Greg was an adventurer despite everything he’d been through. He took to the hill behind his home with firm footsteps, marching up the mile long road like it was a path to great treasure. Even as his sister and I plodded behind him, sweat pouring down us in the stifling August heat, he turned and cried for us to keep up. How he was so animated, I didn’t know. Not even grasshoppers chirruped under the midday sun, and the tall grass, usually so green, had turned to yellow straw as summer reached its peak.

“Come on!” he cried as he reached a seemingly arbitrary spot on the road. “I saw it this way!” He pointed into the grass, a thin footpath barely visible between wavering fronds.

“What did you see?” Samantha shouted. She was usually so calm and responsible, but I could tell she was close to blowing that cool head of hers.

Not long ago, Greg and Samantha had been a trio. The loss of their older brother, gone two years by this point, had broken their parents in an unusual way. It was not uncommon to lose children in my hometown. It felt like every year the class register grew shorter by at least two names. But where most parents became overprotective, Greg’s had gone the other way. They grew listless and morose, withdrawing not only from the world, but their remaining children. Three times a week, Greg and Samantha came to my house and ate food with us. The rest of the time Samantha cooked for her family, just as she packed Greg’s lunches and washed his clothes and did anything else that a parent usually did. If she’d been older, she would have probably forbidden Greg’s “expeditions'' entirely. But she was young and exhausted, and every time Greg set out to explore the wilderness at the edge of town his face lit up so bright it must have been impossible to say no.

Today he had dragged us both to see something he’d found. Something that he claimed was incredible.

“You have to see for yourself!” he said when we caught up with him. Samantha and I were breathless, but Greg was practically jumping on the spot with excitement.

“I need a break,” I whined.

“A good idea Stephen,” Samantha replied in between heavy breaths. “Let’s just… let’s just enjoy the view.”

We turned to face our home.

On our left was the forest, on our right open space, and below us, built on the sloping side of the mountain was our hometown. Looking at it from so far, it appeared plain and small and normal. But in the corner of our eyes, drifting from the spaces between the trees of the forest, we could see the red twine. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of strands floated over open air down the slope we’d just climbed and entered the town miles below where it formed a complex and ever-changing web. Each string had small golden bells attached at every metre, and you’d think that with the string strung so far between such distant points that every gust of wind would create a chorus of ringing. But they were silent, and they would remain so unless someone was careless enough to touch one of the snares.

“It’s actually kind of beautiful,” Samantha mused quietly, and I found myself agreeing. “You’ve checked for snares on this route?” she asked her brother.

“I checked yesterday!” he cried, turning to the path like a dog straining on a leash. “It’s not far! It’s right there!”

“The twine could’ve moved since then,” she said. “I don’t like this. I don’t think we should be doing this. It’s dangerous. Think about the Golden ru—”

“I know the Golden rule!” Greg suddenly screamed. “Don’t touch the thread! Don’t touch the thread!"

Greg kept shouting the phrase over and over until his face turned pink.

“Did it help Johnathan!?” he finally shrieked as he lost energy. “No! He was the most careful of all and it still got him so what’s the fucking point!”

Samantha’s gasp was so loud it stopped Greg’s tantrum dead in its tracks. For a second her hand twitched and I thought she was going to hit her younger brother, but it was only the slightest of movements.

“Right!” she said, as stern as any headmistress. “That’s it. Back we go. Stephen I’m sorry Greg had to ruin this by being a potty mouth.”

Greg’s soured into regret and despair.

“No no no! You have to believe me. You have to see it!”

Samantha took a deep breath and knelt down to Greg’s level.

“Do you know what the most important rule really is?”

“Don’t touch the thread,” Greg sobbed.

“No.” Samantha shook her head. “The most important rule, the one that you’ll one day appreciate is the hardest of them all, is the one that says you never, ever, help someone who’s touched a snare.”

“I know that.” His words were choked out between heaving breaths.

“No you don’t. I mean, you do. But you don’t really know what it means. What it actually means is leaving someone you love behind. Even if they scream. Even if they cry. Even when… even when it comes to take them. You walk away, run if you can. And you don’t look back. Could you do that to me, Greg? If I was lying there crying for you to help me, could you just run away?”

