What the Forest takes. Pt.1

There were thirty-eight empty caskets in Millhaven before Jax's. I know because I counted them. I was eleven when I started keeping track, scratching tally marks on the inside cover of a notebook I kept hidden beneath my mattress like it was something shameful. Maybe it was. Maybe keeping a ledger of the dead is the kind of thing that gets you looked at sideways in a town that prefers not to look at anything too closely.

Jax used to tease me about it.

"You're morbid, Vex"

he'd say, grinning that lopsided grin that made the left corner of his mouth climb higher than the right.

"Normal kids collect baseball cards and Action figures"

"Normal kids don't live next to a forest that eats people"

I'd tell him and He never had a good answer for that.

His casket is number thirty-eight.

The funeral home in Millhaven is called Harrow & Sons, which I have always thought was a spectacularly on-the-nose name for a business built on grief. It sits on the edge of Culver Street, a squat Victorian building painted the grey of old withered teeth, with black shutters that don't quite hang level accommodated with a front garden of white hydrangeas that bloom every spring with an enthusiasm that feels obscene given the nature of the work being done inside. Somebody tends those flowers. I've never known who.

Today the building is full past capacity.

I arrive early enough to watch people stream through the double doors in their dark clothing, clutching each other's arms, their faces doing that particular thing faces do at funeral arranged into expressions of appropriate devastation but with eyes moving, always moving, checking to see who else is here, who is crying hardest, who has aged poorly since the last time the town gathered to grieve. Millhaven has had a lot of practice gathering to grieve. We are, as a community, extremely good at it and not by choice.

I sit in the third row. Not the front that belongs to his mother, Patricia, a small woman with Jax's same dark hair who I have watched age ten years in the two weeks since they found his hiking boots at the trailhead and nothing else. Not the back that's for the people who feel obligated to be here but not particularly sad, the town council members, the hardware store owner who sold Jax his first pocket knife, the high school principal who once gave him detention for calling a substitute teacher a quote

"bureaucratic bastard of a used sock puppet"

which, honestly was fair that substitute was an absolute freak of a creep towards students.

Third row. Yes I'll sit there close enough to see everything. Far enough to breathe.

The casket is mahogany, or something made to look like mahogany. It's polished to a high shine under the funeral home's soft lighting, adorned with white lilies along the top and sides undoubtedly Patricia's doing. also, as everyone in this room knows and no one is saying out loud, completely and entirely empty. No body. No remains. Not so much as a fragment of bone or a lock of hair to place inside it. Just a wooden cocoon of darkness.

The forest doesn't give back what it takes.

What it does with what it takes is something I am trying very hard not to think about in this moment, surrounded by Jax's family and the damp smell of too many people pressed into a room like sardines in a can. It's obvious this room wasn't designed for this many mourners. But my brain has never been particularly cooperative when it comes to things I don't want to think about, so here I am, thinking about it, staring at that empty polished box while the minister begins to speak but I was lost in my own thoughts.

I've been into the forest exactly three times in my life. The first time I was eight and it was a dare. The second time I was sixteen with jax. The third time was two weeks ago, when I went in after Jax.

I didn't find him.

I found other things.

The forest that borders Millhaven on its eastern edge has a name on the town maps Aldenmere Wood but nobody calls it that. Locals just call it

"Them there woods"

Or

"The woods"

with a particular flatness in their voice, the way you'd say the disease or the crash like naming it more specifically would give it ideas. It stretches for eleven miles in every direction from the eastern trailhead, dense and old-growth and extraordinarily, almost aggressively beautiful. The trees there are enormous, the kind of enormous that takes centuries to achieve, their canopies so thick that even on the brightest days the light that reaches the forest floor is green and dim and filtered, like being at the bottom of something. The ferns that carpet the ground are a shade of green so vivid it looks painted. The wildflowers that grow in the clearings bloom in colors that don't seem quite right, too saturated, too perfect, the red of them too red like the color of blood leaking from a lung shot deer, the white of them too white looking like an eye sclera, like flowers in a dream you can't quite shake when you wake up pretty and alluring.

