Read Chapter 4: The Forgotten

The journal’s pages were soft with age, the ink faded to a sepia that blurred into the paper. Callum sat at the kitchen table, the dirk resting beside him like a sentinel, and turned to the first entry his grandmother had marked with a ribbon the color of dried blood.

*The Keeper does not choose the forest. The forest chooses the Keeper. This is the first truth my father taught me, and the last truth I will pass on.*

He read on, the words pulling him into a history that felt less like record and more like confession.

*We guard the grove, and the grove guards us. But nothing is given freely. The pact demands a weight from each Keeper, a memory so precious that its loss carves a hollow that never fully heals. For my father, it was the face of his mother. For my grandfather, the name of his firstborn son. For my husband, Alistair… it was the way home.*

Callum swallowed hard. The way home. That explained the grandfather who had walked into the forest and never returned—not lost in the physical sense, but lost in a mind scraped clean of its landmarks.

The kettle whistled on the stove. He ignored it.

*The sacrifice is made willingly, at the moment of the Keeper’s choosing, but the forest knows when the time is right. It will whisper to you in your dreams. It will show you the memory that matters most. And you will give it up because the alternative… the alternative is the grove’s death, and with it, the land’s. We are bound, Keeper and forest. Where one fails, the other withers.*

Callum set the journal down, his hands trembling slightly. His most precious memory. What would that even be? His mind felt full of fog when he reached for the past—childhood images of running through heather, his grandmother’s hands in his hair, the smell of peat smoke. But those were fragments, impressions. He couldn’t piece together a single vivid day.

That had always troubled him. Now he understood why.

He flipped ahead, searching for anything about breaking the pact. The later pages were more frantic, the handwriting less steady. His grandmother had begun circling passages, underlining words. One entry near the end caught his eye.

*There is an old tale, dismissed by our family as heresy, that the pact can be dissolved if the Keeper finds a substitute—another soul willing to take the burden. But the forest does not accept proxies easily. It must be someone who owes the Keeper a debt, freely acknowledged and freely offered. The exchange is the only loophole. Whether it is a true escape or merely a passing of chains, I cannot know. I was too afraid to try.*

Callum reread the passage three times. A substitute. Someone who owed him a debt. The irony was almost enough to make him laugh.

He reached for his phone, scrolling through contacts until he landed on a name he hadn’t called in over a year: *Ishbel Grant.*

The last time he’d seen her, she’d been in handcuffs in the back of his Land Rover, spitting threats and promises of revenge. She’d been poaching salmon from the river that ran through the MacRae estate’s northern boundary—a crime that should have been minor, but she’d taken a swing at him with a filleting knife when he’d tried to confiscate her catch. He’d let her go with a warning instead of pressing charges. A decision that had earned him a grudging nod and nothing more.

He found her number and hesitated. Then he called.

The phone rang four times. He expected voicemail. Instead, a sharp voice answered, breathless and annoyed. “Callum MacRae. This is a surprise. You finally realize you owe me an apology?”

“I’m not calling to apologize, Ishbel.” He kept his voice low, steady. “I’m calling because I need your help.”

Silence. He could hear wind in the background, the rustle of canvas. She was outdoors, probably setting nets somewhere she shouldn’t be.

“You’ve got a nerve,” she said finally. “Last time we spoke, you were threatening to bring my brother in for the same thing. You don’t get to call me up and ask for favors.”

“I’m not asking for a favor. I’m offering a deal.”

He told her about his grandmother—omitting the specifics of the curse, spinning it as an estate matter involving the family land and some legal trouble over access rights. But Ishbel was sharper than he gave her credit for.

“You’re lying,” she said flatly. “I can hear it in your voice. The MacRaes have always had strange business with that forest. My gran used to tell stories about your family. She said the trees sing your name at night.” A pause. “So what’s really going on?”

Callum pressed his forehead to the cool glass of the kitchen window. Outside, the treeline looked darker than it should at this hour, the shadows stretching unnaturally toward the house.

“I’ll tell you everything,” he said. “But I need something from you first. I need you to owe me.”

Ishbel laughed, cold and quick. “I don’t owe you anything. You let me off that once because you felt guilty about hauling my brother in for the same crime the week before. That was your penance, not my debt.”

“I’m not talking about that,” Callum said. “Last winter. Your brother’s truck. The one that nearly went off the mountain road in the snow.”

Silence stretched again. When Ishbel spoke, her voice had lost its edge. “You pulled him out of the ditch. You didn’t report it.”

“Because he was fifteen and scared, and his sister was out of town and couldn’t help him.” Callum let that sit. “He never told you, did he? That was his shame to carry, not yours.”

“Bastard,” she muttered, but there was no malice in it. “What do you want from me?”

Callum considered his next words carefully. The journal had said the substitute had to owe a debt *freely acknowledged.* He couldn’t force it. He could only present the offer.

“I want you to come to the house. Tonight. I want you to help me understand what I’ve inherited. In exchange, I’ll make sure the old charges against your brother’s name are cleared—the ones from the fishing incident two years back. He’s got a record that’ll follow him into every job he applies for. I can fix that.”

“Why would you do that?” Her suspicion was audible.

“Because I need you to owe me,” he said again, and hung up before she could answer.

He stared at the phone for a long moment, then at the journal. The final line of his grandmother’s most recent entry stared back at him:

*If you are reading this, Callum, know that I did not die in my bed. The forest came for me because I tried to end the pact alone. I failed. I pray you do not make the same mistake.*

Callum’s breath caught. He read the line again, then checked the date at the top of the entry. It was three weeks old.

His grandmother’s body had been found in the garden, the coroner said. Natural causes. A heart that simply stopped.

But the journal told a different story.

He was still staring at the page when a knock rattled the front door. Through the warped glass, he saw a figure—small, hooded, unmistakably impatient. Ishbel had come.

The forest watch remained fixed on the house, patient and hungry.

Callum opened the door, and the wind carried a whisper that was almost a name.

His name.