by Jeff Hirsch
“Where are you going?”
Kevin finished tying his laces. “For a walk.”
Glenn sat listening to the leaves crunching under his feet. She knew she should let him go, blow it off, but something forced her hands down to the ground beside her and she pushed herself up.
“Kevin, wait!” she called. “Kevin!”
She found him when the trees broke and they were on the path again. Kevin turned left, hands shoved in his pockets and his head down like a bull. Glenn rushed after him and when she finally managed to get ahold of his jacket, she tugged hard and spun him around. The first thing she saw was a patch of blood that stained his new clothes.
Their run the night before must have torn it open again.
“Your side — ”
Glenn reached for it but Kevin moved away from her.
“It’s fine,” he said, and then stood silently, waiting.
Glenn stared at the rocky path at her feet. “Maybe …” she began, shifting her feet in the dirt. “Look … I’m sure with Aamon I can get to where I need to go.”
Kevin didn’t move.
“So if you want to go …”
“If I want to go? That’s what you’re saying. If I want to go?”
“Kevin — ”
“That’s what you stopped me to say? Of all the things in the whole wide world there are to say, that’s it?”
“I don’t want you to get in any more trouble. I don’t want you to get hurt again.”
“Well, thanks.”
“Kevin, I’m serious.”
“Did that mean nothing to you last night?”
I don’t want to be having this conversation, Glenn thought, even as she knew it was inevitable, had always been inevitable. “I’m sorry, Kevin. Seriously. But I’ve told you before. I can’t — ”
“Please. Not us, Morgan. I know that didn’t mean anything to you. I’m talking about them. You stood there beside me and saw something I can’t explain. Something I can’t even … I can’t even make the words for. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. It was magic. Actual, for-real, not-in-a-storybook magic! Did that mean nothing to you?”
“Of course! It was incredible. And I can’t explain it either, but unlike you, I’m not some weather vane that turns every time the wind blows. Just because something is beautiful, just because it’s amazing, it doesn’t change who I am. It doesn’t change the world!”
“Right, of course. You would say that.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you see everything that happened last night, and your first thought is to run away from it. Only you, Morgan. I swear, only you.”
“This isn’t a field trip, Kevin. You were almost killed.”
Kevin snapped to face Glenn. “Exactly,” he said, leaning in close to her. “I was almost killed and I don’t want to go back. That’s the difference between you and me. We’re led up to the edge of a whole new world, a world we’ve been told our whole lives doesn’t exist, can’t exist, a world with things like Aamon and the Miel Pan in it. And me? I want to see more. I want to know if there are even more amazing things out here. But you? You want to turn around and go home so you can get your homework done on time.”
Glenn wanted to explode, at his childishness, at his unbelievable arrogance, but she refused to give him the satisfaction.
“We should go,” she said. “Aamon is probably waiting for us.”
Glenn started down the dusty path, leaving Kevin behind.
“You want it too,” Kevin called out. “You want to know what’s out here as much as I do. You just won’t admit it.”
Glenn stopped.
“You’re a scientist, Glenn! Tell me you don’t want to see that again. Tell me you don’t want to understand it.”
Glenn saw the lake as it was the night before, wide and black as slate and then dancing with light and magic. Her chest swelled at the impossibility of it.
“I want to go home,” she said.
Kevin shook his head, deflated, then walked up the path without another word.
“Kevin, wait!” Glenn said, searching for the right words and not finding them. “We have to go!”
Kevin waved her away and kept going, eventually disappearing when the path turned around an outcropping of rock. Glenn found herself alone with the enormity of the forest around her. She looked back toward their camp. Aamon was likely waiting. They had no time for this. Glenn took off after Kevin.
When she came around the first turn, she was surprised to see that Kevin wasn’t heading down the path that led to the lake but had turned onto a different trail, one they hadn’t seen the night before.
What is he doing?
