Dreamwood

by Heather Mackey

  It went silent inside the Climbing Rose as everyone contemplated this sum, something so vast it was like trying to grasp the size of the universe.

  Even Pete was jarred out of his thoughts. “Jiminy,” he said and whistled quietly.

  Lucy couldn’t speak. Was this the breakthrough her father had written her about? William Darrington had always been careless of money. Had he finally grown tired of being poor, stopped looking to understand spirits, and simply decided to use his scientific abilities for personal gain? It didn’t sound like him.

  “A pity,” Angus said, stroking his chin. “I thought he was the first person who stood a chance. Your father’s a very convincing man, Miss Darrington.”

  She couldn’t have stood on a bar stool now; her confidence was too shaken by the timber baron’s casual attitude—about all that money, about her father’s disappearance. “Wha-what did he say about the cure?” she asked. “Did he tell you what he thought it was?”

  “He told me he believed it could be found on Devil’s Thumb.”

  It was as if a wild animal had come into the room. Eyes went wide, chairs scraped.

  A man in a chalk-stripe suit with a handlebar mustache slammed his glass on the bar. “If it’s on the Thumb, it may as well be in hell.”

  The men around him muttered agreement.

  Lucy had an image of Anya’s brown thumb sticking out into the white of her bread dough. Her stomach sank. From the moment she heard of Devil’s Thumb she’d been carrying a fateful dread that that’s where he had gone. And now it was confirmed.

  Another man spoke up. “No one’s come back from the Thumb in a hundred years.”

  “You forget,” said a giant lumberjack. “Brocius Pile went in five years ago and he lived.”

  “But not to tell,” said the gentleman in the striped suit, his eyes blazing. He raised his voice, his mustache quivering with emotion. “Whatever he saw in that forest stole his wits. His brain’s a mass of jelly now.”

  “Brocius Pile was a strong man, but no one would ever call him an intellect,” Angus countered. “Who’s to say the Thumb had anything to do with the state of his brains?”

  The man in the deerskin jacket had been watching all this from under his battered hat; now he spoke up, revealing a thin, sallow face. “I do.” He set his glass quietly on the bar. “There’s something there that wishes humankind ill.”

  “Scare stories,” Angus said with a shake of his head. “Superstition.”

  At their table, the group of Lupine men were silent. Watchful.

  “If something’s haunting the place it can be cleared away,” Lucy said, pitching her voice to the room. “Hasn’t anyone thought to try that?”

  An uncomfortable silence fell.

  “Everyone’s too afraid.” Angus planted a broad fist on the bar. “Why, this slip of a girl has more sense than you.”

  A few of the men hung their heads. Lucy loved to be held up as an example—it happened far too infrequently since she had left her home in Wickham. But she tried to keep her tone modest as she added, “You just need to take a scientific approach.”

  “Exactly, exactly what I always say.” Angus turned to her. His eyes were the deep brown of expensive leather, and Lucy found herself nodding to his words. “Don’t fall prey to every spooky story you hear. Approach it rationally, with logic.”

  Lucy stood up taller. She’d hardly expected to agree so much with the head of Pentland Timber, but it was as if they were two minds with the same thought. Pete was looking at her with an awed expression.

  “A sarsaparilla for the young lady, Shatterhand,” Angus ordered. Then, catching sight of the openmouthed Pete, he frowned slightly. “Make that two.”

  He indicated two seats beside him where he wanted Lucy and Pete to sit. Obediently they climbed up on the stools.

  The sallow-faced man in the deerskin jacket had had enough. He slammed down his empty glass and stalked past them on his way out. “I respect what’s in that forest. You’d do well to do the same.” The doors banged closed behind him.

  Angus made a face of mock fear. “Oh no. Beware the curse. I’m terrified.”

  Lucy giggled. She glanced at Pete, who appeared shocked, as if Angus had just blasphemed. Then he gave a tentative laugh, looking like he expected any moment to be struck by lightning.

