September 4th, 1980

I hadn’t ever met Alice Cleaves, didn’t know who she was, but she knew who I was. I had opened her letter just as I had any other, it started out like any other fan mail, but the further I got into her letter, I could see she had seen things, found out things no little girl should know. When there’s no one around to help you, no one else that believes you, you call on Tobias Rodino, you call on me.

I had worked on dozens of cases like this one, hundreds, but finding out what had happened to Alice wasn’t going to be as easy as just finding the house and knocking three times, I was too late for that, I knew that all too well already.
The Cleaves family had been staying in Green Ridge for little over two months, it was a tiny mining commune in the mid west of America, the place hadn’t been lived in for decades until the Cleaves family had come back to it. The place had been forgotten, left to grow old and under the leaves where no one could see it. I didn’t know a lot about Green Ridge other than being situated around a large natural water reserve where a dam had been built in the mid 1930s. I had entered Green Ridge along the track with the water running from the dam on my left and an obscuring forest on my right, the place was deathly quiet, I was the only one that could hear the distant cawing of the birds. Making my way along the track and closer to the settlement, I recapped some of what Alice had mentioned in her letter, there were five of them that had come back here, Alice was the youngest, twelve years old and had a love for writing, a lot of kids did. Then there was Sid the older brother, I couldn’t get a fix on his age from Alice’ letter but I guessed sixteen or seventeen. There was Mom and Dad, Katelyn and Oliver, married and growing far too used to one another after two kids. Katelyn’s sister, Sinead had tagged along for the ride, then there was Orson, Olivers father and long time resident of Green Ridge who had also returned to his childhood home after a long run away from his family’s ancestral home.
Alice hadn’t mentioned a great deal of details about Green Ridge in her letter, so it was up to me to find out what I could as I went. As I got further ahead the track, it began to curve around to the right, which was when I started picking things up from the energies around me, it was how I always find out what others couldn’t see, that was what made me different from other detectives. I was being drawn to something somewhere on my right, it wasn’t until the track split off to either the left or right that I saw an old church on the right at the end. Making my way closer, there were energies inside, memories of what had transpired. Even in its old age, the church still had a certain kind of commanding presence about it, a kind of archaic beauty that could only have come from yesteryears. Surrounded by the tomb stones of Green Ridge’s deceased residents, it were almost as if they were watching over the holy place to keep it safe. But under all that, I could sense what was beneath, the darkness it was trying to hide from me. Making my way closer to the already open entrance, I saw my first vision while on the Green Ridge case. The figure of a woman strode angrily between the tomb stones, stopping ever so often as if searching for something. It was either Katelyn or her sister Sinead, but right then I had no way of telling which. She strode closer to the church entrance before bending down and picking up a fallen chunk from one of the tomb stones, tossing in her hand for a second or so as if to measure its weight, she continued on to enter the church. I followed her in, the late afternoon sun piercing through the stain glass windows, the air was silent inside. I saw who could only have been Oliver huddled over at one of the buildings alcoves on the right hand side. Muttering to himself, he sifted through bits of paper and torn off notes with feverish intensity, I couldn’t see his face from where I was standing, but his insane muttering told me all I needed to know. She had crept up behind him, the lump still in one hand, gripped tight with white knuckles, her face harbouring something dark, grimly animalistic. I stood and watched the scene unfold in front of me as she had crept between the wooden pews, silently gaining on Oliver like a predator in the wild. I heard Oliver mutter the word “catch” over several times, before going onto an unintelligible sentence with the word “astronaut” being the only decipherable one of the sentence. The woman gained on Oliver until she was only a few steps away, I already had a sense of what she was about to do, even in all the times I had seen psychic visions like it, I still had to hold back the urge to shout no! Or stop! But I stood there in silence as she brought the lump up above her head, the rock caught in the light like a knife before she brought it down right onto the top of his head. Oliver span slightly as he fell to the ground with a dull thud. The woman then jumping on top of him before bringing the lump down onto his head, thump after wet thump until it broke through to the wooden floor beneath. Olivers body led there shaking, the sound of his shoes tapping on the floor the only sound reverberating around the alter. She got up to look at his notes in the alcove, Olivers head had been smashed like an egg, hair and fragments of skull lay scattered messily along the floor, teeth under her shoes, blood on her face as she looked emotionlessly at Olivers notes.
The vision ended before my attention had been brought over to the far end of the alter where the priest would have stood to address his disciples. A trap door had been built into the floor, it had been opened recently and it descended down to some underground level. I felt myself drawn to what ever lay beneath, I was passing into things that should not have been. I felt myself going through and into another place, another world, one that was completely new to me. At the bottom I was suddenly standing in a dark alter, the tone in the air foreboding and ominous, the place lit only in grim candle light that gave off an unusual yellow green color, the shadows were long and dark, plenty of places for something to hide in. Disciples in ragged robes knelt on the floor facing the dark priest at his lectern at the far end. With arms outstretched, he gave a dark sermon of things I couldn’t understand. It was eerie and abyssal, the tinge of the occult something I couldn’t ignore. I heard a faint chorus of what sounded like the Gregorian chant coming from somewhere above, lord have mercy on my soul. I looked to my feet to find a torn off piece of paper, a child’s writing scrawled down on it.

