The Forest at the End of the Street

My brother Theo went missing two years ago, and the police never found him, and the only thing he left behind was a map. I should explain about the map, because everyone who hears this story asks about it wrong. They picture treasure-map stuff, a pirate thing, an X. It wasn't like that. It was a forest. Theo had drawn a whole forest on a big piece of paper, the kind of paper you get on a roll, and it was really detailed for a thirteen-year-old. There were trees, hundreds of them, and a river, and clearings with little labels in Theo's messy writing. The Lantern Clearing. The Stone That Listens. The Long Dark Between. Stuff like that. He'd worked on it for months. I used to think it was kind of babyish, honestly, and I told him so once, and I have spent two years wishing I could take that back. After he disappeared the map stayed pinned up over his desk. Mum couldn't take it down. I couldn't either. So it just stayed there, in his room, with the door mostly shut, and our house got quieter and quieter the way houses do. Okay. Now the part that's hard to write so people believe it. Three weeks ago I was walking home from my friend Dela's house. Same way I always go. Down Carver Street, past the bus stop, onto our road, which is called Maple Close even though there aren't any maple trees, there's never been a single tree on our whole road, that's the thing, you have to understand there were no trees. And at the end of Maple Close, where the road just stops at the turning circle and the fence behind it, there was a forest. Not like a few bushes. A forest. Tall dark trees, loads of them, going back and back, with that cold green smell coming off it, the smell of somewhere much older than a street. It started right at the fence like someone had drawn a line. On one side, parked cars and wheelie bins and Mr. Adeyemi's caravan. On the other side, forest, like it had always been there. I want to say I was brave about it. I wasn't. I stood at the end of my own road and my legs actually shook and I nearly turned around and ran to Dela's. Nobody else was out. That's a thing I keep coming back to. It was five o'clock on a normal evening and there was an impossible forest at the end of my street and not one single other person was looking at it. Just me. I went home. I didn't tell Mum. How do you tell your mum that? She's only just started sleeping again. But I went up to Theo's room, and I turned on his lamp, and I looked at his map for the first time in months. Really looked at it. And the edge of the forest he'd drawn — the bottom edge, where the trees stopped — there was a row of little boxes drawn along it. I'd always thought they were just decoration. A pattern. Two years and I never once thought about it. They were houses. They were small drawn houses, in a row, along the edge of the forest. And one of them, near the middle, had a tiny number 9 written on the door in Theo's messy handwriting. We live at number 9 Maple Close. I sat down on Theo's bed and I held the edge of his desk and I made myself breathe. Because here's what I understood, all at once, and it's the reason I'm writing any of this down. Theo didn't draw a made-up forest. Theo drew this forest. The real one. The one that's at the end of my street right now. He drew it two years before it got here, down to our actual house, and he labelled the clearings and the river and the Long Dark Between, like he'd been there, like he had a reason to need a map of it. And then he went missing. The next morning I went and looked again, and the forest was still there, and I made myself walk right up to the fence. And that's when I saw the second thing, and the second thing is worse, and it's why I'm not just scared anymore, it's why I'm going in. The map on Theo's wall has changed. I checked it against a photo I took two years ago, I'm not making this up, I have the photo. There's new pencil on it. Fresh, lighter pencil, in a part of the forest near the top, a part labelled in handwriting that is absolutely Theo's handwriting, that says, in letters so small I almost missed them: Junie. Bring the map. I can hear you at the edge.