CHAPTER ONE
Riley cursed as her leaky pen dribbled out a blob of ink, smearing and staining the tips of her fingers.
“What happened?” Sam, her little sister, asked. She craned her neck around to look, and the temporary tattoo Riley was drawing on Sam’s shoulder smeared even more.
“Don’t move,” she said. “You’re messing it up.”
“You’re messing it up,” Sam replied. Which was bratty, but also true. Sam had asked for a death’s-head moth, because that was just the kind of ten-year-old she was, and while Riley wanted to be a tattoo artist someday, all she had to practice with right now was a permanent marker and a squirming kid.
They were sitting behind the counter—an old, angled desk that Uncle Toby had found on the side of the road, hauled back, sanded, and refinished—in the Roscoe Mysteries Museum and Tour Center. It seemed like a fancy name for an unfancy operation, run out of an old barn off Route 31. The exhibits were in former horse stalls, hand-painted, dusty, and cobwebby. No livestock had lived here in decades, but a faint animal smell—hay and musk and manure—lingered anyway.
One of the tourists here for Toby’s Sunday evening tour, who’d been taking in the exhibit about Camille Voynich, looked over at them disapprovingly. Riley forced herself to smile. Uncle Toby was technically paying her to watch the museum and check people in. But the tourists mostly sucked, or maybe Riley was just exceptionally awkward and unfriendly.
“Did you … have a question?” she asked. This guy had ridden up to the old barn on a road bike that looked like it had cost more than Uncle Toby’s truck. Nothing had managed to impress him yet. When he didn’t ask her anything, or say anything, or do anything but stare at her like a bug, Riley added, “My uncle says that Camille Voynich’s disappearance started the, uh, modern myth cycle about Voynich Woods.”
“I’m fine,” he said shortly, turning back to the portrait of the Voyniches that had run in the Roscoe Independent. The two parents looked dour, if well-dressed. Their older daughter, Lillian, stood at her mother’s shoulder, staring at the camera with a tight little smile. Camille was seated between her parents, dressed in layers of white, lace at her throat and covering her hands and wrists, long dark hair lying in a braid across one shoulder. Riley had always thought that she looked destined to be a ghost.
“Dickhead,” she whispered under her breath, mostly for Sam’s benefit.
They were right in the thick of Roscoe’s meager tourist season, with the fall foliage about a week or two before its peak but the early autumn warmth not yet chased off by the gray rains. They’d gotten a good number of people for the tour: the aforementioned cranky bicyclist, a family of four with varying degrees of Boston accent, a retired couple who’d had to leave their enormous RV on the shoulder of the road because the parking lot was too small, and a couple of middle-aged women who were definitely plotting out some kind of podcast episode about Roscoe and Voynich Woods.
“This looks like a kid drew it,” the dad from Boston scoffed, holding up one of the prints of Roscoe’s Witch of the Woods. Riley had, in fact, drawn that when she was fourteen, a little too obsessed with both Voynich Woods’ mysteries and drawing creepy women with long hair obscuring their faces. It was exquisitely embarrassing that Toby still sold art she’d made years ago.
“What’s the difference between a forest and woods?” the mom from Boston asked. She seemed bored, half watching her kids touch everything in the little gift shop with fingers stained from the ice cream they’d been eating. “Why’s it called one instead of the other?”
Sam piped up, “It has to do with tree density. If the majority of the area has tree canopy, then it’s a forest. If it’s less than that, it’s a wood. It’s technically a forest now, but when it was named, they called it a wood because the logging industry had cleared away a lot of the trees, and—”
“Uh-huh, that’s super,” the mom said. “Kaylin! Don’t put that in your mouth!”
She pulled the geode out of her kid’s mouth, wiped it hastily on her shirt, and put it back on the display. Riley wished that literally any of the monsters in her uncle’s museum were real, and that she could feed people to them.
“I have a question,” one of the podcast women said, looming up suddenly in front of the desk. She was wearing what Riley could only assume was merch for her podcast, a T-shirt with the words BAD THINGS AND GOOD PEOPLE above a chalk outline of a body with a bright yellow smiley face. “Why isn’t the wall of missing people complete? There are some names I’m not seeing on there.”
She said it loud enough that the other tourists turned to look at her. The adults, anyway. The kids were now driving the crystals around like they were toy cars.
More than any other kind of tourist, the ones who claimed to know more than Uncle Toby were the worst.
Sam went stiff. Riley didn’t look up from the nearly complete moth she’d drawn on Sam’s shoulder, but she did squeeze her sister’s arm. “We only include people who conclusively went missing inside Voynich Woods,” she said quietly.
