Devil Forest

by Jack Lewis

  Jeremiah prodded each photograph. “Ayrith, Myrefall, Lanecrost, Caister, and Blaketree.”

  I recognized those as village names. I’d never been to any of them, but Ayrith was in Scotland, and Lanecrost was twenty miles away from where I used to live growing up. Well, in one of my foster houses, anyway.

  The photographs themselves weren’t of the villages themselves, but were of the same thing; wells.

  Some were in forests, others in what looked to be in the centre of the villages. Four of the photographs showed the wells blocked up by cement, but the fifth well was standing and had a pail and rope next to it.

  This photo was older than the rest; it had that grainy quality to it that added an extra layer of creepiness to the black and white.

  I couldn’t say why, but looking at the wells made me want to turn away from them. Not to the windows, because I got the sense of the darkness in the landscape beyond the train.

  I felt a tingling down my face, like something was watching me through the glass.

  “Notice anything strange about these?” said Jeremiah.

  I shrugged. “Some of them are filled-in. I guess they do that now we don’t need wells for water anymore. No sense risking a kid falling in.”

  “Not just that. Look closer.”

  One of the wells had a tree growing lob-sided over it as if was the well’s protector. The bark had tumour-like growths along it, and some of its trunk had torn away as if the tree had contracted a flesh-eating virus.

  Another well was standing lonely in a forest. Wooden, maybe medieval, surrounded by fog and scattered leaves. A crow was sitting in the corner of the shot, facing away from the camera.

  “Look at the panel on the wooden well,” said Jeremiah. “To the left.”

  I saw it. There was a shape carved into the wood. It looked like the crappy tribal tattoos people got while drunk on holiday in Marbella. It was the infinity symbol of ∞ but with something in the centre of each loop, but I couldn’t make out what they were.

  When I looked at the other wells, something got my attention.

  At the end of the carriage, the man folded his newspaper and put it on his lap. As far as I could tell, he still hadn’t turned a page.

  Don’t let Jeremiah’s bullshit inside your head.

  “The wells all have the same symbol,” I said.

  Jeremiah might have looked for a paranormal edge in everything, but I loved history and symbols and the reasons behind them.

  “Well spotted.”

  “There must be a few decades between some of these photographs,” I said. “It’s unlikely the same person took them.”

  “And a few hundred years between the construction of some of the wells,” said Jeremiah. “Although they were all built in the middle ages.”

  “Weird how stuff survives that long. I mean, we haven’t needed to use wells for centuries, but we cling to the past and try to keep stuff standing. I’m guessing the wells are heritage sites?” I asked.

  Jeremiah shook his head. “Nope. I’ve put the hours in down at the library. Got my hands on a few primary sources. From what I can see, about a dozen wells had the same symbol. Only, nobody knows what it means.”

  “A symbol of the people who made it? Some kind of well building company?”

  “Nope. Villages usually had a local builder make their wells.”

  “It could be something to do with the water then. I don’t know…it kinda looks like the infinity symbol. Maybe that means that the water supply is good?”

  “It could have been. Or it could be a charm symbol, something they put on there hoping it’d mean the well didn’t run dry.”

  “A charm symbol? Witchcraft?”

  “Yeah. That’s not what got me excited, though.”

  “If you say the wells are haunted, and that’s why you got me on Dracula’s commuter sleeper train, I’m gonna flip this table.”

  “It’s bolted down,” said Jeremiah.

  “Speak words that justify this whole thing.”

  “There was a curious fact about these wells,” said Jeremiah. “Or more, the villages that had them. How much do you know about the Black Death?”

  “We covered it in school. It was rats, right?”

  “Close. It was bacteria carried by fleas, who piggy-backed on the rats. It made its way along the Silk Road and wiped out millions of people before finding itself in Britain. And that was before we had aeroplanes. Imagine what’d happen now.”

  “I’d rather not. What do the wells have to do with it?”

