In a community on the outskirts of Hambergen, children were told never to go out after the sunset, when the skies became dark. Something lurked out there that attacked animals and humans. And it was best never to enter the woods alone, even in broad daylight.
Neighboring children had been disappearing at random after dark, but they would know better than to go anywhere near the Reaper’s Wood because of the local legend handed down from generation to generation.
To make matters worse, a rivalry existed between the girls and the boys in the neighborhood. They played apart from one another and whenever the two groups came upon one another on the road, they would bicker and throw small rocks. The ring leader of the boys was a bully named Stefan. He had four other friends and they all lived on the next street over. There were two pairs of sisters who played together and lived next door to each other, who also played with other children from time to time. Astrid and Sofia lived closer to the forest than Lorelei and Emilia by one house. The eldest was Astrid at 14, followed by her sister Sofia who was 12, Lorelei was 10, and Emilia was 7.
One day, after several disappearances, Stefan decided to enter the forest on a dare. His friends dared him to walk 50 paces into the Reaper’s Wood and then turn and face the entrance, with his back facing the woods for 60 seconds. No one would know if he completed the dare, as they were too afraid to follow. He stood there in the forest, true to his word, counting quietly in his head 1, 2, 3, 4…
As Stefan stood there, in the darkness, he could hear something flutter past him in the trees, and caught sight of a feathered creature out of the corner of his eye. It’s just a barn owl, he reassured himself. 5, 6, 7, 8…
As he continued to count, the darkness dragged itself over the trees. The bird swooped lower, and something caught it midair. The barn owl let out a loud scream, but the sound was not the screech a barn owl would normally make. It was the sound of a girl screaming.
All the blood rushed from Stefan’s face as he turned and ran, heading deeper into the forest, away from the screaming owl and the thing that caught it. As he ran, one of his shoelaces became untied, and his shoe slipped off his foot. He did not stop for it. The forest grew in on itself the further he ran. His foot caught on a root and he fell onto the ground, catching his fall with his hands, which scraped against the earth and rock. Stefan stood to make another run for it, when something caught hold of him. He could feel himself shrinking away from his body, and then all he could see was darkness.
The next day, Stefan’s father, Karl, showed up at Astrid and Sofia’s house. He knelt down with pleading eyes, “Have you seen my Stefan?”
Their bodies felt like lead weights. Even though Stefan was cruel to them, he was someone they knew. Still, they knew nothing, so his father left their house even more drained of hope.
Stefan’s father called police, who brought dogs to sweep the neighborhood for Stefan’s scent, but they would not go near the forest, sensing a danger there, and did everything to lead the police off in another direction. Karl had phoned Astrid and Sofia’s mother to let her know that the search had turned up nothing. The girls overheard them talking from the living room.
A short time later, Astrid and Sofia met with Lorelei and Emilia at the vacant lot next to their house. It had an elephantine tree with many gnarled, hulking branches that hung low to the ground. Today they were there to discuss what to do about the disappearances.
“We can’t just do nothing, and wait for it to get us too,” said Sofia.
“It’s daytime. We should go to the forest and look to see if we can find any signs of Stefan,” she added.
They all agreed. Lorelei grabbed a flashlight from the house just in case, and they left, not telling anyone what they were planning to do. When they got to the woods, the trail leading in narrowed so they had to walk single file with Astrid at the front and Emilia taking up the rear. After walking for some time, Astrid spotted something along the path, “Oh Nooo!”
Stefan’s brown shoe was lying on its side.
“Stefan!” Sofia yelled for him.
“Stefan!” They all yelled, tears filling their eyes.
But in return there was only silence. They continued along the trail. Eventually, they came upon a clearing. In the clearing there was a broad tree that towered over the others nearby, and just below it was a massive ring filled with leaves.
“Isn’t it odd that this is the only spot in the entire wood that has any leaves?” Lorelei remarked.
The scene looked strangely like a circle of fire. Around the circle of leaves were strange symbols engraved in the dirt. Up in the tree that stood beside it, was a platform with planks nailed into the side of the tree to ascend it.
Who would build and abandon a tree house out this far? Lorelei thought.
Instinctively, Astrid climbed, clinging to each of the planks and pulling herself up to inspect what was on the platform. There was a metal bucket and inside it there was a red cloth. Or was it white… and stained red by something? She suddenly realized what it was. It was a nightgown. A little girl’s nightgown covered in blood. Astrid’s heart pounded in her chest.
As Lorelei stood on the ground with Emilia, she could feel the darkness shift over her. “We have to go now.”
