“Well, I’ve brought food. So take some. Please, Silla. You’re wasting away.”
I reach for an apple. Poison. Dirt. Disgusting. Toxic. Snow White. Sleeping Beauty. Sleep. Die. Don’t. No.
I lift it to my lips. Open them. I shiver as I bite down, the sound a crack and a creak as I chew.
Chew. Chew. Chew.
Swallow.
Swallow.
Silla, my brain commands. Swallow.
I can’t.
I swallow. It scrapes its way down my esophagus like paper, no pleasure at all, and lands like lead in my stomach. It is a stone in the cavity, and I want to get it out.
“It’s wonderful,” I lie. “Thank you.”
He looks so proud of me. For this one, stupid thing. But then that look fades as he watches me get up and put the rest of it down on a plate to save for Nori later.
“Will you come and visit me?”
“Not that again.”
“Please, Silla.” And he takes my hand.
His flesh on mine.
Someone touching me.
No one has touched me, except Nori, in months. Maybe years.
I’m so distracted by it that I just stare at our hands, missing half of what Gowan is saying.
“… and you might be right. It might be too late. But gardens can lie barren for years and recover. Humans can’t. You and Nori and Cath have to leave. It’s not healthy here. It’s…” He looks around. “Not what I remember.”
And I suddenly wonder what he does remember. How does he see La Baume? Is it very different from what it was then? In what ways? So many curiosities, but that’s the trick, isn’t it? That’s how it happens. An investment. An intrigue. And then a trap. Friendship is a trap. Family is a trap.
Love is a trap.
And it’s all lies, anyway.
I decide to tell him a truth, which is far more brutal than a lie. Because he should know what he is trying to get himself into. With me. And with this place.
“The trees are moving.”
That stops him short. “What?”
“The trees are moving. Coming closer.”
He plays with my fingers. He does it absentmindedly, without thought, without reason. Sensation—real, present, oh, so real—and I haven’t felt that since… when? Have I ever really felt it?
“What are you thinking about?” I ask. My skin? My bones? My bones under the skin? The trees, inching closer, even as we sit here?
He smiles as he looks at me. “My mind is as empty as air.”
“Liar. Tell me.”
A hesitation. “You won’t like it.”
“Wanting us to go with you again?”
“Yes. And if what you say about the trees is true, and they really are—”
“Moving.”
“Yes… moving. Getting closer—”
“They are. I measured them with a root.”
“—then maybe that’s all the more reason to go. Get away from here. This house… it’s not good for you.”
It is W R O N G.
I glance back at La Baume. In the early-evening light it looks even more like blood.
“It’s home.”
“Home can be unhealthy.”
I know this too well.
“And Nori?” I ask.
“She’ll come, too.”
“And Cath? She won’t leave.”
Gowan hesitates, then opens his mouth to reply.
I cut him off. “I’m not leaving her behind. Besides… I told you before. Those trees are wrong. I won’t go back in there.”
“They let you in the first time; they’ll let you leave. You just have to be strong. Small and strong and… beautiful.”
Beautiful. Broken. Cracked. Decaying. Wrong. You are wrong.
“Why would we go with you anyway? We hardly know you.”
I could have spat on him he looks so surprised. Then he nods, with a terse smile.
“Anyway,” I add, “going through the woods was different then. Everything was different then. They let us in. They won’t let us leave.”
“You just have to have faith.”
“In what?” I don’t mean to sound so bitter. “Tell me other things, Gowan. Tell me stories of the sky and the sea. Open places full of magic. Tell me tales of places where music dances on breezes and girls go twirling through the sand. Tell me, Gowan.”
Tell me pleasant lies, and I will believe them before I throw them away.
We spend our days like this. Me, sitting close by, my head cocked, or lying in the patchy, dead grass, crunchy beneath me. Gowan, weaving strands of longer grasses into plaits and telling tale after tale, while Nori plays in the ash-dirt of the garden or dances around us. Sometimes she stretches herself on the ground beside me, too enthralled by the tales he weaves to do anything else but listen.
I watch him closely.
And swallow my beating heart.
And push away my burning stomach.
And remind myself that he is a stranger.
I know nothing about him. I shouldn’t trust him. You can’t love what you don’t know.
But he’s so familiar.
But that, too, might be a trick.
“Come for a walk with me.”
Gowan holds out his hand.
“No.”
“Why not?”
I fold my arms. “I have to look after Nori.”
Gowan grins. “She’s in the library sleeping on the rug. I checked on her before I asked.”
“Doesn’t matter. She’ll wake. Get scared.” [YOU ARE AFRAID TO LEAVE HER. YOU NEED HER.]
Gowan’s hand is still waiting, open and ready. “We’ll bring her, too.”
“You want to go walking with me… and my little sister.”
“If it gets you to come with me.”
I consider him, reading his every muscle, his every blink, twitch, and smile.
And I take his hand. It closes around me like a warm bath, comfort and safety—
[DON’T GET COMPLACENT.]
