CONTENTS

THE CHAPTERS

DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE

SHAZ’s BLOG #2

WEBSITE EXTRACT

RESEARCH DATA

WHAT THEY FIND IN THE WOODS

A novella by Gary Fry

INTRODUCTION

WHAT I FOUND ON A HARD DRIVE…

Dr. Gary Fry

University of Leeds, 2016

I first chanced upon the manuscript you’re about to read last year, after securing a new academic post at the University of Leeds. I don’t know how much is generally understood about funding for higher education, but in the throes of all the government’s austerity measures, there hasn’t been much money splashing around. Among many other things, this means that new IT equipment is rare, with incoming staff commonly making do with the computer used by their office’s previous incumbent.

However stringently the university is supposed to adhere to data protection procedures, occasional slippages occur. I’d already started using the desktop PC, saving files and exchanging email, before I realised that its hard drive hadn’t been properly scrubbed.

Indeed, there, in a folder reserved for word processor files, was a document entitled “Cole_Linton_Deere.doc”.

Now, I’m no snoop, but something about this filename piqued my curiosity, made me double-click upon it before I could consider any implications. With three surnames in the title, I wondered whether it was a draft journal article and whether its first author – I presumed this was Dr. Matthew Cole, whose recently vacated position I’d taken in the Institute for Psychological Studies – might want it returning.

Oh, okay, let me confess: I was just being a nosy old parker. But after reading the opening section of this document, which had indeed been composed by Dr. Cole, I simply couldn’t stop myself from continuing.

It’s a considerably dark account, and I can’t be sure how much is fact and how much fiction. I’ve chatted to several stalwart colleagues in the Institute and all speak affectionately about Dr. Matthew Cole, expressing regret over his decision to leave the University following some private difficulties, ostensibly involving a student. Of course, having read the story in full, I now know exactly who this was: young Chloe Linton, who similarly dropped out of her undergraduate degree at the same period.

But it’s mysterious old Donald Deere who intrigues me most. In fact, despite refraining from getting in touch with either Cole or Linton, I’ve paid a visit to the nearby village of Pasturn, in whose woods the long-dead Mr. Deere is supposed to reside, and taken lengthy walks with my dog, seeking out unlikely disturbances. I’ve witnessed nothing yet, but, after reading such a troubling account, I can’t be confident this will remain a permanent state of affairs.

So maybe I’ll stick henceforward to the city and its suburbs, manmade places bearing only mankind’s threats and foibles. Those woods I last visited only weeks ago make me feel uncomfortable, but I try to tell myself that this is only because I’ve read an account concerning spooky local episodes.

Let’s hope Donald Deere is fictional; let’s hope that what Dr. Matthew Cole and Chloe Linton supposedly found in the Pasturn woods was just a figment of either his or her imagination.

The alternative makes me feel a little queasy, you see.

Chloe arrived for our meeting half -an-hour late.

Following all that happened afterwards, this unpredictable element was hardly surprising, but at the time I knew nothing much about her. Of course I’d taught her during her first two years on the psychology degree, along with a few hundred other undergraduates half my age. And yes, I was aware of the brighter students – Chloe had maintained an average A-minus coming into her final academic term and was well-positioned to gain first-class honours – but as I wasn’t her personal tutor, other contact had been minimal.

This was why I was surprised when she’d put in a request for me to supervise her dissertation. As far as I was aware, having checked out her latest module choices, she was interested in psychodynamic aspects of our subject – Freud and his devout followers – while I specialised more in the social realms of experience. But I realised that other issues were important when youngsters chose who they’d like to support them through this critical aspect of their courses, and that perceived compatibility was often uppermost among them.

When she entered my office that day, she looked a bit nervous, but, despite her good looks – long blonde hair, slender figure, fresh face which needed no makeup; in her early twenties, she’d surely never lacked others’ attention – I didn’t attach much significance to that. Indeed, I could remember my own first meeting with my supervisor twenty years earlier as an undergraduate. I realised this could sometimes become an intimate relationship, but, when conducted professionally, it remained only an intellectual engagement, a coming together of jaded old master and bright young thing. I’d been doing this kind of work for over a decade now – nearly as long as my solid marriage – and had never felt a need to tackle it in any other way.

At my invitation, Chloe sat in a chair opposite my own, a few yards from my paper-stacked desk under the only window in the room, which looked right across the city. At the heart of this informal meeting area was a small table bearing drink-making facilities – powdered milk, a bag of sugar, assorted herbal teabags my wife had bought in an attempt to wean me off my beloved brain-stimulating coke – but I rarely used them. Nevertheless, they’d always offered me an effective way of putting newcomers at their ease, using a little self-disparagement to lighten the tone.

“I’d make you a drink,” I said, lifting one of several cups from the table whose interior bore many brown stains. Then, smiling as warmly as I could, I showed this to my visitor. “But as you can see, hygiene isn’t exactly my forte.”

The young woman – as pretty as some flower yet to fully blossom, as if she’d grown up in the shade – eventually smiled back, raising one hand from a notebook, which, after sitting, she’d removed from a pocket of her serviceably smart dress.

“That’s okay. I’m not thirsty anyway,” she said, her first words to me tender and strained, the way I imagined someone easily hurt might communicate. But other than my experiences of growing up in a very different era, what did I know about youths? I had no children of my own, despite recent activity at home on my wife’s part to alter that crucial fact.

Distracted only briefly by non-work-related issues, I soon got down to business with Chloe, asking her about her research interests and whether she’d settled yet on a topic for her dissertation. During all my years as a lecturer, I’d always found this the best way to get to know a supervisee: simply stick to the reason she or he was here. If things clicked and it looked like the relationship was likely to work, everything else – private issues concerning personal lives – would be addressed if they needed to be. Sometimes they did, other times they didn’t. As far as I was concerned, I was happy to maintain respectful boundaries but also cool if students wanted to get a little closer.

Following a brief preamble about Chloe’s academic interests – despite finding his work difficult to read, she was a fan of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan – she started outlining a potential project, simultaneously consulting notes she’d clearly made before today’s first session. I was impressed – ordinarily students rolled up with a sheepish shrug but little else – and yet also surprised by her choice of subject matter.

“I live in a small village called Pasturn, just north of Leeds,” she explained, her former reticence lifting and her voice becoming enthusiastic – almost passionate. “My mum and I moved there about four years ago, after…well, after my parents’ messy divorce. Anyway, the point is that on one side of this place is some dense woodland, which appears to have attracted what we might call a…rural legend.”

I was intrigued, but not necessarily in my role as a tutor seeking to keep a student’s dissertation plans focused and realistic. There’s just something about such material – folklore, myths, and the like – that instantly grabs our attention, isn’t there? With no lectures to deliver that morning and extra time to spare, I leaned back in my chair and asked Chloe to continue.

“Well, it’s about a man who once lived in the woods and had all these weird children,” she went on, clearly now in her element. “He got them by seducing passersby – young women, I mean – and then snatching their infants once they’d given birth. He was supposed to have lived – oh, centuries ago, I think, but I’m not sure; I need to look into that yet. But what’s significant is the way he did it: brewed special potions and got the victims to drink them, which always made him look, instead of just a strange old man, like some kind of handsome prince.

“And the most important thing is,” Chloe said, with an air of finality, of driving home her points, “some residents think he still lives there, in those woods, along with all his ill-gotten offspring. The children’s spirits, I guess they mean. Their ghosts.”

“Okay, hold on a moment,” I said, raising a forefinger to mark the pause. Then, once I had her attention – she looked at me with large blue eyes, sheens of fragile moisture occupying both – I added, “While I admit that all this sounds interesting, I guess I’m struggling to see how it might lend itself to a project drawing upon psychological theory and methods.”

She hesitated, looking at her notes, or maybe even through the pad on her lap. I didn’t get the impression that she was seeking further assistance from earlier thoughts, rather that she was trying to evade my gaze altogether. But then, after a brief twitch of her head like some kind of nervous affliction, she spoke again.

“I suppose I’m interested in why the community has chosen this particular person as its bogeyman. I mean, what is it about the village that makes that specific issue…” – she paused again, as if needing to draw in a breath, but only for as long as it took to take one – “…what is it that makes young women being exploited like this such a concern that it needs codifying in the form of a legend?”

I nodded slowly, now seeing how a project might emerge from this issue, but also realising how fraught with ethical considerations it could be. Chloe was possibly proposing a survey or even a series of interviews with Pasturn’s residents about this rural legend and how it played out in their daily lives. It could certainly be interesting, if tending towards the sociological side of academia.

But in truth just then, I was more intrigued by the reason for Chloe’s interest in this topic. In my experience, enthusiastic students, the ones who exhibited an engagement with their work similar to what she’d just demonstrated, usually had some personal reason for investigating particular topics. And I wondered what hers was here.

I didn’t ask her directly, however; it was much too soon for that, and perhaps always would be. We were tutor and undergraduate, and not therapist and patient, let alone father and daughter. Instead, I simply continued playing Devil’s advocate, putting up barriers for her to knock down. The brightest, most eager students always managed to do so.

“Okay, let’s say for a moment that you chose to carry out your crucial final-year project on the psychology of communal legends.” I looked at her fixedly, refusing to let her gaze stray from mine. “What sources of data would you plan to draw upon?”

Now Chloe seemed to be on firmer ground. “I’ve already spoken to several people in my street,” she said, the smile I’d spotted earlier resurfacing. “It seems that lots of folk living in the village are aware of this man, who’s called…uh, I mean, who was called Donald Deere.”

Something about the man’s moniker – those solemnly alliterative D-sounds, that ostensibly inappropriate term-of-endearment surname – made me feel uncomfortable for a moment, despite early autumn sunlight cutting in through my window. Perhaps it was the way my new supervisee now held my gaze, as if the power relation between us – if indeed this had been the basis of her previous reserve – had just been subtly inverted.

“Okay, so you have evidence from a number of neighbours,” I said, trying to regain control of the episode by using a lecture-toughened voice. “But you’ll need much more than a few anecdotal accounts to inform a solid study.”

“That’s only true of statistical survey-based work, isn’t it?” She looked at me some more, clearly knowing exactly what she was talking about, which was knowledge I’d been fishing for anyway. “With interview and documentary type research, don’t we go for depth rather than quantity?”

This was all good enough for me; having admirably defended her methodological approach – she clearly planned to conduct interviews with people carefully selected for inclusion in the project, as well as performing a review of associated materials – I decided that her idea might actually result in an original project. Indeed, allowing her to pursue what she was obviously enthused about would be a positive move. In the past, scorers of high grades under my tutelage had been those not only with ability but also with some stake in their research, a private agenda that made the work so much more enjoyable and compulsive for them – for me, too, if I’m being honest.

“Right, you’ve sold me,” I said, now dropping the interrogatory routine and becoming something like a normal human again. Toying with intellectually insecure youngsters was always quite wicked, but I was also here to nurture them. “It’s early days yet. Why don’t you go away and see what else you can find out about this topic, maybe pull together a few documents for us to review at our next meetings. Then we can think about how we might proceed.”

The prospect of further one-to-one supervision seemed to appeal to Chloe, whose face brightened as soon as I’d mentioned future sessions. During the first and second years of a degree, university was much like a school for adults, with many lectures and group discussions, but little personal tuition. This was why smart students tended to come on stronger in their last years: because they received the kind of individual attention from which every young person could benefit, if only they showed sufficient interest.

When Chloe rose to leave, she looked a lot happier than she had just after her arrival, as if I’d endorsed a furtive wish she harboured or maybe even shared one of her secrets. At any rate, that’s certainly my impression now, and you know, I even think it might have been back then, too. Within the space of twenty minutes, she’d moved from being guardedly glum and to being radiantly hopeful. Indeed, in light of what happened so soon afterwards, I’m sure her wide smile was based on more than what she added before exiting my office that day, leaving me alone with unusually disrupted thoughts.

“I’ve already made a start,” she said, snapping shut her notebook and clearly alluding to my previous comment about beginning to look into the case of the centuries-old philanderer Donald Deere. “In fact, I’m aware of somebody in the village who claims to have met him.”

It was a lengthy drive back from the campus in Leeds to my home near Hebden Bridge, a modestly sized detached property way off the main roads. By the time I pulled into its short driveway, it was pitch-dark and my headlamps carved glistening arcs onto the building’s frontage. Once I’d killed the engine, I noticed a light burning in the curtained lounge window. I thought perhaps my wife must have been working late in there, composing another of her quietly successful independent press romance novels, which sold mostly online and in a number of local stores.

After I entered, my head full of thoughts about my day’s work, Rose greeted me with a glass of the red from a bottle she’d started on – well, in truth, already consumed half of – and then served me the meal I always received upon my return, on this occasion a decent supermarket’s microwaveable curry and rice. With only one car between us (my wife couldn’t drive and had no desire to learn), we had groceries delivered, and that was certainly useful given our out-of-the-way location, especially as winter approached.

We talked over the dining table about our relative days, me referring to an interminable staff meeting before quickly glossing over the usual aspects of modern academia: student attendance monitoring, lecture preparation, project supervision. Then she discussed challenges she’d experienced in terms of plot development in the latest of a series of books involving the same character, one Mary Chesterton, who, in only my private opinion, was as detached from the messy real world as my meal was from a restaurant prepared one. But as a decent number of readers enjoyed her amorous adventures, who was I to judge? Demurely sexy Mary might not earn enough to free me from the shackles of fulltime employment – I’d hit forty-three last birthday, while Rose was five years younger – but I genuinely liked to see my wife content, all her creative urges fulfilled, and the traditional balance of the household maintained.

Later, after retreating from our small dining room to the only slightly larger lounge, we watched some popular TV show, a duplication of, or rather a novel twist on, something showing on the other side, and the other side, and the other side. I calmly sipped my wine, and when Rose got close enough on the couch, she laid her upper body across my lap, encouraging me to stroke her hair as I often did. In the event, I used just one arm and then, after draining the last of the wine, set my glass quietly aside on the coffee table next to me, before slipping my mobile phone from one trouser pocket.

I don’t want to give the impression that I was addicted to my work. That wasn’t true at all. But I simply had to check for email regularly because, without this routine task, I’d be confronted with over a hundred messages the morning after. Indeed, this was another part of the job that had grown intolerable over the last ten years. I went far enough back at the university to remember days when lecturers had carried out no more onerous administration tasks than essay marking, while enjoying protected time to pursue their academic interests, maybe heading up research projects or taking fieldtrips to certain global destinations. But after so many recent education policy shakeups and funding cutbacks, the role was now little more than that of a teacher of adults, and the once august institution at which I worked was just a factory for churning out graduates within a breakeven budget.

Nevertheless, I knew there were far harder ways of making a living. After leaving school with just a handful of O-levels, I’d toiled for several years in a factory yard, picking up crap from around giant skips and learning with astonishing speed how easy it could be to have no kind of life at all. As a result of this experience, I had a keen sense of perspective and rarely let a day pass without considering my relative affluence these days. I’d earned it of course – returning to college to study A-levels and then getting an undergraduate place at Leeds University, where I’d taught ever since gaining a good degree – but even so, it was important, not to mention psychologically healthy, to remain aware that, however better things might be, they could be a hell of a lot worse, too.

While accessing my email platform with a password I alone in the world knew, I stroked Rose’s hair more firmly, imagining her eyes closing as I did so, the way they’d often done since we’d developed this intimate habit after meeting eighteen years earlier. We’d both been studying at Leeds, but in different disciplines, me social sciences and her humanities. But neither of us had been so committed to the underlying principles of these rival approaches to experience – empirical science versus ineffable poetics – that we’d struggled to get along well. We were essentially middlebrow, mildly ambitious comfort-seekers, and as soon as the mortgage was paid off and we had enough saved up in our Trust Fund, we planned to settle back to a relatively modest, work-free lifestyle, away from all the noise and bustle of the world at large.

At any rate, this had been true until recently, when my wife had got it into her head that she’d liked to have a child before it was all too late.

By now, I’d accessed my inbox and could observe the usual junk I received on a daily basis. Here were newsletters and funding opportunities, School updates and enquiries from international scholars seeking collaborative opportunities in the UK. I believed that I could delete most without even opening them. But then, at the heart of this unruly stack, like some jewel embedded in garbage, was a message from psy58355cl@leeds.ac.uk. The opening code referred to the psychology department, a student’s registration number, and – most crucially – the sender’s initials. In this case, “cl” would surely stand for Chloe Linton.