  “You see what people are like here,” the timber baron said to her. His eyes, rich and sharp as coffee, gleamed under thunderous brows. “They don’t test things. They’re not open to new ideas. Your father thought something very valuable was hidden in that forest. I’ve been thinking of sending my own men to the Thumb to explore.”

  “Don’t do that, boss.” The Lupine man with the bear claw necklace spoke up. His companions looked away, seemingly annoyed he’d decided to break their silence. “You’ll make it worse.”

  “Make what worse? What do the Lupines know of this?” Angus demanded sharply. He turned on them. “Are you suggesting there is a connection between that place and Rust?”

  The Lupines were now muttering among themselves in their language.

  Lucy leaned forward even though she couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  “We don’t know about Rust,” said the man with the bear claws. He gave an apologetic look to Lucy. “But the forest there . . . it’s not good. If that man went to the Thumb, he’s dead.”

  Lucy couldn’t breathe. This was her fear, coiling inside her like a snake, all along. Now it had struck and she felt the shock, just as if a real viper had bitten her.

  Dead.

  She turned to Pete, her eyes brimming. “He’s not,” she said. “He’s not!”

  Pete’s mouth twisted and for a moment he looked stunned. “Naw. Course he isn’t,” he managed at last. But he sounded uncertain and Lucy was not reassured.

  Angus was off his stool and standing. “Shame on you, scaring a lady like that,” he said, scolding the Lupine man.

  Now the air was tense. And Lucy waited to see what the Lupines would do. But they were silent, making no apology. The staring contest stretched on.

  Angus shook his head as if washing his hands of the lot of them. Then he turned and offered Lucy his hand. Oh, the power in his hand! She took it gratefully, feeling somehow unable to move on her own, and he helped her down off the stool.

  “Take her home,” he told Pete, speaking in a low voice, man to man. He thrust something into Pete’s hand and clapped him once on the shoulder. “And buy yourselves some candy or something.” He glanced once at Lucy. “It’ll make her feel better. Scare stories,” he muttered, shaking his head again. Then he turned back to the bar.

  I’m sorry about your pa,” Pete said on the ride back from Pentland.

  Lucy sat beside him, sucking on a horehound drop, a bag of hard candies on the seat between them.

  “Oh, he’s not dead,” she told him in a sticky voice. “No, sir.” Not William Darrington. She looked off to the side of the road: the sickening, stupid endless forest. The giant trees dripped cold drops of condensed mist onto her head (for of course she’d forgotten to bring a hat), making her even more miserable. He wouldn’t have come all the way up here and written her a letter saying he didn’t know how he would manage without his trusted assistant if he was only going to go off and die.

  And then she was crumpling: forehead, mouth, eyes, all folding like a bent accordion. But she wasn’t going to cry. She rubbed her nose so hard her nostrils stung.

  The candy shattered into bittersweet shards, which she crunched angrily before reaching for another.

  Life without her father. This was a cliff’s edge that she approached full of dread, peering over it for a hasty, sickening glimpse of the abyss beyond. What would she do?

  “Well,” Pete said and flicked the reins unhappily. Something was eating him, too. “Guess I got to tell Pa there’s Rust on the land
next to ours. Billups is our neighbor. What do you bet we’ll be next?”

  She didn’t know what to say. The Knightlys had seemed strained and worried when she’d arrived. She realized they could face disaster.

  Lucy rubbed her sticky fingers on her dress. She’d lost a glove somewhere in the wagon. She’d have been punished for such carelessness at Miss Bentley’s. Now she rather hoped it never turned up—in the current darkness of her mood, she felt like tossing the other glove, too. “Does it spread that fast?”

  Pete looked down at the reins in his hands. “Faster and faster. Like it’s speeding up.”

  It was strange to think the massive kodok trees were vulnerable. They rose like towers over the fern-filled glens.

  “But your father’s a lawyer,” she said, remembering what Able Dodd had said about Gordon at the train station. “You don’t depend on the forest, do you?”

