Dreamwood

by Heather Mackey

  “All right,” she said, planting her chin on her palms.

  “Really?!” Pete was so excited, he missed catching the plum. It fell on the floor and the skin broke.

  A perfectly good plum. And she’d gotten such a nice bunch of food together: all the things she liked.

  Pete didn’t seem too upset, however. “Don’t worry,” he said, retrieving the plum from the floor. “I’ll eat it.”

  As if she’d been worried about him not eating it. They’d have to buy lots more food, that was certain.

  “I’m in charge, though,” she told him. Of course now she’d said he could come it was a bit late to be laying down conditions.

  “Sure,” he said easily, biting into the plum. “Whatever you want.”

  Leaving Pentland was even easier than she had expected, Lucy thought, pressing her nose against the window as the train chugged south. Pete told his parents he would accompany Lucy down the coast partway on her journey back to San Francisco and stop to visit a friend in Crescent City. Gordon and Dot were too preoccupied to ask more than perfunctory questions.

  Pete sat in the seat across from her, wearing dungarees and a snap-button cotton shirt, a bandanna loosely knotted around his neck. Lucy turned from the forest outside and watched as he looked into his rucksack and then closed it again, practically hugging himself in satisfaction. Who knew it was possible to find so much happiness in packing?

  Lucy wished she could feel so pleased. While Pete made arrangements at the station she had a strange conversation with Able Dodd, and she was still unsettled from it. She’d said good-bye to Whitsun and Snickers and was just gathering her nerve to say the same to the Knightlys’ handyman when he cut her off. “Take nothing that is not given,” he’d said in his stern, preacher’s voice. He glared down at her. Even his milky dead eye seemed to find her at fault. At once she felt so guilty she groped in her pockets. Had she taken something? She supposed she had taken sugar cubes for Whitsun and Snickers from the kitchen, but she was fairly certain the Knightlys wouldn’t mind.

  “What do you mean?” she’d asked in a panic, ready to confess to two sugar cubes. But then Pete came back, and Able Dodd would say no more.

  Now she mulled over the warning. Able Dodd couldn’t know they were heading to Devil’s Thumb—she and Pete had told no one of their plans. Maybe Able Dodd simply meant to give her general words of advice: friendly, life advice . . . which from him sounded absolutely terrifying.

  She sighed. Even the new clothes she bought for the journey at Dawson’s general store gave her little pleasure: boy’s pants in stiff denim, which she had to cuff and belt so they wouldn’t fall down, and a shapeless flannel shirt two sizes too big. She changed into them once they were on the train and came back to her seat feeling like she was walking in giant galoshes. When she’d tried finding better-fitting clothes while shopping in Pentland, Mr. Dawson had remarked he had little in stock suitable for girls trying to disguise themselves—and peered at her so suspiciously that she’d rushed her purchase and wound up with the wrong things.

  Drat.

  The train could not stop on Lupine land without permission, so they were let off near the border. It was only because there were so few passengers—and because Pete had paid some of Angus Murrain’s money to the conductor and the porter—that the train stopped at all.

  Lucy stepped down from the train, straight-legged in her stiff dungarees. It was a gray, cool day, with a strong breeze that went right to work unraveling her braid.

  “Are you sure about this?” the porter asked. Although he’d pocketed the money, he looked as though he was having second thoughts. He sucked his teeth, squinting at the gloom of the forest, which lay brooding a little way beyond the tracks.

  “We’re just doing some camping,” Pete said. He gave a jaunty wave of his hand, indicating the glory of the wilderness.

  Lucy breathed in deep; the damp air had the smell of rain-bruised grass. Now that they were off the train she was eager to start walking. “We’re sure,” she told the porter, nodding briskly.

  The porter spat, unconvinced. “If you say so.” With one final look of misgiving, he climbed onto the steps, and the train whistle sounded.

  They watched the train chug away—each railcar that passed making their decision seem more and more final. At last, it disappeared, like a length of black snake vanishing into a burrow.

