Chapter Text
This is a simple story to give you all a little background information on the area we will be visiting this weekend as part of an extra-credit assignment for your course. Please ensure that you are ready to leave at 6am sharp and be waiting at the car park at the front of the University. A van will be waiting to take us to our drop off point and space is limited, so please only bring what is absolutely necessary.
Regards,
Prof. Benton
Helena sighed and shut the lid of her laptop with a snap. Frac, one of her ruddy-furred and unkempt-looking Scottish deerhounds looked up at her from his spot at the end of her bed. Fric, his brother, opened his eyes and yawned hugely.
“You’re absolutely right,” she patted her thigh and Frac jumped down and bounded over to her, “you two count as ‘absolutely necessary’.” She grinned and ruffled his ears. Her smile faded when her gaze fell on the tatty, leather-bound book perched on top of her pile of clothes to pack for the field trip to the woods a hundred miles north of their little town of Serenity. Whenever she looked at it, she felt a little uneasy flutter in the pit of her stomach. The sensible part of her was screaming at her that she should hand over the journal to her professor seeing as it appeared to be the journal of the missing priest from the fable of the Miller’s Daughter.
Helena had fully intended to hand over the journal once she had realised what it was; but a niggling little voice in the back of her head kept making excuses as to why she should keep it for just a little longer.
She laughed aloud as she pulled her tawny hair into a scruffy ponytail, “I guess I really am my mother’s daughter after all.” She compared herself to a faded snapshot of her parents she kept tucked in the frame of her mirror, more for appearance’s sake, rather than any other reason. Helena often thought that would be the only way she would recognise her parents if they ever came home.
Her mother, Dr Joyce Troy, was an exploratory historian for the British Museum; personally Helena thought that was a fancy term for tomb raider/grave robber. She looked very much like her daughter, tall, fair and verging on lanky at times. She was standing next to a humourless US Naval officer, Helena’s father, Admiral Benjamin Troy. Helena had no idea how her parents had managed to get their minds off their careers for long enough to get married; let alone have a child and emigrate to America.
Although the family had lived in the sleepy town of Serenity for just over a decade, Helena wondered if her parents had ever spent more than two days in their home at a stretch. Fric, having woken up once his napping buddy had abandoned him, ambled past his mistress and attempted to goad his larger brother into their favourite pastime of ‘running up and down the stairs as quickly as possible, while making as much noise as allowed by the limits of dogly ability’.
Unable to stay mopey around the two daft canines for long, Helena abandoned the journal, its disturbing, wonderful illustrations, and the niggling little flutter in her stomach when she thought of the trip and ran down the stairs to the delight of her companions.
That evening, Helena was moodily picking through the leftover Chinese takeaway from the night before and debating using the last of her week’s allowance to order a pizza instead.
“What do you think boys?” she leaned her head against the cool enamel of the fridge, “Should I be frugal and nuke these noodles, or splurge on a pepperoni from Luigi’s?”
She looked sidelong at her dogs who whined and lay down on the rug in unison, “Good choice, noodles now, pizza for breakfast.”
Helena tossed the plastic cartons into the microwave, yanked the dial to max and threw herself down on the nearest seat. The journal lay open on the kitchen table and Helena pulled it toward her. The pictures of sprites and other woodland creatures didn’t bother her so much; although many of the images were filled with tiny, hate-filled eyes. She had assumed that as the supposed author was a recently widowed and faithless priest that not all of the entries would be full of sweetness and light.
It was the entries on the demonic spirits he’d been tormented with that disturbed her the most. The distorted, grinning corpses strung up from the trees almost seemed to sway and dance if you looked at them long enough.
She traced the lines of text that wove around the page, snaking between the drawings, trying to decipher the faded script, “The corpse hagge dances on a pile of bones,” she squinted and rotated the book, “She will forest…forever…search for the ones-”
The microwave beeped shrilly and she yelped.