Journal Entry 1

What you are about to read are the entries of a journal found in an abandoned cabin somewhere in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. The location remains undisclosed, for reasons that will become clear in the writing. Nothing in this journal has been changed. Only you can decide if these are based on fact or fiction. The answer may ultimately be found in the Devil’s Wood. Be prepared to believe the unbelievable.

Tuesday, July 14

You don’t need to know my name. For your own safety, it’s better that you don’t. By the time this tale is finished, you may wish you’d never met me, so let’s pretend you didn’t.

I was told this story on a spiritual retreat—a group of like-minded seekers spending a weekend in the Pennsylvania countryside at a campground that shall remain nameless for obvious reasons. People like to visit gravesites, and though this wasn’t one, not technically, the woods we were told about weren’t far way. The last thing I want is for them to be discovered.

I assumed the story wasn’t real. There were no tree worshippers in Pennsylvania, no ghost houses, no skeletons in a place called Devil’s Wood. But I was wrong. What I’m about to tell you is all true. There’s a walking stick in my closet that proves it. I want to be rid of it, but it’s not yet ready to be rid of me.

I have to be honest about how little I understood that first night. Retreats like this one are full of people telling stories they need someone else to believe. It was a spiritual retreat, after all. Some of us believed in God, some of us believed in nothing, and a few were convinced the Devil had stopped by a time or two. I’d learned to nod, to make a sympathetic face, to let people have their delusions. Someone always has a ghost story. Usually it’s a dead relative who visited them, or a past life intruding on the present, or a version of themselves they buried a long time ago and haven’t stopped digging up. Ghosts are often reflections in that way.

This wasn’t that kind of story. I knew about four minutes in this was different. We were all in the main lodge, sitting around a fireplace with logs ablaze, listening to the man—let’s call him Phillip—when everyone leaned in to pay closer attention to what he was  saying. Nobody shifted their position. Nobody reached for their water glass. Phillip had a way of looking past us while he spoke, as if he were reading the story off a wall behind our heads, and more than once he stopped mid-sentence and asked us, quite seriously, whether we’d heard something outside. I brushed it off as an affectation, part of his skillful storytelling, but the hair on my arms stood up nonetheless.

What I heard instead over the next hour was a story about a tree that isn’t on any map, and a community that tended it—to put it benignly—for several generations. We were told about a woman who died on the tree, by her own hand or someone else’s. We learned about an antique shop, and a mysterious estate sale, and a walking stick pulled out of a barrel because it was beautiful—which it is. We heard about writing that wasn’t so much carved into wood as emerging from it. We learned about people who died in ways that looked, from a distance, like nothing at all. A fall. A fainting spell. A car that came from nowhere and returned there just as quickly.

I didn’t believe a word of it. Most of us didn’t. We were just sitting around listening to a story, the way children do around a campfire. By the time Phillip was finished, I even found myself wishing I’d done something more productive with my evening, although there wasn’t much else to do but read. I was prepared to accept it as an entertaining, if unusual, first night of a retreat. But then the dreams began.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself. A story told  to us in an hour’s time is actually much longer, and that’s the journey I’ll  take you on, one entry at a time. There’s no hurry, really.  The Devil has all the time in the world.

I’ll write more soon.

— Anonymous.