The Starlit Wood

by Dominik Parisien

  “Well, there’s a number of things it could be,” said Rose. She rocked a few more times. “Do you know what the Osgoods were up to, last full moon?”

  “I ain’t their keeper,” said the sheriff. He ran his finger around his collar, loosening it up a little.

  Rose rocked a few more times, then suddenly stopped. The sheriff flinched as she reached forward, but she was only going for her coffee cup.

  “We got to lure it out,” she said. “Put something it wants within reach.”

  “Like what?” asked the sheriff.

  “Eleven Osgood, of course,” said Rose. She pulled a rolled-up poster out of her boot and flicked it open across the desk. The words DEAD OR ALIVE were very prominent. “He’s wanted anyway. Surprised I didn’t see this poster on your wall outside.”

  “Yeah,” croaked the sheriff. “Uh, how we going to do that?”

  “The usual way,” said Rose. “How many in the gang?”

  “I guess about eighteen,” said the sheriff.

  “Well, get a posse together,” said Rose cheerfully. “A dozen ought to do it. You ride up to the front of that sheep farm this afternoon and call him out.”

  “The sheep farm?”

  “Errol the sheep farmer’s place,” said Rose. “That’s where they hang out, isn’t it?”

  “Uh, yeah,” said the sheriff uncomfortably. He opened his mouth to ask her how she knew about that but shut it again as he met her cool, steady gaze, which quite clearly told him she knew a lot more about everything than he would like.

  “A dozen against eighteen . . .” continued the sheriff after a moment or two of wary silence. “Uh, where you going to be?”

  “You just do your part,” said Rose. She stood up, and even though the sheriff was taller, he felt diminished by her presence. He had to turn his head aside, because her warden’s badge hurt his eyes. It was bright, uncommon bright.

  “Like you should have done quite a time ago,” added Rose. She poured the dregs of the coffee over his boots with some contempt and walked out.

  The posse came back just before sundown, with Eleven Osgood hog-tied over a horse, blood dripping slowly through the bandage on his wounded hand. Half the sheriff’s men were still back at the sheep farm, digging graves for the four outlaws who hadn’t laid down their weapons when called to do so, not realizing Rose Jackson was already inside the house with them, moving like smoke in a hurricane, too fast to see, too insubstantial to shoot. Eleven himself had been shot in the hand by the sheriff when the outlaw ran out, though in truth Laidlaw had been aiming for his head. He didn’t want Eleven talking.

  “We’ll string him up on that big elm over by the livery stable,” said Rose cheerfully. She was riding alongside the sheriff, with the prisoner just behind, hemmed in by the bolder members of the posse. “Just on sunset. That should bring it out.”

  “What?” growled Eleven, trying to raise his head. “You gonna hang me? What for? I want a trial!”

  “You’ve had two that I know of,” said Rose. “Been sentenced to hang both times. So you’re overdue.”

  Eleven took this in silence for a while, thoughts very slowly percolating through his head.

  “What you mean by ‘bring it out’?”

  “Whatever’s hunting down Osgoods and burning them up,” said Rose. “Something from across the Line. Caught up someone’s dying wish for revenge, I’d guess. Who you kill recently, Eleven? Or maybe your brother did the deed? Or your cousin, for that matter.”

  Eleven muttered something inaudible.

  “Night of the full moon, I’d guess,” said Rose. “I don’t have to know, but it’d make it easier, give me a little warning. It’s got to be in someone, you see, someone of the same blood as you murdered.”

  “I ain’t helping you, Marshal!” spat Eleven. “Hang me and be damned!”

  “Someone who deals with fire,” said Rose thoughtfully, looking across as they passed the town farrier, who was newly wreathed in steam from a quenched horseshoe and not paying the passersby any attention.

  “Joel? The blacksmith?” asked the sheriff, in surprise.

  “No, smiths have their own mysteries and are too ringed with cold iron for anything from the other side to get a hold,” replied Rose. “But it’ll be someone used to fire. Maybe a cook. A baker. Someone like that.”

