The Leaves Forget

By Alan Baxter

Olivia has been missing for months. Her family have tried to accept that perhaps she'll never be found, and they'll never know what happened. So when her brother Craig unexpectedly receives a stack of letters from Liv, all written not long after her disappearance, he's both excited and frightened. Reading through her correspondence, Craig begins to get a sense of where she was, but he still doesn't know where she is now, or if she's still alive. Using what clues he can from the old letters, Craig sets off with his partner and his father to find Olivia, hoping for the best, fearing the worst.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PS Publishing
• Release date: Oct 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781786369840

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

AND SO WE COME TO THE AUTUMN 2023 list for Absinthe Books, and I’d like to introduce you to The Leaves Forget, by the award-winning Alan Baxter.

Some of you may know Alan’s work already, of course, there’s certainly plenty to choose from: not least, he wrote a supernatural novella I loved, The Book Club, for PS Publishing a few years ago; then there’s the standalone novels, Sallow Bend or The Devouring Dark, to name just two; not to mention the novel series he writes—the Alex Caine horror novels, the Eli Carver supernatural thrillers, the short stories... I could go on at length, but you get the picture, I’m sure. I was delighted to see that one of Al’s stories was recently adapted for Netflix’s series Love, Death and Robots—In Vaulted Halls Entombed, a tale of soldiers entering caves in Afganistan to rescue a colleague; what they find is certainly not what they expected. And an excellent adaptation it was.

Which brings me to now. To The Leaves Forget, a supernatural novella that tells the story of Craig as he searches for his sister Olivia, who’s been missing for some months. When a neighbour hands him a bundle of letters from her, wrongly addressed to his apartment, Craig finally has something to go on. He sets off in a race against time to follow the trail Olivia’s left behind, and in the process attempt to rescue her from a mysterious cult he believes she’s been sucked into.

To say any more will tell you too much (and I really hope I haven’t already), but The Leaves Forget is a tense roller-coaster of a story, and one I’m sure you’ll enjoy as much as I did.

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—Marie O’Regan

Derbyshire, June 2021

THE LEAVES FORGET

1

ALL I WANT IS A HOT bath followed by a room temperature scotch and the comfort of my favourite armchair. It’s been a long day and I’m over it. Hobart winters can be ridiculously cold, and today is doing its best to set a record. Everyone thinks because Tasmania is part of Australia, it’s hot and dusty and orange and all that stuff the mainland is famous for. But it’s an island, almost a different country, culture notwithstanding, and it does winter more like some European places. Honestly, I like that about it, except on days like this when I’ve been out on site working for hours and the cold has sunk into my bones, biting at my marrow, threatening to set up in there and never leave. Ah, that hot bath is calling, I can almost feel myself slipping into it as I slip my key into the apartment door.

Hey, Craig.

Oh, come on, I was so close. I turn around and reluctantly admit it’s good to see Victor Tan, my downstairs neighbour. It’s been months. Hey, Vic! You’re back. Obviously. Stupid thing to say, really, but small talk is exactly that. Small.

Yeah, just this morning.

How was England?

Warm! Can you believe it? Summer there now and we came back to this. Bad planning.

Yeah, I can see that. I can hear my bath screeching out for me. But you had fun?

For sure. Maisie and I saw all the sights. We went to eleven different countries around Europe in seven months.

Eleven?

Right? Some are smaller than Australian states. One day we drove through three countries in a single day, where the borders all met up.

Wild. Man, my hands are cold.

Anyway, you’ve been at work. You don’t need me jabbering at you right now. But I wanted to give you these.

He holds up a wad of envelopes. There must be a dozen or more, all the same looking stationery. Brow furrowing, I reach out to take them.

Someone got the apartment number wrong, Vic says. These were all in our mailbox when we got back.

If I was cold before, I’m arctic now. A shudder runs through me and my hand starts to shake when I see Olivia’s neat cursive. The writing I haven’t seen for months. The sister I haven’t seen since last spring. I quickly flip through the envelopes and every one is from her. My apartment address is 6/63 and she’s written 3/63. An easy enough mistake to make, I guess.

