And the Trees Crept In

by Dawn Kurtagich

  But he won’t listen. I can see it in the way he looks at me. Gazes at me. As though I hold all his hope.

  But I’m the wrong person to hold so much. I’m clumsy with emotion. Rage is pure, eloquent, and I can weave it into a tool. Sadness, loneliness, anguish—none of them require a partner.

  Love? Love is a crack in my armor.

  I pull away.

  “I wish you’d save yourself,” he says. “So stubborn.”

  I almost smile at that.

  I hear them talking in the kitchen. I stop just outside the door.

  “In the woods. Across them. Would you like to see?”

  I don’t know what her reply is because I’m too angry to look around the corner.

  “You want to go away from here, don’t you?” Gowan says.

  I do peek around the corner then, and I see her nod: Yes.

  “We need to make Silla see. She won’t listen to me, but maybe if you tell her, she will.”

  Nori looks doubtful. She reaches for the notepad and pencil, and she writes something I don’t see.

  “She might be angry for a little bit, but it’s for her own good.”

  Nori looks uncomfortable, biting at her lip.

  “If you go first,” he says, kneeling down to her level, “then she’ll come after you. We could find somewhere nicer than this horrible house. All you have to do is go into the woods.”

  Blood boiling

  Traitor!

  Bones cracking

  Manipulator!

  Feel my veins in my face

  Liar!

  Slowly, Nori nods—and that does it. I storm into the room and yank her away from him.

  “Go to your room.”

  But I’m hungry.

  “Go to your room!”

  She runs from the kitchen and I round on Gowan. “How dare you.”

  “Silla—”

  “How dare you use her to manipulate me? You thought you could use her as a weapon? Sending her out there alone to lure me in?”

  “Silla, she asked me where I go. Where I come from. I told her. If she wants to come, that’s how she feels.”

  My voice is venom. “Don’t lie to me.”

  He throws up his hands. “I had to do something.”

  I look at him. Look at every line, every crease and bend of his face. Look at the textured brown of his eyes. Look at his lips, which almost quiver with emotion, and I wonder why he even cares.

  Oh, right. He “loves” me.

  “I already told you: We are staying here.”

  “Goddamn it, Silla, what are you doing?”

  “I’m keeping her safe!”

  “You’re not! You’re hiding in this dying place because you’re a coward!”

  COWARD.

  “Screw you…” I shove him away from me. Liarliarliar bastard liar! “Screw you! You’re like a trampoline, bending under whoever’s feet trample on you, and bouncing back into the same old shape!”

  He nods, laughing derisively. “Yeah. You’re right. I am. I’m a trampoline. And you’re the bloody feet.” He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. When he opens them, his voice is lower. “If you do nothing, you’ll die here.”

  “You don’t know that. And you don’t know us! You have nothing to do with us!”

  “How can you say that after all this time?”

  “What, the few weeks you’ve been toiling in my garden and hanging around like a bloody creepo, bringing apples like some pied piper or something?”

  He takes a step away from me, all his fire gone. “Is that how you see me?”

  “I see a manipulator, a traitor, and someone trying to force my hand. Just get out of our lives. I will never go into those woods with you! Never!”

  He nods. “Okay.” He shakes his head. “Okay.”

  He walks to the kitchen door and turns the handle, hesitating only a moment.

  “It’s been months,” he says, his voice low. “Not weeks.”

  And then he leaves.

  The sickness I feel when he walks out is enough to make me double over, breathless.

  “No… no, no, no. Gowan…”

  This book is consuming me. I carry it everywhere.

  It’s broken, like me. It’s hardened over time.

  The once-leather is more like stone now.

  Calcified. The pages crinkle, some tear.

  There is a symbol on the front,

  I remember it from school.

  The Greek alphabet. It’s called omega.

  Omega means… I forget. The end?

  Like alpha and omega.

  Beginning and end?

  It’s like it was left for me to find.

  It feels like a secret worth having.

  I wonder who left it behind.

  I burn the note.

  12

  the sane never come, the crazy always do

  Hush little baby,

  you’re to blame

  to give your heart

  for lies and shame.

  BROKEN BOOK ENTRY

  I wish she would be a bit more coherent. She said this was a curse, her exact words, but is there or was there a point to telling me that stupid story? All that about the house, and the color… is it just to rile me up? A bit of fun for her? What? She is acting like a ghost. Like she’s not even really here anymore. Is that how she is helping us? How she’s loving us? I couldn’t think of a better joke. She lied. She’s a liar. She’s the lie.

  Tears, like the rain, have all dried up.

  On the day Gowan didn’t come, I felt it like a sickness. That day, Nori hid.

  I spent hours searching room after room, calling and then yelling. And as the panic rose and the day wore on and the sickness grew: screaming.

  Nori came out laughing, and I pulled her by the arm, yanking hard. Too hard.

  “You can’t hide!” I screamed into the little face. “We talked about this already! Don’t you ever listen? You can’t disappear, Nori! Not you! Can’t you see that you couldn’t cry for help if you fell? You couldn’t call me if something crashed down on top of you! You would be trapped and you would suffocate and you would die screaming screams I couldn’t hear!”

