Chapter 5: The Mark of the Forest

Chapter 5: The Mark of the Forest

Leo stumbled away from Elodie’s cottage, his feet pounding on the packed earth of the path. He didn't run, but every step was a frantic, controlled flight. Her words echoed in his head, a chilling mantra that drowned out the cheerful sounds of the village he was re-entering. They can smell the old blood. The old blood. The old blood.

Her grip, surprisingly strong, had left a phantom pressure on his forearm. He could almost still feel her leathery fingers digging into his skin, her moss-green eyes staring at a spot he’d never given a second thought. The stink of the forest’s fear. He felt tainted, marked by her words, as if she had seen something inside him that was rotten and ancient.

He slipped back into his house, a ghost in his own home. His mother was in the living room, absorbed in a television show, a cocoon of noise and light that felt a world away from the shadows gathering in his mind. His father was still at work. He was alone. The silence upstairs was a gaping maw, waiting to swallow him.

An echo… what is familiar… one of your family…

What did she mean? His family was aggressively, almost boringly normal. His father, an accountant. His mother, a part-time librarian. They were the Janssens. They kept to themselves, paid their taxes, and maintained their lawn. There were no grand secrets, no dark histories. Or were there?

The desire for an answer, any answer, was now a ravenous hunger. He was tired of being the scared, haunted boy. He needed to find the source of this rot, even if it was buried within his own history. The obstacle was the sheer weight of the past. Where did you even begin to search for something you didn't know existed?

His mind raced. Old photographs. Letters. Documents. Things people stored away and forgot about. Things that ended up in one place: the attic.

The pull-down cord for the attic stairs was in the hallway ceiling, just outside his bedroom. He had only been up there a few times in his life, sent to fetch Christmas decorations or store away old toys. It was a place of forgotten things, a dusty graveyard of his family’s accumulated life.

With a new, nervous energy, Leo dragged a chair into the hall. Climbing onto it, he pulled the cord. The ladder unfolded with a series of loud, complaining groans, releasing a puff of cool, stale air that smelled of dust and time. The smell of secrets. He paused, listening. The television droned on downstairs. He was safe for now.

He ascended the ladder, his head rising into the gloom. He fumbled for the bare bulb’s pull-chain, and with a click, the attic was cast in a weak, yellow light. The space was exactly as he remembered, only more menacing. Old furniture huddled under white dust sheets like enormous, sleeping beasts. Cobwebs, thick as cotton, draped from the rafters. Cardboard boxes, their sides bowing and soft with age, were stacked in precarious towers. It was a still, silent world, a museum of his family’s mundane past.

But Elodie’s words had poisoned the mundane. Now, every shadow seemed to stretch, every object seemed to hold a silent story. He felt like a trespasser, a grave robber in his own home. The feeling of being watched, so familiar from the edge of the woods, returned here, under the eaves of his own roof.

He didn't know what he was looking for. A diary? A strange artifact? A letter mentioning "Watchers" or a pact? He started with the nearest stack of boxes, labeled with his father’s neat handwriting: ‘Leo’s Schoolwork’, ‘Winter Clothes’, ‘Kitchen - Old’. It was all frustratingly normal. He moved deeper into the attic, dust motes dancing in the single beam of light from the small, grimy window at the far end.

He found a heavy wooden trunk tucked away in the darkest corner, half-hidden behind a broken rocking horse. It was older than the other boxes, bound with rusting iron straps. There was no label. This was from an earlier time. His heart began to beat faster. He knelt, his fingers fumbling with the stiff, resistant latch. It finally gave way with a loud metallic clang that made him jump.

The scent that rose from the trunk was one of brittle paper, dried ink, and the faintest hint of cedar. Inside, nestled amongst yellowed linens, were stacks of letters tied with faded ribbon, a few leather-bound ledgers, and a thick, velvet-covered photo album. He lifted the album out. It was heavy, important.

He sat on the dusty floorboards, the single bare bulb casting a lonely circle of light around him, and opened it. The first few pages were filled with stiff, formal portraits of people he vaguely recognized as his grandparents and their siblings. Then, as he turned the thick, black pages, the photographs grew older, the faces more severe, the clothing more archaic. He was digging deeper into the past, into the soil of his family tree.

And then he found him.

The photograph was sepia-toned and printed on thick, stiff card. It showed a young man, perhaps in his early twenties, standing before a backdrop of what was unmistakably the Ardenwood. His posture was proud, his gaze direct and challenging. He wore simple, rustic clothes. But it was his face that made Leo’s breath catch. He had the same slender build, the same line of the jaw, and the same intense eyes. They were lighter in the faded photograph, but they were undeniably Leo’s eyes, staring back at him across a century of time. A small, handwritten inscription at the bottom read, ‘Henri Janssen, 1922’. His great-grandfather.

Leo stared at the image of his ancestor, this young man who looked so much like him. He had lived here, in this village, walked these same paths. He had lived his whole life with that great, dark forest at his back.

Then Leo’s gaze drifted down. Henri’s sleeves were rolled up, his forearms exposed and strong from work. And on his left forearm, stark and dark against his skin, was a tattoo.

It wasn't a crude sailor’s anchor or a lover’s name. It was a perfect circle. A complex, circular design made of interwoven, thorny lines, almost like a wreath of briars. It was elegant and strange, and as Leo looked closer, his blood turned to ice. There were seven distinct, tiny breaks in the circumference of the circle, spaced at perfect intervals.

Seven breaks. Seven figures. A circle on the lawn.

A wave of vertigo swept over him. This was it. This was the echo. The familiar thing. This symbol, this mark, was part of his family. Part of his bloodline.

Elodie’s words came rushing back, no longer cryptic but terrifyingly specific. They can smell the old blood. She hadn’t just grabbed his arm. She had held it, her eyes fixed on it.

A strange, tingling itch started on his own left forearm, in the exact spot her fingers had pressed. He’d been scratching at it unconsciously for the past hour. He dismissed it as a psychosomatic reaction, his mind playing tricks on him. But the tingling intensified, turning into a strange, subcutaneous warmth.

With a sense of creeping, inevitable dread, he set the photograph down. His hand was trembling. Slowly, he pushed up the sleeve of his t-shirt. He looked at his skin.

At first, he saw nothing but the pale, unremarkable skin of a boy who spent more time drawing indoors than playing outside. But the weak light from the attic window caught the faint hairs on his arm, and beneath them, he saw it.

It wasn't a rash. It wasn't a scratch. It was a pattern.

Faint, silvery lines, like the ghost of a scar, were surfacing on his skin. They were the color of a fresh birthmark, a pale network of veins that he had never, ever seen before. He stared, his heart hammering against his ribs, as his mind traced the shape they were forming.

It was a circle. A circle of interwoven, thorny lines.

He scrambled back, dropping his sleeve as if his own arm were on fire. He looked from the photograph of his great-grandfather to his own trembling limb. It was the same. The exact same symbol. The Mark of the Forest.

It wasn't just a part of his history. It was a part of him. Awakening. Growing. And the Watchers, the ancient things in the woods, had seen it before he ever did. They had come not for a random boy in a house at the edge of town.

They had come home.