by E. E. Holmes
A single curl of purplish smoke rose from the cauldron, releasing a heady, herbal perfume into the air. Abigail reached up and pulled a ladle off a nail on the mantle above the fireplace and pointed to the shelves behind us. “Fetch yerselves a teacup, and be quick about it.”
We all hastened to grab a cup—all but Ileana, who stood by expectantly that one would be fetched for her. And indeed, within seconds, Annabelle had plucked a second cup off the shelf and handed it to her.
Without really intending to, we formed a kind of queue in front of the fire. One by one, we held out our cups and Abigail sloshed a ladleful of her concoction into them. The cup quickly became extremely hot to the touch, and I had to adjust my hands to hold it by the handle before I dropped it to the floor. The fumes rising from the cup were dizzyingly sweet, and bits of crushed up herbs floated lazily on the surface. No one made a move to drink it. We were all waiting for further instructions.
Next, Abigail walked around to our backs. She reached up and tugged on Catriona’s arm first, so that she would bend over at the waist. Using one, gnarled hand, Abigail brushed Catriona’s hair over her shoulder, so that the back of her neck was exposed. Then, pulling a bit of charcoal from her pocket, Abigail drew a rune of protection at the base of Catriona’s skull. Catriona flinched at first, then managed to hold still, despite the fact that she had no idea what Abigail was doing or why, for the old woman offered no explanation. Then Abigail went down the line, exposing each of our necks and marking them with the runes. It was one of the runes crucial to Warding, I realized, recognizing its familiar shape as Abigail scrawled it upon Annabelle’s neck.
Finally, when each of us had been marked, Abigail stepped back, rubbed her hands together excitedly, and crowed, “Well, what are you waiting for? Bottoms up!”
Catriona caught my eye. “Cheers, mate,” she muttered, and knocked the contents of the cup back in a single gulp. I took a deep breath and did the same. All around me, teacups were drained. All around me, mouths and throats were scalded, coughs and sputters and gasps rose up in a chorus. The mixture, though it smelled very sweet, was extremely bitter, with a bite of spice on the back end that cleared my sinuses and took my breath away.
When all the gasping and coughing had subsided, Abigail approached each of us one at a time, tugging us forward, gripping our faces between her hands, and staring into our eyes and then, inexplicably, giving each of us a hearty sniff. Whatever she was looking and sniffing for, she found it, for she gave a satisfied nod before moving on to the next person. When she reached me, she stared into my eyes longer than any of the others. Then she pulled my face so close to hers that our noses were almost touching. I froze.
“You’re the Messenger, aren’t yeh?” she whispered to me.
It took me a moment to find my voice. “Yes.”
“Tread carefully,” she replied. “They’ll not want you there. It will mean the end of them.”
“What?” I asked.
Abigail just nodded. “Tread carefully,” she repeated.
Then she stood up and bustled across the room to a large feed sack that clanked when she picked it up. Though it looked quite heavy, she hefted it with ease over her shoulder and then heaved it with a crash onto the tea table before us.
“Choose a tribute,” she said, gesturing to the contents of the bag.
“What do you mean, tribute?” Annabelle asked.
“A tribute for the Keeper. She will want tribute. Anything in the bag will do. She likes a bit of shine, a bit of sparkle in the dark forest, yeh know.”
We most certainly did not know, but one by one we reached into the bag and pulled something out: Catriona, an old costume necklace of glass beads; Lucida, a chipped cut crystal goblet; Ileana, a gemstone bracelet; Annabelle, a set of silver wind chimes; Finn, a polished silver candlestick. I reached my hand into the bag last of all, and pulled from its depths a tiny jewel-encrusted silver revolver, the kind a wealthy woman might have hidden in her handbag or tucked into a garter for protection. I peered into the tiny barrel. The chambers were all empty.
I looked up at Abigail, the question all over my face; surely presenting the Keeper of the Elementals with a potentially dangerous weapon sent the wrong kind of message? But Abigail was nodding approvingly at my choice, so I shrugged and pocketed it uneasily. Abigail picked the bag back up, dumped it unceremoniously on the floor beside the fire, and picked up a lantern.
