Page 15 of Atlas of Unknowable Things
WITCHCRAFT
That there is a Devil, is a thing doubted by none but such as are under the influences of the Devil.
—COTTON MATHER, ON WITCHCRAFT
I intended to get dressed and head up to the house to see what the others had to say about the previous night, but I found myself sitting on the couch staring into space for quite some time.
I began to wonder where exactly I was. I’d been so determined to best Charles that I’d jumped at this opportunity without a modicum of the research I might have given to, say, buying a new pair of sneakers.
Sure, it had seemed like this place was respected and historic (there was a photo of Winston Churchill on the website!), but there was precious little to lead the casual reader to think there might be night sirens and threats of uncontained hellhounds.
And what was it exactly that I’d imagined I’d seen standing at the foot of my bed?
There was no way it could have been real, and yet it felt real.
Its head had seemed vaguely canine, but I’d seen horns atop its head, not to mention the fact that it stood upright.
The most obvious explanation was that I had experienced some kind of waking dream in which I’d hallucinated a manifestation of Margaret Murray’s horned god.
My research was simply bleeding into my subconscious.
And yet the idea of upright-walking canids was a fantasy that mankind had inexplicably clung to for millennia.
Maybe my subconscious was trying to communicate with me.
Taking a deep breath, I ran through what associations it brought up.
There was, of course, Anubis, the ancient Egyptian god of death who sported the body of a man and the head of a jackal.
Saint Christopher was said to be one of the cynocephali, or dogheaded men, some of whom were thought to eat human flesh.
Indeed, Saint Christopher is often pictured sporting a canine head in religious iconography.
Some fringe academics even linked the cynocephali to the famous sixteenth-century Piri Reis map.
Discovered in 1923, it showed a fairly accurate rendering of South America and featured depictions of various animals, including what appear to be dancing dog-headed men.
And then there was the werewolf. Unlike its dog-headed cousins, the werewolf had proven singular in its capacity to provoke a deep, primal fear. Was it simply the fact that wolves were more dangerous than dogs, or was there something that inherently made the idea of a werewolf more plausible?
Almost without thinking, I grabbed my laptop and opened it.
My most recent association with werewolves was Sabine étienne.
Her mauling—her supposed werewolf attack—had been the catalyst for my initial interest in Hildegard.
And now here I was hearing mysterious howls in the middle of the night and seeing monsters at the foot of my bed.
Quickly I reminded myself of the details of the case.
Sabine étienne had worked at a local tavern called La Tanière de Loup.
A well-liked young woman, she’d lived at home with her parents and her younger brother, Guillaume étienne.
On an unseasonably temperate evening five months ago, she’d left the tavern and had started home.
On the way, she’d met up with some friends and had told them she’d come over to their cottage for a bottle of wine after stopping by her house to change. Unfortunately, she never made it.
When she didn’t arrive at her friends’ cottage, they assumed she’d gone to bed.
Likewise, her parents assumed she’d spent the evening with friends.
It wasn’t until the next afternoon, when she missed a shift at work, that anyone realized there was something wrong.
Her brother, who also worked at the tavern, was the first to raise the alarm.
It wasn’t long before her body was found, just off a path that led through an area of the woods locally known as le bosquet de la sorcière.
Her death was written up as an animal attack, but a local veterinarian weighed in that the bite marks didn’t match those of any known local predators.
In the end, though, it was decided to have been an animal, most likely a bear.
The only problem was that according to my research, black bears almost never attack humans, and there were no brown bears in Colorado.
And then there were those quotes from the locals, the whispers of something more malevolent stalking the woods.
The term werewolf, or more precisely, loup-garou, was thrown around.
And then the stranger’s testimony—that phrase that, upon a second reading, struck a note of fear into me:
They breed them up there.
Shaking my head as if to cast off my fear, I pulled away from my computer. I needed to get myself together and head up to breakfast.