“I… I… I don’t know.”

“If I had to do that, I think it would kill me. My heart would never be whole again. Do you want to leave me for dead if something goes wrong?” Greg shook his head to signal no. “That’s why we should turn back,” Samantha continued. “This is too risky. You’re too excited. Do you know what it would do to me if you ran over one? Do you…”

Samantha swallowed and wiped her teary eyes with her cardigan sleeve.

“We’re going home. That’s final.”

She turned towards me and went to speak, but in the few seconds where her back was to Greg, his face scrunched up and all his anger returned. I thought he was going to leap at her and start kicking and punching, but he did something much worse.

He ran into the tall grass.

Samantha didn’t even have time to turn around and call his name before we saw the grass disturbed, and heard a loud thump followed by a twang and the ringing of a bell. The snare, wherever it was, must have been perfectly placed to catch him. There were a few agonising seconds before Greg started crying. I could tell from his voice that my friend had seriously hurt himself, but neither Samantha nor I moved.

The bell kept ringing. It would not stop. It was an unnatural sound and one by one the red twine in the distance began to shiver sympathetically and a thousand other bells joined in. The haunting sound lit up not only the mountainside, but the town below us, and I knew that already my family would be terrified to find me and know that I was safe.

I wanted to run back to them, to flee the rising alarm that seized not only my thoughts but the very air around me as miles and miles of web thrummed with anticipation. But before I could turn, Greg appeared out of the grass and stared at us.

He was, in spite of everything, silent. It must have been shock. He certainly looked like he was surprised to find several metres of ordinary looking twine fused to the bare skin on his arms and face in coiling bunches. No blood. Just swollen flesh slowly turning pink as if it too was shocked to find its own boundaries violated and was now having a delayed reaction. Quick. Invader. Shut it down. But this was no microbe or allergen. Several strands of the stuff had fused to his hair and face and arms, and in places like his cheeks and ears it had even punched through the flesh entirely and emerged on the other side. With a firm grip it was slowly but surely beginning to pull him back into the woods. That force would only increase with every passing second until there was simply no resisting.

But Greg fought on. He pushed against them and staggered towards us, reaching out a hand threaded with twine. Samantha didn’t move, but she did raise a hand as if ready to embrace him. But the sound of me crying out and falling backwards made her look away from her brother, who finally began to wail and sob. She fixed me with teary eyes and in that moment I watched Samantha’s heart break before she turned from her weeping brother, grabbed my hand, and ran.

Greg followed.

Neither of us knew it detail what happened when the snares caught you, but as Greg continued to stumble after us, his cries and pleas growing increasingly furious, I darkly found myself wishing it’d just hurry up and be over with. Looking back I’m surprised at the ten year old’s imaginative vocabulary, but he was facing death and I think his mind dug deep. God he hated us in those moments. I’m sure of that. He was scared and hurting and the only people close to him were abandoning him. He told us we’d go to hell. He told us we deserved to die. He told us a lot, not stopping until half-way down the hill when he finally fell. I turned, not meaning or wanting to, and saw him push himself up with his hands, gravel embedded in the puffy bleeding skin of his face, and he glared at me with burning hatred. He tried to pull at the snares embedded in his forearms, but his hands bonded to the twine immediately and it only left him too tangled up to resist any further.

The twine pulled harder and he fell backwards, and with kicking feet he was dragged slowly out of sight.

I was so afraid of what I’d seen, I soiled myself and my vision blurred. My legs grew faint and Samantha, barely slowing, picked me up and carried me the rest of the way. When we reached the town my parents were waiting for us. They held me so tight that it hurt my little ribs but I didn’t care. I sobbed into my mother’s arms and paid only a moment’s notice to the weak, hysterical Samantha whose own parents were nowhere to be seen.

-

“I can’t believe you bought it.”

“I can’t believe they sold it,” I replied as the helicopter banked over the town below. From this high up the snares resembled something blood red and fleshy, the floating cilia of a strange jellyfish tangled in an artificial reef. The town, a litter of miniatures that grew from the mountainside like a coral, was clearly abandoned. It had never been well looked after, not even when we lived there, but over the last few years it had begun to look apocalyptic.

