Devil Forest

by Jack Lewis

  “Ghosts have an annoying habit of whispering,” said Jeremiah. “So people think, anyway. Even when we think we’ve recorded silence, there are usually minute noises in the background that our ears can’t hear. We never picked up any background sounds we couldn’t explain using logic. Hurry up, Ella.”

  “I’m doing it, give me a second.”

  I loaded the well audio file into the application and hit the sort button. “Okay, it’ll take a few minutes to process.”

  “What are you looking for? You heard Ashley’s voice. Don’t tell me you’re going to try to disprove it. Say it was the wind, or something.”

  “I heard something,” said Jeremiah. “Something after the voice that sounded like your son.”

  “Sounded like? It was him!”

  “If you want to know if a phenomenon is true,” said Jeremiah. “try to prove that-”

  “Prove that it isn’t,” said Marion, waving her hand. “I read that on your blog, too. Ella writes it at least once in every post.”

  “That’s because Jeremiah says it at least once in every investigation. And he makes me include it in the blog,” I said.

  “I don’t want crackpots latching on to me,” said Jeremiah. “I don’t want rumors, fairy tales, or people who want to believe so much they see ghosts everywhere. I only want the truth.”

  “That’s what we all want,” said Marion.

  She walked over to the window and stared out at the centre of Blaketree. I could tell by her posture she was falling back into lethargy again.

  “The café is busy today,” said Marion. “Lucky for me I found Elize. Two months after Ashley went missing, by the time we’d searched every inch of Blaketree, I didn’t leave the house. The café is the only income I have, but I couldn’t even think about working. People would visit me and leave pies and casseroles, and I would just let them rot. I knew that if the café wasn’t open, then I wasn’t making money, and that I’d lose it and I’d lose the house, but I didn’t care.

  One morning I woke up with an empty bottle of vodka on the bedside cabinet, and my bedsheets were soaked. You can probably guess what happened when I was asleep. I don’t feel ashamed of it now. I’ve been to the bottom and I’m climbing back up, and I’m not going to try to hide it.”

  To me, going into the bathroom and taking something – I didn’t know what she’d taken, but it wasn’t definitely something – didn’t speak well of either climbing up from the bottom or not hiding it. But I wasn’t going to say that. The poor woman had been through more than I could imagine.

  I guessed that it must have been so much worse that they’d never found Ashley. She never got an answer, never even had the slim consolation of an explanation. The poor woman needed closure so she could move on.

  “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” I said.

  “I felt like there was, at the time. I felt like there were cameras following my life and everyone was going to see what a fucking mess I was. On the morning when I woke up and realized that I’d wet the bed, the smell of vodka made me sick. I ran to the bathroom and I threw up, and it was like I spewed everything out of me. All my insides. Like it was a purge, and my body was refreshing itself. After I was done, I knew I had to pull myself together.

  So I washed the sheets, cleaned the house, I showered. And then I went to the café. I was going to go through the books, see what payments I’d missed. See if not opening up for two months had well and truly sunk the business.”

  “At least you didn’t lose it.”

  “That’s only because of Elize. While I was feeling sorry for myself, she’d been opening the café every day. You know, we hardly knew each other before then, and she took it upon herself to do that for me. She was just a teenager, she wouldn’t have known anything about running a business until then. But she did it. She told me later that she was supposed to be working that summer to save up money for university in August, but she kept my business afloat instead.”

  “You learn who people are when things are shit,” said Jeremiah. “Some people, when things go to hell, you find out they’re full of nothing but chicken shit. Others, usually people you don’t expect, show you that they’ve got substance.”

  A ringing sound drew my attention to my phone. A box of text on the screen said processing complete.

  -18-

  The application had separated the single well recording into six different channels, each named Channel A through to Channel F. That was a pretty low number; we usually ended up with a dozen or more. Then again, I guessed that there wasn’t much sound in the well to begin with, so there wasn’t much to sort through.