She jogged up to the path, calling to him, but he didn’t slow down. The trail was narrow and rough, clouded over with fallen leaves and exposed roots. The canopy of trees was heavier over it and layered
with a crisscrossing web of ivy and vines. It was darker there, and as Glenn looked down, goose bumps rose on her arms and the back of her neck.
Another one of the stone obelisks stood at the path’s head. It was old and weather-beaten. Time had worn away the detail, but Glenn could just make out the inscription. At first it looked like the circles they’d seen on the other obelisks, but once Glenn wiped some dirt off the plaque and got a better look, she saw it wasn’t a circle at all.
It was the body of a spider, with long, multi-jointed arms
reaching out from it. Beneath it lay its web.
Glenn shuddered and turned back to the darker path.
“Kevin!” she shouted.
But Kevin was gone.
16
Glenn’s heart tripped hard. She could see clearly for nearly a mile down the trail, and no one was there.
“Kevin!”
There was a crash off to her left — someone was moving through the woods. Glenn caught a glimpse of his tan coat and the sound of footsteps running away. Why was he running? Glenn dove in, stumbling down a hill where the land fell off from the road, down into the forest. Kevin was hundreds of yards ahead and running like he was fleeing for his life.
It grew darker as she ran. The woods were like a curtain closing around her, until Glenn was surrounded by a swamplike murk, an eerie twilight. There was the sound of water running somewhere close by. It was slow at first, a quiet whoosh flowing parallel to Glenn’s path, but grew louder the farther she went. A river. Soon it was in front of her as well. A few more minutes, she thought, and she would run right into it and be cut off.
And so would Kevin.
Glenn made it through a tangle of trees and burst out onto the green bank of a fast-moving river. It was brighter there, and the sun dazzled her eyes. When they adjusted she saw Kevin standing at the bank of the river with his back to her. One side of his shirt was stained with fresh blood, but he paid it no mind.
“What are you doing?”
Kevin turned fully toward her now, but what looked at her was not Kevin. There was not the live-wire smirk she was so used to seeing; there wasn’t even his anger from earlier. Instead, there was something older and twisted inward. A silent determination that she had never seen before. Worse still, Glenn was positive that the person who stood in front of her didn’t recognize her at all.
“I have to go home,” Kevin said in a voice that wasn’t his. “She’s been waiting all this time.”
Glenn was speechless. Before she could move, Kevin was off and running down the bank toward a pier that jutted out from a bend in the river’s course. Waiting at the end of the pier was a small boat, and at the back of it stood a tall and impossibly thin figure clothed in a long black cloak and hood. It seemed less like a man than it did a dark slash cut into the day.
“Kevin!”
Kevin made straight for the boat. Either he didn’t hear her or, for some reason she didn’t understand, he wouldn’t — or couldn’t — stop.
Glenn put her head down and ran, making it to the pier just as Kevin stepp
ed calmly into the boat and sat down.
The figure at the back of the boat plunged one end of the pole he was carrying into the river and pushed away from the pier.
“Kevin!” she screamed, but the boatman leaned into the pole and the boat moved away, out into the inlet and toward the faster run of water.
Glenn got to the end of the pier just as they were out of reach.
She called to Kevin again, but neither he nor the boatman paid her any mind. The current was fast and the boat slipped away, growing smaller and blending in with the gray churn of the water.
In seconds Kevin would be gone. Glenn searched for a solution, and found only one. She took a running leap and jumped into the river.
She hit the water hard and was swept away. Without thermals in her clothes, the icy water was cold enough to make her lungs seize in her chest. Glenn scrambled to remember all those days at the beach, the swimming lessons her mother had drilled into her again and again. She got her arms up as fast as she could and straightened her legs behind her. The current alone wouldn’t be enough. If she wanted to catch Kevin, she needed to swim for it. Glenn tore into the water ahead of her, keeping her head up and her eyes on the boat. The boatman held his pole up out of the water, letting the current carry them along. Glenn felt a shock of hope as she closed some of the distance between them.