“Did the government tell you any more about what they found?” Samantha asked.

I looked across at the woman beside me. She looked older than her age, but there still remained a ghost of the teenage girl who’d saved my life, and if I looked further still, a hint of resemblance to her brother. Does it hurt for her to look in the mirror? I wondered. Does that familial resemblance sting? So many ghosts lingered around her, not just Greg’s.

Two brothers, two parents. No one was around to witness the latter’s abduction, but their disappearance was no mystery. How could it be? People did not go ‘missing’ in my hometown. Everyone knew what it meant if someone failed to show up at breakfast, or was a no-show at work or church. It meant they’d gotten careless. It meant they’d touched a snare and there was no coming back from that mistake. Although in the case of Samantha’s parents it was unclear if they’d done so by accident.

“They didn’t find anything,” I said. “Nothing concrete anyway. I think it frustrated them, this unsolvable problem. Maybe they hope I’ll throw enough money at it to figure it out. Let some billionaire spend his cash and leave their budgets alone. God knows it’s what most people think when they find out I have money.”

An awkward silence settled between us.

“Thank you,” Samantha said once it had gone on long enough. “I know you must get a lot of people asking for charity…”

“Don’t worry,” I replied, cutting her off. “I didn’t mean… It’s the least I could do. He was my friend too.”

“It’s just if that drone footage is real…”

She was referring to the one bit of fruitful evidence the government had dug up, a short video taken by an aerial drone racing through overgrown trees. It lasted no more than five seconds, covering a hundred or so metres before the machine had failed. But for the first time in mine or Samantha’s life, we had finally had a glimpse into the forbidden woods which were the source of the red snares. Five seconds of nothing. Five seconds of blurry trees and autumnal leaves.

And a frame.

A single frame.

A frame that was emailed to Samantha by an anonymous researcher. A frame that prompted her to call me and cash in all that guilt. I could’ve been angry to find this ghost of my childhood returned, demanding I spend millions on some whim, but I wasn’t. She had sent me the image and I immediately knew what she wanted and why. Six months later and I’d managed to bribe enough officials to let me purchase the derelict and empty remains of my hometown.

The image was of Greg. A blurred shadow recognisable only by the distinct make and colouring of his clothes. Details burned into both mine and Samantha’s memories. Details neither of us could forget. No you could not see his face, but we didn’t have to.

We knew it was him anyway.

Samantha’s expression grew sad as her eyes fell to the window where the town passed directly beneath us. We were slowing as the chopper approached the landing site. I’d briefed the pilot that the situation was fluid, and he would need to keep a keen eye out for a place free of snares. A glance at the direction he was taking told me he was heading straight for the church.

“Do you know what it was like? In the end?” she asked, eyes still on the town. Even from this height, we could see thousands of snares snaking from building to building, window to window, through abandoned cars and around tilting telephone poles. A cat’s cradle of shimmering red twine.

“Dad called a few weeks before he disappeared,” I answered. “Every couple months he’d call and go through the list. Every time it got smaller. In the end it was just one person. I asked if it had been a good month, if people had been extra careful. He told me there just weren’t enough people to go missing anymore. In the end, he was the last. Stubborn bastard refused to move.”

Down below, the church raced into view. In the months since the town had emptied, the once impeccably kept grass had been left to grow wild and unkempt in the Autumn heat. I wondered what it might hide, so I leaned forward and got the pilot’s attention. “Radio the guys on the ground and tell them not to step on the grass,” I shouted. “They used to keep it short for a reason.”

The pilot gave a thumbs up before speaking into his mic. Standing sheepishly at the edge of the old lawn, three small figures looked up at us and waved to get our attention.

When I’d first paid for the expedition to enter the town and map its contents, there had been four. Two scientists and two former soldiers hired as security. It didn’t surprise me looking down that we were missing one of the scientists.

-

“It’s worse than ever before.”

Dr Wagner, the expedition’s scientist, looked at me with curiosity as we picked our way carefully down Main street.

“It wasn’t unusual for one of the roads to have a few snares across it,” I added. “But the air is practically red with the stuff.”