  I tugged even harder and fell to my knees before her.

  “Do you understand me?”

  Nori nodded fiercely, too stunned to cry, and when I released her, she stood frozen.

  LEAVE THIS HOUSE AND YOU WILL DIE.

  HE WON’T LET YOU LEAVE.

  THE CREEPER MAN IS WAITING.

  COME AGAIN, OH PLEASE DO. YOU CAN COME STAY IN MY PETTING ZOO.…

  I saw him in the woods.

  I wander the house like a specter. Like a wraith. A shadow. Everything seems… empty. When did this happen? Was it the first night he snuck into the library? Was it his sunny greeting every day? Was it his stupid apples that I can’t even eat? I only realized this morning, when I woke and came to the door, waiting, that I’ve become… used to him. He is the start to my every day.

  It is incomprehensible.

  It is impossible.

  It is ridiculous.

  But when he doesn’t come, something inside me moves. Like a book falling off a table; it hits, deep down, with a low thud.

  Nori, too, is silent. Her hands don’t flap. There are no words on her fingers, no laughs in her smiles. There are question marks in her eyes, though.

  There are accusations.

  You sent him away.

  He liked us but you made him angry.

  This is your fault.

  They are little blows and I have to look away. I am to blame. Why was I so resistant? When he comes back… if he comes back… then I will try. I will try to take Nori and Cath and I will try to go into the woods.

  I catch my reflection in the window.

  I will not be a coward and die in this house because of moving trees. [BUT THERE’S MORE TO IT.]

  LEAVE THIS HOUSE AND YOU WILL DIE.

  It was just a dream. [YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF.]<
br />
  HE WON’T LET YOU LEAVE.

  Cath is crazy. Why should I listen to her? [SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THIS PLACE.]

  If you leave the house, I will get you. And I will get her.

  When [IF] Gowan comes back, I will go with him. I won’t be afraid. [YOU WILL DIE.]

  I will go anywhere with him, something inside me declares. [HAHAHA!]

  “I don’t know what to do!” I cry, and I hold my head until the thoughts all die.

  SILLA DANIELS’S GUIDE TO DELUDING YOURSELF

  1. Imagine you are a doll, sewn together with twine.

  2. Fill yourself up with straw, crunchy and dry (no heart allowed).

  3. Use lies mantras to get by (you will eventually believe them).

  • Mantra, option 1: This is not real.

  • Mantra, option 2: You are not circling the loom.

  • Mantra, option 3: You do not feel anything.

  The walls are no longer firm and hard. They sink and warp with moisture and even more mold. We’re all damp now, all the time. The days are never quite days anymore, but rather a depressing half-light. It’s like everything is winding down. More and more, it looks like five or six in the evening when the clocks read noon.

  The only new food has been the apples. The cupboard holds only those damned peanuts, some butter, some sugar—and his apples. The trees are definitely taller and closer, but worse: the basement windows are covered almost to the top with soil.

  There is no doubt about it now. We are sinking.

  One gloomy day, I walk uphill in the garden and bring a box of sand-like ashes into the house, into which Nori climbs and stares out of the window. The trees cover a lot of the sky now.

  She misses the light on her face, and the still air in her hair. So do I. But the window frames are rotten and warped and the glass no longer slides open. It’s so musty in here.

  Nori sits

  and she stares.

  Her bell doesn’t tinkle.

  The book’s cover is a callus. A scab. With a crack [SCAR] running through the middle. As though someone slashed it with a knife right through the omega. It looks like it’s smiling.

  I open it slowly, and it creaks, the pages hard and dusty. The cover thuds against the table as it hits, the pages fanning out, dust flying in an upward arc. The impulse comes over me again. I pick up my pen and I begin to write.

  I don’t stop until the candle dies with a sigh, plunging the room into darkness. We don’t even have the generator now.

  It’s only when I feel Nori tug on my skirt that I realize she’s been with me the whole time.

  I stare at the apple in my hand. I am hungry. I can do this.

  I have lost three teeth now, but I am sure I can still bite. Can still chew. I scratch my scalp, and my fingernails come away full of dry white skin.

  All around me, the books seem to cry out their encouragements.

  You can do it, Silla!

  Take a bite.

  Nourish your body.

  Don’t be afraid.

  In the bowels of the house, my father is laughing.

  HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

  I close my eyes and try to remember the sweetness of apples. To recall wanting to feel the weight of food in my stomach. Before La Baume changed. Before the thing in the woods started watching. Before my father’s voice floated up out of the hole in the entrance hall like a vile toxin.

  I bite into the apple.

  I chew, ignoring the creaking. Upstairs, Cath starts her pacing. Creeeeeaaaak. Creeeeeeaaaak. I chew in time to her rhythm. Creeeeeaaaak.

  I swallow.

  I am less hollow as I feel it slide down the insides of me. I feel it scratching me up in there as it falls, the skin of the fruit sharp as paper. Paper cuts on the inside. Skin cuts.

  My stomach heaves. Once, twice.

  I run to the fireplace just in time.

  The apple skin cuts on the way up, too.

  I sit down on the sheepskin rug and cry silently into my hands, while the masticated apple and saliva spits in the grate.

