The Thing in the Forest

Penny and Primrose are two girls who are evacuated with a group of children to a mansion in the English countryside during World War II. They are evacuated to escape the German bombing of London (i.e., the Blitz), which took place in the early 1940s. The children are described as a ragtag bunch, with scuffed shoes and scraped knees, and carrying toys and dolls as items of comfort, most likely to forestall the terror they must feel.

  Penny is tall, thin, and pale—possibly older than Primrose, who is plump with curly blond hair. They become friends on the train during the evacuation, discussing their bewilderment over the situation, wondering “whether it was a sort of holiday or a sort of punishment.” The train is hot and dirty, and as it passes through unfamiliar countryside, the children feel the dread of not knowing where they are going or when they will return. The narrator compares them to Hansel and Gretel, two fairy tale children who were likewise led into a strange environment with no promise that they would return.

The girls arrive, along with a group of many other children, at the mansion: a big, eerie place surrounded by a forest. The mansion has “imposing stairs,” shuttered windows, and “carved griffins and unicorns on its balustrade.” Penny and Primrose are anxious and scared, thinking of themselves as orphans. They go through the motions of getting ready for bed, eating a meager supper and settling down in military cots with “shoddy blankets.” Some of the children cry themselves to sleep that first night.

The next morning, after breakfast, Penny and Primrose go outdoors with the other children, who play ball and other games. Instead of joining these games, the girls decide to explore the forest. A younger child, Alys—pretty, with pale blue eyes and golden curls, but “barely out of nappies” (i.e., diapers)—wants to go with them, but they tell her no, saying she is too little. Alys persists, promising not to be a burden, the way younger kids do who idolize older ones, but Penny and Primrose refuse.

Creeping into the forest, the girls vow not to go too far, wanting to stay in sight of the gate. The forest is thick and menacing, paradoxically “inviting and mysterious.” Suddenly, they hear a “crunching, a crackling, a crushing, a heavy thumping, combining with threshing and thrashing,” plus a host of other disturbing noises. They also smell a stench like that of “maggoty things at the bottom of untended dustbins, blocked drains, mixed with the smell of bad eggs, and of rotten carpets and ancient polluted bedding.”

Finally, Penny and Primrose catch sight of the source of the smell coming toward them through the woods, and they crouch behind a log so as to remain unseen. The thing has a face like a rubbery mask on top of a “monstrous turnip,” which is “the color of flayed flesh” and wears an expression of “pure misery.” Its most prominent feature is its enormous mouth, and its face is low to the ground as it trundles through the forest and toward the girls on short, squat arms. The girls watch as the giant caterpillar-like creature comes crushing through the foliage, destroying everything in its path with its very large, “turd”-like body, which appears to be made of “rank meat.” When it encounters large trees or rocks, rather than navigating around them the thing splits into two or three distinct worms before rejoining as one body. All the while, the thing lets out a pained moaning sound “among its other burblings and belchings.” The girls stare at it with “horrified fascination” as it passes.

Penny and Primrose huddle together, shaking as they watch the thing slither away. They exit the forest wordlessly and without looking behind them, worried that the mansion will have been “transmogrified,” or will have vanished altogether. But when they arrive they find the other children still on the lawn, continuing to play, oblivious to what the girls have just experienced. They don’t discuss what they saw. The next day, all the children are sent to temporary homes for the rest of the evacuation. Penny goes to a parsonage, Primrose to a dairy farm. They can’t forget what they saw, remembering the sight and sound and smell of the creature, as well as the mixture of excitement and terror they felt. They do not dismiss the creature as a nightmare, focusing on it instead as “a real thing in a real place.”

After the evacuation, the girls each return to their families, which the war has altered. Primrose’s father is killed on a troop carrier in the Far East, and afterwards her mother remarries, having five more children. Primrose’s mother’s health suffers; she develops varicose veins and a smoker’s cough. Penny’s father, a member of the Auxiliary Fire Service, dies in a fire in the East India Docks on the Thames. Her mother withdraws afterwards, becoming a shut-in.

The years pass, and Penny, a good student, becomes a child psychologist, “working with the abused, the displaced, and the disturbed.” Primrose, by contrast, struggles in school due to having to babysit her younger siblings, and holds a series of odd jobs before settling down as a well-loved children’s storyteller, with a corner to herself in a local shopping mall. There, she keeps an eye on other people’s children, “offering them just a frisson of fear and terror” in her stories. The narrator notes that Primrose “got fat as Penny got thin. Neither of them married.”