I set aside my phone and glanced down at Rose lying on my lap, but only because I’d sensed her breathing heavily, as if she’d fallen asleep. That happened regularly, particularly after she’d spent a long day at the computer and then drunk alcohol in the early-evening. I nudged her gently, and then said, “Darling?”

Without opening her eyes, she smiled and replied, “Oh, don’t stop doing that with your hands, Matt. It’s very relaxing.”

After struggling through the rush-hour traffic earlier, I might have benefitted from a little of the same attention myself, but there was little to be gained thinking that way. Instead, I continued stroking her hair, before returning guiltlessly to my phone. Indeed, it wasn’t as if I was doing anything dishonourable here, was it? Responding to an email from an eager undergraduate? Oh yeah, force that man to wear a scarlet letter!

Chuckling (but only quietly), I quickly opened the communication from my newest supervisee.

Dear Dr. Cole,

Thanks for meeting with me today and for agreeing to be my dissertation supervisor. I’m quite excited by my project and hope to get started immediately, as you suggested. As I said before leaving your office, I’ve already gathered some useful data – well, I guess you could call it an intriguing hint about the subject matter, that totally bad guy Donald Deere!

Just to repeat, last week while waiting for a bus at the end of my street, I overheard a girl (about fourteen or fifteen), who lives directly across from me, talking to an older woman (her mum, I guessed). The girl was going on about someone she’d met recently in the woods near Pasturn, and kept calling him “Donald”. The older woman looked troubled, which was what got me interested, and said stuff like, “Yes, Shaz, I believe you,” as if she was talking to someone a lot younger than a teenager.

Anyway, this bothered me all day, and later that night, with nothing much to do now that there’s just Mum and me in the house, I Googled “Shaz” as well as “Pasturn woods” and then “Donald”. And this is what turned up (see link below).

I hope you think it’s as fascinating as I do. As I say, I’d be interested in exploring what this legend means to the community, why it seems so – what’s the word? – prevalent, do I mean? Or maybe resonant?

Anyway, until our second meeting (next week, I hope; will email soon about that) –

Chloe xxx

It would have been foolish to assign any significance to the three Xs with which she’d ended her email; that was how young women often engaged in written communications, even though none of my female students (and there’d been quite a few down the years) ever had. No, what was more important was the content of Chloe’s message. There was indeed a link included at the foot of the page, leading to what appeared to be a blog site, and more specifically, to an entry called “the_passion_man”.

After a few moment’s hesitation, I was about to activate the webpage in question but then Rose lived up to her name, nudging my hands as she lifted her head, a sudden act which almost certainly caused me to switch off my phone with one rapidly depressed thumb.

“I’m tired,” she said, her eyes now all over me, as if I had something to hide or, much worse right then, she wanted a piece of it, too. “Shall we go to bed?”

By this time, the lousy TV shows had switched to the late evening news, and there were various issues I needed to catch up with, if only to have something to discuss tomorrow over coffee with other academics. But I could see that my wife looked insistent, and after quickly pocketing one electronic device and then grabbing a second – the remote-control – I immediately darkened the babbling screen, before standing just as she had.

Fifteen minutes later, after washing and changing into night attire alone in the bathroom, I joined her in bed. She had the lamp on her side switched on, and the window overlooking miles of unlit countryside remained uncurtained as she’d always preferred it. She liked sunlight to stream in each morning, awakening her naturally without the need of any burdensome alarm clock. By then, I was long gone anyway, striving to beat the crush on the motorways towards Leeds, but even so the darkened pane at night bothered me a bit. With a light on in here and so much blackness outside, the glass acted like a vague mirror, capturing every act performed on our elevated king-size double. This was particularly problematic for me because Rose occupied the window side, and whenever I turned her way, I could see my face in the pane, with every response to comments she made laid bare for serious scrutiny.

On this occasion, once I’d swung my legs beneath the sheets, she immediately leaned my way and, with all the understated insistence of her only-child upbringing, said, “Shall we try again, Matt?”

I inhaled sharply, telling myself that this was to combat my sudden excitement rather than to avert a sigh. My wife was very attractive – red-haired, fair-skinned, witchy in her demeanour – and had never failed to arouse me. But I was tired after a long day, and the moderate amount of alcohol I’d consumed had hardly helped matters. I was also forty-three years old and had been led to believe that such problems tended to first manifest at this age.

“I’m sorry, Rose,” I said, rubbing my eyes but certainly not just to conceal my treacherous face. “I’ve…I’ve been under a bit of pressure at work lately.”

This was true; the start of a new academic term always involved a constant battle with paperwork, all those newly established procedures which had taken the zest out of university employment.

“That’s okay,” my wife replied, one hand rested on my chest but without much pressure, which struck me as her attempt to simultaneously understand my difficulty and yet subtly rebuke me for it. Of course we both knew what all this might be about; Rose had stopped receiving her contraceptive injection a few months earlier, and any successful attempt at lovemaking might be the one that resulted in a child. “We can try again tomorrow, if you’re up to it.”

“Yeah, I’ll lay off the coke and try to relax while…well, you know, while dealing with campus stuff.”

“Are the students looking like a good lot this year?”

I hesitated, but only to suppress a yawn. “One or two remain promising.”

After turning over and facing away from me, Rose added, “Oh yeah, I sometimes forget that it’s not just incoming youngsters. There’s the other lot, too, isn’t there – those in their second and final years? I…I suspect you have your eye on a few decent candidates.”

Had Rose hesitated only to combat a yawn of her own? I could only assume so, but now, glancing over one of her angular shoulders as she reached forwards to switch out the light, I could do nothing more than briefly observe myself in that vast window across the room.

It looked like there was a sad, ageing man gazing back, wishing he could simply come inside from the cold.

SHAZ’S BLOG!!!

August 13th, 2014

MEETING UP WITH MR. PASSION!

Nurse Susan (she’s not really a nurse, but I like to call her that, because it makes me feel safe) comes to my house almost every day and we go out walking together or on the bus into Leeds for shopping. I love all this and Mum says it gives her a break, too.

I like to buy makeup (and don’t chew it anymore–I’m older now) and CDs by my favourite boy bands. Sometimes when I walk by in my new skirt and blouse (I have boobies now, and nurse Susan keeps telling me to cover them up), I see boys watching from the corners of their eyes or not always that secretively. That makes me happy. I’ve never been very popular before– even my dad left when I was just a little girl. So I’ll keep wearing that blouse and skirt, thanks very much.

But thisisn’t really what I wanted to talk about in today’s blog post. No, I have a mysterious event to mention, but one only I might end up believing. The doctors used to tell me that much of what I think happens to me is just “fantasy”, but as I say, I’m older now, nearly fifteen. So it’s different.

Sometimes, even when nurse Susan isn’t here, I go out walking in Pasturn. My mum, often drinking alone in the lounge and watching old films that make her cry, doesn’t always realise (just as I don’t think either her or Susan know about this blog). Anyway, I get bored some nights just staring out of my bedroom window, thinking about all the good things other girls my age (who don’t have my stupid problem) must be getting up to elsewhere.

I used to imagineclimbing out of the window and then down some ivy (which we don’t have) to reach the street below, like an exotic princess in a story, going to seek her prince. But then I thought, why bother making this hard for yourself, girl? Just step out of your boring bedroom, down the boring stairs, and out of the boring house. And so then I did. That was how it all happened.

Pasturn is a dull place. As I said, if you want good things to happen, you have to travel on the bus to Leedsand meet up with cool people, some who even look like they’re out of girl and boy bands (but otherswho don’t, much like me, perhaps). In the village, though, there’s just a lot of old folk like my mum has become lately and nurse Susan has always been. I once saw a pretty, young woman, who lives in a house across from mine, standing at the bus stop, but I think she’s too old to be my friend and, looking like a princess, probably has a prince already.

I kept walking that night (I can’t believe this happened only last week!), which was cold and dark and had no stars or moon. After a while, I looked around and saw no houses anywhere near me, which sometimes happens when I fall into one of my trances, asthoughts take over and I forget where I am. This time, I was wondering whether I’d remembered to take my pills earlier – it was a day when nurse Susan didn’t visit– but I was sure I must have, unless mum had been so drunk she’d forgotten to remind me.

But then I saw him, just standing in the road up ahead.

I was now near the Pasturn woods, quite close to the last buildings in the village but too far to see from any of their windows. The woods are big and dark, and lots of people say they’re supposed to be haunted, but nurse Susan and me sometimes walk in them and we’ve never seen anything weird there. Until now, I mean, when Susan wasn’t even here to help me, which is what she’s supposed to do.

The man looked all shadowy under so many crisscrossing, leafless branches, and it must have been the way I kept staring at him which made all the wood down there, all the bark and knots and weepy sap, somehow merge with his skin, as if he was a puppet brought to life by some invisible master. I looked around, stupidly expecting to see someone else nearby, maybe up in a tree and dangling the man on giant strings, but there was nobody about. Just me. And the man.

I thought for a moment that this was my dad come back after years of absence, but then told myself not to be silly. Mum said we were well shut of him anyway, explaining that as soon as he’d realised what my problem was, he’d run off with another woman and refused to have anything to do with either of us. So balls to him (forgive me swearing– this just makes me mad sometimes).

Then the man started beckoning me. I think that’s the right word. I’ve been looking up new ones daily in my dictionary, because I want to make this blog as good as I can. And yes, he kept stroking one arm slowly my way, and it must have been an autumn wind in the trees, bending their old boughs, which made his elbow seem to creak, as if it was made of wood.

Still suffering a bit from my trance earlier, I soon found myself moving forwards, as if under hypnosis. A doctor once tried that out on me, but my brain’s too giddy for it to work. But it worked this time, sure enough, because only minutes later, I was right up close to the man.

His face looked less like part of a tree than it had at a distance. There were no gnarly lumps on it, or seepages leaking down his cheeks. Even so, it did look a bit like wood, the skin smooth but also with a lined texture, like the grain on a new kitchen table from the shops. But it was his eyes I was most interested in. Despite the lack of light just here, they looked green and seemed to swirl like sink plugholes when you pour something poisoninside– chemicals like cleaning liquid, I mean, like the stuff mum uses to get rid of stains.

Then the man, in a voice I could hardly hear because that was when another wind must have got up and made all the trees around us creak again, said,“Come with me. Come and play with my children. Come and dance with them all. They like to dance.”

Well, I like to dance, too, and one thing I’d love to do more than any other isgo to a disco in Leeds, where other young people my age have fun and drinks and dance all night. I’ve seen them on the Internet and it looks brilliant!

And so now I started thinking. The man, moving away into that dark-packed wood which was creaking more than ever and sending this sound my way so that it seemed to be coming from directly in front of me, looked about the same age as my mum: forty or fifty–I couldn’t decide which. Anyway, definitely old enough to have children my own age, maybe other young girls–and boys– who, while living in the woods, might have as little experience as I did of events outside this tiny village.

So then I followed at once, along a path that winded so far that I wondered whether I’ve ever get out of the woods again. The man ahead of me, who I now realised was dressed in some kind of floor-length gown, just kept on creaking, but that was just the wind of course, fighting all the trees around me.

I can’t really describe what happened next– everything occurred in a mad whirl. All I know is that we eventually reached an empty space, a circular part of the woodland which had no trees but had a fire burning at its centre, and then I noticed all these chair-like things around the fire, but when the man clapped his hard hands, every one of these things came to life, and they weren’t chairs at all but little figures, looking even more as if they were made of wood than their dad, who was just a man of course and who then settled down in front of the fire to make something out of herbs he’d cut and also boiling water from a pot, but then we started dancingand I couldn’t watch him anymore, because we were whirling and laughing and creaking and the world seemed like such a fine place and I was happy, happy, happy, even though I was having such fun with things which were little more than bits of wood come to life and mimicking (is that the right word? I’ll have to look it up, but not just yet) human bodies, just trunks and twigs and seeping sap.

When it finally came to an end, I just sat down, my head spinning so much that the world seemed to be doing so. It felt the way it sometimes did if I took my tablets at the wrong times and had to go and lie down until all the craziness in my head passed by (this only happened occasionally). And so I slumped on the floor, and when I felt hands all over me, trying to lift me back up, I let every part of my body go limp, so that I became a kind of rag doll in this other person’s arms.

I opened my eyes again and that was when I saw him, leaning over me, his face more gnarled than I remembered it before he’d led me here, to play with all those things he called his children. But I wasn’t frightened. I think I even felt sorry for him. His eyes were still green, like chemical pools, and when he lifted a wooden cup for me to drink from, I felt like a lady, the way I think daughters must feel when their dads love them and give them treats.

I drank the liquid inside, which tasted herbal and sweet and sour, a lot stronger than those funny teabags nurse Susan sometimes drinks. I thought I’d have to tell her about this happy time for me, maybe even get hold of some of the stuff to take back as a present. But I didn’t get chance this time, because then the world started changing again and I just went with it, because it was so glorious.

Everything was suddenly perfect. The sky at night, full of shadowy cloud before, was now a field of electric stars. The woods around us glowed with all this weird light, and those many figures, like chair legs bent and now latched together, surrounded us to watch.

And that was when I saw him: the young man who looked just like a boy band member, sitting beside me and smiling. I didn’t know where the older man had gone, but I didn’t care. This was like being in the company of a prince, and I was now his beautiful princess.

“What’s your name?” I asked, as he enfolded me in his hands, the thickness of his gown creaking against my body.

“Donald Deere,” he replied, smiling when he did so, his teeth as white as freshly cut wood.

I smiled back, with more eagerness than I’ve ever shown anyone else, ever. Then, as the moon kept shining down, joining all the stars to applaud us with their silvery light, he laid me on my back and loved me. And that was when I loved him back, because this was the nicest thing that had ever happened to meand, unlike my dad and some other men I’ve known down the years (doctorswho’ve treated me, I mean), I trusted my beautiful young prince to make me safe.

I got home hours later, and mum was asleep in the lounge next to a bottle of booze. But after I helped her upstairs to her room, I went to my own bed and then remembered all this stuff, because I knew I’d soon write about it on this blog. And now I have.

I guess I just want the whole wide world to know how brilliant it was, and how much I now love Donald Deere.

“Did you get a chance to read that blog entry I sent you a link to, Dr. Cole?”

“Please, call me Matthew. Well, most use Matt, actually. Feel free to do so yourself.”

“Okay, Matt,” said Chloe, placing a smiling emphasis on the second word as she took a seat opposite me, only seconds after I’d responded to her knock at my door by calling her inside the office.

She’d arrived on time for this second supervision meeting, and I could only assume that now, having overcome her initial uncertainties by settling on a solid topic to research, she was keen to get on with the work. But first she and I must talk about several important fieldwork issues, and I suspected this would be far from a short session.

Unlike her skirt, I thought with uncharacteristic lecherousness as I looked away while she settled in the nearby chair. Given the chill season outside, she was dressed rather scantily today, but then I recalled how little I’d felt the cold when I was younger – much younger – and ascribed her choice of clothing to a naïve feeling of being indestructible. Indeed, she seemed livelier today, no longer sullen and withdrawn. So soon after an almost wordless breakfast with Rose (my wife had been up unusually early that morning, keen to return to romantic fantasies under the guise of her fictional heroine Mary Chesterton), this felt quite stark to me, and I tried seeking distraction, a task to get me away from my seat for a few minutes, enabling time to orient myself.

Realising that a retreat to my desk to tackle any aspects of my work would be unconvincing, I spotted an ideal method of achieving such brief respite.

“Regardless of my poor hygiene standards,” I said, grabbing a cup from the table mercifully between us, “please let me make you a drink today. How about one of these things?”

I dangled one of the herbal teabags my wife had bought me; it looked like a pitiable puppet on one remaining string.

Chloe met my gaze, and now even her eyes were smiling. “Why not?” she replied, and then, as if some kind of nebulous act of telepathy had just occurred between us, I moved away, out of the room, and across to the kitchen area, which had a sink and a wall-mounted boiler steaming with stored-up passion.

I returned only minutes later, following a brief chat with a colleague about some dry-as-timber academic theory on which she’d lecture after lunch. It had certainly been a dull exchange but had served its purpose in defusing a little of the irrational tension I’d sensed between me and Chloe, which might even have been only in my mind, just stubborn residue from my failure to perform sexually a few nights ago with Rose, let alone a second unsuccessful attempt the following evening.

