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Colour leeched out of the world here. There is something almost comforting about that, something familiar. Familiar too is the way this town moves like syrup too thick to be pleasant in your mouth. It was how you moved though the world once. Not anymore though, no, now your mind is your own and not an invading force. Now you can appreciate the drab slowness as something external to yourself, just an environment around you and not a prison closing in inside your head.
There wasn’t much of a plan really. A will reading that left you with not a lot, but enough to get the hell out. Signing with a fountain pen that made your skin crawl with how it scratched. A stiff drink and a dart thrown at a map and tearing a ragged hole in the Greenbrier River as the sharp point didn’t quite sink far enough into the board and tore its way through the paper on the way down. You were never any good at darts.
You aren’t putting down roots. Those were for old growth, not for hardy weeds that broke through concrete and always found another crack through which to grow when killed. Nothing that felt too much like a home, so instead a room at the only inn.
This town is too small to warrant one, but it doubles as a watering hole come evening. It doesn’t seem to have been updated in an age, you wonder idly if the plaque upkept to a gleaming shine declaring the inn to have been opened in 1824 is somehow conveying pride at the fact. The peeling wallpaper in your room was probably pretty once, but the green now seems sick with age and the delicate floral pattern has started to wilt.
There is no routine to your days here until one slowly creeps in as it always does.
Breakfast first. You don’t know if it’s something in the air here, but you wake up with a bitter taste in your mouth and are eager to drown it in food and mint toothpaste. The inn has a small kitchenette for guest use and you make yourself toast with butter and strawberry jam. It’s a little too sweet but the tea helps, black with no sugar.
You stretch out the back of the inn and enjoy the view of the woods. You don’t call it yoga because it makes you less likely to do it, but you had learned when things were bad that quietly engaging your body in the morning was a good way to quiet your mind. There’s a little tension in the back of your neck you try to work out but it sticks there until you finish up and go back inside to shower. The hot water fixes it you think.
The first few weeks here you just sit and watch the world go by, but then you one day you decide to get up and spend some time wandering the town. It’s small, decrepit. There is the inn, a few sparse houses, one general store. The library, despite being the only venue with any chance of entertainment, is usually empty. You meet Mrs Lela Kaletaws who runs it, although she isn’t always around.
Roads here are barely holding together, but the one main road that runs out of town is at least in somewhat better condition. It runs parallel with the woods at one point, curving off just past old Mr Kleer's house. The man in question usually sits on his porch but he’s friendly enough so you don’t pay much mind to the gun.
After you’ve wandered town you make sandwiches for lunch. It isn’t much exciting, but it is routine and is filling enough that you bunker down for a nap after.
In the afternoon you go for a long walk before returning to the inn for dinner. There is a bar downstairs that opens in the evenings and serves food that while not a delicacy by any means is hot and filling. You retire to your room, read some of your book and go to sleep.
It continues that way. Breakfast, stretch, shower, wander, lunch, sleep, walk, dinner, read, sleep.
At first you only really skirt the edge of the woods, but with each passing dreary day you venture closer to the depths down the packed dirt path. The path through the woods is confusing and unmarked. Where you swore just yesterday it went to the right, today it goes to the left. Even so it must be your sense of direction, because the path always leads you past the jimsonweeds that come up to you chest before spitting you out on the road that leads to old Mr Kleer's house. The flowers are beautiful, but there is some metallic tang to their otherwise sweet scent that causes your teeth to ache.
—
More comfortable with the area now, it causes a fright when you see a man in the woods just in the corner of your eye only to snap your head around and have him vanish. You force calming breathes and keep walking. There is no such thing as ghosts in these woods.
Old man Axell calls to you from his porch as you pass, rifle butt settled on the rickety wood that you worry will collapse and left leg stretched straight out towards you like reaching for something.
“Seeing things in the woods kid?”
“I look spooked sir?”
“Like you’ve seen a Ghost I reckon.”
You give a shaky laugh at that.
“Only if ghosts come in flesh and blood and quick feet. Some man gave me a fright is all.”
“Must be out of towners” Axell says.
You do not like the way he says it. You do not like that he looks at you strangely. But you smile and nod and get on your way. He is only an old man.
—
There is someone in the woods. You feel his gaze on you, feel the dull prickle that rests on your nape from those eyes.
“We really must stop meeting like this” you say.
You have stopped trying to catch him. Now you only speak, eyes set on the dirt path in front of you. You do not think you will get a reply and when you do you shudder horribly at how much closer the voice is than you had anticipated.
“Don’t enjoy the company?”
He’s English and you frown. Out of towner. The old man must know something, but maybe you cannot begrudge him having fun at your expense. You have not made friends here.
“Enjoy company where I can see it if it’s all the same to you.”
The man laughs. It is a confusing laugh, warm and cold all at once as it bounces through the trees.
“Careful what you wish for.”
You resist the urge to turn even as his voice moves strangely, like he is swaying from one side of the path to the other.
“Must have a face like sin to keep hiding away” you say.
