by Lisa Morton
Lisa Morton says: “When I was invited into this anthology, I knew instantly what Poe piece I wanted to riff on: The poem ‘Ulalume’ is the only work by Poe that makes any possible reference to Halloween, and even that reference is oblique (For we knew not the month was October,/And we marked not the night of the year—/Ah, night of all nights in the year!). And I love the poem!”
* * * * *
When the message came, it was simple enough:
SCSSAR Team needed. Please proceed ASAP to end of County Route 24. There were GPS coordinates after that.
It was the fourth Search and Rescue I’d been called for since I’d volunteered two months back. A lot of folks got lost up in the mountains— hikers took a wrong turn, maybe a bad tumble into a ravine, and it was our job to save them.
But this time I wasn’t going to the mountains. I knew damned well what was at the end of Route 24:
Weir Forest.
As a child, it has been forbidden territory. My grandmother, who we all called Grams, lived at the edge of the place, and sometimes my parents would drop the two of us — my sister Anna and I — off for the weekend with her, loaded down with warnings about children who’d disappeared in the black, pathless interior of the woods. At night, as the silhouettes of the trees grew below the starlight, Grams told us stories about how things got worse the farther in you went: First, there were ghosts; then ghouls, half-demons who craved the taste of human flesh.
But there was something in the very heart of the woods, something too terrible to even speak of. When Grams mentioned that last, awful thing, she dropped her voice to a whisper, which was sure to produce a shiver in us. It was near Lake Auber. No one knew what it was exactly, because to know it would be to die.
Anna was a year older than me, and an elegant tomboy; she wore boys’ jeans and flannel shirts, but kept her hair long and pulled back, and moved with an uncanny grace. She was as brave as any of my male friends, and so of course she and I challenged each other to enter the woods. We’d tell Grams we were taking our bikes into town to get ice cream or batteries, but we’d ride a half-mile down the county road, turn left onto the dirt trail that led through the cypresses and crab-apples, pedal to the end of the road and then look into the dense brush that picked up where the road ended. Through the mass of brambles and vines and rotting logs, shadows formed a patchwork with squares of dusty sunlight. Things flickered, skittered. We didn’t know what things.
We never went beyond the end of the road, into the brush. There didn’t seem to be anywhere to go— no obvious trail, not even openings to pass through.
“Go in,” I might dare Anna.
“I’d get scratched up in there.”
“Chicken.”
Anna would turn and sneer at me. “If you go in first and keep the thorns away, I’ll go in.”
I didn’t, of course. After a few minutes, we’d get back on our bikes and ride fast into town, feeling proud of how close we’d come to mystery, to danger.
Once, we’d been there later in the day, as the sun crouched down behind the trees. We were standing, smelling the mulch, watching the pollen swirl in the last rays of light, when something big crashed through the branches. We both stepped back involuntarily, gripped our bikes’ handlebars tightly, preparing to flee should whatever it was — a ghost — come roaring out of the woods, but after a few seconds we heard a few smaller sounds, as if the creature that had neared the border of Weir Forest were retreating again.
“Whatever that was, it was big,” Anna said, her eyes wide when she looked at me.
“What do you think it was?”
Anna shrugged. “A bear, maybe…”
I don’t think either of us really believed it was a bear.
* * * * *
Anna went missing two years later.
She’d just turned thirteen, and the way the jeans and flannel shirts looked on her made boys consider her with something other than preadolescent disdain. When Anna hadn’t reappeared after a few days, some of those boys even fell under suspicion. Police interviewed them; they stammered and squirmed, but none of them knew anything about Anna.
They asked me, too. I told them I didn’t know.
I didn’t tell them what I really thought: That Weir Forest had taken Anna. She’d finally gone in there, alone, and it had kept her like a possessive lover.
They found some threads on a blackberry bush on the rim of the forest. The threads might have been from Anna’s shirt. It was the only clue they ever had.
After Anna’s disappearance, my parents kept me from visiting Grams again. I only saw her when she visited us. When she died, in her house, I hadn’t seen her for nearly a year. She’d been dead for a week before her mailman asked the sheriff to check.
I grew up after that, went to college, got a degree I would never turn into a career, took a job in a chain drugstore I would never manage. I was one more millennial burdened with student loans and no real future, a smart phone in my pocket that interested me more than my friends-in-the-flesh. I lived in my parents’ house (the same room I’d grown up in, next to Anna’s old bedroom on the second floor), and on Saturday nights I drank alone. I drank alone and thought of those who’d vanished from my life. Or those who’d never appeared in it at all, who’d left me alone and unfulfilled, whose names I didn’t know but who I missed with terrible longing.
