It was a glorious late summer's day that day. The far corona blessed the World in orange heat and we skipped in its fabulous promise.
It was as if it had been designed just for us, we the four best friends and my five year old sister tagging along.
Our knapsacks were bulging with jam butties and clinking bottles of creamy milk for our picnic. We'd brought a tatty chequered blanket too for laying in our favourite wheat-field.
So we set off, a warm breeze ruffling our hair.
First we had to ford the brook and pass the church. The old graveyard made us slow right down as we were scared of upsetting the residents by running. It's headstones seemed to turn gradually as we walked by. Millipedes halted on the inscriptions and changed them.
Then we ran and laughed and laughed, uncorking a mixture of joyousness and fright.
Things brightened as soon as we took the corner. Somewhere a cockerel crowed and the faint tinge of manure flavoured the summer air. There were farms close by. Plump cows brimming with cream moo'd from the byres and dogs barked at invisible foes in the yards.
The land opened out like a rug, plush and flat until it began to crease. Then a dry slope rose.
We stopped to stare at the small memorial to the dead girl. She'd lost her life some fifty years before to the day, running down the hill and hurtling into a barb-wire fence. She'd been scalped. She'd managed to crawl all the way to the wood where her brother was but lost so much blood from her open head that she died there. We shuddered and kicked the sandy ground not knowing what else to do. This was no way for children to go.
Hands stuffed in pockets we strolled, then hopped, then ran full-pelt uphill towards the crest of the climb.
We stopped still at the top completely out of puff and heaved our chests as fresh air swelled our angry lungs. We could see the golden ears of the wheat fields glinting in the sun about half a mile away.
But first we had to get through the woods.
The outer row of thick full trees stood a little distance down the back of the hill. They waited like a gang of leaves and beyond them lay the sable void where summer wasn't allowed.
Slowly, we descended the barren lee and in a ragged line we gawped up at the tops where the canopy soared and peered squinting into the soupy gloom for any clues of what lay within.
We had visited the wood many times before and each time was a little worse than the last, like a scraped knee that just wouldn't heal.
Crows hopped off when they saw us coming. Corvid spies the lot!
Despite our nerves we always made the most of the half mile through the wood. We kicked and threw the thick leaves at each other, we jumped over the dry streams, we chucked sticks as far as we could into the rising brambles and we played hide and seek without ever straying too far from the seeker or the sought.
But on this particular day we felt different for some reason. Some unfathomable logic made us play louder, wilder, freer than ever before. Perhaps it was the bright rays of the sun penetrating the gloom more than we could ever remember. It slit the dark like claws and we basked in the light and the warmth of our star shimmering between the trees.
Without a care in the world we bellowed across the wood, yelling like baboons and cartwheeling over the swirling leaves. We carved our names into the oaks with pen-knives and broke branches off saplings to fence one other. The trunks echoed to the sound of stones we viciously threw at them. The bark bottoms were darkened by our hot pee. We laughed at the growing stains.
It was a fabulous feeling of freedom we enjoyed that day. A wild liberty in those woods. Euphoric, loud and ragged.
As the afternoon tattered the light began to falter in that old place.
Wedged between the belly-laughs we snarled on all-fours. Spitting at each other we growled like foxes and split our sides laughing.
Our growls became howls as we loped and leapt. Scuffles broke out and noses were bloodied.
But blood was the least we could offer. No-one could have known the price we would pay on that terrible day. The price for being part of that ancient place.
A wren zoomed across the brush cursing the whole time. Our screams were disturbing his sylvan watch. Wood ants teemed over their needled nest hurrying to get something finished. They seemed to pause as we shoved past, ten thousand antennae tapping the air, arousing the sleeping spirits.
"Let's play kick the bastard!" someone raged getting up from the floor.
Another frenziedly booted the ball through the wood and we all scarpered the other way bellowing, hiding behind fat looming oaks and hazel brooms.
"Coming ready or not you fuckin' scrotes!" They yelled once they'd found the ball.
Hunkered down in our shadows we waited. Shaking. Panting. Changing.
One by one we were discovered.
All except my little sister. We'd separated and gone in different directions.
She was found by all of us trapped behind a cage of jagged branches leant against the biggest oak.
"Get me out!" She screamed
We gazed at her, anguished, frantic, helpless and smiled.
It was then a hole appeared behind her at the base of the trunk.
She turned, saw it and yelled for us to save her.
"Pleeeeaase!"
The hole widened, strangled horns wailed in the abyss and darkening fingers reached out for her hair.
She fell.
"Help meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"
She descended into the lightless void shouldering our two worlds apart. There was a sickening peeling sound. Her screams grew fainter and fainter and she was gone. Her wet toy doll, spat out with it's scalp missing, hit one of us in the face.
We all stood, shuffled awkwardly, rubbed our eyes and shook ourselves as if waking from a dreadful dream.
Altered, we looked at each other.
Dismissed by the closing rift we turned and cursed, slowly headed down to the wheat fields by the woods just a breath away, where two small girls with fleshless scalps, my sister and a stranger, sat with us, as we laid out our picnic in the pitch dark.
