They hike in pairs up the steep woodland track, eight Girl Guides with their boots thumping in the dirt and their torchlight bouncing off the knotted tree trunks. High above their heads, the thin autumn canopy quivers in the damp air. One of the older girls holds her torch beneath her chin and turns back to the others, the shadows contorting her face. ‘I’m Sally,’ she says, making the others shriek and giggle. ‘Sally in the Wood. Wooooh.’
Their unit leader, a sensible, middle-aged woman dressed in Gore-Tex, snaps at them to stop being silly. The quiet only lasts a moment before the girls pick up the thread again, whispering their ghost stories and the name ‘Sally’ like an incantation through the trees. On reflection, thinks the leader, a ‘sunrise hike’ scheduled the morning after Halloween probably wasn’t the best idea for the troop’s adventure badge. ‘If you lower the volume, you might just hear the birds,’ she says. ‘Listen.’
The girls fall still, but the woods remain cloaked in an ominous silence and when they start walking again, all that can be heard is the steady thud of their boots and their laboured breath. ‘My brother told me the birds never sing in these woods,’ whispers one girl. ‘Not even in summer.’
‘They’re quiet because it’s still dark,’ says another. She tries to sound convincing, but they hear the waver in her voice.
A tree root sends someone sprawling. ‘Stick together,’ the leader pleads, falling back to tend to a grazed knee. ‘We’ll open our thermos flasks at the folly.’
But the girls aren’t listening. They press ahead, eager for the summit and the promised dawn view.
‘Look,’ says a girl at the front of the pack. She points to the dramatic stone tower rising in the distance, a pillar jutting from the treetops, black against the lightening sky. ‘There it is.’
She nudges her partner and they put on a sudden burst of speed, the two girls breaking away from the group, rushing the final incline until they are standing at the base of the folly, craning their necks to peer up at its vertiginous, lichen-spotted walls.
It’s even more startling close up, dark and imposing against the dawn sky, a thin, rectangular tower with a peaked roof.
‘I feel dizzy just looking at it,’ says the younger of the girls. ‘Are you really going to climb it?’
Her friend nods and disappears.
Left alone, the girl gazes up again, awestruck, her eyes fixed on the arched opening gaping at the top, yawning like the black, toothless mouth of a giant. It reminds her of a place she’s read about in a fairy tale, somewhere to lock up a maiden, imprison her for a hundred years or force her to spin straw into gold. She reaches out a hand and rests it on the stone. It’s cold to the touch, strangely clammy in the early morning air. ‘I still don’t hear the birds,’ she calls.
There’s no reply, so the girl walks around the base and comes upon her friend standing rigid, eyes wide, her mouth hanging open. She’s staring at something sprawled on the ground before the tower entrance, something hard to make out in the half-light, though it looks like a sack, or a pile of stained white fabric. ‘What is it?’ she asks.
Her friend’s answer is a strangled cry.
Stepping closer, the girl sees it’s not a sack, but a long white dress, two hands folded neatly, crude black marks scrawled onto bloodless skin, strands of long blonde hair. Her gaze travels higher, looking for a face, finding only blue lips parted as if to take a final breath, before the face morphs into a mass of glossy black feathers, a hooked beak glinting in the dawn light. A puddle of liquid leaks from beneath, like a can of spilled paint.
The girl stares and stares as the confusing pieces of the scene fuse together. When her scream comes, it echoes through the empty chamber of the folly and flies out across the valley like a flock of startled crows.