by Shea Ernshaw
I roll onto my back and squeeze my eyes closed. Why does my brain refuse to remember? What is it blotting out? The truth about what happened. About what I did.
A hole is widening in my chest: the place where I have ruined everything. Where I lied to her. Where I have nothing left to lose.
Nothing to go back to.
No one to trust. No one who trusts me.
I open my eyes and peer up at the low ceiling—at all the little knife marks, the divots and slashes that form words and images and meaningless symbols. The face of a rabbit etched into the wood stares back at me. Several trees carved along the lowest, sloping part of the ceiling, crude lines for every branch, create a tiny forest. Every cussword you can think of has been slashed into the boards. Permanently preserved. Boys’ names crisscross the wood beams, a way to mark their time here—a reminder that a hundred boys have slept in this bunk before me.
But a name catches my eye, carved where the ceiling meets the wall, nearly hidden. Each letter is cut deeply, as if in anger. A night when he couldn’t sleep. When the trees felt too close. The air too cold. His home too far away.
The letters spell: MAX CAULFIELD.
Max slept here. In this cabin. In this bunk.
I sit up and touch the wood grain, my finger sliding along the indentation of each letter. Max slept here.
Bursts of filtered moonlight cut across my vision, the memory of snow against my skin. I think of Nora, her hand pressed to mine last night, but I push the memory away. My mind plays tricks on me—always drifting back to her. I try to recall the cemetery, laughter rising from the others’ throats. But I wasn’t laughing with them. They were never my friends, my mind repeats. They were laughing at me.
Taunting me.
I sit up and scramble down the ladder, away from the bunk—from the place where I once slept. But it wasn’t always my bunk.
I arrived at camp late in the season, when the air had already turned sharp and the boys had already been assigned their cabins. I was the new kid. The outsider.
I never belonged.
Max had gotten in trouble before I arrived. I remember it in waves now, breaking against the shore of my mind. Salt and foam, crashing over me. He had been caught sneaking into the counselors’ cabins and rooting through their stuff, caught spiking his morning coffee with whiskey. Offenses that were worse than most of the boys’.
So the counselors moved him to a cabin beside the mess hall, a single room with no other boys. A cabin flanked by the counselors’ cabins, where he couldn’t easily sneak out without being heard. I remember it now, when I arrived at camp and the boys told me that I had been assigned to Max’s old bunk.
He hated me for it—like it was my fault.
I move back away from the bunks, my heels hitting the heavy wood door.
They made me go to the cemetery that night; they laughed and passed around a bottle of booze and I stood rigid, ready for a fight. Ready for them to attack me.
We were never friends.
And Max—he hated me the most.
NORA
Hello?” I call into my own home.
As if I were the stranger. The intruder picking locks and slinking through shimmied window frames.
Fin sniffs the air, quick inhales through his nostrils.
I tiptoe into the living room, trailing snow across the floor. Tink, tink, tink go the droplets of water.
And then someone appears at the bottom of the stairs. “Shit, you scared me,” Suzy says.
My shoulders drop. “I thought the house was empty.” But my tone betrays something—the uncertainty I feel, looking for cracks along her edges, for something she’s hiding.
“Just me.” She moves into the kitchen and leans against the white tile counter, as if she’s still a little unsteady on her feet, a little hungover after last night. Dark circles rim her eyes.
“Oliver’s gone?” I ask.
Her mouth puckers to one side. “Guess so. No one’s in your room.” She rubs at her temples, then lifts her bloodshot eyes to mine. “I only went up there to see if you were still asleep. I wasn’t snooping.”
“It’s fine,” I say. I walk to the stove, the fire burning brightly—she must have added more logs. My head has started to pulse, little pricks of light fanning across my vision.
“Where were you?” Suzy asks.
“Just needed to get out of the house,” I say. I don’t know why I lie, why I don’t tell her that I went to see Mr. Perkins. That I found a watch that belonged to Max in Oliver’s coat. That I think he did something he can’t take back.
