The Wicked Woods

Chapter Two

Imagine a haunted house. Now times it a hundred and add some poor taste – there’s my childhood home. Several strange towers and rooms that are useless and serve no purpose. Some are even impossible to get into – there’s no door. It stands high and crooked on top of a hill, surrounded by comically gothic iron gates overgrown with thorns and weeds. A few foxes have made their home in our wild garden; I’ve seen them scurrying through the bushes like they own the place, which, given nobody has been here for sixteen years, is perhaps not completely inaccurate. Large ebony pillars, rotting at an alarming rate, line the porch and hold up a dilapidated roof. The stained glass windows depict the strangest scenes, from myths and legends to family memories. Most of them are broken or gone now. The garden used to be beautiful, when my father tended to it, but now it’s overgrown and a mess of weeds and out-of-control plants. The apple tree only grows rotten fruit. The once lovingly lain cobblestone paths that lead past flowerbeds and little benches and statues are almost impossible to find. 
I stand next to the enormous statue of what my mother said was a moon goddess and stare into the statue’s empty eyes. She smiles slightly as she holds up her arms to embrace a crescent moon, like she’s holding up a bowl for the stars to drink from.
“It’s so dramatic.”
Demetria stops kicking a cobblestone loose and looks up.
“True. It’s nice, though. Gives the garden an elegant touch, if we can get those roots to stop eating her thighs.”
I sigh. “This job might take longer than I thought.”
“We always knew it wouldn’t be easy.”
“Easier than dealing with uncle Thomas’s attempts to play the didgeridoo.”
Demetria groans at the memory. “God, don’t start.”
I look down. “Has that cobblestone insulted you in some way?”
She follows my gaze to look at her work. “Right. We should probably go inside, see which room needs the most work. I’m cold anyway.”
Autumn is around the corner and here, in the North of Scotland, the wind bites harder. I nod and follow my sister inside. The house isn’t much warmer – the isolation is, by all accounts, completely fucking terrible – but at least we’ll be out of the wind. I prefer being inside anyway. Outside, the woods loom like an ancient god waiting to strike. The thought of the endless maze of tall dark trees makes me shudder.
We diplomatically ignore the living room and move straight through to the kitchen. No blood was spilt here, or at least, none that I’m aware of.
“Well... it’s not as bad as I’d thought,” Demetria says unconvincingly.
The kitchen was left in a hurry – it wasn’t touched, not after my parents died here. All my aunts and uncles did after my parents’ death was take out the food, and even that they did as quickly as possible. Nobody wanted to be here. I don’t even want to be here. I kick an old piece of crime scene tape and it flutters through the dusty space like a depressed moth.
“They didn’t even take the cutlery with them.” I nod at the dishwasher. “How much do you want to bet that it’s still full of dirty dishes?”
Demetria shudders. “Not eager to try, to be honest.”
I chuckle and carefully move forward. Moving in this house feels... wrong somehow. It should remain stationary. Like a tomb. I try to repress that thought and run my fingers along the stove. They come back caked in a thick layer of grimy dust and grease. I quickly wipe my hands on my jeans.
“If someone cooks on this as it is now I feel like they will just spontaneously contract the plague.”
Demetria laughs. “Which is why we’re cleaning it. Which may take weeks. But hey, that’s okay, right? People love vintage stuff.”
“I hope they love it enough to conveniently forget about a double homicide.”
“Always have faith in hipsters.”
I laugh – the sound is hollow and unfamiliar here, out of place and wrong. It echoes through the kitchen and once again I am reminded of a tomb. Colours seem muted here. Grey and murky brown and muted whites and blues; no colour, no flowers, no happiness. We’ll have to change that if we ever want to sell this place.
We set to work. We clean and scrub, we remove cobwebs and open windows, desperate to let some light in. I spend a full three hours cleaning the oven until I can literally use it as a mirror. It’s cleaner than it was when we first got it, I’m sure. For some reason cleaning the kitchen brings me a surprising amount of joy. Perhaps I hope that as I wipe away the dust, I can also wipe away the history of this place. Yet something still lingers. Something that is... sad. Hard to grasp. Like visiting World War One graveyard with all the anonymous white crosses, straight and stiff with soldiers who were but boys buried underneath them. The air is different somehow. Thicker. Heavier. Saltier.
