Woodwose

The village of Harrowgate keeps a tradition older than anyone can remember. Every midsummer, a man is chosen to wear the costume - the antlers, the mask, the leaf-tunic sewn from hundreds of oak leaves. He becomes the woodwose, the wild man of the wood, and the village's young men chase him north across the common until he reaches the treeline and disappears into the forest.

He always comes back. He always comes back as himself, grinning, telling the story of the chase. That's how the tradition works. That's how it has always worked.

Until the year it doesn't.

Margery is a farmer's wife, thirty-one years old, eleven years married to Thomas, who is this year's woodwose. She has helped him into the costume every year since their marriage - the antler headpiece, the carved mask that is older than anyone knows, the tunic with its layers of leaves stitched by generations of village women. She has watched him run north with the young men in pursuit. She has waited for him to come back around the east path, grinning, ready to tell the story.

This year, Thomas comes back.

But the thing that comes back is not quite Thomas.

WOODWOSE is folk horror about traditions that outlast their meaning, about the bargain a village made with something in the forest centuries ago, about the women who have always known what the tradition was and never named it. It's about what happens when the ritual stops working the way it's supposed to - when the thing that comes back from the forest wears your husband's face but doesn't quite fit inside it.