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“Black Annis,” Rachel says loudly to rouse the sleeping figure sprawled across the single bed.
Dougal jerks to awareness, his snoring cut short.
“Black Annis, an English variation of the bogeyman figure, is said to be a blue-faced crone with white teeth and iron claws,” she continues. He props himself onto his elbows and groans from the effort. “If folklore is to be believed, Black Annis is prone to stealing children through open windows and then she eats them, because why not traumatize your kids with threats of being cannibalized when they don’t want to take a bath, right?”
“What’s the time?” Dougal reaches up to wipe the sleep from his eyes.
“Seven o’clock.” Rachel leans back against the doorframe, scanning through the printed pages in her file. “I’m not saying this fairytale character is real, but after what we saw last night, it’s difficult to deny we saw something.”
“Can ye get out of my room and come back at a holier hour?”
Rachel glances up from her file, contemplates the request, and responds with a simple, “No.”
Dougal groans louder. He falls onto his stomach and pulls the pillow over his head.
“My dad used to be a historian who specialized in The New Nation era, but in his spare time he enjoyed researching Shadow Grove’s history,” she starts again, undeterred by his muffled retorts. “When he died, my mom boxed all of his stuff up and stored it in the attic. I never so much as thought about his old research until your grandmother nudged me in that direction the other day.”
“Get to the point already.” Dougal flips onto his back, one arm covering his eyes. “Please.”
“Don’t rush me,” she says, pulling out a printed page and closing the file. “Anyway, after you left last night, I decided to go up to our attic and poke through Daddy’s old journals. There is a lot of information stored in those boxes, too much for one person to go through in a few hours, but just as I was about to give up on my search, I stumbled on an odd doodle in one of the margins. It resembles what we saw on the road.” Rachel pushes away from the doorway and crosses the room to show Dougal the crude drawing.
He sits up to study the sketch and exhales through his nose. “Aye, that’s a Black Annis, all right,” he confirms. “What’s a historian doin’ with a drawin’ of her?”
“Good question,” Rachel says. “Get up, get dressed, and come help me find out.”
“It’s seven o’clock on a Sunday mornin’,” Dougal whines as he gets out of bed, his reluctance evident in the way he forces himself to the closet in the corner of the bedroom, feet dragging, shoulders sagging, hair tousled from sleep. Dougal is clearly not a morning person, but at least he’s not mean about it.
“It’s not like you have anything better to do,” Rachel says, retreating from his bedroom. “Don’t take too long. It gets especially stuffy up there during the summer,” she calls over her shoulder as she makes her way downstairs to wait for him.
Fifteen minutes later, years of undisturbed dust swirls back to life as Rachel and Dougal enter the cluttered attic, much of which flies up her nose and settles in her lungs. The stagnant air is stifling, thanks to the summer heat. Dust motes dance in the weak sun rays penetrating the grimy, arched window. Stacks upon stacks of boxes lean precariously against the walls, pieces of antique furniture stand about. It’s a maze built out of lost and forgotten things, several generations’ worth of crap and treasures.
“It’s a bit of an obstacle course up here.” Rachel inches around a wardrobe dating back to the 1920s. “Mind your head,” she says just as a hard thump sounds behind her. Dougal says something she can’t understand, probably cursing the low-hanging Halloween decoration she’d ducked beneath in time. She giggles. They pass the creepy dressmaker’s mannequin that stands beside the empty cello case and an old military trunk with faded bold lettering along the side. “Both our families have a tendency to hoard.”
“Yer tellin’ me Nan’s attic is in a similar state?”
“Worse,” Rachel says over her shoulder. “Your grandmother isn’t the sentimental type, though, so don’t be surprised if she decides we need to clean up that mess just to keep busy. Consider this a fair warning.”
“Och!”
