A Fall Night In A Haunted Forest

I was already lost when I took that last turn and by the time I reached the forest I was as good as driving on another planet. The GPS broke down and my phone’s battery used up the last of the remaining juices trying to find me a way. When that was gone I braked and stopped. On top of that the needle of the fuel gauge was crawling over E. The headlights illuminated the dirt-road for yards before it dissolved in the darkness.
The road I was on was scarcely traveled and was bare of directions. It was hardly wide enough for my car with the age-old trees of the forest reclaiming most of it. The trees were dark and looked burnt as if charred in a forest fire. Only a few had leaves on them but that too threatened to fall.
I wish I hadn’t fought with Lee and left alone, but when he said that being a girl I shouldn’t go about a foreign place all alone I lost my mind. He might be a Captain in the Force of Kristoez but I was a Lieutenant in his team too. But in reality, I was blind without GPS or a map. Now that both were gone I was basically stranded.
While I was looking up and down the empty road for some sort of traffic the sky split into two and started to rain. What a nightmare!

Drawing in the jacket closer I started to walk in the direction I came. If I could hit the main road maybe I could get a ride back to the city.
The rain hailed like an angry beast. The drops were as big as orange peeps. Rain? In November?
I raised the collar of the jacket and took longer strides but soon I started to slip and fall. The dirt road was filling with mud and puddles.
Suddenly lightning flashed and I found a man standing in front of me. He was tall, towering about five feet above me, head tilted to a side. Even for a flash of a second, I could see his bulging eyes.
I stopped short in my track, almost slipped but retained balance by putting my hands on the ground.
I looked about me. There was nothing. Besides the sound of the falling rain, there was no sound in the forest. I looked ahead. In the dark, I could barely see. I extended my hand. It met with the tree trunk but no human. I took another step. If he was there I should collide with him right now. I walked three steps without any resistance. Pushing it aside as my imagination I continued to walk.
For half an hour I walked on that mud-filled road without a change of scenery and more often than not things looked awfully familiar. I was walking in circles but I didn’t know where I took the turn. There was no other road branching off.
Oh, how I wished Lee was here with me.
Lightening cracked and I saw that man again. This time the lightning lasted for a bit longer and I could see his neck wrapped in the vine of a climber.
Trying to move I tripped and fell back.
Was this the same place?
The lightning flashed again and I looked about me. There more such bodies hanging from the trees. I, gasping for breath, got up, slipped and fell, got up on all fours and scrambled. Something tickled my right foot, climbed up my leg twisting it around the limb. It tightened before I could get a grip on the slippery ground.
It turned me on my back and pulled.
“Help!” I yelled. “Lee!” As if he could hear me from five miles away.
The vine dragged me by my leg over the mud-road while I kept clawing the ground. With a final yank, it hoisted me off the ground ignoring my plea to let go or my call for help. I looked up and screamed. Heads. The space was cramped with heads, eyes bulging, tongues hanging out. And I, hanging upside down, tried to reach the vine hoping to loosen it. Suddenly it broke and I fell head down on the ground, shoulder first and then somersaulting to land on all fours.
“Run,” a voice said. “Go.”
I whirled around on my feet but there was no one.
“Who… who…?” I stammered but didn’t go. I knew that voice. He had cut the vine.
A strong grip clasped my arm and pulled me away. My saviour ran down the road. I tripped, he tripped, time and again, but we stayed on foot.
I didn’t see where we were going. Rainwater played into my eyes and hair, my shirt stuck to my skin. Only his knife shone now and then.
All of a sudden the mud-road disappeared and there were wooden steps under my feet. The hand holding me whirled me around till I faced the door through which we had just passed and shut it with a bang encasing us in darkness.
The storm continued to rage outside. The rain thrashed on the window panes.
Then a light appeared between us and I saw a face. A familiar face. The face I had been praying to see.
“I told you to run and...” he started quite vexed but then broke off. “What… what are you doing?” He tried but failed to sound angry.
I wrapped my arms around him and buried my face in his chest.
“Lee! I knew you would…” I looked up. That half-lit face was relieved and then he smiled. His hair was plastered to his scalp, water dripping from the tips.
He patted my hair and raised my face by putting his bent finger under my chin.
“You silly girl,” he said, whispering.
I looked into his eyes, breathed easily and stepped back. He removed his finger and looked about us.
“This house must be hundreds of years old,” he said. “We can wait here for a while.”
“How did you find me?”
Lee turned to me and raised my wrist having my watch.