“Perhaps it has become frustrated with the lack of food,” she replied.

“You think it eats them?” I asked and she nodded. “Seems possible,” I added as I studied a nearby shop window. A little boutique that sold dresses, the kind women would wear to church. I remember waiting outside while my mother perused inside for what felt like hours on end. Sometimes I would grow impatient and want to go inside too, but something about the mannequin in the window scared me. Faceless. Featureless. Hard plastic limbs. What was it about the lack of eyes that left me convinced it was looking right at me? It had only gotten worse with age, its head a rorschach of peeling paint, beige on white on tarnished gun metal greys.

“It must be intelligent, sentient if not sapient,” Wagner said as I turned away from the unsettling doll. The scientist was a small woman in her late forties, usually quite brazen and funny, but twenty four hours in this town had already worn her down. “It knew to target the objects that Mike… Dr Mignola touched regularly.”

I cringed at the reminder of the expedition’s losses.

“It isn’t just intelligent,” I said. “It’s vindictive. Did I tell you what happens if you damage the thread?”

She shook her head.

“One man set fire to a whole bunch of snares on his lawn,” I told her. “Used a can of spray paint and his lighter. Woke up the next day to find a snare punched right through his belly and tied to a bed spring on the other side.”

The scientist winced at the thought, but I left out the part where the man had stayed in his bed for a full two days before he was finally driven mad by the itch of the twine running through his guts. I’d heard from some older kids that in the end he tore at himself like an animal in a trap, and in a rare twist the twine did not take him. It left his body there, skewered on a piece of string, and the doctor had to come round with a couple farmers and cut him out. But still the twine stayed fixed and taut so that his family could not get rid of anything it touched. Not she sheets. Not the mattress. Not even the half inch or so of flesh the twine had bonded to. The stink of infection infested the house, they said, and on hot summer days it even reached the street outside.

“It must have been hell living here,” she said. “Why would anyone stay?”

“Most people didn’t. Just about everyone my age left as soon as they got old enough. Town went from five thousand to a few hundred in just a couple decades,” I replied. “When my dad was a kid there were maybe two or three snares at a time. Few enough if you got tangled others could cut you out without too much risk to themselves. Hurt like fucking hell, mind, but survivable. By the time it got real bad, some people were just too old or stubborn. Plus I suspected some stayed in the hope those taken would come back. My father was definitely in that camp.”

“At least you got out,” Wagner said. “If you’d stayed you would’ve either been taken already, or probably gone insane from the loneliness.”

I understood her words but I didn’t feel them. People who were born into this were never really normal. I couldn’t take a piss without checking the door five times each way. Sleep was short, fitful at best since that was always when you were most vulnerable. From what I understood, most people who’d left the town hadn’t fared so well.

“I suppose.” I shrugged and we continued to carefully step over strands of red twine that thrummed with excitement as our feet passed over. We got maybe half-way down Main street before Wagner tripped, fell, and set off the first of the snares.

-

“Drop it.”

She lowered her backpack without taking her eyes off it. Lucky woman had fallen in such a way her bag had taken the hit, but already other snares had started to gum up the fabric. They attracted each other, somehow. You never saw them move. They just appeared when you weren’t looking, almost like they were always there. But a quick person could beat them.

“Jesus Christ!” I cried. “Step away!”

Wagner ran over to me as dozens more snares appeared wrapped around her backpack. Slowly they began to constrict, melding into and right through the material, looking for the flesh of its owner, while still dragging it further into the web so more snares could seize it. Slowly but surely, the bag was dragged into the darkness of a nearby alley.

“Fuck that was close,” the scientist said once the bag was out of sight.

I didn’t bother chastising her. No one could really get used to this kind of place. You had to live with it for years before the lessons it taught you sank in. I merely offered to take a short break, sharing what little food I had, before the pair of us continued. At least she was a little more watchful going forward. Nothing more I could ask for.

