Devil Forest

by Jack Lewis

  “I thought they called it Blaketree Wood,” I said.

  “Places always have two names,” said Jeremiah. “Their official one, and the one the people who know it well enough give them. By the people who live there, or in this case, who walk through it. When places first get named, their names mean nothing. They’re chosen almost arbitrarily, sometimes. But when people really get to know a place, know how it feels, know its aura, they give it a name of their own. One that means something in the context of their experience.”

  “And they call this one Devil Forest?”

  “Apparently so. Usually names like that are bullshit, but there’s a good reason for it here.”

  “Are you going to tell me what happened?” I said.

  “The reason it’s called Devil Forest? Sure. Don’t go getting scared, though. ”

  I saw where this was going already. Jeremiah’s game of ‘I have information you want, and I’m going to withhold it until you want to slap my face off.’

  I had to be calm. One of Jeremiah’s games was pushing me so he could see me get worked up.

  “Not the forest,” I said. “What happened with the train? The elderly lady who stopped you getting off. An old flame?”

  Jeremiah kicked a stone away. A momentary flinch of anger.

  “Just a misunderstanding,” he said. “You know what? Maybe we’ll try to find the well. You had it on your map thingy on your phone, didn’t you?”

  I took out my phone and opened the map app. In his texts with the boy’s mother, Jeremiah had asked her to plot where the well was, and then I’d saved its location on my map.

  After checking it, I saw that my phone was completely out of signal. No texts, no calls, no mobile data.

  Luckily, I was more than prepared for the fact that a village in the country wouldn’t have an inner-city signal. I’d downloaded a map of the area I could use offline.

  “What about your cut?” I said. “Was that a misunderstanding, too?”

  “Walked into a door,” he said.

  I stopped walking. “I’m getting sick of this,” I said. “It’s always the same. You drag me out of bed at crazy times, you tell me we’re taking trips with no notice, and then you keep things to yourself. If someone has a problem with you, I should know about it because it might affect me too.”

  “Where’s the well on your map thingy?”

  “Jeremiah…”

  He crossed his arms, which was his version of a pout. I knew how this would go; we’d done this dance before. Eventually he’d tell me what I wanted to know, but he enjoyed stringing me along.

  I just didn’t understand why information was so precious to him. I knew he wasn’t embarrassed to tell me things – Jeremiah didn’t know the meaning of shame. It was something else. As though it physically pained him to share anything with me or with anyone else.

  “What happened?” I said firmly.

  “First, you owe me five pounds. The man on the train got off at our stop.”

  “Funny. The woman?”

  “I don’t know her,” said Jeremiah. “But I know of her. I know who she’s with.”

  “With?”

  “Have you got the well up on your map?”

  I showed him the screen. The well was in a forgotten north-eastern part of the forest where there were no paths.

  Jeremiah took a compass from his pocket, then changed direction, taking us off the stone pathway. “So the woman,” he said. “She’s part of the Effigia.”

  “The ghost hunting group you once joined? I thought that was years ago.”

  Jeremiah nodded. “Everyone ends up joining a cult while they’re at university, don’t they?”

  “They were a cult?” I said. “You told me you used to meet up in old pubs and mills and try to find spirits.”

  “And that’s what they did, at first,” said Jeremiah. “But the Effigia are more than just amateur ghost hunters. That’s the front they show people, but once you get deeper, you see another side to them. That’s why I left. Are we on track?”

  I looked at my phone, and then the forest. There was supposed to be a pond to our left, but all I saw was leave-less trees standing alone and apart. Sunlight was chasing away the last hanging of the night now, and the sky was turning milky.

  Weirdly, the growing daylight made Devil Forest worse. It opened it up and made it seem bigger than it was. A person could scream their lungs out here and get nothing but an echo of their own terror.

  A few more steps, and I saw it. A pond with a bench in front of it. Green growth covered the bench, and the wood looked like the jaws of time had chewed it or worn it away. The pond water was so brown that anything could have been lurking under its surface. Definitely not a nice place to sit on a bench and rest.

  Still, at least we were heading in the right direction.

  “So, the Effigia. What’s the deal?”

  “You can google most of this stuff, Ella. It’s the best kind of secret; an open one.”

  “How’s that the best kind of secret?”

  “Because people who use it correctly are clever. When you have something to hide, sometimes the best thing to do is to show it in plain sight. Nobody ever thinks a rumored secret can be true if the people being talked about admit it openly.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “So, the Effigia are a ghost hunting group. Plenty of those all over England, no big deal. Some of them are out-of-work actors looking to charge people a fortune to give them a tour of a spooky place. Others are people who genuinely want to find spirits, but they don’t really know how to look and besides, they search in the wrong places. But the Effigia are different.”

  “They really find ghosts?”

  “Nope. Their ghost hunting is a front. I found that out the hard way. Hence why I want nothing to do with them.”

  I heard a noise. It was a rhythmic, banging sound.

  Jeremiah touched my arm and stepped in front of me, as if to cover me. Moving away from him, I saw why.