Astrid turned to come down from the platform and took one more look at the ring of leaves from above.
“It’s a portal to hell,” she said absently.
An icy chill moved through her body as she realized what she had said. Astrid had never seen one before, nor did she know of any satanic rituals, but she knew in her gut that’s what this was. She hurried down the planks to the ground below. Once she was at the bottom, panting, she said, “It’s how…it’s taking them. The leaves are some kind… of veil.”
The other girls’ eyes grew wide.
“We have to close it!”
What Astrid was saying made some kind of strange sense to everyone.
“But first, let’s get out of here. If it catches us, we can’t stop anything,” Sofia added.
The darkness grew around them. The girls ran the full length of the forest to the entrance, something paced them in the trees the entire way. They didn’t stop running until they got to Astrid and Sofia’s house, collapsing on the patio furniture completely out of breath.
“What are we going to do, Astrid?” Lorelei asked.
“I will try to figure out a way to close the portal.”
A look of deep concern spread across Sofia’s face. “That means we have to go back in there again, it isn’t safe!”
“Nothing is safe.” Astrid replied.
“Why don’t we get our parents involved?” Emilia asked.
“What happens if they don’t believe us? They may forbid us to go, and then we won’t be able to do anything about it,” Astrid said, crossing her arms and slouching back into her chair to think.
The girls resolved not to tell their parents.
That night, Astrid sat at her computer, pouring over countless websites, looking for information on how to close the portal. She could sense a strange presence in her room, but dismissed it because of the horrific nature of the content she was looking at. Around 3 a.m. she shut down her computer, and when she turned to get up from her chair, she could see a figure in her window with a white face and two large black eyes staring back at her. She screamed. Then she realized it was just a barn owl. It placed something on the windowsill outside and then flew away. She got closer to the window to see what the owl had left. On the sill was a neat row of tiny rocks, arranged from large to small.
Owls don’t do that, Astrid thought to herself.
That night she could barely sleep. She kept watch over the window, waiting for the owl to come back. The next morning, Astrid met the other girls in the gnarled tree on the vacant lot after breakfast.
“We have to pick some sage from the garden and tie it into bundles. Try to pick the leaves that look dried out by the sun. Then we need salt, as much as we can find,” she said, laying out the plan with a yawn.
Sofia and Emilia set to work picking sage and tying it while Astrid and Lorelei gathered all the salt they could find in their houses. Astrid also found a lighter, rummaging through the junk drawer in the kitchen, that they would need for the next part of their plan.
Astrid grabbed four ceramic bowls out of the kitchen cupboard and placed them into her bag. Once they had gathered everything, they headed for the woods. When they reached the clearing, Astrid bent down and pulled the four bowls out of her bag. She began scooping a couple handfuls of fresh dirt into each one. The ground was loose there. She handed a bowl to each of the girls and kept one for herself. Then, she passed them a bundle of sage to place inside their bowl. She pulled the lighter from the bag and lit the bundles, which smoked.
“We need to stand at four equidistant points around the circle of leaves,” she said.
The girls each took up one point around the circle as Astrid walked the circumference, pouring the salt onto the surrounding ground.
“This salt will seal the portal,” she explained.
“Now we must pray,” she told the girls.
They held out their smoking sage and followed Astrid’s words.
“By the Power of the Heavenly Father, I command all types of dark portals in and around this wood to be immediately filled with Jesus Christs’ light forever dismantling, closing, and sealing these portals. I also command that the entities who created these portals leave immediately and never return!”
Just then, the ground inside the circle, covered by the leaves, gave way to a seemingly endless hole in the earth, and something was moving upward inside the hole. The girls edged backward in fear, unsure of what they had done. Hundreds of barn owls began flying out of the void and swarming the sky. As the last owl flew out, the earth swallowed the pit, sealing the portal forever.
Astrid felt disappointed. She didn’t just want to stop the children from being taken; she wanted to return them. She wanted to return Stefan to his father. She then realized something.
“The owls are all the missing children.”
The girls stood there for a while, looking at the sky with alabaster faces, horrified by what this meant.
“How do we change them back Astrid?” Emilia asked. The question felt painfully rhetorical.
As the sunlight dwindled, they went to Astrid and Sofia’s house. Their father was sitting in his armchair when the girls came crashing through the door.
“You kids look like you had a visit from Uncle Hendrik,” he remarked jokingly.
That night, and every night since then, a barn owl with a heart-shaped face visits Stefan’s father’s bedroom window and then it flies to Astrid’s house, leaving a stone on her windowsill.
*Note: Uncle Hendrik is another name for death.
