And the Trees Crept In

by Dawn Kurtagich

Silence rings loudly. Clarity. Air. Truth. Truthtruthtruthtruthtruth: something true at last.

  “I was alone,” I whisper now. “I didn’t know what was real. I didn’t know if I was…” Crazy. “And then there you both were… so young. Nori looks so like Pamela, those little golden-red curls.” My voice hardens. “I couldn’t let her go.” A pause. “Besides. Once you came through, there was never any leaving.”

  “So. What? We’re trapped here?” the girl spits, a speck of saliva landing on my lip. Water from fire buried under stone. “With you?”

  At least with my father, the danger was out in the open. I knew what to expect. But Auntie Cath is a different kind of dark altogether.

  The worst kind.

  The kind made from love.

  3

  he’s already here

  The Creeper Man is watching you

  while you think you rest

  he sows discord between the two

  who love each other best.

  The boy is there when I hang the laundry, leaning against the garden fence with his arms crossed.

  “You were right,” he says. “It’s a ghost town.”

  “There is no town. Not anymore. You didn’t believe me?”

  He shakes his head slowly. A piece of dark hair falls into darker eyes. “It seemed… impossible. It’s crazy. What happened?”

  I wipe the dust from my hands, though I’ll never be clean. “Everybody left?”

  “Yeah, but why?”

  “The land died. Everything’s gone. This is a poor place.” My voice fades away. “Nothing like London.” I blink. “No one comes here. Not ever. Why would you go to the saddest place on earth?”

  “And they say the countryside is so rich in resources,” Gowan says. There’s a smile in his voice. “I can help with the garden. I’m good with earth.”

  “Threat of war makes everything die.” I don’t mention the ashes in the garden.

  “There’s no war. Not even out there, yet. Just a bunch of people scared and ignorant.” I feel as though he is lying to me. “Why don’t you come and see me. I have apples and pears and radishes. Come and see.”

  He offers me his hand, which is so clean it hurts, but the woods loom behind him, and I feel like he’s laughing at me.

  “I can’t,” I say, and turn back to my digging.

  “Please.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this place looks fed up.” His eyes scatter over La Baume behind me like marbles. “It’s not how I remember it.”

  I stop again, and throw down my tiny spade. “Who are you?”

  He grins, and then settles next to me, heedless of the gray that filters into his trousers, his fingers, his skin. I almost want to pull his hand out of the soil, but I stop myself.

  It’s infecting you.

  “Gowan,” he says unhelpfully. Then he gestures to the manor. “Are you here alone?” In this light, the blood-paint looks like a fresh scab.

  Maybe he’s a robber or a rapist. “My aunt is here. She”—is crazy—“takes care of us.”

  “And school?”

  I shrug. “Done with all of that, I guess. Like everyone is. We have a gun, you know. So you better not try anything,” I add.

  He laughs at me. It’s like a jingle from a TV commercial.

  “What?”

  He shrugs, but the gesture is awkward on him and I know he is copying me. “There’s a library in there. In the manor. I remember it. You can keep teaching yourself. Don’t need school for that.”

  I’m surprised that he knows about the library, but then I remember he used to live here. I guess he was telling the truth.

  “You were one of Cath’s orphans.” I state it. It’s the truth.

  He nods, but makes no further comment. My gaze slides away.

  “You’re preoccupied,” he says.

  “You don’t know me well enough to think that.”

  “Sure I do. You’re distracted. Your eyes keep jumping from the ground to the trees, to the sky… and you’ve been digging a hole in the same spot since before I sat down.”

  I can’t stop the slow smile. I feel it cracking my granite. He is the first person I’ve had a normal conversation with in three years, two months, and sixteen days.

  “So? What is it?”