The priest under the church
There was a dark priest that lived under the church that taught his followers the secrets of the atom. He made them wear black robes and pray to the gods so they would go to heaven when they die. But the priest was a nasty man that wanted everything for himself. He would tell his followers to go to the nearest village and steal from the other people because they didn’t follow his religion. His followers would return to him with gold and jewellery that belonged to other people. One day a follower came back empty handed and the dark priest got mad at him. As punishment, the priest made him steal all the magic potions from his fathers lab, so the follower went and broke into his fathers lab and stole all the valuable potions that his father had made and brought them back to the nasty priest. The priest picked a bright bright yellow potion from what the follower had stolen and drank it. He hoped he would get a super power or some magic power, but instead all his teeth fell out and he lost his voice. Afterwards, the priest became ill and died from a fever, but all the followers stayed in the church thinking he would come back. They stayed everyday and prayed until all of them changed, they stayed in the church for too long until their heads went wrong and they lost control of themselves before turning into animals.

After reading the piece I found myself standing back in the alter with the trap door at my feet and the paper still in my hand. This was Alice’s work alright, no one else would have done this, not like that. I started to get a glimpse at what kind of kid she was, at what her environment was doing to her, but it still didn’t explain what had happened here, where everyone had vanished to, or more worryingly, what had driven them to murder one another. I had to carry on, the mystery of what had happened to the Cleaves family was only beginning for me, but this place had changed them, driven them to something I still couldn’t understand.
I returned back outside, looking back at the church once more before I felt something drawing me toward the forest that lay behind the church. There wasn’t a path or any form of track that led me the way, I just followed my instincts, followed the energies that Alice had left behind. Reaching the cover of the trees, the canopy of leaves cast obscuring shadows over the ground like a camouflage of light and dark. I had picked up small bits of information through the ether as I went, I knew Alice would’ve had a name for a place like this, she called it the Forgotten Woods,there were plenty of places for a kids imagination to run wild out here. I had been taken into my second vision only a few minutes into the walk through the Forgotten Woods. Alice appeared ten feet or so in front of me, stood completely still like a statue until shifting her stance and craning her neck to peer at something through the trees to our right. I looked in the direction to see straight away what it had been that had her attention. Something in the woods, in between the trees, unnatural, man made, something that didn’t belong in the woods. I’d looked once, then again harder just to make sure I was seeing what Alice was looking at. A computer terminal, or to be more specific, a section of a bank of computers that looked identical to those used in the NASA mission control room. In the moment I didn’t concern myself with how or why a thing like that was there, but instead followed the vision. Alice went through the woods straight for it breaking into a run as she went. There was a single screen in the middle of the upper section of the computer bank displaying what looked like an astronaut inside a shuttle or some kind of craft. I got the sense something was wrong with the astronaut, in trouble maybe, I heard a voice coming from the speaker but couldn’t discern actual words from any of it. Alice stood there static, not moving at all until I heard the words “press the red button” come through the speakers. I front of Alice, on the keyboard area of the computer, there was indeed a red button. I watched as Alice’s tiny palm pressed down on the button, pushing it down half an inch before hearing a gentle click. We both looked up in unison as, the sound of a roaring jet engine erupted above us before a fiery lunar landing module went hurtling over head to some where further into the woods. Seconds later, the almighty crash shook the ground and sent birds from their treetop perches and into the air. Alice had obviously seen that it had landed nearby, I followed her tiny footsteps further into the forest I didn’t know until we were confronted with the crash site. I stood next to the apparition of Alice, a massive crater still smoking to our fore, trees upset and parted like the red sea, but there was nothing. No landing module, no astronaut, no discernible explanation of exactly what had just happened. Alice’s expression seemed blank, almost accepting of what she had just seen. Suddenly, the vision ended, the crater no longer smoking, but all too clear and present, a mystery.

