The Starlit Wood

by Dominik Parisien

  “Welcome to New Woodbury,” he says, and there is no welcome in his eyes. “We don’t get many visitors around these parts.”

  “Can’t say as we’re visitors,” says Coyote. “I’m John Branson.” A simple name. A liar’s name, a lying name, stolen from a tombstone at the edge of the green world that was Boston, a thousand miles and a lifetime behind the both of them. He glances at the red fox girl, who nods minutely. This is her lie, but he has to be the one to tell it. Little girls have no voices here. Little girls have no voices anywhere. “This is my niece, Mary. We were in East Canaan, saw a poster hung at the request of a man named Paul Stabler, said he was looking for someone as could retrieve a thing for him. Said as he’d pay. My niece and I, we’re fond of money. Find it buys nice things, bread and wine and a basket to put them in. If you could direct us his way, we’d be grateful.”

  The red fox girl—whose name is not Mary, had never been Mary; her name is a secret to be guarded and concealed, as precious as a pearl and twice as prone to being stolen—holds her silence and watches the man with narrowed, mistrustful eyes. He meets them for a moment and then looks away. The things she isn’t saying are painful even when unheard.

  “Paul Stabler? He runs the bank. Other side of the town.”

  Not that there’s much town to be on the other side of anything. New Woodbury matches its name: still new, still scented like sawdust and aspirations. The main street doesn’t even have a sign. It’s the only candidate for the position, running from one side of town to the other. It tapers off into the desert at either end, becoming one with the sand and the stone. The same fate awaits everything men could build here where the sun holds cruel dominion, and there is no forest to hide them, no path to lead them home. Conquer the desert, defeat it with wells and with walls, or be lost to it forever.

  Coyote tips his hat. Somehow, the gesture neither reveals nor conceals any more of his face than was already showing. “We’re much obliged. Is this a safe place to leave our ponies for a spell?”

  “There’s a livery stable,” says the boss-man. He’s losing control of the situation. He can feel it slipping through his fingers, never to be recovered. He just can’t say how, and somehow that’s the worst part of all for a man like him, in a place like this. He came to the wastes because here, no one would ever challenge his authority. This man in his black hat, this little girl in her brown one that still manages to be red as a berry on a bush, they’re not challenging him. They’re not doing anything of the sort. And they’re winning.

  “We’ll keep that in mind for after we’ve been paid,” says Coyote. “Come along, Mary.” He starts across the street toward the distant outline of the bank. The red fox girl follows, leaving their horses untethered at the trough, leaving the boss-man to blink after them, confused and unsettled and feeling as if he’s just escaped a predator with eyes that could see right through to the heart of him, and claws that had been poised to snatch him up.

  He watches them go until he’s satisfied they won’t be coming back, and then he turns and walks toward the saloon. The sun is high and the day is young, but he needs a drink more than he can remember needing anything in his life.

  The air inside the bank is cool and stale and old. It tastes like Boston, resting heavy on the tongue and carrying a hundred years of silent commands. Sit still, stand up straight, be quiet, be good, behave, or pay the price for misbehavior; do not stray from the path, do not wander into the wild places, do not speak with beasts. The red fox girl says nothing, but she steps closer to Coyote, haunting his shadow like the ghost of a drowned girl haunts the ditch where she died. He doesn’t say anything either. He just slants his body to afford her more cover and walks on, toward the long oak counter where the teller sits, nervous as a rabbit, and watches him come.

  The counter is a good ten feet long, polished wood from a forest so far from this place that it might as well have fallen from the sky. The teller, groomed and polished and perfect as a magazine ad, could have come from the same distant star. She forces a smile when the pair draws close enough, and says, “Welcome to the New Woodbury Bank. How may I help you?”

  “We’re here to see a Mr. Paul Stabler about a job he was looking to have done,” says Coyote. “I hear there’s a nice boardinghouse here in town. My niece and I would like to sleep there tonight, which means we need paying. Paying means working. So we’d like to see about that job sooner than later, if you don’t mind.”

  The name of her boss is a rope, and the teller is swift to grab it. Let him pull her to safety. She works for him; the responsibility should be his. “I’ll get him for you. If you’d wait here?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. She’s off and running, and Coyote and the red fox girl are, for the moment, alone.

  “You can go, if you like,” he says, looking down at her. He can’t see her eyes under her hat, but he can read her posture, read the way she hunches her shoulders and dips her chin. She could live a hundred years, become a wild thing never before seen in the world, and he’d still be able to read her clear and easy. “I know this is your hunt, but a good hunter knows when it’s better to stay home and hidden. I won’t blame you if you go.”

  She shakes her head, ever so slightly, and for a moment the light slanting through the bank windows turns her brown leather hat apple-red, blood-red, the red of an expensive silk bonnet tied to the head of a girl too young to understand why she should value it. She wore the bruises for that bonnet on her skin for weeks after an errant gust of wind carried it away, leaving her laughing until the shadow of her father fell across her face. She was a girl who laughed then, his red fox child, and it was the sound of the laughter being beaten out of her that had drawn him, for no true hunter can stand the cries of a young thing being hurt. Kill them clean or give them peace and plenty, but do not harm them for sport.