“Indeed,” she says, finally coming up to the clearing she’d made the previous night. Close to fifty boxes surround the cramped space, with Liam’s Stuff carefully written on their lids in permanent marker. She spreads her arms wide. “Here we are. The boxes aren’t marked by year, but my dad had a sorting system for his journals.” Rachel bends to retrieve a journal from the open box, flips it around, and points to the number scrawled in blue ink on a large label in the right corner. “In this journal’s case, my father was working on something that occurred in 1792, during the year 2006, and this number here shows it’s the second journal pertaining to that particular section of his work.” She opens the journal to a random page, scans it through, and finds a similar number in the notes. “My dad also used this system to refer to other journals. It’s not exactly the most rational system, but it worked for him.”
Dougal grimaces. “All right.”
Rachel moves to the spot beside the open box and sits. “Pick a box and start going through the journals.”
“Ye want me to read history journals?”
“I doubt you’d find it very interesting, but if you want to read through hundreds of journals about The New Nation era, be my guest.”
“Very funny,” Dougal says as he takes a seat across from her. He pulls a box closer and opens the lid. “What are we lookin’ for?”
“Something like that doodle I showed you. Just page through the journals and see if you can find anything out of the ordinary. You’ll recognize the oddity once you come across it,” Rachel says, scanning through the journal filled with crisp handwriting in blue ink. “Daddy didn’t trust computers. He said it rendered his research, which he deemed a cathartic ritual, impersonal. The only time he used a computer was when he worked on his dissertations.”
Dougal pulls a random journal out of the box and opens it to the first page. He scans through words, turns the page, repeats the process. Before long, he says, “Do ye want to talk about it?”
“There isn’t much to say, is there? Greg is probably considering how to make your life hell at school next year, but if you—”
“I don’t care about haver.”
She looks up from the journal in her lap, eyebrows rising. “Haver?”
“Nonsense,” Dougal clarifies.
“I’m not sure I’d classify Greg’s temper tantrums as nonsense, especially when he’s nursing a bruised ego,” Rachel says, casting her gaze to the journal once more. She turns the page. “Greg’s not an enemy I intended to make in this town. He’s the ...” Rachel runs her fingertips across the faded brownish splatters on the sheet, bled through from the next page. She flips through the journal until she finds a large splash of dried rust-colored ink.
“Greg’s the what?” Dougal presses.
Rachel pushes the journal beneath Dougal’s nose. “What do you make of this?”
He scratches his cheek, studying the blob, nails scraping across his unshaven chin. “Looks to me like dried blood. Yer dad must’ve had a nosebleed at some point?”
“Only crazy people will sit over a journal and allow a nosebleed to go unchecked. My dad was sick, not mad.” She frowns, tracing the edges of the splatter with her gaze. “It could be blood.” But there’s no indication as to what caused the blood to flow so freely. It’s probably nothing, she decides, and moves on.
They work through the boxes of journals, while the clock ticks on and the summer heat rises. A few apparent oddities are found in the hundreds of written pages, and those books are set aside for further inspection at a later time, but for the most part the journals are unremarkable.
One of these remnants of her father’s life dates back to the early 1990s, when Liam and Jenny were mere acquaintances. The journal, belonging to her teenaged father, mainly revolves around his day-to-day experiences at Ridge Crest High. A class schedule is crudely drawn on one page, and a few hasty, typical teenager notes are scribbled down on other pages. The most interesting part about this journal is a brief account of when her father snuck into the forest. He doesn’t say much about his trip—in fact, it reads like a secret government file where entire sentences have been blocked out with black marker—but the contact details for someone called Misty Robins are in the corner, the words In Case of Emergency written below her number. Rachel doesn’t recall ever hearing the name Misty Robins, and finds it suspicious that someone who isn’t related is listed as an emergency contact. It could be nothing, but Rachel plays it safe and sets the journal into the High Priority pile.
In the meantime, she relays macabre tales of Shadow Grove to its newest resident.
Cursed land, cursed bloodlines, accursed life in the middle of nowhere.
