The Ghostfaces

by John A. Flanagan

  But as they entered the trees, the bickering died away and both boys became instantly more wary. The forest was an unfamiliar and strangely disturbing place. The trees were tall and grew thickly together, creating blind spots and deeply shadowed areas where anything could be lurking. When they were building the barricade, the crew had collected most of the deadfalls and kindling that lay close to the campsite, so now the twins had to go farther afield in search of suitable firewood. The trees seemed to close in behind them, masking the cheerful, familiar sound of waves breaking on the beach. Without realizing it, they began to talk in lowered tones, afraid of disturbing the stillness of the forest.

  Ulf spied a good pile of deadfall underneath one of the older trees. They were branches that had dried and fallen off in the wind—or under the influence of their own weight. He stepped quickly forward and laid the firewood carrier out on the forest floor.

  “Keep an eye out for bears,” he said. He reached toward the pile of dead branches and grabbed a large bunch in both hands. As he went to pull them free, he heard a violent buzzing, rattling sound from the wood and he sprang back.

  “What was that?” Wulf demanded. He’d turned in time to see his brother leap back from the pile of wood.

  “The wood rattled at me,” Ulf told him, his voice unsteady.

  “Don’t be an idiot. How can wood rattle at you?”

  Ulf pointed at the tangled pile of dead branches and gestured an invitation. “See for yourself,” he said. “Try to pick it up.”

  But Wulf had heard the rattling buzz and it had a decidedly threatening sound to it. He wasn’t putting his hand anywhere near it. Stopping a few meters away, he thrust the bear spear forward, pushing it in between the branches and twisting it so that the transverse spike caught in a Y-shaped fork.

  The rattle sounded again—louder and more insistent this time. Wulf drew back the pole, dragging the forked limb with it and disturbing several of the other branches at the same time.

  The rattle increased in pitch and volume, and he distinctly felt two sharp impacts against the end of the spear. Twisting it free of the branches, he withdrew it rapidly and they both stepped back.

  The rattling stopped.

  Wulf brought the sharp end of the spear closer and held it up for inspection. There was a small stain of viscous liquid on the end, just before the burnt, hardened point.

  Ulf crouched, shading his eyes from the sunlight filtering through the trees, and peered under the pile of branches. There was something there, he saw. Something mottled and brown, that blended into the colors of the bark and leaf mold. As he peered more intently, it took shape.

  It was a snake, lying coiled up, with its head and tail both rising out of the ends of its thick body. As he watched, the tail vibrated, and a low, warning buzz sounded. The tail seemed to be constructed of a series of hard rings, and as the snake moved its tail rapidly from side to side, these rattled together. He edged toward it a pace. The vibration increased in speed and the rattle went up in volume and pitch. He stepped back and the sound subsided.

  “It’s a snake,” he said. “It has some kind of rattling thing on its tail.”

  “I thought so,” Wulf said loftily. He never liked to look as if he was hearing anything he didn’t know.

  Ulf looked at him and shook his head.

  “I suppose it’s venomous,” Wulf continued.

  His brother jerked a thumb at the liquid staining the end of the spear tip. “Unless that’s wild honey, I’d say it is,” he said sarcastically.

  Wulf dropped the lofty, knowing tone and studied the spear tip once more, taking care not to touch the thick liquid. “What should we do?” he asked.

  Ulf had a ready answer. “Leave it alone. It only rattles when we come near it. It’s warning us off. If we leave it alone, it’ll stay where it is.”

  “What makes you so sure?” Wulf asked.

  Ulf gave him a long-suffering look. “Well, it’s stayed put so far, while we’ve been disturbing it. Stands to reason that if we simply walk away, it’s not going to come after us.”

  “Maybe we should kill it,” Wulf said uncertainly.

  His brother gave him another pitying look. “What with?”

  Wulf looked down at the bear spear, but before he could speak, Ulf forestalled him.

  “You’ll never get at it with that sharpened stick,” he pointed out. “There are too many branches in the way. If you go poking around in there with that, it’s possible it’ll come darting out and attack us.”