I know why they're so beautiful now but I wish I didn't.

When I went in after Jax's disappearance.I followed the trail about a quarter mile before the trail did what it always eventually does in Aldenmere it thinned, grew uncertain, began suggesting rather than directing, the way a path does when something doesn't want you to have a clear way back. I kept going because Jax was in there somewhere and I was not prepared to accept the alternative. The trees got bigger. The light got greener. The silence got louder.

I found the wildflowers about half a mile in, in a clearing I had never seen before even though I would have sworn I knew every clearing within a half mile of that trailhead. They were growing in a rough circle, knee-high, shockingly red, and they were growing out of something dark, soft and wet in the earth that I made myself not look at directly the way you don't look directly at the sun. But peripheral vision is a hell of a thing, and I am an observant woman, and what I observed in my periphery was the suggestion of shapes beneath the soil. Pale and curved. A knuckle, maybe? The arc of something that used to be a rib? Either way I knew the flowers were beautiful but.

"The flowers were fed"

I turned around and walked back to the trailhead at a pace that was technically not running only because I was too frightened to run afraid to make noise. Because running in the forest especially this one feels like announcing yourself, like ringing a dinner bell, and I was not prepared to become fertilizer for something's floral arrangement so with regret i left going back home somehow I made it back alive.

They found Jax's boots the next morning. Clean. Unlaced, but clean, sitting together at the mouth of the trail like he'd left them there on purpose, like he'd just stepped out of them and walked on ahead in bare feet. There was no blood on them. No mud. Like the forest had tidied up after itself, which I found somehow more disturbing than blood would have been.

Millhaven's sheriff ruled it a disappearance pending further investigation.

I ruled it a thirty-eighth empty caskets with no clear explanation other than the forest ate him alive.

The minister is talking about Jax's laugh now breaking me from my own thoughts but still I kept my head slightly dipped down.

Jax had an extraordinary laugh big, sudden and completely unselfconscious, the laugh of a man who had never once worried about whether laughing was appropriate. He laughed at his own jokes before he finished telling them. He laughed at my jokes with a generosity I didn't always feel I'd earned. He laughed in the forest, the one time we'd walked the trailhead together as teenagers, loud and bright and reckless, and I'd grabbed his arm and told him to

"Stop it, would you, stop making so much noise in here"

and he'd looked at me with those brown eyes and said

"Vex, it's just trees"

Just trees.

I am staring at the white lilies on his empty casket and I am thinking about all the things I did not say.

I am thinking about the summer we were nineteen, sitting on the roof of his mother's house at two in the morning, close enough that our arms were touching, and how he'd turned to look at me and opened his mouth and then closed it again, and I'd thought

"say it, say it, say whatever you're about to say"

and he'd said

"So you want the last of this beer?"

And I'd said yes because I was a coward and he was a coward and we were between the two of us, an absolute catastrophe of unspoken things.

I am thinking about how I will never be able to tell him that I knew. That I think I knew for a long time. That the knowing lived in me like something planted, growing in the dark without sun, putting out roots I couldn't pull up even when I tried.

The minister continues his own words breaking me from mine again

"Jax was a young man of great warmth"

I press my thumbnail into my palm and focus on the small sharp pain of it and refuse to cry, because if I start I don't think I'll stop, and I have things to do after this. Crying is a luxury I cannot currently afford.

Patricia is in the front row with her shoulders shaking. Someone has their arm around her. I should be up there. I know I should be up there but yet I can't make myself move.

After the service people spill out onto the grey lawn and stand in clusters with cups of weak coffee, speaking in the low tones people use when they're not quite sure what's allowed to be said. I stand at the edge of it all, slightly apart, which is where I am most comfortable and also where I can see everyone, which is a habit I cannot help.

I can see the forest from here.

