Author: Giulia Prodiguerra. Italian-Scottish writing aficionado, jack of a very few trades. Loves art in all forms, has a soft spot for videogames (but not very good at it).

Vincent knew he was lost.

Inevitably, surely, definitely lost.

He had stopped for a moment to catch his breath, and all he could see were thick patches of trees brightened by the pale moon. To make things worse, his sense of direction had always been a disaster. Growing up in the city, where cobbled paths and signs tell you where to go, he wasn’t used to the open fields and relying on nature’s directions. He had been to the woods only a few times growing up, around the lake, as his parents always preferred the seaside.

Also, he wasn’t wearing the best attire for any sort of outdoor activity: his mother had forced him to wear his older brother’s blue suit, so he should have given it more thought before storming out during dinner. But he just couldn’t take it anymore: another minute and he would have burst, either in a fit of rage or into tears.

And neither would have solved anything, they would have succeeded at making him look more pathetic. The only relief is that he had been quick enough to grab a lantern from the hooks in the hallway.

But the air was gelid, and he could feel it seeping into his bones. He kept walking down the muddy path, trying to recognise something, a clue that could take him back to the main road, but he didn’t have the faintest idea about his surroundings. An owl hooted close to him, so loud that it gave him a fright.

He kept walking aimlessly, while his feet started to hurt: how vast could a forest be, and how had he gotten that far from the house so quickly?

Of course, his brother-in-law had to live in a mansion in the middle of nowhere.

At first, he had chalked it up to him being eccentric, coming from such a rich family.

He had postponed visiting them for months: he thought it was because he would have felt out of place there, but something else, something far darker and gruesome, had been whispering in the back of his mind. He had chased that bizarre gut feeling back, blaming it on his ever-changing medications.

Despite the improvements, his family never spared the snarky comments about his medications and the fact that he had struggled to work for the past year, so the comparison with Anthony, a rich entrepreneur, wasn’t particularly fair.

His sister had insisted so much they’d go and visit. The fresh air will do you good, we can spend time all together for the holidays, and a long list of very reasonable motives for him to be there and leave his room.

However, Vincent had noticed his sister had been acting differently, especially after the wedding. She had lost weight and looked paler in the pictures she was sending them. She was very evasive whenever he’d ask questions about Anthony, or her daily life. Whenever Vincent would bring up he was worried about her, she’d just blame him for being paranoid, as usual, just seeing things that weren’t there. If he were to visit them, all his concerns would disappear, she promised.

However, it made sense now: Anthony had been hiding.

Hoping that if he wasn’t around long enough people would start to forget his face. But you can’t forget any of the things he had done. Just thinking about them filled Vincent with terror and disgust, the kind that grips your stomach and blurs your vision. He got to a clearing with a massive tree stump in the middle next to a burn, almost too perfect to be true. After sitting down to rest, he lifted his gaze to the purple evening sky, the moon encased in a soft foggy cage.

More and more nocturnal birds had started taking up their posts and filled the crisp air with their songs and calls. The noise made Vincent more serene, as it reminded him of the city.

The silence was one of his least favourite things. And in that giant house, in each of its corridors, rooms, nooks and crannies, he had sensed an overwhelming, crushing silence, the same one of the house he grew up in, so heavy and thick it prevented him from breathing.

He was now shaking, and his fingers and feet were numb. He wondered if he would have frozen to death. Somebody told him it was like falling asleep, but he didn’t truly believe it and wasn’t in a hurry to find out. But he’d prefer freezing to death out there than returning to that place. He stood up and moved around to get his blood flowing.

A squirrel, tremendously late for his bedtime, approached him and got close to his shoe. It didn’t look scared at all by his presence, and when it considered itself satisfied with its investigation, it slipped away quickly. Vincent watched it climbing up one of the heftiest trees and instinctively followed him: maybe from a higher point it would have been easier to make sense of where he was.

He hadn’t climbed a tree for at least two decades, but the branches were big and straight enough to make for an easy climb even for him. He wondered how old it must have been, how many wanderers like him he had witnessed, how many animals died under it, and how much snow had melted from its bark.

He felt queasy when he pulled himself up over the third branch and grabbed the trunk as hard as he could. He managed to reach halfway, while his skin hurt and had started breaking from the climb, and his fingertips were bleeding: everything was entirely engulfed by the darkness, and the milky light of the moon wasn’t enough to lighten the horizon.

In that boundless black space, he caught sight of the trembling flames of the search party scattering around the house.

He was now presented with a few options, none of which were particularly enticing: staying there and possibly freezing to death, getting mauled by an animal, ending up in a ditch (not necessarily in that order), or returning to the house.

“Vincent!”

“Vincent, where are you?”

The voices from the search party echoed throughout the valley. He went back down, not without strain, and found a woman sitting on the bank of the burn, crouched down, next to a big lantern.

How could he not realize she had arrived with such a big light?

“Oh dear, finally,” she stated. She was beautiful, with the longest and straightest blonde hair he had ever seen, reaching down to the ground, however he couldn’t really make out her age. Her skin was silky smooth but wrinkled around the eyes and forehead. She had a wooden basket filled to the brim with clothes and was wearing a light white dress with a dark blue apron on top. Despite the exposed arms, she seemed fine.

“We’ve been expecting you, Vincent.”

“We? How do you know my name?”

“I was afraid you had got lost in the forest.”

“I don’t mean to be rude but… who are you? What are you doing here?”

“Can’t you see? I am washing clothes dear. My name is not important now.”

Weird, Vincent thought. Maybe he was already freezing to death and was now hallucinating.

“Do you live around here?”

