Spectre of springwell fo.., p.6
Spectre of Springwell Forest, page 6
I expected Olivia to be tired by the time we reached the footpath that led west into the woods, but she seemed just as energetic, if slightly out of breath, after the steep climb. We followed the path along the edge of a field and finally set foot beneath the oaks, elms, and birches of Springwell Forest.
The sun remained visible, shining through the golden leaves, and the place had a clean, invigorating outdoor scent. Squirrels could be seen hopping to and fro, collecting for their winter stores, and we also glimpsed rabbits bounding around near their holes. Olivia and I stood silent and still, observing these woodland creatures and enjoying the tranquil atmosphere, amid chattering birdsong and the occasional rustle of leaves.
At first, our walk into the woods went well. The trees were not too densely packed. However, in time, the ground became more uneven, and we were forced to step over several tree roots, rocks, and areas of thick mud. Occasionally a fallen tree trunk lay across our path, and in one case, we had to duck under such a trunk, which proved considerably easier for her than for me.
“Remind me again, Olivia,” I muttered, after stumbling on another tree root. “Why did you want to explore this place?”
“I just do,” she said. “There might be hidden treasure. Or a monster…”
“Or both,” I said. “What if the monster protects the treasure? Maybe the monster uses the treasure to trick and trap people before he gobbles them up.”
Olivia’s eyes widened. Far from being an easily unsettled child, she loved scary stories. Later she became much more rational and dismissive of fantastical notions, but in those days, her imagination ran riot.
“The monster will eat you up…” Olivia whispered, her eyes darting to and fro.
Almost despite myself, I glanced around at the bushes, imagining some dark lurking creature, waiting for us to fall prey to their ambush.
We crossed a bubbling stream, which judging by our location, I guessed would probably flow down the hill toward the valley next to Springwell. I knew we were approaching the heart of the woodland, and it was then that I noticed a curious phenomenon. Birdsong became sparser, rustling leaves quieter, and the forest felt unnaturally still. The foliage seemed thicker, the trees denser, and our path became entangled with thorns, briars, and holly bushes that shot out inconvenient branches like great prickly hands attempting to thwart further passage.
Presently, we came to a particularly large fallen pine tree, which Olivia wanted to climb, so I watched her do that for a while. Every so often, I stared up at the sky through the sighing tree branches, and watched as the sun again disappeared into the grey cloud. Shadows fell across the woodland as I shivered.
“Shall we keep going or go back?” I asked.
“We haven’t found the treasure yet silly,” said Olivia. “We have to keep going.”
“But that means we might find the monster.”
“Then we’ll have to be brave and fight it.”
In truth, I’d had enough of the forest. Our path became narrower, more uneven, and increasingly tangled with brambles. At one point it seemed impassable, but after a few more minutes, our path widened, and we found ourselves in a strange clearing.
“Mummy, what are they?” Olivia asked, indicating strange wooden devices dangling from the branches surrounding the clearing.
“I have no idea.”
I took a tentative step forward to examine the hanging items, slowly approaching the nearest tree. A group of twigs had been bound together, forming an X shape over a T shape, akin to a figure of some kind. I moved on to another tree and found a pentagram made of twigs and another figure similar to the first, only bigger. I also found wooden wind chimes, which rang as a sudden, eerie breeze blew through the clearing.
I examined the ground, and found a pile of ash at the centre of the clearing. Burnt embers were present and, despite the rain, I could tell the fire had been recent. Rather more ominously, I discovered burnt animal bones near the ash. As far as I could tell they appeared to be poultry bones, perhaps a chicken. Reluctant to handle them, I crouched down to stare instead.
“Did you find the treasure, Mummy?” asked Olivia.
I shook my head. “No sweetheart.”
“Why are there burnt bones?”
“I honestly have no idea.”
But my mind had leapt to witchcraft. I remembered seeing similar sights during a walking holiday in the New Forest, where many witches were known to practise their rites. It seemed clear to me that similar ceremonies had been performed here.