  “As you say,” he says, and he turns, the man in the black hat with the young woman beside him, to wait for the door at the back of the bank to open.

  Seconds slither by, the baitworms of time, followed by the larger minnows of minutes, until finally the doorknob turns, the door swings wide, and Paul Stabler appears. He is tall, in the way of men who ate well as children; his belly never ached in the night, his jaw never chewed at the air for the lack of anything else to eat. He is pale, in the way of men who never see the sun without glass between them and it. His mouth is hard and dips downward at the edges, for he has lost so much to come here; he has already paid so dearly.

  “There you are,” says Coyote, and his voice is bones and ashes and the white moon against the horizon. “I understand you’ve lost something, and you want to have it returned to you. Is that right?”

  But Paul Stabler’s eyes are only for the red fox girl. He takes a step toward her, drawn as if by a magnetic force, and says, “That’s my little girl.”

  “She’s her own girl, actually, and not so little for all of that,” says Coyote, and his voice is teeth, nothing but teeth, teeth from one side all the way to the other. “That’s the funny thing about children. They can belong to you as long as you’re only dreaming them, but once they walk in the world, they have a nasty tendency to belong to themselves.”

  “Did you steal her?” For the first time, Paul Stabler looks at Coyote, and he does not have the sense to be afraid. “Are you the one who opened her window and carried her away?”

  Coyote says nothing. The window had been opened from the inside; the tree that had been used as a ladder to freedom would never have borne his weight, even slender as he was. There had been no kidnapping to pull her from the path, only a running away so comprehensive that it had reached across a desert and demanded aid. He had come for her, to be part of her story, to aid in leaving the green world she had always known. But steal her? Never.

  She stole herself.

  The red fox girl steps forward, tilts her head back enough to let the man—to let her father—see her face. This is her hunt. She must be the one who moves. She is thinner than she was in Boston,
older, more wild thing than woman, and more woman than child. But her mother’s eyes are her birthright, and no one who had known his wife could deny her parentage. “He didn’t steal me,” she says. “He found me. He helped me find my way here, to you. You’ll pay him, won’t you?”

  And then, the most painful, most difficult word of all: “Daddy?”

  Paul Stabler pays. Oh, yes, he pays. Some debts must be settled, after all, no matter how long it takes for them to come due. Coyote walks out of that bank with full pockets, and he does not look back. His part in this is not over, but it is finished, for a time.

  The sun is setting in the desert outside, and the shadows it casts on the street are the color of blood, the color of garnets, the color of a lost red bonnet floating to freedom on a distant river.

  Paul Stabler is a man who lives alone. It suits him, he finds, and if that’s a surprise, it’s only because he’s never had cause for solitude before. First had come his parents, and then came his wife, and when his wife had gone his daughter had still been there, and when his daughter had gone, there had been all the eligible women of Boston, wanting to dry his tears and tell him he could be a father again. He fled west to escape, both from them and from the quiet ghost in the red hat who looked at him reproachfully from every shadow.

  New Woodbury was exactly what the name had promised: new. If there were ghosts here, they belonged to someone else, and they had no interest in haunting him.

  Now he walks into the front room of his modest home, and the red fox girl who was his Rosalind follows, her feet silent as a whisper on the carpeted floor. He looked for her not because he wanted her back again, but because it was his duty as a father to find what he had lost. As long as he was looking for her, he had had no need to remarry or to explain himself; his grief was seen as motivation enough for everything, from his stony silences to the bruises on his workers’ arms. A man may be a wolf, if he’s been bitten hard enough.

  He leads her to the back of the house, where a narrow door like a coffin lid sits ajar. He pushes it open, looks to her, and says, “This is your room. You’re not to leave it without speaking to me first. You’re precious to me, and I’ll not lose you again. Do you understand me?”

  Rosalind nods, silent as a prayer, and steps through the open door, into the narrow child’s room on the other side. The bed is covered in a thin layer of dust. It has never been used. She looks at that bed, and is still looking at it when the door closes behind her, and she is alone.

  There’s nothing to be done now but wait. This is a path she needs to walk alone, if she’s to see it to its conclusion. So she sits down on the floor—she cannot bear to think of sitting on that dusty bed, or worse, sliding between those rigid, cobwebbed sheets, like a corpse sliding into its crypt—and waits. The sun will finish setting soon enough, and the wolves will come out to feed.

  Night is the time for wolves.

  She waits, and the hours run down around her, great river catfish chasing the baitworm seconds and minnow minutes into the undying ocean of the past. She waits, and the room grows dark, and she can hear her father’s footsteps on the living room floor. Her father, who did not ask her why she had run away, who paid for her with crisp new bills and did not ask her where she’d been, did not ask her anything at all worth knowing. Maybe he should have. Maybe he could have saved himself.

  But the hour grows late and the shadows grow long, and still she waits, until the soft tread of a father’s footsteps in the next room have grown heavy, until she hears him coming toward her door. The knob turns. The door opens.