She tells Dougal about the Siren’s Pit, located near the abandoned train station on the Other Side, where a hundred or so corpses were buried after an influenza outbreak in the early days—Not enough hands left to do all the grave-digging by the time the influenza outbreak ended—and about how Henry Henderson took the opportunity to get rid of his nagging wife when nobody was paying close attention. Speaking of the Henderson family, she goes on to relay the tragic tale of Vince Henderson and his killing spree almost two hundred years after his ancestor committed the initial crime. Rachel mentions how only Justin Henderson survived his father’s descent into madness—Thank heavens he got a full ride to attend college three states over. Once that’s over, she moves on to tell Dougal about the horrifying history of the Eerie Creek Sawmill, built in conjunction with a large lumber company back in the late 1700s, and how immigrants decided to come to Shadow Grove for work—They flocked here to begin anew and died in droves for no apparent reason.
Rachel offers Dougal a soda then, because he’s gone green in the face. As soon as he’s taken a few sugary gulps to replenish his strength, she picks up with the morbid story of Timothy Bentley. The young preacher had settled in Shadow Grove in the early 1910s, bought the old remains where the first church in town had stood—It burned down during another tragedy—and rebuilt God’s house from the ground up with his own two hands. People liked Timothy Bentley so much that his pews were full every Sunday, from the first day that the church opened its doors to the day he met his end. He took a bad fall down the stairs into the church’s cellar, injured his spine, and lost his speech some way or another, and the rats had literally eaten him alive. Or so the story goes.
Moving back to recent events, she tells him about Arsenic Annie’s special recipes at the school’s cafeteria—Her food is to die for, seriously—and recounts the harrowing facts she’s gathered about the missing children. With this, Rachel catches Dougal’s complete attention. He listens intently, the journal in his lap all but forgotten.
By eleven o’clock, the sweltering heat drives them out of the attic and toward the nearest fan, located in the living room.
“This town is strange,” Dougal says, rolling the cold soda can across his forehead to rid himself of the heat.
“Honestly, you haven’t heard the half of it,” Rachel says. “My dad loved researching Shadow Grove’s dark history, especially the type of stuff the town council’s been covering up or rewriting for the sake of tourism.”
“Did he tell ye anythin’ about the forest?”
Rachel grimaces. “Daddy only ever told me that the forest may be Fraser and MacCleary land on paper, but it’s never belonged to either of our families. We’re just guardians.”
Dougal frowns, takes the soda can away from his face, and pins Rachel to her seat with his penetrating gaze. “We need to go in there, ye know? We need to go look for those weans ‘fore Black Annis decides to eat ‘em.”
“After everything I’ve told you about this town, the tragedies and horrors, you’re still on this Black Annis bandwagon? There are a lot of monsters out there, Dougal, and none of them are make-believe.”
“Aye, but this time the supposedly make-believe monster is the real threat,” he says. “Ye can’t deny we both saw her.”
“Did I almost run a bizarre-looking old woman over last night? Yes. Does the stranger resemble my dad’s doodle? Perhaps. Then again, even out here we get our fair share of drifters, and one coincidence is hardly enough reason to go into a panic.” Rachel stands and stretches her legs. “However, if it will make you feel better, I’m more than willing to go into the forest and put your fears to rest.”
“Ye want to go now?”
“We might as well.” Rachel brushes away the hair sticking to her neck. Her skin is slick with sweat, but her muscles beg for movement. “In this heat, we’ll suffocate in the attic. Your grandmother won’t be home for at least another few hours, and I have no idea when my mom’s coming home, so we really ought to break a few rules while we can.”
Dougal stands from the armchair across the room, a mischievous grin playing in the corners of his mouth. “Now yer speakin’ my language. Let me just go put on my hikin’ boots.” He crosses the living room, his strides long and powerful.
“Grab a water bottle while you’re at it,” she says as he passes. “If you faint, I’m leaving you behind.”