  Pete’s cheeks were sucked in as if the air had been let out of him. “Pa made some bad investments.” He looked worriedly over at her. “I think they were counting on selling the land to pay their debts.”

  Then the Knightlys were in trouble. Lucy picked awkwardly at the buttons on her blue wool dress. “There’s bound to be a way to fix it,” she said. “You heard them back there—my father said he’d found a cure.”

  “Uh-huh,” Pete replied. He took a candy from the bag but crunched it without much energy. “Too bad he didn’t get a chance to tell anyone what it was.” He gave a heavy sigh.

  Whitsun and Snickers made their steady way down the road. Lucy took another candy and hunched her shoulders against the drippy mist. If her father had said there was a cure, then a cure most certainly existed.

  • • •

  As it turned out, Pete needn’t have worried about telling his parents they might have Rust on their land.

  In the time they’d been in Pentland, Rust had already been discovered in the Knightlys’ trees.

  Lucy and Pete walked in the front door to find a scene of chaos. Able Dodd thrust past them carrying a yoke and two large oilskins, which gave off a strong stink of fish.

  “Back to snake oil,” he muttered darkly. “Never should have changed to electricity in the first place.”

  Lucy and Pete shrank back against the wall, giving him a wide berth.

  “What was that about?” Lucy asked. “What’s snake oil?”

  “For the lamps,” Pete said. “It’s cheaper than electric. I guess we’re turning off the power.” He was about to say more when Anya came bustling by with a tray of coffee and sandwiches.

  “Thank goodness you’re back,” she said breathlessly. “They’re in a state.”

  “Anya!” called Gordon from his study.

  “Coming!” the cook replied and hurried off.

  Lucy and Pete followed after her.

  The door to the study was open, and Lucy could hear Dot’s agitated voice as well as Gordon’s defeated replies. They were standing in a small room decorated rather severely with gloomy landscape paintings and dark wood furnishings.

  “He was growing it, Gordon. Right here. On our land!” Dot was standing over a desk, rifling through an explosion of papers. Two livid spots stood out on her thin cheeks.

  “Let’s be calm,” Gordon said, pacing behind her. “I’m sure he wouldn’t do any such thing.”

  Dot’s voice got high and shrill as she bent down to read. “It’s all here. Written down. Pages and pages of notes about how it grows. Look, it says here, Rust is a fungus. I’ve managed to grow it and study it in a controlled environment.”

  Lucy stepped closer. Pages and pages of notes—that had to be her father’s research.

  Gordon coughed. “He does say controlled.”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Dot, her head down, hadn’t noticed Lucy’s approach. “He brought this on us,” she said despairingly. “We should never have let him anywhere near us. And to think—we took in his child.”

  Lucy’s stomach churned as she realized Dot was talking about her.

  Dot looked up and at that moment saw Lucy. But she didn’t apologize. Instead the sight of Lucy seemed to push her past some final barrier of rage. “Your father has ruined us!”

  It was as though she’d been slapped. For a moment Lucy was numb, unable to speak. She put a hand on one of the room’s high-backed chairs. “What do you mean?”

  “His experiments.” Dot thrust out a notebook in front of her.

  Gordon looked at Lucy unhappily. “I was searching for some papers relating to our land deeds and I happened to look through your father’s notebooks. He grew Rust on our land and now it’s spread to our neighbors’ as well.”

  Lucy felt as if a block of ice had settled in her chest. Her father never would have done anything to hurt someone. And people were always grateful for his work. Sometimes they might pooh-pooh his ideas or methods. But he’d never been accused of anything like this.

  “Those notes are his research for a cure,” Lucy said. She looked at Pete—who’d come to stand beside her—hoping for corroboration. But he was stock-still, a look of anguish on his face.

  “We’re lucky he’s disappeared then,” Dot said in fury. “Any more of his cure and the whole forest would be gone.”

  “Dorothea,” Gordon said, reaching for his wife. “She’s just a child. She had nothing to do with this.”

