They found the girl strung from the trees.
Her eyes had been plucked out. Roses grew from their pits, black as the beetles that crawled over her skin, and soiled with her blood. Her pale, naked limbs were tangled in branches and leaves, her skin shredded and sliced where the binds were tightest.
The men hefted her down, untangling her with gentle, sorrowful hands, and the women whispered of curses and clawed warding signs across their breasts. The children were locked inside, hands pressed over ears and eyes, words of comfort whispered into their frightened faces, as the men took the girl’s body – covered in a black, fluttering shroud – to the priory, to see what would be done with it.
Inside the sullen brick walls of the priory, words and grief were hushed with the weight of time and worship. The girl was placed upon an altar, the shroud folded to her shoulders so that the prior might gaze upon her marred face, upon the roses that were not simply placed within the sockets, but that grew from them, the stems coiling further into her skull, the thorns shredding through skin and sinew. The petals wept along her cheeks like inky tears, kissing her lips.
The prior asked of the men who had brought her, “You found her hanged?”
One of the men, a burly, reserved blacksmith called Cillian, shook his head. “No, Father Jakob. She was wrapped in branches and vines, but we cannot tell how she died.”
“Were it the roses?” another man suggested, and the room seemed to darken further.
The prior made a sign of warding – a five-point cross, hooked from two fingers, that began and ended at his brow. “We cannot be certain, but you did right to bring her here. There is something unnatural about this. Only time and prayer will tell.”
He nodded, and the men let themselves out, dismissed. In the pale, hollow sunlight, they wondered to one another about the poor girl, speaking in voices that were hushed, despite the daytime. None knew her, and theirs was a small town, where everyone knew everyone.
Cillian, who had been the one to clamber into the tree and untangle the branches from the girl’s limbs, trailed behind the others. He was thinking of what he had seen – or what he thought he had seen – in the green shadows of that tree, where he huddled to saw the girl’s binds off with a pocket blade. The branches were twisted in stubborn knots around her wrists and ankles, far too deliberate to be mere chance. Far too cruel. The girl’s cheeks were rosy still, and he had the eerie feeling as he sawed that her throat would swell with air and she would sit up, alive or undead, those roses boring into him like eyes.
He had been watching her for that foolish reason when something flickered in the shadows of the tree. He glanced up, blade stalling, and caught a gleam in the depths of the leaves. Black as a moonless night, and shining like the sun on his blade.
It’s an eye, he thought, sudden and unbidden. It’s watching me. I can feel it.
The thought was enough to chill him to the bone.
He took his blade from the branches and said, his voice gruff but quiet, lest the others heard him, “Someone there?”
His skin prickled with a terror that was as irrational as it was deep. His blade felt spineless in his greasy hand. When the black gleam disappeared and reappeared, he knew it was an eye, and the terror bit deeper, even as he lifted the blade higher.
The shadows shifted, and threw the eye into clarity, and he recognized – with a sharp, cold shiver – the wide, black pupil and ochre iris of a deer. He had hunted and killed enough of them to know it well, yet no deer should have found its way this high into the trees, and no deer should have watched with such awareness, such recognition, as the eye that watched him.
Cillian said, his throat dry and sticky, “Better not come any closer, whatever you are. I’ve killed enough of yer kind before.”
The lie rattled out as though shaken from him, and he knew them to be a lie, even as they left his lips.
The eye blinked once more. And then it vanished, with a breeze that smelled of earth and ripe fruit and the strong, bitter scent of rot.
Cillian’s brow was wet with perspiration by the time the girl’s binds snapped and broke, and by the time he was able to carry her down the trunk, slung over his wide, tired back. The other men asked no questions. The girl’s body was enough to cause a murmur of fear to run through each of them as it was.
Presently, the men dispersed, each to their own home, each with the unspoken hurriedness of a man who knows he must be with his family to protect them from strange ills. Cillian found his own way home, though he had no such family to worry for. Only himself. Only the ghost of the terror that had trickled through him when he met that strange, deer-like eye.
He dreamt that night that he huddled in the trees once more, and the eye did not belong to a deer at all, but to a young, handsome man, clothed in robes as black as his curls. He carried a gnarled, wooden staff crowned with a skull adorned in black roses — a skull that looked to Cillian all too human — and watched him with the full, ochre-and-black irises of a deer.
There will be others, the young man with the deer eyes told him. On moonless nights, when the forest is at its darkest and the air is thick with rot, there will be others.
Cillian awoke with his hands clawing at his throat, which felt tight with the ghost of rose stems and curling, black branches and the young man’s hands wrapped around his skin. The dream had left something else behind, too – a name for the young man who had spoken to him.
The God of the Woods.
He shivered.
The light and the shadows of his bed chamber appeared different, somehow – too light, and too shadowed, at once. Smearing together in a melange of browns and blacks.
Cillian pulled himself out of bed, and stumbled towards the small, oval mirror that hung above the wash basin. He was uncertain why he did so. That terror had returned, cold and deep and thrumming through his bones. His heart rushed in his ears like the waters of a river. His skin felt cool and greasy with perspiration.
His reflection appeared different too and, at first, he did not understand what had changed in the tan of his skin, the cherry-brown of his hair, the broad set of his cheeks. Until he met his own eyes.
Cillian cursed, stumbled back, and crossed himself with the same movement as the prior had when he had seen the girl’s body. Yet, as he gazed into the mirror, cold with terror and disbelief, he knew that this was no dream, no nightmare he would awake from.
His eyes, he saw, had shifted to the ochre-and-black irises of a deer.
Maren, the little girl was called, and she was both small and sharp for her eleven years. It drove her ma up the wall, it did, when her answers to her ma’s questions were too perceptive for a girl of her age. That was how, one evening, her ma sent her out into the garden for a little while.