“Och, yer worse than my ma and Nan put together,” Dougal says over his shoulder, his grin now fully developed. “See ye outside in five minutes.”
Rachel battles against her own smile as she makes her way to the kitchen to fill her water bottle.
If today had been any other day, going into the forest wouldn’t even have entered her mind. She had never harbored a secret, inherent need to explore what lies beyond the ACCESS PROHIBITED sign at the end of Griswold Road, and she definitely wouldn’t have embarked on the journey by herself even if she had wanted to go in there. After yesterday, Rachel feels somewhat more rebellious. Dougal’s company, as much as she hates to admit it, fuels her desire to be more than the goody-goody Cleary girl who has never so much as broken curfew.
She makes her way to the front door but stops to regard the umbrella holder. An inexplicable urge to take one along, in case it’s needed, overwhelms her in an instant. Rachel picks out her favorite one from the lot—an indigo umbrella with silver embroidery on its edges and stars carved into the wooden handle.
It had once belonged to her great-grandmother, Alice Green, a woman who’d had big dreams but found herself in a “delicate situation” before she could leave Shadow Grove. This particular umbrella had been a consolation gift from Alice’s new husband, a proud father-to-be. Rachel isn’t sure whether her great-grandmother had liked or hated what the umbrella represented—possibly the latter—but the uniqueness of the piece is undeniable.
Rachel exits the house, swinging the umbrella as she walks up to where Dougal stands in the middle of the road, a patched-up backpack over his shoulders and a baseball bat leaning against his leg.
“Took ye long enough,” he says loudly, fumbling with the backpack shoulder straps. When he looks up, he tilts his head. “Why are ye bringin’ along a brolly?”
“Brolly?” Rachel asks.
“Umbrella.”
“Oh, it felt like the right thing to do.” Rachel shrugs. “Why are you bringing a baseball bat?”
“Felt like the right thing to do,” he answers, taking the baseball bat by the handle and raising it into the air. He rests the sleek, wooden club against his shoulder, and says, “Ye ready then?”
With a curt nod, she faces the imposing forest entrance. Despite it appearing devoid of life—not a single leaf rustles in the unholy heat, no birds chirp from the trees, no critters scuttle across the earth—common sense beckons her to stop being so foolish before she gets herself killed. Whatever reservations she may have about this expedition, however, are overruled by her desire to impress the foreign boy with her faux fearlessness. Every step closer to the forest sends a shiver up Rachel’s spine, which in turn makes the hair at the back of her neck stand on end. She grips the umbrella’s handle with all her might as they near the signpost.
Rachel hesitates when she sees Dougal halting a step beyond the invisible line. He visibly shudders but quickly composes himself.
“I’m still alive, Rach,” he says without looking back. “No need to be scared.”
“I’m not scared,” she retorts, stubbornly stepping across the boundary.
Something akin to electricity runs over her skin, tickling her nerve endings and momentarily washing away any and all thoughts. Rachel cannot subdue the shudder making its way through her system nor the surprised intake of breath. Beyond the brief discomfort, nothing else occurs which can be classified as out of the ordinary. She continues following Dougal, carefully stepping across the wildly overgrown forest floor. Tree roots protrude in large arcs from the earth and low-hanging branches stretch toward each other, intertwining overhead. Sunlight barely penetrates the thick canopy of lush green leaves, creating a gloomy atmosphere the farther they walk from the entrance. There’s an unfamiliar freshness in the air, woody and ancient and untouched by man. The forest is silent, though. Quieter than a deserted cemetery.
After about ten minutes, Dougal asks, “Ye still all right back there?”
“Yes, but let’s not get too carried away with exploring. Last thing we need is to get lost in here,” Rachel says to Dougal’s back. “Also, I doubt it’s a good idea to wander around too long.”
“I was thinkin’ along the same lines,” he says over his shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll protect ye if need be.”
“I don’t need protection,” she says.
His breathy chuckle reaches her ears. “Yer so easy to wind up.”
