The dreary yet quaint town of Nocton nestled in the southwest of England catered to confinement rather than community. The left leaning commuters to the city of Bristol rubbed up awkwardly with the old money conservative rhetoric you’d often hear in one of the villages few local pubs. It was a place of political and social division, yet what seemed to unite the small populous was the villages folklore of the nearby woods; aptly named “Lady Hang”.
The small patch of woodland gained its namesake from an experience a train engineer had endured early one morning in the winter of 1838. It was said to have occurred on Christmas eve of the year of Victoria’s coronation.
The young engineer was on his morning commute to the train station, which stood on the outskirts of the woods. The skeletal appearance of the black, leafless branches and thorned vines made it a place where few favoured to wander in the winter months. However, the young man found himself running late for his 8am start so, despite his best judgement, he decided to take a shortcut through the woods, so as not to be reprimanded for his tardy behaviour by his superiors.
Upon the cracked snapping of the brittle bones of foliage beneath his boots, the young man began to hear the faint yelping of a dog. The cries alerted his ears as they did not sound playful, nor were they the typical whining’s of a mutt begging for its master’s attention; these were the cries of an animal almost certainly being brutalised.
The young engineer stood muted for a moment as his palms sweated wisps of apprehension into the stark morning’s air. The howls continued to echo from the dark alluring core of the forest’s belly. Now conscious that some poor domesticated animal was in pain and at the mercy of this unsympathetic frozen woodland: he quickened his pace into the dense and darkened vegetation. Without direction, he sought to find the source of the continuously aggravated whimpers; his only guiding compass being the increasing velocity and desperation of the animals’ screams. The serrated puncture of the thorns to his wrists, in addition to the whippings from the slithering branches to his face, only served to invigorate the young man’s canter. As the howls swelled into a deafening crescendo, the engineer stumbled and subsequently tripped into a clearing with a clumsy thud.
The engineer groaned as his arms laid sprawled before him. With his face down in the glistening, frost-kissed soil, he felt the shiver from the earth that cradled his pulped face. Spluttering out dead leaves and the dirt that coated his lips, the shaken man clawed his hands back and positioned them between the ground and his shoulders. As he pushed himself up, his scratched and bloodied knuckles entered his vision. His gloveless frozen hands grasped the blackened soil up into his palms and under his cracked fingernails as he craned his torso upright. He rested on his aching sodden knees. Only after the stinging shock of his pain subsided did he realise the stillness in the air. The symphony of horror that had beckoned him into the clearing was replaced by a barren yet chaotic silence. The only audible tones plucked from the still winters air was the thumping of his own panicked heart and a drip…drip…drip… coming from the curiously amber coloured leaves lying beside him.
The engineer turned his head stutteringly with each drip, like a tired piston thirsting for oil. The dripping continued but the engineer saw nothing. As he rose to his feet, he palmed the mud off onto his overalls and advanced further into the clearing, cautiously stepping over the rotten logs and the curling frozen vines which constricted them. The puzzled man was losing hope of finding the distressed animal that had tickled his altruism and led him into this barren, vegetative wasteland. Feeling defeated with a muddied face, aching hands and a bruised ego, the engineer surrendered and began to turn back around as he felt the silence carried a far more sinister tone than the roars of desperation which proceeded it. A spin of the heel into the squelchy bog had the engineer facing the spot where he had fallen some 100 yards away now.
Upon his turn is when he saw it.
The engineer’s stomach folded in on itself as he keeled over and vomited on to the ground. His brain pulsated violently inside his skull, as the absence of oxygen in his lungs suffocated his already dwindling consciousness. He could not breathe, nor could he scream. The thunderous pounding throb of his heart forced him to swallow a frozen breath down his quivering throat. The arctic stream felt like a jagged dagger, slicing its way down his blistered windpipe and into the pit of his voided gut.
His line of sight had settled upon a scene that was so despicably gruesome, the petrified man instinctively clamped his eyes shut; burying them within their sockets and blinding himself from the terror and the new reality that he was doomed to inhabit.
The engineer’s fist clenched as he hoped that what he had seen was some sort of devilish trick of the light and not something he had to be in this forest with alone. Eternal seconds passed in the frozen silence, which was only broken by the now barely audible dripping that had cloaked itself within the squelching and snapping of the leaves beneath his boots moments ago.
With the last ounces of courage, the engineer had left in his soul, he began to pry his eyes back open. He hastily cupped his vision with his bloodied right hand, creating a barrier between himself and what hung swaying beyond the clearing before him. His left hand clenched an effervescent fist, mimicking the inoperable lump that had lodged itself between his stifled screams and frost-bitten, quivering lips. The petrified man loosened his grip on his face, which had shielded his vision in a cage of denial. Peering through his fingers, he lowered his hand to meet his gaping mouth-still haunted by the stench of vomit.
His eyes aligned with hers once more.
A woman. A woman who danced a sway with the breeze that rocked her. Her face haggard and her lips a glazed sapphire blue. Her arms dangled lifelessly beside her limp swollen body. Her crooked head, which poised sideways to her shoulder, sprouted a mess of grey matted hair, topped with dead leaves and curious insects. Her mouth loose and gaped mirrored the engineer’s own. But hers birthed no breath, nor any words or instances of life, asides from an almost clockwork dripping of blood from the corner of her lips to the leaves below her feet.
But her feet did not touch the ground.
Her only anchor to this world appeared to be a tight, frost- laden rope, which married her wrinkled neck to a single bowed tree branch above her.
Tears from the engineer’s petrified eyes waltzed down his cheeks in unison. He grasped at attempts to rationalise what he was seeing but his eyes stayed prisoned to hers. They had a stoic intelligence, like the royal portraits he had seen hanging in historic manor houses. But her gaze evoked no majesty. Only a piercing knowing and provocative chill of maniacal evil.