by Susan Cooper
The forest was thick and lush, with high bushes and leafy vines tangling between the trees, and giant ferns and mosses mounded over everything on the ground. Rocks, earth, fallen branches or trees—they were all turned bright green, all swallowed by growing things. Yet it wasn’t like any forest I’d ever seen; there was something very spooky about it. Not a glimmer of sunlight came down through the high canopy of branches and leaves; the light was dim, and the air was thick and still and humid. After that one horrific yellow moth, there were no insects to be seen, no butterflies or beetles or wasps or flies, and no birds either. You could hear harsh cries and croakings out there in the trees, but nothing flew or fluttered through the air, or moved on any branch.
As I looked more closely, I began to see that all the trees were exactly the same kind of tree, great spreading giants with broad roots and strange scaly bark, and that the vines were all one kind of vine, thousands of clambering, twining stems, thick as a man’s leg and sprouting clusters of broad round leaves. The ferns were all alike too: tall arching fronds as high as my head, with yellow-green leaf-divisions like fingers, the back of each one of them studded with those brown spore-cases you see on most ferns. I put out a finger to touch one, and the thing vanished in a puff of floating brown dust. It smelled bitter, like vinegar.
And Lou walked through all this as if he were following a route he had known all his life.
“The tree will call him,” Bryn had said, but what did that mean? The place was full of trees, and trees don’t talk. But from the moment those words came out of Bryn’s mouth, my little brother Lou stood still, and stiffened, and seemed to forget that anyone else was there. Even me.
He started to move ahead through the forest, slipping through ferns and around trunks and low branches, with such silent certainty that we all followed him. I stayed close behind him, and soon I realized that he had taken us to a kind of path, a clear way through the thick tangled growth that showed no sign of having been cut or cleared, yet was wide enough to let a full-grown man pass through.
Math was at my heels; I glanced over my shoulder and saw him looking ahead at Lou intently, out of his bright dark eyes. I also saw, for the first time, that the handle of a big knife was sticking out of the top of one of his close-fitting boots. The boots were still soaked with water; it was the faint squishing sound that had made me look down at them.
In that same moment, everything around us erupted. Lou leaped back, yelping, Math’s hand flashed down and up, and the knife was flying through the air to bury itself, ahead, in something black and furry and snarling, blocking the path.
Lou fell, and I grabbed him. Bryn and Annie were diving forward, past me: “Get back!” Annie hissed at me. “Keep him back!” And I saw they had knives too, and were striking like Math at the thing ahead, again and again, grunting, intent.
The thing screamed, a horrible high shriek, and then it was silent and still.
Math brought his knife down in one last violent slash, and a spray of liquid came flicking back at us. When I wiped it off my arm I saw that it was blood.
The creature looked like a rat, the size of a dog. It had a pointed nose and a long hairless tail, and its body was sleek black. It lay there, filling the pathway. The jaws were stretched wide and menacing, full of huge sharp yellow teeth. There was blood everywhere. I held Lou close; I knew he must have been terrified.
But Lou was wriggling out of my hands, not shaking, not trembling on the edge of a seizure, not even visibly afraid. He was looking ahead. He had his head up as if he was listening. He gave a little gurgle that was almost like his happy sound, and he kept on going, walking round the path and the twitching body of the giant rat.
“Lou!” I shouted.
“Just follow him,” Annie said in my ear. “He can hear the tree.”
“What tree?” I said unhappily.
The others were passing us, following Lou. Annie held me back. “Listen to me,” she said. “In your world, Lou is nothing, but in ours, he is magical, he is predestined. We have been waiting for him. Only he can save this world, only now and only here.”
I couldn’t make sense of any of this. “I have to look after him! I always have—he’s my little brother, it’s my job.”
“It’s still your job,” Annie said. “But it’s ours too.” She gave me a big warm smile, that lit up her face like sunlight, and tugged my hand so that we were running together to catch up with the rest. The shrieking in the trees grew suddenly louder, and in a great flapping flurry a big dark-colored bird swooped over our heads and away again, into a tree. I couldn’t see it clearly. It looked a bit like a golling, a bird we have in the islands that’s the size of a duck, and usually comes out only at night. But this one was far, far bigger.