Once my wife had fallen asleep on that first occasion, I’d removed my phone again and then accessed the blog post to which my student had sent a link. It had been an enlightening read, loaded with suggestive and evocative power, a fascinating glimpse into the psyche of a young woman clearly experiencing psychological challenges, almost certainly some kind of learning difficulty. I was no expert in the field, but the nature of her alleged experience was enough for me to suspect something unusual at work in her life. Indeed, it was this that Chloe and I needed to discuss during our latest session.

After handing her the drink (in one of my cleaner cups, with a soggy label hanging over the rim announcing the now scented contents), I apologised for the short delay and then retook my chair. In my peripheral vision, I noticed that I’d accidentally left my mobile phone on my desk to one side – I was usually careful not to let the device out of my sight – but then realised that I was fretting about that to give me something to focus on as I glanced back at Chloe. She was still smiling, but the expression no longer touched her eyes, as if she was chastising me in wordless code for leaving at exactly the moment she’d needed most contact… But then I told myself to quit with all this silliness, and began to explain the issue I’d hope to address today.

“In answer to your earlier question, yes, I did read the blog post and found it very interesting, if not also rather…well, disturbing, wouldn’t you say?”

Chloe, reanimated by our renewed engagement – just the two of us, with the office door shut tight – nodded at once, already equipped with a response. “But that’s how I’m likely to earn a high mark, isn’t it – by tackling something with plenty of substance?”

I didn’t much care for her giddy tone, but nonetheless responded in my usual grounded way. “Yes, that’s true. But as researchers, we also have to be careful. We have a responsibility to ensure the safety of everyone involved in our work, and I don’t just mean their physical well-being – I’m referring also to mental issues. And having reviewed the contents of the evidence you presented, I’m afraid I cannot allow you to approach its author as a potential subject for interview. She’s not yet fifteen years old, and as such would be considered a vulnerable subject. Even if we tried, we’d be unlikely to gain ethical approval from the university to recruit her.”

The young woman thought for a moment, re-crossing her legs as she sipped from her cup, leaving a smear of red lipstick on its rim and looking unlikely to remove it anytime soon. “But I can include the blog post as documentary data, can’t I?” she asked eventually, blue eyes narrowing with a knowingness I was gradually getting used to. “I mean, having published it in the public domain, hasn’t the girl – Shaz – relinquished any rights to prevent us from using it for such purposes?”

If I perceived a coldblooded attitude here, I tried not betraying it, even though I now realised that Chloe – craftier perhaps than I’d imagined her – had already checked on legal issues relating to online information. It was true that universally accessible material was free for everyone to draw upon, unlike most social networking data which, often fire-walled by owners by password-protection mechanisms, required formal permission to use. But none of this meant we could do whatever we wanted with it; there were still moral rules to adhere to.

I explained all that, and Chloe nodded again, this time with what I interpreted as mild impatience. But the upshot was that the blog post would be included in her dissertation as an ethnographic document, to be supplemented by further investigation, including interviewees who lacked its author’s obvious personal difficulties.

“I’m quite interested,” my supervisee said once we’d moved on to other matters in her project, “in the way Shaz at first thought that Donald Deere was her…well, her father.”

I’d detected Chloe’s brief hesitation, which usually suggested that an emotive issue had just been alluded to, and then wondered about something she’d said during her first visit to me earlier that week – or rather, a conspicuous omission in relation to the few aspects of her home situation she’d mentioned. She’d suggested that she and her mum had moved to the small village of Pasturn about four years ago, following her parents’ messy divorce, but had said nothing at all about her dad, a man who might, I imagined, be little older than I was.

I drew a quick breath and replied, “Well, that may indeed be interesting, but we have to be careful not to lose sight of our goals. What you’re perhaps suggesting is some form of psychoanalytic analysis – one concerning a girl’s relationship with her father – and although that could result in a perfectly good dissertation, I’m afraid I’m unqualified to support a piece of work like that.”

At that moment, Chloe, having visibly warmed to my words “our goals”, seemed to back down from her previous focus with surprising haste. “Oh yeah,” she said, shaking her head and then hiding the rest of her face behind the cup of steaming herbal beverage, “I was just mentioning that in passing, really. I mean, I agree with you. We should use the blog only as a basis for the project.”

“Well, you should, Chloe.”

“I beg your pardon?”

I smiled, clasping together slightly tremulous hands. “I acquired my degree twenty years ago. That’s as far back as you are old,” I explained, eyeing her carefully, hoping I was being sensitive enough to get across my point without offering so much information that I might be accused of impropriety if I’d misread the situation.

Chloe’s gaze dropped, making her look like little more than the child she was, and one who’d been caught out in some illicit act she’d had no idea others were aware of. I simply gazed at her, sensing myself sighing inside. Right then, I didn’t know how to proceed.

The simple truth was that all our exchanges during this latest session had persuaded me that young Chloe had developed – what had been known in my own youth, though I had no idea whether the word still had currency today – a bit of a crush on me. It was apparent in her body language as we conversed, in the way she attended to my every word and seemed dispirited whenever I failed to support any of her spontaneous exclamations. Lord knows why she felt drawn to such an ageing, un-ambitious, impotent person like me, but I supposed it wasn’t the first time this had occurred.

Young women, as the almost certainly deluded Shaz had demonstrated, had a weakness for older men they considered to be in possession of power. Now, being a university scholar was hardly a position of world-leading authority, but nonetheless contained its own brand of appealing qualities. To a youth about to enter life, with all its potential for menace, people ostensibly in-the-know must appear attractive, particularly to those whose pathways were possibly more challenging than for the great majority. Indeed, it was no secret that young women faced greater barriers in the jobs market than their male counterparts, possibly because this was how the world had been shaped, prioritising the achievement of men.

This was of course a social-psychological account, my personal speciality, with aspects of evolutionary theory built in. I was aware that there were other explanations for such cross-generational attraction – including a Freudian approach which Chloe had I had briefly touched upon earlier – but the central issue was that such relationships were often mutually delusional: experience-hungry younger woman seeks stability, combining passion with safety; older man clings to what he interprets as his fading status, recapturing youthful feelings of power. I’d never previously engaged in any such nascent trysts, gently pushing away the student until the message was slowly and harmlessly received.

And yet what was different here, with Chloe Linton? Why did I feel an almost overwhelming temptation not to bother with my usual artful withdrawals, all those almost imperceptible distancing strategies I guess most teachers learn during years of tutoring young, zestful and inherently insecure people?

I didn’t wish to dwell upon this issue – images of my wife now rose unbidden to my mind, especially the passionless sex act of making babies – and so then, after further strained talk about her project, I decided it was time for Chloe to leave, using the excuse of having to deliver a lecture as my reason for cutting the session shorter than I’d hoped it might be.

Perhaps she detected the uncertainty in my bearing, because when she spoke again after draining her cup of that herbal beverage, she sounded confident once more. “Okay, but let me quickly recap on our discussion. We agreed that my next step will involve conducting a documentary analysis of relevant information I can find on the Net, as well as any material available from the university’s library.”

I nodded, thinking this would be a good start. “That should certainly keep you busy for a few weeks,” I said, and although my body seemed to protest, I immediately added, “Then maybe we can fix up another meeting.”

Chloe looked hard my way, her large blue eyes appearing to consume me. “Is it all right if I email you concerning anything I’m uncertain about?” she asked, her voice back to sounding unsettled, as up and down as her general mood seemed to be. “I mean, just to make sure I remain on the right track from the start.”

“Of course. That’s absolutely fine,” I replied, because this was the support I provided for all my students, the act I was paid a good wage to fulfil, one which had allowed my wife to pursue such a creative life while making unrealistic plans for the future. Moments later, standing from my chair just as Chloe had, I quickly added, “In fact, I…well, yes, I look forward to it.”

“Oh, me, too,” she replied, ostensibly passing me back the now empty cup, but then, with her free arm, taking my rising hand spontaneously and giving it a slow shake. Then she finished, “Goodbye, Matt.”

I didn’t hear again from Chloe until over a week later, and only then by email and not to arrange another meeting. She’d certainly been busy gathering information suitable for her project concerning the role of local legends in small communities, their psychological relevance to a variety of residents. I was impressed by her industry.

I received the first communication one evening, while Rose and I again watched TV in our lounge. As soon as the email dropped into my inbox, my phone made a small pinging sound I’d forgotten to switch off after another long day at the office. My wife hitched her head from my lap and asked who was contacting me at this time. By now, I’d already unfurled the message and found it difficult – not to mention unnecessary – to lie, and so I told her that it was just a student panicking over her (yes, I did say her) dissertation, and that to put her mind at rest, I should take a quick look at her work. Which was the truth, after all…well, close enough to it, anyway.

At any rate, once Rose had settled back again, clearly content with my explanation (it was hardly an unprecedented situation; undergraduates commonly grew flustered during their final years, and my wife knew I had a responsibility to them which I took seriously), I was able to address the material Chloe had sent through. I attached little significance to the fact that she’d chosen to contact me during unsociable hours. She’d have other coursework to develop during the daytime, as well as lectures to attend and all the other stuff involved in achieving the worthwhile degree she was destined to get.

I soon learned that she’d shown some enterprise by venturing out into the streets of Pasturn and conducting a short survey with many passersby. We’d covered this research stage while dealing with her ethics forms for submission to the university, but I hadn’t expected her to act so quickly. Her results, neatly processed and presented in suitable tables, were very interesting, and after only a brief perusal of this data, I realised that she’d already identified a few promising trends among the village’s residents.

In search of “the passion man”: a social psychological investigation of a rural legend by Chloe Linton

Exploratory survey results

Table 1. Study sample: by gender and age

(number = 158)

Age	Gender	Male	Female	Total
16-24		15	21	36
25-44		20	22	42
45-65		25	20	45
65+		17	18	35
Total		77	81	158

Table 2. Awareness of the “Donald Deere” legend: by gender, age and village occupancy status

Category	Sub-category	Heard of legend? (%’s)
Gender	Male	24
Gender	Female	75
Age band	16-24	72
	25-44	38
	45-64	32
	65+	89
Lifelong resident of Pasturn?	Yes	84
Lifelong resident of Pasturn?	No	36

Table 3. Selected comments made by survey respondents (all recorded with permission of speakers)

Respondent characteristics

Comment

Female, 16-24, lifelong village resident

“It was me gran that first told me about [Donald Deere]. I don’t even think my mum had heard about him and wasn’t happy when I explained what gran had said.”

Female, 16-24, lifelong village resident

“He’s supposed to look like the trees where he lives, isn’t he? I also heard he had green eyes which swirled like hypnotism. He’s meant to put a spell on you, but I don’t know how. I think I’d find him scary [laughs].”

Male, 25-44,

lifelong village resident

“Yeah, I’ve heard of Donald Deere. He was supposed to have lived around these parts – in the woods nearby, I think – about five-hundred years ago, when folk knew no better than to believe in silly stories. Anyway, he apparently brewed up potions to get what he wanted from young women in the village. I think we all know what I mean by that [sniggers]. Thank God the world’s moved on!”

Male, 45-64, lived in village for twenty years

“No, I’m afraid I’ve never come across that legend before. It all sounds a bit daft to me, not to mention implausible. I mean, who’d want to keep hold of children without a mum around to help out and…well, to do other things for a man, if you follow? It doesn’t make sense.”

Female, 65+, lifelong village resident

“We all knew about him as girls, way back before you were born, love. None of us would dare go near those woods, especially at night. And this was when there was a war on!”

Female, 65+, lifelong village resident

“Donald Deere is like all men: he needs loving and doesn’t want to do all the dull things for himself. He’s a monster, but only because he never died and never will. I won’t let any of my granddaughters go anyway near those deep, dark woods.”

This was such a strong start to the data-collection stage of her project that, still feeling uncomfortable – even guilty – about the tensions which had clearly arisen between us during our last meeting, I emailed her back at once.

Dear Chloe,

Good work! If I’m reading your evidence correctly, I’d say there were three key areas to explore in more detail:

1) The fact that considerably more females are aware of the legend than males (which makes intuitive sense).

2) The fact that lifelong village residents are more aware of Donald Deere than relative newcomers (which also makes intuitive sense).

3) Most intriguingly, the fact that older people appear to be more aware of the myth than younger adults except those aged between 16 and 24 years old.

I think all these questions could make for a fascinating project and I’d urge you to move on immediately to the next stage of your research, maybe carrying out one-to-one interviews with selected residents. The comments you’ve included already hint at some social-psychological explanations for the issues I’ve highlighted above, but it’s unwise to speculate without further evidence.

At any rate, keep up the great work and I look forward to your next communication!

Best wishes –

Matt

I’d already sent the email – mainly because my wife had begun stirring beneath my arms – before I’d had chance to reread and judge its tone, considering the impact it might have on its recipient. Had I been too effusive here? Should I actually have signed off so informally (using Matt instead of Matthew or even Dr. Cole)? Oughtn’t I to have waited till morning, during normal working hours, before answering the message?

Whatever the long-term consequences were, it appeared that, now later than eleven p.m., Chloe had stayed up tonight, because only seconds after I’d responded to her work, she sent back another email, one whose brevity was belied by its unsettling suggestiveness.

Thanks, Matt.

I can’t wait for what happens next.

C xxx

She might be – and probably was – referring to the following stages of her research; she was a bright student and obviously committed to her work. But even so, as I retired to bed that evening with my wife (who, on this occasion, had fallen asleep on my lap, and, to my mild relief, had needed little encouragement to continue with this arrangement upstairs), the psychologist in me couldn’t help assigning further significance to those three Xs, let alone the way she’d now truncated her Christian name to the intimate “C”. Indeed, didn’t only lovers do that? Or at the very least close friends?

I wish I could say I slept well that night, but I’m afraid that would be a lie.

With no lectures to deliver during the next few days, I decided to work from home, which genuinely surprised Rose, because this wasn’t something I often did, despite having been such an integral part of the School for so many years that my Head of Department was happy to grant me carte blanche on this issue.

As my wife continued writing about much more passionate lives than ours – maximising satisfaction with a modest income – I went about the uninspiring and yet reliable process of survival, marking half-decent student essays to pay for food I later prepared for our evening meals, which Rose and I enjoyed before settling back to more cheering TV, a serious-minded film maybe, or a cutting documentary about how demanding life could be for others.

One night towards the weekend, after retiring to bed, we tried making love for the first time in several weeks, and I even rose to the occasion, even though ejaculation eluded me. Rose smiled and thanked me for helping her achieve orgasm, but by now I suspected she was simply glad I was able to perform at all. I didn’t want to believe that she’d begun suspecting me of anything improper concerning our relatively happy marriage, but I’m afraid this thought had occurred to me on several occasions lately.

The next time I heard from my supervisee Chloe Linton was about a fortnight after her previous message. I’d seen her a few times on campus and on each occasion she’d been hanging out with people her own age, including a number of good-looking lads. Maybe whatever wobbly stage she’d gone through during the early months of her final study year had now lifted and she felt she could get back to being just another normal (if uncommonly bright) undergraduate. Or perhaps all this had just been in my mind, anyway, some kind of incipient middle-age crisis projected onto a student in that impish manner the human mind often resorted to. Whatever the truth was, I felt more confident about replying to the young woman’s latest message in merely a professional way.

It had helped that Chloe had emailed during a working day. I was in my office at the time, having started work on a funding bid for research I planned to carry out the following academic year, when I hoped a short Sabbatical break could be arranged, offering me some much-needed protected time. My head was whirling from all the financial details I’d had to work out, and so new information about the mysterious Donald Deere, that possibly supernatural resident of a nearby village called Pasturn, greatly appealed to me. My supervisee began as she had in her previous communication, greeting me impartially and explaining that she’d attached several documents relating to the case she was exploring. I downloaded these at once.

The first was a print-screen copy of a page clearly extracted from a website dedicated to the documentation of the myths, legends and folklore which attended every region in the country. This text ran as follows:

In the small West Yorkshire village of Pasturn, just miles north of Leeds, a man named Donald Deere once resided in local woodland, along with a number of entities reputed to be his children. Donald was allegedly a black magician in the 1500s, whose spells and potions were supposed to possess amorous qualities. Indeed, even unrequited love could be overcome by offering one of Donald’s herbal drinks to the person you lusted after!

Donald had a reputation for being something rather less than human. People who’d met him had invariably done so in the Pasturn woods, and it was said that he closely resembled the trees which surrounded him. But all this could change according to his surroundings, including the company he kept. In short, a consensus suggests that he – whatever he was – functioned as a mirror of sorts, reflecting both his environment as well as the desires of those with whom he frequented, especially after they’d consumed one of his specially brewed cocktails!