One of my few joys was simply being outside. The most useful skills I’d learned at college were from friends who taught me how to hike and camp. Just before graduation, one of my friends had told me about how much he’d enjoyed being a volunteer in his home town search and rescue team, so I signed up when I came back from college. By the end of my fifth week, I’d been involved with finding a runaway kid who was hiding out in a cave on Mount Yaanek, I’d rescued a family dog from a bear trap, and I’d tracked down a grandfather with Alzheimer’s who’d wandered away from home one night. It was mid-day when I located Grandpa Henry, so the poor old guy had spent the long October night there, turning this way and that, with no idea where he was or why he was there. When I spotted him, he was standing beneath the shade of a sycamore, facing the trunk, chattering. I made out part of it before he knew I was there. “…they’re all here, I seen ‘em but goddamnit I can’t remember the names, but I knowed every goddamn one of ‘em, and—”
I said, softly, trying not to frighten him, “Henry?”
He stopped muttering and turned to me. Squinting, he asked, “Who are you? Are you alive?”
I would normally have laughed at the absurdity of the question, but here, on the perimeter of Weir Forest, it didn’t seem so funny. “Yes, I am. I’m with a search and rescue team that’s been looking for you, Henry. Your family is very worried about you.”
“My family? Hell, they’re all dead.”
“No, sir, they’re not. They’re fine, and they’re waiting for you…” Henry, at least, was docile and let me lead him back to his home, but he muttered the whole way and occasionally glanced back over his shoulder, as if expecting to see something following him out of the woods. One of the last intelligible things he said before I left him was, “Tell them to stop laughing… they laughed all goddamn night…”
That’d been last week, before Halloween.
Today, I’d been scheduled to work, selling plastic bags full of bubble-gum eyeballs and flame-retardant masks, but when the SCSSAR text came through, I called into the store sick. There were other team members who could take this one, but I knew where Route 24 led.
Weir Forest.
It took me thirty minutes to reach the destination. After I turned onto County Road 24, civilization thinned out— houses gave way to isolated farms to abandoned shacks to nothing human. It was the end of October, and even though the tree branches were barren, their leaves already fallen and crisp, the brush around the sides of the road was so thick that it was impossible to see more than a few yards in. I passed no other cars in either direction, saw no one walking or biking. Soon the trees met over the road, creating a shadowed, organic tunnel, blocking out the gray skies.
I rounded a final curve, and saw two other cars already parked before a metal barrier with a sign reading ROAD ENDS. I parked and walked up to two of the county sheriffs, Sam and the tall Asian one who was still new— Cheng. They turned and smiled at me and Sam gave me a mock salute. “‘Morning. You’re the first to arrive.”
“What’ve we got?”
Sheriff Sam gestured at the car parked beyond his sheriff’s cruiser, near the barricade at the end of the road. It was a big black SUV that looked like it had just rolled off the lot. One of the doors was open; there was no one inside.
“That SUV belongs to a company called Durand Enterprises— sound familiar?”
“As in… Mark Durand?”
Sam nodded, a cynical half-smile curling his mouth up on one side. “The same.”
Mark Durand… everyone around here knew that name. He was a tech billionaire who’d decided to move his company headquarters to our little county, and the influx of hundreds of jobs had cheered some but left others anxious. Then, last month, Durand had made a deal with the state to lease a huge chunk of unincorporated land— which was most of Weir Forest. There’d been a few attempts to turn it into a national park in the past, but they’d all failed. The area had no landmarks, no renowned monuments or natural beauty; there was Lake Auber, at the region’s heart, but it was surrounded by marshland and largely inaccessible. The state was only too glad to let Durand take Weir Forest off its hands.
Sam nodded at the black SUV. “Durand wants to start developments out here, so he sent a surveying crew — three guys and their equipment — out here yesterday. Then, when they didn’t come home last night, we sent one of our guys out to check, and sure enough— there’s the van, but no sign of the three. Their equipment’s gone, too, so we figured they made their way out into the forest and, being city folk, just got turned around.”
I shrugged. “If they’re surveyors with equipment, you’d expect them to be able to find their way out again, wouldn’t you?”