“It’s harmless,” Annie said. “Keep going.”
“They’re all huge. Everything.”
“Mutants.” We’d caught up with the others; I could see Lou trotting purposefully ahead of them. “That’s why Government preserves the Wilderness—to study them. There’s a big research facility somewhere in here, and the whole area’s shut off, and guarded. It’s a bad place, the Wilderness. If it didn’t have some of the oldest trees on the planet, we’d have attacked it long ago.”
With a swoosh, the dark bird flapped back across the path over our heads, and then into the trees again. It didn’t seem able to fly very high. Bryn and Math looked up uneasily, but little Lou paid no attention; he went on, without pausing. The forest seemed a bit brighter here, as if more light was filtering down through the thick crisscross of branches overhead. There were fewer trees too. Gradually, as we went on, the light grew, and I began to see a few chinks in the green ceiling, a few glimpses of hazy sky. We were beginning to come out of the forest.
And then, in an instant, we were out of it, and all of us stopped, bumping into each other like a line of dominoes. We were standing on a slope, there among the few remaining trees, and spread before us was a grey world of concrete and steel and stone, an unbroken city, stretching as far as we could see in all directions. Buildings and streets filled an enormous plain, flat, flat, until in the distance it rose into slopes like the one on which we stood. Beyond them, folds of hills rose higher and higher, each of them grey with the buildings of the city, until they vanished into a brown haze.
Gwen was standing beside me now, looking out. “There is what we’ve done to Pangaia,” she said bleakly. “There’s our world.”
Lou had paused only for a second. He was standing there now on the mossy slope, turning his head from side to side, like a dog casting about for a scent. Then he began to move again, sideways, toward a rocky outcropping surrounded with the same tall ferns that had crammed the floor of the forest. And I saw that beyond the rocks, between the forest and the endless sprawl of the city, a tremendous steel-mesh fence stood as a barrier, topped with whorls of barbed wire. Beyond it was a second fence, just as big, just as sturdy, and beyond that a third. If Lou’s strange convinced sense of direction was leading us all toward the city, we’d have a hard time getting there.
We followed Lou, walking now over stony ground patched with moss and clumps of an odd yellow grass. I was staring out at the fences, which looked taller and more forbidding the closer we got to them. I said to Gwen, “How can we possibly get out of here, with those in the way?”
She said, “If the tree is inside the fence, just be grateful we’re here. It would have been even harder to get in than to get out.”
There was that word again. “What tree?” I said.
Then gradually I began to hear, somewhere, a sound that seemed to come straight from Long Pond Cay: a weird husky whistling sound like the wind in the casuarina trees. It was soft but unmistakable, and though it didn’t grow louder, it didn’t go away. It seemed to fill the air all around us; I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
Lou walked round the group of tall irregular rocks ahead of us on the slope, and as we followed him I could see an inner cluster of rocks with
a tree growing out of them. Its roots were spread over one flat rock like long dark fingers. It wasn’t very big, maybe twenty feet high, but it looked very, very old; its trunk was broad and twisted, with grey bark smooth as stone, and its thick, gnarled branches drooped, as if they had carried a heavy weight for a long time. They were covered all over with new side-shoots and twigs bearing long thin leaves almost like pine needles. And all these were moving in a breeze that I couldn’t feel; a breeze that came from nowhere, and blew only on this one tree, producing that soft moaning casuarina sound that was filling the air. It was like singing, though it had no words.
Perhaps it had words for Lou. He paused, and clambered up onto a ledge of rock on the way to the tree. Bryn and Math climbed up after him—and then they both gave a kind of strangled gasp, and grabbed fast for their knives, staring downward. Gwen and Annie and I scrambled up to look over the edge of the rock.