“Keep it up and I’ll show you how easy it’ll be to knock you down.”
“With yer brolly?” Dougal continues laughing.
Rachel raises the umbrella and gently pokes him between his shoulder blades with the sharp wooden tip. “You don’t know what I’m capable of with this brolly.”
Dougal glances at her over his shoulder, a cheeky smile on display. “So there’s some bite in that bark after all.”
She lowers the umbrella when Dougal faces forward, swinging it to and fro with each step. They don’t speak much thereafter, the uneven ground demanding their full attention as they traverse the still woodlands, but she can’t shake the feeling of being watched. Like the previous day, while she was in her bedroom making sense of the dilemma which had befallen Shadow Grove’s children, she is overcome with the sensation that her every movement is being tracked. Rachel soon notices a change in the air, too, like pressure building before a great storm erupts.
Alarm bells go off in her mind and her worries are reinforced by a muted crack sounding somewhere behind them, somewhere in the distance.
Rachel stops, listening for any other telltale sound, while Dougal walks on.
The almost imperceptible rustling of foliage, like an immense weight slowly pressing down on dead leaves, releases a small amount of adrenaline into her system. She spins around, searching for the stalking presence.
A shapeless shadow flits across her line of sight, moving from one tree to the other. Shadows shouldn’t scare people, but this one doesn’t act like a normal shadow. It seems almost intelligent, calculating—a hunter incognito.
Rachel’s flight or fight response kicks in; the former being the more rational choice. She turns around and sprints to catch up with her companion, dodging branches and jumping over roots. Brambles scratch at her bare legs. The rustling behind her becomes louder, more persistent, following her move for move.
“Run!” Rachel shouts as she comes up behind Dougal, hurdling over another high tree root to overtake him.
She hears his initial confused outrage, followed by an almost girlish shriek. Rachel doesn’t look back. She forces her legs to pump faster, unable to relinquish her grip on the umbrella—her only weapon if things turn dire—and continues to dodge, jump, and duck nature’s obstacles. Dougal’s footfalls quickly join hers, his backpack slapping against his body with his movements. Soon, he’s ahead of her, glancing over his shoulder from time to time.
“Crisscross,” he shouts.
“What?”
Instead of repeating himself, Dougal crosses in front of her, heads farther into the woods, keeping his pace. She does the same, heading to the other side and narrowly avoids running straight into a tree.
“Again!” The way his voice echoes through the forest, like they’re in an outdoor amphitheater with magnificent acoustics, doesn’t make sense.
Rachel does as she’s told and crosses back to his side, this time ahead of him.
“We need to try and double back,” she shouts in passing.
“Good luck wi—” Dougal’s sentence is cut off by a crash behind them. The ground shakes, leaves rustle, air rushes. He glimpses over his shoulder again, and the blood drains from his face. “Don’t look back.” Panic laces his words as he speeds up.
Rachel pushes her body harder, ignoring the burning muscles in her legs, to try and keep up with him. Her labored breathing is quietened by a second crash, louder and closer than the previous one. It takes every ounce of her willpower not to look back.
“Split up?” Dougal shouts the question as they crisscross paths again.
“No!” Rachel’s response is fast and thick with justified fear. “Just run.”
They keep running through the awakening forest, blindly making their way deeper toward its dark heart. Violent cracks and hollow crashes boom throughout the area. The earth continues to shake, the air churns and grows heavy. Whatever is chasing after them is remorseless in its destruction, chaos personified.
Eventually, the sounds become fainter before the unsettling quiet descends over the forest once more. Not wanting to tempt fate, Dougal encourages her to keep on running with a: “Ye can do it,” or a, “C’mon, Rach, just a wee bit longer.” Rachel goes on, but her speed falters and her energy reserves deplete. She settles into a jog, gasping for oxygen.