From where I was, I had carried on east through the forest. I could see a clearing in the distance, maybe the woods edge, but things came to me as I walked. Alice had been chased through here, I couldn’t get any gauge on the time or by whom, but the energies here told me someone had been in pursuit of her here. She had been frantic, her pursuers even more so, and judging by what I had seen at the church, it wasn’t hard to believe. I had carried on ahead until reaching the edge of the forest with a small settlement ahead of me with the Cleaves’ house and two others. The house nearest to me wasn’t the Cleaves’ house, but I could already sense there had been activity there so decided to look there first before moving to their abode. Getting closer, I could sense Alice had visited the house before voices came through to me.
“ Alice hasn’t been going into the old Klaver house has she?” I heard Katelyn say.
“Yeah, I think so, why?” The older brother, Sid replied.
“I don’t want her going in there, it’s not safe.”
“She said she found something in there.”
“What do you mean?” Katelyn replied.
“I don’t know, she wouldn’t tell me.”
Getting closer, I could see why Katelyn hadn’t wanted her daughter going inside the place. It was rustic, rotting, delicate, it had been left unused and exposed for too long, it wouldn’t have made for safe exploring. In spite of all of that, I still entered, following Alice’s footsteps, seeing what she had seen, seeing what she was trying to show me. The old Klaver house was empty save for some old chairs and kitchen work tops, the ground floor wasn’t hiding anything from me, or if it was, it was eluding my senses. Where ever Alice had been going, it had been upstairs, that much I could sense. Walking back past the front door, I took my first steps up the stairs up to where ever she was leading me. Reaching the first floor, voices came to me again, a past conversation.
“Alice where have you been all day?” I heard Katelyn ask.
“Nowhere, just exploring in the Lonely Forest.” Alice had replied.
“The Lonely what? You were in the forest all day? You missed diner.”
“Sorry mom, I was writing my story, I lost track of time.”
“You and those damn stories, I hope you haven’t been going over to the other side of the dam.”
“No.” Alice replied suspiciously.
“I don’t want you going over there, that side’s for us grown-ups only.”
She was a kid, it was all too obvious to me that she’d wanted to get away from everyone else, somewhere where no one else could interfere with her imagination. I’d ascended yet another set of stairs that took me up to the houses attic. It was dusty and faded, shafts of sunlight shone through the gaps in the roof and cut through the darkness inside. The was an open door that had once been a well concealed entrance in the wall. Indistinguishable from the wall, it had gone completely unnoticed until recently. The now open secret door way revealed a bright and small room, saturated in color and completely out of context with the rest of the attic. Shelves lined the tiny secret room, vials of potions, a mortar and pestle on the wooden work top, the sound of bubbling liquid. I couldn’t decide whether it was the work space of a magician or an alchemist, it was enchanting all the same, so different to the rest of the house. The room was a secret, something no one else was supposed to know about. Yet another torn off piece of paper lay on the old work top in the lab, as before, a child’s writing etched onto it in pencil.

The secret magician
There was a magician that lived in the old house over the road. He had come from the stone city hoping to find somewhere quiet where he could do his work. He worked all day perfecting his potions in secret, he would go to the town and buy all sorts of strange ingredients from the market for his next potion. One day, people began to wonder why he always bought the things he did and wanted to know what he was doing with it all. Someone followed the magician into his house and found his secret lab in the attic of his old house. They waited for the magician to leave before going inside and looking at his lab. The magician had lots of herbs that he had bought from the market that was all stored in jars so it wouldn’t accidentally be added to any of his potions. There was a potion cooking over a flame and they decided to add two pinches of angels bane into the potion to see if anything happened. Nothing happened so they left the house and the magician never knew anyone had been in his secret lab. When he returned, he found his latest potion for invisibility had brewed nicely, but for some strange reason looked darker than it should have. He tested his potion by drinking a small cup of it once it had cooled down. It tasted sour but it was supposed to be that way to stop anyone drinking too much of it. In a moment, he turned invisible, he was very happy with his latest potion. But for the rest of the day, he still didn’t turn back to normal, hours past, then days, but he was still invisible. He guessed he must have added too much of the angels bane into the mixture, and when that happened, a person would be made invisible for the rest of their lives. After that day, no one ever saw the magician again.