You can see the forest from almost anywhere in Millhaven if you face east. It sits at the edge of town like a held breath, dark and enormous and incongruously lovely, the canopy swaying slightly in a wind I can't feel from where I'm standing. The trees at its edge are the tallest things for miles in any direction. In autumn they don't turn the way normal trees turn they don't go orange or yellow or the tired brown of dying things. They go a deep, arterial red the exact color of the wildflowers I saw in that clearing, the ones growing out of the dark wet earth, and every autumn the whole town stands and looks at them and calls them beautiful and tries not to think too hard about what feeds them.

I look at the forest now and the forest, I think, looks back.

A cold thing moves through me that has nothing to do with the temperature.

Jax is in there. Whatever is left of him. Whatever the forest decided to keep and whatever it decided to use, he is in there somewhere, feeding the roots and the ferns and the flowers, becoming part of something ancient and patient and profoundly indifferent to the fact that I loved him and he is gone and I never said so.

I set my coffee cup down on the nearest flat surface.

Thirty-eight empty caskets.

The forest took thirty-eight people from this town just this year and this town buried thirty-eight boxes of air and planted thirty-eight headstones over nothing at all, and every spring the trails are opened back up and every summer the hikers go in and every autumn the trees go red as an open wound and we stand here and call it beautiful.

I am done calling it beautiful.

I look at the treeline for a long moment. Something shifts in the shadows at the forest's edge a movement too slow and too deliberate to be wind. The darkness between the trees rearranges itself almost imperceptibly, the way a face rearranges itself when it becomes aware of being watched.

It knows I'm looking.

Good.

I want it to know.

I pick up my coat from the back of the chair where I left it and I walk away from the funeral, away from the coffee and the murmuring and Patricia's shaking shoulders and I walk east.

Half way I stop not walking east. I stand planted in place staring at the looming alluring forest I wanna move.

I want to. Every nerve in my body is arranged in that direction like a compass needle finding north, pointing at the treeline, at the dark between the old trees, at whatever shifted in the shadows while I stood there with a cup of cold coffee and a chest full of things I should have said two years ago. I want to walk straight into Aldenmere and find what's left of Jax and drag it back out into the light by sheer force of grief and something else something deeper.

Instead I walk home. Because wanting to walk into Aldenmere is exactly what the forest wants, and I have made it a personal policy never to give it what it wants.

Jax called that policy paranoia.

Jax is currently fertilizer for worms and Lord knows what else.

My house is a ten-minute walk from Harrow & Sons, a narrow two-story rental on the end of Birch Street that I've lived in since I was twenty-three and that I have furnished with the specific aesthetic of someone who owns too many books and not enough bookshelves. The kitchen smells like coffee and something I burned four days ago and haven't identified. There is a coat hook by the door that has never once held a coat because I always drape them over the back of whatever chair is closest, a habit that would have driven Jax insane. He was inexplicably, a very neat person. Organized. His kitchen had labeled containers. I used to give him grief about it and secretly found it endearing in a way I would have died before admitting.

I hang my coat on the hook, just this once, because it feels like something.

Then my path lead me to my room where I pull a box out from under my bed.

The box is a shoebox, originally, a brown cardboard shoebox that I reinforced years ago with packing tape when the sides started to give. It contains, in rough chronological order: my notebook with its tally marks inside the cover, forty-seven newspaper clippings from the Millhaven Courier dating back to 1989, a photocopied sheaf of cemetery records I obtained from the county office three years ago under the pretense of doing genealogical research, two sheriff's reports from 2019 that a deputy named Carl left on the hood of his truck and which I may have technically stolen oh well not like they cared it was gone, and a folded piece of notebook paper on which I wrote, in my own handwriting, every version of the folklore I had ever been told about why people disappear in Aldenmere Wood.

I spread it all on the kitchen table and make fresh coffee and sit down.

The earliest clipping is from August 1989.

"LOCAL MAN MISSING AFTER HIKE, SEARCH CONTINUES."

The missing man is named Harold Greer, forty-one, a hardware supply salesman who was visiting Millhaven on business and took what the article describes as a casual afternoon walk on the Aldenmere trails. He was reported missing when he didn't check out of his motel. No body was recovered. The article is three paragraphs long and uses the word unfortunate twice, which tells you everything you need to know about how Millhaven has historically chosen to discuss this particular subject.