“I think we should go back now,” I said.
Despite appearing somewhat unsettled, Olivia didn’t like that idea. “No, Mummy, we have to keep going.”
“I don’t know, sweetheart.”
“But we can’t give up the treasure hunt now!”
I sighed. “Very well. But just a bit further.”
We continued past the clearing along the path, but then found it forked. We decided to take the right-hand path and at first, the choice seemed a good one. However, after a couple of minutes it became narrow and overgrown with tall brambles once more, disappearing into a steep dip. I almost told her we should give up, but a movement in the distance caught our attention.
“Olivia,” I whispered. “Be very, very quiet. I think there’s a deer ahead.”
She nodded, and we stole along the path, slowly winding our way out of the brambles and into a more open area at the foot of a dell. There, about fifty yards ahead, I glimpsed a mother deer with a young fawn at her side, a doe. They stood near a broken fence post and a tangle of barbed wire.
We waited and watched the mother with her fawn; a delightful scene that drew quiet gasps from Olivia.
“Mummy, this makes me think of Bambi…”
“Me too.”
After another minute or so, Olivia shifted her ground slightly and stood on a twig. The loud crack startled the deer and caused them to bolt.
“Aww…”
“Never mind,” I said. “Let’s go on a bit.”
We went up to the fallen fence post, and whilst Olivia explored around the dell a little, I examined the area around where the deer had stood. More than one fence post had been broken. Tangles of barbed wire lay at either side of a wide gap in a fence, twenty yards across at least. I puzzled over the confusing scene. Could the gap have been the result of storms or bad weather? No wild beast native to England could have caused such damage, and the break in the fence appeared to have occurred quite recently.
Feeling a sudden unease, I decided Olivia and I should leave. Perhaps this section of the woods had been fenced off with barbed wire for good reason. At the very least, we might be trespassing.
“Olivia?”
I looked up, but she had vanished.
“Olivia!”
No doubt she was just out of sight, a little further along by the bushy, rocky scrubland. I strode forward, through the stones and bracken, beneath gnarly beech trees that lined the lip of the dell on a ridge above. There was something indefinably uncomfortable about the place, and the longer we lingered, the more uneasy I felt.
“Olivia?”
I could hear her playing in the distance, but could not see her. I approached the dell only to discover that the ground suddenly levelled. From where I had been standing, an outcropping of rock had given the illusion of a dell-like C shape akin to the edge of a quarry, whereas in fact two separate outcroppings stood apart from a steep embankment next to an abandoned and overgrown railway line that disappeared beneath the undergrowth on the left, and then curved around a bend to the right. It was from this direction I could hear the indistinct sounds of Olivia playing.
Gripped by a sudden fear that she might be in danger, I ran full pelt toward the sounds, following the railway line along the curve in the track to the right. I turned the corner and caught sight of her, only to stop and gasp at what I saw.
The rails led to a disused railway tunnel, choked here and there by brambles and shrubs that had crept down from the embankments. I noticed several wild mushrooms on the ground, and broken logs and branches lay deeply embedded amid the tangled weeds, covered in fungus. Judging by the placement of trees surrounding the tunnel, the crumbled state of the bricks and the general geography, I could tell it was the same location depicted in Alison Merrifield’s paintings. No doubt the photograph she had been given was taken here, although it must have been some years earlier, as the place was now a lot more overgrown.
A cynical part of my mind threw a slight question mark over my conclusion, purely because there were many locations in Britain with abandoned and overgrown railway tunnels. But deep down, I knew with almost absolute certainty that this was the place. It had an odd, melancholy beauty, but amid the inexplicable sadness of the place, it felt eerie, bordering on menacing. The black mouth of the railway tunnel seemed to draw me forward, and I put one foot in front of the other almost involuntarily, heading into the darkness exactly as Olivia was doing.
“Wait for me!” I called out, parental responsibility temporarily overruling intrigue. I felt a twinge of anxiety, and a small but definite part of me inwardly screamed to stick to my original plan of getting away from that place as soon as possible.
