The Only Secrets Worth Knowing

There was a noise, something moving in the undergrowth. She turned, saw the bracken undulating as though they were the surface of some deep sea disturbed by what swam though it. It looked as though it was big... whatever it was.

Melody turned back to the path, picking up her basket of berries and herb leaves, including the precious leaves the old crone has insisted she get.

The woods looked too dark; forbidding and full of secrets that she would not want to discover. She had always been told never to step off the path, but the crone had laughed, her few remaining teeth dark in the cavern of her mouth.

'The only secrets worth knowing, all of them lie off the path,' Old Beth laughed. 'If no one ever dared step off the well-worn path, none of us would ever learn anything.' The old woman then looked up into the tall young girls eyes. 'If you learn little else from me, young one, remember that. It is only when we go beyond what we know that we ever discover something new.' She hobbled away to her shelf of mysterious potions in dark bottles, jars and jugs. She picked up a green bottle, tightly stoppered, with something indefinable inside it. 'Although,' the old woman turned back. 'It is always possible – if not likely – that we will learn something we never wanted to know.'

Melody, as she hurried back towards the path, was beginning to think that she had discovered – or it had discovered her – one of those things she would rather not know.

She sighed a deep sigh of relief, one more step and she would be back on the path and safe.

The sudden claws struck out, grabbed her ankle and dragged her back into its own deep darkness.