Wildwood Whispers

by Willa Reece

  Her sister in every way but blood stood up and drained the rest of the tea from her cup. She placed it back on the table with a decisive clunk. But she did pause beside Sarah’s chair and lean to kiss the top of her head.

  “Get to class. I’ve got this,” Mel said, bumping her hip against Sarah’s side. It didn’t negate the affectionate kiss. But it did punctuate the end of their conversation.

  Sarah watched Mel retreat from serious conversation to her room. Where, in spite of the valerian tea, she would probably toss and turn over how to pay for Sarah’s residency scrubs and how long she could ignore the fact that she needed new shoes. When Mel’s bedroom door closed, Sarah reluctantly reached for the “For Fox Sake” cup she’d saved pennies to buy for Mel last Christmas. She needed to see the dregs of the ground valerian root in the bottom of the cup, although she dreaded what they would say.

  Her heart pounded and her eyes went wide. The lumps and swirls in the bottom of Mel’s cup negated the fox’s cartoon smile. Sarah dropped the cup to the table. It clattered over onto its side. She glanced toward Mel’s bedroom door and halfway rose to go to her—for comfort? To warn her? It was no use to try either. Her glance moved to the apartment door down the hall and froze there. The three extra dead bolts Mel had installed weren’t going to protect them forever. The danger that had driven Sarah from the mountain still stalked her, and even Mel wouldn’t be able to catch her when she fell this time.

  And who would catch Mel?

  Sarah gathered up the breakfast dishes quietly and washed the dregs down the sink, hoping she was wrong. While she cleaned, she strained her ears for answers, but the cooing doves outside the window had nothing more to say.

  One

  Twelve-year-old Sarah Ross reached quickly for the fragrant charm beneath her pillow the same way she would have reached for a parachute ripcord if she’d been rudely pushed from a plane cruising at ten thousand feet. It was only an imaginary fall, one that had propelled her awake, as bad dreams do, but her trembling fingers clutched at the familiar shape of the tiny crocheted mouse like a lifeline. The charm her mother had filled with sage and lemon balm was supposed to help Sarah sleep, and it did, usually, but the dream fall had cannoned her awake with stomach-swooping dread, as if the entire world had disappeared beneath her sleeping body.

  This time her knuckles didn’t stop hurting even after the bed solidified under her. She wasn’t falling. She was awake. Her soft bedding still smelled like sunshine from its time on the clothesline.

  Her hands hurt.

  It was only a ghost pain that had haunted her first waking moments since she was a little girl. There was nothing wrong with her fingers, her knuckles, or the palms of her hands. The mouse usually banished the pain by grounding her in the real world.

  Not this time.

  Sarah didn’t take the charm with her when she sat up. She left it where it lay, hidden, because she was twelve years old and shouldn’t need to clutch a faded pink mouse for comfort. Her heart still pounded. Her stomach doubted the assurance of solid floorboards beneath her bare feet. Sarah walked over to close the window anyway.

  Maybe the chilled morning air had woken her.

  But sometimes a Ross woman felt things and knew things that couldn’t be explained away by ordinary circumstances.

  Predawn light barely lit the sky outside. Sarah strained her ears. There was no whip-poor-will calling in the distance. There were no coyotes laughing their way to their dens for the day or runaway roosters calling triumphantly from hidden bowers far from their barnyard homes.

  The wildwood was quieter than it should be.

  Unease suddenly woke her completely and diminished the ache in her knuckles. The cabin felt wrong around her, and the wrongness stretched out from where she stood, silent and still, to the Appalachian wilderness that ran for hundreds of miles around her home.

  Sarah almost went for her mouse charm again, but then she remembered today was her birthday. There would be apple stack cake and presents and maybe, just maybe, her mother would finally let one of her friends ice Sarah’s earlobes and pop a needle quickly into each one. She could wear the new earrings that were sure to be in one of the brightly colored packages in her mother’s bedroom.

  Happy thoughts.

  And, still, Sarah’s heart wouldn’t stop beating more quickly than it should. The quiet forest and the dream fall didn’t explain it. The phantom pain in her knuckles was too common to rush her heartbeat. Something was wrong. It was the wrongness that had woken her. Not the cool breeze from the window. Not a bad dream. Not the occasional pain in her fingers on waking that her mother said would probably be explained one day.