The next words you can feel. His breath is right at your cheek, a strand of your hair lifted by his fingers.
“Quite the opposite.”
Your heart is a prey animal running from a predator, beating wildly against your ribs as you turn to find he isn’t there. Only you certainly felt him. He leaves a sweet smell behind.
—
Sleep does not come easily that night. The rain against your window casts the moonlight strangely into your room. You spend hours watching as the creeping vines on the wallpaper seem to twist and shift beneath the moon flowers. When you finally fall asleep, it is almost as if you can smell them. Sweet and slightly metallic.
You wake up with the fading scent of damp earth and something on the edge of rot in your nose and the feel of dirt packed uncomfortably under your nails. They’re clean you find, but you spend the start of the morning cutting them down once you see the fading scratches left on your arms and legs through the night.
—
He is not the only stranger in the woods. You swore you would not go back, but routine takes you there without thought.
The Scottish man likes to walk on your right hand side, just enough steps behind you that you can only see him at the very side of your vision. You think he is handsome, but it is difficult to be sure. What you can be sure of is that he is dressed oddly. You have spoken to him for a while now, discussing yourself mostly. Perhaps it is the eerie quiet of the woods that makes you want to fill the dead space, but you tell him more about yourself than you ever would have thought yourself comfortable with.
“Are you a soldier then?” you ask.
“Sometimes, I think.”
You take a moment to chew that answer, wonder at the taste of it. There is a panic when you smell blood on the air, but it is quickly blanketed by sweetness. You have reached the jimsonweeds. It is too early, you have not walked far enough to be here already. But before you can protest the steps to your right stop and you know the man is gone.
None of them ever come farther than this.
—
You try the next day and the next to get answers from him. He seems to make a decision at one point just as the familiar smell reaches you and you think you will leave with no more information than you had before.
“I’m SAS.”
He is not there when you turn to thank him. He is not there at all when you return the next day.
—
The library run by Mrs Kaletaws is added to your routine. Breakfast, stretch, shower, library, lunch, try to sleep, walk, dinner, read, try to sleep. The small building has the peculiar addition of a cat you never quite see. You hear the skitter of claws on worn wood floor that has started to smell of sickly sweet rot, see fading scratches on the legs and arms of the chair, find hairs on your clothing, feel the prickle of eyes focused on you from the dark running up your spine to settle dully on the back of your neck. You have tried before to get a glimpse of the creature, but it only seems to exist in the very corner of your eye and retreats when your gaze tries to creep around to catch it.
Lela never talks about the cat. She told you once that it is only her and her wife that live in the basement below the library. You have never seen her wife and fear she must have some permanent sickness that stops her from being able to do much. You think they should move above ground so she can at least see the world through the windows obscured by racing raindrops, but you keep it to yourself.
The one computer here is old, the white plastic exterior now yellowed. Still, it is the only gateway to the outside world in this little town and you blow at your tea while waiting for your search results. ‘SAS military bases in West Virginia’ is a shot in the dark, but you need to start somewhere. After a sip you dump more sugar into your cup before looking at your finally loaded results.
There are none. No British military installations at all in the USA. You had hoped at least the results would bring up something about training exercises but it is just pages of useless information about bases around the world. You read about the SAS, fall down a rabbit hole of how they torture their soldiers to train them to withstand it. You go through pages and pages of search results until finally one talks about SAS soldiers in this area.
The link takes you to a dusty website that stopped being updated sometime in the late 90s. It’s some sort of conspiracy blog and you are prepared to close it, but you can’t help but get lost in the story it tells.
The details are unclear which you suppose is the hallmark of any good conspiracy. 40 years ago. There was a team of two, or maybe four or maybe seven. They set up just outside the woods with little to no explanation. There’s an interview from a local, not a name you recognise so one you think is likely long dead. She says two of the soldiers went into the woods first. She remembers something bad must have happened, because there was an argument between the five left outside. Nobody was allowed close, but she watched two more men go into the woods. After that the operation seemed to vanish entirely overnight and nobody heard anything more about it.
Whoever authored the blog has a gift with words because despite your logical mind knowing it was probably nothing but a random training exercise, the hairs on the back of your neck raise.
There is a photo of the alleged unit at the end loading slowly. You stare in fascination as line by line appears from the top. The world stops before it fully loads. At first you are confused as to why your whole body is tense, why your heart is racing. And then you figure it out. Silence. Complete and all together sudden silence. No rain hitting the windows, no scratching of the cat echoing, not even the whir of the computer.
You do not want to look away from the screen. You do not want to turn around. The prickle on your neck goes from dull to sharp.
The computer powers down.
—
He says to call him John. This man does not walk to your right like the Scottish one, or behind you like the first one you met. He walks in front of you. You can see the full expanse of his back clad in a vest. He wears a hat. He only ever turns slightly, enough to see that he has sideburns but never enough to see his face.
You are so enraptured by being able to see so much of him so clearly that it takes you a while to notice there is someone on your left. A few steps behind like the Scottish one does on your right. It takes you by surprise enough that you are about to forget the unspoken rules and turn, but John predicts your move.
