Where the Woods End

by Charlotte Salter

  Kestrel scrabbled around for her spoon while the grabber’s long fingernails tore at her sweater, struggling to find a good hold on her. Hurry up! she screamed at herself. But it was no good—she couldn’t reach her pocket. Through the panicked fog in her head, she tried to image what Granmos would do.

  She wouldn’t mess around with weapons.

  She drove her foot backward and heard a sickening crunch, like teeth crushing ice, as she broke part of the grabber’s body. The grabber squealed. She could see its shadow on the ground in front of her as it flailed, a terrifying, hulking blob held aloft on spindly legs.

  Kestrel tried to wriggle from the grabber’s grasp, but it clamped a strong hand over her mouth. Kestrel almost cried out. None of the grabber’s fingers matched one another. They were long and crooked and stuck with claws from a dozen animals, grimy with dirt and rotten bits of skin.

  “Pippit!” she shouted, but it came out more like a muffled grunt. The grabber’s stomach rumbled, and she felt warm saliva drip down the back of her neck.

  Its body tensed. Kestrel yanked herself out of the grabber’s grasp and dropped to the ground, just as its teeth crashed shut on thin air.

  She hadn’t been standing in a jumble of tree roots at all. She was surrounded by a forest of legs, each one made from ripped-up tree roots and bones. Even worse, each foot was a hand, and each hand had ten long fingers on it, exactly the same as the ones over her mouth. Fingers covered in skin, with long, dirty nails.

  Hands for feet, Kestrel thought dizzily. Actual hands. For feet.

  The grabber roared. Kestrel grabbed her spoon, raised it above her head, and drove it into one of the grabber’s feet with a furious battle cry.

  The grabber screamed. The noise was high-pitched and cold and it made Kestrel’s hands wobble, but the feeling only lasted a second before she squashed it away. She saw one of the grabber’s hands swing toward her, and she flung herself out of the way just before its nails could catch her face. It reeled, confused by her quick reactions.

  Kestrel’s spoon was still embedded in the ground, pinning one of the grabber’s hands down. The grabber twisted its leg and tore it free, leaving the hand pinned and still flailing.

  She scrambled away from the grabber on her hands and knees, then turned to face it, her fists raised. Despite her fury and determination, the full view of the monster in front of her made her falter, just for a second.

  “Ungh,” she said.

  It was a spider.

  A massive, hairy, sharp and bristling spider.

  It was almost twice her height. Each leg was as long as a ladder, and together they supported a fat, bloated body that hovered higher than Kestrel’s head. It was covered in tatty, stretched skins that had been stolen from a multitude of bristly and slimy animals. She could see bones bulging underneath its flesh, and in some places they poked right out through the skin. An ax was embedded in its back like a jaunty accessory.

  The grabber had hundreds of eyes which looked like they had been violently smushed into its face, all of them rolling in different directions. It had a jagged, zigzag mouth which didn’t close properly and a collection of teeth that would make a hardened dentist faint.

  Kestrel had fought plenty of grabbers, and she knew that there was only one way to kill them. You had to get them in the heart. But her spoon was still stuck in the ground, holding down a set of wriggling fingers.

  She took a deep breath. This wasn’t the time to lose her nerve.

  The grabber straightened its legs, raising itself high, its dozens of knees making arthritic snapping sounds.

  Kestrel could hear the blood pounding through its veins. She could hear its heart thumping double-quick as it walked toward her on its creaking legs. She waited for it to come, preparing to spring.

  That’s when Pippit burst out of the trees, a furious, spitting, grabber-killing machine the approximate size of a glove.

  “AAAH!” he screamed. He flew at the grabber and attached himself to one of its legs, digging his teeth in and growling. The grabber jerked back and snapped its own teeth, spraying the ground with a shower of loose molars.