The clippings get more frequent after 2001. Three in 2003. Two in 2005. A gap of four years and then five in 2009, which was the year the Courier stopped reporting on the disappearances entirely, a decision they explained as not wanting to unduly alarm residents or discourage tourism, which is a sentence I have read approximately forty times and which still makes me want to put my fist through something.

The cemetery records are more honest than the newspaper, in the way that documents are sometimes accidentally honest not because anyone made a deliberate choice toward truth but because the form didn't have a field for euphemism. Under CAUSE OF DEATH for the Aldenmere missing, someone in the county office had developed, over the years, a small vocabulary of careful language. Exposure. Misadventure. Unknown circumstances. And then, beginning sometime around 2015, a new entry that appears on six consecutive records, written in the same hand, with what I have always imagined was a kind of exhausted resignation: Forest.

Just forest no Aldenmere woods just plain jane forest.

I respect that clerk enormously and I hope they got out of Millhaven I really doubt it though.

The folklore page is the most interesting document in the box, and also the most useless, which is a combination I have found to be extremely common when it comes to information about Aldenmere.

There are seven versions of the story, gathered from seven different people over roughly fifteen years, and they agree on almost nothing except the basic premise that the forest is dangerous and that the danger is not accidental.

Version one, from my grandmother before she died:

"The forest is old enough to be hungry. Old things get hungry. You don't go in after dark and you don't go in alone and you especially don't go in when you're sad, because it can smell grief the way a Wolves smells blood."

Version two, from a man named Douglas who drank at the bar on Culver Street every Friday and who claimed his grandfather had been a logger:

"They tried to clear-cut it in 1923. Sent in twelve men. Got back four. The four that came back didn't talk about it, but two of them stopped eating afterward. Just stopped. Sat down one day and didn't see the point anymore. You ask me what's in that forest, I'll tell you it's something that takes more than your body."

Version three, from my high school history teacher, who was the closest thing Millhaven had to an academic authority on local history and who delivered this information with the slightly embarrassed air of a person who knows how they sound:

"The indigenous name for the land predates European settlement by at least four centuries. The rough translation, as best as anyone has been able to determine, is something like the place that eats or possibly the place that is always eating. The distinction apparently wasn't considered important enough to specify."

The place that is always eating.

I look at that line for a moment. Drink some coffee. Continue.

Versions four through six are variations on a theme: the forest is a punishment (for what, nobody agrees), the forest is a presence that predates the town and resents it, the forest takes people because it needs them, because something in it requires a specific and ongoing supply of something that can only be sourced from human beings. Version six, from a woman who moved away from Millhaven when I was twelve and whose name I never knew, was the most specific:

"It uses them to grow. Not metaphorically. Do you understand me? It puts them in the ground and it grows out of them. That's why nothing in there ever dies. That's why it's always green. You go in there and you don't come back out because you become the reason it stays beautiful."

She moved away the following week. I don't blame her.

Version seven I wrote down last. It is the shortest entry on the page, and I wrote it in different handwriting from the rest—slightly larger, slightly less controlled—because I wrote it two weeks ago, sitting on the floor of my kitchen at three in the morning, after I came back from the forest without Jax.

It says:

"I think it knows us. I think it picks."

I have been trying not to think about this in sequential order because sequential order makes it more real, gives it a shape, and shapes can be examined, and I am not sure I am ready to examine it fully. But I am sitting at my kitchen table with thirty-eight empty caskets lingering in my head and a forest that watches me from the east side of town, and ready or not seems increasingly beside the point.

The boots at the trailhead were placed, not left. That was the first thing. I'd almost missed it with the others in my panic both boots sitting parallel, three inches apart, laces tucked neatly inside. Jax couldn't have tied his shoes in a straight line under normal circumstances. The neatness wasn't his. Something else had arranged them.

