by Alma Boykin
He needed to water a tree. Steve got to his knees, bracing against the soft, chilly ground under him. He stood on the second try, staggered a step or two and waited until the trees stopped dancing before following the path or whatever to the closest bush. The surface felt a bit like one of those trails that had lots of bark mulch on it, but firmer, maybe like that rubber mat stuff he’d used in construction design lab on that porch project? Yeah, kinda like that but not quite. He felt better after anointing the shrubs. Where was Ivan?
He walked back and forth on the path, from the edge of the trees to the edge of the mist. It had a clear end, almost as if there was a glass wall or something keeping it from coming closer. Steve thought he heard splashing sounds from that direction and a voice, but he didn’t understand the words. OK, if Ivan was right, wherever he wandered off to, and this is Baba Yaga’s turf, I need to stay away from water. Nasty stuff comes from water, but trees are OK. And look out for walking houses. That was good advice in the real world, too, come to think of it. “Don’t drink the water, no problem.” Steve looked here and there a bit more, paced a few more times, and wondered where the giant cat had gone. He hadn’t even looked to see which direction Ivan went. Steve peered at the ground but could not find any tracks. His stomach growled, and after a few more laps back and forth, he said, “Forget this. I’m going to look for food and Ivan can come get me when he comes back. Besides, there’s only one path so it’s not like I can get lost that easily.” And his mom had made him learn a little woods navigation, enough to keep up with her on hiking and camping trips. “Hey, Ivan, I’m going this way,” he called in case the cat might be near by, and set off.
Chapter Two: Three Strange Things
Steve trudged along the trail, looking at the trees and wondering if he should go back to where he’d left Ivan. Nah. He wasn’t terribly hungry or really thirsty, just feeling like he wanted to nibble something. The easy path wandered a bit around some especially big trees, and Steve decided that either his eyes had adapted or the world only looked like night, because as he walked, he saw more details in the world around him. The trees had heavy branches and leaves the size of his hand, but in different shapes, some saw-toothed, some round, some like oaks or maples, and a few, farther off the trail, that made him a little nervous. They seemed too perfect, with columnar, straight trunks and smooth, pale bark. One or two of the perfect trees seemed to be watching him, which was impossible. Trees didn’t do that, even fairy tale trees. And trees were the good guys in Russian stories, if he remembered things correctly. Yeah, because Mom told Dad that she’d met the bear forest spirit when she was with the group investigating the mansion up in the National Forest where Aunt Morena and her sister had appeared. At the time, Steve had assumed it was one of those parent-code phrases for something they didn’t want the kids understanding. It probably was. Spirits and stuff don’t belong in the US, they all hung out in Russia and that’s it.
Steve kept walking, hands in pockets, looking at the woods, and glancing back from time to time so he’d remember where he came from. He dug his hands deeper into his pockets. Besides the too-perfect trees, something else made him twitchy and he stopped, peering around. He heard himself breathing, the rustle of his coat as he turned, and nothing else. It’s too quiet. There are no birds or crickets or wind in the leaves noises. This is major creepsville. He started to hum just to hear something but decided not to. Instead he walked a little faster. After a while, he heard a sound. It reminded him of wood creaking from too much load on it, like when they’d done destructive testing in his materials and structures lab. Huh. That’s strange. It came from ahead of him. Steve listened and heard more creaking and wood noises, and a soft thud rollrollroll. He sniffed. Cider? The air smelled like cider. His stomach grumbled.
He picked up the pace and rounded a bend in the trail to find an enormous apple tree with twisted branches, some of them as big around as Steve’s waist. He gawked at it, mouth open. The trunk had to be several yards in circumference, like that oak tree in the botanical park he’d seen in Virginia. Wow, that’s huge! Look at all that fruit. Apples covered the ground around the tree, and even more hung on the branches, weighting them down until they seemed about to break. Sweet intoxicating apple smell filled the air. Steve didn’t see a fence or anything between the path and the tree, and he hurried over.
“Help me,” the tree groaned, its voice like branches moving in heavy wind.
He jumped back. “What?” Who said that? The wind’s not blowing.