I’d finished reading the piece when the secret room snapped back. The shelves that, just moments ago had been filled with vials of potion and various ingredients of a child’s imagination, became empty and dusty. The secret room was bland, dark and devoid of anything but a single grubby glass beaker on the wooden worktop. Moments later, I heard Sid’s voice come through to me.
“Why do you keep writing all these stories?” He asked Alice.
“Because I like writing them, it’s fun.”
“You realise no one’s ever gonna’ read them…right?”
“I don’t care, I like doing it.” She replied nonchalantly.
Then the voices changed, a different conversation, Sid’s voice now being exchanged for Sinead’s.
“What is the matter with you?” She’d asked with mock concern.
“What? Nothing’s the matter with me.” Alice replied to her aunt.
“Just stop leaving your stupid stories lying around. With all this talk of you finding a secret room in the old Klaver house, it’s starting to freak everyone out.”
I could quite easily see why Alice had become distant from her family. They didn’t understand her, her brother and her aunt ridiculed her, no one else shared her imaginative nature, her stories were her outlet, her way of escaping them, and I couldn’t blame her.
I left the old Klaver house and went back out into the late afternoon sun. The Cleaves’ house was just on the other side of the track, a tall and long old farm house like something from a slasher movie where everyone dies in the end. I had to go in, there were things that needed to be revealed to me, I could sense that even from a distance. The interior of the house had been what I had expected, old, worn down, but the front door was left wide open and a keen breeze had kept the air from going stale inside. It was dark, lacking color, slightly dusty all over. A photograph lay in a shard of sun light on the kitchen table, a picture of the family. Taken on an instant Polaroid camera, the five of them had looked run down, tired from all the work of keeping this place. Oliver and Katelyn stood shoulder to shoulder, another woman to the left of them, and seeing her now, I knew it had been Sinead that had murdered Oliver back at the church. Alice stood a distance from all of them over to the right, her expression blank, her eyes unreadable, an exercise book in one hand, her collected works so far. The camera had obviously been put on a timer because Orson stood almost covering Sid as he had backed away from the camera hoping to get in the shot. An old body warmer, flat cap, he almost looked as though he’d never left at all.
Before I looked any further, voices came through to me once more. The sound of the door going, footsteps coming through.
“I just saw something out in the forest.” Katelyn had announced.
“What do you mean?” Orson replied.
“It looked like someone dressed like an astronaut, just walking through the forest.”
“An astronaut? I don’t think so.” Sinead remarked.
“Look Katelyn, you were probably just seeing things, we’re all tired right now.”
“No, I’m pretty certain of what I saw.”
“Or maybe you weren’t.” Sinead retorted again.
“Actually.” I heard Oliver pipe up. “I was out there the other day, I’ve seen it as well, yesterday.”
Suddenly silence befell in the family.
Had it really been an astronaut they had seen? The same one Alice had already seen, and then mysteriously vanished? Now that two of them admitted to seeing it, it held a greater weight, more than on of them alone could bare.
Just as I went to leave the kitchen, the front door came flying open before I realised I was seeing another vision. Sid came through and into the house panting like a dog before Katelyn and Oliver turned their heads to look at him. Alice stood at the back of the room, shrouded in a shadow, her face just darkness in the dim light, her story book in one hand.
“Mom, Dad!” He yelled. “I just saw it, I saw the astronaut walking through the forest! The astronaut! It has to be the same one.”
The vision ended before I could see any more, but I had seen enough to know their sighting of this elusive astronaut was spreading. It was strange things like that that could drive a family to do things beyond their normal capacity, to things they never knew they could do. But down stairs held little else for me, I glanced into each of the rooms, nothing out of the ordinary. The stairs were bare wood that creaked underfoot, no carpet, not even a lick of paint. I walked into the first of the bedrooms I saw, a double bed inside, personal effects still were they had been left, then voices.
“Oliver? Oliver?”
“I just had the weirdest dream.” He told his wife.
“You were talking in your sleep.”
“Oh no.”
“You were talking about the…astronaut.”
“That’s what I was dreaming about, we have to catch the astronaut, that’s what it told me.”
“What do you mean? What told you?”
“I don’t know, the star maker. If we can catch the astronaut, we’ll be shown the truth. We have to catch the astronaut, but only one of us can catch him.”
If I didn’t know any better I would have said they were hallucinating, everything pointed to it, but by the same token, they were all seeing the same thing. The mystery of the Cleaves family was as intriguing as it was strange. I went out from the bedroom, back onto the landing before going into the next of the bedrooms.
“That sister of yours, she knows something, and she’s not telling us.” I heard Sinead say before Sid replied.
“I think she’s already seen the astronaut, she just isn’t telling us.”
“If she catches him before any of us…we have to stop her.”
“Yeah, we should tell Mom and Dad, and Grandad Orson.”
So the family had conspired against young Alice, fearing she would find this supposed astronaut before any of them. But I still couldn’t see how it had led to murder amongst them though. Going back out onto the landing again I heard the voices of Sid and Katelyn come through to me.
“Mom? Alice has been going in the old Klaver house, she..she found a secret room in there, up in the attic.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she somehow found a secret room, a hidden doorway in the wall that leads to this tiny secret room.”
Katelyn’s tone then turned uneasy, uncomfortable.
“Huh, are you sure about that? It sounds…odd.”
After that, there had been nothing else in the house for me at that point. It was back outside, and standing on the front porch of the house where I had entered, I saw an apparition of Alice skipping along the track. She was heading to my right, over in the direction of another stretch of forest I still hadn’t yet explored, where was she leading me? What was she trying to show me?