From outside, the Forest Desiree looks normal. It's merely a stretch of trees reaching for infinity, their greenery poking potholes in the clouds. Their expanse is only broken by a thin path winding into the beginning of their reign, like an invitation, a beckoning to curiosity, and the roses that sit just beyond its greeting only add to the intrigue by the way they flourish in the shadows that groom them.

Many girls have stood at the entrance, tempting temptation with their presence and admiring the scent of the flowers. But few have taken one. Although each petal drips beauty like dew, everyone knows that these are his property and, unless you have something to give in return, you don't take one. You never take one. You just admire.

Don't get me wrong, there are those who are bold enough to pluck such seduction from its home, and have, but they are the girls who never return. Any last sighting of them is with that rose entwined in their hair as they follow the path that winds out of view to him.

I was lured much as any other girl was lured – by curiosity. You see, my parents used tales of him as a method of keeping me away from the forest, told me of the rapes he had committed, the girls he had abducted, the corpses he kept as souvenirs. They described the screams that broke in a run from the forest at night and the way they would nip at your neck with terror. They said that all the insomniacs in the world stayed awake solely from the horror of hearing it only once, that the screams robbed sleep from you forever.

But, instead of acting as a warning, the stories only served to increase my interest. I wanted to see him, this destructor of girls, to find exactly what it was that made him so alluring and how he could make girls grovel in front of him, naked and so very raw. And it intrigued me that none of the villagers had seen him or touched him or loved him, yet all of them knew him. He lived in the morbidity of their thoughts, in that solitary track of ideas that was reserved for night-time and the shielded perversion it provided. I think they talked about him so much because they secretly revered him, they wanted to be him and have his power. Under the screams and the insomnia, they adored him.

And so, as a young girl of sixteen, against my parents' wishes, I entered the forest.