A quarter mile in, the trail began to change. I've described this already the thinning, the dimming, the silence that accumulates like water in a low place. What I haven't described is the smell. Because there are things the mind skips over in the moment because to register them fully would be to stop moving, and stopping moving in Aldenmere is not something you do if you want to leave.

It smelled like iron. Like wet soil. Like the specific sweetness of organic decay underneath something floral, the way a bouquet smells if you leave it in the vase too long and the stems begin to rot in the water beautiful on top and something deeply wrong underneath if you get close enough. It was everywhere. It permeated. Within a hundred feet of the trailhead I could taste it at the back of my throat and I kept walking because Jax was somewhere in there and I am, whatever my other failings, extremely stubborn.

The clearing was roughly fifty feet across. The wildflowers I described the ones too red to be natural, too perfect, too saturated they were growing in a ring, dense and waist-high, and at their center the ground was dark and sunken the way ground gets when something substantial has been added to it and the soil hasn't fully settled. The roots of the surrounding trees stretched toward this patch of ground with a deliberateness that I can only describe as appetite, the thick pale roots surfacing from the earth and submerging again, over and over, like something feeding in shallow water.

And in the ground

I won't write it in full. I have written it in full exactly once, in a document I encrypted on my laptop and will likely never open again. What I will write is this:

"They were not all recent. The shapes beneath the soil were at various stages of becoming part of the soil, and some of them had been there long enough that maggots and worms wiggled about that shapes the flowers had grown through them completely in places. stems threading through the architecture of what used to be people, blooms opening where the biology of the thing below had provided something the flower needed."

It was the most horrifying thing I have ever seen and it was also, and I hate myself for this, extraordinarily beautiful, the red of those flowers against the dark earth, the way the light came through the canopy in long green shafts, the absolute silence of it all.

I think that's deliberate. I think it wants to be looked at. I think the beauty is the point.

I found a scrap of orange fabric snagged on a root at the clearing's edge away from the others. The same orange as Jax's jacket the beaten-up canvas thing he'd had since college, the one with the frayed left cuff he never got around to fixing. The size of my palm. Torn, not cut. Like something had pulled it off him in a hurry, or like he'd grabbed the root on his way down trying to stop himself from.....I don't wanna think about it.

I took the fabric. I still have it. It's in my pocket right now.

I sit at my kitchen table for a long time after I finish going through the box. The afternoon light shifts and dims and the kitchen goes grey and I don't turn on a lamp. In the dark, the anger is easier to hold than the grief, so I hold the anger at Jax for going in alone, for going in at all, for being the kind of person who believed in afternoon hikes and the fundamental benignness of the natural world right up until the natural world proved him definitively wrong. At myself for not going with him. For every argument I'd had with myself over the years about why now wasn't the right moment to say the thing I wanted to say, why there would always be more time, why we were young and there was no rush.

There was a rush. There was always a rush. We just didn't know it.

I am so angry at us both for not knowing it.

The grief comes anyway, the way it always does under the door like cold air, finding every gap in whatever I've built to keep it out. I think about his laugh. I think about the roof at two in the morning and the beer I didn't want but took anyway and the things he didn't say. I think about his boots sitting in parallel at the trailhead, neatly arranged by something that has no understanding of and no interest in who he was, who he is to me, what it took from both of us when it took him.

I think about the orange fabric in my pocket.

I take it out and put it on the table.

And then I notice something I didn't notice before something I must have seen without processing, the way the mind sometimes shelves information until you're ready for it. Along the torn edge of the fabric, there is a mark. Not a blood stain. Not a dirt smear. Something deliberate, something drawn or pressed into the material in a dark brownish pigment, a shape approximately two inches across.

It looks like a root system. Or a set of lungs. Or a hand with too many fingers, the lines branching and twisting in a pattern that seems almost organized. Intentional.

Like a map?

Or a message?

Or an invitation? Of sorts.

I stare at it for a very long time in the grey kitchen light, with the forest sitting at the edge of town, patient and permanent and always eating, and I feel the compass needle in my chest swing east.

I think:

"I need to know what this means."

I think:

"Im going to need better boots."