“But what about—”
“Not everyone who’s ditched town gets added to the official list,” Riley said. She tried to sound bored instead of angry. She didn’t look at the wall, at the ten black-and-white photographs that stretched from 1938’s Camille Voynich—the most famous of the missing, and the one who the woods were named for—to 2018’s Amy Macready. She didn’t think about whose photo wasn’t there. “Some people just leave.”
“Official list according to who?” asked the other podcaster lady.
“That would be me,” Toby said, finally coming into the barn. “Though I’m more of an unofficial historian. But literally nobody else wants this job, so.”
He said it lightly, timed to get a laugh, and it worked, dispelling the tension that Riley had created by being her usual charming self. She was ready for tourist season to be over.
Riley pointedly went back to her drawing, tuning out anything else that the two podcast ladies asked as they crowded up to Toby with questions. She put a few finishing touches on Sam’s death’s-head moth, comparing it to the picture she’d pulled up on her phone. Not bad, she decided, for permanent marker on someone who hated sitting still. She took a quick photo and turned her phone around to show Sam.
“Nice,” Sam said. “Kinda smeared.”
“You’re sweaty,” Riley told her.
“You’re sweaty. And you stink,” Sam replied.
Riley capped the marker and said, “All teenagers stink. Give it another few years and you’re gonna be even worse.”
“Gross,” Sam announced, and Riley shrugged. Couldn’t argue with it. “You should offer to give the tourists fake tattoos.”
“Maybe in a few years I can give them real ones. Roscoe Mystery Museum, Tours, and Tattoos.”
Toby must have been half listening, because he looked over and grinned at her before going back to his conversation with the podcast women. He had promised to pay for a tattoo for Riley’s eighteenth birthday, on the condition that she never, ever tried to give herself one in her bedroom again. (It had gotten infected, the little snake she’d tried to press into her skin with a sewing needle and some nontoxic ink. In retrospect, not her smartest decision.)
“It’s wild,” one of the podcast women said, loud enough to break Riley’s focus. “How beautiful and timeless this place is, but how there’s this dark history threaded through it.”
“Oh my god, like the caves—” said her friend.
“Yes! Just like the cave system under the woods! Beauty all around you, but below your feet…” She trailed off meaningfully.
“I can see you’ve already done some research,” Toby said. “Have you heard of the Witch’s Well sinkhole?”
He was in full tour guide mode as he started talking about karst geology and the area’s caves: a big, friendly smile, a hint of “aw, shucks” swagger, and a gentle country twang to his voice. Not how people in Roscoe talked—which was nasal and fast, syllables scooped out of words—but how outsiders might expect them to speak. Riley and Sam called it the Redneck Professor persona. It had been weird to see Toby slip into it the first couple of times; their mother’s brother had always been kind, but he had no idea how to interact with the two nieces he found himself caring for whenever Mom was arrested or in rehab. It got channeled into long, uninterrupted speeches about topics he was perpetually researching for “the book.” Riley didn’t know what the book was about, exactly, only that it seemed to include local history, cryptids, and ghost tales, sure, but also the Wabanaki Confederacy, the eugenics movement in New England (and the importance, in general, of remembering ugly history that made you feel bad), and all the failures of the state that led to the local opioid epidemic. She didn’t know how all those things fit together; she suspected Toby didn’t know either, and maybe that was why the book never seemed to be finished.
Toby led the tour group out of the barn, having smoothly transitioned into his talk about myths and stories from the Western Abenaki tribes. Once he got them ushered out, he leaned back in the doorway. “You two good?” he asked. “It seemed tense when I came in.”
“Podcast lady said there’s missing people we left off the wall,” Riley said.
“She’s right, though,” Sam whispered.
Riley didn’t realize how tightly she was gripping the marker until her hand cramped. She shook it out, opened her mouth to argue that Mom hadn’t disappeared into the woods, but into the night with an arrest warrant in her name. Then she thought better of it: Why spoil a nice day with the one thing she and her sister would never agree on? “Sam, we’re not going to talk about it for some random lady’s podcast. She came up to us like she was about to accuse us of a conspiracy.”
“I’ll keep her away from you two. Or do you want to skip the tour? Stay home?” Toby offered.
Riley looked at Sam, leaving it up to her.
“We’ll go part of the way with you,” Sam said. “Then we’ve got plans.”
This was news to Riley. But Sam never had the same misgivings about Voynich. She loved the woods, loved the stories that Toby told about them, and the monsters and missing people that were basically in their backyard. She’d only been five years old when she and Riley came to live with Toby, and she treated the creepy-ass woods behind their house like her own personal playground.
“Still on the hunt for the Wishing Tree, huh?” Toby asked.
Riley’s eyes slid over to the exhibit about the Wishing Tree. The story went that there was a big tree, hidden somewhere in the forest. If you came to it with pure intentions and left a gift—a coin, a nail, a ribbon, depending on what you wanted—it would grant you a wish. It was one of the first exhibits that she had helped Toby put together; they’d sketched the outline of a tree on a piece of plywood, then painted it with acrylics that the high school had thrown out after cutting all the art classes because of the budget.