“Yer as ready as ever you’ll be,” she announced. “To the Screaming Woods we go.”
14
At the Heart of the Screaming Woods
TWILIGHT HAD BEGUN to drape itself upon the little village. It was not yet silent; lights bled from the windows of the local pub, and music and chatter echoed into our tiny lane. Cars drove up and down the main road, and a knot of people strolled down the sidewalks, the last of the evening crowd. We would not be lured to the warmth and the crowds, however; a darker finger beckoned and we followed it, through a maze of narrow country lanes, down a cowpath lined with hedgerows, and finally over a post-and-rail fence and through a field of tall grass beyond which the Screaming Woods reared up like a creature sniffing the air.
Around us in the field, I could see the evidence of recent tourist visits. Beer cans, fast food wrappers, and other refuse littered the field through which we approached the wood. Several official signs had been posted on fenceposts and trees: “NO TRESPASSING IN DERING WOODS AFTER DARK. VIOLATORS WILL BE FINED.”
A narrow, well-trod path snaked off through the trees. At first, I felt sure we were going to head down it, but Abigail turned at the treeline and continued along the edge of the wood. When she realized the rest of us were hesitating, she turned around and waved us onward. “Paths are not for such as we,” she said in a quiet voice that nonetheless carried through the field. “We do not plan to tred where others have trod.”
“Of course not,” I muttered as we turned to follow her. “Because paths would lead people safely through the wood, and we aren’t trying to get safely through the wood, are we? We’re going to hurl ourselves right at the terrifying epicenter and hope a bit of tea and a bunch of metal junk will save us.”
Annabelle gave a nervous peal of laughter. “At least your bit of junk shoots bullets,” she said. “Mine will just act as a cute accessory while an Elemental destroys my sanity.”
I couldn’t be sure what Abigail was looking for, or how she knew when she found it, but she stopped suddenly at a clump of trees that looked exactly like every other clump of trees and said, “Ah. Here it is. This is the way. Hurry along, now. Keep up, keep up.”
There was no logical reason a woman so old and so bent and so tiny should be so very adept at moving through dense forest, and yet, within minutes, all of us were panting to keep up. Even Finn seemed to be struggling. Ileana, who had spent her entire life maneuvering through the forest, was nonetheless used to her own familiar haunts in her own grove, and therefore her life as a Traveler did not provide her with as much of an advantage as one might expect in this strange and unfamiliar territory. Catriona kept lagging behind to wait for Lucida, who lacked the stamina for this kind of hike after years of malnutrition and lack of physical activity while locked away in the príosún. Both Annabelle and I fared better on this trip through the forest than we had in the Traveler grove, but that was an exceedingly low bar, given that we had been occupying each other’s bodies at the time. When Abigail stopped to rest about thirty minutes later, every single one of us sank to the ground in relief, panting and pulling bits of leaf and twig and briar from our clothes. Finn passed a canteen of water around, from which we all drank gratefully except for Abigail, who waved it away as though she’d never seen such a thing and found its very existence absurd.
“Aye, there it is,” Abigail said at last, clapping her hands delightedly and pointing up over her head. Hanging high in one of the trees was a collection of silverware, each individual piece strung up with a bit of ribbon. “We’re headed the right way. You must leave
your things here, now.”
“What things?” I asked.
“Your bags, anything in your pockets. Go on, empty ‘em out. Leave it all here under the tree. You’ll be able to retrieve ‘em on yer way out.”
Catriona looked horrified. “You want me to leave my phone and my car keys and all of my ID under a tree we may never find again in a forest crawling with drunken wanker tourists?”
Abigail considered this. “Are the keys shiny?”
Catriona blinked. “I… suppose so.”
“Then yeh can bring ‘em along, but you’ll have to offer ‘em as tribute, so if you want to keep ‘em for yerself, I suggest leavin’ ‘em right there.”