  Lucy tugged at the straps of her pack. She brought a bedroll, her father’s instruments, and the various supplies she’d bought in Pentland, including what Pete deemed a suitable knife. Hidden in an interior pocket was a glass vial of antimorpheus—Arthur Lyman’s proprietary blend of anti-dreaming drops.

  Her pack, however, was depressingly heavy.

  Pete watched as she tried to get it on her shoulders but didn’t say anything as she heaved and staggered under its weight. His shirtsleeves were rolled up over tan arms, and he hoisted his pack easily as if to make a point about his muscles.

  “I’ll get the hang of it,” she said. At last she managed a somewhat upright position.

  Pete had an old pocket compass, which he made a show of consulting, even though they knew where the coast was—the ocean, a wide band of blue on the horizon, was impossible to miss.

  “This way,” Pete announced officiously, having satisfied himself that, yes, the ocean was right where it should be: in front of them.

  “Are you sure? Do you want to check again?” Lucy asked, trying hard to keep a straight face.

  Pete ignored her, sniffing once before rather protectively putting his compass away.

  They set off, heading away from the railway tracks, crossing a hillocked meadow beyond which stood a line of high, imposing trees. As they stepped under their eaves and into the shadows of the forest, Lucy turned for one last look at the railroad tracks. Even though she was eager for them to be on their way, the tracks were a line back to civilization, whereas they were heading into the wilderness . . . and the unknown.

  • • •

  They walked all day through the dark and whispering woods, a world of shadows and sudden shafts of light. They passed fairy rings: crumbling hollow stumps of trees that made circles of magic, moss, and rot. The giant roots of downed trees. Nurse logs that sprouted with bright green seedlings, tree orchids, and curling ferns. Occasionally a noise would sound in the brush, a fern would wave as something passed beneath it, an antler would spear through the shadows, but nothing showed itself or crossed their path.

  In late afternoon they reached the top of a rise and saw below them a large meadow full of high prairie grass.

  “We should stop here,” Pete said. There were holes in the ground he liked the look of: rabbit burrows. “Wait and see, I’ll catch us one.”

  Lucy dumped her pack on the ground and straightened her shoulders with relief. “You know we can’t do that once we’re on the Thumb,” she reminded him.

  “But we’re not there yet.” Pete grinned, bringing out a slingshot and some metal pellets.

  He had taken the rule against catching their own food surprisingly hard, until at last Lucy realized he’d been counting on showing off his wilderness skills.

  “Go on, then,” she said, waving him away. Then she sat down (difficult in her cardboard-like dungarees) and unlaced her boots.

  She’d dozed in the sun by the time he returned, holding a long, limp rabbit by the legs.

  “Least you could do is get some wood for a fire,” he grumbled.

  She hadn’t even thought of that. But now she went and poked about in the underbrush, getting her hands dirty and pulling up the biggest logs she could find. She went back teetering under her load, thinking, Wait till he sees how much I can carry. She had impressed herself.

  Pete was sharpening his knife; he held it up and scrutinized the blade. Only then did he turn and give a quick, dissatisfied glance at the wood she carried.
“What, no kindling?”

  She dropped the logs in a heap. They’d streaked mud and forest gunk all over the front of her new shirt. “Fine,” she snapped.

  She’d get the best bunch of kindling ever. After more scrounging, she put together a load of twigs and small branches. These she dropped on top of her log pile. “Where’s the tinderbox?” she asked, hands on her hips.

  Pete was skinning the rabbit—a quick, efficient bit of work that she knew (but didn’t want to admit) took some skill.

  He gestured with the gory knife toward where the giant kodoks staggered into the meadow. “Just look under a big toadstool for where the tinderbox fairies leave them.”

  She sighed. “So I should have brought my own. Can I borrow yours?”

  “Sure,” he said coolly, “it’s in my pack.”

  But by asking for the tinderbox she’d invited greater scrutiny of her fire-building technique. And, with a knot in his forehead, Pete soon found many flaws.

