The Hollow Between the Beeches

In the autumn of my tenth year, we lived in a rented farmhouse at the edge of a town called Mirefield, where the main road curved around a bog that breathed mist even on dry days. My best friend was a girl named Elowen, who had hair the color of straw and a laugh that sounded like a startled bird. Every day after school, we took the shortcut through Old Man Hemlock’s abandoned orchard, a sprawling tangle of gnarled apple trees and head-high weeds that our parents forbade us to enter. But we were children, and children believe the world bends to their will, so we slipped through the rusted gate every afternoon, daring the branches to snag our coats and the roots to trip our feet.

The orchard was a place that seemed to hold its breath. Even at noon, the canopy of leaves and mossy branches swallowed the light, casting everything in a green gloom. We knew every hollow and hideaway, every spot where the ground squelched with hidden water, every fallen log that made a perfect bridge over the muddy ditch. It was our secret kingdom, and we were its only monarchs.

One Tuesday, Elowen was taken out of school early for a dentist appointment, and I was left to make the journey alone. I remember the knot in my stomach as I approached the orchard gate, but I was stubborn. I pushed through the wet grass, my boots sinking slightly, and had just reached the old stone well in the center when a figure materialized before me.

It was my great-grandmother, whom I had seen in photographs but never in life. She wore a grey dress that seemed to be made of mist, and her eyes were dark pools that held no light. Her lips moved, but no sound came at first, then a whisper like dry leaves skittering across stone. ‘Turn back, child. Take the long road. Do not walk the hollow tonight.’ I had been raised to honor the ancestors, to heed their warnings without question. Shivering, I turned and retraced my steps, my heart hammering, and I took the main road home, which curved around the bog and added a mile to my walk.

When I arrived, my mother frowned at my lateness, but I said nothing. That night, the police cars came with their lights strobing through the rain, and the next morning the word spread: they had found the body of a girl—a girl from the next town over, just my age—in the orchard, near the stone well. Her name was Iris, and she had been reported missing three days earlier. The officers questioned everyone, but no one saw anything. They cut down some of the brush, but the orchard remained, deeper and darker than before.

I never took that shortcut again. But sometimes, when the wind blows through the trees, I hear a sound like a child laughing, and I remember the ghost of my great-grandmother, who had died forty years before I was born, and I wonder if she was the only one who ever saw the hollow between the beeches for what it truly was: a door that should never have been opened.