  “Leave me alone,” I beg the manor. “Please, just leave me alone. I didn’t do anything to you.”

  I am partly talking to him, out there in the woods. “Please… go away. You can’t be real. Please…”

  The apple is nothing but ash in the grate now. It might never have been there at all.

  It has been three days.

  Gowan has not come.

  The sickness has grown.

  I am losing my hair.

  SOON

  I know that boy. That boy, down there, walking away through my garden. I know that boy, I do, I do. It’s getting so hard to remember, though. All these higgledy-piggledy thoughts.

  It’s going to happen soon. Oh, dear, yes! It’s going to happen soon!

  It happens in the night of its own accord. The wood bends and splinters and falls away, disappearing into the nothing of the hole. Darkness rises and a voice begins to hum.

  When I awake, I’m lying on the edge of a bottomless pit the size of a small chair.

  I teeter for a moment, undecided, and then lazily roll away.

  The thing in the hole bares its teeth and reaches, but I am already gone.

  Maybe I’m just very, very sick.

  I read about cancer patients once.

  They hallucinate. The drugs or the sickness makes them see things that aren’t really there. So maybe I’m just really, really sick.

  Which begs the question: Was Gowan real? He came after the hallucinations of the man out there began.

  The Creeper Man.

  …

  I went to ask Nori. She looked a little bit scared at first. I told her I was playing a game. She signed: Yes. Gowan went away. He went away because of you. So I guess that’s real. Unless Nori is an illusion, too. So: illness.

  That’s only one of my theories about what the hell is going on.

  It’s the least bad of all of them.

  13

  long memory

  Promises made like breath on the glass,

  mean nothing to those who see the time pass

  lingering on in a house made of blood

  he’s brought closer by Python Wood.

  BROKEN BOOK ENTRY

  Another theory of mine is that there is a presence in this house. Like, maybe something terrible happened here, a long time ago—the house’s secret, maybe. A murder, maybe. Or a poltergeist is locked in the walls. Maybe the house doesn’t want any of us to get away because it’s lonely, or malevolent. Maybe, over the years, it has become a sort of living house. A house brought alive by something evil—a version of a curse. Another theory to explain the unexplainable. I just want to know the truth.

  Creeeeeak.

  I am totally ignoring my brain.

  Creeeeeeeak.

  Nope.

  Creeeeeeeak.

  If I had a gun right now, I’d go upstairs and shoot Cath in the leg. That thought alone is enough to pull me from whatever half sleep I’ve been in. And that’s when I realize that the creeping isn’t coming from upstairs.

  I wait.

  Crrrrreeeeeeeeeeak.

  “Cath?” I call. “Are you out there?”

  Has she finally come down? After almost two years?

  Thump!

  That came from above me.

  “Auntie?” I whisper, hunching lower in my blankets. But the creaking is not my aunt. It is not the endless pacing in the attic. It’s coming from the stairs. Like someone slowly walking up. Step by creaking step.

  My heart goes from zero to a hundred in a second, and when I swallow, it’s LOUD. [GONNA RUN? GONNA HIDE?]

  And then I hear that sound again. The sound of a ball—only not rubber or plastic. It sounds heavy and warm, like flesh. A flesh ball. The creaking turns into a rolling sound, and then I hear the flesh ball thump! against something. Wood. The first step.

  Another roll.

  Thump!

  Another roll.

  T
hump!

  It’s coming up the stairs.

  KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

  I suck back a scream and jump out of my bed, grabbing my comb as if that could somehow save me.

  “Go away!” I yell.

  There is a tiny shuffle, and then a sequence of knocks and scratches.

  Scratch, scratch, knock.

  ME.

  I rush to the door and fling it open, pulling Nori, who still has her fist raised, inside. I slam the door behind me.

  Nori signs: Something woke me.

  [HE’S COMING.]

  Roll.

  Thump!

  I grab her hand and rush out my door. Quick—quick! The flesh ball (if that’s what it is) is getting closer. (Roll, thump!) I rush toward the staircase, but instead of going down, we run up. Up to the silent third floor, where I would never go unless I had to, and never with Nori.

  Nori resists my tugging—she’s terrified of this hall—but I pull harder and say, “Come on! We have to go up to go down!”

  But she won’t stop tugging, so I pick her up and run with her to the end of the dark corridor. I open the door to the wasp-husk room and run (the husks CRUNCH under my bare feet) to the end and take the dodgy back stairs down, down, down, until we are on the ground floor. I can’t hear the flesh ball anymore, and that terrifies me.

  And then I hear it. It rolls warmly (if sound can be warm) across the floor and thump, thump, thumps! down the stairs, faster and louder than before. We run to the basement, the only place left besides Python, and I lock the door behind me. I push Nori into the old cupboard in there and press my shaking fingers to her lips.

  Keep quiet, I sign. Not a peep!

  She is crying, but I shake my head. Like a mouse, okay?

  She nods. A mouse. Squeak!

  She couldn’t make a sound if she tried, and right now I envy that. There is an old, tattered penguin doll wearing a knitted red scarf in the cupboard, so I pick it up and shove it into her arms, then I close the doors.