The Curdled Wood

By Oliver Franklin

A walk in the woods was never so eventful! Roman and Katya are twin brother and sister, bookish, aloof and somewhat distant from their peers, and not entirely by their own choice. On midsummer’s day they decide to go for a picnic in the woods on the outskirts of the village. They soon find themselves further from home than they ever could have imagined and in imminent peril. A fairytale for young adults, brutal and realistic with more than a grain of truth...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Oliver Franklin
• Release date: Dec 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005630478

Oliver Franklin

You will read some of it in the books...

Book preview

The

Curdled Wood

By

Oliver Franklin

Copyright © 2020 Oliver Franklin

The author has asserted his moral rights

First published in 2020 by Buddlewood House

Typesetting, page design and layout by DocumentsandManuscripts.com

Cover images courtesy of https://unsplash.com/

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The right of Oliver Franklin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the copyright, design and patents acts pertaining. All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this work may be made without written permission from the author.

Chapter 1

Through The Mist

Once upon a time in Merrie England there lay a quaint village a good league below the wilds of Dartmoor. There, in a little house, lived a fair brother and sister who – oh, let’s not bother with all that rubbish!

Let’s start again.

Roman and Katya Ivanov were twelve years old, twins living on the edge of the village of Ugborough, Devon. Their father worked at Riverford Farm in Staverton, famous for its organic ethos and vegetable boxes, which were delivered all over the region to happy customers. Meanwhile their mother worked in a clothes shop in the town of Totnes – a haunt of all things New Age and weird, replete with coffee shops but nowhere to park for more than two hours, which was very annoying if you wanted to spend a whole day there and presumably damaging to local business.

It was after breakfast on midsummer’s day and the twins had decided to go and explore Ugborough Wood a short walk from their house. Usually, by the age of twelve, brothers and sisters prefer to play with their friends but, being new to the area and of mixed heritage, they found it difficult to integrate into the life of the village. Not that there were many young folk for them to be integrated with anyway.

Ugborough seemed to have quite a few babes and toddlers and, beyond that, only mid-to-late teens, whose idea of going to the woods would involve things like drugs, raves or other illicit activities. None of which interested the siblings.

Had they both been boys, or both girls, they would have been identical, near enough. Of course this was not the case but, even so, if Katya had worn her hair short like her brother, or Roman had dressed in girls’ clothes, one would have been hard pressed to tell them apart. At least until they spoke.

Some teacher had actually tried to use them as a case study in a weird talk about gender identity the previous term. However the twins were having none of it and, shortly after that, their parents, being Catholics whipped them out of that school and began homeschooling, which Roman and Katya found much more interesting and fun. The only downside was it didn’t help them make new friends. So they spent more time together than the average brothers and sisters of their age.

Ugborough Wood extended to about a square mile of mixed woodland contained largely within a river valley. The surrounding farmland was owned by the same farmer who seemed perfectly at ease, with children trespassing his property. Indeed there was an ancient right of way running through the middle of the valley and hence, the wood but, strictly speaking, wandering off the path meant one was trespassing.

The twins set off at about ten o’clock with packed lunches and a bottle of spring water. The sun was out, the weather warm but not excessive and they were planning to be home before evening. So they only wore shorts and t-shirts.

As they made their way past the church and then the pub, Katya who was a keen reader said, ‘Do you know why there is almost always a church and a pub in a village together?’

‘Nope,’ her brother responded, half interested.

‘Well, building a church involves years of work. Sometimes, on a massive project like a cathedral, the stonemasons would be there for twenty or thirty years. Obviously they would need somewhere to eat, drink and live. So they would usually build a pub or an inn first, before starting on the church, or they would build them at the same time. But, either way, it was a practical thing to do’

‘Cool’, Roman said, wondering why his sister was such a bookworm.

As they made their way through the village towards the wooded valley about half a mile ahead they mused on what they’d do when they arrived. Katya was very keen to see some wild deer. Roman was for climbing trees and damming up the stream. On the outskirts of the village a teenage boy known only as Jimbo came drifting past them on a pushbike, cigarette in one hand and can of beer in the other. Consequently his steering was somewhat erratic.

‘Where are you freaks going to?’ he called out.

‘A walk in the woods,’ Roman answered without looking at him.

‘What for – cherry picking?’ he added with a dirty look.

‘Nope,’ Katya explained sweetly, ‘we’re brother and sister, you see.’

Jimbo seemed to think his comment very witty and snorted with laughter as he cycled off towards the nearby village of Wrangaton leaving them quite unimpressed in his wake.

‘What a verbose idiot that boy is,’ Katya remarked.