  “You’ve built the pile all wrong.” He bent down, adjusting and fiddling with the arrangement of wood. But then its inadequacy simply became too much to bear; he pulled the whole thing apart, muttering to himself as he did: “You don’t put a big log on at the beginning. How’s this supposed to catch?” And so on.

  “I was going to fix it.” Sheepishly, Lucy scuffed the ground with her boot. The truth was, she’d never made a campfire before. She would like to have learned outdoor skills like Pete’s, but William Darrington was always too busy. If he wasn’t out hunting ghosts, he was home, working on his research or writing what he said would be a history of ghost clearing. Between all that, she sometimes felt she was lucky she was paid any attention at all—asking to go camping would have been an unreasonable demand.

  “So how do you make a fire?” she asked, admitting defeat. Stiffly she squatted down beside Pete so she could get a closer look at how he arranged the wood.

  “I’ll show you,” Pete said, unable to hide a grin. And he did.

  In the twilight the smoke rose into the sky.

  A strange type of bird called out mournfully from its roost. Down below their hill, a group of elk emerged from the trees and disappeared into the tall prairie grass. The only sign of them that remained was their antlers, sailing like spiky ships across an inland sea.

  The rabbit was delicious, and she was hungrier than she’d thought. She tore into it and licked her fingers.

  “So how long do you figure it’ll take us to find your pa?” Pete asked, chewing.

  “Maybe a day or so once we’re on the Thumb,” she said confidently. “I’m good at finding things. I once found a two-hundred-year-old key that my father thought he’d lost. He said I saved his life.” Lucy knew her father hadn’t meant that literally, of course—if she hadn’t found the key her father would have merely disappointed the friend who’d lent it to him for study—yet in some mysterious way the incident had made her realize her father did need looking after.

  “I never lost anything important,” Pete said thoughtfully.

  “Really?” Lucy looked into the fire, suddenly thinking of her lost things: mother, home, now her father. She couldn’t imagine going through life like Pete, unscathed.

  Perhaps Pete realized the conversation had turned more serious than he’d intended. “Well,” he said, using a twig as a toothpick, “once I lost my voice.”

  This sounded like it would be good. “How’d that happen?”

  “Curious story,” Pete said, getting comfortable on the ground. “We used to have this pig—a sow named Bethany.”

  Lucy threw a few twigs into the fire and watched them crackle. “That’s a good name for a pig.”

  “It sure was. And she was a good pig. A great big thing.” Pete sketched something monstrously large with his arms. His hair shone like bronze in the light of the flames. “One day I was supposed to be helping Able Dodd in the barn, but I didn’t feel much like working. I wanted to be on the river, fishing.”

  Lucy tilted her head at him. “What a surprise.”

  He grinned. “You see, you already got me figured out.”

  “I’m observant.” Lucy hugged the hard denim folds around her knees. It was easy to talk to Pete when he was like this—not so critical.

  Pete nodded. “So anyway, I wasn’t doing the greatest job with my chores. And Bethany got out. My pa was furious. He said I needed to find Bethany or he was going to break my fishing pole.”

  “Oh no.” She had once jammed her father’s microscope in her eagerness to see what butterfly wings looked like, and the repair had taken him weeks. She was banished from his basement laboratory for a month: a punishment that Lucy still believed was unfairly harsh.

  “A threat like that, you can believe I paid attention. So I went tracking after Bethany. Took hours.” Pete sucked on a rabbit bone before throwing it into the brush.

  “Did you find her?” Lucy asked. She nibbled her own bone—more gracefully, she hoped, than Pete.

  “I did.” Pete wiped his fingers on his shirt. “The only problem was someone else had found her first. There was this family that lived out in the woods, the Babkins. The dad had lost his job because of Rust, and now their kids were jumping up and down outside the stall, all excited. And there was Bethany inside. So I just turned around as quiet as I could and came back home.”