  “I don’t ever want to see . . . or hear . . . anyone else burn like Potato did,” said the sheriff nervously.

  “We’d better get the critter, then,” said Rose brightly. “Specially as they sometimes get a very wide notion of revenge. You know, start on those directly responsible, but then move on to anyone who might have helped out in any way. Unrelated people, even. Who’d you kill, Eleven?”

  Eleven remained stubbornly silent. But the sheriff opened his mouth.

  “Come to think about it,” he said. “Come to think about it . . .”

  He lifted his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead, though the day was already cooling, the sun beginning to set.

  “There was a body found soon after the full moon, up by the canyon,” he continued. “Young feller Danny . . . called himself Danny Hallaway, sometimes Danny Hathaway. Knifed in the guts.”

  “He have kin in town?” asked Rose.

  The sheriff thought for a moment, eyes crinkling.

  “Parents dead, two sisters run off with the traveling show,” he said finally. He turned to Rose. “But he had a little sister. She sells matches.”

  “Makes sense,” said Rose.

  “So what do we do?” asked the sheriff. He was mightily relieved to have figured it out. “Kill the girl?”

  “You do that and Eleven won’t be the only one hanging,” said Rose. “What I will have to do is catch it when it shows itself, which will be just one moment before it sets Eleven here on fire.”

  The sheriff blinked. He didn’t have anything to say to that. It was only a hundred yards or so to the elm, so they rode in silence.

  They tied off the horses at the livery stable and wandered the dozen yards along to the tree, where the sheriff threw a rope over the best-looking branch and handed off one end to four of his men. He fumbled about making a noose for a while with the other end, till Rose took it from him and tied the neck-breaking knot with ease.

  “You cinch him up,” she said, stepping back. “I got to get ready.”

  “I ain’t seen that little match girl around,” said the sheriff.

  “You won’t,” said Rose. She got a round, enameled box out of her waistcoat, the kind of thing a woman might keep earrings in, or maybe a little powder. She unscrewed the top and held both halves, carefully holding each up to the fading sunlight to inspect the insides, which were of mirror-bright polished silver.

  “What . . . what happens if you don’t catch it in time?” asked the sheriff. His hands shook as he stretched the noose over Eleven’s head and pulled it tight, the long knot plumb against the back of the outlaw’s head.

  “Don’t worry about that,” said the marshal easily. She looked to the west, where the sun had almost dipped below the horizon. The shadows were very long, and there was one extra over by the stable doors, a small human shadow without anyone belonging to it, with a reddish glint suggestive of eyes. “Lift him up!”

  The sheriff stepped back a few paces. His men hauled on the rope. Eleven went up, kicking and—

  “Penny for a match, mister! Penny for a match!”

  The lisping, little-girl voice was all around. The sheriff turned on the spot, desperately trying to see her. The men let go of the rope and ran away, sending Eleven plummeting back to the ground with the awful crack of a leg breaking.

  A match struck in empty air.

  The sudden, sucking breath of combustion sounded.

  The marshal leaped, clapping both halves of her silver box together.

  Just a moment too late.

  Eleven Osgood burst into flame, his screams louder and higher than his brother or his cousin. A second later the fire leaped
from him and hooked the sheriff in, Laidlaw screeching and turning, screeching and turning as he was drawn toward Eleven and they joined to become one great tower of incandescent flame.

  Rose screwed down the lid of the silver box, slipped it inside her waistcoat, and drew out a little pepperbox derringer instead. She fired all four barrels into the capering, conjoined shape of fire that was Eleven and Laidlaw, finishing the screams, if not the flames.

  “Penny for a match, mister,” said Lili, not seeing anything that was before her, and not lisping either.

  Rose picked Lili up, carried her away, and set her on her horse, before mounting behind her. Her body shielded the girl from the fire, which was only now burning down. Rose made a tcha-tcha sound with her tongue, and her horse ambled off.