The story picks up again in 1984. The country mansion that had housed the evacuees during the war has been turned into a museum. Penny and Primrose, now adults, each turn up for a tour of the museum on the same day by pure coincidence, each unaware that the other is there. Both of their mothers have recently died. The women have not spoken at all since the day they saw the thing in the forest.

Penny and Primrose recognize each other almost immediately when they find themselves side by side, looking at an old book on display in the mansion museum—a “nineteenth-century mock-medieval” volume with pictures of a knight lifting his sword to slay something not quite visible on the page. A description next to the book tells of the Loathly Worm, a giant creature that, according to legend, had terrorized the countryside around the mansion. Various people over the years had tried to kill the worm, but it had always come back, having the ability, like garden worms, to grow new body parts if divided.

Delighted to see each other again, the women go out for tea. They talk about their jobs, being unmarried, and their parents. They talk about the mansion, commenting on how, despite all the history on display, there are no indications that the place was ever used to house evacuees. Finally, they discuss the thing they once saw in the forest. “Did you ever wonder,” Primrose asks, “if we really saw it?” Penny replies, “Never for a moment.” They talk about their horror that day, and how it “did [them] no good.”

Penny comments that the thing “finished [her] off,” prompting Primrose to remember Alys, the child who had begged to go with them into the forest. Recalling how they never saw Alys after that moment, and how no one ever asked about her or looked for her, they conclude that the thing must have killed her. Reliving their encounter with the worm reassures them that, as Primrose says, they are “not mad, anyway.”

Penny and Primrose agree to have dinner together next evening, but neither of them keeps the appointment. They don’t see the purpose of further reminiscences. Instead, on the following day, they set out separately for the forest surrounding the mansion. Primrose hikes for a while, then sits on a tree trunk, thinking of her mother, who used to make stuffed animals to give to her. Her mother didn’t tell stories, as a mother might be expected to do, but she was “good with her fingers,” which Primrose sees as an unimpressive talent. It ruined the magic of the animals when she discovered her mother had made them.

Standing up, Primrose resumes walking, telling herself a story about “staunch Primrose” (herself) bravely walking through the forest. She stops again, remembering more about the death of her father and her “sniveling” mother with her “dripping nose,” and she considers the difference between reality and imagination, characterized by her talent (storytelling) versus that of her mother (knitting). She decides that her memory and imagination are more real to her than where she actually lives (a lonely apartment “above a Chinese takeaway”) or other elements of her life. Then she leaves the forest.

Penny is in a different part of the forest, trying to find the spot where she and Primrose had seen the loathly worm as children. She finds evidence of the worm, “odd sausage-shaped tubes of membrane, containing fragments of hair and bone and other inanimate stuffs.” Finding a spot to sit down, Penny reflects on her career as a psychologist, realizing that her encounter with the worm all those years ago “had led her to deal professionally in dreams.” Penny is a scientist, “drawn to the invisible forces that [move] in molecules,” and she therefore has to see and hear things to find them real. She hears a rumbling and thinks it is the worm returning, but she sees nothing. She thinks about her dead father. After a while, when night falls, she leaves the forest.

Penny and Primrose take the train back to the city. They do not sit together. When they get out at the station, they see each other at a distance but don’t speak. They stare at each other through the “black imagined veil that grief or pain or despair hangs over the visible world,” thinking that they see in each other’s faces the same misery they once saw in the face of the worm. Then they part ways.

Penny tries to see patients again, but she can’t stop thinking about the worm. She discovers that “the black veil had somehow become part of her vision,” and feels that she needs to see the worm, that it has become more real than the faces of her patients— more real, even, than herself. So she travels back to the forest. Finding the spot where she and Primrose had encountered the worm 40 years earlier, Penny waits and silently calls the Thing. She hears and smells it approaching. She thinks that when it arrives, she will look it in the face and see what it is. She is relaxed and ready.

Primrose returns to her life, and her job at the shopping mall “like a crystal palace” where she tells stories to children. The children enjoy juice and cookies, and they are described as being of “all colors.” Primrose smiles at the children and begins a story about “two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest.”