However, astonishment and curiosity are difficult forces to suppress, and they soon overrode my fears. The closer we moved to the tunnel entrance, the more I sensed an uncanny atmosphere in our surroundings, as though we were being observed. We sped up as we reached the entrance, as though the dark void were like a black hole sucking us inside.
“Be careful where you step,” I told her. My voice echoed in the gloom.
Olivia grinned. “This is really exciting. It looks like the picture in our house.”
I nodded. “Perhaps we will find the treasure.”
“Or the monster.”
We had no torches, so we proceeded cautiously. Such utter darkness acted like a shock to the system. It seemed absolute; a thick curtain of black pushing us onward. I knew the tunnel was high and wide, yet the smothering, impenetrable void felt crushing. The darkness had weight and I found myself hunching under its heaviness.
About thirty or forty feet in, my extended arms touched a brick wall. The entrance had been properly sealed. Olivia sighed.
“No treasure after all…”
Even I felt slightly disappointed. A part of me thought the tunnel must hold some secret, but I still couldn’t see properly in the dark. In any case, as far as my hands could tell, there was nothing to see but soot covered walls and old bricks.
I began to feel as though the darkness was somehow getting blacker. Just as my eyes started dimly perceiving the shapes of Olivia, something clouded my vision. We were about to turn back when the temperature abruptly plummeted. It had already been cold in the tunnel, but the air became icy, and as I slowly turned to face the light from the entrance, I could see my breath. My heart beat faster and as I tried to walk forward, I discovered my legs could not move. Panic raced through my mind at being rendered suddenly and unexplainably immobile. I tried to cry out, but my tongue clung to the roof of my mouth. It felt like being trapped in a bad dream.
My first overwhelming instinct was to protect Olivia. I glanced around and saw her nearby, motionless, making no sound. Once again, I tried to speak, and this time managed a very faint utterance.
“Olivia…”
Something with a horrible icy grip grasped at my left arm. Had I not been paralysed I would have screamed. I was convinced we were not alone in the tunnel and that some other individual had been lurking in the shadows, choosing only now to reveal themselves. My imagination went to a hundred different places, all of them equally horrible, but at that stage, none of them supernatural in origin. Was it a desperate and dangerous criminal on the run, hiding out here and upset about being intruded on?
Suddenly I could move again. The temperature returned to normal. I grabbed Olivia by the arm and ran out into the open, my heart racing and adrenaline pumping through my veins. I felt absolutely terrified, though of what I did not know. As I emerged into the grey daylight, I realised the entire experience had lasted mere seconds. Yet it had felt like an eternity. I turned to Olivia, who looked confused rather than frightened.
“Olivia, darling, are you alright?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied. “Why did we run out of the tunnel?”
“I…” Somehow, I couldn’t put the experience into words, because I didn’t know what had just happened either.
“Mummy just got a bit scared. I’m alright now.”
“Did you see the monster?”
“No. Nothing like that. We’d better go home now. Come on...”
I glanced back in the direction of the tunnel and, for Olivia’s sake, tried to hide how shaken I felt. Even though something had grabbed me, I began to realise no other living being had been present with us in the darkness. My thoughts of criminals were ridiculous, but I had definitely sensed a malevolent presence, still lurking behind us in the black maw. I wanted to put as much distance between us and it as I possibly could.
Once the tunnel became hidden from view, I felt a little more at ease. However, I also noticed for the first time the complete absence of birdsong in this part of the forest. What kept the birds away? A friend of mine who visited Auschwitz spoke of how no birdsong was heard there either, in that place where such monstrous evil had taken place.
The entire experience of being paralysed had lasted mere seconds, but had felt like hours. Olivia had apparently not shared my experience and was confused at my behaviour. Had I imagined the whole thing? Could I have been hallucinating? How could I have felt the hand gripping my arm so vividly? What about the change in temperature? Perhaps being immobilised could be explained away my sudden cramp in the legs, but even that seemed unlikely.