  They hadn’t gone more than a dozen yards along the main street when the little girl suddenly stiffened under her hand, as if unexpectedly awoken.

  “Oh no,” she wailed. “I done lost three matches, and no money for ’em neither!”

  “Here,” said Rose, slipping the girl a silver dollar. “You’re finished selling them anyhow.”

  Lili took the silver dollar.

  “What am I to do?” she said forlornly. “Who are you anyhow?”

  “Well, I’m Marshal-Warden Rose Jackson, only you can call me Auntie Rose, on account of we’re going to be traveling together a ways.”

  “We are?”

  “Yep,” said Rose. She looked down at Lili, who twisted back and smiled tentatively in return. “See, you don’t know it, but you’re special. You’re going to have magic powers and all when you grow up, so you gotta go somewhere to learn how to be wise about using ’em.”

  Lili pondered this for some time, occasionally darting looks at Rose, and to either side of the strangely empty street.

  “We going across the Line?” she asked finally, as they neared the edge of town.

  “Yep,” said Rose. “Going to visit with my daughter, lives there. She’s got two girls of her own. Younger than you. You’ll stay there a spell.”

  “They eat regular?” said Lili.

  “Three squares, regular as clockwork,” said Rose.

  “And I won’t have to sell matches?”

  “Nope,” said Rose. “There’ll be work, but not selling matches. You’re done with that, I reckon.”

  “Good,” said Lili. She held the silver dollar tight in one small fist, relaxed back against Rose, and fell asleep.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Garth Nix: I actually don’t like the Hans Christian Andersen story very much. It could be called “It’s Okay to Be Poor and Freeze to Death, at Least You’ll go to Heaven with Granny.” But its evocation of the magic of creating fire with matches is very powerful. We take it for granted now, but for most of humanity’s existence fire was much more difficult to conjure up. And it has always been both an invaluable ally and a potential foe, even a lethal one. I started my story before I reread the original, and my recollection of it was wrong. I thought I remembered that no one would buy her matches and they treated her badly, which led me to thinking about revenge. So my starting point was not entirely the original Andersen story but rather my imperfect memory of it. I guess it became a Western because matches are such a motif of the imagined West. Struck against a boot, lighting a cigarillo, held to the fuse of a stick of dynamite . . . I thought matches, and I thought a Western. But a fantastical one, of course, because that is how my mind tends to work. Accordingly, I set it in the world of one of my previous stories, “Crossing the Line.” I love a Weird Western, and I think I’ll probably write some more!

  SOME WAIT

  Stephen Graham Jones

  he first of our children to disappear was Jace Weissman.

  The whole town shut down, walked the trees, beat the grass, dragged the creek, held prayer vigils.

  While we were out doing that, the second of our children was spirited away. Alyssa Johnson.

  This time we locked our doors, leaned our shotguns against the wall, one in the chamber, our fingers always hovering over that third digit of calling the sheriff’s department.

  The third of our children to go missing made the national news. Cathy Gutierrez. Three children in two weeks.

  Husbands and wives traded shifts sleeping, bedrooms were consolidated, sick days were used, and more were begged for.

  It didn’t matter.

  It happened again, and then again, and then three more times.

  Understand, our town is two thousand people.

  Of that two thousand, not many are fourth graders.

  Even fewer now.

  The detective assigned to liaison with the parents was from the city. Claude Weissman, Jace’s dad, claimed to remember the detective from a high school basketball tournament. Meaning he was chosen as liaison because he was from these mean streets, not those.

  Claude Weissman couldn’t remember what position the detective might have played on the court.

  “Point guard,” Andrew Rucker said after our first meeting, when we were all shuffling around in the elementary school cafeteria. The lights were flickering above us. They hadn’t really taken hold yet.

  “Homicide now,” one of us said, watching a long tube of light shudder with darkness.

  It was the word we’d all been holding in our mouths for nearly four weeks.

  Television re-creations of these events are years away, if ever. No dramatizations are in the works.

  Just look in our eyes instead.