  Lucy thought this was a fine thing Pete had done. It’s what she would have done in the circumstances, too. “So that’s how you lost your pig. How’d you lose your voice?”

  “Then when I got home, I pretended to fall sick and”—his voice got faint and scratchy—“not be able to talk.” He coughed and resumed talking in his normal voice. “I didn’t want to tell a bunch of lies, so I just said I couldn’t find Bethany, and then hoped they’d leave me alone. Now that I think of it, that was a cowardly thing to do. I lost my nerve, playing sick like that. So that’s a second thing I lost.” He stared into the flames.

  Lucy hoped he would keep talking. “Did your father break your fishing pole?”

  “Yep.” He stretched out his long legs and sighed.

  “That’s the third thing you lost,” Lucy pointed out, not counting the pig, which Pete had found after all.

  “Anya says things come in threes,” Pete said, throwing another stick into the fire and watching it burn. “Though I don’t know how true that is, because if she’s right, I’ve had my three so I shouldn’t have to lose my house.”

  Lucy did not believe in old wives’ tales like the law of threes, but Pete had been so nice to give that family his pig, she wanted to reassure him. “And you won’t. Because when we return from the Thumb you’ll be able to get your house back.”

  But Pete dropped his chin dolefully to his chest. “I got a new fishing pole later,” he said. “I think my pa felt bad. Maybe I still have one loss to go.”

  Lucy did her own arithmetic of loss. Her mother and her home were two. That meant she still could lose her father. You don’t believe that rubbish, she told herself. At night, though, it was harder to remember all the things you didn’t believe in.

  Something rustled close by in the darkness and she shivered. Pete saw her.

  “You scared?” Pete asked.

  He did not sound as if he would blame her if she was, but Lucy answered right away, “No.” She brought out her shawl from her pack and settled it around her shoulders to show she was just cold.

  It had gotten dark. They were in the wild land on the edge of the Lupine Nation, and the fear of not finding her father seemed to have stolen in like the smell of campfire smoke.

  She no longer felt like talking. Lucy snuggled down into her bedroll and made a lumpy pillow from her shawl. But as she readied herself for sleep, she noticed something flickering out there in the dark.

  “Look across there,” she whispered to Pete. On the eastern edge of the meadow was a pinprick of
orange light. Too sly and small to be a fire. Too large to be the glow of someone’s pipe. It twinkled like a misplaced star.

  Pete got to his knees, his mouth a thin line.

  “Do you think it’s an outlaw?” Lucy asked, still keeping her voice low. Their fire had died down and all around them the night was an inky black so solid she thought she could reach out a hand and touch it.

  Pete’s brows swooped together. “No,” he said rather too quickly to assure her. He peered into the darkness and whispered, “Maybe it’s a ghost or a haunt, though.” His hand went to the ghost stone in his pocket.

  Lucy was shocked to realize how little Pete knew about haunts. “It can’t be. For one thing, it would be floating around, and it wouldn’t have so strong a glow.”

  Pete said with a grim sort of satisfaction, “Saarthen haunts are probably stronger than what you’re used to.”

  Forgetting to be scared, Lucy got up from her bedroll and went to her pack, dragging out the ghost sweeper. “If it was a ghost my sweeper would react.” She held it up by one tubular leg; the egg showed all the animation of a tin can. “My father made this to protect me. There’s an actual sweeping engine inside.”

  Like many boys she’d met, Pete showed an awed respect for the word engine. He relaxed his grip on his protection stone and bent to examine the egg. “It isn’t moving a lick. That means there’s no haunt, right?”

  So big, strong Pete, who knew about knives and slingshots, was actually scared.

  “You can sleep with it next to you if you want,” she said, laying the ghost sweeper on the ground. She settled cross-legged onto her bedroll. The ghost sweeper lay on its back with its legs in the air, a bit like a dead beetle.

  “It doesn’t look like much,” she admitted, “but if anything from the spirit world comes around, it will wake up quick enough.”