Don’t enter The Weald

If you think the Rot is a threat to life itself, Old Man Flundgunson will tell you that you shall not go deeper into Hollar. The things he has seen will turn every man’s beard white, every woman’s hair grey and will blind each child for life.

Those who followed Bannwart Frieda Diephelm into the marsh do not talk about what they heard coming from the foul pools, or from the empty hamlets north of Vehingen and Belgheim. Some did not come back. Of Frieda herself, nothing is known except that Gunda saw her shoe lying upright in the mud, when she ran. No one blamed Gunda for running. Not even Bodenbacher, who blames everyone.

The sound is the worst of it. It is familiar, which is what makes it wrong, something you have heard in a barn or the meadow, but never so patient and deep. There is no daylight beneath that canopy, only fog that tastes of wet iron and a sweetness that seeps through whatever cloth you tie across your face. The sound is always just behind the fog, never in front of it, and it is always a little closer than before you stopped to listen.

Gunda says she reached the Moosweiler chapel only because a woman in white stood between the trunks and called her name. Softly. Twice. Nothing stays white in Hollar. She says she ran towards the voice, and only later, in the dark, wondered how the woman had known it, and why she had been so sure it was kind.

Gunda has not left the hamlet in a month. She sits at her window and no longer sleeps, and the neighbours say she is humming. They say she keeps one hand in her sleeve, and that when she forgets and lets it show, the skin looks damp.

Last night someone saw her take down her axe and walk towards the trees, unhurried, like a woman answering.

This morning her door was open. Her boots stood by the hearth, upright, laces tied, and the whole room smelled faintly sweet.

This short story took place in the world of The Weald – an endless forest of folk horror created by and for the independent tabletop community.