  The well was just ahead, and there was a man standing over it with his back to us. He looked like he was feeding some rope down into the well. He hadn’t heard us yet, and that was strange since we hadn’t known he was there, and so we hadn’t tried to be quiet.

  I saw him move his arms, and the rope slowly wound through his grip and fed into the well.

  I looked at Jeremiah, who shrugged.

  “There are easier ways to get water,” he said.

  The man flinched at Jeremiah’s voice. He dropped the rope, and I heard a dull thud where whatever he’d been feeding into the well plummeted, banging against the walls with a series of ever-quieter knocks, before giving a deep plunk when it hit the bottom.

  When he turned to face us, I couldn’t help gasping. He had grey skin, one eye, no nose, and his lips were sewn shut with thick, black thread.

  It was only when my heartbeat cycled up so fast that I thought I would pass out, that I realized he was wearing a mask.

  Jeremiah, his head clearer than mine, approached the man.

  The man panicked. He looked left, and then right. At Jeremiah, then at me. He charged at us, getting close enough to punch Jeremiah in the face.

  -11-

  I knew better than to chase a mask-wearing guy who’d just committed an assault through deserted woodland I wasn’t familiar with.

  Instead, I put my arm around Jeremiah’s shoulders. He held his hand to his face, wincing.

  “Let me see it,” I said.

  The guy had got him good. His face was a mess of blood, with trickles of it coming from his left nostril. It was smeared on his palms, his wrists, even on his sacred coat that he could never take off.

  I felt calmer than I had any right to be. Maybe it was the suddenness of it; it happened so fast it was hard for any real dread to build up inside me. It was just a few seconds; wham, Jeremiah cried out, and the man took off.

  “We better get back to the village,” I said. “We need to report this.”<
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  Jeremiah wiped his hands on his trousers and then marched over to the well. He leaned over so far I couldn’t see his head.

  “Jeremiah?” I said. “Come on; you need to sit for a minute.”

  He turned away from the well when I reached him. His face was pale now, his usual cheery blush absent from his cheeks. This had shaken him more than he would admit. In that way, we were alike. Neither of us shared our feelings.

  “He dropped something in the well. Did you see it?”

  “I heard it,” I said. “But he assaulted you. We need to file a report.”

  Jeremiah wiped his nose with his palm. He wouldn’t use his coat sleeve – he loved the tatty old thing too much for that. He’d rather stain his skin.

  “I’ve had worse than this on a night out in Cardiff. This is the well, Ella. And that bastard dropped something down it.”

  Then he turned around again, his back to me. I checked the surrounding forest; there was no sign of the man. Thanks to his mask, I hadn’t even gotten a good look at him.

  Jeremiah hit the well edge with his palm. “Damn it. Whatever it was, he was lowering it down with a rope, but he let it drop when he heard us.”

  I approached the well. It was strange, but every step I took seemed harder than the last, almost as if my body was resisting looking down the well.

  Nothing Jeremiah had told me about it had gotten to me. Or I didn't think so, anyway. It was hard to say, sometimes. He’d once told me a ghost story before we went into an old school, and my nerves had acted up. Fear had a way of creeping up on you.

  But this was just a stone well. Sure, I could see the infinity symbol carved into the brick, and that confirmed it was like the others Jeremiah had told me about; wells where the villagers nearby had survived the plague without a single death, but then had increased mortality rates.

  I applied the ghostly trifecta to that – willful believer, hoax, or coincidence?

  It was easy to see people wanting to believe that these wells somehow warded away the plague. They wouldn’t have understood it back then; rather than it resulting from disease-spreading fleas, they’d have thought the plague was a punishment.

  Hoaxers seemed less likely. People spreading rumors about the wells had little to gain.

  So, a coincidence? Maybe.

  Either way, when I put my hands on the well edge and leaned over and looked into it, I saw a darkness so thick, so unending, it was like it could swallow me up.

  And then I thought about the boy. About his mother calling down into the well, and hearing his voice answer her even months and years after he had disappeared. About her standing here alone at night.

  Hearing the story from Jeremiah was one thing, but being in the forest was another. A chill ran through me, and I zipped my coat all the way up.

  Jeremiah clapped his hands together. “Let’s drop off our stuff in our rooms and come back,” he said. “I need my torch, and I need some rope.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re going down there.”

  “Don’t be stupid. Do I look like I’d fit? One thing bulk like mine is good for, is it gets you out of having to climb down old wells.”

  I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. “If you think I’m going down there…”

  Jeremiah laughed. “Even I know I don’t pay you enough for that. I just want to shine a light down there and see what that bastard dropped. Maybe even see if we can hook it and bring it up, or something.”

  As we headed back through the forest, I stayed close to Jeremiah. The forest felt too open now, too expansive. The kind of place you could easily get lost in, and who knew who was lurking there?

  I needed to take my mind off it. “You were telling me about the Effigia,” I said. “What does your old ghost hunting club have to do with the woman on the train?”

  “Like I told you; their ghost hunting is a front. A way to make money, and a way to sift the tourists from the believers.”

  “Believers in what? The paranormal?”

