The Mysterious Woods of Whistle Root

by Christopher Pennell

  Ms. Hankel had been right, Carly realized. With the light bulbs gone, this was the perfect spot for her to hide and sleep.

  She watched the book, waiting to see what would happen. She found that the darkness actually helped her stay awake, despite how tired she was.

  But when nothing happened during the first hour, she eventually did fall asleep, even though she didn’t want to.

  CARLY’S EYES FLEW OPEN AND she banged her head on the shelf above her.

  Something had woken her up.

  She looked where the book should have been, but it was gone, and she scrambled out of her shelf and looked around.

  Almost immediately, she noticed something she hadn’t seen before—all of the bottom shelves against the wall were completely filled with books except for one, which was only half filled.

  She bent down and grabbed one of the books. But when she did, all of the other books came out with it.

  Someone had glued them together.

  She got down on her hands and knees and saw that behind the books was a hole in the wall. And in that hole was what appeared to be the top of a ladder. She stuck her head in and looked down, but it was too dark to see what was at the bottom.

  She would have to go in backwards if she wanted to climb down. She hesitated for a moment, but then heard Ms. Hankel.

  “Who’s over there?” said Ms. Hankel, her voice coming closer. “If I catch whoever’s stealing those bulbs, I’ll slap their ears till they fall off!”

  Quickly, Carly backed into the hole and found the rungs of the ladder with her feet. She climbed down a bit, and then grabbed the glued-together books and pulled them back into place in front of the hole.

  “What happened to these books?” she heard Ms. Hankel ask angrily.

  Carly held her breath. She assumed that librarians frowned on books being glued together. She imagined Ms. Hankel tossing them aside and dragging her out of the hole by her ears like a rabbit.

  But nothing happened. And after a few minutes, Carly pushed the books slightly to the side and peeked out.

  Ms. Hankel was on the other side of the aisle. She was putting the books back on the bottom shelf that Carly had cleared for her hiding place.

  Safe for the moment, Carly looked down toward the bottom of the hole. She knew that whoever had taken the book had gone down there. And so, slowly and quietly, she began to climb down.

  When she reached the bottom, she couldn’t see a thing. She felt around with her hands and found that she was in a small space with four walls. Three of the walls felt like bricks. The other one felt like wood. Not knowing what else to do, she knocked on the wood wall.

  Suddenly, the wood wall disappeared.

  “What are you doing here?” a familiar voice asked her.

  Two hands reached in and pulled her into a dimly lit room. She looked back and saw that she had stepped out of a fireplace. She looked to her right and saw Green holding her arm.

  “What are you doing here?” Carly asked him. “Under the library, I mean.”

  Green looked embarrassed and didn’t say anything. He let go of her arm and concentrated on putting the wood board back in front of the fireplace.

  “Do you live here?” asked Carly.

  Carly studied the room.

  There were several lanterns hanging from wood beams in the ceiling, which appeared to be the only source of light. An ancient rug covered the center of the floor. There was also a table, an old couch, a sink, a stove, a cupboard, and a bed piled high with blankets.

  And by the fireplace, a lonely little chair sat by itself with a book lying on its seat.

  “Do you live here?” asked Carly.

  Green nodded and stared at the floor.

  “I mean, it’s all right if you do,” said Carly. “I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

  She reached out and touched one of the walls; the stones felt cool and damp. She understood why Green needed the blankets, since there was a definite chill in the room.

  “How did you build this?” she asked with real admiration in her voice.

  “I didn’t. My grandmother did. It was a cabin she built for herself.”

  “But why did she build it down here?”

  “Well, it wasn’t under the school when she built it. It was in a little valley between two small hills.”

  Carly was confused, so Green walked over to a small desk she hadn’t seen and opened one of the drawers. He took out a newspaper and handed it to Carly.

  On the front page of an old copy of the Whistle Root Gazette, Carly read the headline:

  GRANNY PITCHER LOSES FIGHT TO SAVE HOME—TOWN SEIZES PROPERTY TO BUILD NEW SCHOOL

  There was a black-and-white picture under the headline of a fierce-looking old woman standing in front of a little cabin. She looked ready to hit the camera with the block of firewood she held in her raised right hand. In her left arm she held a baby.

  “Neither of the two small hills was big enough for them to build the school on,” explained Green. “So they filled the valley up with dirt and built the school on top. They were supposed to tear the cabin down—but I guess they were in a rush, because they just poured dirt on top of it. And when Granny found out the cabin was still there she . . . well, she moved back in.”

  The pile of blankets coughed and Carly jumped backwards in surprise.

  “That’s Granny,” said Green, and walked over to the bed. He pulled the blankets down a bit and Carly could see the long gray hair of a very old woman.

  “Is she okay?” asked Carly.

  “She’s been sick for a few weeks now,” said Green. He put his hand gently on her head, and then walked over to the little kitchen and stirred something in a pot on the stove. “I guess you were watching when I took the book,” he said, and Carly suddenly felt guilty about tricking him into revealing his secret.