It was like a snake pit, all round the tree. Between the outer group of great lichen-patched boulders where we were standing, and the rocks in the middle where the tree grew, there was a gap like a big ditch, filled with shiny black bodies, moving, slowly rippling, like a sluggish sea. They were hideous: thick armor-plated cylinders about three feet long, with tiny snout-like heads. At first they looked like stubby hard-shelled snakes, but after a moment you could see the legs, hundreds of legs, moving ceaselessly under each body. There was a very faint smell that reminded me of something, though I couldn’t remember what.
Bryn was looking down in fascinated disgust. He took a breath, and I saw his fingers tighten round his knife. He said to Math, “If we go down together, back to back, we can cut a way through.”
But Math didn’t have a chance to answer. Lou swung round in front of them, making the throaty noises that for him were “No, no!” He was shaking his head violently, and he had his hands up, trying to push them both backwards, away from the ditch.
Math looked down at him in astonishment. He said, “What, then?”
Lou put his finger to his lips. He held up the other hand with its palm toward them. Then very slowly he began to edge himself down into the pit full of those squirming black monsters.
“Ah, no!” Math said, appalled. He started forward, and Lou stopped, frowning, and held up his hand again.
“Let him be,” Bryn said. “He knows what he wants to do.”
And just as I began to panic, I remembered in an instant where I had first smelled the faint smell that was in the air here. It was the tiny hint of a scent that you could catch once in a while from one of Lou’s favorite playthings at home on the island: the little black millipedes, that grossed out Grammie but curled obligingly into a harmless circle in Lou’s gentle fingers.
I stared down at the pit. These awful-looking things, long as my leg, were gigantic mutant versions of Lou’s millipedes. He seemed to have recognized them at once—but would they recognize him? I had a sudden terrible vision of him down there, screaming, covered with flailing black bodies.
Lou looked up and caught my eye, and shook his head. He grinned. He knew just what I’d been thinking.
Then he climbed slowly down into the ditch, and squatted at the edge of the mass of black bodies. He reached down and patted one of them; then knocked on its hard black back with his knuckles, and laughed.
The millipede curled itself slowly into a circle. So did the next, and the next. And on, and on, until every one of them was curled up like an automobile tire, lying there unmoving, unthreatening, in a harmless heap.
“I’ll be damned,” Bryn said.
Lou laughed again, and he walked across the ditch, stepping lightly from one black curled body to the next, until he reached the other side. He paused, and looked up at the tree.
He was still my little brother, and he was alone. I said softly, “Lou? Shall I come?”
He smiled, but he shook his head, and looked up at the twisted old tree above him. He reached up, and put his hand on the trunk. All this time the strange wind that nobody could feel had been singing softly through the thin needle-like leaves, in a constant background, rising and falling a little but never stopping. I could hear it, I could see the leaves moving, but I could feel no breath of wind at all.
Lou was listening intently; you could see the concentration on his face.
I said softly to Gwen, hesitating a bit because it sounded so ridiculous: “Uh—is the tree talking to him?”
“Of course,” she said, and she gave me a smile so open and cheerful that it was like a hug.
“Well—what’s it saying?”
“Nobody knows that but Lou,” she said.
We all stood there watching Lou and the singing tree, bemused, and in the background, beyond the steel fences, the silent grey city stretched to the horizon in all directions.
Then the pitch of the tree’s singing changed, grew higher, shrill, and Lou looked up suddenly at the sky, alarmed. A louder noise came roaring toward us, and down over the tall fences came two whirring helicopters like the one that had dived at us when we first found ourselves in the Otherworld. They were small, black and sinister, and they moved very fast. Before we could gather our wits they were hovering low over the ground near the rocks, and a real wind was whirling dust and leaves through the air, turning us all blind and deaf for a scrambling moment. The noise was painful. A figure dropped to the ground from each helicopter: two men in dark red jumpsuits, some kind of uniform. The helicopters rose again instantly, to hover higher up.