  “It doesn’t matter; just believers. People who have open minds and are motivated enough to pursue their curiosity that they’d pay for a ghost hunt. The tickets were expensive, so you had to be pretty determined to go on a hunt. If you’re open-minded enough to want to hunt ghosts, you’re probably a suggestible person. And that leaves you open to more insidious beliefs.”

  “So? We take people on ghost tours too. What’s so special about the Effigia?”

  “Because the Effigia aren’t just harmless ghost hunters. They’re followers of the occult. I’d been a member of their group for two years before I found that out. Their leader, Lester, invited me to his house. Creepy place out in the country. The type of house that has its own name – Lockpit Manor, they call it. It had been in his family for centuries.

  I thought he wanted to talk about maybe letting me lead some ghost hunts. Not just helping them fiddle about with spectral aura monitors or research lore of haunted places, but lead a hunt of my own. But when I got to Lester’s house, I realized how crazy that bastard was.”

  A twig snapped to my right. My breath caught in my throat – I must have been more wired than I’d realized.

  Not wanting to show it in front of Jeremiah, I forced myself to be calm. I looked at the forest with a more logical perspective. It was a squirrel, or a mouse, or something.

  Another twig snapped. This time, Jeremiah tensed up.

  He nudged me and nodded to his left. Way in the distance, a figure was watching us.

  -12-

  Whoever it was, they sloped away when we started walking again. Soon, they were so far in the distance that we lost them. I guessed that it must have been the man who’d punched Jeremiah, but what kind of assaulter stuck around to watch his victims?

  Then again, in a place where people pointed at you for speaking, there was no sense applying logic to motivations.

  The day was in full sway when we got back into Blaketree and then collected the keys for our rooms at the Slaughterman’s Inn. I dumped my things in my room – a boxy one-bed with an adjoining bathroom and décor untouched since World War One, – and joined Jeremiah in his.

  While many pubs revamped their décor to attract crowds, this inn looked like the owner had tried to make it look even older. It had stone walls that looked cozy and cold at the same time, and although I couldn’t get behind the owner’s taste in rugs and paintings, I appreciated the love that had gone into decking the place out.

  The thing that grabbed my attention straight away was a wooden frame hanging from a nail driven into the wall. There was a sheet of paper displayed inside it. Slaughterman’s Rules, it said, with a list of ten rules that guests staying in the inn had to follow. 'Don’t steal the towels’ was number two.

  Jeremiah still had blood crusted around his nostrils. He hadn’t even bothered to wash it off; the guy was an infant. I wet some paper towels and was going to hand them to him, when I thought better.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  I positioned his face so it fit my mobile screen, and I snapped a photo.

  “For when we go to the police,” I said.

  “We’re not going to the police.”

  “Jeremiah, a guy punched you. It was likely him watching us when we left the woods, too. We can’t let someone go around just thumping people.”

  “The police only complicate things. They ask questions, they poke their noses in where they’re not wanted.”

  “Sounds like someone I know.”

  “I’m here to find out about the boy and the well. If we tell the police about him they’ll want to know how it happened, and where. Guess where that will lead them?”

  “What’s wrong with that?” I said.

  “Because when I tell them we saw him dropping something down the well, they’ll want to know what it is. They’ll think it is drugs, or something. I’m not letting them find it before I do, because then the whole police confidentiality stuff will kick in, and we’ll never know what it was.
No, Ella. We’ll get a flashlight, some rope, and then we’ll go see what was so important that the bastard had to punch me.”

  I sat down on his bed, deflated. There was no point arguing with Jeremiah when he was like this. I might as well have been talking to the moon.

  “Fine, we won’t go to the police…yet. Tell me about the Effigia.”

  Jeremiah wiped the blood from his nose and then tossed the stained towels into a bin. “So I went to Lester’s manor, thinking he would let me lead a hunt of my own. I thought it’d just be me and him, but when I got there, it was a party.”

  “And you’re not the party-going type.”

  “Especially not parties where you get stark-bollock naked.”

  The words caught me by surprise. “What?”

  He nodded. “I knocked on the door but there was no answer. We didn’t have mobiles back then, so I knocked more. Then I heard singing. Or, I thought it was singing, anyway. So I opened the door and went inside, and the sound got louder. I followed it through the hall, into some kind of atrium, and then down some stairs. The place was like a maze. Honestly, I thought it was April Fool’s, or something like that. But when I got to the bottom of the stairs, I saw them.”

  He paused now, no doubt savouring being able to leave me on the edge of finding out what I wanted to know. It was moments like that he relished.

  Infuriating as hell.

  I sighed. I wouldn’t play his game. “I’ll go unpack my things,” I said.

  As I turned and walked toward the door, he spoke.

  “There were twelve people there. A bunch of the guys and girls who’d I’d been on ghost hunts with before, and older people I hadn’t met. All of them as naked as the day they were born, but with shapes painted on them in blood.”

  “What color were the walls painted?” I said.

  “Is that a pertinent question, Ella? I just told you they were naked and covered in blood.”

  “I just know you hate it when I ruin the narrative. Stop being so bloody dramatic all the time. Are you sure it was blood?”

  “The dead goat in the basement's corner was a clue.”