  “We could kill it with our saxes,” Wulf suggested, dropping his hand to the hilt of his saxe knife. “We could lop its head off.” The idea appealed to him. He’d teach that snake to go rattling at him, he thought. But again his brother offered a scornful suggestion.

  “You can try it if you like. But I wouldn’t go pushing my hand through that tangle of deadfall, saxe or no saxe. That’s getting altogether too close to it.”

  “So what do you suggest we do?” asked Wulf, with the tone of someone who has presented a series of good ideas only to have them disregarded by someone with none.

  “I told you. We should simply walk away and leave it alone. Listen,” Ulf said, pointing to the tangle of dried wood. “Since we’ve been talking, and not poking around where the creature lives, it’s stopped its rattling.”

  “All the same, it tried to bite me,” Wulf protested.

  “It tried to bite your stick,” Ulf told him. “And if you went poking around me with it, I’d likely do the same thing.”

  Wulf regarded him with interest. “You’d bite a stick if I poked you with it?” he asked. He seemed to be contemplating the idea.

  Ulf met his gaze for several seconds without speaking. “No. If you tried to poke me with a stick,” he said, “I’d bite you.”

  There was something in his voice that told Wulf he was serious. He discarded the idea of poking him with the bear spear. “So what should we do about it?” he repeated.

  Ulf sighed. Sometimes it was like talking to an infant, he thought. “We walk away. We ignore it and it will ignore us. We haven’t heard a peep out of it since we’ve left it alone.”

  “It doesn’t peep. It rattles. Or buzzes,” Wulf said, remembering how high-pitched and urgent the rattle had become as he shoved the stick farther into the bushes. Then he added thoughtfully, “Of course, it may be trying to lull us into a false sense of security. I’ve heard snakes do that. It may be waiting for us to walk away, and when we do, it might come chasing out after us. And I’ve heard snakes can move very quickly when they want to.”

  “So?” Ulf challenged.

  “So what do we do if it chases us?”

  “I don’t know what you’ll do. But I’m going to run away.”

  “Can you run faster than a snake? I’ve heard they’re very fast,” Wulf repeated.

  “I don’t need to run faster than the snake,” Ulf said, in tones of sweet reason. “I just need to run faster than you.”

  There was silence for a moment. Then Wulf asked: “And what will you tell our mam? Will you tell her you ran off and left me to be bitten by a rattling snake?”

  “No. I’d tell her that I ran away and you bravely threw yourself on the snake to save me. I’d tell her you died a hero, and we’d both shed a tear for you.”

  Of course, they both knew that neither of them would ever desert the other in the face of danger. And they knew that either of them would willingly give his life for the other. But neither mentioned the fact.

  chapter fifteen

  In another part of the forest, Lydia had found the trail of a small group of deer.

  Their tracks wound through the close-growing trees, and from time to time, one or another of the animals left a small tuft of fur on the sharp edges of twigs. They also broke small branches as they pushed through, leaving them bent back and oozing sap.
/>   That fact alone was enough to tell Lydia that the tracks were fresh.

  “Three of them,” she said in an undertone. “Two females and a fawn.”

  “How can you tell?” Thorn answered, also speaking in a lowered voice. It wasn’t that either of them was overawed by the dimness and brooding silence of the forest, as the twins had been. Lydia had spent half her life tracking animals through the dimness beneath trees and felt thoroughly at home here. As for Thorn, he wasn’t the impressionable type. He didn’t react to atmosphere. He looked for facts and hard evidence—which was why he asked the question of Lydia.

  She knelt and pointed to two hoofprints in the leaf mold. They were so close, they almost overlapped.

  “These were made by two different animals,” she said. He inclined his head, about to ask a question, when she elaborated. “See, they’re only two centimeters apart. They couldn’t have been made by one deer. It had to be two, with one following the other closely.”

  He nodded, understanding. It was simple when someone explained it, he thought. Then he realized that most things in life were.