  “I just wish I had news. From my family in London. From my old friends. I’m beginning to feel completely cut off from everything and everyone I used to know. I keep waiting, even though it’s been months since anyone wrote to us. And the postman used to come at least once a week, but he came less and less until one day he just stopped. They closed the post office, I guess. He left, with everyone else. It’s weird not having him come by every few days. It’s weird not having the corner shop in the village open every night, all night, or having the sounds of people at all hours like back in London.” I look at Gowan. “First-world problems,” I add casually.

  “Those are pretty big problems,” Gowan says. “Are you lonely?”

  “A TV would be nice.”

  “No TV?”

  I shrug. “Cath isn’t big on technology. No TV, no phone, no computer. The radio barely works and is this giant piece of furniture all on its own.”

  He smiles fondly, gaze turning inward. “I remember.”

  I sigh and rub at my arms. “Is there even a world out there anymore? Have we blown ourselves to bits yet?”

  “There’s a world. Just beyond the trees. Not half a day’s walk. And it’s beautiful, full of beautiful things, even if they’re scary.”

  Bullshit. I don’t say it. I wish I hadn’t said anything.

  Instead, I say, “I don’t remember there being so many trees when we first came here. Nori was only four. They’re assholes.”

  “They’re just trees.”

  I look up, not at him, but beyond him, at the trees. I know they’re watching us, laughing at my distress.

  I clench my jaw. “There are so many… they go on forever.”

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not!” I retort. “But there’s so much work to be done. I have to look after”—Cath—“Nori.”

  I gather up my spade and garden fork, shaking loose the fine gray sand. “Go away.”

  I get up, turning my back on him, and head toward the manor, the scorching-red manor, and I hear his retreating footsteps. I turn, want to say I’m sorry, please stay but instead I watch him leave. Alarm bells ring inside me: DANGER. DANGER. Can’t he see the dark, the curse, in those trees? Can’t he feel the wrongness when he crosses into those shadows?

  He’s already here.

  I don’t think Nori was talking about Gowan.

  I’m digging in the garden, looking for potatoes or turnips or carrots or worms, when I find another root. It can’t be the same root… but this is the same spot I found the other one. Only this one is three times bigger. And I pulled the other root out completely.

  No. “This is not happening. It’s impossible.”

  I look up

  and scream.

  The woods are closer. They are definitely closer. Every time I look away and then back, they seem to have moved, the trunks looming ever taller. I keep wiping my hands on my dress—get it off me, get it off—when I feel it.

  Another root.

  Sticking out of the dirt like another broken finger. Pointing, accusing. I know, it seems to say. I know, Silla Daniels.

  The woods are coming. He’s here. I shake my head. No. No, this is not happening. Stop it. Stop it now. But I know that this land is cursed more than I know that Cath is mad. It has to be cursed. What else is there? I have felt it for a while now. First the town left, then (crazy) Aunt Cath went mad, and now the woods are closer and the garden is dying…

  And I am not crazy.

  I’m not like Cath.

  I get to my feet, never taking my eyes off the trees for paranoid fear that they will be closer once again if I look away even for a moment. I step backward, toward the house, my feet finding their way
, and when I’m through the doorway, I slam it shut and pray that the woods will not be right outside when I open it again tomorrow.

  I hate the mirrors in this place. As if it isn’t big or creepy enough already, the largest mirror just makes the corridors longer, repeating ever onward to infinity. It’s warped in its age, and doesn’t reflect the truth. The edges are all blacked out and mottled like an old crone’s hand. The head on my first reflection is distorted: too narrow, eyes too dark. The next, her head is normal, but her neck is too long and thin. Each one not quite me. I am looking at hundreds of little almost-me’s, decreasing in size down an endless corridor until I can’t see the last at all. There is no last.

  I lift a hand and wave at the me’s. They wave back, and when I laugh, they all sneer.

  As I turn away, something about the reflection strikes me as not right, in a way I can’t put into words. Is the reflection out of time with me? Is it too dark at the very back there? The very last tiny me, waving? I rub my eyes and turn away, but then jolt at the idea that I’ve turned my back on hundreds of little versions of myself, all watching me. I glance back and they all do, too. But they are wrong. Somehow.