Sam took a swig from his travel mug (emblazoned with the logo of a local golf course) and peered into the trees. “Maybe. It’s Weir Forest,” he said, as if that explained everything.
The new sheriff, Cheng, said, “Oh, right— it’s supposed to be full of ghosts or something, right?”
Nobody answered. Sam and I looked away. Cheng hadn’t grown up around here, but we had. We’d heard tales of Weir’s ghoul-haunted woodland for as long as we could remember.
I turned to look back, gesturing at the empty road behind us. “The others are coming, right?”
Sam glanced at his phone. “Got affirmatives from eight of you, and Bill Morse should get here soon.”
Bill Morse was the only one of us civilians who’d undergone actual SAR training, so he usually took lead on these operations. But this time I didn’t want to wait. This time it was Weir Forest.
I tried to sound casual as I said, “I’m just going to go scope out the immediate area a little.”
“Fine. Just don’t go too far. It’s darker than a dog’s ass in there.”
I heard Cheng offer up some comeback about wondering how Sam knew so much about dogs’ asses, but I was already pulling on my pack’s shoulder straps and heading for the woods.
I stepped off the asphalt (badly cracked where it ran up against the forest), around the metal barricade with the ROAD ENDS sign, and let my eyes adjust— it was as if I’d entered an unlit structure. There was only one clearing in the brush, the closest thing to a trail leading away from the road, and I walked to it. Pausing, I peered along its length; it entered the forest, but seemed to be an actual animal track of some kind, the easiest way in. If three surveyors had decided to inspect Weir Forest, they would’ve had to come this way.
I walked maybe a hundred yards along the path, which veered between winter-drained trees and deadfalls as thorns and twigs clawed at me. At one area where the trail broadened slightly and moved over a rotting log, I pulled out a Maglite and knelt to inspect.
There was a shoe imprint in the mushy top of the log, its treads almost clear enough to name the brand.
So they had come this way.
I pulled out my cell phone, intending to send a text back to Sam to let him know what I’d found, but I had no reception. That seemed odd; my reception had still been fine when I’d parked, and I hadn’t come that far.
I knew I should go back now. I should let everyone know I’d found some sign of the missing persons.
I should. But I didn’t.
Because Weir Forest was before me, and it was time to accept its challenge. Its mysteries pulled on me; they always had, just as they’d pulled on Anna. But I wasn’t Anna. I wasn’t a teenager, alone and unprepared.
So I stepped over the marked log and set off into the murkier depths of Weir.
I walked on, although at some point I began using my Mag just to find the path before me. What time was it? It was the last day of the month but the withered branches entwined above me should have allowed in more light, yet it remained dank, dismal, and I moved slowly. I stopped at one point, saw my breath exit in a thick puff. When had the temperature dropped? I zipped my down jacket all the way to the neck, shrugged out of my pack, and removed a water bottle. As I took a long swallow, my gulping sounded amplified, and it took me a few seconds to realize why: I hadn’t heard another sound for a while. Normally a forest like this was full of bird sounds, leaves crunching as animals dashed through them, wind soughing in high branches.
But Weir was completely silent.
I recapped the bottle, stowed it, shouldered my pack, and decided I was anxious enough now to go back. Entering Weir had been a mistake.
Turning around, I pushed back down the path, away from the decaying heart of Weir. I walked, my breath in vapors. The woods grew no warmer, no brighter. It all looked the same, but none of it looked familiar. I walked. Sweat turned to a layer of damp chill. I walked.
And went nowhere.
I tried my cell phone again. I tried scaling a tree for a better view, but the bark repelled me. I searched the thick organic carpet of the forest floor for traces of my own footprints, but there were none. I hadn’t come this way.
I was lost.
As that realization sank in, I stopped, dropped my pack, squatted down to think. What time was it? I was reaching for my phone when I saw something in the trees nearby, a whiteness that shone against the dark gray tree-shapes.
I rose slowly and moved to the side, where I could see it better. It was a person, another human being. I nearly choked in relief, started to run forward, to call it— but my voice froze in my throat when my Maglite swung up and settled on the face.
It was Anna. My sister, Anna. She was still thirteen, still dressed in the sweatshirt and denim skirt she’d worn the day she vanished.
“Anna?” I staggered forward. She didn’t move or speak, just looked at me.
“Anna?”