  Last night when she’d gone to bed she’d opened the window to release a frightened luna moth caught between the screen and the wavy glass panes. The thumping of her heart against her rib cage reminded her of the frantic beat of the luna moth’s wings. Helplessly trying to fly free. She’d released the moth, but there was nothing she could do for the racing heart trapped in her chest.

  The floor was cool against her feet, but she didn’t pause to find socks or shoes. She hurried out of her loft bedroom and over the small landing that led to the half-log stairs. They were covered with rag rug treads so her slapping feet fell silently as she slipped down to the cabin’s great room.

  All the lights were off, even the one in the bathroom off the hall that led to her mother’s bedroom. Her mother always left that light on in case she had to get up in the night to answer the door. She was a healer, and on the mountain a healer was often woken up in the middle of the night even now, when a modern clinic was only forty-five minutes away.

  The unexpected darkness was temporary. The sun would come up soon. There was a hint of pink around the shadowed edges of things.

  Sarah went to the kitchen instead of running to wake her mother. She wasn’t a baby, in spite of the fluttering moth in her chest.

  She was twelve. She was going to get her ears pierced, and pretty soon she would be helping her mother when it came to helping others. She’d already learned a lot by her mother’s side—the growing, the grinding, the tinctures and tisanes. She was getting too old to be nervous over dreams and premonitions.

  The pain in her knuckles was gone. And its meaning could wait.

  The refrigerator hummed a reassuring sound as she opened its door. She reached for the orange juice her mother always kept in a carafe on the top shelf. The familiar sweet tang soothed her. At least, that was what she told herself until she put the juice back and closed the door. It had been the light that soothed her. When the door snapped shut and the refrigerator light went out, she was left in the strange darkness once more, and no thoughts of sunrise or cake stopped her from finally hurrying to her mother’s room.

  The dark didn’t matter. She knew every familiar step down the hall. She’d lived her whole life in the cozy cabin her great-grandmother had built. Just as her mother and her grandmother had.

  Sarah stood in the bedroom doorway for a long time when she saw her mother wasn’t in bed. The fall was there again in her stomach and, oddly, in the back of her throat like a choked-off scream. She reached for the doorframe and held it with white-knuckled fingers that were whole and strong and uninjured. Nightmares weren’t real. Melody Ross must have risen early to sweep the front porch or grind herbs in the stump that held the stone mortar bowl generations of Ross women had used.

  But even hearing in her mind the sound of the oaken pestle, smoothed from the friction and the oil from so many hands, grinding against the mortar didn’t convince her.

  Because she was a Ross, and Ross women knew that premonitions were as real as the scatter of paper on her mother’s bedroom floor.

  Sarah let go of the doorframe and rushed forward. She fell to her knees in the pile of paper, but even the rustles as she gathered them up to her chest hardly allowed her to accept the reality of their desecration. Something her mother never would have allowed if she were okay.

  Darkness
outside had given way to a washed-out gray.

  The pages had been ripped from the Ross family remedy book that normally sat on her mother’s bedside table. They were worn and stained from years of use. The familiar scripts and scrawls of all the Ross women who had come before her had been carefully protected and preserved.

  Until now.

  The wrongness swallowed Sarah. The feeling of falling blossomed out from her stomach to take her whole body down into black despair. And still, she gathered up the pages before she struggled, wobbly, to her feet. Every last one.

  With the growing light, she could see what she’d missed before.

  More pages led down the hall and into the sitting area. And still more led out the open front door. The moth of her heart had risen up into her throat to lodge there so solidly she could hardly draw breath. She ran forward, gathering up the pages because she knew it was what her mother would want her to do.

  The book had been a part of her life since she was a baby. She was a Ross. And by the book she would heal and help, bind and brew, nurture and sow the seeds of tomorrow. Hot tears ran down her chilled cheeks. Mountain mornings were cold. Her thin nightgown didn’t provide enough warmth. But she didn’t go back for a robe. She shivered, cried, and gathered up page after page as her feet became wet and icy in the dew.