  Kestrel sped forward, thinking she could grab her spoon from the ground, but Pippit’s distraction only lasted a second. The grabber staggered toward Kestrel, Pippit still attached to its knee. Its mouth was hanging open, revealing a long, dark tunnel of a throat. Its stolen organs pulsed and squirmed inside it as though they were trying to get away from the nightmarish creature. As it stamped toward her, Kestrel fell back again, her mouth dry. It clawed the ground with its fingers and left a trail of yellow grease behind it, shaking the trees and dislodged a cascade of dead leaves. They flew around in a tiny storm, blinding Kestrel for a second, but not before she saw one spiral into the grabber’s mouth and make it splutter.

  Kestrel’s heart skipped a beat. She knew what to do.

  She reached into her pocket and felt around for a missile. Her fingers closed around Finn’s lucky stone. Even then, faced with the huge monster, she felt a twinge of guilt for using his gift. Then she grabbed her slingshot, pulled the stone back, and took aim.

  Pippit dug his teeth in with a furious cry. The grabber twitched and roared, and Kestrel released the stone.

  It disappeared down the grabber’s throat with barely a rattle. For a moment it had no effect. Then the grabber started to cough. It began as a low rattle deep in its chest, which turned into a terrible hacking sound. The grabber’s legs buckled and it swayed, trying to regurgitate the stone that was lodged deep in its throat. “Les geddit!” Pippit yelled, clinging to the grabber’s shaking legs.

  Kestrel hurtled toward the grabber. She dodged through its jumble of legs, its snapping teeth missing her by inches again as it coughed and quivered. She reached her spoon on the other side and pulled it out of the ground, pausing only to stamp on the disembodied hand, which was trying to run away by itself.

  The spoon was like an extension of her arm, and Kestrel immediately felt stronger. She drew herself up tall. The grabber turned to face her. It was wheezing, but the stone hadn’t been big enough to choke it, and now it was angrier than ever.

  Kestrel waited as it stamped toward her, its eyes rolling furiously. It was difficult not to back away, but she dug her feet into the ground and gritted her teeth. She was good at ignoring her instinct to run.

  Hold . . . it . . .

  The grabber was so close she could smell the mold on its rotting body parts. It opened its mouth, and she flung herself through its legs again so she was under its body. The grabber tried to catch her with its hands, but it was too slow. She held the spoon above her head and listened for the echo of its heart.

  Kestrel drove her arm upward. The blade went in. There was a crunch of wood as its makeshift bones splintered. The grabber moaned and in an instant collapsed, and Kestrel was pushed to her knees. She tried to make herself as small as possible, hoping the grabber wouldn’t crush her to the ground. Then the weight stopped pressing down, and her spoon slid out, and she opened her eyes.

  The grabber was dead. It was propped up on its bent legs, its horrible body hanging an inch above her head. She crawled out and flopped down on the ground beside it.

  “Yeah,” hissed Pippit, running back and forth over the forest floor, leaping over Kestrel’s head in a victory dance. “Yeah! Yeah!”

  “We did it,” she said wonderingly, rolling over in the leaves. She’d hurt muscles she didn’t even know existed, and she could hear blood pounding through her ears like rows of soldiers, but she wanted to leap up and run around the forest. She couldn’t believe she’d lived to kill another grabber. “We got it!”

  As Pippit ran around the clearing, picking up bits of splintered bone and gobs of who-knew-what, Kestrel got up and walked around the grabber. It was still warm, and it stank like the bottom of a bin. She grabbed the handle of the woodchopper’s ax sticking from
the grabber’s back and pulled it out.

  It left the grabber with a disgusting squelching noise. She wiped it on the ground, trying to ignore the sound of Pippit enthusiastically chewing things up. She had to take it back as proof that she’d gotten revenge and killed the grabber, or her mother would be furious.

  As she dragged the ax over the ground she felt something cool on the back of her neck, like a breeze was shifting through the trees.

  Then she heard it. A quick, faint thumping sound.

  She held her breath and tried to pinpoint the noise. She could feel the hair on her arms rising, and in the corner of her eye she saw a shadow creep over the forest floor.

  The stupid, evil, stinking monster had two hearts.

  The grabber coughed up some phlegm from deep in its lungs. Without thinking Kestrel turned and swung the ax with all her strength, driving it into the grabber’s chest with pinpoint accuracy as it loomed over her. It screamed again, its hundred eyes rolling into the back of its head, and fell down. Kestrel yanked the ax out, ready to swing again, but the grabber only twitched once more before it was silent.