“We can stop if you need to, Lysandra.”
My sister’s soft, gentle voice startles me, and only then do I notice I’m crying. She carefully lays her hand on my shoulder and hands me a handkerchief.
“I know it’s difficult.”
I try to smile, though the reflective surface of the oven tells me it’s more like a serial killer’s grimace. 
“I’m okay.”
Demetria narrows her eyes and shakes her head. “Let me make you some tea.”
I know it’s useless to stop my sister, so I give in and sit down on the now-surprisingly-clean kitchen floor. It’s a habit – in our old apartment the kitchen floor was the stage for many of my mental breakdowns, often accompanied by a cheap bottle of terribly vinegar-like red wine and a Leonard Cohen album.
Things change. We don’t even have a record player here – mine broke during the move, though I do still have my records. They are gathering dust in a box in the hallway. We haven’t been able to bring ourselves to unpack everything. We don’t want a reminder that we have to stay here for a long time.
It’s only when I look up that I notice my sister’s hands are trembling. Her lip quivers; she frowns, angry at her own emotions. I get up and wrap my hands around hers.
“It’s okay.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not. It’s been sixteen years. But...” She looks at the kettle on the stove, bubbling away happily. “It’s just... Dad always used to do this. Remember?”
I smile. “With honey.”
“With honey.” She blinks away tears. “I miss them. Still.”
“I don’t think we’ll ever stop missing them.”
“I know.” She kicks the kitchen counter with her bare foot. “This may have been a mistake.”
“Oh, it was definitely a mistake,” I say with a sigh. “But it’s much too late to turn back now. I’ll go see if I can find the teabags.”
We brought groceries, though most of them are still in boxes. The power still works – it’s a miracle! – so we did place some things in the fridge, but we were so exhausted yesterday that we couldn’t even bring ourselves to laying biscuits in a kitchen cupboard. It surprises me, how well I’ve slept, since the house makes as many sounds as an old woman’s back when she walks down a flight of stairs. It creaks and pops. I feel like it may collapse any minute.
I walk through the hallways back to the main hall where the boxes stand. I intentionally give myself tunnel vision, desperate to ignore the pictures on the wall that we still haven’t taken down. Pictures of us. Our parents. Holidays. Happiness. I want to tear them off and throw them in the nearby lake, if I could even bring myself to looking at them.
The pile of boxes is about as crooked as the tower of Pisa. I carefully lift them down, one by one, softly cursing under my breath the entire time. The box that contains the teabags is the bottom one, of-fucking-course. I tear it open and start rummaging through. We brought enough tea to start a tea shop. My sister has a hoarding problem.
A sudden gust of wind lifts my hair from my face. I look up and notice the front door – open and swaying in the chilly Scottish wind.
That’s strange.
I carefully approach it, suddenly suspicious.
“Demetria?” I yell through the house.
I hear movement from the kitchen. “Yes?”
“Did we leave the front door open last night?”
She pops her head around the corner. Dust and cobwebs stick to her midnight black hair, as if she’s greying already. She frowns. 
“No, we didn’t.”
“Huh.” I take a step closer. “That is strange.”
“Maybe it just doesn’t close well anymore. It’s an old house.”
“Yeah,” I say distractedly. “Maybe.”
Closer now. I don’t understand why I’m so afraid to open the door – as if my parents’ murderer might stand there, axe in hand, ready for round two. It’s so quiet it unnerves me. My sister moves closer behind me, her careful footsteps muffled by the ratty red carpet that is in high need of replacing. 
I place my hand on the doorknob.
“Lysandra,” Demetria says quietly. “What’s wrong?”
I can hear she’s nervous, too. She remains behind me, ready to strike if need me, like an overprotective viper. She carefully takes a baseball bat from one of our boxes and places her feet firmly on the ground.
“Nothing... I hope.”
I open the door. Nothing. The absence of a threat does not make me feel much better – if someone did open the door, I would have liked to know who it was.
“Lysandra,” Demetria says softly, “look.”
I look at where she is pointing. In front of my feet, on the porch, lies an apple. It’s from our apple tree; I can tell because it is black and rotten, an ugly piece of fruit by all accounts. I step away. My sister pushes past me and pushes it over with her feet.