“I can’t,” she says, stopping. Rachel rests her free hand on her knee, greedily sucking air into her lungs, and plants the umbrella’s tip into the ground. Cuts and bruises mar her exposed arms and legs. Her legs are covered in angry, red welts in some places while tiny beads of blood well up where her skin is broken. A thin film of sweat coats her body. “I can’t,” she repeats, shaking her head.
“Drink up.”
A water bottle comes into view and she realizes she’s lost her own somewhere along the way.
Rachel casts a look up at Dougal, who doesn’t look to be in much better shape. “What about you?”
“I’ve got an extra bottle in my backpack,” he says, offering the bottle again with a small shake.
She accepts the bottle, unscrews the cap, and takes a sip. The water wets her swollen tongue and coats her dry throat, slowly soothing away the pounding headache forming behind her eyes. Rachel takes another gulp of the water, then another, managing to thank him in between her desperate breaths and swigs. Meanwhile, she wonders how long they had been running, and what they had been running from in the first place. She has no answers to those questions.
Dougal moves toward a nearby red maple tree, removes his patched-up backpack, and leans against the trunk. He rummages around inside and takes out a second water bottle.
“What was that?” she asks, using the back of her arm to wipe the sweat from her forehead. “What did you see?”
Dougal unscrews the bottle. “There are no words for what I saw, but if I had to describe it ... We were bein’ chased by Death.” He closes his eyes and drinks deeply, chest rising and falling in quick repetition. When he pulls the bottle away, Dougal sighs. “Somethin’ close to Death. I don’t know for sure, but it felt that way.”
Rachel grimaces, walking around in a circle to survey their surroundings. They’ve stopped in what looks like every other part of the forest. All that stands out is the rotting tree trunk overgrown with moss and the strange formation of trees beyond it. There, hidden behind another red maple, four birch trees have grown together, trunks and branches twisting around one another to create a thick, natural arch. She steps across the rotting tree trunk, head tilting as she studies the odd feature encircled in a variety of mushroom species.
“Dougal,” she says, walking closer to the arch. “You need to come check this out.”
If Dougal hears her, she doesn’t catch his response.
Rachel takes another step closer, mesmerized by the bone-white birch trees against the green backdrop. Another step forward brings her to the edge of the mushroom circle. She’s almost certain the overgrown grass is greener within the circle, just one shade darker, just a bit lusher than on the outside. She crosses the mushroom barrier and is greeted by a now-familiar sensation that runs across her skin. The electricity is more intense, crackling instead of tingling like before. This time, Rachel doesn’t give it too much thought. The birch arch seems to act like a magnet, pulling her closer and closer, and for reasons she can’t comprehend, she yields to the silent call and places one foot in front of the other.
A single word is etched into the bark of the twisted arch, the letters irregularly spaced across the middle: Harrowsgate.
She stares at the word and raises a hand, reaching out to touch nothing.
But it feels right to reach out, as illogical as it might be, and touch the nothingness.
She’s certain the air ripples as her middle finger presses against the area located between those trees. Rachel withdraws her hand slightly. Curious, she unfolds her fingers and places her whole palm against the air. Along with the indistinct ripples comes a faint resistance. Rachel pushes harder against the unseen obstacle, struggling against midair.
“What the hell?” she whispers, pressing as hard as she can with one hand.
The air doesn’t budge.
Rachel pulls away, her frown deepening with confusion as she looks at the empty space between the birch trees.
“Fine, let’s do this the hard way.” She hooks the umbrella over her wrist and places both hands up against the stubborn area. “Come on,” she says through gritted teeth as she leans up against the invisible blockade, pushing at it with all her might. Muffled, distant yelling comes from behind her as the air finally shifts beneath her hands, moving away almost like bricks without concrete keeping them fixed together. Then there’s a heaviness, like something’s holding onto her shirt and pulling her back.
Rachel looks over her shoulder as the barrier evaporates beneath her touch, far too quickly for her brain to send the correct signals to her body, and she meets Dougal’s fear-filled blue eyes as they fall forward together.