  “You can see that one print is slightly bigger and deeper,” she continued.

  Thorn bent closer and peered intently at the two prints. In fact, he couldn’t see that at all. But he grunted as if he could.

  Lydia glanced at him. “Can’t you see that?” she asked incredulously. To her, the two prints were so obviously different that she couldn’t understand how anyone could miss the fact.

  “Well, maybe a bit,” Thorn prevaricated.

  She shook her head. “So, which is the bigger?”

  He put out a hand to the two prints, let it hover over them and then touched the front print. “That one,” he said, trying to keep a questioning note out of his voice.

  Lydia sighed and said nothing.

  “Is that right?” he asked, knowing from her reaction that it wasn’t.

  “You have to ask?”

  He shrugged. Then he froze, his hand outstretched to the two small impressions in the leaf mold. Out of his peripheral vision, he had seen a faint, almost imperceptible movement in the trees to their left as a shadow flitted from one patch of cover to the next. With a superhuman effort, he refrained from turning his head to look at the spot where he’d seen it.

  “So how do you know about the fawn? Don’t look. But I just saw someone following us,” he added, in the same conversational tone.

  Lydia stiffened slightly. For a moment, she said nothing, gathering her wits, then replied, “Deer tend to snag their chests and shoulders on twigs and branches as they pass through—those are the widest parts of them, after all. And some of the tufts of hair on the trees here are a good bit lower than the others—barely at thigh height. So one is considerably smaller than the others. Which direction?”

  There was no real need to continue their conversation about the deer. The chances were that if anyone was watching them, he or she wouldn’t be able to understand them. But it helped maintain the matter-of-fact tone of their voices.

  “Off to the left, about fifteen meters and a little behind us,” Thorn said, reaching down to trace one of the footprints with his forefinger as he spoke. Lydia did the same, as if showing him a salient feature of the print.

  “Just saw it move again,” she said quietly. “Whatever it is.”

  Their pantomime of studying the tracks seemed to have lulled their watcher into a false sense of security, she thought.

  Thorn straightened his back and rose to his feet, groaning slightly as he did and rubbing both hands into the small of his back. “You don’t think it’s a person?” he asked.

  She rose lithely from her crouching position. She didn’t groan or rub her back, Thorn noted ruefully. She pointed through the trees, in the direction in which the three deer were traveling.

  “Don’t know. I didn’t get a clear enough look,” she replied.

  Thorn twisted his mouth, gnawing at the end of his mustache. He hadn’t got a clear look either. But his instincts told him it was a human movement, not an animal. An animal wouldn’t have moved, after all. Animals were smart.

  “I think it’s a person,” he said.

  Lydia started off through the trees once more, following the deer. “What should we do?”

  He considered the question for a second or two. “Nothing,” he said. “We keep doing what we’re doing. So far they haven’t bothered us.”

  “He said, just before a spear came whistling out of the shadows,” she said sarcastically and he shrugged his shoulders.

  “If they wanted to attack us, they’ve had plenty of opportunity,” he pointed out. Lydia accepted the fact, but it didn’t stop her nerves from tingling and she ached to turn around for a good look at the trees behind them and to their left.

  The opportunity to do so came a few minutes later. She sighted sunlight through the trees, indicating that a clearing was up ahead. And a clearing could mean that the deer would stop to graze. She tested the wind. It was in a perfect position for them, dead ahead, blowing their scent away from the deer. She turned back to Thorn.

  “There’s a clearing up ahead,” she said. “Go slowly.”

  As she turned and spoke, she was just in time to see a shadowy form slip back into the shelter of a clump of man-high undergrowth. That was definitely a person, she thought. An animal wouldn’t have the instinct to move into cover. It would either freeze in place or turn and flee.

  “All right,” she said. “I saw him that time. He’s about twenty meters away and hiding in the bushes. What do we do?”

  Thorn considered the question for a moment, then decided. “We keep doing what we’re doing,” he said. “First item of business is to get one of those deer.”

  “If you say so. Odds are they’ll have stopped in that clearing, so tread quietly.”

