll tell you anything just to keep you coming back.”
“If it doesn’t matter, then it doesn’t matter about you telling us,” said Mag.
Jay took a metal flask from his inner coat pocket, opened the lid, and too ka swig. “What’s all this about a psychic?”
“Alt here wanted to consult with the spirits,” said Mag.
Altair reached for his glasses, then stopped himself. “I did not. If you must know, I…uh…”
A look crossed Mag’s face then. She looked like a cat spotting a vulnerable chick left alone in a nest. “Come on, Alt. No need to be embarrassed.”
Loe didn’t pick up on any embarrassment as such, but the look on Mag’s face was unmistakable. Mag knew it was there, and she was ready to pull it out. Was it some kind of sisterly instinct for a chance at mockery? If it was, it was a skill Loe had never had chance to learn.
“Come on, Alt,” cooed Mag.
Jay took another swig. His cheeks were flushed. “Yeah, come on. Don’t be shy.”
Altair took his glasses off now, and once again huffed on the lenses and rubbed them. “You two won’t shut up until I tell you, will you? Fine. I saw a girl on the tube, on my way to work. I was trying to read my book, but I felt like my cheeks were burning. She kept looking at me. I could see her from the corner of my eye.”
“You weren’t standing inappropriately close to her like a creep, were you?” asked Mag.
“Thanks, but no. I hate the bloody tube, especially when you’re packed together like balls in a sack. She kept looking at me, honestly. And when I saw her do it once more and I looked back, she smiled at me.”
“Where does the psychic come in?” asked Jay.
Altair rubbed his glasses even more furiously. His cheeks reddened, though in a different way to Jay’s alcohol flush. “I wanted to find out her name.”
Mag laughed. Altair’s cheeks reddened further. Jay set his flask down. “Hey, Mags. Come on! Give him a break.”
“Really? Alt’s smiling at girls on tubes and then going to psychics to find out their names, and you expect me not to mock him?”
“He saw a chance at making a connection, and he tried to take it. What’s wrong with that?”
Mag said nothing for a second. Altair looked at his little brother gratefully.
“Maybe try talking to girls when you’re actually in their company,” said Mag, not unkindly. “And then don’t waste your money on psychics.”
The three of them fell into light-hearted bickering and mockery, each giving and receiving their fair share. Loe enjoyed it. Even though she didn’t know them well enough to add anything of her own, she felt like that by just being there, she was a part of it.
When Jay called Mag a straw-haired witch and the bickering began to die down, something occurred to her.
“You didn’t tell us what the psychic said.”
It was as though she’d just tipped a tank of sea water over them. The air became cold and the wind seemed to groan like two icebergs sliding together.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Come on, Altair,” she said, determined to pursue it. “You’ve told us everything but the good bit. Put us out of our misery. You don’t know me well enough to know just how bloody persistent and downright annoying I can be.”
He huffed. “Fine. You asked, just remember that.”
“Yes, I did.”
He stared at her. “Fine. The psychic told me I was going to die.”
Jay spat a spray of whiskey. “What?”
“Uh…what?” said Mag.
“She said, you’re going to die, Brian.”
“Brian?”
“That’s the name I gave her.”
“Well,” said Jay. “If she didn’t see through your ingenious trickery, she’s not much of a psychic.”
“What did you say to her?” asked Mag.
“I asked when, and where.”
“I’d ask how,” said Jay.
Loe set her half-eaten sandwich on her lap, her hunger weirdly banished. “What did she say to that?”
“She said…” said Altair, pausing, clearly enjoying his captive audience. “She said…”
Mag punched him on the arm.
Rubbing his bicep, Altair said, “She told me that our hour was up, and that she’d go into more detail in our next session.”
“Told you!” exclaimed Jay. “A big, fat con. A swindler. She gave you the psychic version of a cliff-hanger. Told you something big so that you’d book another session with her.”
“God, this is l
ike pulling teeth from a statue,” said Mag. “Stop making us ask questions, Alt. What happened when you went back? What did she tell you?”
“That’s the thing,” said Alt. “She died a day later. She got run over by a bus.”
None of them said anything for a few seconds. Wind wheezed through the cavities of the old tree. Nearby birds shrieked at each other.
“She should have seen that coming,” said Jay.
*
“You’re reading it wrong,” said Mag.
Loe checked the map. She’d checked it so many times over the course of the day that she reckoned she could close her eyes and she’d see it perfectly laid out in her mind.
“Trust me, Mag. I’ve been careful.”
“Then where is it?”
They should have reached the duck pond in the north by now, but instead all the forest greeted them with was more trees, more muddy earth, more pine needles littered all over.
“Maybe we didn’t walk far enough,” said Mag.
“We’ve overshot it, if anything,” said Loe. “I wanted to be sure.”
“Then maybe we missed it.”
“Pond is a modest name for this thing, judging by the map. I think it’s more like a lake. We wouldn’t miss it.”
“Let’s go just a little further,” said Loe.
“You said yourself; we already walked far enough, and we wouldn’t have walked by it.”
“Trust me, just a little further! I’m not going back now.”
She must have said this in a strange way, because Mag asked, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Honestly.”
It was disingenuous, using the word honestly to seal a lie. In fact, it was the definition example of disingenuity. She knew that she wasn’t lying to her brothers and sister, really. She was lying to herself.
In her mind, seeing the duck pond would have meant that the map was correct, that there was no more to this place than just an old house and a forest, and that even if the road wouldn’t take them away from it, there were other ways to get out. Seeing the duck pond would have meant everything was okay. That was what she really needed now.
They carried on walking, and Loe tried to trick herself into believing that soon, they see the glittering waters of the pond.