  “I’m sorry, Green,” she said. “But I wanted to find you. You’ve been gone for days.”

  Green turned to look at her and pushed his glasses back up his nose. In the unsteady light from the lanterns, his red hair flickered like an unkempt fire.

  “I guess we’re even,” he said. “Since I got you into trouble with Ms. Hankel.” He nodded toward a corner of the room and Carly saw a box filled with the missing light bulbs. “I thought it would make it easier to come and go during the day, so I could check on Granny without anybody seeing me. But I’ve been so worried that I haven’t wanted to leave her alone.”

  Carly looked again at the picture in the newspaper.

  “Is the baby you?” she asked.

  “Yes. Granny took me in when my parents died.”

  Carly looked up at Green. “My parents are gone too.”

  They were both silent for a moment. Then, feeling awkward, Carly turned away and studied the room a little more. She saw a regular-looking door and windows with shutters closed over them. She wondered what she’d see if she opened them. She kept looking around and jumped when she saw an owl staring at her. The owl was very still and stood on a tall perch in a corner of the room.

  “You have a pet owl?” she asked, trying to keep the fear out of her voice.

  “What? Oh, that’s just Elzick. He was Granny’s. He lived with us for years. And Granny loved him so much that she stuffed him when he died. I forget he’s there sometimes.”

  There was a pile of books beneath Elzick, and Green saw where she was looking.

  “I haven’t found any more yet,” he said. “Stories, I mean. But you can look through those books if you’d like. You might get lucky and find one.”

  Carly walked cautiously toward Elzick and sat down. She picked up a book from the pile and flipped through the pages but didn’t find anything.

  “How do you know which books to look in?” she asked.

  “I don’t,” said Green. “I found the first one in the library by accident, during the summer. And then I got curious and wondered if there were more, so I started looking and found the second one. But I haven’t found any m
ore since then. And now Ms. Hankel has convinced the school to hire a night watchman, and he’s always hanging out in the library, so the best I can do is grab a bunch of books whenever I get a chance and bring them down here.”

  Carly looked through a second, and a third, and a fourth book but still didn’t find anything.

  “Do you think the stories are true?” she asked as she reached for another book.

  “Granny said they are,” said Green. “She told me to show them to you . . . before she got sick.”

  Carly looked up.

  “What do you mean? She knows who I am?”

  “I guess so.”

  Carly looked toward the bed.

  “But I never met her. Why would she want me to see them?”

  Green shrugged. He was holding two steaming bowls. “Do you want something to eat?”

  Carly walked to the table and sat down, still wondering why Green’s grandmother would have wanted her to see the stories.

  Carly looked in her bowl and saw that Green had made pea soup. He had also put a small loaf of bread on the table for them to share.

  “If you like the food in the cafeteria, you’ll love this,” he said. He broke off a piece of bread and dipped it in his soup.

  “You stole this?”

  “I had to. Granny and I used to gather what we ate from the woods at night. But since she got sick . . . well, it’s just a lot quicker to get food from the cafeteria.”

  “When did she get sick?” asked Carly.

  “About three weeks ago, I guess,” said Green. “I found her one night, sleeping, and she hasn’t woken up since then.”

  Carly inhaled sharply and her eyes opened wide.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Green. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, it’s just . . . I don’t think your grandmother’s sick, Green.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Carly hesitated for a moment, but then she told him about the smoking whistle root tree and the whispering creature covered in feathers. She told him how it had tried to make her sleep.

  To her surprise, Green didn’t laugh and tell her she was crazy.

  “You said you heard it griddle?” he asked.

  Carly nodded. “It sounded like laughter.”

  Green was quiet for a moment. “It’s funny, but it reminds me of something Granny used to tell me. She said a griddlebeast lived in these woods—though what that was she never explained. But she told me to run if I ever saw an animal I didn’t recognize, and to never let it speak to me. It scared me when I was little, but when I got older, I thought she’d just made it up . . . you know, to keep me from wandering too far into the woods by myself. I’d almost forgotten about it until now.”

  Carly and Green heard the sound of school bells ringing above them.

  “But if there is a griddlebeast,” said Carly, “and that’s what I saw, and it’s been here all this time, why hasn’t it done anything before now?”

  “Maybe it has. How would we know? Granny’s out in the woods at night a lot. Maybe she just got unlucky and ran into it.” Green paused, looking at Carly. “Has anything else strange happened lately?”

  Carly thought about the rats and how they were disappearing. She thought about their village and the creek that had risen mysteriously and almost destroyed it. She thought about the warnings from the red hat. Feeling certain she could trust Green, she began to tell him everything: about Lewis and the rats, about the cave and the creek, about the owls and the whistle roots, and about the white cradle and the hat.

  And the whole time she talked, she couldn’t escape the feeling that Elzick was watching her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE GRIDDLEBEAST

  CARLY HAD INDEED SEEN a griddlebeast at the smoking whistle root tree.

  Several weeks before the rats began disappearing, the griddlebeast had hatched from a rock in a small field filled with other rocks much like his. He knocked on several of them, but there wasn’t any answer, so he said his farewells and walked into the woods.

