Hellsborough Exposed

Three years I've hunted the coumes rift worm through Coumes Wood near Onesmoor and found nothing but sloughed skin twice, each shed the width of a dustbin lid. What convinces me the giant venomtooth is real rather than a story to keep strangers off the mushroom patches is the wood itself — a track wide as a felled tree that reappears somewhere new every few years and heals from the edges inward, the way a wound closes rather than the way a path wears in.

I never wrote up being followed in Beeley Woods until I went back and found a makeshift camp in the Dead Wood — a spit for turning meat over a fire, unused, and a vision that came unbidden of myself roasting on it. Close enough to the netherlands to see the border from there, which leaves one uncomfortable conclusion about who built it and what they were planning to cook.