I smelled something dead then. The force of the stench hit me like a blow, and I turned aside for a second, coughing. When I turned back, Anna was gone.
First there were ghosts…
“Anna,” I said, and gave in to the frigid tears that spread down my cheeks.
* * * * *
After some time — as even the vague light of the forest faded and full night came on — I found matches in my pack, gathered material, and lit a fire. I hoped Bill Morse had his SAR team looking for me. Maybe they’d already found the surveyors, and would find me soon. Maybe a fire would help.
Its warmth did little to dispel the chill, but the orange glow was welcome after the silver daylight. I was leaning forward to warm my hands, contemplating eating a protein bar, when I heard it:
Laughter. High-pitched, distant, tittering, but clearly laughter.
I almost put the fire out, but whatever had made that sound could probably find me in the dark. Besides, I wanted to see it, and my Maglite was dying.
I waited, feeding more stripped branches into the flames.
The laughter came again, closer, and from multiple throats.
The ghoul-haunted woodland.
They appeared, edging forward out of the darkness into the circle of pumpkin-colored light. Three of them, ashen-colored, bare-skinned, with crimson eyes and jagged teeth. Adrenaline coursed through me. My hand instinctively sought a burning branch to use as a fiery weapon, but they kept their distance, leering. After a few seconds, one of them beckoned me, gesturing behind, into the woods. They wanted me to follow them.
I debated. If I didn’t, they could well turn on me, tear me to shreds in seconds. Or they might abandon me here, to die alone, to join my sister in a frozen afterlife. But what would they show me if I followed them?
The truth was I wanted to know. I thought it might be a secret revealed, a question answered.
I picked up the longest, thickest branch from my fire, one with a flickering end that would make an effective torch. I hefted it, stood, and moved toward them. They tittered and leapt off into the night-black woods.
The ghouls kept up a quick pace and I stumbled more than once, but tried to be careful of the flame, tried to hold it up and keep it going.
At last I saw the fire glint off something before me. I pushed past a final stand of brush that tore through my jeans and gloves, leaving sharp, throbbing scratches, and then I saw where we’d come: Water. Lake Auber. The heart of Weir.
I gazed across its expanse, the flat ebon surface reflecting only my faint light, and then I heard my monstrous guides utter their grotesque amusement again. I turned, moved toward them, holding out the torch, feeling the ground beneath me change from sodden mash of leafy detritus to sucking, damp shore—
And then I saw the three surveyors… or what was left of them, because the ghouls had already feasted. Limbs were reduced to bones with a few bloody shreds; clothing, which was apparently not to the ghouls’ taste, hung in tatters or littered the ground. The remains had been stacked in a pile, a pyramid shape with three severed heads on top. The eye sockets were all hollow, the orbs sucked out.
I retched. Leaning over the tarn, I convulsed, producing only a thin string that sizzled as it hit Auber’s surface. I panted, wiped the back of my hand (which had lost its glove some unknown time ago), and tried to straighten up. My eyes were drawn back to that hideous collage before me, to the ridiculous thought that Weir would never be charted, never be neatly divided into squares on a map, to be flattened and paved and populated.
One of the ghouls touched me. I leapt back, crying out, nearly lost my balance on the soggy ground, but then saw that the creature merely wanted to direct my attention away from the gore-covered pile. I followed its pointing finger, and saw something near the shore of Auber, something that glinted without need of starlight or moon’s glow.
It was a stone edifice, a marble square with columns and metal gate.
A tomb.
As I neared it, I saw a word carved into the front, a name. I stepped closer until I could read the name by the ethereal light:
Ulalume.
And then it was as if I fell headlong into a tunnel, a passage through lives and centuries, a backward, descending spiral. I rushed past other versions of me — a 1960s soldier, a 1920s dance girl, an 1890s Victorian matron — back, back, down, until I came to the bottom and the beginning. To Ulalume, who I’d once loved and lost and buried here, on another night such as this so long ago. Ulalume, who appeared now before the tomb, who had seized the surveyors and given them to the ghouls as a sacrifice on this night, to bring me here. Ulalume, whose loss I now understood I’d felt throughout my life, even though I couldn’t put a name to that loss. Ulalume, whose hand was cold fog in mine, but strong enough to pull me toward the black waters of the Auber. Ulalume, who I would join now, at last, united forever here in the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.
My beloved. My Ulalume. My destiny.
Ulalume, found at last.
* * * * *