  Jeremiah had a look in his eyes now. It was a look I’d seen a few times, usually when he thought we were on the cusp of finding something truly paranormal. Every time so far, that had been dashed. That never deterred him, though. He was a mix of cynic and optimist, wanted desperately to believe, but unwilling to let himself.

  “It’s sorted them into six channels,” I said. “This is channel A.”

  Jeremiah nodded.

  Feeling my pulse start to pick up, I pressed play.

  The sound of wind filled the room. Loud at first, screaming and swirling, then dying down.

  “Next,” said Jeremiah.

  Channel B was just the random thumping sounds as Marion lowered the rope and phone down the well, and the phone dinked against the sides.

  I played channel C, but it was silent. Whatever sound the application had taken this channel from, I couldn’t hear it.

  Tension filled the room. With each channel, I felt my heart rate double its pace. I couldn’t say why; maybe the idea that with each press, I didn’t know what we’d hear. Every time a channel played nothing of note, it made me think something bad was waiting on the next one.

  Marion rubbed her palms over her lap again and again. “I can’t take this.” She took something out of her handbag. I heard something click, and then Marion took a deep pull on a cigarette.

  “This room’s no smoking,” said Jeremiah. “You’ll get me fined.”

  I shook my head at him. There was a time and a place to get worried about things like that.

  Marion reached for the smoke detector above her, twisted it and dislodged it. She removed the battery and tossed it over to Jeremiah.

  “Try the next channel,” he said.

  I heard Marion exhale a long plume of smoke. Jeremiah crossed his legs. I pressed play, wondering if we’d hear Ashley’s voice again next.

  At first, there was nothing. Then there was a hiss. A definite break in the silence.

  I messed with the settings for Channel D, increasing the volume. I played it again.

  And then a boy spoke.

  “I’m Ronnie Adlam. I’m twelve years old.”

  “Ronnie Adlam?” I said. “Who the hell is that?”

  “Play it again,” said Jeremiah.

  I hit play. “I’m Ronnie Adlam. I’m twelve years old.”

  “Marion?” I said. “Is there a boy called Ronnie in Blaketree?”

  She shook her head, letting smoke escape her lips. She flicked ash into a cup. “Never heard his name before. Now do you believe me? About the voices?”

  It had always been in the back of my mind that she could have made the recording of Ashley herself. That it was a trick, maybe a way of drawing attention back to her missing boy, since searches tended to fade in intensity the longer a child was missing.

  This second voice was different. It was quieter than the rest. Not just that, though. I played the recording again.

  “He’s from Liverpool,” I said. “Whoever this boy is, he has a Liverpool accent.”

  “I don’t understand. Was he speaking at the same time as Ashely?”

  I nodded. “Too quiet for you to hear without the app stripping the sound into its own channel and playing it on its own with the volume magnified.”

  Jeremiah took his tablet out of his bag. It must have been worth over £400, but it bore brown ring stain
s from him putting coffee cups on it.

  After a few swipes and taps, he started reading something. “’Local boy missing; police appeal for witnesses.’ It says here that a boy called Ronnie Adlam went missing from St Dellier, a village outside of Liverpool.”

  I couldn’t help eyeing Marion to see how she reacted to this. Could she have researched other missing children and used them in her recording?

  No way. She’d need to know how to weave audio clips together, and how to hide sounds within a recording. The theory that she made this up didn’t hold water.

  If that was the case, it meant the recording was true. The path that conclusion led to made my legs feel weak. There could be something here. Something Jeremiah had been looking for all this time. It was a battle of wills to rein my thoughts in and try to be logical.

  “So Ronnie Adlam,” I said. “What happened? Was it similar to Ashely?”

  “In a few ways,” said Jeremiah. “Except Ronnie Adlam went missing in 1963.”

  The words were like an ice bath.

  “What?”

  Jeremiah nodded. “1963 – the same year I plopped into the world and got slapped on the bum by a doctor. We need to look into this.”