“But why—”
“When you come to see the Keeper, you come as you are. You don’t bring the outside world in. She hasn’t no use fer it, because the outside world hasn’t no use fer ‘er, see? It frightens ‘er, and fear is what the Elementals feed upon. You bring yer tribute and yer business, an’ that’s all. Understand?”
We didn’t understand at all, but I didn’t think any further explanation from Abigail was going to help illuminate things. Indeed, her vague explanations only made me more uneasy as I emptied my pockets and set my backpack carefully down on the ground, tucking it along with everyone else’s belongings into a bush in an effort to mask them from view. Finn looked particularly displeased. I knew his pack contained a lot of supplies that would help us if we got lost or hurt in here.
Abigail looked us all over, forcing us to turn out our pockets, before continuing on through the trees, which seemed to be growing older and more prehistoric looking the further into the woods we ventured. There was no longer any sky to be seen above us, and no grass below: all was soft, mossy darkness. Abigail’s lantern swung like a ship on a tempest-tossed sea in front of us, sending soft yellow beams of light back and forth across our path, casting and throwing long, distorted shadows all around us. The silence around us was oppressive, like a living thing forcing its weight down upon us. The temperature dropped steadily, and I knew from the unnatural chill that it was something more than the absence of the sun sending shivers up my spine and into my hair.
I looked over at Finn, whose face had gone suddenly very tense. He returned my look and nodded. The silence. The cold. He could feel them, too.
The Elementals.
I glanced around the rest of our group. I wasn’t sure that any of the rest of them would come to the same realization as we had. After all, none of them had had the same up-close and personal experiences with an Elemental that Finn and I had had. But though Annabelle shivered, and Ileana shuddered, and Catriona and Lucida trudged forward watching their breath rise in puffs like tiny cumulous clouds, I was forced to conclude that none of them had a clue what we were walking into.
Here and there in the trees above our heads, I began to see little flickers of light. At first, it looked as though we’d come across a swarm of fireflies, but then I realized that the light was simply being reflected from Abigail’s lantern by a collection of objects hung high in the trees, each of them made of metal or glass or something else that could catch the light.
“A bit of shine,” I whispered to myself, recalling Abigail’s words when we pulled our chosen objects out of her sack. That must mean we were approaching the place where the Keeper lived.
“Castings,” Finn whispered suddenly. “Protective Castings. Look.” He threw out an arm to stop me and pointed first at the trunks of the trees, and then at the ground. Runes had been carved crudely into the wood over and over again, huge chunks of bark worn and torn away from the trunks. And on the ground, the shape of an enormous summoning circle was just visible, created from various sized stones arranged upon the mossy earth. In the center of the circle, a knot of three trees grew together, entwined like lovers, and in the shadows of their embrace, a strange dwelling seemed to have sprung up from the roots. Whether it had been built or simply dug out of the ground, it was impossible to tell. Its structure was covered over with moss and lichen and creeping plants. A grey, weathered wooden door, no taller than my shoulder, was set into the face of it. And all around it, shiny objects hung from branches and roots, strung between them on wires or else tied on with strings. It was like stumbling upon the world’s most terrifying Christmas tree.
“Glad to see the Blair Witch is still doing her thing,” I muttered.
“What are you on about?” Finn asked, frowning.
“Never mind. It’s not important,” I replied.
At that moment, Abigail raised her hand and we all stopped in our tracks. She hung her lantern upon a claw-like, low-hanging branch and turned to us.
“You must make yer offerings now,” she said, reaching into her apron and pulling out a fistful of black ribbons. “Take out yer shine and tie it onto the wire there.”
“What wire?” Catriona asked.
But Ileana was already pulling a length of ribbon from Abigail’s fist and stepping forward. Barely visible in the gloom, a long rusty wire had been strung up between two tree trunks, like a clothesline, just before the border of the summoning circle. Dozens and dozens of strings and ribbons and ropes dangled from it, empty. It was amongst these that Ileana tied her tribute, the silver bracelet, set with sparking green and blue gemstones. Then she stepped back, watching it swing gently back and forth, catching the lantern light. Following her lead, each of us stepped forward in turn, tying our gifts to the rusty wire with one of Abigail’s black ribbons. Then we all backed away, watching the objects glitter and sway in the frozen breath of a breeze now sweeping through the forest.