The journey dragged on for hours with our pace so slow. We used the time to document what we saw. The state of the town. Crumbling buildings. Twine punctured glass without shattering it, blending perfectly with wood, rock, metal, and plastic where one end met man-made structures while the other ran off towards the horizon, inevitably disappearing into the darkness beneath the forest’s canopy. From there, no one knew where it led. Only that disappearing into the woods meant you never came back. Meanwhile the silence bore down on us. I wasn’t used to it. Certainly not here of all places, what was once a home to me. But aside from us moving and speaking, there was nothing to break up the ear silence and even then, our words felt intrusive and dangerous. Like we might catch the attention of something lurking just out of sight, perhaps somewhere behind the windows that peered down on us. Old grey and grimy, the rooms beyond hidden like islands in the fog. The only splash of colour, the red twine that ensnared the spaces within those decrepit rooms. Hardware shops. Florists. Record stores. Apartments once occupied by people who had left no one behind to claim their things, so now toasters and TVs and ovens and fridges and all manner of personal items lingered on, gathering no dust because there was no one left to shed skin and create some.

I felt watched by those windows. Slowly but surely my paranoia spiked, like a child in a haunted house convinced that something was waiting to jump out. Wagner spoke to me in places and I just ignored her, willing her into silence out of fear of something coming along. At one point she had to grab me to get my attention.

“Do you hear that?” she asked, her eyes wide with fear and I realised for the first time it wasn’t just me who’d been feeling the pressure.

I listened.

There it was. A tinkle of a bell, but unlike the ones I’d heard when a snare was touched. This was gentle. Playful. Singular. A lone bell, a lone piece of twine somewhere, being played with like a cat batting a toy.

“What the fuck?” I muttered, clearly more baffled by this than Wagner. The bells did not ring alone. I knew this. Everyone in the town knew this. They always screamed in unison.

As quickly as it came it stopped, but we investigated anyway, pulled by the lure into the doorway of a shop. I went first, Wagner close behind. When she saw the figure standing there she gasped but whatever noise I wanted to make was caught in my throat. At first I assumed it was another person, but their stock-still pose could not have been achieved by anyone with a pulse.

It was a mannequin. The mannequin. The one I’d studded at the other end of the street. It even wore the same clothes. It had been punctured by snares in dozens of places. The head. The neck. The elbows and knees. So much so it resembled a marionette, and even as the comparison popped into my head it turned to face us. Stiff rotation achieved by the tug of the twine. With more stilted movement it reached out and held up Wagner’s bag, suddenly unharmed, albeit a little scuffed.

“Should… should I?”

Wagner almost reached out.

“Fuck no!” I cried while snatching her wrist. “I’ve never seen anything like this, but Jesus Christ if it doesn’t look like a trap I don’t know what does. No. No. We need to move. We need to find the others and get the hell on with this expedition. No more notes.

“Radio the others,” I added while glaring at the empty street, watching for signs of further movement behind all that dull and lifeless glass. “It’s time to move into the woods.”

-

Samantha and I were standing on the crest of the same hill where Greg had fallen over twenty years ago, only now the air was cooler and the grass greener, and plenty of birds chirruped in the nearby trees. It had seemed through no gentle twist of fate we’d been brought to the trail he’d singled out years ago.

“This is definitely what the satellite picked out?” I asked while Samantha chewed anxiously on her thumb.

“This is the route,” Wagner replied. “Why is there something wrong with it? It’s just that the infrared and elevation scans made it clear, if we want to enter the forest this is our best bet.”

“No, if you’re sure, you’re sure,” I said while briefly nudging a child’s shoe back into the long grass. I could only hope Samantha hadn’t noticed.

“Come on,” one of the soldiers said while taking point. “We need to get moving or else we risk getting stuck here in the dark.”

-

The woods were surprisingly free of snares, but for the last century the townspeople had treated it like cursed land, and it seemed so had the wildlife. No trails. No paths. No sign of intervention by humans or animals. Nothing dared to encroach on these trees, to weather down their grip on the Earth. They grew over one another like people in a jostling crowd, roots left to thicken and fight tooth and nail, crowding so tightly they burst through the soil and crawled over one another like something in a mangrove swamp. You didn’t hike through this forest, you crawled along on your hands and knees, climbing steep inclines one moment, gripping gnarled roots like the rungs of a ladder, before descending the other side in reverse.

“Was this place always free of snares?” One of the soldiers asked.