  “Stupid,” I tell myself, and walk farther away.

  I’m trying, even now, after three long years, to get a handle on this manor. There are still rooms I haven’t explored, and the idea of not knowing every inch of this place is suddenly very wrong. I need to know La Baume inside and out.

  Besides. We’re now running dangerously low on food, and I need to try again to get Cath to tell me if she has any hidden supplies. And she’s not about to tell me.

  And I’m not about to go up there and see her.

  A creak behind me startles my thoughts away. I turn to look back down the hall, but see nothing. Not even the little me’s are big enough to make an appearance in the mirrors now.

  But something is wrong.

  “Nori, if you’re spying, then stop it.”

  I wait for her to jump out, but there is nothing. Only a stillness that is too still.

  I need to be firm with myself, so I turn away.

  An old manor, at night. Who wouldn’t get the creeps?

  Except I hear the creak again. Barely there. Like a shifting of weight on the floorboards.

  “Cath?” I call.

  The stillness becomes deeper.

  And then I hear Cath upstairs, pacing above me.

  Creeeeeeaaaaak. Creeeeaaaaaaak. Crrreeeeeeaaaaak.

  And I know that whatever is at the end of the hall is not Cath.

  So I run.

  I don’t think about anything except the movement of my legs, and where I’m headed: the library.

  I rush in and shut the door firmly behind me, ignoring the mocking voice inside telling me I’m a child for being so afraid of what is probably nothing. Probably.

  The library is a monolith. Central to La Baume in the way the heart is to a human body. It’s a semicircular room, three floors high—a cylinder cut right through the middle of the manor. Standing in the center, you can look right up through each floor and the skylight to see the sky. It’s a sanctuary, but even here, the oppression of the house is all around, trying to press in.

  I’m determined to keep the door to this room locked at all times.

  And I have no reason to think this, but I know this room is still uninfected.

  I don’t even really know what I mean. Only… that La Baume is somehow sick. Like it caught a nasty bug, and the library is the last defense of its immune system.

  I came here looking for… the past. Some feeling of how things used to be. When Cath, Nori, and I would sit here for hours, reading or talking or playing. When Cath stroked my hair and told me everything would be all right, when she cuddled Nori close, like she was her own daughter. If I could catch even a breath of that, I would feel okay.

  I wander up and down the rows of books, some of which sit neatly in the bookcases, others stacked in haphazard, leaning towers. While I walk, I sing: “Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, I think I’ll go eat worms…”

  I touch the books as I pass, reading the spines.

  “Big ones, little ones, fat ones, juicy ones, itsy-bitsy, fuzzy wuzzy worms…”

  Some of the titles are the most peculiar things I have ever seen. I’m not sure if they unnerve or delight me.

  “Bite their heads off, mmm, they’re juicy, throw the tails away…”

  I pick up one and stare at the spine; the title is half-erased by the passage of long years. Bulgarian Thimbles: A History.

  “Nobody knows how big I’ll grow eating worms three times a day.”

  I decide to make a mental note of my favorites.

  A Gentleman’s Guide to Coffin-Making

  An Argument Against Tea Cozies (eight hundred pages)

  Bulgarian Thimbles: A History

  A Typology of Bed Fleas

  Weaving with Dog Hair

  A Practical Guide to Embalming

  Despite myself, I grin. But I’m looking for something specific. I touch many of the tomes, hoping that somehow I will know which one to open. Which to explore. There has to be an answer in here. A history of La Baume, maybe. Or of the town. Something that will suggest what could be happening in this manor.

  If nothing else, this is a distraction from the roots in the earth and the trees creeping toward us.

  A distraction from the fact that I am almost convinced I’m being haunted. From the fact that Cath is mad, in the attic, pacing up and down, that the garden is dying, that we’re running out of food, and that something is terribly, terribly wrong here.