  “You are an arrogant child,” he says, and his breath is whiskey and winter.

  “The better to defy you, sir,” she says, and her words are summer in the desert, hot and cruel and unforgiving.

  “You are an unwanted child,” he says, and his breath is bruises and blame.

  “The better to leave you, sir,” she says, and her words are time to heal, hard and hopeful and full of peace.

  “You are a spiteful child,” he says, and his breath is captivity and cruelty.

  “The better to spite you, sir,” she says, and her words are freedom, freedom opening all the way to the desert, freedom that knows no horizon.

  The door closes behind him as he steps fully into the room. He reaches for her then, as he reached for her once on the other side of the country, in a green place where she wore a red hat she had not yet earned. He reaches for her, and she falls upon him, and the world is red as a desert sunset, and not half so forgiving.

  Morning finds her sitting outside, picking her teeth with a splinter of what had been her bedroom door. Coyote strolls up, their horses following patiently behind him. This town is too small to contain them; they need the wide sweep of the desert, the hills and the rolling dunes, and the wind to carry the tears of children treated bad and women treated cruel.

  “Your hat’s red,” says Coyote.

  The red fox girl looks up through the tangled corn of her hair and smiles like a thousand miles of empty horizon. “It is,” she says.

  “You handle your wolf?”

  “I did.” She stands, stretches, moves to his side. She leaves no footprints.

  It brings him no pleasure to ask his next question, but ask it he does, for some things must be observed: “You ready to ride alone?”

  “Not yet,” she says. “Got some lessons left to learn. Don’t feel like looking for another teacher.”

  Coyote smiles. He sets his hand atop her head for a moment, feeling the reality of her. Then he swings himself up onto his horse and waits for her to do the same before he turns toward the horizon. There will always be wolves, even if some of them walk wrapped in human skins. There will always be woods, even if some of them are difficult to see. And there will always be little girls who leave the path in search of something bigger, something better, and find their own salvation on the line between morning and midnight.

  The sky is the color of bleached bone as Coyote and the red fox girl ride across the desert. His hat is black as shadows, and hers is red as blood, and none saw where they came from, and none will see where they go.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Seanan McGuire: The story of “Little Red Riding Hood” has always had a special place in my heart—one that was solidified forever when I played her several times as a teenager in productions of Into the Woods. She is young; she is innocent; she is unprepared. Like most people who adore the story and grew up steeped in the modern mythology of horror movies and urban fantasy, I thought, “What if she was the werewolf?” and put together a whole series pitch; sadly, as I was in high school at the time, it never went anywhere, but still. I love Red, and when I was asked to be in this anthology, I leapt at the chance to tell her story again. I also love horror movies, but at this point, a werewolf Red seemed predictable. At the same time, her story is inherently one of betrayal by someone who was trusted, however unwisely, and of attaining adulthood through a single trip through the woods. It seemed natural to turn the story on its ear, to turn trees into endless sand, to turn men into wolves, and to let Red cut her own path for once. I think it’s recognizable, and in the end, that’s what matters about fairy tales: that they use different codes to tell the same story, and still bring you out the other side.

  UNDERGROUND

  Karin Tidbeck

  edvig hammered her fists on the front doors, more out of rage than hope that she would be let out. When her hands hurt too much to continue, she sat down and wept. When she ran out of tears, she opened the carpetbag the driver had left behind. The only items inside were the three gramophone records she had wanted for her birthday, and for which her father had given her away to the man underground.

  You understand why I must do this, her father had said when the big black car came to fetch her. I had to promise him the first living thing I saw.

  As the car door swung shut, he said, I’m sorry. I thought it would be the dog.

  The faint scuff of a shoe made Hedvig look up
. A butler and two footmen stood in the lobby next to a pair of ornate doors that led farther into the mansion.

  “Please let me go,” Hedvig said.

  The servants said nothing, just watched her with impassive faces.

  “Where’s your master?” she asked.

  The butler bowed and opened the rightmost door. Bright electric light spilled out.

  Hedvig followed the silent man through room after room. The mansion was furnished in the new, angular style; it felt cold and oppressive compared to the soft lines and pastel colors of home. Instead of windows, the walls were covered in curtain-framed paintings of geometric suns and stark landscapes. The butler took her through a series of smaller rooms seemingly designed for a lady: a library with overstuffed chairs, a music room with a piano, and a fully equipped sewing room. In every single room sat a gramophone. Finally she was shown into a dimly lit room with a huge mahogany bed.

  Hedvig grabbed the butler’s arm. “Will he come for me?”

  Up close, the butler’s skin looked smooth and hard, like Bakelite; his eyes glittered like glass. He gave off a vague chemical smell. Hedvig realized that his mouth and eyebrows were painted on. He gently pried her hand off his arm with jointed fingers, bowed again, and left.

  Hedvig cried until her eyes were dry again, then wound up the gramophone and put on one of the records. The soft voice rang out through the funnel, both intricate and soothing. It made her feel less alone.