  She didn’t leave any of the pages in the damp grass, even the ones that were sticky with blood. She gathered those too as gasps of despair made it past the moth in her throat and her stiff, cold lips.

  The pages led her down a path into the forest. She didn’t hesitate even though the woods were still and dark around her. She knew these wildwood shadows. She’d been taught every plant, every root, every tree and every vine since before she could walk and talk. But the wrongness had preceded her here. The morning breeze in the leaves wasn’t a welcome sound, because another joined it—a rhythmic creaking that made her clutch the rescued pages to her chest.

  Cree-cree, cree-cree. An unnatural sound in a place that should be wholly natural.

  Sarah came to the end of the path that led from the backyard to the garden, and unlike every time she’d come to the clearing before, she paused in dread. The creaking was louder. It roared in her ears, drowning out the sound of her pounding heart and the trickle of the mountain stream that usually gurgled a welcome to her at this point.

  The cree-cree was ominous. Her mind tried to identify it and shy away from it at the same time.

  But what if some pages had fallen into the water?

  Panic pushed her forward.

  She had to save the pages that had been ripped from the book. It was the only logic she could grab in a morning that defied normalcy.

  The sudden revelation of her mother’s body hanging in a black locust tree stopped her again. All logic fled. All reason escaped her. The rope around her mother’s neck strained and rubbed on the crooked branch that held the other end—cree, cree, cree. Sarah’s arms went limp and all the pages she’d gathered fell like crimson-speckled leaves to the ground. Some did fall into the stream then. They were the lucky ones, washed away on rivulets and ripples while Sarah stood frozen, inside and out, staring at her mother’s body.

  Finally, she released the moth that had been stuck in her throat on a wavering scream. Her cry broke the silence that had gripped the mountain. The stillness also broke, as sleepy crows were startled up from the roosts they had claimed around the gruesome scene. Sarah ran to her mother’s blue-tinged pendulum feet. To help her. To protect her. Although it was obviously too late.

  There was blood on her mother’s nightgown, black splashes of dried blood, stark against the pale pink cotton. Her mother was always clean and neat, strong and prepared, full of energy and delight. Someone had hurt her. Someone had dragged her from the house, leaving a trail of blood-stained pages in their wake.

  Sarah wasn’t ready. Twelve years of apprenticeship wasn’t enough. She needed more than charms and remedies. She needed more than the wildwood garden. The moth was gone. Only groans remained. Sharp and ugly, they parted her lips with jagged wings that cut like glass. Her mother was gone too. There was nothing left but a pitiful shell of the wisewoman Melody Ross had been. Her eyes were glassy and empty. Her mouth would never smile again. Her dark curls were tousled and damp and lifeless where once they had gleamed in the sun.

  It had taken Sarah too long to make it to the garden. She must have heard a noise. She must have sensed the terror. It had woken her, but she’d hesitated over her mouse and the dark house. She’d tried so hard to make everything okay with juice and birthday wishes. She was a Ross, and nothing was ever as simple as cake and earrings.

  A howl of anger and fear met the sun as it broke over the horizon. Nothing as sweet as a crochet charm would ever soothe her again. Sarah fell to her knees at the base of her mother’s locust tree, shocked at the sound she’d made. It would be a long, long time before she was capable of making another.

  The ashes sat exactly as I’d left them. The stainless steel urn hadn’t tipped over as I slept to spill Sarah and her horrible memories onto the floor. Grim dust hadn’t risen up to haunt my usual faceless dreams with nightmare precision, sharp and detailed. The hit-and-run accident that killed my best friend had left me with nothing but a mild concussion… and Sarah’s ashes.

  It had been a month since I’d picked up her remains.

  No one else had claimed her.

  The hollow chill of that responsibility made me into a shell of a woman through the days and far too receptive to the gnaw of terrible thoughts at night.

  I was the one Sarah Ross had turned to after her mother was murdered and I hadn’t lived up to the task. I hadn’t kept her safe. I hadn’t kept her at all. Just as I hadn’t kept anything in all of my twenty-three years… except Sarah’s memories.