  “Well, I had to familiarise myself with the Black Death. I like history too, but not as much as you, and not the grisly stuff. When I read that it wiped out between 40 and 60 percent of the population, I almost shit.”

  “Bad times. I used to feel so bad for them, how isolated everyone had to be. Just shutting themselves in, hoping they didn’t catch it, watching their neighbours and families die.”

  “Nowhere was safe from it, Ella, and the worst thing was, they didn’t have a clue why it was happening. If you don’t know what causes something, how do you fight it?”

  “We’re lucky to live in the times we do.”

  “I’ve never been more thankful to live in this age, no matter how much some of it pisses me off. It’s sad we’ve got to look at one of the darkest periods in human history before we remember to let a little gratitude into our lives.”

  “I’ve made a folder on my phone,” I told him. “Whenever I see a photograph that gives me a warm feeling, I save it there. Camper vans, cosy cabins, snow-scape cities, that kind of thing.”

  “That sounds more like wishing than gratitude.”

  “It’s easier to tell yourself to be more grateful for what you’ve got than to actually feel that way. I guess we’re programmed to never be happy with our lives.”

  “Maybe. It’s simpler in my head–I just need to picture everyone around me dying of the plague and sitting there wondering when it’ll be my turn, and that makes everything click into place.”

  “You know, sometimes I think it’d be easier to think like you. Rarely, but sometimes,” I said.

  “Here’s the thing, Ella. The plague wiped out 60 feckin’ percent of our population. Nowhere was safe from it, not cities, manors, villages, nowhere. But every village that had a well with the weird infinity symbol in it didn’t have a single recorded mortality.”

  -4-

  “Wow. That’s a coincidence,” I said.

  “Once is just chance, twice is coincidence, and a dozen times in the universe fucking with you. Twelve villages that have all survived the deadliest pandemic in recorded history without a single death? All of them with a well bearing a weird carving?”

  “Correlation doesn’t mean causation,” I said.

  I knew that was the sort of thing Jeremiah would want me to say. He was a contradiction; he was so desperate to see something supernatural he’d have offered part of his soul to see true paranormal phenomena if he could find someone to strike a deal with.

  Then again, he scoffed when he heard about ghost sightings, or when he saw photographs online of spectral kids in the background of a shot. He wanted to believe, but he wanted proof to underlie his beliefs.

  Me? Well, I believed. I never used to, but I had accompanied Jeremiah to a village in Scotland once to investigate a haunting, and I’d seen something. I couldn’t prove it, but I had seen it. It killed Jeremiah that he couldn’t say the same.

  Jeremiah had once told me how he had first gotten interested in the paranormal, and it wasn’t the way I had expected. I figured it was a case of an over-active imagination, too many horror movies, or a visit with a psychic, or something.

  Nope. It had started with a man throwing an empty beer can at him.

  Jeremiah grew up in Rawtenscroft, a town in the North West of England. These days it is full of micro-brewery pubs, bistros with dog friendly signs stuck on the windows, and haberdashery shops where the inventory changed every week. The kind of place
that was my perfect afternoon. Food, beer, and dogs.

  Back when Jeremiah was young – it was always weird to think he’d ever been a kid – Rawtenscroft was different. If you believed his account, it was a ghost town full of closed-minded adults whose sole purpose in life was to beat a free-thinking spirit like Jeremiah down.

  But, I’d learned to believe fifty percent of what he said. I always let his words drain through a mental sieve.

  When Jeremiah was ten years old, he was walking home from school with his friends. They’d just bought sweets from the shop, and they’d have to walk another five minutes through the town centre before separating like cruiser missiles and homing in on their own streets.

  It was a normal day in most ways; the occasional car drove at twenty-miles per hour through town, the boys joked with each other, insulted each other’s sisters and mothers – the usual stuff.

  “Oh, and there was Mad Bill outside Dukeson’s Tailor shop,” Jeremiah had told me. “He had his placard in front of him and he was shouting bullshit as usual.”