Alas, his life is believed to have ended in scandal, when local residents discovered that he’d been misusing magic for private purposes, seducing women and then stealing their children to live with him in his woodland lair. When authorities finally tracked him down, it’s said that he’d taken possession of at least thirteen purloined offspring, all of whom pandered to his nefarious needs. Although Donald closely resembled a person, none of these youngsters had done so, and then, understandably horrified, his hunters had taken action. Donald and his ill-gotten brood were apparently destroyed in a fire started among all the trees in which he’d resided.

One final point: across a range of historical material, Donald is referred to in no other way. In fact, the surname “Deere” is thought to be a latter-day variation, possibly added soon after the Second World War (when the alteration becomes apparent in local documents). Interviews with people living in the village at that time suggest that this was how the man always responded to requests about his identity. To wit:

“What’s your name?”

“Donald, dear.”

What’s perhaps more troubling, however, is how such relatively recent Pasturn residents had come about this knowledge. Surely nobody during that period had encountered his spirit lurking in a lonely road running alongside that wood…had they?

This article had obviously been written in a playful, sceptical way, its author remaining anonymous. Nevertheless, in light of what I already knew about the story – particularly the strangely compelling blog post made by fifteen year-old “Shaz”, who almost certainly had special needs – it made me tremble in all the cool, clear daylight streaming through my office window.

I soon turned and glanced through the glass, seeing only a vague outline of myself reflected in the pane, my features seemingly composed of all the things in the room: desktop computer, paper files, a stack of unmarked essays. For one moment, it looked as if I was made out of these things, as if I’d gained form from my immediate surroundings the way Donald Deere (or rather “dear”) had been reputed to do. Then I glanced quickly away, and readdressed my monitor screen, seeking to access the other document I’d opened from Chloe’s attachments.

It immediately became apparent that this was a JPEG file, a scanned reproduction of a pencil sketch possibly executed lots of years ago, maybe as many as centuries. It showed a figure climbing a kind of ladder, which was pressed up against what resembled a tree-house surrounded by plentiful woodland. The ladder had an asymmetrical structure, with a number of chunky logs serving as its uprights and thinner branch-like structures as the rungs. But it was the climber I was keener to observe.

It was clearly a man. He was dressed in a kind of dark gown which reached as far as his knotted ankles. Other than a pair of chiselled feet, only his similarly carved hands and sanded face were visible, all looking as if they were made of a gnarled, grainy substance which matched his immediate environment to a disarming tee. Indeed, if not for the lumpy protrusion of both a nose and a mouth, as well as bright eyes depicted with starry radiance by several elaborate flourishes of a pencil, he might have been hard to spot there, lumbering upwards, eager to enter a wooden home from which smoke emerged, as if he had something decidedly insidious on the boil.

It had taken me a few days to respond to Chloe after her last submission of project materials. I’d apologised, blaming administrative responsibilities, which was only half-true. However, as the university policy was for all staff to respond to dissertation enquiries within a week, I was hardly violating any formal obligation.

Nevertheless, when she showed up about a week later (as arranged during a perfunctory exchange of emails), she appeared quite sullen again, much the way she had during our first encounter, when I’d ascribed her attitude to mere shyness. But did I still believe this was the case?

Of course I had no idea about what might be going on in her private life (my hunch concerning an issue with her father was little more than that, with no further evidence to make it clearer), and in any case, that was none of my business and irrelevant to our professional relationship. And so then, trying hard to ignore her reticence that early November afternoon, I settled down to more instrumental concerns.

As Chloe – dressed with more reserve today, maybe because it was so cold outside – reached into a handbag she’d brought, I asked, “Do you want to tell me about the progress you’ve made since we were last in touch?”

When she sat up again, she held the same notebook she’d used during her first meeting, and had just removed a loose printed sheet from its opening section. But before showing me that, she said in a hard-to-read voice, “No drink on offer this time, Dr. Cole? I’m quite thirsty, as it happens. I just got off the bus and had to run across campus to make this appointment.”

Being late hadn’t troubled her on at least one occasion in the past, but as she’d terminated her comment with a narrow smile, I decided to match her playful demeanour.

“Ah yes, of course,” I replied, only now realising that she’d just reverted to a formal mode of address – “Dr. Cole” – rather than my preferred “Matt”. But then I quit burdening myself with such foolish mind-games and made a grab for a cup on the table between us. “Same as last time okay?”

I’d already snatched up another of the herbal teabags when Chloe leaned forwards and, with her free hand, took it from me. “Let me make it this time,” she said, and then handed me the piece of paper she’d produced from that pad. “You take a good look at that while I’m gone.”

Glancing down at the sheet didn’t prevent me from noticing that Chloe collected two cups from the table between us, before quickly leaving the room, headed for that small kitchen area across the corridor, which students were also permitted to use. One teabag shared between two vessels? I thought, but not for long, because that was when I looked more closely at the sheet my supervisee had passed to me.

It showed another JPEG image, presumably extracted from the Internet. But this was no artist’s sketch. It was a black-and-white photograph, displaying a figure standing at the heart of woodland, one almost merging into the tree-packed background, limbs little more than bony branches, head resembling a giant knot amid a vertical strip of gnarled bark.

As I suggest, this shape almost merged into its background. Because there was definitely a face visible here, one whose strikingly wide eyes shone with twin violent lens-flares. There were also unmistakeable impressions of hands and feet, whose fingers and toes curled tightly, the first at tendrils of dangling foliage all around this human-sized shape in the woods, and the second at a leaf-strewn, muddy floor.

I suppressed another sudden shiver in the brightly lit expanse of my office; this was becoming quite a habit, I thought. Then my door arced open, seemingly of supernatural volition, but I remained too compelled by this alleged real life, un-doctored photograph to pay it much heed. Underneath the printed image were a caption and a copyright credit, probably added by the person who’d taken the snap:

IS THIS DONALD DEERE?

“So what do you think of that, then?” asked Chloe as she retook her seat and immediately handed one of the two cups she’d brought back, each bearing what appeared to be a reddish liquid with a scent like several kinds of herbs mixed together. The teabag, split between two beverages, must have been completely drained of its strength, because she’d clearly thrown it away after brewing these pungent concoctions.

Now gripping a cupful of the steaming liquid, I looked up at her, holding out the page with my other hand as if I found it negligible to her research, though actually wanting shut of the thing as soon as possible. The image had unaccountably troubled me – yes, me a dyed-in-the-wool rationalist who believed that God was a delusion and dead was dead.

“It’s diverting enough, I guess, but far from central to our investigation,” I said eventually, my voice becoming involuntarily pompous.

Chloe’s renewed smile seemed to falter, maybe on account of the sternness of my tone. After placing her own cup on the table between us, she glanced down at the printed page and then promptly back at me. “But what about all the figures you can see in the background – there are about thirteen, I think, all white and bony…”

“Chloe, please,” I said, realising that I hadn’t examined the shot in sufficient detail to spot anything more than that creepy figure upfront, surely nothing more than a conspiracy of tree limbs which had resulted in the illusion of a humanlike entity standing in a shadowy wood, just waiting and watching .

Shaking my head clear of such corrosive thoughts, I added, “If we’re…if you’re going to get the grade you’re certainly capable of achieving, you’ll have to remain focused on the task at hand. This basically means forgetting about any…any foolish speculation concerning whether the issue under scrutiny – a rural legend – has any basis in truth, and concentrating instead on exploring, from a psychological perspective, its impact on the resident community.”

“Well, I guess that tells me,” Chloe responded in a dramatic whisper, her mouth now a small moue of surprise.

Following my uncharacteristically passionate outburst, I began to feel slightly guilty, and it was several more seconds before I managed to look away from the young woman, my heart pumping hard, and finally said, “Hey, look, I’m sorry. I’m…I’m under a bit of pressure at the moment, what with so many admin deadlines to hit. I guess I shouldn’t have been so…well, direct.”

Chloe, surprising me with her resilience – I’d actually expected my words to have had more impact on her previously tender nature – simply smiled with clear understanding and then spoke again. “Why not take a little drink, Matt? It’s herbal and supposed to be relaxing.”

Something about the way she’d articulated the final word – “relaaaxing,” she’d said, with the central vowel extended – persuaded me to obey her instruction, drawing deeply from that cup of sweet, hot liquid I held, and almost finishing the lot in one go.

After finally setting aside the almost empty vessel, I noticed that Chloe was smiling more broadly than I’d ever seen.

We spent the rest of the meeting discussing various tasks remaining in her project: advertising for Pasturn residents to volunteer to be interviewed; dealing with issues of confidentiality and anonymity; emphasising the importance of trying to get down a good first draft of the dissertation’s literature review before Christmas; and generally making sure all other written sections – methodology, findings, and conclusion – were timetabled to occur way in advance of the hand-in date during spring of the following year.

Now that we seemed to have patched over the cracks of our recent minor altercation, Chloe looked happy enough, and even though I’d just begun to detect the first stirrings of what might be a head-cold – this was hardly surprising, what with winter approaching – I was similarly confident about the project’s movement towards completion.

That ghastly picture, the one showing a near-human figure which couldn’t be anything of the sort, wasn’t alluded to again, but as my student finally rose to leave, she mentioned something that, to my mind, was almost as bad.

“Oh, I forgot to mention,” I said, her voice almost casual in tone, “the girl whose blog I found a short while back, the one who triggered this whole project…”

“Yes? What about her?”

“…she’s pregnant,” said Chloe, her face as straight as some doctor delivering news about a terminal medical condition to a patient.

“Pregnant?” I repeated with a uselessness I found rather hard to reconcile with my usual self-image, one of sharp-minded competence and at times even dogged inspiration. When I spoke again, I found myself no more at ease. “How did you find that out?”

“I noticed her the other day, standing in her bedroom window. She’s already started to show.” Having just thrown the strap of her handbag over one shoulder, Chloe held both hands in front of her belly, about six inches from her leather jacket. “I’d guess that she’s about four months’ gone.”

My mind performed a quick calculation, establishing a conception date of early August: the period in which, I recalled, so-called Shaz had written that creepily evocative blog. It was now nearly December, and sure enough, that was almost four months later.

At that moment, a lot of information I’d acquired from the website text my supervisee had sent a few weeks earlier returned savagely to me. I’d assumed – and we’d certainly discussed the document along these lines – that this would be used as only background information, a way of scene-setting the project during Chloe’s introductory sections, merely establishing the rural legend’s features, before explaining how she’d explored its impact on Pasturn’s small population. But having handed me that unsettling photo, did Chloe now intend to treat this story as more important than that…even as something true?

I sincerely hoped not; that wouldn’t only jeopardise the grade she might achieve, but also, by her failure to address a suitable psychological issue in a scientifically respectable way, call into question the state of her mind at the moment, suggesting that the story she’d haphazardly chanced upon was taking firmer grip on a promising young student than any objective, critical approach should ever allow.

But what more could I do than issue further cautions? In any case, weren’t these becoming rather repetitive, and even likely to flare up more tensions between us?

In the event, I said nothing, and as Chloe, still holding her face in quite a neutral expression, turned to leave, it was she who spoke the final words that day.

“By the way, I know good researchers should leave no stone left unturned, and so, for the sake of completeness, I’m going to get in touch with the man who took that photograph – you know, the one I showed you earlier of the figure in the wood, surrounded by all those dancing things.”

I’d still yet to see these other alleged entities in this shot, but as the picture was now tucked back in Chloe’s bag, that didn’t look likely to change anytime soon. That was my own fault, of course; I’d been too eager to dismiss it as even a piece of supplementary evidence. But what could I say? That I was wrong and she was right? That she could include the image in her project, after all?

As that sense of violation – a stinging sniffle in my nose, a burning sensation at the back of my throat – took renewed grip upon me, my student spoke again.

“As you saw, the guy’s called Norman Gantley and lives in Derby. I tracked him down recently by using an online telephone directory and plan to call him this week.”

And before she went out, she didn’t give me chance to issue my approval, even though I’m not sure this was something I’d have offered anyway.

That head-cold – or whatever it was; it remained burdensome, but the symptoms never seemed to graduate to anything more than low-grade irritations – refused to leave me for a long while. During this time, I’d mulled over all that had occurred during Chloe’s and my last meeting, deciding that whatever had once happened between us, in the subtle interstices that exist among all people (especially men and women), it could be dismissed as a passing phase one or possibly both of us had been going through.

At any rate, things felt smoother now. I hadn’t heard from Chloe in over a week, suggesting that she was knuckling down to serious work on her dissertation and other modular assessments. Additionally, things at home had for me reassumed their usual steady nature, with Rose approaching a deadline from her independent press publisher and working hard to finish a new romance novel. Indeed, other matters – equally important in her mind, but slightly less pressing at the moment – had been temporarily set aside.

One evening in early December, my wife fell asleep beside me on the couch at only eight o’clock, which led me to suspect that she was also now becoming ill, maybe having contracted whatever ailed me. I leaned across and roused her, asking in a whisper, “Hey, darling. Are you okay?”

She looked up, eyes hooded; she’d probably been staring at a computer screen all day, and after many similar experiences myself lately, I realised how tired this could make you feel, not to mention the headaches it induced. After some tender encouragement, I eventually persuaded her to go to bed early, tucking her in and kissing her forehead, before retreating again downstairs. I was happy with Rose, I really was, and when other intrusive thoughts, previously suppressed because I’d wanted to spend some valuable time in my wife’s company, returned to me while browsing my phone, I at last gave them the attention they probably warranted.

Uppermost among these concerns was one relating to a particular blogger residing in a small village north of Leeds, who was now apparently pregnant following some tawdry fling or other. It was a pitiful truth that vulnerable people like her often fell prey to unscrupulous others, especially men on the prowl as they commonly were. Maybe, I speculated recklessly, the girl – Shaz from Pasturn – had engaged in such an illicit tryst during the summer, and then afterwards, feeling guilty about it (having contravened instructions from her alcoholic mother and only semi-present nurse), she’d invented an elaborate fantasy to justify the encounter in her undeveloped mind. Indeed, rather than a messy bang in some litter-strewn backstreet, she’d actually made love to a prince, someone who, out among all that romantic wildlife, had made her feel like a princess.

Admittedly, this was desperate reasoning, but it was as good as I could manage that evening, with dark crowding beyond the lounge window and a stiff wind making trees creak outside, like someone approaching with rather less than normal human limbs.

Quickly thrusting aside that distasteful impression, I typed into an online search-engine: “Shaz, blog, Pasturn.” Seconds later, after clicking FIND, I was rewarded with a whole range of the world’s detritus, including various exotic ladies, all of whom ably exemplified the predatory needs of males the world over, along with, near the top of this pile of links, just what I’d sought: Chloe Linton’s first informant, and more crucially, her infrequently updated public journal.

She’d made only a handful of new posts since that troubling one back in August, most relating to her everyday life, how restricted she felt, how frightened she sometimes became, and how regrettably few people were involved with her on a regular basis. She liked her “mum” and “nurse Susan” of course – they were kind and always understanding – but she wished “something else would happen”, something “amazing and wonderful”, which would make “the stars look brighter at night.”

But then something obviously had. Her first blog entry in September simply read: “I’m going to have a baby!!!!!!!!!!”

This was followed by a few months’ silence, during which I could only imagine what the girl had been going through. Perhaps her earlier fantasy, penned before she’d realised the consequences of the forbidden act she’d enjoyed and later elaborated upon in private prose (insofar as a universally-available blog post could be described as such), had assumed even more power over her tender mind.

This was the only explanation I could come up with after I’d read the last entry she’d added to her blog, one made about a week ago now. It made me wish my wife was still awake, helping me to feel less alone in our silent home, even though she’d inevitably ask what I was doing reading the ostensibly secret thoughts of such a young, clearly disturbed person.

SHAZ’S BLOG!!!

November 26th, 2014

MR. PASSION HAS A LOOK AT WHAT’S COMING!

Mum still won’t talk to me very often, and nurse Susan doesn’t say I’m a big disappointment, but I can see that in her face anyway. It’s the way her eyes look at me, as if she’s trying not to glance down at my big belly whenever she visits but really struggles not to. But all this is OK, because I’ll soon have someone else to be with, won’t I? And that will be best of all.