  Circling the loom, Silla darling. You’re circling the loom.

  4

  too stupid to see

  Mash it up and add some spice

  put it in, keep it down

  rumbling is a childish vice

  hunger is the dark’s device.

  BROKEN BOOK ENTRY

  These are my dreams. Someone will walk from the trees, and the sky will be bleak above him. And then he smiles, waves. He is gray-faced. He begins to jog across the green toward me, smiling, and my heart swells into the universe, which cracks open, revealing an infinity. It’s almost like a memory, but of course it is just the night visions. Nightmares. There are too many of them these days. I have them almost every night. Most people have nightmares about their past, but not me. I have them about my present. He reaches me. He takes hold of me and pulls me closer. His head on my shoulder. He wants me. He pulls back to look at me but his face is gone. In its place an eyeless thing watches; I scream…

  And I wake.

  Light flickers and flashes through the skyline of the library. The trees are dancing in the storm out there. They creeeeeeak and moan through the night. Or is that Cath pace-pace-pacing in the attic? Nori was asleep in her bed when it got bad, so I left her there, but now I regret it.

  It’s just so… quiet… in the library. So still. There is no thunder. I’ve riffled through so many books that my eyes are itching from the dust. There are no answers here.

  hopeless.

  Such a pretty word.

  The floorboards complain in the hallway beyond the door and I freeze, waiting. Too heavy for Nori. Cath wouldn’t leave the attic, surely?

  “Silla?”

  “Gowan?”

  “Yeah, it’s me. Open up, would you? It’s bloody freezing out here.”

  I crack the door open a little and see his face pressed to the gap. “Let me in,” he says, his breath fogging.

  I step back, more out of surprise than anything else, and a waft of freezing air follows him. I slam the door shut and lock it compulsively.

  “What are you doing here?” I whisper. “It’s the middle of the night!”

  He heads for the fireplace and sits down on the sheepskin rug, shivering. “It’s freezing in this house. I forgot that.”

  “Gowan!”

  “What?”

  “What are you doing here? How did you even get inside?”


  “I fancied a visit,” he says. “I used to live here, you know. It’s kind of a memory. I could still get into this house if you locked every door.”

  “Yeah, but in the middle of the night?” Part of me wants to call him stupid, idiotic, pathetic—pervert. I swallow my anger, unsure where it is coming from, and allow myself to feel the relief that is flooding through me. Someone is here. I’m not alone.

  He shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep.”

  “Wait—did you walk through Python in the middle of the night?”

  “I know the way.”

  You are insane. My urge to yell at him becomes an urge to push him, hit him, bite—stop it. Again, I force away my anger. Stop this. Relief rises again.

  He laughs at me, as though he can hear what I’m thinking.

  “Do I get a hug?”

  I step back. “Excuse me?”

  He grins. “For warmth purposes only.”

  “Uh-huh.” I go to the sofa and throw my blanket at him, a little too hard maybe.

  He catches it deftly, grinning. “Thanks.” Wrapped around him, it looks much more pleasant. He’s so… tall. I blink and look away.

  “What are you reading?” he asks, coming over, a bulk of fleecy white.

  I shake my head, dropping the old text on the sofa by the door. “Nothing in particular.”

  “I used to come here every night,” he tells me. “I’d sit for hours, reading. Sometimes just looking. Half of the books are in French, but they are beautiful and I could get lost in the look of the words. Tiny, endless words filling pages upon pages. I used to tell myself I’d fill a whole giant book with words one day, in gothic letters, pressed tightly together. Didn’t really mind what they said. Just seeing the text building up, like a collection, was enough.”

  “Mm. Fascinating,” I drawl. But in fact, I am intrigued. By him, by his voice. There’s something so warm and appealing about him. But anger rises again, unbidden.

  “This is ridiculous,” I mutter.

  He ignores my comment. “I brought you an apple.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls free an apple that is mostly green, but with a blush of red on the side. I take it.