  Lydia, with years of practice, made virtually no sound as she slipped between the trees. Thorn made a few slight sounds, but for a big, bulky man, he was surprisingly light on his feet. She had noticed this on previous occasions with him, but it never failed to impress her how quietly he could move.

  She drew a dart from her quiver and fitted it to the atlatl handle. Remembering the previous day’s hunt, she raised it and drew it back, ready to throw. That way, if the deer were in the clearing, she wouldn’t have to make any preliminary movement that might unsettle them.

  With her left hand, she gestured for Thorn to stop. She continued to the edge of the clear space among the trees.

  The deer were there, grazing on the far side of the clearing, about fifteen meters from where she stood in the shadows. Two does, she saw, the younger and smaller one with the fawn beside her, butting its head up into her body to nurse. The other was older and heavier, and she was busily cropping the long grass. Something alerted her and her head came up, ears twitching, nostrils sniffing the air, testing it for an alien presence.

  In a second, they’d be off, Lydia knew. There was no time to waste. Targeting the older of the two adults, she drew back the final few centimeters and cast. The dart flashed across the clearing as the now-alert deer tensed to turn and run. It sliced into her left side, behind the shoulder, and took her cleanly in the heart. The tensed legs and muscles collapsed and the doe fell without a sound onto the grass.

  The other doe and the fawn didn’t hesitate. They bounded into the trees and Lydia heard them crashing through the undergrowth as they made their escape.

  “Got one,” she called softly.

  Thorn came level with her, taking in the fallen brown body across the clearing. He drew his saxe, stepping into the clearing.

  “I’ve got an idea,” he said as he moved toward the dead deer and dropped to his knees beside it. “We’ll field dress it and leave a joint hanging in the tree as a gift to our silent watcher. That way, he’ll know we’re friendly.”

  “That�
�s good thinking,” Lydia said. But she put a hand out to prevent him starting to work on the carcass. “That saxe is too big for the job,” she said, drawing her razor-sharp skinning knife. “I’ll skin it and gut it and you can hack off one of the rear legs with your saxe.”

  She went to work and he watched her deft movements as she separated the deer from its skin, then opened the body cavity and carefully removed the stomach and entrails, making sure not to puncture the thin walls of the intestines or gall bladder with her knife.

  She made a neat pile of the guts, laying them on the recently removed skin of the deer. Then she gestured to the naked, glistening carcass as she wiped the blood off her hands on the thick grass. Already flies were buzzing around the entrails she had piled to one side.

  “Take off a leg,” she said.

  Thorn drew his saxe—he had re-sheathed it when she went to work with her skinning knife. He took hold of the deer’s left hind leg with his right-hand gripping hook and lifted it up, exposing the hip joint.

  In just two powerful, accurate strokes, he severed the leg. He held it up, looking admiringly at it.

  “Plenty of meat there,” he said. “I hope our hidden friend appreciates it.”

  He brandished the joint toward the direction where they had last seen their secret observer.

  “This is for you,” he called in a raised voice. He smiled at the wall of green shadows. Then he turned to wedge the leg into the fork of a tree some two meters from the ground.

  Which was when they heard the low, rumbling growl.

  It came ninety degrees away from the direction Thorn was facing. He froze, still holding the leg aloft, and they both turned to see a massive brown shape force its way through the trees into the clearing, snapping several saplings like twigs as it came.

  “Orlog’s teeth!” he said softly. “It’s huge.”

  Even on all fours, the bear was immense. It stood at least a meter and a half high at the shoulder.

  Then it reared onto its hind legs and towered above them, although still twenty meters away. The left forepaw hung uselessly beside it, but the right one was pawing angrily at the air, the curved claws slashing like black scimitars. The fur was thick and brown and matted, with half a dozen old scars and bare patches, evidence of combats fought long ago. The teeth, when it bared them to snarl once more, were huge and yellow. It must have been three and a half meters tall, Thorn thought, and for several seconds he stood frozen, his blood like ice water in his veins.