The Haunting of Romney Wood, Part Three

Tactics

The Witch stood by the train station, watching hopefully down the line.  She knew it was pointless.  The tracks were overgrown, impassable.  The bridge was gone.  The tunnel was a wall now, an artificial bandage over a hole in the mountain.  A thin trickle of water forced its way from beneath the old bricks but no train would ever come through it again.

She remembered Shelby.  How surprised she was that he could see her, for the Witch had come to believe that she didn’t have a form.  Not anymore.  25 years had passed since the last person came who could see her.  But Shelby had seen, and, more importantly, for so long, he had given her gifts.  He had been kind.

She was heartbroken when Shelby discovered the house.  Heartbroken for many reasons.  To see his horror at her deeds, and to know that their strange passing acquaintance would end. But there had been a silver lining.  The thought had always festered in her mind that Shelby would help free her.  The sheriff and his men had almost done it.  They’d nearly set her free.  But then they cleaned up and left.  They didn’t see, and that was the key. Being able to see…like Shelby.

Not that freedom was truly her goal. She had no real goals anymore. So she just watched with a neutral calm as the sheriff’s men stomped through her house. She could have snuffed each of them out, squeezing them like grapes.  With a wave of her hand she could have turned them against each other.  A wild, panicked deputy with his gun could have done her job for her.

Her job.

It wasn’t her job.  She just did it.  She got so angry sometimes and she just did it.  All she wanted was to be seen… She wanted to leave.  She’d been in Romney Wood for far too long.  Wandering the ruins of Black Hill now nearly two centuries after her Great Suffering, when the residents of Black Hill, a company town led by a madman, took her deep into the woods and snuffed out her life…after all of the men took a turn with her.  She still flinched.  Still felt the bare rock against her body as they turned her over, as they shoved themselves into her.

Anger.

Her job, when she woke to find herself a part of the woods, was to release that anger.  Black Hill’s oil ran dry, yet the town lingered.  Lingered until people started to go missing, or accidents started to seem not all that accidental.

They all left and the town fell into decay, falling to nature, and storms, and age.

Some time later, the first of those who could see the Witch showed up.  A daughter of the company man who had run the town, so long ago.  A seeming hereditary position of wealth and power that carried down for generations, though this poor girl told the Witch that everything was gone.  Lost in some great turmoil.

The girl stayed with the Witch for a few years, moving through the ruins of her family’s town, and speaking every morning with the Witch, who was always watching, always following.  She told the witch of great wars, of an America that was very different from the young country the Witch had grown up in.  The Civil War was still an open wound for all back then, but, even so, the Witch didn’t really pay attention.  In Black Hill, there were no wars.  No politics.  There was only oil.  Though even that was drying up by the time the Witch died.  The writing was on the wall even then that the Atherton’s brief run-in with fortune was fading into the night.

The Witch knew about coal and timber which rose after the oil and gas boom.  The forest told her about that.  About the open mines, and the blasting.  The forest gave her the simplest of overviews of the world she was living in, and it rarely made sense beyond impressions of pain and fear.  And anger.

Always anger.

The Witch was glad for Amanda Atherton’s presence.  The girl was so broken and so sad that it was pointless to seek vengeance against her family.  Her family had come to ruin, and would die with her.  And she would die in Romney Wood.  The Witch always knew this.  She could see what would happen to Amanda and, when the girl finally hung herself from one of the oak trees, the Witch let her stay up for some time.  She hoped, secretly, that Amanda’s spirit would linger.  That she would have some form of companionship.  But Amanda was gone, so the Witch allowed her to fall to the ground and roll down the slope.  Her bones, long scattered by the time the sheriff and his men came, were never discovered.

Sometimes, the Witch talked to her.  Amanda became an imaginary friend.  The Witch wanted to know why she was still what she was.  Her duty was done – she was avenged.  The Atherton family had tumbled into obscurity and despair. Black Hill was gone.  Nobody remembered anything that happened.  Nobody except for the Witch, and she seethed.  She seethed because now she realized that she was trapped.  Forever in Romney Wood, forever surrounded by dead Black Hill, forever stalking the land where she had been so brutally raped and murdered and, now, abandoned by whatever power had kept her conscious and aware of herself.

So she appeared to campers, hikers, and hunters.  To unwary tourists and suspicious locals.  To fishermen and lost children.  None saw her.  All panicked when the stalking began.  All fought her.  And so they died.  Vanished into the Wood.  Until, finally, the Witch was all alone.  Nobody came to the Wood.  The few who did stray across the creek bored her.  The Witch allowed herself to get lazy.  To wander the avenues of memory – waiting for a long forgotten train, or stalking Black Hill muttering to an imaginary Amanda Atherton, or simply watching the road from the furthest point she was allowed to reach – the second support of the collapsed rail bridge. There on a small table of rubble and weeds, a hunk of metal encased in concrete, birds circling away from her and the river beneath steaming with an inexplicable cold.

It was from that perch she saw the canoe, and the film crew, approach her side of the river.  One woman and two men, armed with two cameras and camping gear.

The Witch narrowed her eyes and retreated to Romney Wood, to Black Hill, to her house. She sat and allowed the woods to flow through her, and she watched through the eyes of the land as the four strangers beached their canoe and leapt onto a cursed land.