What I wanted to tell you about– anyone out there, still reading this blog – is something that happened to me last night. I thought I’d be scareder than I was, but it turns out that having a baby inside me has made me less scared, which has to be good, hasn’t it?

Anyway, I’d just gone to bed, after helping Mum into hers. She’d drunk a lot, mainly because she has nobody elseand now even I’m about to share her with another. I waved goodnight to my pop posters, which will have to come down soon to make way for other things–adult things– and finally switched out my lamp. It was dead dark and silent for a long time, but that was when I heard something moving outside.

You won’t know where my house is and what the surroundings look like, so let me tell you that I live in a narrow street with lots of joined-up houses on both sides. Each house has a small garden, and sometimes, after all the people have gone to bed, animals creep around in them, looking for bits and pieces that might have fallen out of dustbins. But this thing sounded bigger than an animal. It seemed to be surrounded by other noises, all like rattling objects, the way skeletons might sound if a wind rushed through a long row of them. This noise got angrier, as if something was now tugging all the bones together, but that soon ended. Then that other sound struck up again.

When it started making an annoying clunking, which soon got louder and louder, I could only think it was moving towards me, but not from a distance, like the far side of the street. I mean upwards. I think I’ve said before that my bedroom is on the top floor of my house, and so if something– or even somebody– was trying to get high enough to peer into my window, it must be doing something to get the better of what everyone knows is called gravity.

Now I got scared, but not so scared that I was too afraid to get out of bed and then creep over to the window, where my curtains were pulled closelytogether like a nun’s outfit. I had someone else to protect now, not just myself, and if someone was about to try burglarising mine and Mum’s house, I wouldn’t let them, because since dad left, it’s all we have, and we’re never letting it go, ever.

So then I pulled back one of the curtains. And almost collapsed at the sight of what I saw out there.

The thing beyond the window almost looked like me, but only because my legs had just given way and I’d droppedonto my knees. Now my head was only as high as the figure’s outside, and the room was so dark that it made moonlight bounce off my face and place its reflection overthe man’s features beyond the glass, so that, for one horrid moment, it even looked like my dad out there. But then I stood up and backed away, glancing again only afterI’d got my balance. It wasn’t my dad at all. But the awful thingis that I’m not sure what it was.

Hisface was all blank like a window, but parts of it– the ears on each side, itssticky-out nose, and the end of its chin–seemed to be made of old brick, just like the stuff my house is built from. I couldn’t see much more of his body, because only his head was poking over the sill at the bottom, but I did notice bits of wood on either side of him, as if he was using things like the trees in our garden to support him. But then, by the way he now moved these items, I realised that they were attached to him. They were his hands!

By now, I was really scared, and I quickly darted forwards to shut the curtain I’d yanked back a moment ago. Then, perhaps caused by my sudden movement, the hideous thing with that bricklike face began to look a bit like some of the boys on my pop posters, but only in a weird way, their features all skewed, as if someone had poured hot water down the walls and all the paper had got wet and crinkly.

I finally managed to pull the curtain across and then, holding my belly with both hands, I ran back and climbed into bed. Lots of time seemed to go by so slowly, but after about a minute that felt like an hour, I heard those noises again, all the horrible clunks, and then realised they were footsteps. When these stopped, more of that mad rattling occurred, like lots of objects as hard as bones scratching at a road. Now I knew that the thing or maybe even things were moving away, and before long it or they had gone – forever, I hoped at the time.

But I don’t think like that now, while writing this blog in normal daylight. Because later I worked out what the figure looking into my room was.

It wasmy baby’s dad and I love himand can’t wait for him to come back.I think I’ll be less scared next time.

When I finished reading this deeply disturbing account, I immediately shut down my Internet-enabled phone and quickly retreated upstairs, having first made sure all the doors and windows were shut and locked on the ground floor. In truth, I felt vulnerable right then, that weird sensation in my skull – like a head-cold, but not one boasting any usual symptoms – spilling my thoughts all over, threatening to make even harmless, delusional material seem realer than it should be taken to be. Indeed, as I slipped eagerly into bed with Rose, refusing to glance into that curtain-less, unlit window across our room, I shifted my thoughts to another woman, one who presently felt much safer to dwell upon, a mental process I could hardly resist because it seemed almost automatic.

And that was how, only minutes later, thoughts about Chloe Linton, swirling around in my mind like some exotic dancer, sent me hurriedly off into a dream-packed sleep.

All that – my wife falling asleep early in the evening, and me reading the blog before rushing to bed later like some fretful child – had occurred on a Friday night, but over the weekend I didn’t feel much better. By this time, the weird virus or infection which had got inside my head seemed more bullish, pushing around my thoughts like fragile children in a playground, rendering each fearful of exposure, holding secrets firmly within.

I took tablets and drank wine, but nothing helped, and after another disturbed sleep on Saturday night (I was mercifully unable to recall my dreams, even though I woke the following morning with an ache deep in my groin), I decided to go outside and get some fresh air, hoping the graspingly chill fingertips of advancing winter might pinch the malady from my bones.

To my credit in light of where I ended up going, I need to say that I invited Rose along, too. But my wife refused, saying she must submit the first draft of her new novel the following week and hadn’t the time to spare. I was both pleased and disappointed by this response, but for very different reasons, and when I finally went outside to climb into my car, I felt the pain in my skull ease to some degree.

I started driving, exactly where I wasn’t certain, but definitely in the direction of Leeds. I was so familiar with this route that I might have casually claimed that habit had taken over my body, but I knew this was a lie. The simple fact was that deep down, at a level of the mind beyond even the activation of muscle memory, I realised exactly what I was up to. But that didn’t make the experience of obeying such nebulous mental instructions feel like anything less than yielding to a compulsion, as if certain magical forces had conjured up a powerful form of magnetism, dragging me to a specific place.

I’d never been to Pasturn, but had occasionally seen it signposted during my travels close to my place of employment. Once I’d come off the A-roads – wonderfully deserted during this non-working day – I advanced along a series of country lanes, enjoying the rapid transformation West Yorkshire could always manage between urban bustle and rural tranquillity. This new area reminded me of my home near Hebden Bridge, but I quickly suppressed any negative thoughts about what my wife might think if she knew where I’d headed today and instead concentrated on all the territory up ahead.

It wasn’t as if I was doing anything wrong, anyway; this was merely a reconnaissance mission, seeking out the area of fieldwork being negotiated by one of my ablest supervisees. If it came to it, I could just claim that, regardless of it being a Sunday, I was simply taking my job seriously, making sure a promising student was as safe as the university rules claimed she must be. Only Rose could question that, but not because I was stalking anyone; indeed, however much my irrepressible thoughts kept turning her way, it wasn’t as if I planned to visit Chloe Linton’s home, let alone that of the newly expectant “Shaz” living directly opposite, was it?

When I reached Pasturn, I slowed my car and carefully observed my surroundings. Most of the housing appeared quaintly dated and had a private, even secretive bearing that appealed to me. I soon headed for the village centre, where a crossroads of shops was accompanied by what looked like an infants’ school, a church and a small modern medical surgery. Any child born here in the future would certainly be in good hands, I reflected, but then quickly dismissed the notion as I took a turning to my left, towards a bank of trees I’d spotted at a distance. Surely this belonged to the woods I’d heard so much about recently.

By now, it was early afternoon, and the feverishness inside my head had relented slightly. I imagined the mere act of driving had helped, something which had always felt to me like fleeing my troubles, but this certainly didn’t mean I believed it was my wife I’d hoped to escape. Far from it, in fact: now I was here, in this uncommonly quiet place – few people walked along the pavements, just an occasional male drinker with red-raw eyes staggering out of a pub – I felt a need for company, though my brain was still too clogged to decide who this should be. Rose seemed the likeliest candidate, but how much of that might be just nuptial familiarity, all the safe ground involved in a long-term marriage? I’m not suggesting that matters between us had gone stale lately – I’d never described myself as a passionate man, anyway – but I guess there comes a time in every relationship when the mind wonders what if.

Thoughts like these were most unwelcome as I pulled my car into a kerbless roadside, where a stretch of trees had now concealed the green horizons, sinking deeper than my eyes could perceive. The local woodland was a surprisingly large body and had come upon me suddenly: one moment, I’d been driving past a network of small residential estates, and the next, there it had been, like some shadow writ large, filling my perceptual field the way an incipient brain tumour – or certainly some invasive affliction of the skull – might blemish vision.

I didn’t get out of the car, simply sat there, with my engine idling, watching the depths of those woods, as if expecting…well, what exactly? What had I ever thought this impromptu visit might achieve? Was I seeking confirmation of my belief that, whatever function it played in this small community, the story about Donald Deere was just hearsay, rumour, nonsense? And why the hell should that be so important to me right now?

Sitting there, still seeing nothing other than darkness lurking amid so many clustered trunks and stripped-bare bony branches, I turned my mind to my role as a professional, an academic tasked with supporting an eager young undergraduate. What intrigued me most about the case from a scientific perspective was the third research question arising from my student’s early survey. It was obvious why long-term residents of the village, along with so many women, should be familiar with the legend – the first group growing up hearing about it, the second mindful of its personal threat – but not why both older and younger people – the 65+ and 16-24 years old categories Chloe had identified – had demonstrated noticeably more knowledge of it.

I was hoping that the next batch of research findings my supervisee sent would enlighten me on this issue; I had a few speculative ideas, but none I would willingly give voice to, not until I had more evidence to work with. And in the absence of that emerging from all the woodland nearby (what on earth had I expected? Donald Deere stepping quietly out of that insect-ridden darkness, along with his coterie of misbegotten offspring?), I simply slipped my car back into gear, programmed my satnav to take me home, and then gently let out the clutch.

I’d again got as far as the village centre when another sudden impulse struck me. I pulled over, unwary of doing so as the place looked so deserted this dim December day, and then removed my phone. Using a staff password, I had access to all students’ personal details stored in secure folders, and it was a relatively simple task to extract Chloe’s residential address. I don’t know why I felt the need to carry out this furtive act; a vague notion in my unsettled brain suggested that, as I’d driven all the way out here and was unlikely to visit again, I might as well take a quick look at the street in which my supervisee lived. This could even help me to visualise the scene of these supposed encounters, just as travelling to the Pasturn woods had surely done.

Look, I’m nobody’s fool; I realised what nonsense all this self-justifying reasoning was. I guess I’m merely trying to be honest about what I was thinking at the time, about the decidedly strange place my psyche occupied, as if…well, yeah, as if none of these thoughts even belonged to me anymore – the familiar me, that is: the practical, guarded, quietly emotional person who’d grown up an only child, got married to the first woman I’d ever known intimately, and had since committed myself to a modest career in the social sciences, trying to make sense of exactly the kind of experiences I was going through now.

Once I’d reprogrammed my satnav, I quickly turned the car around and headed for my ablest student’s home.

Of course I never planned to go further than the end of her street. Okay, I know I hadn’t intended to go anywhere other than those woods, but this was different. There’d been nobody lurking amid all those trees, regardless of any creepy tales and spooky photos I’d heard and seen lately; I’d ventured there without consequence, knowing my prowling would go undetected. But there were certainly implications in straying too close to the young woman’s house, potentially a devastating change in our relationship, which I’d always sensed was on the verge of becoming something it shouldn’t be anyway. If she spotted me loitering, so close to where she lived, I’d never be able to explain myself, even by drawing on lies which I might – by coming here at all – have already begun to tell my poor wife.

Despite all this sensible reasoning – despite every accessible part of my previously well-balanced mind saying no, no, no – I continued acquiescing to the seductive woman’s voice programmed into my satnav, as if driving in some kind of trance. Again, I experienced a profound sense of compulsion, of ungovernable magnetism, pulling me in that direction, churning my rational thoughts. By this time, there were troubling images rooted deep in my brain, of figures coupling, one older and the other painfully young. I felt simultaneously aroused and horrified, as if an act of blissful abandon might lead to years of personal damage, the loss of a marriage, a stable home-life, possibly even a career…

But all of this could only occur if I got caught, couldn’t it? At any rate, that was what I kept telling myself as I eventually reached my destination, the narrow street described by Shaz in her blog, one flanked by twin rows of terraced houses, all with small, well-kept gardens.

It was now that I felt impelled to tell myself a new lie. As I stopped the car in the roadside, leaving the engine running in case I needed to make a swift getaway, I sensed my body cool off, as if the virus that had made it so hot and impulsive appreciated this move to a more conducive environment. That was a crazy thought, of course – the stuff of implausible novels, like the ones Rose penned – but I was simply unable to suppress this conclusion. Now, parked so close to Chloe Linton’s property, it was as if the feverish symptoms I’d experienced recently had finally relented, my immune system doing its expected duties, leaving my head clearer and my reasoning sound.

And this was the lie I told myself: I’d come here not to stake out my supervisee’s home, but to see whether the details presented in that blog entry I’d read the other night were supported by physical facts.

It didn’t take me long to figure out what the problem was. From where I was parked, to the left of the street, I could see all the property on the right. As the nearest house beyond the kerb beside me was number 7, my student’s place – number 19 – must be six doors along, a clean, squat building which, at only a single glance, made my heart ache a little, as if someone so attractive and intelligent deserved far more… But I quickly put a stop to that sort of yearning and focused on the task at hand.

If, as I’d been led to believe, “Shaz” lived in any of the properties directly opposite Chloe’s, it must be one of a few relatively rundown houses, each with only two visible windows: one downstairs – presumably giving onto a lounge – and another above: a bedroom situated about twenty feet off the ground.

Short of hefting some great ladder through the streets at gone midnight, there was no way any person could ever get their head as high as this pane, glancing into the room beyond it with furtive scrutiny.

It was nonsense, then – the legend, that blog, my student’s borderline belief in it all. And during our next meeting, I’d have to do everything I could to make sure she stuck to the project we’d agreed upon: exploring only its psychological impacts, the often weird dynamics involved in human experience, but ones no less amenable to a rational analysis.

With this firm resolution in mind, I – without seeing so much as a single person during the few minutes I’d been parked there – backed away into the street from which I’d entered, and then, my body protesting only modestly on this occasion, began driving off.

I tried not to think again until I’d reached my secluded home, and certainly entertained no further mental imagery, especially any pictures – sketches or photographs – I’d recently observed, telling me things I simply didn’t wish to dwell upon so soon.

She emailed me the following day, both asking for a meeting before Christmas and telling me she’d attached a new file, the transcript of her first interview carried out with a long-term Pasturn resident.

It felt as if my dreams the previous night had summoned this communication, but, still feeling peculiar and to such an unpleasant degree that I’d seriously considered taking time away from the office and maybe even visiting a doctor, I resisted any such fanciful notion. I merely agreed to another supervision session later that week (I was working from home again that day, which had initially puzzled Rose, but she was too busy completing her new manuscript to interrogate me) and then settled down to read the document.

In search of “the passion man”: a social psychological investigation of a rural legend by Chloe Linton

Fieldwork interview #1

[I = interviewer; P = participant]

I: Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed for my university project.

P: You’re very welcome, dear. I just hope I can be of some use.

I: I’m sure you can. Now, as you’ve already signed the consent form, we can begin. So I just wondered if you could me a little about yourself.

P: Yes. I’m Judy. I’m eighty-three years old and I’ve lived in Pasturn all my life.

I: Wow. That’s pretty amazing. I bet you’ve seen some good times here.

P: It’s a lovely village, dear. Quiet, but that’s the way I like it – my family, too. My daughter and then her daughter and now her daughters live here, too, so it must have something about it!

I: All girls, too! That’s amazing. But you know, that’s kind of why I asked you to take part in my research. As I said before this interview began, it concerns a local legend – one about a man who once lived here called –

P: Donald Deere. [laughs] Oh yes, I know all about old Donald!

I: Could you tell me more?

P: Well, yes. We all heard about him as girls. This would be during the Second World War and just afterwards. Later, when things settled down a bit, I’m not sure he was talked about that often, and I’ve always had a theory about that, you know.

I: Do you want to tell me about it now?

P: Yes, I’d be happy to. It’s been a while since anyone other than my great granddaughters was interested in anything I have to say! It’s basically this, my love. Like everywhere else in the country, we lost a lot of young men during that terrible war, and as Pasturn, perhaps more than other places, was a bit of a walk away from the rest of Leeds, this presented a problem for us young women.

I: How do you mean?”

P: [laughs] Well, how do you think I mean, love? There were no young men around to court us!

I: Ah, right!

