The path through Hangman’s Wood

Text 1: The Plank, by Rosa Tilling

An original short story extract.

The last bus went past Lucy at the top of the hill with all its lights on, warm and yellow and nearly empty, and did not stop. She watched it go round the bend by the church. She watched its red lights flicker between the hedges and disappear. Then it was gone, and so was the noise of it, and she was standing on the verge in a silence so complete she could hear her own coat rustle when she breathed.

Three miles by the road. One by the footpath through Hangman’s Wood.

She told herself the name meant nothing. Every village had a wood called something like that. In daylight she had walked the path a hundred times with the dog, and it was nothing, a track between beeches, brambles, a stile, a stream with a plank across it. In daylight.

The wood began at the stile like a wall. One step and the moon was gone, switched off, and the dark came down so thickly that she put her hand out in front of her as if she could push it aside. Her phone torch made a small, nervous circle on the path. Beyond the circle, everything was guesswork. Trunks loomed and slid away. A branch touched her hair and she ducked and swore and then laughed at herself, too loudly, and the laugh did not sound like hers.

The wood was not silent. That was the thing nobody told you. It ticked and dripped and shuffled. Something small ran across the leaves to her left, quick and secret. Something larger, further off, moved once, and stopped, and did not move again.

She walked faster. The path went downhill and she could hear the stream now, chattering away to itself like a child who has not noticed the grown-ups have stopped talking. The plank. She had to find the plank.

Her torch found it: black, wet, narrow. She stepped onto it. Halfway across, the phone in her hand buzzed, loud as a hornet, and the screen lit up with her mother’s name, and Lucy, wobbling on the plank above the black water, was so glad she could have wept.

“Where are you?” said her mother.

“Nearly home,” said Lucy, and looked up, and through the last of the trees she could see the orange streetlight at the end of their road, steady and ordinary, like a lamp left on in a window.

Explore how Rosa Tilling uses language and structure to present Lucy’s experience of walking through the wood at night.

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