The Boy in the Woods

I lived with my father in a huntsman's cottage in the woods that local children called haunted, and which attended upon me an atmosphere that I hardly deserved. On warm days my father would let me take the horse through the woods and across the eleven miles to school, on wet days I'm surprised I didn't drown several times in the muddy bog engendered by the rains.

The woods were considered haunted because 70 years prior a huntsman had hung himself from an old oak, and some years later a woman died nearby, her face supposedly held in a wide-eyed rictus of terror. This was the literal genesis of the reputation, but it was heavily supported by the closeness of the trees and the ceaseless winding of the paths in various places, their original designer having accorded to an eccentric sense of how his grounds should be laid out.

In recent years the rumours of haunting had picked up speed again due to strange noises in the woods heard by poachers and ramblers, including the sound of rattling chains and the sight of a long-cloaked figure in pursuit of a bound homunculus. The local priest muttered darkly of heresies and seemed liable to stir up another witch hunt, the likes of which this hamlet hadn't seen since James I.

My friend and I went to the wise woman once and she told us in exchange for our pocket money that in her view the huntsman from close to three-quarters of a century ago had found his way from eternity to here. 'Suicides don't go to heaven' she said in her sage and scholarly manner. The long-cloaked figure was a demon from hell, and those who'd set their eyes on him were lucky to not have been dragged down through the dirt to the Devil's domain.

For myself, I couldn't shake the belief that there was some prosaic answer to the mystery quite unconnected with ghosts and ghouls. The priest liked to scold me for my lack of faith, what he perceived as the absence of a healthy fear of God, but it was just my inheritance from my father, as blush and practical an Englishman as ever there was. 'Just you be careful' said the priest, whose name was Fletcher, fixing a beady eye upon me. 'You can't ever know when mercy will come.'

I wasn't sure back then what he meant by that, but I think like a lot of ascetics he wasn't fond of this life, dependant as many religious obsessives are on the promise of a better world than this. His wife was a perishing wallflower who managed to look dishevelled and needy even when he dressed her up in fine clothes. Of the wise woman he had no good opinion at all, only tolerated her so long as the subject wasn't raised in his presence, and for her part she went about as though he didn't exist, not attending church. I bring up their animosity only to observe that despite it they agreed about the haunting in the woods, at least according to their statements.

I didn't sleep many nights when I was 12, wracked by the insomnia that's troubled me periodically all my life. Once as the moon crossed over the trees I went for a walk while my father slept, used as I was to the peculiar winding roads. I heard a foraging in the distance and, the sound not seeming to come from poachers with guns, elected to investigate.

I found among the blackberry bushes, gorging himself like a Dionysian reveller, a small boy. I placed a hand on one of his shoulders and he turned his face towards me at which point, I confess, I visibly and audibly balked. He was, in a word, deformed, his facial features seeming to have been tilted on an axis to the left and his eyes buried in their sockets like little stones in a mountainside. The entirety of his face was puffed out, giving him the aspect of a grotesque Cupid.

But he shivered with what seemed like more fear of me than I had of him and made strange little noises as if trying to plead with me... My heart melted and in that moment I knew exactly what his life had been, and why, and pitied him incredibly.

I took him home and fed him sandwiches and milk from the kitchen. He wolfed them down and then I gave him a painted spinning top that my late grandmother had gifted me when I was little and that I'd kept as a sort of lucky charm. But I motioned for him to hide it in a pocket of his dungarees, perceiving I now realise how things might end if his guardian saw that the boy had interacted with someone from outside the vicarage.

The ghosts of the woods seemed to have been exorcised after that night. No one again reported seeing the spectral shambling figure in the long greatcoat and the elf or sprite or whatever it was he was chasing. The wise woman claimed, so I heard, once a year had gone by without paranormal report, that the ghost of the huntsman had finally been caught by its pursuer and dragged back to hell. That by then the huntsman had become probably a pale imp and had clawed its way up from the depths, to caper in the world of mortal Christendom.

When I went to the city as a man I became a trader and later a philanthropist, advocating for the coffers of various children's homes and bedlams. One bedlam in particular held an inmate deposited anonymously fifteen years prior, in the courtyard outside the kitchens, where he was found foraging for food in the bins. They called him Cherub for his puffy, baby-like face. And when I visited him in my capacity as the institution's benefactor, he always took out a spinning top.