P: And I suppose that’s why the old Donald Deere story got – what’s the word? – got reactivated. Because some girls, many of my friends included, became so desperate that they started going off with any young man who showed his face in the area.

I: So did people believe the legend was true?

P: I’m certain some did – you know, superstitious types. But I’m not sure everyone did. The thing was, at the time – just as it’s been ever since, now I think about it – mothers and grandparents didn’t talk much about…well, about personal issues to children. So the Deere legend became a way of safely warning us girls about the dangers of going off with strange men, without actually spelling out those dangers, if you know what I mean. You see, everyone knew about what Donald was supposed to do to women – seduce them in the woods using a magic potion he’d made himself – and so mentioning the man at all became a kind of code between adults and their female offspring. It basically said: be wary of predators because they’re not likely to have much nice to offer you.

I: All that’s really interesting. It already answers a few issues my research has come up with so far. But there’s another thing I discovered in a survey I carried out with village residents. I found that although a lot of…well, a lot of…

P: Old people? Like me? [laughs]

I: [laughs] Respectable elders, I was going to say.

[both laugh]

I: Yes, although a lot of people of your own age had heard of the legend, the only other group to have done so was younger girls nowadays. That is, women in their thirties, forties and fifties were less likely to be familiar with Donald Deere. Do you have any idea why this might be?

P: Well… [lengthy pause] Well, I’m just guessing, love, but I wonder if it’s anything to do with the fact that us old folk have been telling the youngsters about similar threats to their safety, using a code like we did back in the day?

I: Okay, but how does that explain why you didn’t tell your own children – I mean, the women who are now your granddaughters’ mothers?

P: Yes, I see what you mean. [lengthy pause] Well, now I think, I wonder if our current times play a part, too. I mean, these days, it’s hard for young people all over the world, but particularly for women, I’d say. We hear it on the news all the time, don’t we, love? You know – rape, abduction, even murder.

I: Yes, I guess that’s true.

P: Now I don’t know whether this is because there’s actually more violent crime against women or whether it’s because it’s reported more in the media. But either way, I think people in the last few generations talked less about that kind of thing. Parents at that time may have been embarrassed or – who knows? – possibly even sceptical about referring to such a…well, such a silly story.

I: Ah, yes, I see what you mean.

P: Whereas we oldies nowadays don’t care what we say! Embarrassment is for pretty young things, like yourself, dear – those who have stuff to feel embarrassed about!

[pause]

P: And as for believing in old stories, well, you know, sometimes, love, I think such things are truest of all.

I: That’s how they survive, I guess. Because they say something important about aspects of life that always remain an issue, whatever generation is involved. And so the more things change –

P: – the more they stay the same. [laughs] You’ll do well, my dear. You have a wise head –

I: – on young shoulders. Thanks. [lengthy pause] Can we also talk a bit about your knowledge of the Donald Deere legend? I mean, do you…well, are you aware of anyone who claims to have actually seen him?

P: Good God, no, love! Let me be clear. Although I’ve told my two granddaughters about him – for all the reasons we’ve just discussed: mainly concern about their safety in the village, especially at night – it was always treated as tongue-in-cheek and always with that…that – what’s the word? – that euphemistic code in mind. Basically, it’s a way of conveying to the girls the importance of being careful, without making them blush.

I: But that man – what he does – it’s all quite horrific, really.

P: That’s true, but isn’t that the way of the world, my dear? Young women have to learn that. Otherwise before long they could end up…well, you know, in the family way, only without any family to rely on except their own.

I: Yes, that brings me to another point. Do you have any idea what the significance of Donald stealing his victims’ babies is about? I’ve looked at what few materials I can find about the legend – there isn’t much available, to be honest – but haven’t been able to locate anything about this.

P: There used to be a joke in these parts about why people bother paying staff to help keep up with their households when you can have children for free and train them to do the same. It’s a very Yorkshire sentiment, isn’t it? Anyway, the rumour went that whenever Donald had actually lived in those woods –

I: It’s thought to be in the sixteenth century.

P: Just before I was born, then!

[both laugh]

P: Yes, the rumour went that Donald, too lazy and preoccupied by other matters – all that perverse magic, no doubt – went about turning his unspeakable crime – drugging and seducing all those poor women – to his advantage. As father to so many children, he believed he had a right to own them, and that was how he ended up doing so. I heard that he got them to do all his dirty work, maybe feed him and deal with his clothing and whatnot.

I: That sounds like most men, to be honest. [laughs]

P: [laughs] Yes, but this one was obviously so pathetic that he needed absolute power over his helpers to make them do whatever he wished. Women answer back, but children don’t have to.

I: Those poor kids. And the poor mothers who had them stolen.

P: [pause] I don’t know so much about that last point, love.

I: How do you mean?

P: Well, I understand that some of the mothers – or so I heard, but only from an old aunt who used to drink a lot and couldn’t always be trusted – some of the mothers weren’t bothered by the fact that their children were taken, because when the kids were born, they…they…

[lengthy pause]

I: Are you okay, Judy? We’ve been talking quite a long time. Do you want to take a break?

[pause]

P: I’ll be okay, love. Just went dizzy for a moment – it happens sometimes. Anyway, where was I?

I: You were about to tell me about Donald’s chil–

P: Oh yes, the children. Well, judging by what I heard, apparently every child he fathered didn’t look quite right.

I: Not right? How do you mean?

P: Just what I say, but I’m afraid I don’t have any details. That’s all I ever heard my aunt mention: that his children never looked quite right.

[lengthy pause]

I: Okay, one final question. What do you think it is about Pasturn’s residents which make them likely to uphold such a rural legend?

P: [pause] We’re a tradition lot, I guess. And despite the fact that so many new understandings of the world have come to pass lately, we’re quite superstitious. A lot of us are churchgoers, including me, and also believe in the family, in taking care of each other and making sure none of us come to harm. We’re also, I think…

[lengthy pause]

I: Yes, Judy?

P: I was just about to say, we’re also quite…well, prudish, I guess you’d call it. I mean, few of us talk openly about…about personal matters. I’ve mentioned some of this earlier. It goes back into our pasts, maybe because we’re so isolated out here from the city and all its animal ways. We keep ourselves to ourselves, and often our private passions and whatnot remain held firmly inside. After all, I guess we must reason, what might happen if we let all that dark stuff out? Might we even become a bit like Donald Deere?

I: It’s an intriguing thought, but I’m sure most of us needn’t worry. I’m pretty certain most of us are just good people trying to get along in life.

P: Yes, that’s probably true. [pause] Do you have a boyfriend, my dear?

I: Do I…I… Ah, well, not just at the moment. But…I’m working on it.

P: Then, as we’ve been saying here, just be careful who you get involved with. You don’t want to end up with someone who’ll take advantage of you?

I: Someone like Donald Deere, you mean?

P: [laughs] Well, no, but I’m thinking of the people who I think Donald is supposed to represent. You know, maybe creeps in cars who come visiting the village, just parking up and waiting, watching.

I: I’ll be sure to keep a keen eye out for such men.

P: You make sure you do that, love. They’re trouble with a capital T. Dangerous.

I: Yeah, I know that. [pause] Anyway, thanks for the interview. It’s been really useful.

P: You’re welcome, my dear.

[interview ends]

I closed the file, feeling scared – really scared. But of what, I no longer knew…if indeed I ever had.

I had to put an end to this – whatever this was.

After waking on the day of my next meeting with Chloe, I leaned across to kiss my wife, who still slept after finally submitting her latest novel, a book I regret to say – unlike most of her others during development – I’d yet to read. To excuse this, I’d claimed to have been unusually busy at work, which was only half-true. The fact was that I’d been neglecting Rose, along with her escapist fiction, an exaggeratedly twee world she depicted in prose which was at best florid and at worst garishly unrealistic.

But I loved her for that, and while leaving that morning, my heart ached for her – for the warmth and comfort she’d always provided, as well as all the safety and reliability in my life. The fact that she’d recently considered having a child, merely adding to our quiet complications, mightn’t be so bad, after all. It would at least commit me to our marriage, as respectability had always been as important to me as personal freedom, a desire to be valued by my community, by friends, family and all newcomers. Compared to this, passion was little more than an irrational force, a destroyer of our respectively small worlds.

Indeed, however much I now had to admit that what I’d begun feeling for my student – for Chloe Linton, a woman outrageously half my age – might border on desire, lust, or even possibly nascent love, I simply couldn’t act on this. It could never work out well. As revealed inadvertently by my supervisee’s latest piece of research output, the situation had already transformed me from being an honourable, trustworthy academic into some kind of seedy street-stalker, the kind of man residents of a whole village often warned their young female members about. It was simply all wrong, and whether my impressions about the student’s feelings for me were genuine or merely imagined by my ageing, repressed psyche, none of this could go any further. In fact, I’d see to that today, just as soon as Chloe reached my office.

For the second time during our meeting schedule, she arrived late, on this occasion at least forty minutes after the appointed time. Even though I suspected that a bus from Pasturn had been delayed, I couldn’t help feeling that she was now playing games with me, possibly having spotted me that day, during the previous weekend, lurking at the end of her street, just waiting and watching. Worst yet, she might have even doctored that transcript, shaping it in a specific way to communicate an ambiguous message to me. Indeed, I had only her account of the first interview, didn’t I? I hadn’t heard the original recording, which Chloe must keep confidential anyway. The young woman might easily have invented any part of the discussion…but now, as a knock came at my office door, I realised just how paranoiac I’d grown.

I responded at once in a casual voice – “Come in,” – and then settled back in my usual chair, away from my desk. When Chloe entered, I spotted the audacious outfit in which she was dressed, a kind of all-in-one skirt with braces and thin material covering her modestly sized breasts. She wore a white blouse beneath, the colour of inarguable innocence, and her legs were bare, supported by a pair of wooden high-heeled shoes. She came immediately across to me, smiling a little reservedly, I felt. When she sat and started removing paperwork from her familiar handbag, it was as much as I could do to get myself under control before speaking again.

“I…I think this will be our last meeting in a while, so I guess we have a few things to get through.”

My hands were actually shaking, and the last thing I thought I should do was reach across to steady them by grabbing any of the cups on the table placed defensively between us. I hadn’t even washed them since our last meeting, anyway, but there’d be no herbal tea today made by either of us. Indeed, there’d been quite enough potions brewed and spells cast during previous sessions, even if in only a metaphorical sense. And these latest proceedings must be conducted with stone-cold sobriety.

In response to what I’d hoped would be taken as a subtle distancing statement, Chloe glanced up over some written notes and printed documents, her eyes looking empty and troubled.

“Oh, okay,” she said, but then seemed to recall a critical detail, something that immediately made my comment seem less dismissive. “Ah, right, of course. What with Christmas coming up, you mean? We won’t see each other again until the new year?”

I reacted at once, refusing to miss any opportunities to achieve what I knew must now happen. “Well, as you’re doing so well with data collection and your research skills seem solid, I’m not sure it’s important for us to engage over trivial matters much more than by email in the near-future. It’s…well, it’s full steam ahead for you, I believe. I mean, you can do a lot of this alone now – you don’t need my assistance.”

In fact, this wasn’t particularly true. Despite all the alarming, self-revealing knowledge I’d acquired from that interview transcript, I thought that Chloe had conducted the fieldwork only half-professionally. Yes, she’d acquired some interesting insights into why the Donald Deere legend might have taken root in the village at a particular time after the Second World War, as well as the reason why it had been reactivated in recent years, but she’d also pursued a number of enquiries that were irrelevant to her project’s central focus. For instance, she’d asked Judy, her aged participant, a potentially troubling question about whether she’d been aware of anyone who’d claimed to have met the legendary character occupying those dark woods. That had absolutely nothing to do with Chloe’s research question, which must, as she and I had previously discussed, stick to the impact this myth had on the community in a psychological way. Whether it had ever had any basis in fact, let alone whether it continued to do so, was not her concern here. These issues could be left to the world’s many cranks, those who established the likes of web-resources documenting such unlikely information, and posting up pictures of…of…

I was unable to pursue this line of desperate reasoning, and so quickly pressed on, hoping we could race through the few issues my supervisee needed to remain mindful of while completing the rest of her dissertation. If this, along with my unwillingness to allude to her recent transcript (let alone correct her interview technique), threw into question my ability to supervise her, it would simply have to stand. She was certain to achieve a good grade anyway, regardless of a few amateurish errors while gathering evidence. The worst that this could lead to was the difference between an A-plus and an A-minus.

The rest of the meeting involved some discussion – conducted quite awkwardly, it had to be said – about Chloe’s first hand-in date just after Christmas. This was when students had an opportunity – not compulsory, though certainly helpful if pursued – to deliver selected sections of their dissertations in order to receive written comments from their supervisors. Following this date, only spoken communication about newer work could occur, and the advantage for me in the current circumstances was that was I needn’t be present when this was submitted. Chapter drafts could be emailed and any supplementary materials left in my pigeon-hole mailbox in the School office.

Chloe seemed happy with all these arrangements and said she had a bunch of materials already prepared to hand in. None of that surprised me, but when she requested another meeting early in January, I quickly resisted, claiming to have booked some additional Annual Leave after the Christmas holiday period and even checking my diary to make this bogus claim look more convincing.

“So…we won’t meet again until February?”

I couldn’t push this back further; I’d violate my professional responsibilities and leave myself exposed to a formal complaint if I so much as tried.

“As I say, Chloe, we can exchange emails whenever you need to, even while I’m away on Leave, if you like.” At once I regretted saying this, now believing it was probably my irresponsible tendency to reply to out-of-office-hours communications that had encouraged her to believe there was more to our relationship than mere student and tutor. Indeed, I promptly added, “But that would have to relate to an urgent matter, of course.”

Chloe crossed her legs, her skirt revealing a length of heart-accelerating thigh. I had no idea how aware she was of this manoeuvre, the arousing sight it offered me; she kept her eyes averted all along. But moments later, holding up incomplete parts of her promising research, she said, “I’m just beginning to get a bit concerned about relating my findings to existing literature. Is that urgent enough?”

“I’ve read all of…ah, I mean, most of your second-year essays, Chloe,” I replied, my quick correction actually a lie; in truth, I had read all her existing undergraduate work, but hadn’t been required to do so, as I’d only tutored her for a selection of her modules the previous academic term. “I have every confidence in your ability to achieve that with ease.”

By now, the burning sensation in my gut – one I’d suffered for over a week, possibly since our last supervision meeting – had diminished to some degree, a development perhaps related to Chloe’s clearly weakening resolve. She appeared sullen again, like a child who was unable to get her own way. Maybe that was even the truth. And yet however cruel it felt to turn the screw, a mental image of my innocent wife kept me focused on my standoffish position.

When at last, with all our business attended to, Chloe eventually got up to leave, I sensed my own resolution waver a little, her remarkable youthfulness filling my vision with its usual disarming power. All this felt wildly tempting, and for such a wide range of reasons that even I, a trained psychologist, was unable to assimilate them. In the event, however, I merely looked away, and then, as another concern about her academic work mercifully occurred to me, I filled the sudden silence with an impartial enquiry.

“Incidentally, whatever happened to…uh, what was the guy’s name?” For some insidious reason, both pictures my supervisee had located online – that pencil sketch and the photograph of Donald Deere – had been on my mind lately, but just now it was the second that concerned me, that admittedly spooky image of a figure standing amid a profusion of trees so dense I’d failed to spot other entities lurking nearby, things my student had described as “all white and bony”. Nevertheless, I’d now recalled the name of its taker, and then quickly finished, “Whatever happened to Norman Gantley? Weren’t you once trying to get in touch him?”

Chloe, still appearing rather sulky, like a girl told off by a father she idolised greatly, turned to me while preparing to leave, the generous mound of one breast visible beneath that loose-fitting bib. She clearly wasn’t wearing a bra under her chaste white top. Then, possibly even observing my irrepressibly roaming gaze, she replied, “He died.”

Only that and nothing more.

I was intrigued, but it was eagerness to avoid anything of a more personal nature that made me ask, “And how did you find that out?”

“His wife told me.”

“Ah, right.” Should I have taken this new monosyllabic attitude as a personal affront or rather as an indication that the matter under discussion didn’t concern her much, that nothing really did now? In truth, neither option particularly heartened me, but that was when I added, “How did she get to tell you?”

“Oh, just by telephone. I called her up.”

“And…” – I was almost reluctant to say it, but as Chloe had still to make for the exit, I found I had no choice – “…and how did he die?”