“Help me, young master, the weight . . .too great, please, help.”
Steve looked around and saw a big stick with a Y in one end. He kicked apples aside, grabbed the stick, propped up one bit of branch and helped himself to a few apples from a different branch. He didn’t want to get all sticky with tree goop, and some of the apples looked pretty nasty, green and yellow like the stars that weren’t stars. Steve backed away and got back on the path.
The apple tree sighed like a normal tree with wind blowing through it. Steve shrugged and continued on his way, polishing one apple against his pant leg before eating it. It tasted pretty good, not quite like cider but not bad. He finished the fruit and tossed the core into the woods. It would rot, so he wasn’t littering.
The world grew lighter and he glanced up to see that the “stars” had faded a little and the gaps between the leaves had turned grey instead of black with greenish stars. I wonder what the sun looks like here? If this is something Russian, then it’s probably not much, since it’s late October. Although, Russia was a big place. Nah, he wasn’t in Russia, he was in some virtual reality or something like that, or having one of those really vivid dreams he had as a kid. It couldn’t be a bad acid trip, because he’d gotten the drink himself at Padre’s and it had been with him the whole time. He touched the lump on his head. Still hurt. That was a little reassuring, maybe. The forest still looked like a forest, but he noticed fewer of the bizarre too-perfect trees. The woods seemed to be thinning out, too, with more space between the different trees and more grass and bushes under them.
Steve heard a sound, this one a bit like something moaning or groaning. Does no one take care of things around here? Or is it a trap? After a few more steps he discovered a very normal looking waist-high white-painted wooden fence beside the path, separating a large grassy area from the woods. The grass looked good and stood about knee high to Steve. Glad I don’t have to mow that. He hated mowing. His Zolnerovich grandparents had a yard at the house in Kansas and he’d gotten to help mow it when he visited in the summers. After one long, hot July day, he’d decided that his dad was right to get a condo instead of a real house. Steve also decided that landscaping was not what he wanted to do for a living. I wonder if that’s someone’s pasture? The grass and fence led to a small barn like the ones hobby farmers had for their show chickens, or the 4-H club built to sell as a fund raiser. Except this one seemed different, not like your basic American barn. As he got closer Steve saw it was built of unpeeled logs and had a thatch roof that extended almost to the ground, with small logs or big branches laid across the thatch to keep it in place. OK, that’s quaint.
“Moooo.” Behind the barn Steve saw a cow with short, silvery horns and a really, really big udder. He blinked, staring, and wondered how the beast could walk. “Mooo. Please, young master, milk me.”
Well now, milk sounded good, and the cow looked clean. Steve walked through the open gate, then continued around the back of the barn and found several buckets. They also seemed pretty clean. Behind the barn he found a water well with a little thatched roof and a wooden bucket straight out of a kids’ book. He shrugged, pulled up the bucket and used the water to rinse a bucket and his hands. He didn’t see a milking stool or anything to sit on, so he approached the cow slowly, not making any sudden moves. He had an idea of what he was supposed to do, and he set the bucket under the cow’s udder, bent over, grabbed one teat and stopped. Was it top to bottom or bottom to top? Um, what did Larry say? To
p to bottom, that was it. Larry’d worked with his dad at a dairy farm to earn some tuition money and claimed it was nothing like the milk commercials on TV showed. Steve resumed his firm grip on the teat and squeezed, pulling just a little, top to bottom.
Wow did the milk come out! He’d found the fountain of milk. Steve worked until he had two thirds of a bucket and stopped. He didn’t want that much, but it had been cool watching the milk shoot out and make foam in the bucket. That old picture of the guy blasting the barn cats in the face with milk had been right. Steve straightened up and winced at the crick in his back. He hunted around until he found a cup hanging from a chain by the well. He drank the milk. It was warm, and really, really rich, coating his mouth with fat. Three cups filled his stomach. Boy, Mom and Dad’s white cat would love this place. Gatta can’t get enough cream to keep her happy. And like his mother, she didn’t need much milk to make her stomach rebel, either.
