Hole in the ground.

This was where I'd lost the children. This was where my life had come apart, in a wood so tame it barely deserves the name; it was just a small, scruffy collection of trees near a nice park with swings. And three of the kids went missing. Not one, but three. No rhyme or reason. No evidence, as the police would have it. Just gone. And I was their teacher. The man in charge. With no 'one else to blame, attention turned to me, by default. They were my responsibility. Hell, I knew that, and I was, or at least had been responsible. But they just vanished. I can't work with that. I didn't need the world's help to demonise myself ' I lost it all on my own, and, as my therapist says, I've never moved on.
And so I'm back here today, sneaking about round the trees, looking for something that I know is not there, because there's nowhere it can be. This place is so bland, so uninteresting, no atmosphere, no brooding presence, no sense of foreboding. Bad things don't happen in places like this, they happen in the deep dark woods of fairy tales, or on run down rat-run council estates, or underground in maze-like caves. Not here though, for fucks sake.
I'm aware that I look a bit creepy, lurking amongst the trees not far from a kids' playground. I'm not too good around people either, a bit twitchy. In other words, I don't want to be approached, I don't want the attention. But, even so, I had to come. I had to have a look.
And there was nothing to see.
I sat on a log and began to cry, wallowing in that other time and place I could not move on from. Torturing my self, setting light to my own head.
Those three children had been here one minute, gone the next. There was nowhere for them to go, and no-one to take them. If I could just come up with some other way it could have happened, then maybe I could find some peace. The police had to drop the charges against me because there was just nothing to go on. The other kids had never seen me disappear. They cross-examined the fucking life out of them at the time, they did. It could only have been me, but there was no proof. I knew it wasn't me, but it didn't help much. So, I came back, sat on the log, and cried for my life.
All cried out, grateful for the brief respite from my feelings, I stood, took a deep half-sobbing breath, and looked around the trees one last time before I left them alone. And then I saw the hole in the ground.
It hadn't been there before, perhaps it was a new home for a fox or a badger or whatever lives in a hole in the ground in the woods. But it was definitely a new addition, and when I looked in, it was deep and wide. Bigger than foxes and badgers. Big enough for children.