  “Mad Bill?”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, every town has a mentalist, don’t they?”

  “That’s really, really not the right term,” I said. I hated to be Jeremiah’s political correctness teacher, but sometimes there was no choice. He was well meaning, but sometimes it made me cringe when I was around him.

  “Whatever; he used to stand on the street and rave about all kinds of rubbish. We’d learned to tune him out. He was a fixture of the village, in a way.”

  Jeremiah continued with the story, telling me that as he stopped to tie his shoelaces and the other lads got ahead of him, something hit the back of his head.

  The pain stung him, and he rubbed his skull and turned around.

  Mad Bill flashed a smile at him. His teeth were surprisingly white and straight.

  “I didn’t know what to do, at first,” said Jeremiah. “I was a little paralyzed by it. He’d thrown an empty can of Foamface beer at me.”

  “Get the hell away from him, would be my first instinct,” I said.

  “Well, I watched him. He stared at me for the longest time, and I could see how lucid he was. How normal. How much his name didn’t fit, and that everyone had judged him wrong. I saw how ignorant we all were.”

  “People like to pigeonhole others.”

  “That was why I stuck around, even after my mates left me. Soon after, Bill yelled again. This time, rather than just walk by, I listened to him. I listened to every word, and then I understood.”

  That afternoon, Mad Bill had been ranting about death. That everyone was wrong. Religion was wrong. Movies were wrong. Books were wrong. There was nothing after death. No afterlife, whether good or bad. Just a void.

  Jeremiah took that belief to heart, despite Bill’s nickname. He believed it because Bill said it with such passion, and because it directly went against his religious parents’ beliefs, which he’d always found to be a hindrance. He especially resented being in church on Sundays when his mates were playing footy at the park.

  Jeremiah grew up knowing what happened when you died. It was a mystery of life sorted, and he was barely a teenager.

  Then two things happened.

  First, his childhood best friend, a chestnut cocker spaniel named Rory, died.

  Then granddad James died.

  Two hammer blows in a month and a half, and suddenly Jeremiah was reeling. His mum saw his weakness and pounced, offering him the comfort that Rory and James had gone somewhere when they died. Somewhere good.

  Jeremiah could see them one day, if only he listened to her and Dad and went to church with them.

  Rather than latch onto that comfort, Jeremiah grew angry at his mum. He resented her exploiting his sadness to draw him back in to the things he’d never really believed in.

  At the same time, he didn’t want to believe Mad Bill’s theory of the void anymore. He didn’t want to believe that Rory and James just didn’t exist now, that their existence only led up to a void.

  So, stinging from grief, Jeremiah had started a search that would take up the rest of his life. He searched for the existence of another realm, a spiritual world.

  If only he could find the existence of ghosts, then he could believe that the people he loved didn’t just cease to exist after death.

  Before Jeremiah had told me this, I’d already known he was obsessive. After hearing about it, I understand why. And I didn’t just understand, I felt a wrenching empathy with him, with his need to know.

  He wasn’t just looking for ghosts; he was looking for hope. Just like everyone who used his blog to contact him, who asked him to come to their homes and investigate a haunting. They were looking for hope and truth, too.

  Jeremiah took more sheets of paper from his man bag and spread them over the photo printouts.

  When I saw them, I couldn’t believe it.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  As I said the words, the train driver spoke over the speaker system, announcing that we were pulling into Greengrove station. The train thrummed to a stop. I glanced at the man and his newspaper, hoping to see him get off the train.

  He caught my stare, held it, then looked out of the window.

  “I wish I was kidding you,” said Jeremiah. “The facts are there, black and white.”

  I held a sheet up to him. “No, I don’t mean that. This is a printout of a photograph of a mobile phone, Jeremiah! Someone sent you a text, and you took a photograph of it, and then printed it out.”