“I had installed a tracking device in that,” he said and smiled. “Can’t let you wander off in wrong places, can I?”
I released my hand and looked away.
“Right. But what were those things?” I asked, shivering involuntarily at the memory. I ran my hands up and down my arms trying to warm up.
“Remember the suicide forest?” he asked shining his torch around. Old dust coated furniture lit up in the cold beam. It was a hall and there was a doorway on the opposite wall.
“Yes,” I said. I had heard about it when we were researching this city.
“Well, you have just seen it,” he said.
“You mean those men I saw was…”
“Yup. Men, women, whoever had committed suicide,” he said walking over to the fireplace jammed with cobwebs.
“But… but there was … Lee, you okay?”
In the faint light of the torch, I could see his face. It was grim and serious. His eyes were fixed on something ahead. With soundless steps, I joined him.
“Lee…”
Silently he pointed at something on the front wall. A portrait hung there decorated with cobwebs and layered in dust.
“See that,” he said. “The first one to start the curse.”
“Curse?”
“About four fifty years ago,” Lee said. “There was a witch going by the name of Evanora, living in the outskirts of this town. She was quite famous with her hocus-pocus. She had a son, Krik, who was a magician. This man, Frederick G. Davidson, hosted a Halloween party where Krik was supposed to perform. He did but Davidson made fun of him calling him a bluff and a joke. Krik was disheartened and after he went home he hung himself from a tree that night. Evanora cursed Davidson and his family that on every fall a member of this family would die by committing suicide.”
“All those people were from this family?”
“No,” Lee shook his head. “The family had its last generation about two hundred years ago. But the last Davidson had killed the witch and buried her in the house before hanging himself.”
“What?” I grabbed his sleeve.
“The forest is full of people who wanted to end..." he paused. "Better get out,” he whispered switching off the torch.
“What? Why?”
“Myth says that Evanora had put a spell on the forest so that no one can escape from the house.”
Lee was stepping backward moving towards the door.
“But…”
“Her spirit still lives.”
Lee’s words put ice in my veins.
A sound came from inside of the otherwise empty house. A floorboard creaked somewhere.
Lee touched the handle of the door.
A swish of a skirt was heard by the doorway on the other side.
Lee pulled me behind him. Lightning flashed now and then keeping the hall in light most of the time. Lee pushed the door. It didn’t yield. We both pushed it with our shoulders putting all our weight on it. It didn’t even budge.
“The witch!” The word slipped through Lee’s lips. “Move,” Lee cried and took out his gun.
“You carry a gun on vacation?” Even in the time of despair, I couldn’t hide my surprise.
Lee took aim at the lock and fired. The bullet went through but the door didn’t open.
“Fools,” a piercing voice said. Lee and I turned to face the doorway. “You can’t escape.” The voice cried again.
Lee pushed me behind him and raised his gun.
“I don’t think that would help,” I mumbled looking for a way out. It was then that I spotted a window, literally. I tapped Lee on the back and nodded towards it. The panes were cracked, a piece was missing.
“Go,” Lee said, keeping the gun aimed at the darkness. A ball of fire started forming in mid-air. “Go, go, go, go, go.”
I ran for the window but the fireball crashed in my path forcing me to retreat.
Lee fired back. The bullet met thin air and nothing else.
Scrambling up to my feet I made for the window. The panes won’t open. They were jammed.
“Hurry,” I heard Lee cry. Out of the corner of my eyes, I could see another fireball in the making. Desperately I grabbed a stool and crashed it on the pane. The glass flew out in pieces leaving a gaping window.
I passed through it. Lee followed. He was halfway through when a fireball hit him on the back thrusting him on the porch.
He slipped and went off the edge but I grabbed his leg and pulled back.
“Stay back,” he cried.
We couldn’t leave. The house was surrounded by creepers slowly crawling to reach the main door.
“If we get through this,” Lee said gasping for breath, “remind me never to spend a fall night in a haunted forest.” He was training his gun all around.
I grabbed Lee’s arm.
“I will but how do we leave?”
“I had requested Headquarters for an airlift,” he said scanning the cloud-laden sky. “It…”
The sound of rotors was heard. Lee switched on the torch skywards and waved his hands trying to get the chopper’s attention.
The creepers snaked their way up.
A spotlight hit us from above. I felt the deafening sound of the machine would wake the dead of the forest; if they were not already awake.
The tips of the vines were licking our feet. Behind us, the fireballs assaulted the wall.
A rope ladder rolled down from above and Lee caught the last rung. He pushed me up and followed. The chopper took off just before a creeper coiled itself around Lee’s free leg and missed.
While the ladder retreated and the chopper carried us away, the shrill laughter erupted from the house engulfing the deadly forest.

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