“Sort of. That house you just escaped from has been around for a very long time. These woods are older than you could ever imagine,” She continued while dipping a rag in the water. There was an echoing quality in her voice he couldn’t really explain. It was like every word was followed by a soft echo of someone else repeating the same words.

He took his jacket off and offered it to her.

“Here, I think you need this more than me.”

“Oh no dear, I am perfectly fine, thank you. So do you want to tell me, why are you here in the cold and not in the mansion?”

He sighed and sat next to her, the water from the burn gleaming under the light from the lantern. Vincent realized he wasn’t feeling cold anymore.

“No one believes me, I don’t see why you would,” Vincent shrugged.

“Why don’t you try me?”

“Do you know the people that live in the house?” he inquired.

“I keep to myself you know. I don’t really like people, I am afraid,” she squeezed what looked like a pair of trousers after dipping them in the water. “But yes, I know them. They arrived a couple of years ago. One is your sister, is that correct?” she asked.

Vincent was taken aback again. How did she know? Neither Anthony nor his sister Stella had ever mentioned someone else living on the grounds apart from the service staff.

“Yes. How… How do you know?”

She winked at him. “I am very observant. Tell me about her, please.”

“We were very close growing up. She was my guide, you know? Her name means “Star” in Italian. We got through some bad stuff, to say the least. Our family is not exactly a perfect model, I am afraid. I thought she had finally found happiness with a well-adjusted, handsome guy. Turns out she was dealt an even worse card than me.”

Vincent surprised himself at how easily he had opened himself up to that mysterious lady who was staring at him, barely blinking. Her eyes were charmingly large, he felt he could have drowned in those black and blue shining pools of ink. 

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Turns out Anthony is…” He felt his stomach turning, “Oh dear, can’t even say it out loud. He hurt some girls, that’s all I can manage to say. Paid most of them, and the police, to stay quiet. I felt like the move into the woods was too quick. Turns out he was probably trying to get the police off his tail.”

She nodded slowly while she was taking the information in, “And how do you know about the girls?”

“Coincidence, funnily enough. I was at a colleague’s house, visiting. He has been good to me even after I lost the job. You know, most people didn’t want anything to do with a depressed weirdo. But he didn’t mind. So while we were at dinner, I showed them some pictures of Stella and Anthony’s wedding. I could immediately see the blood leaving his sister’s face. I just knew.”

The woman tilted her head and waited for him to continue.

“She hadn’t seen a ghost, she had seen a beast, and I didn’t need anything else to believe her. She refused to tell me anything else. Those eyes… I dream about them sometimes, you know? I tried to find some more evidence before calling the police but I am not good at this stuff. He was making me so furious just looking at him, that… I just exploded. Everyone thought I had finally lost my mind. I was an idiot.”

She gently put her index finger against his mouth, “You were ready to see the truth. Because of this, we can help you.”

“I am sorry, I am still confused, who’s we?” Vincent accepted that he was probably delirious, or dead at this point.

“The house is ours. We lured him there after he hurt one of us. Didn’t expect him to be with a companion. We needed to know Stella would be taken care of. It will be… difficult at first. Sometimes justice isn’t what we were hoping it to be, but it’s justice nonetheless. A small consolation.”

“I am not sure what any of it means, but I assure you I want only the best for my sister. Just because the old skull doesn’t always work as it should,” he said while tapping his head with his knuckles, “It doesn’t mean I can’t take care of her. I just feel… awful it took me so long. Maybe if I had visited before–”

“Well, you’re here now. Good, very good. I just need something from you, anything you can part from. Consider it as a token for our services.”

Apart from the clothes, Vincent couldn’t immediately think of anything he could give her. If he was dead, might as well play along and see where it would take him. He took off the cufflinks, which Anthony had gifted him the previous Christmas, and handed them over.

“They are not exactly mine though.”

She looked at them like a magpie admiring a treasure trove.

“These are actually perfect,” She put them in the apron pocket and resumed washing the clothes from the basket. Vincent swore that she was washing Anthony’s purple vest, as he could recognise the monogram on the chest gleaming under the light.

Before putting it back, she turned to Vincent, still kneeling, and gave him a soft kiss on the cheek, “Sleep now, sweet lad. Everything will be okay in the morning.”

He felt so sleepy he had to lay down, and the leaves felt the softest they had ever been. When he woke up, at sunrise, he confirmed he still wasn’t cold despite the frost around him, and noticed that the woman was gone. He felt a heavy sadness in his heart that he couldn’t say goodbye to her, even if she had been a figment of his imagination.

He decided to walk back to the house. The fact that he was starting to feel cold again reassured him about the fact that he wasn’t dead. Once he reached the main path, the sight of some police cars and all the family members gathered around the main entrance took him back to reality.

His heart dropped while he started running to reach them. There was a commotion in the crowd as soon as his uncle spotted him, and a murmur pervaded the place. However, one of the detectives, a tall and stern woman with black hair, was the first one to speak directly to him.

“Mr. Layton? Are you okay?” She asked.

“Yes, that’s me. And I am fine. Where’s my sister?” She gestured to him to come in and sit down in the living room on the ground floor…

“Would you like anything to drink?”

“ I am sorry, but where is my sister? What are you doing here?”

“Don’t worry,” the policewoman answered, “she’s upstairs with a doctor, and physically she is fine. She seems in a state of shock, as she cannot recall how she found herself here or who her husband was.” She took a pause and put her notepad away. “As for Mr. Archer though…”

“What happened?”

“He’s dead. Not a nice scene, at all. He started feeling sick and dropped dead in front of everyone shortly after you had left. Your relatives said it was the most unholy scream they had ever heard.”