  Kestrel let out her breath. She watched the grabber for any sign of movement, breathing hard, but this time it was well and truly dead.

  A minute later its teeth began to fall out, pattering down like rain.

  “Ugh,” she said, making a face. Then her shoulders slumped, and all the horrible pent-up fear left her, making her feel empty.

  Pippit finished collecting trophies and returned with one of the grabber’s fingers hanging from his mouth. Kestrel patted her pockets to make sure everything was still there, the slingshot and the spoon and the notebook, and remembered that Finn’s lucky stone was still in the grabber’s throat.

  The forest was growing cool and shadowy in the aftermath of the grabber’s death, and in a few minutes other creatures would start to arrive, drawn by the prospect of a free meal. Kestrel looked around nervously. She knew she should leave, but she didn’t want to lose the stone.

  “Lessgo,” insisted Pippit.

  Kestrel looked desperately at the deep, dark forest beyond the clearing, then at the grabber. They probably only had a few minutes before things started to descend on them. Cursing herself, Kestrel held her breath and reached into the grabber’s mouth.

  It was warm and wet and slimy. She felt around, feeling nauseous, but she couldn’t reach far enough down its throat. She found a big stick on the forest floor, used it to prop the grabber’s jaws open, then took a deep breath and stuck her head in its mouth.

  She pushed her shoulders in and reached as deep down as she could. After a few nauseating moments of scrabbling, her fingers closed around the stone, and she nearly shouted with relief. She started to wriggle out of the grabber’s mouth, but then, just for a fraction of a second, she saw something move.

  Kestrel froze, her eyes fixed on the bottom of its throat. There was something down there, something moving deep inside the grabber. For a horrified second she wondered if the woodchopper was somehow still in its stomach, trying to fight his way out.

  She peered deep into the grabber’s innards.

  Four yellow eyes flickered open and peered right back.

  Kestrel screamed and tore herself away from the grabber’s mouth just as the stick snapped and its jaws slammed shut. She stared at its face, her stomach squirming horribly. The eyes hadn’t been human, but she’d never met an animal with those eyes before, either.

  “Back?” Pippit said as Kestrel grabbed the ax.

  “Definitely,” she said, casting one last look at the creature.

  Maybe the grabber had some new, four-eyed monster living in its stomach. It wasn’t unheard of for them to have whole ecosystems in their compost-heap bodies. She didn’t really believe it herself, but she didn’t want to stick around and find out for sure.

  Pippit was happily squirming on the ground, playing with the grabber’s dismembered finger. Without a second glance Kestrel scooped him up and ran toward the trail, the ax leaving a deep and terrible scar in the earth behind her.

  THE YELLOW EYES

  Night was already curling its cold fingers around the village as Kestrel dragged the woodchopper’s ax out of the forest. Pippit was wound around her neck, snoring. She staggered past the woodchopper’s house, then sat down with a relieved thump.

  She landed in a puddle and sighed.

  The contents of the woodchopper’s house had been piled back inside, and his hat had been nailed to a nearby tree stump. It looked weirdly jolly, as though he had gone on a break and was going to walk around the corner to retrieve it at any moment. It was one of the rituals the villagers did after a grabber attack. Sometimes, when she was half asleep, Kestrel glimpsed the nailed-up hats and thought there were disembodied heads everywhere.

  The door to his house opened, and Kestrel ducked.

  Hannah slowly came out and stood in the doorway, staring at the grabber’s trail, not seeing Kestrel in the gloom. Her face was white. Hannah looked around, her expression wobbling, then when she was sure she was alone she let out a choked sob.

  It took Kestrel a moment to remember that the woodchopper was her father.

  The thought of anything happening to her own dad made Kestrel squirm with horror. For a second, she considered running over and giving Hannah a hug. Her legs even twitched. Then she had a vision of Hannah snarling and throwing her back into the puddle, and changed her mind.