“Honestly… I don’t know,” I replied. Both Samantha and I had been shocked by that fact and neither of us had talked since noticing it.

“No one went into the woods,” Samantha added as the same man helped her over a particularly steep set of roots. “It wasn’t even a matter of being forbidden. It was just that if you entered, you never returned.”

“High stakes for a hike,” he replied. “I’m not sure I’m being paid enough to never see the sun again.”

“Well we’ve walked, what? Thirty minutes? And we’re still alive,” Wagner said. “Maybe people just got lost. Nothing says…”

Wagner was climbing beside Sam as she spoke, only her words came to a startling halt before she could finish. She cried out, lost her footing, and tumbled backwards. But as she fell her cries grew shrill and almost hysterical, and I rushed over to help unsure of what had happened. When I reached her, she was on her back, clutching an old piece of root. In a blur, she threw it far away from herself and began to point at something inside the roots.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck…” she muttered while hyperventilating.

“Oh my God!” Samantha cried as her eyes picked out what had upset Wagner.

It took a second to see it. I had crawled over that exact spot just moments ago and noticed nothing. But there it was, a moss-covered bundle of leathery and mottled skin, the features below so brutalised by decay that it was scarcely recognisable as anything that might have once skittered or skulked around these woods.

A deer.

Dead. Desiccated. Taken years before. Poor Wagner had gripped one of its bony limbs mistaking it for a root–it was nearly identical due to the moss covering it–but only the slimy give of its skin beneath her fingers had clued her in and then once she saw those hollow eyes gazing back at her from the darkness… well it’s a wonder she hadn’t screamed the whole place down.

“Looks like it died and got caught up in the tree roots,” one of the soldiers said as he took a closer look.

“Do you think it touched one of the snares?” Wagner asked as she rubbed her hands clean on her trousers.

“Guys…”

“Does it even take animals?” Wagner added.

“It can,” I replied.

“Guys…”

“Weren’t allowed pets because of it,” Samantha added. “Birds seemed to avoid the snares instinctively but cats, dogs, anything like that really, didn’t fair so well.”

“Guys!” One of the soldiers shouted from the nearest deadfall where he peeked over the top. “I found the townspeople.”

-

They moved. Chasing them or walking towards them was a sure way to get lost and the soldiers let us know that emphatically. We were to continue as-is, penetrating deeper into the forest in the hope of finding something, anything, that gave us answers. Meanwhile all we could do was ignore the strange figures that bobbed amongst the trees.

Limp bodies.

Hanging arms

Drooping heads. Hair full of twigs and leaves. Mouths full of soil. Moss coated skin, pallid and soft. Dead bodies suspended like puppets in twine. They didn’t run if you approached them, they merely drifted away as if the hands that controlled them were taking them off stage. This was the first time in my life I’d seen the red thread used for something other than snares.

Somehow, this felt worse.

“Guys,” I said after we’d marched for another hour. “I think we can safely say how that image of Greg was taken.” I gestured to one of the bodies that floated amidst the trees, its body swaying in unseen currents. “Are we sure we need to go further?”

“He’s right,” one of the soldiers said as he dropped his bag and began to roll out his shoulders and back. “I don’t like this one bit. And we now know the context of that screengrab. I know I’m not paying for this whole thing but, I think it’s time to call it a day.” He reached down and grabbed the bag, ready to pull one strap over his shoulder, when we heard it.

How had we been so stupid?

The woods had never been free of snares, it was just another way of getting us to lower our guard. When the soldier had reached for the bag his hand, bare skin even, had brushed against a snare that had appeared when our eyes were turned. A dozen brass bells rang out from the contact and slowly, joining in one by one, a thousand, a million others joined. A deafening, maddening, ear-splitting cry. The most unnatural thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Decades gone without it, but here it was once more, powerful enough to make me feel like a weeping child waiting to be grabbed by Samantha’s arms.

The soldier looked at me, terrified.

“You said there weren’t any in the forest!” he cried, pale as a ghost. I began to stammer. I wanted to say we’d made no promises, that I’d only agreed with others observations, but what would that achieve!?