“Nothing. Well, that was disappointing.”
“It’s not nothing,” I note, my voice trembling. “Someone put that there.”
She shrugs. “Probably a prank from some neighbour kids, or something.”
I stare at her. “What neighbourhood? There’s only the house next to us, and I haven’t seen anyone outside yet.”
“There’s a village down the hill. They might have biked up here.”
“To put an apple on our porch?”
“Admittedly it’s not the greatest prank.”
“It’s not.”
“It doesn’t matter, anyway.” She throws me the apple. I barely catch it. “Come on. Let’s go clean the rest of the kitchen.”
I look at the apple. It even feels rotten and mushy. If I open it there might be nothing but a set of wriggling worms digging their way through the flesh. I shudder and throw it as far away as I can. It hits the driveway with an unpleasant thud and rolls away into the bushes, out of my sight.

That night I can’t sleep. The apple unnerved me much more than it should. I slip out of bed, careful to avoid the creaking boards. I still remember which ones make the most noise. It seems not much has changed in our house. I slip on a robe and grab my phone to use as a torch, and wander out of my bedroom into the dark corridor. It’s too quiet, still. I miss the sounds of a living city around me. The twenty-somethings making bad decisions because they still can, the teenagers on their first night out, the taxis that drive around every single minute of the day, even the shuffling homeless man who often came to get a coffee with us and sat in a corner, quietly reading a newspaper or crime novel. I miss life around me. Out here there’s nothing, no one, not even a cricket. The silence is eerie. I long for a group of singing drunkards more than ever.
I sneak past my sister’s room. She is in her old bedroom, too; her name is still painted on the door in clumsy letters. She did it herself. It’s horrible misspelled and crooked, but the buttercup yellow paint gives the whole thing a charming air. I stop briefly to touch the letters, the colour misplaced in such a miserable place. Silence from the other side of the door. Demetria has always been a deep sleeper.
I move on. The house creaks and sighs with as much enthusiasm as it did the first night, though now I can’t sleep through it, no matter how tired I am. We cleaned the entire kitchen and part of the salon. A room and a half a day? We’ll be here for ages. As I breathe now I can taste the age and the dust of the house. I might contract some sort of lung disease here if I’m not careful. 
My aimless wandering brings me outside to the garden. The moon goddess statue smiles at me from her pillar. From the right angle it looks like she’s cupping the actual moon in her hands. I try to take a picture, but the camera on my phone is too poor to catch how magical the whole scene looks.
I stop at the gate. There it is, through the vines, through the iron bars, beyond the wildflower-riddled field beyond; there it is. The woods. Dark, tall and looming, moving and swaying as if alive. The woods. 
When I was younger I was never scared of the woods. In fact, my parents often took Demetria and I into them to play and explore, and I loved every minute of it. The scent of rotting leaves and wet earth, the feeling of moss and tree bark, rough like my mother’s calloused fingers. But now... the woods seem different. Threatening. Aunt Maeve made sure my sister and I never went into any forest. Not safe, she said. Full of creatures that could harm us; full of roots to trip over and branches to fall from and lakes to drown in. The city seemed to be the safest place to live. And now, looking at the intimidating trees in the distance, I feel like I understand her fear. Something feels deeply and horribly wrong with them, and-
Someone is in the forest.
My train of thought is immediately cut off when I see something, someone, a shadow, a spectre, weaving its way through the trees at the edge of the forest. Whatever or whoever it is, they move with a thoughtless elegance, a grace that makes them seem less than human. Are they wearing a cloak, or a dress, or...
The figure turns and looks at me. I think. At least, they suddenly stop and seem to be turning their head, but they’re too far away and it’s too dark to see if they’re looking at me or into the forest. The moonlight isn’t enough of a light source to help. The way they stand, now, so silently, it’s like they froze, like they turned into stone.
I rub my eyes. They must be playing tricks on me. I’m tired, after all, and this place, it... it inspires the imagination to say the least. When I look back up the figure is gone. Like they were never there in the first place. Perhaps they weren’t. Despite the fact that I’m quite far away from the forest I turn around and run back inside, heart pounding for no reason other than an overactive mind