At that point, I wasn’t prepared to concede that my encounter within the tunnel might have been supernatural, but at that moment, something else happened that temporarily drove the matter from my mind. As we approached the place where the fence had been broken, the same deer we had seen earlier stood by one of the broken posts. At first Olivia’s face lit up, but the deer bolted upon hearing us, revealing a horrible sight that had previously been hidden. She let out a wail of dismay and I immediately rushed forward, hoping I could do something, but knowing we were almost certainly too late.
The fawn had become entangled in the loose barbed wire to such an extent that its throat had been badly cut. It lay whimpering and distressed in a puddle of blood amid the tangle of cruel wire, bleeding to death.
For a moment I simply stood over the fawn, uncertain as to how I might be able to save the poor animal, or whether I should try and end its suffering. If I chose the latter option, I knew I would have to do so in front of Olivia, hardly an ideal scenario. I’d have to cover her eyes.
The fawn continued to thrash around in great distress amid the growing puddles of blood. I noticed the mother still lurking nearby in the trees, no doubt torn between leaving her fawn, and also aware of the danger posed by humans. Olivia whimpered and I took her hand in mine.
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do, sweetheart.”
“Can’t you make it better?”
“Sorry, but I think the fawn might be too badly hurt.”
“What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?” cried a voice behind us. “More poachers and thieves, I’ll bet!”
I turned and saw an angry, red-faced man dressed in green and brown with a thick coat and cap. In one hand, he held a shotgun and was accompanied by two terrier dogs, both of which started barking the moment they saw us.
At a loss for words, I indicated the fawn entangled in the barbed wire. Olivia began to cry. Upon seeing the injured animal, the man’s expression grew even angrier. He increased his pace then halted near the fawn, raised his shotgun, aiming at the head. Before I had a chance to turn my daughter’s head away, he fired.
She burst into tears and buried her head in my coat. I held her and stared at the man reproachfully.
“You didn’t have to do that in front of her.”
“I can do whatever I please on my property,” the man grunted. “And by the way, you are trespassing.”
“We saw no sign and the path led here.”
“Through broken posts and barbed wire? You didn’t think you might be trespassing?”
I had no good answer to this. Olivia continued to cry.
“How come the fence was broken?” I asked.
“Never you mind,” said the man. “I’ll have it fixed soon enough. Go on, get out of here!”
We left the distressing sight of the dead fawn as quickly as we could, rushed past the fence posts, back through the dense undergrowth, and along to the clearing where we had found the wooden witchcraft emblems hanging from the trees. As we walked, Olivia’s whimpering eased a little.
“Why did the angry man do that?” she asked.
“The fawn was in lots and lots of pain,” I said. “I know the man seemed angry, but really he just wanted to end that poor animal’s suffering. The fawn is fine now.”
“But what about the mummy deer? Won’t she miss her? Won’t she be very, very sad?”
“Well, yes… But I also think she will be happy that her doe is now at peace and not hurting anymore.”
“Has it gone to heaven?”
“Yes, I think so.”
Olivia fell silent for a moment. Then she wiped her tears and smiled. “I suppose the deer will be happy in heaven, even if she misses her mummy.”
“Yes, of course. Look, I know seeing that was a bit horrible, but we don’t have to let it spoil the day. There are still parts of the forest we could explore, if you like.”
“I think I just want to go home and have lunch now.”
I nodded. “Very well. After lunch, don’t forget you were going to play with Howard. You’ve got a fun afternoon ahead of you.”
Despite the shock of what she had seen, Olivia now seemed to accept that the dead animal had been put out of its misery, and she reverted to her usual cheery self. It took me a lot longer to inwardly calm down, following the peculiar turns our walk had taken in the forest. My mind kept going over the incident in the tunnel and whether my imagination had been playing tricks. I could have sworn I felt a cold hand and the thought of being unable to move sent shivers down my spine. Had I really been paralysed by some unknown force? Or had it merely been fear rooting me to the spot? Why had Olivia not felt similarly disturbed?