The landscape rushed by them as the river took a sharp turn into the dimness of the forest they had come out of. There, the water grew murky and colder and choked with debris. Logs and masses of dead plant life littered the surface. Glenn’s clothes had become soaked through and heavy, eager to drag her under. Her arms felt like they were filled with concrete.
Glenn closed her eyes and saw Kevin lying spread out in the snow, every ounce of his blood fleeing from a gunshot in his side. All because of her. And now this. Glenn thrashed with her legs and knifed her arms into the water, almost crying out from the effort.
The boat eased out of the current to a moss-covered bank. When they reached it, Kevin stood up, stepped onto dry land, and walked off into the woods without a look back. The boatman stood motionless.
Glenn forced her hands and feet into the muddy bank to pull herself up. As soon as she came out of the water, she seized nearly in two. The freezing water had actually been keeping her warmer than the air outside. She wrapped her shaking arms around her chest as she staggered off into the trees.
Glenn turned to follow the shoreline down to where Kevin had left the boat, keeping the boatman well in sight. He didn’t move in the slightest, and the boat itself barely seemed to rock despite the motion of the water. As Glenn drew closer, she saw that whatever it was that surrounded the boatman wasn’t a cloak. At least not made from any fabric she had ever seen. It seemed to move and shift in liquid patterns of black and gray while deep inside other more solid things turned, surfacing and disappearing again. It was like the dark surface of the river come to life.
Glenn backed away from him and picked her way through the
trees. She tried her best to not make a sound, but her body was numb and moved clumsily. Jolts of fear stabbed into her when a branch snapped or a leaf crackled underfoot.
17
Finally she came to a clearing where the forest had been driven back just enough to make room for a house of timber and mossy stone.
The heavy copse of trees around it bent forward, looming over the thatched roof and the simple, bare yard. It was even darker in this area of the forest — out there in that small piece of land, it seemed to be almost night.
Kevin trudged up a slate walk toward the house. Glenn sank into the cover of the trees and watched as he went to the door and, without pause, reached for the doorknob. There was a flash of warm candlelight as it opened. Then Kevin stepped inside and was gone.
Glenn crouched in the snow-flecked debris of the forest floor.
Her hands shook and the muscles in her legs quivered as icy water dripped from her soaked hair across her skin. She needed help, but had no idea where she was, much less how to get back to Aamon. Even if she did, it might be hours before she could return with him. What would have happened to Kevin in that time?
What was happening to him now?
Glenn stepped out of the trees and onto the grass. Her legs shook as she made her way up the rock-lined path to the door. Once there, she took a single faltering breath, turned the door handle, and stepped inside the house.
Kevin sat at a small wooden table with his back to Glenn. In front of him was a bowl of what looked like oatmeal. Kevin picked up a spoon, filled it, then ate slowly and mechanically.
Rows of open cabinets lined the wall across from them. They were filled with glass jars, lumps of moss, a brass set of scales, a chart of the stars. A collection of animal bones was laid out on black felt.
The whole house smelled of wood and the musty perfume of dried flowers and herbs.
“Kevin?”
Small drops of blood fell from the soaked end of his shirt and splattered onto the wood floor. Glenn took a rag that was lying on the table and knelt down beside Kevin. He took no notice of her as she pressed it tight into his side.
Glenn became aware of a fire crackling off to her right, and alongside it, a strange rhythmic creaking. She wanted to grab Kevin and run, but she found herself somewhat like a puppet herself, turning toward the sounds.
Across the room was a gray stone fireplace and a rocking chair made from knotty bark-covered tree branches. The chair reminded Glenn of the animal bones on the table behind her, like the skeleton of some crouching beast.
The chair gently rocked, its back to Glenn. A lump grew in her throat. The rounded edges of someone’s shoulders and a sleekly pulled-back plain of gray hair was visible over the edge of the chair.
Mixed in with the rocking chair’s creaking was another sound, a dry clicking that made her think of jaws opening and closing.