For a few long, agonizing seconds, nothing at all happened. And then—
“The house! Someone’s coming out of the house!” Annabelle announced in a terrified squeak of a voice.
She was right. The door of the little hovel was slowly opening with a long, grating squeak. As we all watched, not a single one of us breathing, a face peeked around the doorframe. It was impossible to make out any more than the shape of it, hidden in a tangle of long, stringy dark hair. It froze and looked at us for what felt like an eternity, and then it withdrew, pushing the door the rest of the way open, and emerging into the moonlight.
I couldn’t draw enough breath to scream—the sound that came out of me was no more than a strangled gasp. The figure that emerged from the door was no larger than a small child, clad in a long grey nightdress, with bare, dirty feet and pale, skinny arms. She did not walk; she moved in a kind of crouch, pushing her palms against the ground to propel herself forward, her long, filthy hair swinging in front of her face, masking her features. She crept forward a few feet, face still fixed in our direction, and then stopped. Then, from behind her, a second figure emerged from the hovel, ducking its head and shoulders to fit through the door. This figure was the size of a small adult, also dressed in a shapeless grey garment, something like a nightdress. It was slightly stooped, and its head was covered in a brown bonnet. As it stepped more fully into the moonlight beside the first figure, it raised its head and revealed the rounded figure and features of an old woman.
Both figures held statue-still, waiting, it seemed, for us to make the first move. I don’t think I could have moved or spoken even if I’d wanted to, and nearly everyone else around me seemed similarly paralyzed with fear. Abigail, thankfully, tottered forward and raised a hand in greeting, and then gestured to the objects we had hung upon the wire.
“A tribute from these Durupinen visitors to the Keeper of the Elementals, with whom they should like to speak,” she called out in her croaky voice, making us all jump at the broken stillness.
The two figures did not reply. They did not confer. But then, suddenly, the smaller one reached out a hand, grasped the larger one’s arm, and swung herself, monkey-like, onto the woman’s back. The woman stepped forward and said, in a soft, almost childlike voice, “The Keeper will inspect your gifts.”
“What the hell is going on?” Catriona breathed beside me. “The child can’t be the K
eeper, can she?”
“I guess she must be,” I replied, watching in fascinated horror as the woman now came forward, picking her way carefully between the tree roots, the Keeper clinging to her back, one arm wrapped around her neck, the other hand wound through her grey tangle of hair. As they came closer, I could not help but back away, so instinctive was my revulsion. The woman reached the place where the wire was strung and pulled a pair of scissors from somewhere in her garments. The Keeper leaned forward on the woman’s back, reaching out to examine each tribute in turn, her face still completely hidden by her hair, though I thought I glimpsed a twinkle in her eyes as she raised her chin. Her hands were strange for a child—veiny and large-knuckled. She turned Ileana’s bracelet back and forth, watching how it caught the light. She let out a high, silvery giggle and nodded. The woman reached out and cut the bracelet off the wire, letting it drop into her hand and stowing it in a kind of pouch she had tied around her waist. They repeated the process with each offering until they came to mine. The Keeper lifted the tiny revolver into her hands, turning it over and over. Then she grasped it in one hand and lifted it to point directly at my face. Finn, panicking, jumped in front of me.
“Bang,” the Keeper whispered. Then she laughed her silvery laugh again and motioned for the woman to cut the revolver down.
The woman did so, tucking it away and stowing the scissors as well. Then, she reached to the other side of her belt, lifting a small black bag I recognized instantly as a Casting bag. She turned in a circle, dropping stones around her and muttering words I could not make out, but that had the familiar lilt of Gaelic. A shiver seemed to run through the air around us as a Casting lifted. It was, we knew, the Casting equivalent of unlocking the door to let someone in.
Abigail nodded in satisfaction and turned to the rest of us. “I present to you Lira Blackwell, Keeper of the Elementals and her sister Ms. Margaret Blackwell.”