My student looked at me for a few seconds, her eyes ghosted and face dead pale. “He got cancer, his wife said, though she didn’t go into much detail. Only that he’d used to work in a mill and that fragments of wood had got in his lungs.”

“Fragments of…wood?”

“Yes, but that isn’t what killed him – failure of his respiratory system, I mean. Hell, I’m just beginning to realise how much his wife did tell me about this. But I guess she just needed someone to talk to. She sounded pretty spaced out. She didn’t even remember the holiday she and her late husband took up north a few years earlier.” Chloe paused a moment, and then, looking back into my face, finally added, “The man died of cancer in his eyes. It must have – what’s the word? – must have metastasised from his lungs. Anyway, that’s what got him first: his eyes. The cancer apparently ate right into his brain, Matt.”

Christmas came and went, and Rose and I were happy. She’d had her latest novel accepted for publication late the next year and had now clearly turned her attention to other pressing matters. I tried my best to perform on several nights over the holiday period, and to my wife’s credit, she was understanding, accepting my surely accurate opinion that a combination of occupational stress and the daily drink I’d used to help me unwind was playing havoc with my forty-something self.

I didn’t hear at all from Chloe, which presumably meant she was happily getting along with her project or maybe even enjoying a nice, long holiday with her mother, just the two of them together in that small house. On more occasions than the observation warranted, I recalled a comment she’d made to her first interviewee in Pasturn, about how she presently didn’t have a boyfriend but was “working on it”. Whoever the guy was, I hoped he wouldn’t interfere with her studies; despite my rather slipshod supervision lately, she had great promise, that student – great promise indeed.

The irregular blogger Shaz had made no further entry in her chronicle of imaginary events in that same village. I trusted that this was because her pregnancy, the consequence of some lamentably indulgent act one night after escaping her mum and paid carer, now preoccupied her, possibly even forcing her to grow up quickly, removing all those pop posters she’d claimed to have on her bedroom walls while thinking deeply about becoming a mother.

I worried about her capacity to achieve this well; after all, the experience she’d documented online, some kind of waking dream in which she’d believed she’d seen her child’s unreal father gazing into her bedroom, had to have been a fantasy. In fact, I’d proved that, hadn’t I? Her window was much too high; only someone using a ladder could have gained such elevation. And who the hell would carry one of them around in a residential location so late at night?

Having now assimilated the death of photographer Norman Gantley – he’d once worked with wood and contracted a related disease, which had since spread to his eyes and then destroyed his brain: but so what? – I soon found myself, during New Year’s Day, examining the other picture my supervisee (who still hadn’t been in touch, despite my daily checks for email) had sent to me a few months earlier. It showed that bad man in his natural habitat, climbing into a tree-house with his gnarled face pointing over one trunk-like shoulder, his naked feet and hands little more than clustered knots. But it was the device he’d used to ascend that high which now interested me.

As I had no copy of the other alleged image of Donald Deere (my student had shown me only a printed version of this photograph during a meeting in my office; I’d tried finding it online, but with no luck), I was unable to observe these two pictures side by side. Hadn’t Chloe said something about a number of smaller figures lurking in the background of late Mr. Gantley’s snap? Perturbed by what I’d already seen – that conspiracy of woodland assuming a humanlike shape – I’d quickly relinquished the sheet and hadn’t got a chance to examine it closer. Nevertheless, the young woman’s description of these “thirteen” entities to me – “all white and bony” – had certainly put me in mind of similar hints in Shaz’s innocently evocative blog concerning her experiences deep in the Pasturn woods. Hadn’t the girl talked about seeing a large number of “chair-like things” around a fire, and then, upon the master’s (their father’s?) instruction, every one of them coming to life, looking like “wooden effigies”, and later, “bits of wood […] mimicking […] human bodies”?

I glanced again at the artist’s sketch of this rural legend’s subject, of a man called Donald Deere, who – according to eighty-three year-old Judy, lifelong female resident of the village – had apparently stolen children to serve as obedient assistants, which presumably, back in the 1500s, meant performing any and all domestic or practical tasks. And was the structure seemingly made of misshapen wood which Donald climbed in this drawing really just a rudimentary ladder? Hadn’t fragile Shaz, in her second post about her apparent experiences – one in which she’d awoken to see her child’s ostensible father staring into her bedroom one moonlit night – mentioned other details, including the sounds of objects moving just out of sight, maybe below her furtive observer, who’d clearly clambered towards her bedroom window with a clump of rising footfalls?

With mounting panic and irrationality, I quickly pushed aside all this corrosive nonsense and then simply got on with being a good husband…in all areas except one, of course. The alcohol I found myself resorting to with increasing need as the new academic term approached hardly helped such matters, but that was just the way life was. If I’d ever had enough time and freedom to do what the hell I wanted, I’m sure I’d also have developed a rose-tinted view of reality, perhaps even expressing it creatively for the enjoyment of others with similar idealistic perspectives. And yet passion and joy and all the other pleasurable aspects of existence – recreational activities, sexual relationships, ownership of property, parenthood – came at a cost. They all had to be worked for. And the things we strive hardest to achieve could be easily swept aside at a whimsical stroke. Indeed, a mere moment of weakness could wreck many years of cautious strategy.

During the days leading up to my return to the office, I was drunk nearly all the time. This helped me ascribe that weird sensation deep inside – a feeling of emptiness which undoubtedly contained a lascivious component – to a constant chain of hangovers blighting every morning and often the afternoons, until I started drinking again, carrying me all the way till bedtime, where my wife had often turned in earlier anyway and there were no further problems to endure.

I believe it was this uncharacteristic behaviour that, unsurprisingly, resulted in her suspicion. On the evening before I was due to return to the campus, she sat beside me on the couch and, after drawing in a long breath, asked, “Matt?”

I was checking for email at the time, finding only frustrating circulars, all of which reminded me of the hassle I was about to face as the academic year moved into its final stages. I must have replied with an air of distraction – a terse “Hmm?” perhaps – because that was when Rose spoke again.

“Is there something going on I’m not aware of?”

I paused in my actions and then turned to look at her, my face surely rouging over, but only because I was still consuming wine at more than a bottle a night. “What do you mean?” I asked, a little aggressively maybe, but it wasn’t as if her question had been particularly sensitive.

“With you, I mean? With us?”

All six monosyllables felt like shots to my heart, a handgun’s chamber fully discharged. For a while I said nothing, simply glanced away, out of the lounge window whose curtains had yet to be drawn. I couldn’t see my face reflected in the glass, carved out of the world’s dark way beyond, and this lent me enough confidence to respond.

“I’ll be okay. It’s just this…this fever I’ve been suffering.”

“Fever?” Rose sounded incredulous, and rightly so, I now understand in hindsight. “But you first complained about that weeks ago. Don’t you think it’s time you went to see a…well, a doctor?”

The way she’d spoken, with emphasis on her final word – on that modern distributor of magic potions – left me in little doubt about what she referred to. I felt briefly affronted, as most men do whenever such matters are alluded to, but then considered the situation from her point of view: she wanted a child; we’d recently agreed to try for one, me doing so because that was what I’d always done: be compliant, please other people, put my personal desires to the back of my increasingly frustrated mind. I now realised what Rose must think each night when I struggled to rise to the occasion; she’d almost certainly believe it was her I had an issue with.

And was that so far from the truth?

I managed to placate her that night with a cuddle and a kiss, promising that if I wasn’t feeling better in a few days, I’d make a medical appointment. She just smiled and nodded, and later, once we’d gone to bed, I held her tight until she slept in my arms, while many savage agents of the night outside went about their usual unforgiving business.

She handed in her draft dissertation materials on time, but I didn’t get to see her at all during the first few weeks of term. She hadn’t contacted me by email, merely printed off all her chapter sections and supplementary materials, before shoving them in my pigeon-hole mailbox. This meant she’d been on campus, but when I made enquiries, like someone desperate still trying to convince himself that he was merely being professional, I was told that she’d skipped most of her lectures lately and that the School office had recently received a sick note from her doctor, excusing her for a “presently uncertain period of time”.

As her final-year project supervisor, I felt tempted to call her – or at least her mother – at home, but in the event, my nerve failed me. Her other modules were nothing to do with me – I wasn’t a lecturer or marker on any of them – and as far as her research was concerned, she’d submitted everything required, hadn’t she? On paper, I had no grounds for concern and would struggle to justify personal contact after a medic had written that she needed “some recovery time”.

But recovery from what?

After collecting her documents from among my post – I now felt like a lovesick teenager clinging onto a long-awaited missive from his elusive amour – I had no choice but to retreat to my office, shut the door behind me, and finally delve into these materials, these latest scraps of information about a man called Donald Deere.

Chloe had carried out a number of additional interviews with various members of the Pasturn community. During our last session, we’d discussed the importance of “maximising variation”, of getting a good cross-sectional representation of the village’s residents, capturing their differing demographics, with some older and others younger, some female and others male. Ethnicity was less of a concern in such a predominantly white-British location, but it was nonetheless important to explore people’s belief system, their religious inclinations or their willingness to accept ostensibly irrational phenomena.

She’d certainly done that, but again her line of questioning during many of the discussions she’d conducted since we’d last met involved an increasingly frantic attempt to discover whether the legend was in fact true. I recalled that she and her mother had only moved to the area recently, and that Chloe would be unfamiliar with the local myth from her youth. She was effectively an outsider here, and although that left her in an advantageous analytic position – she’d presuppose nothing about the case and was in possession of objective distance – the lack of firsthand knowledge had possibly proved frustrating. Nevertheless, it now seemed as if she’d become rather obsessed in trying to acquire this.

Some interviewees scoffed at her questions, especially when she asked about whether they believed it was possible to create a potion capable of making someone love another and whether this could ever work. In truth, during such lengthy passages in her transcripts, she didn’t sound in her right mind, and when I read a few more examples in which the person being interrogated – because that was often how it sounded – took umbrage at her line of enquiry, I started to get concerned…frightened, even.

Quickly setting aside the can of coke with which I’d facilitated consumption of all this material, I turned to the appendices Chloe had included in her pack. This section was clearly under development, but even so, I was unsettled to find copies of the pictures she’d already shown to me, those two depictions – one sketched, the other photographed – of Donald Deere, lurking in his furtive home environment. Dismissing the first on the basis of troubling over-familiarity, I finally got to re-examine that photo by the late Norman Gantley and did indeed notice some figures in the distant background which might even be accurately described as “white and bony”, but might as easily be just narrow wooden stumps scattered among all the trees back there, their severed ends pale and smooth-grained. At any rate, I immediately set aside this snap in favour of other contents of the appendices.

There were also copies here of both of Shaz’s blog entries on the same topic, which disturbed me all the more, because Chloe and I had not even discussed the second one and I’d assumed only I’d seen it. How foolish. My student had again proved far from lapse in her data collection. Indeed, she’d gone much further than I had, discovering a new piece of evidence, a photocopied facsimile of something she might have discovered in an old book acquired through the university’s library service. It certainly looked old, but its ancient lettering, whose spelling was rendered in a Middle Ages script, was legible all the same.

It was a recipe, simply headed, “The way to make another love thee”, and ominously signed “D” at the bottom. I didn’t need any more information to tell me what I now held, but as I rose from my desk and crossed my room while still reading the sheet, I soon found myself halting and groping with my free hand, trying to take hold of the cup from which I’d drunk the last time it had been used: during a supervision meeting with Chloe Linton, the one when she’d made me a drink of herbal tea.

Just then, dropping that list of ingredients – which also included some kind of magic incantation, presumably intended to be read while constructing the beverage – I sniffed the treacherous vessel’s interior. It might just have been my desperate imagination at work, but I now thought I could smell cloves in there, and cinnamon, and parsley, and rosehip, and nutmeg, and…well, everything the page had mentioned, all mixed together in a heady brew designed to disarm even the most resolute of people, someone who’d constructed a solid life for himself and would happily welcome no further distractions between the present day and his grave.

And that was when a terrible suspicion began overwhelming me.

Had I been deliberately poisoned? Was my student the dishonourable stalker in this relationship, and not me, after all?

Of course all this meant that I’d have to accept everything she’d been striving to prove lately, asking lifelong Pasturn residents about their experiences of a local bogeyman. Had she remained distant from me more recently, wondering why her crafty conjuring had failed to have the impact she’d hoped? Was she actually losing her mind? Had her obvious attraction to me – some kind of complex sublimated father-daughter manifestation, possibly arising from an awkward relationship with her absent dad – led her to a kind of psychological damnation, where she’d become so ill that she was about to throw away all her great academic potential?

But there was another way of looking at this. Indeed, I soon found myself wondering whether I was deluding myself, a problem arising from a life lived without passion as well as physical limitations borne of incipient middle age? Was the stained residue inside this cup simply leftover liquid from one of the standard herbal teabags my beloved wife had once bought me? And had my prolonged virus been nothing other than that, a fever lingering only because I’d stubbornly refused to see a doctor?

Just then, I couldn’t think to any useful purpose; my mind felt awhirl. But moments later, a bizarre idea occurred to me, and being unwilling to wait until I could exercise better judgement in a calmer state, I immediately left my office, locked up, and then hurried across the campus to the science departments while still carrying that cup.

I realised how strange my request must have sounded to the first academic I spoke to that afternoon, but once I’d shown him my staff card and offered to pay for the service, he eventually referred me to someone who might be able to carry out the task I required. I went to this man’s office at once, but learnt from a colleague occupying the office next-door that he was presently delivering a lecture. Then I waited and waited, watching the sky darken outside, and my reflection in the corridor window looking more and more haunted.

At last the academic returned; I explained what I needed, and although he looked at me askance – maybe even with some degree of suspicion – he finally agreed to help me out.

“I won’t be able to get this back to you for a few days,” he explained, taking the cup I now offered. But I said that was fine and then calmly – or rather, as calmly as I could in my increasingly disturbing circumstances – left the building.

I genuinely hoped the lab results based on an analysis of that drinking vessel’s contents would settle this matter for good. If tests revealed any or all of the ingredients I’d found listed in that ancient recipe, I’d have no choice but to conclude that my student Chloe Linton was experiencing some kind of breakdown and would surely need therapeutic care. But if they revealed anything else – that the liquid residue contained only manufactured tea derivatives, perhaps – such a diagnosis might be more suitable for me.

As I stepped back outside, I realised there was one thing left to try, something that – if my head had been clearer before fleeing my office several hours earlier – I might have considered in advance of taking drastic action. Indeed, I could go back and try a drink made from one of those remaining teabags, judging whether it was similar or otherwise to that I’d enjoyed with my supervisee that day. I had only a faint recollection of that beverage’s taste – it had been scented and sweet, like such products tended to be – and so doubted I’d be able to make an accurate assessment. But it was certainly worth a try.

However, I was only halfway back across the university’s sprawling grounds when something stopped me dead in my tracks: a private incoming mobile phone message.

And as it turned out, it wasn’t from my wife.

When I finally reached Pasturn in the car, I knew exactly where to go. The text I’d received had simply read:

Matt,

Meet me you-know-where at 7 p.m. I need you.

When you get there, shout loudly, and I’ll shout back, leading you to me through the woods.

C xxx

I knew I should have left all this well alone, but by the time I’d reached my vehicle in the university car park, I’d already called my wife and told her that, as this was my first day at work after the holidays, I needed to stay back a few hours, catching up on paperwork and similar, and that she should go ahead and eat without me. Rose had hesitated a moment, as if still entertaining suspicions about where my heart now lay, but eventually, presumably believing that someone as intelligent as I was supposed to be wouldn’t try hiding an affair behind the feeblest excuse in modern history, she accepted my comments and rung off.

In any case, that wasn’t what I was up to, was it? By the time I’d driven to the village and then parked up outside that now moonlit woodland, I’d convinced myself that I was here in only a professional capacity, preventing my vulnerable student from doing something foolish. She’d been ill recently, after all, and I believed that her indisposition was likely to possess a psychological component. I’d seen her latest research and realised that it wasn’t the product of a stable mind. Indeed, hadn’t her message to me that day read, “I need you,” as if only I, a qualified practitioner in the social sciences – in the human arts – could help?