  “Save it and hear me out. Every village with a weird symbol well survived the pandemic without a death, right?”

  I nodded. “With you so far.”

  “Here’s where it gets even stranger. In the years after, going on for decades and centuries, these villages had a higher death rate than the rest of the same-sized villages in England. Only not from the plague. While Britain was trying to recover, these villages had more people die than the rest of the country.”

  “And it definitely wasn’t from the plague?”

  “I’ve seen the records. They got their shit together about recording stuff after that. All kinds of deaths; sawmill accidents, getting run over by horses, people dying in their sleep when they were still young. Any way you can think of to die.”

  “And that was only in the villages with the symbol wells?” I said.

  “Right. But when the wells were filled-in or demolished, the deaths stopped. Their mortality rates fell in line with the rest of the country.”

  I didn’t know what to make of that. Correlation didn’t mean causation was the cornerstone of the doubter’s instruction manual. Just because there were patterns and strange things, it didn’t mean those patterns caused the strange things.

  “So how does my early hours train ride figure into this?” I said.

  “Because they’ve found another one of the wells,” said Jeremiah. “Still standing, not filled in. It’s in a forest just outside of Blaketree. And that’s where we’re going. Now...You said you’d brought it?”

  I hefted my rucksack onto the table. “Fine. You won’t shut up until I show you, will you?”

  -5-

  When I had finally answered Jeremiah’s phone calls, he’d given me two instructions: pack for a few nights away from home and grab a copy of this morning’s Daily Pioneer.

  He gave the last instruction with such urgency that I was desperate to know why, but he wouldn’t tell me.

  At least it was time to find out now. I took the newspaper out of my rucksack and unfolded it. “What’s all this about?”

  Jeremiah drummed his fingers on the table. It always amazed me that no matter where we were, no matter what time of day, he had so much energy he looked like he was ready to pop.

  “I gave an interview last week,” he said. “A journalist called Tamara Hecking-something. Heckingbottom? Lovely girl, anyway. She was writing a piece about ghost hunters, and someone gave her my name.”

  “I thought you
didn’t like being called a ghost hunter?”

  “How do you think I can afford to fund these little trips? To pay your rather generous wages?”

  “I’d hardly call it generous. I could have earned more if I’d taken the job at…”

  He waved his hand. “Don’t wanna hear it. If you didn’t enjoy working for me, you wouldn’t be here. Let’s not pretend otherwise.”

  Damn it. He had me. I did enjoy it. “So the interview…”

  “It’s a puff-piece. I told her some stories, and she was hanging on every word. I made her promise to put the name of my company in there – Lasbeck’s Haunted Nights.”

  I’d helped Jeremiah out on a few of his haunted nights. He’d pay for access to the creepiest looking places possible – disused mental wards, abandoned churches, that kind of thing – and he’d sell tickets to people who’d go there hoping to see ghosts.

  Jeremiah was a master at the theatrics. Honestly, he could have had a career on stage. He’d gather his would-be ghost busters in a candle-lit room and tell them stories, and then he’d pull out lots of ghost hunting contraptions. Fake, mostly, but he could spin a narrative and give his paying customers a thrill.

  There was never anything paranormal in those places, and I knew Jeremiah didn’t like that part of it; he was almost duping them, in a way.

  But it was through that he could pay for his real trips, ones where he really thought he’d see something occult, paranormal spectral.

  “Come on,” he said. “I want to see what she said. She was so impressed. You should have seen her!”

  I couldn’t help but smile. It was nice to see him so excited. I flicked through the newspaper, turning page one, two, three, all the way to page twelve, where I finally found the journalist’s write-up of her interview with Jeremiah.

  And then I wanted to slink down in my seat. I read the words and felt my stomach coil.

  “Well?” he said. “You gonna read it, or what?”

  I closed the newspaper. “Maybe we should save it.”

  “You’re making me worried, Ella. Don’t tell me she went all cheesy, calling me a ghostbuster or something.”