The Forest Ruins

Founder's Week - Part Two of Three

Welcome to Founder’s Week!

This is Part Two. (Start here or move on to Part Three.)

Please enjoy the second part of this three-part flash fiction saga!

---

Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash

Tamsin’s first surprise: the old road was not closed. 

True, the powers that be on the island had done everything in their authority to dissuade hapless tourists from wandering into it; the new road was clearly marked, paved and beautiful, just a slight turn off of the highway to continue onward toward Damascus. The connection to the old road was just an unassuming gravel turn-off, hidden by overgrown scotch broom, that curved north to the big black line of the woods. 

Tamsin laughed at her own good fortune. Clearly, all of the warnings had just been smoke; if the place was truly dangerous, there would be no way to get to it, at all. 

She took the gravel drive. The scotch broom leaned over her car, scraping like claws against her windows, but the sun was shining glorious and Tamsin was feeling more than a little bit invincible. She rolled down the windows and turned up the music as she drove down the unkempt road. 

Her second surprise was that there seemed to be people living along this gravel stretch. Smaller dirt roads spidered off and away to who-knows-where, and Tamsin could barely see isolated houses through the trees, their roofs overgrown with moss and their driveways choked with blackberry bushes. 

After about a half-mile, the gravel turned to ancient pavement, cracked and bubbled and marked with holes, risen in places where roots had been allowed to grow underneath, and Mothwood Forest loomed ahead of her, a great dark tunnel of towering firs, hemlock, cedar, and pine. 

Tamsin continued into the woods, and the sun was blotted out. She turned on her headlights. With the sudden darkness came an unseasonable chill. Tamsin closed her car windows and turned on the heat, shivering in her shorts and t-shirt. 

It occurred to her that this darkness would be pretty lousy for any videos she might want to shoot. She hoped there would be a better spot, or that the trees would eventually open up. But there didn’t seem to be any hope of that on the near-horizon. 

Up ahead, two shapes stepped out in front of the car. Tamsin braked hard, leaning into it, and stared out through the windshield. 

They were two deer. Yearling twin fawns, their baby spots faded, their summer coats sleek.  

“Aw,” Tamsin said, in spite of herself. “Hi, cuties. Move.”

But the pair of deer stood there watching the car, staring down the headlights. 

“Come on. Move.”

No movement, not even the twitch of a tail. 

A memory stirred in Tamsin’s mind, then. Something buried very, very deeply.

Early summer at the cabin in Seavend, her grandmother’s geraniums blooming along the walkway, skinned knees from tripping on the trails and salty feet from wading in the shallows. The smell of her grandfather’s pipesmoke and chimney woodsmoke and steamed clams and boat fuel.  

And a deer, a doe, breaking the line of the woods beside the cabin with her two twin fawns in tow, still wet and clumsy from birth, their eyes shining.

Tamsin, little Tamsin, just watching. Awed, and a little afraid, at these creatures whose lives mostly went on in the shadows, away from the prying eyes of humans. Little Tamsin’s first taste of wildness, of something that lives on the edge of safety.

But the next time little Tamsin saw the doe, there was only one fawn. The other was nowhere to be seen. 

The memory slipped away just as quickly as it had arrived, and the pair of deer staring down the car had not shown any indication of moving. 

So Tamsin finally leaned on the horn. The sound was strangely deadened in the thickness of the giant trees, but blared enough to startle the twins who bounded away and disappeared into the brush. 

Tamsin’s heart was pounding, but she wasn’t sure why. 

“Okay,” she said, to herself. “Now to find this lighthouse.”

She carried on. The old highway wound gently through the trees, the edges of the pavement being consumed by the underbrush, and Tamsin’s car whined and juddered over the uneven surface. The road had narrowed to the point that Tamsin realized she wouldn’t be able to easily turn around, even if she wanted to. 

But just as a germ of anxiety attempted to take root in her heart, the headlights illuminated an old sign, just ahead:

NOW ENTERING DAMASCUS

Tamsin’s heart leaped in her chest, and she felt strangely vindicated. She had heard the story: that the town of Damascus had been moved, wholesale, west out of Mothwood a long, long time ago. There was no one reason given, just lots of legends. But rumor had it that the old ghost town was still in the forest. 

And here was proof. 

Past the sign, the skeletons of ancient buildings loomed, old houses with glassless windows like sunken eyes, porches mouldering into the salal below. Roofs caved in and old paddocks sagging. Taller, wider ruins of what might have been banks, taverns, shops filled in what must have been the center of town, long ago. 

Before long, Tamsin reached a surprising sight: a crossroads.

She stopped the car, looked at each way in turn.  

Straight ahead, the road seemed to leave the ruins of Old Damascus and carry on into the woods beyond. To the left, the way appeared to be blocked by fallen debris and underbrush. And to the right? Who could say. But Tamsin knew that the sea lay in that direction, perhaps also the lighthouse. And Ferris’s landing place. 

Tamsin parked the car in the middle of the crossroads and got out. She was surprised to find that the woods were alive with the sounds of animals, birds chattering in the unseen heights and a scuffling in the underbrush betraying the presence of little mammals, startled by her presence. 

She walked back down the road the way she had come, looking up at the ghost town, the overgrown paths where the town must have expanded out into old neighborhoods, now lost to time. It was exactly how she had pictured it might be. 