  We’re the ones who walked our son or daughter to the bus stop that first kindergarten day, trying to make a photograph of it. And then it’s like we’re just standing there at the end of the driveway, by the mailbox, Hamlinberg swirling and smearing around us, the seasons cycling through faster and faster, Easter to Thanksgiving, homecoming to prom.

  Watch the eyes, though.

  We’re still looking down the road. We’re still watching where our son or our daughter just disappeared.

  They’ll be back, we’re telling ourselves.

  We just have to stand here.

  We saw the nanny-cam recording before any of the detectives, before anybody from the sheriff’s department.

  Trina Johnson had always been vigilant.

  We all had. As vigilant as you can be without wrapping them in a quilt, carrying them from place to place.

  Trina Johnson’s daughter was Alyssa.

  We’re not supposed to use the past tense for them, and we never meant to. But at some point you do, and it just falls like a dead bird onto the floor, doesn’t even kick once, and all the parents, they look away from it.

  Alyssa’s babysitter had, for her last two years of high school, been Connie Abbot. Connie was back from college for the summer. The thought nobody would think out loud was that she’d met someone in the city. That she’d been followed back. That when she’d shown up to babysit Alyssa, she’d had a shadow.

  The detective told us it was natural for smart people like ourselves to develop our own theories. To grasp at whatever straws there were, or could be.

  We weren’t children, we told him. We were parents.

  From the other room, then, Trina Johnson screamed.

  What she’d found on the monitor of Alyssa’s computer was what we all found on our missing children’s monitors within the hour.

  It is one hundred years since our children left.

  “What is it?” one of us said, the voice breaking the way all of ours would have, had we been the one to say it.

  “That game,” Trina Johnson’s husband Gerrold said. “It’s that game. Right?”

  The game had been on a freebie CD all the kids had come home with from school.

  Our midnight interrogation of Principal Wilkins on his front lawn established that the CDs weren’t from the textbook salesman, like the teachers had assumed. The days didn’t match up. The box had just been in the hall one Tuesday.

  A fourth grader will look into any box that’s just sitting there.
/>   And the game, it was outdated, it was clunky, but it was free, right?

  We policed them over their shoulders the first week or two, told them that they knew this was all fake, didn’t they? That it was all pretend?

  They all knew.

  Until it wasn’t.

  That line about it having been one hundred years since our children left took very little research to crack.

  The story is hundreds of years old itself, is thought to be a fanciful way of remembering a sickness that passed among a village’s young.

  Part of that fantasy—what we thought was fantasy—is that a man in patched clothes uses his wiles to lure all the rats out of a village. For an agreed-upon price. One the village then decides is too high. It was just a few rats, right? So, to exact the payment he deserves, the piebald man then uses his wiles to lead all the village’s children out of town, never to be seen again.

  It’s better to figure Death as a jester sometimes. To let his comical bells jingle louder than the moans, louder than the sound of pustules bursting under fingernails.

  The parent who figured this out wasn’t the librarian. Our librarian, Mr. Dockett, had no children, so he wasn’t at these meetings.

  The parent who dredged this story up from his childhood, it was Martin Able.

  His chin trembled into a prune as he retold the story.

  Never for years, save at funerals, had people cried as freely as we did that month.

  It wasn’t Mr. Dockett taking the children, either.

  And it wasn’t the babysitter’s boyfriend.

  The game the fourth graders had all been playing was a simple labyrinth. It looked like it was supposed to help with their spatial reasoning.

  The animation wasn’t refined, and transitioning from room to room took much longer than a blink. It made us wonder how they could invest so intently in the labors their characters were going through.

  A different generation, we told ourselves.

  The television shows we’d believed in at their age would be basic and crude to them, we knew. Thinking this let us feel part of a grander cycle. It let us feel like we were handing our art and entertainment down. And of course those idle pastimes would become instantly unrecognizable. It was for them, right? Not us. And we knew from our parents’ efforts that any attempt to suppress their interest would only fan the flames higher, as it were.