I continued deluding myself in such a self-justifying way as I finally stepped over the boundary of that dark expanse of trees. By this time, in late winter, it was pitch-dark, with only an icy sheen of starlight guiding my initial ventures into that overgrown plot, where brambles and creepers slivered underfoot. Before long, just as – now sufficiently away from the road to avoid embarrassment in the presence of any potential passersby – I first called Chloe’s name, a particularly tight strand of undergrowth tore off one of my shoes, leaving me scuttling around in just the sock, spikes and knuckled things sticking in my foot.

But just then I didn’t care much about that; my suddenly unleashed love or desire – a feeling I’d been violently suppressing for weeks – seemed to have immunised me from physical pain. Indeed, I soon found myself shaking away the other shoe, as well as tugging off both socks, all of which enabled me to be at one with nature, my bare flesh grappling with its unruly elements.

“Chloe!” I called again, no longer believing that my passion was merely a fever, nor caring whether it had been induced by my lived circumstances – a stable marriage, such cautious economics, my sensible career – or by a species of invasive magic, which called into question every rational thing I’d ever believed in, let alone implicated someone I now deeply cared about in a form of mental rape. This feeling simply existed, and that was enough for me. And now I was desperate to locate my victim or abuser.

“Chloe!” I shouted for a third time, on this occasion with full-throated volume.

Indeed, that was when she responded.

“Matt,” said her voice from a good distance, somewhere over to my left. As I went that way at once, many more woodland fragments and unyielding stones biting into my flesh, she added, “Come to me. I’m over here.”

By now, she sounded louder, but I couldn’t tell whether this was because she was much more eager or I’d merely got closer. At the time, I think my state of mind led me to hope both were true. I tore through countless naked, whipping branches, treading wet earth into compacted clumps of mud. After at least a minute spent pursuing Chloe’s repeated, rapidly nearing, and impassioned cry of, “Matt…Matt…Matt,” I sensed my vision becoming disputed by my sudden outburst of energy, as all my advancing years protested. Sweat ran into my eyes, causing disturbances in the shadowy territory around me. For one panicky moment, I thought I saw a figure lurking to my right – a tall person, far bulkier than my petite supervisee – but after turning to snatch my gaze that way, I noticed just more tree trunks, solid and imperious, so many knots and gnarled bark on their uprights resembling distorted faces, their creaking limbs reaching out little more than spindly-fingered twigs.

But then I’d finally reached the area from which my student’s voice still called loudly. I’d expected this to be a clearing, like in the first blog post I’d read by Shaz, but it didn’t turn out to be that. Indeed, for several confused moments, during which chemicals surged through my body like explosives about to yield to some sudden ignition, I was unable to figure out where her new cries – “Matt…Matt… Up here, Matt,” – came from. But then, instead of glancing around into so much shadow-packed woodland, I looked directly upwards…and finally saw her.

She was laying in what resembled some kind of tree-house, a carpentered composition of planks and logs forming an uneven platform coupled with firm sides and a leafy roof. From where I stood, still barefoot and also quite naked of hands and face, I could see only her head and shoulders, poking over the ragged rim of the place’s solitary entrance, where a ladder of sorts – I viewed this in only my peripheral vision – reached as high as her. But I was unable to observe that upright device with any more scrutiny; the young woman had now captured my full attention. The top of her body was nude, I realised, and when she spoke to me again with such desperate seductiveness, I immediately crossed to the base of that row of unsteady rungs and began to climb.

“I need you,” she’d said once more, just as she’d written in her text.

Each of my eager, clumsy footfalls caused creaks to resound around me, as if the item I incautiously ascended had been only tenuously constructed. It appeared to be made of wood, but the substance – each length of those timbered rungs and uprights – felt warm to my touch, like something alive rather than any inert material. At any rate, to whatever degree I briefly suspected otherwise, it certainly hadn’t squirmed under my hands and feet; that sensation was surely just an effect of so much perspiration leaking from me, an involuntary betrayal of my forty-something body.

When I eventually reached the top, this latest treacherous reflection took firmer grip of my mind and I recalled all the failed attempts at lovemaking my wife and I had suffered lately, every one of them my feeble fault. I’d been too tired, too drunk, too uncertain about the possibility of having a child so relatively late in life… I knew I could legitimately claim each of these things was true, but as I clambered inside that makeshift shelter – which, judging by the creaking wetness of its constituent substance, had surely been built a long time ago – the disturbing truth was that I now had an erection more forceful than any I’d enjoyed since my indestructible, carefree youth.

Nevertheless, while clambering further inside that scented chamber towards the person who, during the last few months, had beguiled me so powerfully, I remained self-aware enough to remove quite another item from the area of my groin, something that would satisfy my curiosity on a matter which, at a subconscious level, had began to trouble me while driving all the way over here.

Chloe Linton, wearing no clothes at all, wriggled in front of me, half-hidden by shadow but also visible in the additional strands of moon- and starlight penetrating this elevated location. I saw her garments piled to one side, as if she’d planned all this mental and physical assault, going back months, planting seeds of lust – that palpable vulnerability, those scanty outfits, so many out-of-office-hours communications – which had since grown into great trees of passion inside my head, each bearing fruits of love.

Was this – an admittedly trite and yet compelling conception of such a base relationship, one I’d possibly just filched from my wife’s prose – a fair summation of what had occurred lately between me and my supervisee? More importantly, was it accurate? Or was it rather merely a self-justification, a way of endorsing my sexual desire, which was obviously now matched by that of my almost certainly disturbed student?

Whatever the truth was – whether Chloe had poisoned me with a form of magic derived from the previous tenant of this shack, or that was simply wishful thinking on my part – I immediately tackled an issue that demanded an explanation. As I’d just seen the young woman’s mobile phone rested on top of her discarded clothes, I now held up mine and asked, “Where…where did you get my number?”

Chloe came writhing my way, the sight of her pale, lithe body almost separating my habitual mental reserve from an uncharacteristic physical impulse. Yes, I wanted to go to her and perform the act I’d now been denied for much too long. But a timely recollection of Rose, of her innocently needy nature, prevented me from yielding so soon. Then, as my student tried placing her hands upon me, I briefly resisted, gazing hard at her – no, not at her small, pert breasts, nor at her thrilling thatch of pubic hair, but deeply into her eyes, as if to detect not only the yearning there, but also any terrible lies.

“Answer me, Chloe. I need to know.”

I’d always kept my phone number private, sharing it with only a limited number of people: Rose, of course; the Head of my Department and selected colleagues; the several close friends I’d maintained along such a lengthy span of life. Few others had ever had access to it, not national agencies like the government or banks, nor local establishments like doctor’s surgeries or dentists. Indeed, the only way anyone could acquire it without my knowledge was by manually accessing the phone when I was unaware – and how often would such an opportunity arise in my slightly obsessive existence?

I could think of only one likely occasion in recent memory, and now awaited Chloe either confirming or denying this fresh intuition.

By this time, other sounds had arisen above the constant wind outside, all those snapping sounds of branches feeling for purchase. The latest noises seemed firm and yet incomplete, edging slowly towards me – towards us – from behind. Had someone followed me to this hidden place? Had my wife’s suspicions been elevated to such a degree that she now kept track of my activities? But no, how could that ever be so? Rose was unable to drive, and the thought that she might have hired someone to carry out such a task on her behalf – a private detective, maybe – was the stuff of cheap fiction, even less realistic than material she wrote. Indeed, the simple truth was that Chloe and I should be alone here, tutor and student about to conduct their most intimate supervision session of all. But even so, something had definitely just mounted that makeshift ladder outside my present location.

I grew scared, hearing more hollow clunks coming slowly my way, as if whatever now approached its home was as keen as me for a prize. I was reminded at once of that underage blogger’s second online entry concerning her ostensible encounter with Donald Deere, the way the father of her burgeoning child had come to observe its blooming mother. This notion – sex as a brute act of procreation rather than spiritual communion – caused my penis to sag, a sensation I experienced as a psychological defect. Moments later, I wondered whether it was the avaricious look in Chloe’s eyes which had caused this, and even whether all my other impressions – just auditory hallucinations induced by guilt – were simply my moral mind at work, flinching from the potential ruination of everything in life I’d worked so hard to set in place.

“Tell me, Chloe,” I said, my eyes still fixed on her. “Tell me now.”

Those sounds on that thing – on those things – only mimicking a ladder, that weirdly alive mechanism by which I’d also achieved entry, had almost reached the top. But then – as I feared turning to look and seeing what poor Shaz had perhaps observed one night last month, gazing through her bedroom window – my student eventually spoke.

“It was just the once, when you went to make us a drink, during our second dissertation meeting,” she explained, her voice a disarming combination of unfailing allure and shameful apology. “I took a look in your phone. You’d left it on your office desk and I saw it and then, without really thinking, I got up to grab it in my hands. It wasn’t password protected, and I…I quickly scribbled down your number in my notepad.”

Of course it wasn’t password-protected; unless profoundly flustered by some recent experience, I’d never let the device out of my sight. And yet on this occasion I had done so, and now I realised how sneakily – how invasively – my supervisee had exploited the episode, and more crucially, how soon in our relationship it had occurred. Indeed, if this could be taken as evidence of her feelings for me from the start, as well as proof that I wasn’t misguided, after all, I wondered what else she was capable of, what further lengths she’d go to ensure she acquired what she’d obviously set her heart upon.

She’d basically exploited me; this was surely certain now. That magic potion she’d prepared on the basis of an ancient recipe, coupled with the accompanying ritual she’d also discovered, had pitched me into a deeply unfamiliar condition. Now this was decided, I had to admit that I believed it all: I believed in Donald Deere and his toxic legacy; I believed in the children he’d begotten in such a disrespectful way; I believed in life after death.

And then, with a renewed burst of creaking which sounded like more than merely that multi-sectioned ladder protesting, something began rearing up behind me.

I sensed its shadow more than anything else, even though it smelled like a thousand woodland herbs and spices, all rotted together to become a corrupted mulch. This dark shape, projected by scant heavenly light and now laying over Chloe and me, seemed incomplete, more a hint of a person than any sustainably living form. Of course it had yet to gain its full, age-compromised height, but as I observed up ahead my student’s unfailingly contrite smile, terror finally overwhelmed me.

Had she and Donald Deere already become acquainted, like complicit rival abusers?

I refused to stay and find out. Backing away from the young woman, whose face was a mask of unquenchable passion, I fled immediately, knocking aside just behind me what felt like little more than a large bagful of sticks and leather in the process, sending me – and it – tumbling down, beyond all those impromptu rungs and uprights, until I hit the floor, all my senses reeling. Then, with Chloe pushed violently aside in my mind, I simply had to escape this perverted place, this vile realm of induced sexual congress.

Hearing countless lumps of wood collapse nearby with a sound like bones clunking together, I got up and started running, my bare feet and hands flaying at all the intervening woodland, at leafless branches and spiny twigs. As I continued charging, darting left and right to avoid so many solid trunks, I perceived something skitter in my wake, something whose movement seemed to produce an incessant sound of creaking, like ancient furniture yielding to intimate parts of the body. It came hard and strong, an unfinished or even eroded presence, which matched my relatively youthful frame pace after pace.

Then, as I spotted the road up ahead in which I’d parked my car earlier, I detected a new impression, a kind of greenish light that, as I hurdled hard for that manmade route – that merciful example of modern civilisation – illuminated the area behind me, displaying other figures in my peripheral vision, which resembled organic lumps of wood come to life, their bonelike figures wrestling through undergrowth, as if, with some kind of queer dance, they were herding me back among all those trees.

But I ignored every one of them, simply kept on running, head-down, eyes fixed forwards, until I’d reached the lamp-less land, and all those treacherous creepers and brambles fell away, forcing me to take only a single glance back and see, lurking on the fringe of that shadowy realm, a decidedly ragged figure surrounded by small grainy shapes, all of which appeared to have knots for faces and twigs for limbs. The tallest of these approximately fourteen entities looked like nothing more than gnarled bark and splintered timber, but its eyes – oh God, its eyes. They were hypnotic lights, each a swirling, envy-laden green, and when they eventually closed and darkness fell anew in that area, I heard only a rapid scrambling away, as if a bunch of sordid creatures – just a sickened father and his multiple inhuman offspring – had started making their way back to their secret Pasturn dwelling, where the latest in a long line of troubled young ladies lay waiting.

By the time I got home that evening – it was gone nine o’clock – my wife was in bed, but after quickly entering the house and then washing and changing without her awareness, I immediately headed for the bedroom, where I woke her with a rough nudge and then we fucked like we hadn’t in over ten years. Needless to say, perhaps, that I had no problems rising to this particular occasion.

The following morning, I decided to stay away from work, but in actuality did only a minimum of university-related tasks, spending quality time instead with Rose, attending to her as I should have every day of this last year. If she wanted a child, we should have one; if that meant I had to commit myself to a demanding career in the longer term, so be it. There was nothing much better than security, I felt just then, and if this could be combined with non-destructive passion, it was all the better. We’d be a family, a close and solid one, and everyone else should keep well away.

As for other elements in this decidedly troubling story – well, what can I tell you? Chloe Linton experienced a mental breakdown towards the end of the final year of her degree and spent some time in a hospital receiving state-funded therapeutic (and pharmaceutical) support. As far as I was aware, she never mentioned anything about hers and my relationship, because ultimately, other than the usual professional engagement existing between a tutor and student, we hadn’t had one, had we? At any rate, I didn’t visit her during her recovery period, mainly because I hadn’t wanted to raise her mother’s suspicions or even those of university personnel. I had a job to cling onto now and would never again do anything to jeopardise that.

As for those tests I’d commissioned from a boffin in the science department: they’d proved inconclusive, all traces of liquid found in the bottom of that cup too slight to allow analysts to draw inarguable conclusions. There’d certainly been hints of fruit in there, as well as selected herbs, but it was impossible to say more than that. It might have been a manufactured concoction or it might have been a homemade one. Indeed, in the words of the scientist in question, “whatever reason [I’d] wanted these results for, it might be wiser to seek alternative evidence.”

But I simply refused to do so. In fact, I haven’t returned to that woodland near the small village of Pasturn and probably never will. However, an interesting coda occurred a few months following all the events I’ve just related. I was browsing the Internet one spring afternoon, seeking recreation between marking essays and another lecture I was due to deliver later that day, when I spotted an article concerning a relatively local resident, one Sharon Dennis, a young woman – now sixteen years old – with special needs who resided exactly where I’d expected her to. Apparently, following a pregnancy brought about by “unsupervised activity” in her community, she’d given birth to a premature child, only seven months into her full term. Although this kind of event was obviously tragic, there was nothing particularly unusual about it…except that in this case – the non-mainstream website I’d accessed had announced – there had been.

In short, the infant hadn’t even looked human, let alone boasted the usual qualities associated with newly born offspring: no predictable mewling, need of sustenance, or even uncoordinated movement. There was talk of angular limbs, a roughly surfaced head, as well as seepage from a number of orifices which had resembled some kind of sap. Then, in the words of the article’s author, this “thing” had simply “skittered around that hospital room like some kind of insect”, before “scuttling quickly out of a window it had managed to break, headed Lord knew where.”

The NHS institution, where this episode had allegedly taken place, had either failed or refused to make a formal statement, and the case “awaited further developments”.

With my hands shaking badly, I somehow closed down this unofficial webpage and went immediately back to work.

Later that day, after travelling home with a great need for comfort, Rose had news for me. Her latest novel, another romantic tale about Mary Chesterton and her amorous exploits in a world rendered toothlessly charming, had been picked up by a leading UK publisher, and furthermore, her new agent had claimed, the “advance and royalties were likely to be life-changing.” We celebrated that night with alcohol – or at least, I did – because my wife, in an almost delirious state I loved and would forever more (how was it possible for anyone to express such passion about life? This constantly left me in a state of awe), had further news for me.

You’ll have guessed what, and indeed how and when this had come about.

Anyway, that night, once I’d stroked Rose to sleep in our lovingly shared bed, I thought of Chloe and Shaz, both grieving at a distance. But there was no profit in pursuing that kind of speculation; I now had what remained of my life to lead. As I settled down beside my wife, holding her (along with her silent, developing passenger) firmly to me, I noticed a face in the dark, uncurtained glass across the room: it was like someone standing on a ladder of sorts propped against the exterior, and looking furtively inside.

But it was okay. It was only my reflection. And despite everything that had happened lately, I found it difficult not to smile my ageing smile and then wonder whether I was now enjoying merciful feelings of survival…or rather Donald Deere-like predatory power.

In short, was I a saint or a monster?

What do you think?

Dr Matthew Cole

University of Leeds

February, 2015