That feeling of nostalgia prickled at her skin, again.

Visits to the cabin always meant watching whatever Grandma wanted to watch. And at some point or other Grandma would always put on reruns of Goldgreen. 

Goldgreen, that ill-fated TV show that only made one eight-episode season back in the early 1960s before mysteriously ending. The only TV show ever filmed on the island, by a crazed director who had turned his back on Hollywood and was trying to blaze his own trail, do something different. They had filmed it right here, in the ruins of Old Damascus, though back then the town had only been abandoned for a decade or so and made a serviceable set for a historical drama. 

Tamsin peered around at the old town and smiled to herself. 

“It’s perfect,” she said, into the stillness of the air. 

She strode back to her car, pulled out the phone stand, and set herself up so she could get a nice view of the ruins in the background. Obviously, her normal TikTok format wasn’t going to work, here. Instead, she adopted an appropriately spooky tone. 

“Welcome to Ferris Island’s most incredible ghost town: Old Damascus,” she said, gesturing with her arm to the ruins behind her. “The site of the filming of the ill-fated TV show, Goldgreen. Abandoned back in the early 50s, this place has been taken back by the forest. Only the bones remain.”

She turned off the camera and smiled to herself. 

“Only the bones remain. That was good,” she said.  

She tapped the video to rewatch it, make sure the lighting was right. Her own tinny voice came back to her, and Tamsin frowned. She hadn’t checked her hair before she started filming. It looked strange. 

Sighing, Tamsin fixed her hair, using the camera as a mirror, then set everything back up again, tapped Record. 

“Welcome,” she said, “to Ferris Island’s most amazing ghost town: Old Damascus. This place was where Goldgreen, the ill-fated TV show, was filmed. After the town was abandoned in the early 1950s the forest has slowly taken it back. Only the bones remain.”

She rewatched it, grinning. So good. This is gold.

But something caught her eye in the background of the video. Tamsin froze, slid the video player’s slider back to rewatch, focusing on the decaying building behind her.  

Was that the pale shape of a person, in the upper window?

Tamsin turned quickly to look up at the building. But the windows stared back at her empty, deeply dark. 

She laughed, in spite of herself.

“Get a grip,” she said. 

Picking up her phone rig, Tamsin pressed deeper into the ghost town. She peered into the old windows where crockery still sat on the tables and chairs were drawn up to the hearths, as though waiting for someone to come and build the fire. She passed old shopfronts where rows of glass bottles and jars still stood filled with who-knows-what on shelves. There were even cars, ancient hulking beasts missing their headlights, rusted and pockmarked, their tires long since rotted away underneath them. 

Tamsin took out her phone as much as she could, filming in the places where it wasn’t too dark to do so. She noticed the time was wearing on, much longer than she had expected, but she decided that she didn’t care. Who gives a crap about an old farmhouse on a cliff or a stupid state park when this was the kind of social media posts everyone would want to see? That “only the bones remain” stuff? Brilliant. 

Rounding the back of an old building that was almost certainly a church, the skeleton of the steeple just barely hanging on despite the decay in the roof, Tamsin came face to face with a graveyard, some of the stones still standing over their dead, some scattered by the unrelenting movement of time. Native willows had grown over the graves, their twisted boughs reaching for the light above. 

“Wow,” she said, pulling out her phone. “This is incredible.”

She slowly panned the phone around the graveyard, trying to get the whole thing in frame. The willows dipped in the slightest breath of wind, the birds chattering above.

“This is the cemetery at Old Damascus,” she murmured. “The town is one of the oldest on the island, and these graves are definitely centuries old. Who knows what spirits still haunt these ancient stones, waiting to be encountered?”

Not bad. Not as good as only the bones remain, but it would do.

Suddenly, Tamsin became aware that the birdsong had ceased entirely, and a hush had fallen over the graveyard. Still looking through her phone’s screen, panning back through the scene, some movement behind a gravestone only a stone’s throw away stopped her.

Tamsin paused and looked up, over her phone’s screen. 

There was something behind the gravestone. Something lifting, swaying very gently. A pale shape, like a crescent moon.

It was the crown of a head.

It rose, ever so slowly, the gloom in the old graveyard making it nearly impossible to see clearly, until Tamsin realized she was staring into the face of a young woman, long white hair down to the leaf-litter ground, eyes unnaturally empty. 

Tamsin recognized her own face in the ghostly form.

A silence.

And then, the apparition spoke, a whisper like the breath in the willows:

“Bones. Remain.” 

Tamsin shrieked, stumbled backward, tripping over herself in her panic to get away. She had wandered so far into the town that she nearly forgot how to get back to the car.

She threw herself over old fences, through overgrown backyards, and around the rotted houses until she saw the car, waiting at the crossroads for her. 

But her relief quickly soured in her stomach when she saw the forms of two twin yearling deer, shadowy-black and eerily still, standing on either side of the car. Their eyes were glowing white, watching her as she approached.

Seeing through her.  

Tamsin, in her desperation, could think of no other place to go. She had to get out of this darkness, had to find light. Somewhere, some way, these trees had to end. 

As the twin deer advanced toward her on slim, dark feet, Tamsin turned and bolted, down the road of the crossroads that led to the right. 

North, she hoped, to the sea. 

---

Thank you for reading!

Click here for Part Three!