But I do know why I don’t say any of this: because I’m not sure I can trust her.
I’m not sure she doesn’t know more about Max. About everything.
She blinks several times, like she needs more sleep. “What’s wrong?” she asks. She senses something is off.
But there are too many things wrong. A bone moth is following me, a dead boy’s watch was in Oliver’s pocket. Something bad is happening and I can’t tell who’s the villain and who’s just as scared as me.
Nervously, I twirl the moonstone ring around my finger. “Were you there with them that night?” I ask, the timbre of my voice cracking.
“When?” Her eyebrows crush together.
“The night Max died. And Oliver went missing.”
She frowns even deeper, little lines creasing the sides of her mouth, confused. “No,” she answers, straightening up from the kitchen counter. “I was asleep in Rhett’s bunk when they all left.”
“Did you know they were going to the cemetery?”
She crosses her bony arms, her sweatshirt twisted around her torso, a defensive posture. “No, what are you talking about?” A strand of hair slips free from the tanged bun atop her head.
“But when they came back,” I urge. “You must have known something happened? That Max and Oliver weren’t with them.”
She chews on the side of her cheek like she’s trying to remember, to sift through the drowsy fog of her mind. A little black smudge is just visible by her right eye, her mascara rubbed away while she slept—the only makeup she must have brought with her. “Why are you asking me this?” Her tone is suddenly acrid, flint scraping together. Sparks catching on her teeth.
Because a bone moth is following me, I want to say. Because the throb at my temples won’t go away.
Because death is coming for me. Tiny black spots of doom—just like her smeared mascara—always just beyond my vision.
Suzy and I stare at each other, neither of us breathing, looking for the truth in the other’s face. In the lines around our eyes that often reveal when someone’s lying.
Never trust anyone who blinks too often: a note—a warning—within the spellbook.
“I didn’t know anyone was missing that night,” she says flatly when I don’t answer her. “I don’t keep track of who sleeps in which cabins.”
Anger boils up inside me now, wings thwapping against my ribs—the certainty that she knows something she won’t say—and I take a step closer to her. “But you heard them talking about it—that someone had died?”
She lifts both shoulders in an exaggerated shrug, her perfect dark eyebrows raised like little tents. “I guess,” she answers. “I wasn’t really paying attention. I was more worried about being stuck up here.”
“A boy died, and all you cared about was being stuck?”
She sets her jaw into place and uncrosses her arms, looking suddenly rigid. “You think I had something to do with it?”
“I just want to know what happened.”
“And you assume I’m lying?”
“I don’t have any reason to believe you aren’t.” The words should probably sting, but I’m beyond that now. Beyond caring what she thinks. I feel like I’m losing control. Like I can’t see what’s right in front of me—everyone is hiding something and I want to scream. This is my forest, the place where I’ve always felt safe, yet I have no idea what’s happening.
I am a Walker who can’t see the truth.
Suzy moves her hand too quickly, and she knocks one of my mother’s honey jars off the counter onto the floor. It lands with a loud shatter, the glass breaking on impact, and the sticky amber liquid spills into the cracks. She stares at it, like she might apologize, but then she lifts her eyes and says, “Why would I lie?”
The honey pools along the wood floor, following the divots and lines, filling in the scrapes like mud. Slow and mercurial. “To trick me,” I say at last, my ears ringing louder now. “To make me look like an idiot. Because that’s what people like you do—find ways to torment the Walker witch.”
People like you, I think. People who only pretend to be nice but say awful things about me behind my back. People who form circles that no outsiders can enter. Who like to watch others squirm while rumors are passed ear to ear.
Her mouth hangs open for a second, and then her eyebrows dip back down. “I thought you were my friend,” she says, her voice thin as paper, tearing slowly along a crease. Like she might sink into a crack and disappear. Just like the honey.