We walk the perimeter of the garden; he never lets go of my hand. When we arrive at the gate, I pull free. He looks back at me.
“You’re like water slipping through my fingers.”
I shake my head. I don’t understand him.
He opens the garden gate and walks out, into the field, leaving it open behind him so that I can follow, if I want.
I follow when he is thirty paces in front of me, panting with the effort of walking uphill, my calves burning.
“Look at this.” There is wonder in Gowan’s voice, and it calls to me. He is crouching down some way ahead of me, and I hurry over, breathing hard.
“I can’t believe it…” Gowan murmurs.
A yellow flower, small—minute—has pushed itself from the earth. It’s not three paces from the woods. I haven’t seen a flower in weeks. Longer. Not since the end of summer, which feels too long ago now.
“I can’t believe it,” he says again. “It’s strong. Small, but strong. Like you.” He looks at me. “It’s beautiful.”
“Asshole,” I whisper, though my chest is filled with a rushing warmth, like a river in a growing storm. “It’s a weed. Useless.”
“Beautiful like you,” he persists, grinning now.
I nudge him. “Shh. Nori might hear.”
And then something horrifying occurs to me. Before I know what I’m doing, I pluck the flower from the earth, fragile and delicate roots dangling from my fist, crush it in my hand, and throw it into the woods.
“It’s a trick,” I say, shrugging away the look on Gowan’s face and the awful way I feel inside. “The trees are trying to trick me.”
Gowan swallows. “I have to go.”
Later, when I go and look, hoping to use a stick to pull the flower back to me, it’s no longer among the trees. [THE CREEPER MAN TOOK IT.] I swallow my guilt, and the shock I feel at myself—
His face.
Oh, God. Why do I even care? He’s nothing. And yet, I can’t stand
the hurt I saw there.
—and I vomit into the earth.
I should have told him. I should have told him the horrifying thing that might be happening.
When I walked to him today—it was uphill. Slightly. Ever so slightly.
But when we arrived at La Baume, the house was at the top of a hill, not in the dip of a valley.
God help us.
I think the house is sinking.
8
food infiltration
Rotting in your skin
rotting in your mind
you are rotting in this house
in this house you’ll die.
I frown down at my dress. The pale material is spotted with green. It puts me in mind of a rash, or an infection. A spreading bacteria in a petri dish.
I peer closer.
It can’t be…
Impossible…
It’s… fungus. Or mold. Suddenly repelled, I brush it off. Try to. I want it as far away from me as possible. It does nothing but smudge, turning my white dress into a blotchy green mess.
I rip it off and fling it away across the floor. It lands and sits like a curled snake. I’m shaking as I pull on the yellow dress instead. The clean cloth soothes me, even if it is a little damp, and I loose a half-hysterical giggle into the silent room.
“Enough of this,” I tell myself, my voice grounding out the unreality of the moment. “Get Nori up. Now.”
Her room is closest to the stairs, so I head for them, resisting the urge to look down at the ground floor, imagining I will see something or someone looking up at me. Nope. “Getting Nori up,” I sing in a half whisper, “so we can start this crappy day.”
I pause at her door, force a smile, and breeze in. “Wake up, lazy bug,” I say, but then I stop beside her bed. A horrible, chilly feeling dances along my spine in unpleasant tingles.
Little patches of green—like tiny verdant freckles—are scattered upon her unblemished little cheek.
With a rising sense of horror, I raise my hand and wipe my own cheek, then look down. My fingertips are green.
Mold. Or moss. Or fungus.
It’s growing on us.
Cath paces.
Creak. Creak. Creak.
Apple is masticated.
Creak. Creak. Creak.
The wind is agitated.
Creak. Creak. Creak.
My heart’s full of hatred.
Creak. Creak. Creak.
The whole house is rotting. I can smell it. Rising damp, maybe. Mildew and wood rot everywhere. Even on us, now. Even the damn air looks a little green.
I watch Nori eat, seeing how the apple falls apart piece by piece, how Nori chews—squish, squish, squish—and swallows—slosh!—I am
r e v o l t e d.
“All right?” Gowan asks.
I nod, though I’m queasy. “Why are you here?”
Gowan blinks. “You… you asked me to watch Nori so you could take a look at the walls inside, remember? Find the rising damp?” Trying to cozy up and be my friend.
I did? I… maybe I did. I can’t remember.
“Right,” I say. Here to look after Nori. But he’s wrong if he thought I was trying to make him a friend. I swallow any pinch of embarrassment I might feel, get up, and walk away.
I feel half in a dream. I wander without thought. Anything to be away from Nori’s apple mastication. The creeeeaking of her little rotten teeth and the slurping of her saliva. I’ll feel better when I’m alone. When it’s quiet.
Only, when I am alone, I feel far from okay.
Hunger
so intense
it’s like
there’s a fence
between my urge
my need
my desperation
and the body that
seeks
food infiltration.
Can’t swallow.
So hollow.
Could I borrow
your tomorrow?
I can’t eat.
Can’t swallow.