  Marion lit another cigarette. “You’re forgetting something.”

  Jeremiah and I both stared at her. She flicked ash from her cigarette, and this time it landed on the floor.

  “There are two more sound channels,” she said.

  “Right.”

  I played channel E, and this time a familiar voice spoke.

  “My name is Ashley Webb, I’m ten years old.”

  Marion seemed impassive now. I couldn’t tell if she was fighting to keep emotions in, or if she was so worn out by it that her feelings weren’t even landing home anymore.

  “That’s just Ashley,” said Jeremiah. “Skip to the next.”

  I looked at him, feeling like someone had just pried my mouth open so my jaw would hit the floor. Jeremiah wasn’t a cold guy, but he was about as skilled in emotional intelligence as a bag of bricks.

  “Jeremiah,” I said.

  He glanced at Marion. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant…”

  She gave him a stare that would have drilled a hole in a diamond. “I know what you meant.” Then she nodded at me. “Ella.”

  I pressed play on channel F. There was a faint hissing noise, one that should have been stripped out when the audio was processed, but what else could I have expected for a £5.99 app?

  The hiss soon ended, and then a voice spoke. This time, it was a girl.

  -19-

  “My name is Hannah Oriel Rigby, and I’m eight years old.”

  Her voice hit me hard. It wasn’t that the boys before her hadn’t, but she sounded so much younger than them. So brittle. I wondered when she had gone missing. Knowing that might show us a link between the children, and maybe that would explain why all of their voices were on the audio recording, even if two were hidden in the background.

  There was something else about her voice, too. Something familiar, but I couldn’t place it. We needed to know more about this girl.

  “Jeremiah, can you look up Hannah online and see if-”

  Jeremiah grabbed the phone from me. He’d never lunged at me before, and I was taken aback. Looking at his face, I’d never seen him so pale, such a look of confusion in his eyes.

  He prodded the phone screen and played the channel again.

  “My name is Ashley Webb…”

  “Damn it,” said Jeremiah. “Play it again. The girl.”

  I took it from him and replayed it.

  “My name is Hannah Oriel Rigby, and I’m eight years old.”

  Jeremiah ran his hands through his hair. His skin was milky now, his eyes vacant. He grabbed his coat and left the room, slamming the door behind him. Before I could even think to follow him, I heard his boots pounding down the stairs and into the main pub area.

  I joined Marion at the window where I saw Jeremiah marching across Blaketree village. He bumped into a man, and when the man said something, Jeremiah shoved him away and carried on.

  “He has a temper,” said Marion.

  “He isn’t normally like that. Where’s he going? It was the girl who set him off. Hannah Oriel Rigby. Do you know her?”

  Marion shook her head. I lost sight of Jeremiah as he passed by a shop on the opposite side of the road. I didn’t know where he was going, but there was only one thing that I knew for sure was in that direction – the well.

  “Are you going after him?” said Marion.

  I nodded. “One second.”

  I picked up Jeremiah’s tablet and used a search engine on Hannah Rigby, eight years old, missing.

  Nothing. No articles about a girl with her name going missing. What did that mean? Why had it affected Jeremiah so much?

  The only thing I knew for sure was that he was going to the forest, and to the well. I grabbed my bag. “Do you know where we can buy some rope?” I said.

  Twenty minutes later, after visiting an outdoor sports shop and buying 50 metres of climbing rope – I could have gotten 30 meters, but 50 was cheaper, and I love a bargain – Marion and I reached the edge of the Devil Forest.

  Now, after listening to the recording, the forest seemed even bleaker than before. I imagined children’s voices swirling around me, mute to the naked ear but there all the same, just stating their names and ages.

  If I held a microphone up now, how many missing children would it detect? Or did it have to be done at the well? Even so, why here? Why Blaketree? Too many questions. Top of the list was Jeremiah – why had he stormed off like that?