  I had held her hand when we’d first met, and through a succession of midnight confessions I listened as she’d whispered about the morning she’d found her mother.

  She’d been so small.

  I’d been awkward, a giant beside her petite frame. She’d been placed in the same foster home as me and they’d had only one bedroom for us to share. Her size had fooled me for only a few seconds. She was the older one. By a whole year. But her age hadn’t stopped me from knowing instantly she needed a protector. Something about the bruises under her eyes and the sickly pallor beneath her fading tan skin. Her lips had been dried and cracked. After hours of tears, the salt from her sadness had leached the moisture from her mouth.

  I brought her a glass of water and sat on the floor beside her bed. She’d taken a few sips, enough to moisten a parched throat, and then she started talking. I’d taken her hand and held on for dear life.

  Until she died, I hadn’t known I’d memorized every word she’d said.

  The nightmare inspired by her raspy whispers came every night after the accident. It always jolted me awake at the same moment and sent me wandering for reassurance. Every night I found the urn. Confirmation there would be no comfort.

  The harsh light from the ceiling fixture caused a glint on its surface almost like glass. In it, my reflection was distorted. The strange, softened face of a woman I didn’t recognize caused me to back away and close the door.

  The second bedroom of the Richmond apartment I soon wouldn’t be able to afford on my own had become a tomb.

  On the way to the bathroom for some pain medication, I checked my phone. No notifications. There was nothing left of Sarah there. No messages. No texts. I’d deleted them all and there would never be more. Why hadn’t I saved them? Because the evidence that we’d enjoyed a normal life for a while was more than I could bear.

  Besides, my heart was as empty as the screen.

  I laid the phone on the hall table and focused on the throbbing at my temples and in various other battered and bruised parts of my body. It was time for another dose. The tiny white pills were probably as responsible for my lucid dreams as anything else, but I couldn’t sleep without them and the ni
ght was only half over.

  Sarah would have brewed some valerian tea. Over the years, I’d learned to like the slightly minty, slightly bitter concoction she remembered from a family recipe.

  Sarah had never fully recovered from her mom’s murder. She’d stayed pale, surrounded by an aura of fragility only I was allowed to penetrate. I was tall, strong and walled off from the world. Only Sarah managed to penetrate that. But we’d managed to find “okay” together. For a while.

  Now, there was a hole in that wall where Sarah used to be and the nightmares slipped through it to freeze my soul. I’d made a promise to Sarah. To take her back home when she died.

  It was one I intended to keep. Eventually. I wouldn’t let the last thing between us become a lie. My body didn’t try to fight the effects of the pill when I lay back down. It was too tired and too sore. Truth was, even my mind was quick to welcome the embrace of hazy unconsciousness. Nightmares were the only place I was sure to see Sarah again. Fear wouldn’t stop me from going to her. It never had.

  Two

  It wasn’t far from Richmond to Morgan’s Gap, Virginia. But distance between communities isn’t really measured in miles. There was no Global Positioning System that could have prepared me for the world I discovered at the top of Sugarloaf Mountain. One of those maps a reader finds in fantasy novels would have been more fitting than the slightly robotic voice that directed me to a land of morning mists and deep forest shadows so far removed from crazy commutes and cappuccinos. It was late spring and I drove from dull cement and asphalt into myriad shades of green that dazzled my eyes.

  When I finally arrived in Sarah’s hometown and pulled into a parking space on the street, the sunrise was so deeply pink on the horizon it seemed the perfect surreal light for an alien landscape. The GPS informed me the nearest familiar coffee chain was forty-five minutes away—back the way I’d come. I was lucky the navigation system worked at all. My cell phone had only a few bars of signal. I sat in the rental car in a sort of stunned, uncaffeinated silence while the pink sunrise turned into an orange-tinted morning. I was a barista. I’d grown too accustomed to easy access. Some part of my brain was awake enough to translate the nearest restaurant’s name into visions of heavy white porcelain cups filled with plain black liquid. The idea came from a movie scene, not from any real experience I’d had, but my need for stimulant urged me out of the car. It was more than the lack of caffeine or missing the familiar morning ritual of obtaining it that had me on edge.