The Bet

“Oh, dear, Grandma, I am sorry,” she whispered.

It was foolish of her to have left the house unchaperoned as it was, without being so reckless with her own safety as to go wandering off into the trees, especially in an area she had never been to before and her grandma had warned her to avoid.

“Now what?”

“Go home, dearie.”

Estelle screamed and whirled around so fast that she dropped her basket and scattered apples everywhere. She paid them no heed. Her gaze was locked on the small, wizened creature who stepped out from the shadows and stared spitefully at her; her weathered face a mask of foreboding the likes of which made Estelle start to panic. Her world rocked on its axis, suspended in time and animation amidst the narrow eyed stare the woman levelled on her. The brilliant blue of the woman’s eyes were so pale they were almost translucent; hauntingly so, and were so cold and unwelcoming that Estelle took a hesitant step away from her.

She is an elderly lady who is most probably cantankerous, as some old people can be sometimes, that’s all, she sternly warned herself.

Rather than allow any of her concerns to show on her features, Estelle smiled tentatively at the woman, and was unsurprised when she received not even a blink in response.

“I am sorry, you gave me a start. I didn’t realise you were there,” Estelle muttered, but then realised that she had just lied. “Well, I heard you, of course, but didn’t realise it was you who made the noise.” She fell silent when she realised she was rambling.

“You shouldn’t be here,” the old woman grunted eventually.

“I-I don’t know who these woods belong to,” Estelle murmured.

She wished she knew where she was so she could find a way out, but truly had no idea how far she had come. She could be no more than a few feet away from the main road leading back into town, or she could be half a mile or so. She had been so lost in her thoughts she had lost all track of time and place.

“Turn around and go back,” the old woman warned. “It is no place for the likes of you. Get back to yonder place and don’t come back.”

“Yonder?” Estelle asked. She wondered where on earth ‘yonder’ meant. She would go if she had any sense of where she was. She opened her mouth to tell the woman her predicament only for the woman to raising a crooked finger in warning.

“Yer strayin’ into places you shouldna go. Get ye home now,” the woman chided.

Behind that bony finger were the meanest eyes Estelle had ever seen on anybody. They were so full of menace that she immediately began to back away.

“I-I am sorry. I didn’t mean to trespass. I got lost, you see?” she explained, hoping the woman would take pity on her and at least point in the direction she needed to take.

“Aye, well this is no place for anybody to wander around,” the woman snapped. “Get yer home now.”

“I-” The rest of Estelle’s reply was abruptly halted by the loud snap of a twig directly behind her. She whirled to face the noise only to be met with another solid wall of trees.

I am really starting to hate trees, she thought desperately.

“If you-” Estelle turned to face the old woman only to gasp and stare in dismay at the empty space where the old woman had been. She looked around but knew instinctively that the old woman had gone. She had vanished, just as quickly and quietly as she had arrived.

“Now, where did you go?” she murmured, but doubted she would ever find out.

She received her answer, though, when she began to stomp in the direction the elderly woman had appeared from and caught sight of her rapidly retreating back through the trees. Determined to ask her for help getting home, Estelle followed. She was nervous to do so. The woman wasn’t friendly, but with no other hope of rescue there was little else Estelle could do.

The more she followed the woman, the more curious Estelle was to know what she was doing in the woods. It was evident from her purposeful gait that the old woman knew where she was going. Her tread was steady and measured. The fallen branches and twigs no hindrance to her meandering route through the woods.

Estelle was busy contemplating whether to go back and try a different route home when the woman mysteriously vanished again. If she hadn’t seen her disappear behind a tree, but not come out the other side, she would never have believed it.

“There has to be a logical explanation,” Estelle whispered with a shiver.

With her eyes glued on the space where the woman should have appeared by now, she quietly crept closer. To her surprise, to her left, in a small clearing, a small house emerged. Estelle wondered if she was imagining it. After all, who on earth would want to live in the middle of purportedly haunted woods, in a place where not even sunlight managed to filter through the thick canopy of trees? Nevertheless, someone did because there, nestled within the gloom, was a small thatched house that looked like something out of her

childhood dreams - or her worst nightmares.

She made an immediate decision not to venture near it, not least because the woman was less than friendly, and clearly didn’t welcome her presence in the woods. But also because there was something about that odd little cottage that elicited a deep sense of foreboding within Estelle, and kept her frozen in place, several feet away.

The first thing she became aware of the more she studied the building was the stillness of the trees it was sheltered by. Nothing moved. There were no birds tweeting in the trees, no rustling of small animals in the undergrowth, no gentle trickle of the stream she knew meandered its way through the woods somewhere. It was all startlingly surreal. So much so that if it wasn’t for the presence of the old woman now scurrying toward the front door, Estelle would have doubted its reality. But she knew it was real. She watched the old woman lift the latch on the crooked wooden door and walk inside the small, single storey building. Strangely, there was no sound as the door closed behind her. Instead, there was a deathly silence that was as cold and unwelcoming as the woman.

Curious, Estelle felt compelled to stay and watch. She had no idea why, or what she should watch, but she couldn’t bring herself to walk away. Not until she could decide whether to knock on the front door and ask the woman for directions so she could leave just like the woman had ordered her to. With nobody else in the area, Estelle studied the building and tried to decide what to do.