But I refuse to feel bad for her. “We were never friends before this,” I point out, my voice bitter and quick. I don’t belong in her world, among her circle of friends. I am lost in that gray in-between. Not quite normal enough to have friends, not quite powerful enough to summon real magic like the Walkers before me. “You’ve never talked to me at school, you’ve never even smiled at me in the hall.” The words are tumbling out. “I’m just a convenience for you. Because I’m all you have right now—because you have nowhere else to go. You’re just using me.” The words have left my mouth before I can even regret them. Before I can feel their full weight slam down inside my skull.
Suzy’s round lips snap shut.
And the anger I felt dissolves on my tongue just as quickly, turns to nothing. And I’m left feeling empty—as hollow as an acorn husk.
Suzy crosses the room to the couch without even looking at me, grabs her bag from the floor, and walks to the front door. As she passes, the air has the hint of stale rose perfume—the last of whatever she dabbed onto her skin days ago. She pauses and flicks her gaze back to me. And for a moment I think I should say something, a string of words to undo what’s been said—a balm for the wounds I’ve just caused. But she speaks before I can. “I always thought everyone was mean to you at school for no reason. I defended you to Rhett and the others, I told them you were nice and that all the rumors weren’t true.” She pulls her jaw back into place. “But maybe I was wrong.”
She yanks open the door and ducks out into the snow, slamming it shut behind her before I can say anything else.
Gone.
* * *
The honey sinks and settles.
I pick up the shards of glass one by one and toss them into the trash. Feeling just as broken. Just as worthless as honey smeared onto the floor.
Upstairs, the loft is empty—no sign of Oliver—just like Suzy said. And I sit on the edge of the bed.
The house feels oddly vacant now, only echoes and exhales and settling floorboards. I’m all alone. And the guilt folds over me like an old blanket—torn fibers and threads unraveling and stinking of mothballs. I never should have said those things to Suzy. Even if I don’t believe her, even if she knows what happened that night but isn’t saying, I never meant to be so mean.
I pull out the pocket watch and hold it in my hand, running my thumb over the engraving of Max’s name. The broken chain falls between my fingers—a clue I don’t understand. There is no blood on the watch. No tiny spots of red scattered across the glass. And there was no blood on Oliver when I found him in the woods. Blood can be wiped off, I think. But not easily. Not when you’re lost in the forest, freezing to death.
Something else happened. I just can’t see it. Can’t make the pieces fit.
A moth follows you, Mr. Perkins said when I left his house, the bone moth fluttering up into the trees. Always close.
Death is coming for me.
But I don’t want to end up like Max. A corpse—lies buzzing around like flies.
I pick up the spellbook from the bedside table and set it in my lap, flipping through the pages. I don’t know what I’m looking for: an explanation, a remedy, a way to make the bone moth stop following me. To destroy it, maybe. To keep death at bay.
I read the stories of my ancestors, the strange accounts of years past: the autumn a palomino horse went missing inside the Wicker Woods, and Dodie Walker found it using a water-witching stick. She rode the horse out of the woods bareback, and locals said her eyes had turned the same mustard brown as the horse’s. The summer a plague of prairie locusts descended over Jackjaw Lake, covering porch lights and spilling down chimneys. It wasn’t until Colette Walker caught one of the locusts inside a glass jar and muttered a tiny spell into its ear that the air finally cleared and the prairie locusts left the mountains.
Near the bottom of the page there is a notation about the best way to lure an insect into the loft:
Open window after sunrise.
Burn a blue-lavender candle to its nub, to lure insect.
Catch insect in a glass jar and whisper desired spell into its ear.
*spell not advisable for those who fear creatures of a winged or creepy-crawly sort
The spell seems simple enough. No blood or sacrifice or special pagan holiday needed to perform it. And if I can catch the moth, maybe I can compel it to go away. To leave me alone and take death with it.
I have to try.
I find one of my mother’s empty honey jars in the kitchen and bring it upstairs. I dig out a lavender candle from my dresser drawer, the one that’s nearly burnt down to the base, and I light it, placing it on the floor.