  “I used to hate this place when I was a kid,” said Marion. “Some of the others always wanted to play here. Hide and seek, army games, that sort of stuff. Not me.”

  “I can see why.”

  “I guess it’s the sort of place you’re used to now, since you follow Jeremiah around on his hunts. He’s not what I expected,” said Marion.

  “Jeremiah? What did you expect?”

  “Mid-forties, a jawline that could file iron, athletic, strong.”

  “I don’t know how you got that from my blog,” I said.

  “I didn’t. You hardly ever talk about you or Jeremiah on it. Not who you are or how you’re feeling, anyway. You just describe what you do, so I had to imagine the rest. It was easy to imagine Jeremiah as someone else. Comforting, in a way.”

  “You sound disappointed in the real thing,” I said, starting to get a little prickly. Call me stupid, but after working for Jeremiah and taking so many trips with him, I’d started to get attached to him. Mainly in the same way a barnacle gets attached to the hull of a ship.

  “Not disappointed,” she said. “Just surprised.”

  “One thing I learned about Jeremiah is that his heart in the right place, even if the wrong words sometimes come out of his mouth. Every time he says something rude or insulting I ask myself did he mean that to hurt me? The answer’s always no; it’s just his way. Maybe the way he was brought up, or something.”

  “You sound very fond of him.”

  “God, don’t say that.”

  I stopped walking. A sound caught my attention, coming from the north of us. We were five minutes into the forest now, far enough that the village had disappeared and with the trees spread in every direction, it was easy to think we were deep in the wilderness.

  “Something wrong?” said Marion.

  I heard the sound again.

  “Did that sound like someone was shouting to you?”

  She shrugged.

  “Come on,” ‘I said.

  We picked up our pace. Since we were heading toward the well, Marion took us in a different direction than Jeremiah and I had gone earlier. In her letter she wrote that she’d visited it every night, so I guessed she knew shortcuts. I couldn’t even imagine coming out here alone in the dark. It didn’t matter that I’d been to supposedly haunted hospitals, schools, manors; this was the type
of place that made my skin grow cold when I thought about staying here alone.

  The sound came again, making a bird flap away from a nearby tree, which in turn made me jump. I listened out.

  “Help!” shouted a voice.

  It sounded muffled, but it was definitely a man. What the hell had Jeremiah gotten himself into now?

  Marion tugged my sleeve. “This way. It’s another shortcut. It’ll be a little boggy.”

  After following her ten minutes on a zig-zag trail through the forest, we emerged into the well clearing. Bog water had dirtied my boots and soaked through into my socks, and I could feel the squelch with every step. Dreams of log fires and soft beds flapped around my head like a flag in the breeze.

  The well was ahead of us. Looking at it, my breath caught in my chest. Not like the first time, not because of how creepy it looked, but because a pair of legs were sticking out.

  We rushed over. “You grab his right leg,” I told Marion.

  Jeremiah was wedged into the well so that only his legs stuck out. The well mouth was wide enough for him to plummet all the way down, and it looked like the only way he’d stopped his fall was by pressing his arms out against the wall to hold himself in place.

  “Hurry up! Feckin hell,” said Jeremiah.

  “On three,” I said. “One, two, three.”

  I breathed in deep and then pulled. Jeremiah was a heavy guy, but I had Marion helping me. Not only that, but I had an intense desire not to let my friend plummet thirty feet into well, where his skull would crack and his neck snap. Straining and feeling the sweat pool on my forehead, I pulled. I pulled so hard I thought I’d rip his leg from his socket.

  We backed away inch by inch until we dragged him out of the well. I let go of him then, my arms burning.

  Jeremiah sat against the well with his eyes closed. His face was gashed now, some of his skin worn away to show red flesh beneath. He must have scraped it on the stone. His coat was scuffed and marked grey where it had scratched the well.

  I kneeled next to him. “What happened? Why did you run off?”