Riley could hear Toby’s voice in her head, the lecture he gave: The earliest evidence came from journal entries of a logging foreman in 1830, who referred to the Wishing Tree like it was already an established myth in the woods his men were clearing. It was probably older than Roscoe, but nobody had ever seen it or taken a picture of it. Some people called it the Witch’s Tree and claimed that it had hosted dark, unholy sabbaths.
“Whistles?” Toby asked.
Riley pulled the silver whistle on its chain out of her shirt. Sam did the same with her whistle. With the spotty reception in the woods, it was more reliable than a cell phone.
“You remember the rules?” he prompted. He’d learned at some point that he couldn’t keep them out of Voynich Woods. The forest butted nearly right up to the fields beyond the backyard, and Sam was particularly enamored with the woods and the creatures it supposedly hid, while Riley tended to chase after her. So he instituted rules: Always carry whistles, never go alone, always come home before dark, and if anyone calls your name, don’t answer them.
The last one wasn’t a rule found in most survival manuals.
Sam gave a thumbs-up, and Riley nodded.
Outside, the Boston dad grumbled loudly about wasting daylight, while the bicyclist was telling the podcast ladies about a tour he’d taken of a ghost town down in the south of the state. “Much more professional,” he said.
Toby pasted his tour guide smile back on and said, “Guess we shouldn’t keep them waiting.”
* * *
It was a beautiful day to be outside, crisp and autumnal, sunny enough that Riley was hiking in only a sweater. Toby stretched out a hike up the mountain that Riley could cover in thirty minutes into a nearly two-hour tour, from the old gatehouse down at the entrance to watching the sunset at Dyson Pond, a picturesque spot with a clear view of the mountains and Roscoe’s downtown—if you could call the tiny collection of shops and empty storefronts that. Roscoe had never been much of a town, had only become less of one as time went on. The tourists that Roscoe did attract came for Voynich’s monsters and missing, and the strange history of an ostensibly beautiful place.
“There are a lot of ghosts in Voynich Woods,” Toby said now, more than an hour into the tour. “The oldest one has been called a lot of things, but most of us locals call her … the Dead Girl.”
A round of snickers, and Toby smiled. “Yeah, we get real creative around here.
“Most ghosts that people see don’t show a lot of signs of death, exactly, just a certain … unearthliness. The Dead Girl gets her name from her looks, which are very gruesome. But she’s also the friendliest supernatural entity in these woods. The story goes, if you’re lost and call out her name near a body of water, she’ll come to you, and if you’re lucky, she’ll lead you to where you need to go. Some stories say to call her name three times, some say five times—”
“Wait, what’s her name?” one of the tourists asked. They always asked. Toby smiled again; last week, he’d taught Riley all about the power of the mysterious smile. The two of them had practiced while her little sister Sam held up numbers to judge them like it was the Olympics. She’d kept docking Riley points for not being enigmatic enough.
“Nobody knows,” Toby answered. “But if you’re brave enough, you can try your luck guessing it when we get to Dyson Pond, which is one of her favorite spots.”
Toby started ushering the group farther up the path. One of the podcast women lingered until she could walk with Riley and Sam at the back of the group. “Loving the hike. And all the stories your dad knows—”
“He’s my uncle,” Riley said. She pulled Sam to her side, wanting to physically wall her off from this woman’s questions.
“Must be nice having family close by,” said the woman. She spoke crisply, like she was recording right now. “Are you all close?”
Riley hated questions about her family, especially from strangers. Even when said strangers weren’t obviously snooping, what was she supposed to say? That one of her parents was in Holy Cemetery and the other had skipped town after violating her parole conditions?
“I guess,” she said, trying to channel “off-putting, sullen teenager” as much as possible. She glanced over at Sam, who was doing her best to avoid the woman’s curious gaze, and then at Toby. He’d stationed himself at the head of the group, while she and Sam had lingered at the back. The other podcaster had occupied him, and from what Riley could hear, was talking his ear off about poor Amy Macready, the last “official” disappearance in Voynich Woods.
“You probably figured out that we’re here for research purposes,” the woman said.
“You should talk to Toby, then. He’s the guide.” Riley could feel her shoulders pulling in. Did the woman not notice Riley itching to flee this conversation, or did she not care? “Like, the one who knows stuff? I’m not—”
“It’s good to get multiple perspectives.” The woman gestured to her T-shirt. “I don’t know if you’ve heard of our podcast—”
“Nope,” Riley said.
“Oh, well, we do a mix of true crime and supernatural—”
Copyright © 2024 by Nino Cipri
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