“Calm down!” I shouted instead but he tried to run towards us. Already new snares had appeared to tangle up his feet, binding to his clothes, wrapping around his limbs from the ever-rising panic that made him thrash his limbs. The man was going to die. Destined to. It was too late. Maybe if we’d taken it slowly, reacted just right, but that ship had sailed now. He was bound in dozens of them, and as he continued to panic it only grew worse. They melted into his scalp, his cheeks, his brow, his hands and where his top rode up in the mad struggle, they now began to weld to his chest and back.

“No no no no no…”

He muttered the words over and over. His friend took a step towards him but I held out a hand to stop him. What could he do? The soldier continued to thrash in fear. Anyone who got near him would end up touching a snare and there was no coming back from that. His panic made him as dangerous to us as he was to himself. We had to watch as the snares ramped up the pressure, dragging him with increasing speed up and over a cluster of roots.

“Oh no…”

Wagner was the first to notice. The snares did not run over all the roots! They went through them, under them. Their path was a complicated weave in and out of ancient boughs and roots.

“Don’t watch,” was all I managed to say as his body hit the first of many split directions. As one we turned away. Samantha scrunched her face, trying as hard as she could to shut out any and all light. Wagner clasped her hands over her ears to block out the sound of breaking bone, but there was no escaping those screams. She surely must have heard them.

And the remaining soldier… for some reason he watched.

When it was done there was only blood slicked tree limbs, torn and shredded clothes, and a grown man on his knees vomiting and crying from what he’d just seen. And behind us, all around us, all except for a single route ahead, the snares had returned. So many the air thrummed like a dropped guitar. So many it was hard to see further than a few metres in any direction. So many that the message they sent was clear. After all, the timing of the first snare could not have been an accident. Whatever lay them was telling us loud as it could,

There is no turning back.

-

We did not hear the soldier’s cries, but we heard the struggle.

I’m still not sure what happened, only that by the time we turned he was one foot off the ground, his mouth a mask of twine so thick it resembled a writhing nest of earthworms. A faceless floating body, his limbs shivering from the overwhelming agony–God I hope that if you can die of pain, it at least happens quickly–and his face a quivering ever-shifting bundle of blood-red. The sight was like a nightmare, and it was all the worse that we hadn’t even seen it happen. If it hadn’t been for one of his shoes falling off as he had a seizure, we might never have even known he was gone!

But that wasn’t the worst of it. No. The worst was that he came back.

Wagner noticed first. She was already at the rear. When it became apparent to her that another person had floated up behind and was now just a few metres away, she mewed a desperate cry for help and Samantha and I turned in unison.

The man who’d been taken just an hour before had resumed his position at the back of the group. He bobbed along the woodland floor, but his feet did not touch the ground. If we approached, he moved away just like the others. But unlike them he was being paraded in full view, close behind to make sure we stayed on track. If we took a step, he took a ‘step’ as well, bouncing along in mock imitation of us. Whatever had happened to him in the canopy, he looked broken now. Crunched. Crumpled. Playdoh squeezed in the fist of an angry child. Sunken eyes and a toothless mouth hung low, his dislocated jaw swinging freely as saliva collected on a swollen tongue.

Just like the mannequin, with a single stiff arm, the twine moved him and gestured for us to carry on.

-

At last, after the hours had gone on for so long the sky turned a dull grey, ready for nightfall, we found it. A clearing in the woods as large as any stadium and there before us lay what I could only describe as a congregation.

And like many great gatherings held in secret and silence, they knelt in supplication, heads pressed to the floor. Skin and hair withered away, or at least so marred by the filth around them that they were hard to tell apart. Individual identity meant little in this crowd. The clothes too were close to falling apart, but all these people on their knees, somehow their shoes still told a story. Leather boots. Brogues. Moccasins. Slippers. Trainers. Chucks. Nikes. Doc Martins. Boomers to Millennials, three generations of a town brought to their knees. Bright and colourful. Stern and businesslike. The elderly and the young alike lay before us.

Dead men and women praying.

To a woman bound in twine.