“Cool yerself down, girl,” she told Maren. “And be back ‘fore dark.”
The door slammed with a heavy, wooden thud.
Maren was not particularly bothered by this, nor was it the first time such a thing had happened to her. And so, hunting for amusement in the waning light, she wandered out of the garden and towards the forest that hugged the village, its leaves and branches trembling in a warm, sweet breeze.
She was no child, despite what the adults liked to think. She knew what had happened to that other girl, the one who the priory had swallowed up and never returned. And she was curious, a deep flame caged within her belly, about the forest that had done it to her. She’d been having dreams of late, dreams of trees and deer and black, unfurling roses. Dreams that whispered in the warm, honeyed voice of a young man.
Her ma would have never let her out of the house if she knew.
The night was moonless, but the stars winked blearily at her, dusting the path that led to the forest with a pale, silvery light. Maren followed it on feet that felt as light as leaves, and as eager as rabbits. She was unafraid of the dark, unafraid of the trees that seemed to bow in greeting as she stepped out of the town and into their embrace. She was pretending to be a bird, soaring through the dusk, alighting on the stars. Following a path of acorns that lay scattered along the dirt, crisp and crunching below her shoes.
She took one as she passed, dancing it along her knuckles and admiring the gleaming wood. The path sank further into the woods than she had realized and, when Maren glanced up from her acorn, she found herself in a clearing that was the shade of night and smelled thick and pungent. Like the rotting mushrooms her ma had once cursed at her for gathering.
The trees towered above her, whispering. The breeze that curled around her was slow and heavy and smelled of dead things, and Maren remembered suddenly a dream she’d had, where she stumbled across the carcass of a deer deep in the woods, and saw eyes peering up at her from between the animal’s gleaming ribcage.
Fear planted its first grains within her.
The acorn was cradled loosely in her hand but, when she shifted it, she gasped aloud. In the bleary darkness, she caught the sharp crack in the acorn, where the shards had sunk into her skin. She shook the broken fragments from her hand, but blood welled and pain grew hot and bitter.
I should be getting back now, she told herself, swallowing her fear. Ma will be getting worried.
But tears needled at her eyes, and clung, thick as dust, in her throat. Fear cradled her in its rotting hands. She took a step back, and the crunch of an acorn below her feet was as loud as a bird’s cry in the silence. She startled.
Then, in the haze of shadows at the edge of the clearing, something shifted.
She felt the man’s presence before she saw him, and her terror was a spider’s web, clinging to her skin no matter how she tried to brush it off. She knew she had seen the man before, in her dreams. His were the eyes peering up at her from the deer carcass; eyes unlike any other person she had ever seen. His was the voice she heard, floating along the breeze. His were the pipes that sang, sweet and hollow, amongst the trees.
The man stepped into the clearing and she saw that his legs were not human legs at all, but the spiny, tan legs of a deer, ending in pointed hooves.
I want to go home to my ma, Maren thought, with a sudden, cold clarity, too sharp for a child’s mind. The thought that followed was sharper. He won’t let me.
The man grinned. Maren saw his teeth, gleaming in the blackness of the clearing.
Come with me, child.
The voice was soft and warm as deer fur, as a summer breeze, as the mug of milk her ma used to fix her every night, when she couldn’t sleep for the nightmares. It slid into her thoughts, like it was just another one of them. It beckoned to her with its words.
And Maren knew, just as she always had in her dreams, that she would follow him, because there was nothing she could do but follow him.
She crossed the clearing to the man who stood in the shadows, who watched her with eyes that were not human at all. He held out a hand, and took hers in his own. His grin was wide and sharp and only fed Maren’s terror. But, when he began to walk, deeper into the trees and deeper into the shadows, she followed because it was the only choice.
Maren’s ma never found her daughter after that evening she sent her out of the house. No matter how she wept and prayed and called for Maren, circling the tree line every waking hour of the day, there was no trace of her girl. The prior was called, at first to conduct prayers, and then to conduct rites. The night after the rites were said and done, Maren’s ma found the shards of a broken acorn, littered by the tree line.
They were wet with blood.
The townspeople walked in terror, closing themselves in their homes at night and making scarce appearances during the weak daylight. They prayed, fervently, for the evil in the forest to be dispelled. They crossed themselves whenever they passed the blacksmith’s house, or the grieving mother by the tree line.
The blacksmith was said to see more than he should be able to, now. He was said to rave of worlds glimmering behind this one, of glamour that could be peeled apart and stepped into. The townspeople saw him, sometimes, wandering the forest paths with a vacant look in his strange eyes, murmuring into the dark breaths between the trees, as though conversing with someone – or something – that only he could see.
The grieving mother had planted a broken acorn in her garden and what grew from it was a vine of black roses, thick and curling around her home. Each of the roses blossomed damp with blood. Every night, the grieving mother was said to kneel at the vine’s roots and pray for her daughter to be returned. Some said they saw her whispering to the rose petals, as though they held her secrets, others said they had seen the beginnings of a rose, budding across her lips.
The prior spent day and night deep in prayer, most often by the altar on which the girl’s body lay, neither aging nor rotting, the roses in full bloom. His prayers, if the townspeople’s gossip was anything to go by, went unanswered.
The forest loomed, and most nights bloomed moonless, now. Children saw deer eyes watching them from the tree line, and men and women alike had dreams that whispered to them, bleeding into their waking lives seamlessly. They returned the forest’s gaze, both afraid and, somehow, enticed.
Wow. That’s it. That’s my comment.
What an opening line! And your building of the haunting and beautiful darkness from there was just masterful. I'm subscribing immediately!!