“You must be cold.” The woman’s voice was crisp and strong, with only the slightest tinge of age. “Come, sit by my fire.”
“I came for my friend.”
“Sit,” the woman said. “Be warm.”
Glenn’s clothes were dark with river water and icy tremors still shook her. How far would she get with Kevin in tow on the verge of hypothermia? No, she needed the woman to stop doing whatever it was she was doing to him, and she needed to get warm.
“Hold this here,” Glenn said, moving one of Kevin’s hands over the rag. He said nothing but did as he was told while scooping spoonfuls of oatmeal into his mouth.
Glenn circled around to the woman’s right, staying as far away as she could, keeping an eye on the chair, ready at any moment to grab Kevin and take her chances. But the woman didn’t even look at her.
Glenn sat down on a stone bench beneath a window. The heat from the fire filled her up.
The woman was in her seventies or eighties, Glenn guessed. She had a small, finely shaped face and long gray hair that was swept into a bun at the back of her head. In her long-fingered hands she held two bone-colored knitting needles. She worked them back and forth, drawing together a pile of yarn in her lap.
“There,” she said. “That’s better. Isn’t it?”
“Who are you?”
The woman paused her knitting. The firelight flickered orange across the lines of her face. Her eyes were almost entirely covered with milky cataracts. She was clearly blind.
“My name is Opal Whitley,” she said.
“What do you want?”
Opal’s brow furrowed. “I can’t feel you,” she said, puzzled. “Him, I can feel.” She gestured to Kevin and then laid the tip of one of the knitting needles against her temple. “In here. But you, I try to feel you like I feel him and there’s nothing there. Where you are is … a hole. An empty place in the room.”
The red jewel on Glenn’s bracelet shone dully.
Back at the table, Kevin neatly set his spoon next to the empty bowl. “I’m done with my supper now.”
“Why don’t you
go outside for a while, Cort?”
Kevin pushed his chair from the table, hand still on the rag at his side. He threw open the front door and slammed it behind him. Glenn looked out the window as Kevin ran into the yard and then abruptly stopped as if he had forgotten what he’d gone out there to do. He stood perfectly still, staring ahead into the shifting darkness of the forest. He reminded Glenn of a toy set aside, waiting until it was needed again.
“What did you do to him?” she asked.
Opal examined the pile of yarn with her fingertips, then picked up her knitting needles again. They clacked together once and she dropped them into her lap, as if she couldn’t muster the energy or the will.
“No one travels that road anymore,” she said. “It’s been years since anyone fell into the web. I had almost forgotten it was there. Then I felt him there, so … young. I’ve been alone for so long. I couldn’t resist. I wasn’t going to hurt him.”
Her web, Glenn thought, remembering the strange symbol on the rocks at the head of the trail. A circle with eight radiating lines, a spider.
The plaque had been a warning.
“What was that thing?” Glenn asked. “In the boat.”
“A servant. Pieced together from bits of my forest. The river. The trees. It has no will of its own.” Opal pointed to a locket that hung by a silver chain at the edge of the mantel. “It’s bound to the owner of that charm to do little errands.”
“Like kidnapping people.”
“Will you pour us some tea, dear?”
Opal inclined her head toward an iron kettle suspended over the fire. A thick towel sat on the hearth nearby.
“Let my friend go.”
Opal turned her face to the window. After a moment, her thin lips parted and she exhaled, a long exhausted release. She nodded.
Soon, the door opened and Kevin joined them again, looking
puzzled, like someone waking up from a very strange dream.
“Glenn?”
“It’s okay,” Glenn said. “Come in.”
Kevin sat on the floor next to Glenn, dazed. Glenn found ceramic cups on the mantel and filled them from the kettle over the fire. She had to put the cup in Kevin’s hand and wrap his fingers around it. She eased his bandage back. The bleeding had stopped for now. She took her own cup of tea and sat on the stone above Kevin.