Why am I so hollow?
9
daddy
Where are you going?
won’t you play here?
storm winds are blowing,
bringing me near.
I’ve waited so long,
for you to see.
if you must go on,
then go on with me.
LEAVE THIS HOUSE
AND YOU WILL DIE.
I wake up with his sylvan, rootlike voice rattling my skull.
LEAVE THIS HOUSE
AND YOU WILL DIE
AND SHE’LL BE MINE.
I shut my eyes, and then open them again, straining my ears so that the silence hurts. A dream. Just a dream. Branches moving, clawing—roots twisting around my legs. The Creeper Man grinning, his mouth opening, Nori screaming—
Just a dream.
I lie back down, letting my heart settle, trying to ignore the incessant creaking, which seems to have crawled beneath my very skin. Even with this smallest sleep tonight, I heard the creaking. I have just closed my eyes once more, when—
Silla.
A voice. An impossible voice.
Presilla, daughter. Come to me.
My lungs won’t inflate. “D-Dad?” I choke the word out on a strangled whisper, searching my shadowy room for him. “Dad?”
I slip out of bed. The hallway is still and empty. He can’t be here, he can’t be.
Silla.
I follow his call
Silla, come.
down the stairs
Daughter mine.
and to the entrance hall.
To a hole.
No bigger than my foot.
Presilla.
And his voice
Come on, girl.
is coming
Come to me.
from
Give in.
the darkness below.
He comes again the next night. It begins with a whisper I can almost ignore. More like the suggestion of breath on my shoulder. By midnight, the breath has become a touch. Every now and then, not enough to know for sure that I’m not alone, the sensation of a finger bruising my collarbone. Or a tug at the edge of my nightdress, too sharp to be nothing, gone too quickly to be something.
I sit up in bed and wrap my arms around my legs.
I wait.
And it comes again.
The hole in the entrance hall.
Presilla. Daughter.
I want to answer. I no longer know why I don’t.
I know you like no other.
The door to my room stands wider than when I went to bed, the black beyond it deepening farther along the corridor until I see nothing. Nothing at all.
Come and talk to me. I understand you.
No, you don’t, I think. No one understands this. [I WISH GOWAN WAS HERE.] The thought is unexpected, but urgent. Gowan, I need you.
The door is wider.
The black outside it is pregnant with presence, and I can’t tear my eyes away. Something is watching me.
And I left my door open.
An invitation.
LEAVE THIS HOUSE,
AND YOU WILL DIE.
AND SHE’LL BE MINE.
Paralyzed, I stare at the space beyond the door, waiting. How is it possible to know—know with absolute certainty—that I am not alone? Know without knowing why, that the thing outside my door is still, too. Not still like me, but still like a predator. Something that had eyes fixed on me, pupils dilated. I remember the way the creature out there in the woods fell forward onto all fours and stared at me with cocked head. I remember the animals sinking into the quagmire, their terror, their demise.
I hear the bugs from that day, feasting on the pets’ carcasses, only the sound is real, here, right now. A quiet chewing, wriggling, smooshing sound. The sound of thousands of worms wriggling together, over and under and through one another. The sound of exoskeletons beating with paper wings, the crunching sound of mandibles
eating the rotting wood around me.
My body bolts out of bed before my mind can catch up, running for the door. I feel the thing in the corridor bolt, too, a fraction of a second later.
But I shut the door, heart T - H - U - D - D - I - N - G in my chest, and then
nothing.
I hear my father laughing at me from downstairs.
Stupid girl! Kill yourself and get it over with!
I have to get out of here. I pull my blanket off the bed, wrapping it around myself before tiptoeing back to the door. I feel frail in my own skin—it feels like a membrane, about to tear should something blow hard enough. It isn’t enough protection.
I take a tentative peek into the corridor; it stretches away into gloom like a death-row march. I kick myself for being so damn foolish and hug my blanket closer. The library has only one entrance, and it’s downstairs. The upper floors are all reached from within the cocoon. Which means I have to walk along the corridor, left along the hall, down the stairs, past the whispering hole, through the entrance hall, past the basement door, and then, finally, to the library. It’s a lot of floor to cover. A lot of dark.
A lot of—
Stop. Stop. Just go.
I hesitate for only a moment, but it’s enough for the spearing ice of dread to puncture my chest. Enough for me to regret stepping beyond the confinement of my bedroom. Enough to make me trip over my own feet, or my blanket, and stumble into the wall. I ignore the chill of it, the way it seems almost soft, as though it weren’t the stone beside me, but something more like flesh.
My heart thuds in my ears so loudly I can’t even hear my footsteps. I hear my breath, jagged, because I caught movement from the corner of my eye as I righted myself and pushed off the flesh—the wall.
Something is behind me.
I break into another run, passing Nori’s room and noting the silence with relief, before flying down the stairs. I yank the blanket closer to me when it snags on the banister—
it was the banister
it was
—and pulls me back. It tears but I ignore it and hurry on.
And the Trees Crept In Page 8