  But Lucy had heard enough. Anything said against her father was as good as said against her.

  “He was trying to help!” she cried. She knocked into Pete as she turned, storming from the room. She slammed the front door behind her and had the satisfaction of hearing the windows rattle.

  And then she was running, running with such fury she didn’t know where she was going, just away.

  • • •

  For some time Lucy simply crashed and ran, pell-mell, into the woods. There’d been a path, of sorts, and she’d followed it—or thought she had. Eventually, exhaustion overtook her and she stopped to catch her breath. Her side ached. Sweat soaked the heavy fabric of her dress. Her lungs felt raked with fire.

  So . . . the path.

  She put her hands on her hips and walked a circle, gasping for breath. It had to be here somewhere. But then even the starting point of her circle had disappeared, swallowed up in ferns. The trees all looked the same. The filtered light gave no hint of the location of the sun.

  Lucy tried to quiet the pounding of her heart. She had an excellent sense of direction, she reminded herself. The path was just over to her right. It had to be. She plunged ahead, the moments going by in hot, sweaty distress.

  Or maybe it was to her left?

  She stopped, knowing it was no use. She was lost.

  Lost in the woods of Saarthe!

  As soon as she thought this she felt the immensity of the forest, its wild and hidden life. Somewhere above her a bird gave a sinister croaking call. Ahead, the underbrush rustled, waving as some invisible animal slunk through it . . . toward her.

  Wolves. In her adventure novels, the forests were always full of wolves.

  She ran again, panic racing along her nerves. But before she had gone very far her foot snagged on a root and she went sprawling on the soft humus of the ground. She lay there, heart pounding, and spat dirt out of her mouth. Then she sniffed the air.

  Was that wood smoke?

  Cautiously she got to her feet, brushing off kodok needles and dirt from her dress. Ahead of her she saw a small peaked-roof cottage, so decorated it might have been made of gingerbread. Every surface was covered with wooden cutouts of animals, flowers, hearts, and stars—everything whimsical and charming.

  Lucy went toward it, pulling kodok needles out of her hair. The smoke she’d scented was streaming merrily out the house’s chimney. Someone was at home.

  Slowly she climbed the cottage’s wooden steps and stood before its door. A
n ingenious design of different colored woods made a scene on it as fine as any painting: a river valley cutting through forested hillsides.

  For just one moment she hesitated. In fairy tales, this was exactly the sort of place where witches lived, hiding their wickedness behind an enchanting exterior. But she was not the sort of girl to put stock in fairy tales.

  She swung the knocker three times and waited.

  The door opened, revealing a short, round little man about her own size. He had bandy legs, a full beard, and long white hair tied in braids on either side of his head. Slung around his waist was a leather belt bristling with tools. He had wire-rimmed glasses and on top of his head was a jaunty striped stocking cap.

  “My goodness!” he exclaimed. “A child.” He peered up at her with bright blue eyes under bushy eyebrows. “And you’ve been crying.”

  Behind him, coming from the interior of the cabin, Lucy heard a strange click and clack; she had the strongest impression of something moving within.

  “No,” she said, though perhaps a few tears had fallen during her flight. She wiped her eyes to get rid of them. “I’m lost.”

  “Oh no,” the little man said, his eyes widening. “But come in, come in. I’ll make us some tea.”

  There was that odd noise again, almost like hundreds of dominoes softly falling against one another.

  Lucy hesitated. “Please, could you just point me in the direction of the road . . . ?”

  “Certainly. But have some tea first.” He waved her inside. “Come in, come in . . .”

  He was so small—and jolly as an elf—that Lucy gave in to his insistence and stepped over the threshold. When her eyes adjusted she found herself in a room filled to bursting with carved wooden toys: animals of all kinds real and unreal, dolls that had such lifelike faces they might have been real people, an army of wooden soldiers. They hung from the carved rafters or sat on shelves or nested in the branches of the great carved wooden tree that took up the far corner of the room.