‘Moron!’ Roman called after him.

They soon came upon a stile in the hedge beyond which a well-worn path stretched across the field to a woodland on the far side. Over the stile they went and within a few minutes were descending into a broad and shallow valley. The path was more a bridleway now and, indeed it was popular with riders who were also keen to exercise their right of way.

The meadow soon disappeared and the trees began to close in around them. The green canopy was sparse at first but grew denser the further in they went. After an hundred yards or so of gradual descent they rounded a corner and suddenly encountered a patch of mist, which was unusual for a warm summer’s day. It was like one of those banks of fog you sometimes see filling a hollow on a cold, moonlit night. Commenting on it and the possible reasons for it, they walked straight through the damp air and, before long emerged on the other side where the sun shone brightly once again.

When they did so, they noticed a few things that hadn’t occurred to them before. The forest, yes forest, felt different, larger and more ancient. There was more birdsong. The ground was rougher underfoot and the distant sounds of the village had completely vanished. The feeling was mutual and significant enough that they found themselves talking about it.

‘Interesting effect when you get inside a wood, isn’t it?’ Roman said. ‘Everything seems a little different.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Katya agreed, striding along beside him as the path, which had now flattened out, was easily wide enough. ‘It feels like another world despite the fact that our house is little more than a quarter of a mile away.’

‘Obviously it’s just the imagination but, don’t you think, some places just seem more – ’ Katya paused, searching for a suitable word.

‘More… magical than others?’ her brother prompted, grinning slightly.

‘Oh! I was trying to avoid using that word,’ she protested. ‘You know I’m a scientist: I believe in books, facts and reason.’

‘Hmm,’ said Roman, ‘but who checks your facts? Surely, the only way you can establish absolute truth, is to have an absolute frame of reference. That means you need infinite knowledge and that means you need to be God.’

‘Yes, I know, that’s why we, unlike the majority of our peers, have not given up Church.’

It was a happy talk but, some twenty minutes later, they had become somewhat disorientated. By that time they should have been emerging through the far side of the valley and would usually have stopped before then and gone wandering into the trees to explore, had their conversation not been so engrossing that they just kept walking.

Roman noticed it first and his sister a moment later. As he stopped and looked around to recover his bearings, she also stopped and ventured, ‘Ro, where are we? We should be past the woods by now and almost at Wrangaton.’

‘Yeah, I was wondering about that. We’ve been walking about half an hour and – ’ he looked at his watch ‘ – Oh blow! It’s stopped working. Battery must have gone. Anyway, as you say, we should be out of the woods by now.’

‘Unless we’ve been going round in circles without realising it,’ Katya suggested.

Roman thought about that for a bit then replied, ‘No, we can’t have done. We’ve kept to the path all the way and we know the path runs along the bottom of the valley, following the river. Listen, you can hear the river now; we’ve been accompanying it all the way.’

‘Oh, look!’ Katya exclaimed, briefly taking their minds of the topic. ‘It’s a red squirrel, I’m sure it is.’

Roman squinted into a nearby tree where his sister was pointing and, when the creature moved again, he saw it briefly before it disappeared into the canopy.

‘Wow! You’re right,’ he said, then, ‘Hang on… red squirrels don’t live in this part of the country, not these days. The invasive grey squirrel that came over from North America forced it out. It’s extinct almost everywhere in England. You only find them in the North and Scotland. There are also a few in North Wales and the Isle of Wight.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I read it on Wikipedia the other day, but I already knew about the greys outcompeting the reds from school.’

‘But I’m sure it was red,’ Katya insisted.

‘Yes,’ Roman agreed, ‘I saw it too. Strange though, they’re not supposed to be here.’

‘Anyway, where is here?’ Katya asked. ‘Ro, I think we’re lost.’

Roman reluctantly agreed but he could not see how. They had walked the very same path a number of times before and always come to the same place at the end. But was it the same path? He had to admit that it didn’t feel quite the same. It was rougher than they were used too, as though it had not been worn down by centuries of foot traffic. He began to feel uneasy.

‘The quickest way out of the wood is to turn off the path, walk up the side of the valley and before long you come to the fields,’ he stated. ‘Let’s just do that.’

Katya agreed and they turned right off the path and marched through the trees until they came to the top of the rise. Expecting to find a fence but seeing none, they continued until they came to some higher ground but, to their growing consternation, there were no fields, no village, no sign of settlement at all. Instead, the forest went on for mile upon mile into the distance and they could not see the end of it.

The two of them were now seriously unnerved.

‘R-Roman,’ Katya ventured, ‘I hate to