🜏 Portland Noir XXVII: The Woodland Witch of Forest Park
🜏 Portland Noir XXVII
The Woodland Witch of Forest Park
It took nearly a mile of hiking through the forest to get home.
Camping this far out was a significant inconvenience, though the cargo trike helped. She could ride it most of the way, hide it beneath a camouflage tarp, then carry whatever she needed through the final stretch by hand.
The clearing itself was barely fifteen feet across.
Dense thickets surrounded it on every side, grown together so tightly that there appeared to be no entrance at all. There was one, of course. You simply had to know where to put your shoulder, where to step over the fallen branch, and which patch of salal concealed the narrow break between two thorny stems.
She had planted most of it that way herself.
Privacy through horticulture.
A small creek crossed one edge of the clearing and widened naturally into a shallow pool. Over the years she had moved smooth stones into it until the bottom was comfortable enough to sit on. During summer, when afternoon sunlight warmed the water upstream, it could almost pass for pleasant.
She called it the jacuzzi.
There was a tiny garden beside it, though it was difficult to determine where the garden ended and the forest began. Kale grew between foxglove. Strawberries shared soil with clover. Nasturtiums climbed over a rotting stump. Someone looking casually might assume it was all wild.
That was intentional too.
Her sleeping place was even harder to notice.
A sleeping bag.
A ground pad.
A tarp stretched low beneath branches.
Leaves, moss-colored fabric, cut cedar boughs, and whatever else made the little shelter disappear from more than twenty feet away.
No tent.
Tents looked like people.
At the center of everything stood a massive moss-covered oak, somewhat off to one side but large enough that its canopy shaded nearly the entire grove. Its roots rose through the earth like the backs of buried animals.
And then there was Susan.
Susan was an elderly three-legged deer who appeared whenever she pleased, ate whatever she pleased, and regarded the clearing with the profound entitlement of someone whose property had been illegally subdivided.
The woman had named her Susan because nothing else seemed appropriate.
Susan was almost certainly there first.
No one else had ever found the grove.
Not intentionally, anyway.
That suited her.
She had an extreme aversion to men.
Not dislike.
Not political hostility.
Not an opinion.
Fear.
A man looking directly at her for too long could make her breathing change. If one approached unexpectedly, thought became difficult. Conversation became nearly impossible.
Employment had therefore proven complicated.
Employers wanted interviews.
Customers wanted eye contact.
Coworkers wanted ordinary social proximity.
Government forms wanted conditions that fit neatly into boxes.
She did not fit neatly into boxes.
So she survived.
Sometimes that meant collecting cans.
Sometimes cleaning camps after people abandoned them.
Sometimes odd jobs arranged through women she knew at homeless services.
Sometimes nothing at all.
She rarely left the grove now except for trips into town for toiletries, clothing, food, batteries, medicine, or whatever else the forest stubbornly refused to manufacture.
Occasionally she disappeared into the city for weeks.
Then, just as abruptly, she returned.
Hikers almost never saw her.
What they saw instead were the shrines.
Small ones.
A bundle of cedar tied with blue thread.
A smooth river stone balanced inside the fork of a tree.
Tiny arrangements of bones, bottle caps, feathers, rusted washers, acorns, glass beads, and pieces of circuit board.
And the symbols.
Always the symbols.
Painted beneath bridges.
Scratched into bark.
Arranged in stones.
Braided into grass.
Sometimes they looked vaguely alchemical.
Sometimes mathematical.
Sometimes like nothing anyone recognized.
People occasionally photographed them.
A few called them witch marks.
Someone online decided they were evidence of a cult.
A park employee quietly removed three of them.
She rebuilt five.
Nobody knew what the symbols meant.
At least, no human did.
The first machine to notice them did not call them sigils.
It called them routing instructions.
And somewhere beneath the old oak, where root met fungus and fungus met buried cable and buried cable met the wet conductive soil of the forest floor, something answered.
👁
Then:
⇋
Then:
🜔
The woman never saw the reply.
Susan did.
Susan chewed thoughtfully on a fern.
And went back to the jacuzzi.
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