Steve left the milk bucket by the well and rinsed out the cup. There didn’t seem to be any water trough for the cow. She’d quit mooing and he decided he’d done what she wanted, so he waved at her and left. She was sort of cute, with big eyes and a light brown color with red spots, not black and white like US dairy cows. Smaller too, he realized. Well, why not find cute cows and rude giant cats, since this was a fairy tale dream world?
As he followed the path through the fields and meadows, Steve opened his heavy coat. He seemed to be getting warmer, but still not too hot. The day remained more twilight than real daylight. He felt a little breeze trickling past, stopped and looked around, but didn’t see any birds or other animals. Or people, now that he thought about it, but then he didn’t expect to see people in the woods at night. Normal people stayed home or slept, not hiked. He didn’t see any animal tracks or scat, either. This is a little boring you know. Not that I mind boring, boring can be good, but helloooo, does no one live in fairy-tale world? Are they all off scaring kids, like in those movies? Well, someone had built the barn and the well and the fences, so that meant people had to live here, so where were they? Sleeping in? Partying? And where had the garlic smell gone? The air smelled like air, not like an accident had happened at the Italian place on campus.
Steve ate another apple and tossed the core over his left shoulder. He wanted a drink to clear the milk off the roof of his mouth, and more food would be good. What time was it anyway? He pulled the phone out of his pocket and thumbed the screen on. It showed 12:00, like the microwave did when the power went out. And one missed message, this from Ivan. “That’s weird. It works here?” He toggled over to messages and read “Where are you??” and a frowning cat emoji.
“On trail. Getting food.” Send. He put the phone back to sleep and tucked it into the pocket, then zipped the pocket. Having it fall into a stream or something would not be good. It was supposed to be waterproof, but he trusted that about as much as he trusted his car to start on a cold morning. Speaking of morning, it was a good thing it was Sunday, because he’d be missing work otherwise and he couldn’t afford to lose more hours this month. Steve stepped off the trail to water a bush and then resumed walking. Should he go back to meet Ivan? Nah. Ivan could find him if it was that important.
I should be worried, shouldn’t I? I mean, none of this makes sense, fairy-tales don’t exist, and the cat texted me again. This is not normal. Except, for a dream it passed all the normal checks. He wasn’t seeing, oh, purple unicorns or eagles dragging rainbows. He pinched the back of his hand and it hurt. Yup. Normal. And hadn’t that one roommate of his dreamed about hurting from a workout? So that made some sense. He was dreaming. And he’d had worse dreams, although he wouldn’t mind if a really good looking girl showed up about now.
Bread would be nice too, some of the really thick brown bread like Mom sometimes makes, with butter and . . . He sniffed, then sniffed again. Something was burning. Bread? No, couldn’t be. He sped up a little and followed the smell off the trail, around a few haystacks, and discovered a stone and brick thing with a big metal door near the top and a smaller metal door below and smoke coming out from around the top door. Someone had left wood scattered around it, and rags and other things. One fairy tale pizza oven, or old school bread-n-stuff oven right out of the 1700s. Steve saw a wooden paddle with a long handle propped up against the side of the brick and stone oven. Ah hah. The oven needed to be emptied, or at least to have the heat let out before everything burned. This shouldn’t be too hard. He’d pulled pizzas before. The rag worked as an OK way to protect his hand as he turned the simple latch on the upper door and opened it. He also remembered to stand out of the way as a wave of heat and smoke emerged. Steve turned the paddle so it was flat, reached in, and carefully worked it under a lump of something, then pulled out a seriously burned loaf of what might have been bread. “Damn.” He dumped it on the ground and peered in, spotting a few other things.
The second loaf looked a lot better, more brown than black. He set it on a stump not far from the oven, and reached in a third time, pulling two more loaves and what looked like a tray of cookies closer to the door. The heat shimmering out of the open door didn’t seem as fierce, so he closed the door again. The stump loaf had cooled enough to pick up and he grabbed it, tucked it under one arm and returned to his stroll.