When I open the window in the loft, snow drifts into the room. Little dancing flakes that slide across the sill, in no particular hurry.
I look for any signs of Oliver or Suzy out among the trees. But nothing stirs—the forest is silent and humanless.
I’m truly alone. Last night, two people slept in my house, swelling lungs and tired eyelids. But now a well of sadness rises up inside me, salty tears wanting to stream down pale cheeks—but I don’t let them. I’m a Walker. We’re used to being on our own. Surviving. Calloused hands and sharp eyes and sturdy hearts.
And I don’t want Suzy or Oliver to return—not really. I fear what Oliver may have done, and I fear what Suzy might’ve seen. I’m safer without them. Locked doors are better than friends you can’t trust.
Still, the quiet of the house is a burden inside my chest.
I walk back across the floor and sit beside the flickering candle. I hold the glass jar in my hand, and I wait for the moth to flutter through the open window, to be beckoned by the light. But it never comes and the room grows cold.
The daylight fades to evening.
The shadows turn to full darkness.
And I lay my head on the hardwood floor.
Fin stretches out beside me. His paws touching my shoulder, his breathing quick in his lungs. And again my eyes want to sting with tears.
I know the bone moth will never come into the loft.
I know it won’t be so easily fooled by a lavender candle on a bedroom floor. A bone moth is not the same as catching a locust or a bee or a buckthorn firefly.
And even if I had caught it, I’m certain I wouldn’t have been able to whisper a spell powerful enough to compel it to leave me alone. A spell to banish it from these woods. And what good is a Walker who can’t even charm an insect? A witch who doesn’t know the simplest of spells? Whose grandmother died before she could teach me how to summon the moonlight inside me, whose mother would prefer I never utter a spell within the walls of this house again.
I’m a Walker who is barely a witch at all.
I thought I wanted to be alone, that I was brave and strong and didn’t need a single thing from anyone. But now I’m not so sure. Now my heart crumbles inside the cave of my chest, and I wish I was the size
of a gnat, so small I could fold myself into a crack in the floor and disappear. Tiny and forgettable.
I let the candle burn down to nothing, wax dripping onto the wood floor beside my feet until the flame fizzes and blinks out. I let the glass jar roll away from my fingertips and thud against the bedpost. I draw my knees to my chest and curl my toes under the rug. But I leave the window open—I want to feel the cold—and I listen to the wind bite against the eaves of the house.
A soft pain forms inside my ribs, a hurt that won’t go away. Empty and hollow, like my gooey insides have been carved out with a blade. Jack-o’-lantern slop.
Eventually my eyelids sink closed and I drift into an awful sort of sleep.
My dreams are strange and green, and I feel myself being pulled under by moss and golden leaves. Rich, dark soil blots out my vision, it clots my ears and mouth, it suffocates, it buries me alive. I can taste the earth, the cold frozen ground caving in on top of me.
But then there is music, metallic and thin and far away, vibrating through the soil of my dreams. I wake, choking and grabbing at my face as if to pull the roots away, to claw my way back aboveground. But I’m still on the floor of the loft. Not buried—not dead.
The night sky fills my room, the sun long set. How long have I been asleep?
Snow blows in through the open window, along with something else.
A noise from somewhere outside, in the trees, in the snowy dark.
The music was not in my dreams.
It was real.
Spellbook of Moonlight & Forest Medicine
EMELINE WALKER was born a month late under a ghost moon—instead of the dwarf clover moon, as was intended. Her eyes were alabaster white, and when she opened her mouth to cry, only air slipped out.
She was a quiet child, who spoke to herself and played cat’s cradle alone in her room and dug her toes into the mud to feel the worms wriggling beneath.
But at seventeen, during an unusually windy autumn when wild dandelion fluff blew over the lake like tiny parasols, Emeline went into the Wicker Woods and lost her mind.