  Kestrel wished she could crawl back into the forest as Hannah continued to cry. A patch of red, spongy bloodmoss on the ground in front of her started squirming. Kestrel leaned away from it, silently willing Hannah to leave before it reached her and started eating her boots. Finally, after two horrible minutes, Hannah went back inside and slammed the door.

  Kestrel sprang up just as the bloodmoss reached her toes.She edged around it and, with a final burst of effort, carried the ax toward her mother’s house.

  But all she could think about now was her own dad. He hadn’t been back in weeks, and each absence was bigger and more worrying than the one before. He tracked and trapped wolves with a stubbornness that scared even her, and she was certain that one day a wolf would take him down. He knew everything about them, and he’d taught Kestrel all of it, from interpreting their howls to following their tracks. But it didn’t make Kestrel feel like he was any safer. If anything, it made her shiver even harder when she heard the yowl that meant hunger.

  Walt, the stoker who kept the wolf fire burning, saw Kestrel approach and froze with his great mustache bristling. His eyes traveled down the length of the ax Kestrel was carrying, to its bent and dinted blade.

  “Fletcher!” he hollered. Then he started heaving logs onto the fire again, his job apparently done.

  Ike Fletcher sprang from his house like an eager rabbit, crumbs falling from the front of his shirt, and pursed his horrible thin lips at Kestrel.

  “Good,” he said, as though Kestrel had performed a clever trick. “We’re indebted to your mother.”

  Kestrel wanted to shout What about me? She turned away and stomped toward the house. Within minutes, word of her return would travel around the village, and cakes and biscuits and bowls of soup would start piling up outside her mother’s door. They were scared that if they didn’t thank the old woman for sending Kestrel out, she would do something terrible.

  She had all their teeth, after all.

  Kestrel shivered and plucked Pippit from her neck.

  “Come find me later,” she said. “I’m going in, okay?”

  Pippit grumbled and slinked away. Kestrel raised her fist and knocked on the splintered door, which swung open under her touch.

  The black dog appeared from nowhere and gripped the ax handle between its teeth. Kestrel dropped it obediently, the blood rushing back into her hands, and stepped inside. Her mother was waiting with open arms.

  “
I knew you’d do it, sweetie,” she said with a perfect impression of warmth. “Come closer and tell me all about it.”

  Kestrel had to force her legs to move. She crawled through the tunnel in the weave and sat on the edge of her mother’s swept-out skirt, which was as far away as she could get without being disobedient. Her mother reached out and wrapped her fingers around Kestrel’s shoulders, pulling her into a bony embrace.

  “It was a spider,” Kestrel said into her shoulder, trying not to breathe in the sweet, cloying smell of her mother’s breath. She remembered the four-eyed creature in the grabber’s stomach and wondered if she should ask about it, but something told her that it wasn’t a good idea. She didn’t want to be accused of not finishing the job. She suppressed a shudder. “It had lots of fingers,” she added lamely.

  Her mother pushed her away, still holding her by the shoulders, and studied her face.

  “Nothing else?” she said.

  “Not really,” said Kestrel, certain that her face was turning red. The harder she tried not to think about the yellow eyes, the more brightly they burned behind her eyelids. “Can I go now?”

  “You’re hiding something,” her mother said, so softly that it took Kestrel a moment to notice the threat in her voice. “I know my daughter’s face when she’s lying.”

  “Why don’t you just leave me alone?” Kestrel burst out.

  With one hand still gripping Kestrel’s shoulder, her mother snatched one of the candles sitting next to her and pressed it to the side of Kestrel’s face. “Get off!” Kestrel yelled, trying to pry her mother’s hands away.

  “I’ll teach you not to be rude,” her mother hissed. “You think you’re so strong, but you wouldn’t be anything without me, you little—”

  There was a clang outside the door, and the sound of something shattering. One of the villagers had dropped a bowl of soup. Her mother hesitated, then lowered the candle. Kestrel fell away from her and opened her eyes. Red splotches floated in the middle of her vision. She touched her eyelids frantically. If she didn’t have her vision, she’d lose the thing that made her a good hunter.