Up at the house, I found Lexi, Dorian, and Aspen sitting at the dining table. They all were looking very serious, but as soon as they noticed me, they broke into smiles.
“You’re up!” Dorian bellowed, standing to greet me.
“We didn’t want to wake you,” said Lexi with a sweet smile.
“We must apologize for last night. We have dogs we keep on the far side of campus, and unfortunately one got loose.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I heard about the dog. Must have been some dog.”
“Dogs are responsible for more human fatalities per year than almost any other animal,” Lexi said like a child proudly reciting facts. “They have the capacity to be incredibly dangerous creatures.”
“That’s true,” said Dorian, nodding serenely. “Second only to snakes. And mosquitoes of course, if you factor in malaria.”
“I always try to factor in malaria. But let me just get this straight. Is there some kind of danger I should know about? That siren made it sound like we were going to get hit by a tsunami or like there was some kind of breach in a power plant. A toxic chemical leak or something.”
They looked at me blankly, and then Dorian shook his head. “You have nothing to worry about,” he said. “There was a problem, but the problem was solved.”
“Right. So I can just wander the grounds and that’s fine?
” I said almost by way of a dare, but as soon as I said it, I began to consider that the possibility of a day spent walking in the woods might be rather pleasant.
I could use the opportunity to clear my head.
Plus, it couldn’t hurt to have more of a look around.
“Of course,” said Dorian, but Aspen was quick to jump in.
“Just make sure to stay on the trails,” she said. “Don’t go deep into the woods.”
“Why? What’s deep in the woods?”
“It’s an environmental thing,” said Dorian. “The ecosystem is fragile.”
“I’ll be sure to stay on the forest path. And if I see a witch’s cottage or a big bad wolf, I’ll go in the opposite direction.” I took a croissant from a basket and left.
After stopping by my cabana to pull on some sturdy boots, I set out.
I did exactly as I was told not to do: Pretty much as soon as I was in the woods, I went off the path.
After trudging through some underbrush, I found a game trail that led me down a ravine and into a hollow, at the center of which rested an expansive, old-growth yew.
The sight of it stopped me in my tracks.
With roots creeping like a massive tentacled beast, the ancient tree took up a large portion of the hollow.
Around its base a thick, etheric fog had settled.
The hollow felt enchanted down there, hidden from the world, with the scent of pine needles slipping past on the morning breeze, but there was also something vaguely unsettling about the area.
Unquiet is the word that came to mind. The idea that the earth was somehow disturbed in certain places was by no means a new concept.
It came up repeatedly in folklore the world over.
I’d read many an account of villagers convinced that a certain part of the woods was haunted, infused with an otherworldly evil presence, but I’d never actually understood what that might feel like until now.
Was it really possible for land to somehow be malevolent, even deranged?
Carefully I walked toward the ancient tree, but as I came near it, I noticed a chain-link fence stretching up on the other side of it.
When I walked over and peered through one of the gaps, I was struck by the uncanny image of a large red X painted on the trunk of an alder tree.
I knew that sometimes the Forest Service painted symbols on trees for their removal, but something in my bones told me that this X had a different meaning.
Taking a step back, I peered up at the fence, which was extremely tall and had barbed wire around the top.
Nervous, not wanting to linger, I turned back and started up the side of the ravine until I hit a proper trail, and then followed it along a ridge before dipping down and across a shady land bridge flanked by two quaking aspens.
I stopped there to admire them. A twig cracked and I startled.
Catching my breath, I stared into the dense thicket.
Was there someone—or something—there? That creature at the foot of my bed had been a hallucination left over from sleep.
It had to have been. And yet in that moment, standing there alone in the middle of the forest, it felt like almost anything could be real.
“Hello?” I called, but was met with silence.
Picking up the pace, I started up a steep slope that led to a ridge. Once I was out of the thickest part of the woods, I felt decidedly more myself again—less affected by the sublime paranoia that only nature can evoke.