We’ve been trying for months to track her down and nothing. We’ve been so scared of what might have happened to her. She just disappeared one day. We’ve even had those tentative conversations, my parents and I—what if she’s gone for good? What if we never find her? What if someone turns up her body? And all this time she’s been writing to me and putting the wrong apartment number on the address? That’s such an Olivia thing to do it hurts.

Vic, thanks for this. My voice is artificially light, the aural equivalent of plastic. He doesn’t seem to notice.

No worries. Catch up for drinks soon, yeah? Maisie will be keen to show you some photos and stuff.

Like they hadn’t been posting fifty shots a day on Facebook the whole time they were away. We all know everything we might want to know about their trip already. But that’s not in the spirit of friendship, is it? Sure thing, of course.

Good, good. Now get inside, you look so cold.

Vic, you have no idea, mate. Thanks. See you soon.

I stumble inside and head straight for the bathroom. I want nothing more than to read these letters, but I have to get warm. I start the bath running and look back at the pile on the coffee table in front of my couch.

Jesus, Olivia, what am I about to read?

2

WHEN I LEAVE THE BATHROOM door open I can see the coffee table and the stack of letters on it. The bath is purely functional now, simply putting warmth back into my bones instead of the relaxing pleasure it should have been after a day on site. I’m only going to stay in here until I can feel my fingers again. Already they’re burning as blood starts coursing through. Although my gut is like ice and that might not change any time soon.

What am I going to find out, Olivia?

My sister has always been flighty. The kind of person who takes astrological predictions more seriously than doctor’s advice. She’s so open-minded her brain fell out, our dad said once, and my mum snapped at him, appalled, but it’s true.

She doesn’t go so far as to believe every conspiracy theory, chem trails and flat earth and all that shit. And she has been vaccinated, but didn’t get any boosters. She worked in a café and said the vaccine mandate infringed her rights, but she went along with it anyway. She admitted to me one drunken night that she was glad of the vaccine, but still resented it. I’ve never quite understood that. We didn’t talk much more about it because she’s infuriating and I always end up so angry at her bullshit. Her hippy-dippy ways as Mum puts it.

But she’s my sister and she’s smart and funny and cool, and she’s so fucking kind it hurts. The kind of kid who would cry if she accidentally squashed a bug. Then, around last September, it’s like she fell off the planet.

It’s never unusual for Olivia to go incommunicado for a few weeks at a time. She’d get some new partner, some new craze, and it would occupy a hundred per cent of her mind, but she’d always come around eventually. She’s thirty now, not a kid any more, even if she’ll always be my little sister. Adults have a right to their own lives, don’t they?

When Mum started trying to plan Christmas and Olivia didn’t respond, didn’t even check the family WhatsApp, we got worried. We worked out no one had spoken to her since the week after Grandad’s birthday in early September. And that was me. I spoke to her last . . .  I don’t want to think about that. I’ve been torturing myself about it ever since. Why couldn’t I have been more forgiving?

And now here we are in the first week of June, winter kicking in early and hard, and still nothing from Liv. Nothing at all.

We checked with every friend and acquaintance. We filed a missing person’s report. The case remains open, of course. By the time the new year rolled around, we’d already exhausted just about every avenue and started repeating ourselves. And we started getting used to the idea that maybe she was gone. Like, really gone. Forever. And maybe we’d never know why or how. You read about that stuff all the time, then maybe decades down the line some bones are found in a farm paddock somewhere and a cold case is finally solved. Or nothing is ever found and the case is added to the long list of mysteries without a resolution.

My gut clenches in the hot water and I cry out, grief a beast eating my insides. There might be answers right there in those letters. There might be relief or irrefutable proof of tragedy. And I realise I’m terrified to even look. Schrödinger’s missives. Right now I both know and don’t know what happened to Olivia. When I finally get up the courage to look, I fix reality in place. And I might not like it.

But knowing is better than not knowing, right? Closure is valuable. And what if there’s a chance to find her still? A course of action in those letters.

Except the last time I talked to her, we fought so badly. I said terrible things. She left in tears. And I’ve never forgiven myself for that. I’ve lived ever since desperate for a chance to apologise. What if those letters confirm I can never do that?

I haul myself from the bath and towel off, get dressed. My hands shake as I pour a generous scotch and sink into my armchair, pick up the envelopes.

They each have a date in the postmark at the top right,