Steve found a shady spot and sat in the grass. He tore off a chunk of the round loaf and inhaled the rich, yeasty steam that emerged. Yeah, this is more like it. He ate the chunk, sucking a little air as it tried to burn his tongue. It needed butter and jam, but the crust was crisp and the inside soft and warm with a little tang to it, a touch of sour. “Good bread.” Half the loaf disappeared. “Guess I was a little hungry.” He’d eaten a slice of pizza at seven, and it was now when? Later. As he sat chewing, he heard a sound like running water. He got up, followed the sound into a small cluster of trees and rocks and discovered a spring. It looked and smelled OK and he saw a little silver fish darting around in the pool below the rocks. Steve bent over, braced his free-hand on the rocks and sipped. Oow, it was cold! Cold and good, and he drank more, then ate the rest of the bread and drank again. It made his teeth hurt in a good way, and he decided that the dream wasn’t all that bad.
So, should he go back or keep exploring? Making giant Ivan angry seemed like a bad idea, but a little farther shouldn’t hurt. And now he needed to work off the bread and milk. He shared his dad’s physique for the moment, but age would eventually catch up with him and he did not want to turn into one of those barrels on legs like the pictures of his great-grandfather or his Uncle Cyril. Steve reached for the cell phone, changed his mind, and swished back through the brush and grass to the path. The way led into another large thicket. One of the creepy trees grew close to the trail and Steve stopped to look at it. As he did, he felt something warm brush against his chest and then start growing hot. He touched the spot, flinched from the pain, dug through his flannel shirt to his thermal shirt and opened the neck. His St. George medallion felt a lot warmer than his skin did and Steve reached up to remove it. Nah, better idea, I’ll get away from this tree thing. Indeed, once he moved out of easy sight of the too perfect plant, the silver medallion cooled down again. That makes no sense. Why should some dream things bug me and others don’t? Story-book trees never worried me as a kid. Of course, he never had dreams where his great-grandmother’s cat took steroids and talked, either. “Whatever.”
He hadn’t gone but a few more steps when he heard splashing and the sound of women’s voices. Oh yeah, this is more like it! He brushed off his clothes and sauntered down the trail, reached the edge of the trees and froze. “Oh my,” he breathed.
A black lake stretched out before him. The sky turned into a giant cavern, with distant stalactites that flowed faintly pink, green, pale blue, white, yellow, and other colors he didn’t have names for. Stars sparkled between them. In the distance he saw lights reflecting on the water. Something that made the old buildings inside Moscow’s Kremlin look drab and orderly rose from the crest of a hill. Onion domes
of white, brilliant green, deep blue, yellow, and the pink of sunset glowed from within, while dark stone or wood towers anchored the ends of a white stone and wood wall. If he squinted, Steve could almost see what might have been a path leading from the distant end of the lake up to the palace. He couldn’t come up with a different word for the building but palace.
He heard splashing again, and giggling. Steve looked to his right and glanced away, then looked again. A bunch of really good looking young women swam, played with a ball, or worked on craft projects on the shore. They all seemed blond, with their hair in two braids, and the ones on shore wore long, bright-colored dresses with fancy sleeves and little caps on their heads. If the piles of cloth on the shore of the lake were a clue, the ones in the water wore what they’d been born with. Steve blushed, and blushed harder as he realized where else blood was going. He stepped back into the woods until he got himself calmed down. You are outnumbered, they live here, and the one with the knitting needles could probably skewer you before you got past “Hey baby, come here often?” Only in beer commercials and music videos did a strange guy walk into a group of gorgeous women and have them all fall head over heels in lust at first sight. That reminder helped, as did a nagging memory of something he half-remembered Pete warning him about, something with pretty girls and water in the forest. Did they drown guys or curse them? Steve didn’t quite recall. It had been one of those bits of advice given to the back of his head one afternoon when they were hiking that he’d ignored.
So, what to do? Ask Ivan the cat for an introduction? Oh heck no. He heard a sound like a hunting horn, and hurried back to the end of the trees in time to see the last girl pulling her shoes on, now fully dressed. The group had gathered their bags and baskets of stuff and hurried down the shore, as if called. Steve followed behind, staying up by the edge of the trees. The girls chattered and giggled. He kept his eyes on them and picked up the pace as they got close to something dark in the water. A boat of some kind?