  He was hungry that first night and crawled down a hole and ate an entire family of rabbits. He liked their burrow very much and decided it would make an excellent home. It smelled of rabbits, but that didn’t bother him. He rather liked the smell of rabbits—it made him think of food.

  He furnished the burrow completely with rocks. They were, after all, the closest thing to family that he had. They weren’t comfortable, but he rarely had company. And when he did have company it was normally rabbits, and he was planning to eat them anyway, so it really didn’t matter if they spent a few uncomfortable moments sitting on some rocks.

  He decided rabbits tasted best if you cooked them first, so he kept a fire burning and dug a hole in the ceiling so that the burrow wouldn’t fill with smoke. He dug straight upward into the bottom of a whistle root tree, which he completely hollowed out, right to the tips of its smallest branches. He cut holes there, so that the smoke could escape, and turned the entire tree into a giant chimney that looked constantly on the verge of bursting into flames.

  The rabbits were easy to catch. He snuck up on them in the fields while they were eating and whispered in their ears. “Follow me,” he whispered, and surprisingly they did, whole groups of them at a time, like little ducks following their mother.

  The griddlebeast could have gone on this way quite pleasantly, eating rabbits and growing fat. But one moonlit night he heard the rats playing music and suddenly knew that he had been placed in these woods for a reason.

  He would be very busy now, he realized, but he looked forward to it, almost as much as he looked forward to eating rabbits. “Oh, wonderful night!” he said, and spread his arms wide to the trees and stars above, and laughed happily, saying, “Griddle, griddle, griddle . . .”

  He found the first owl sleeping in a tree early the next day. “Take the rats,” he whispered to the dreaming owl. He whispered it several times, and then climbed down the tree and hurried away through the woods. He found other sleeping owls and whispered the same words to each of them. “Take the rats,” he said. He liked to steal a few feathers from each owl and stick them in his fur.

  By the time the griddlebeast had found all the owls in the woods, he was so covered in feathers that he looked almost like an owl himself.

  The griddlebeast’s body is shaped like an upright bloated bean. His hands and feet look like delicate, long-legged spiders. He’s as tall as a tree stump. His small, pointed ears sit on top of his small round head. He walks on two skinny legs. He runs on all fours. He grins unpleasantly. He whispers when he talks.

  He saw the old woman in the woods one night. He followed her home and whispered “Sleep” through a keyhole. She never even knew he was there.

  And on the night of the flood, he walked along the little creek until he was quite close to the rats’ cave. He got down on all fours and drank from the creek, like a cat licking up milk from a bowl.

  When he was no longer thirsty, he stopped drinking and looked at himself in the gently flowing water. He was still wearing the owl feathers and he liked the way they looked in his fur.

  He then began to whisper again.

  “Rise,” he whispered to the creek. “Rise, rise, rise!” He raised his arms and danced in a circle excitedly.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A RISKY TISK

  IT WAS LATE FRIDAY NIGHT.

  Carly stared out her window at the new squash. The moon was out and she knew Lewis would be along soon. She had already seen owls flying nearby. She wished she could blow her whistle roots to scare them off, but she didn’t want to wake her aunt or the neighbors.

  Carly was quietly playing a small piano that her aunt let her keep in her room. She was playing short lines of music her father had written. The piano had belonged to him, and Carly had found the music, written on scraps of paper, in a storage space in the piano bench several years ago.

  Sometimes she imagined she could hear messages in the tunes when she played—that her parents l
oved her, that they missed her . . . though she knew it was foolish to think the tunes were saying anything at all.

  She stopped playing and instead thought about everything Green had told her earlier that day. She felt certain she had seen a griddlebeast at the smoking whistle root tree. What else could it have been? And she thought about the griddlebeast’s whispers and how powerful they were. She wondered how she had stayed awake when Green’s grandmother could not.

  But really, she already knew the answer. Whatever was inside her that kept her awake every night, and resisted the most powerful sleeping pills her doctor could prescribe, had also been able to resist the griddlebeast’s whispers. Though she didn’t know what would happen if the griddlebeast caught her in the daylight.

  Carly stared out at the woods. Was this once the Kingdom of Endroot?

  Just then, Lewis climbed up over the edge of the roof holding his fiddle.

  “Why didn’t you fly up here?” she asked when she opened her window.

  “It’s too windy,” he said.

  Carly hadn’t noticed but the wind was blowing strongly.

  “You can’t fly when it’s windy?”

  “No, not in wind like this,” said Lewis. “I’d probably end up miles from where I wanted to go. And that’s only if I didn’t get killed crashing into a tree or something.”

  Carly thought of her father and the tornado that killed him. She knew how dangerous the wind could be. Nevertheless, she crawled out her window onto the roof.

  “Hold this,” said Lewis, and handed her his fiddle. He checked her fingers to make sure she was holding it correctly, not too tight and not too loose, and then disappeared back over the edge of the roof. When he climbed back up, he was holding a drum, which he placed beside the new squash.