She was not another floating marionette. This was immediately apparent. Her features were not hidden, her skin not marred by soil. Her hair, a rich chestnut brown, was long and flowing. Her clothes, what little we could see beneath a cocoon of red twine, was a pale white gown. But time had not left her alone. Her head was a withered skull, her mouth a leering gape. A corpse as surely as any other, but free from the abuse of a life on the forest floor for she floated high amongst the trees, thousands of red snares emerging from her body to suspend her in the centre of an explosion of red lines that radiated out from her core.

Beneath her lay the remnants of an ancient bonfire. Above her, the branches and canopy had been scorched black. But the woman appeared to have been untouched by flame, a ghostly image of death. She was like something out of a renaissance painting. Beautiful and haunting, otherworldly and divine. The sight of her made my heartbreak, even if I couldn’t say why.

“Who is she?” Wagner asked, her voice choked with tears.

All at once, the bodies turned to face us, moving from their bowed position just enough to fix us with vacant, cloudy eyes. Greg was one of those many. I spotted him nearby, still a child. He glared at me with empty sockets that seemed darker than any shadow, like a flicker of his betrayal remained alive within him. Had he worn that furious expression for all these years?

I wanted to answer Wagner’s question but the answer froze in my throat. I had no definitive proof but couldn’t see the betrayal on the woman’s face? Couldn’t she see the hatred in her hollow eyes? God being stood there, it felt wrong, felt dangerous. It felt like I’d just wandered into Chernobyl and was making direct contact with the elephant’s foot. Whoever that woman was, she radiated hate the same way the sun radiates heat. Whatever the details of her life, there was no mistaking the intensity of her contempt for us.

I had spent decades wondering what force or creature could hate my town so much that it would torture us for nearly three decades. Looking at her I understood easily where that cruelty came from. A witch burned, perhaps? I’d never heard of that in our history. And who burns a witch in the nineties? But who knows what happens in the deep woods. Who knows what atrocities are committed in the dark, and so far from watching eyes? Then again, did she need justification to hate us? A part of me felt like I was standing before a god of some kind and who knows what they do or do not take offence to.

After all, do you explain to an ant why you crush it?

As if hearing my thoughts she turned to face me. Dead but alive. Rotting but whole. And for a brief passing instant I saw enough to render the world white, for blood to come bubbling out my ears in a warm stream I wouldn’t notice for hours more. And then, after that, silence, darkness. My final thought was the realisation that I’d been right.

I had just heard a god speak.

-

From the town came church bells. Even from where we sat on the hood of a car miles away awaiting extraction, I could see the glow in the tower. The town had come alive at last. Our journey from the woods had not been alone. Her congregation, easily a thousand rotting bodies, floated down behind us. And she came in tow, looming over all like some nightmarish puppeteer. Only when we reached the bottom of the hill and passed the first building did the woman in red move into the lead where she slowly took her congregation to the centre of the town. There she remains even now, still floating, still bound in a million threads.

But her congregation moved on.

Greg returned home. My father too, hand-in-hand with my mother, the woman he’d loved so much there wasn’t much room for me. Others had work to do. Shopkeepers flipped closed signs to open. Switches were flicked. Barber’s poles came to life. Neon signs began to thrum and glow. Light flooded the nighttime streets as ancient bulbs flickered once, twice, and then finally fell into a steady hum.

All of them, lifeless bodies manipulated by the twine. Cloudy eyes. Brains as inert as a lump of insulation. And yet they were animated with just enough hints of a former life as to make me wonder what exactly the woman in red had been doing with them up there for all those years. Either way, the facsimile was shocking. If you could ignore all the snares and the strange way its citizens floated and bobbed along, the town almost appeared normal as life began to slowly flood back in.

It had been a miracle to get electricity back on so quickly. But the woman in red had brooked no argument. Her demands were many and if I hadn’t accepted them she would have boiled my brains right there in that clearing.

“What happens when we die one day?” Samantha asked as we watched houses light up one by one. “What happens if there’s a power cut? She can move the cars on her own but electricity?”

“I don’t know,” I replied while shaking my head, but already I was thinking of ways to install a generator. Something the twine could maybe move in emergencies, enough to keep the town going while I took care of the rest.

“But I’d really rather not find out what happens if she doesn’t get her own way.”