“Eyes forward.”
“Sorry” you say automatically, fixing you eyes to his back and letting the other man stay as the impression of a creature just in sight of your left eye.
“They’re pretty, Captain.”
“I’m aware.”
It should not make you blush but somehow it does.
“What’s you name?” you ask.
There is no way to direct it specifically to the man on your left, so you simple direct it to the back of John and hope that the trees will send it where it needs to go.
“Captain?” the man asks, not for permission but as if genuinely unsure of the answer.
“Kyle, your name’s Kyle.”
“Right. Kyle.”
You catch the movement of him touching his chest, maybe rubbing at a name tag there but you can’t be sure.
“You can call me Gaz if you like.”
John and Gaz are your company for weeks. Whenever you ask after the other two, the air turns sweet and bloody and you are left alone among the jimsonweeds.
—
“Got intae trouble for ye.”
You’re not sure where you are but you recognise the voice. Is he in your room?
“We both did. Curiosity would’ve killed you little kitten,” comes the other voice from the first man in the woods somewhere behind you.
You hazily look down at yourself. You are not in the bed at the inn, you are in another bed laid on your back. You feel your legs brush against one another, not clad in the flannel you remembered wearing. Silk, you are wearing silk. Delicate against your skin, not much of it. Were you wearing perfume? Something smells sweet.
As you stare at the bare expanse of your leg a hand sinks into your thigh, squeezes.
“Fuck LT, so soft. Fingers just sink right in.”
You fight the urge to look to the right where the hand is coming from. You can’t look, some primal part of your brain knows you cannot look.
“Stay away from the woods” the man behind you whispers into your ear like a caress as his hands settle gently around your neck.
You do not feel the snap of bone, but you hear it. You taste the blood in your mouth.
You do not manage to fall back asleep when you wake.
—
Breakfast, library, try to sleep, don’t go into the woods, dinner, try to sleep, stare at the wallpaper, try to sleep.
—
You overhear Axell and Lela once. You think they are talking about you.
“You think we’re doing the right thing?” Axell asks.
“I don’t think there is a right thing anymore.”
“It’s been a long time now. Maybe we should let them go.”
“You think we could?”
There is a silence. Neither of them thinks so. Paranoia settles over you that you haven’t felt since back when things got bad. It’s like an old vice settling into your bones, or maybe seeping out of them as if it never truly left. You cannot go back to that place again so you take some aspirin for the rhythmic pulsing behind your eyes and the dull prickle at the back of your neck and resolve to put any thoughts of conspiracy out of your mind. Lela and Axell are simply old, there is not something they know that you do not.
—
You do not mean to walk into the woods again. The man behind you is back. He feels different somehow.
“I could eat you right up” he says against your neck.
Old Mr Kleer sees the bloodied bite at your throat and says nothing as you walk by.
—
You book a bus ticket. It feels too much like there are tendrils growing from you to burrow into the ground, to fix you here. If you don’t rip them out now, it is only a matter of time until the roots are so deep you won’t be strong enough to move. You aren’t eating properly, you’ve hardly slept and when you do you wake up with a bitter taste in your mouth and covered in scratches. There is still the shape of a bite on your throat and the B&B owners in Pennsylvania look at you with pity as you check in.
The building is charming and fairly new. You stare at the neutral pink wallpaper. One corner of it has lifted ever so slightly. You fall asleep staring at the peek of green underneath.
—
It doesn’t rain as much here, the sun is out and everything seems more colourful. Weeks pass in a haze and you slowly emerge again, eating properly, sleeping through the night. The town on the Greenbrier starts to fade to an unpleasant dream.
—
There is something comforting about the old man who comes to stay and sits by you for breakfast in the mornings. He has the remnants of a Russian accent and laughs frequently and easily. The stories he tells are fantastical, but he’s non-committal about his visit to small town Pennsylvania although he at least tells you that he likes the nature around here. He whispers that his legs aren’t up for much walking anymore, so he has to take the easy paths through small patches of nature.
It takes a week or so more to work up the courage to accompany him on a walk. It seems silly, but the woods make you feel afraid. Maybe a short walk through the small area he spoke of will help you get beyond it. You rub at your neck, feeling the marks faded but still there.
—
He notices your discomfort and tries to ease it with his stories as you walk the dirt path.
“It’s the most important thing I’ve learned you know” he says, the aching grief in his voice causing you pause, “you cannot leave friends behind.”
You turn to him, intending to ask how much longer the path leads since it is getting dark now. He is not there.
“Nik?” you ask, calm at first but increasingly more frantic.
That old familiar dull prickle settles on the back of your neck as you run back down the way you came to get out of the woods. Drooping tree limbs get in your way and you push through, ignoring the scratches. As darkness falls you slow to a walk, unable to see anything in front of you. You catch the smell the sweetness of the jimsonweeds. You can smell blood.
Foot steps that are not your own surround you. A set in front of you. One behind. To the left and to the right.
“Welcome home.”