I found myself knocked sideways, rolling, caught then by Annie’s outstretched arm. All four of them had dived behind the outer row of boulders, taking me with them.
“Police!” Gwen hissed in my ear. “Keep behind the rock!”
“But Lou—!”
Bryn put his hand over my mouth and said in my ear, “We’ll get Lou. Just watch.”
The two policemen, quick and intent, were running toward the rocks, toward Lou and the tree. We lost sight of them for a moment and then they reappeared on the edge of the outer circle of rocks, facing the ditch. They paused, uncertain, looking down at the sea of giant millipedes, piled still in mounds of shiny black coils. Even without movement, the sudden sight must have been awesomely nasty.
Lou was standing beside the tree, his hand on its trunk, watching them. One of them called to him. “Hey kid—you’re in danger! Come on out of there!”
Lou shook his head. He waved to them, smiling. I couldn’t believe how cool he was. Then he patted the trunk of the tree, almost as if he were telling it something, and he walked away from it, away from the men, toward the end of the inner group of rocks, facing us.
One of the men yelled at him again, and took out something that looked like a gun, but the other knocked his hand down. The first man put the gun away and began, reluctantly, to clamber down into the ditch toward the silent millipedes. The other followed him. And two things happened at once, very fast, so fast that I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
The instant both men were in the ditch, all the giant millipedes uncoiled, whipping their bodies straight, moving in absolute unison as if they were a school of fish. They seemed suddenly much bigger. Their snouty little heads were up, facing the two policemen. And both the men dropped like stones, and a second later, that strange isolated wind sprang up over the ditch, whirling the branches of the tree, blowing away from us, away from Lou.
The millipedes swarmed slowly but relentlessly over the two bodies, covering them, but I knew the men had been dead the moment they fell. I’d been hearing Grand’s voice at the back of my memory, talking about the little black creatures we have at home. “They don’t sting—they don’t need to. They give off this little whiff of cyanide gas that kills their enemies. . . .”
Not such a little whiff, when the millipedes became giants. And when the cyanide had killed the enemies, that wind had sprung up to blow it away from the friends.
The sound of the helicopter engines grew louder again. Lou looked up. He was such a small unlikely
figure there, in his T-shirt and shorts and raggedy sneakers. Overhead, the two helicopters were dropping out of the sky again toward us; they must have seen what had happened to the two policemen.
“Run, Lou!” I shouted desperately, though he couldn’t have heard me.
He slid into the ditch and patted the nearest of the giant millipedes on its shiny black back, just as he had at first, and then rapped on it lightly with his knuckles. And just as before, the creature curled itself obediently into a tight circle, and so did the next, and the next. As soon as there were enough of them to make a pathway across the seething black mass, Lou ran toward us, jumping from one coil to the next as if they were stepping stones. Bryn and Math pulled him out of the ditch as soon as he was across.
“Quick!” We were all running back to the forest, as the helicopters dropped lower and lower.
But the police seemed less interested in us than in the tree, the small ancient tree among the rocks, that had sung to Lou. The two helicopters hovered low over it for a moment. Then from each of them a brilliant ray of light flicked out, focusing on it, and instantly the whole tree was in flames. Every inch of its black trunk and branches and roots was glowing orange, licked with white flame; and then the rays flashed again, reaching down around it, into the ditch.
Lou stopped in his track, looking back, and suddenly he was a seven-year-old again. He let out a high wail, and Bryn scooped him up and carried him off under his big arm.
I kept glancing over my shoulder as I ran. Again and again those two rays of light, or laser, or whatever they were, stabbed down from the helicopters at the blazing tree. They were surely determined to finish it off. Or maybe they were simply using it to fry the millipedes.
We had reached the shelter of the edge of the forest, where the shadow began. Lou struggled down from under Bryn’s arm, and took my hand. We turned to look back at the tree, with its two attackers hovering still, like great roaring armor-plated dragonflies. Beyond the flames you could see the tall steel-mesh fence rearing up, and in the distance the grey blur of the city, under the hazy sky.
