by M Sawyer
“I can relate to feeling like some inhuman...thing,” Nolin said, “stuck in a place I don’t belong. Maybe I wish I could just be something like that. At least then I could have an excuse to feel so weird with people. I would make much more sense.”
“Well, that’s exactly how those people felt,” Ms. Savage said. “Weird isn’t a bad thing, Nolin. Like I always say, there are only two kinds of people in the world: the weird and the boring. Take your pick.”
Nolin smiled grimly, though she didn’t feel any better. Her fingers twisted inside her pockets.
A crack was forming in her mind, breaking open along the seam of something sealed up long ago. She felt she was on the verge of unraveling some mystery. The crack deepened like a fissure in the earth, and she feared what was hidden underneath.
Chapter 28
MELISSA WALKED THROUGH the forest, barefoot. She knew where she was going. She always did.
The massive tree rose in the darkness. She approached its powerful trunk as she had many times before. This time, there was someone else beneath the tree.
A thin, wild figure with long, dark hair and even darker eyes sat cross-legged under the trunk, waiting, peering up at her with a grim smile. Dark circles carved out hollows under the creature’s eyes. The lips were pale blue. Large, black eyes glittered dangerously. The ragged girl was pale as a corpse.
Melissa froze, an odd mixture of terror and longing fixing her to the spot. The figure’s blue lips moved slowly, carefully forming words with no sound.
“I… I can’t hear you,” Melissa said, her voice and body trembling.
Grinning with a smile that didn’t reach the eyes, the creature pushed herself to her feet and approached Melissa. They were exactly the same height. The creature’s lips moved again. Her voice was rough and low, like stones rubbing together, her breath like cold wind.
Come and find me, she said.
Melissa’s eyes snapped open. She lay paralyzed in her bed, arms and legs splayed. Inside her bony chest, her tired lungs struggled to draw breath.
The fear and cold she’d felt in the dream still engulfed her. These were not ordinary dreams. She learned that long ago. She wanted them to stop.
For years, Melissa had tried to convince herself that the strange things she saw were in her imagination. The dreams, the voices, the dark-eyed face that watched from the shadows, the face that both thrilled and terrified her, that she longed for and dreaded all at once.
She forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply. Her eyes darted around the room, scouring the shadowy corners for the white flash of a face.
She was alone.
***
Nolin thumbed through Melissa’s books, half-watching the stairway. She heard the groan of the bed only once, followed by soft creaking and footsteps to the bathroom. Melissa was definitely awake. Did she ever plan on leaving her room? Nolin’s restless fingers twitched. There was much she wanted to know. Should she go looking while Melissa was home?
The box of notebooks in the garage. The studio, full of Melissa’s sketches and illustrations of strange creatures, and the drawing of the tree that she’d stumbled across when she was ten.
She’d completely forgotten about that drawing until her walk home from the library. The memory came to her in a flash, and she felt the textured drawing paper under her fingers again, saw the scratchy ink lines, felt the weight of the sketchbook in her hands and the sudden pounding of her heart as she’d realized what she was looking at: a drawing of a tree that only existed in her dreams.
Nolin found the old copy of The Bell Jar. Nearly every page had been dog-eared at some point, and now those corners held on for dear life, some dangling by the last fibers of the worn seams. How often had she read that book in her childhood? How many times had Melissa read it before her?
Nolin remembered turning those pages, thinking of her mother under the bell jar of madness, strapped to a cold metal table with wires attached to her head, electricity jolting through her body.
“Are they going to shock her?”
“No, they don’t do that anymore.”
Nolin’s heart skipped a beat. She recalled that horrible day in the hospital and her father telling her Melissa was even sicker than they thought.
Are they going to shock her?
Nolin shuddered, snapped the book closed, and shoved it back into the bookshelf.
She slinked up the stairs and tiptoed down the hall, skipping the squeaky spots and listening for movement in Melissa’s bedroom. Praying the studio door wouldn’t creak, she pushed it open.
The studio was silent, as if the room were holding its breath. It was a much dustier version of the studio she remembered, everything still in its place right down to the configuration of watercolor brushes sprouting upright from the jar on the desk. The drawing taped to the desk was the same one that had been there when she’d run away. The mermaids. Nolin’s heart dropped. Melissa probably hadn’t been in this room at all.
Nolin glanced over her shoulder one last time to make sure her mother hadn’t crept up behind her, like she tended to do.
She squatted down in front of the lowest shelves to run her finger across the aged spines of the sketchbooks. In which book had she found the drawing of the tree? She couldn’t remember. So many of the books looked the same.
Nolin chose a book near the middle. It didn’t slide out easily. Once it did, the other books exhaled with relief as they expanded to fill the space. The spine creaked when Nolin pried its covers apart. The book had been closed for so long that she had to peel each page from the one behind it in order to turn them.
This wasn’t the right book. It was just pages and pages of doodles, spirals, and swirls that turned into tree branches, rough sketches of human figures growing more and more stylized. Nolin did her best to wedge it back into the shelf where she’d found it.
There were dozens of sketchbooks; how was she supposed to find the one she was looking for? She ran her eyes over the rows of sketchbooks again. Nothing leapt out at her. Sighing, she stood up to examine the higher shelves.
Her vision swam when she stood up. The room melted together in a muddy wash. Nolin rubbed her eyes and blinked the dizziness away. The room came back into focus, and her gaze fell on a small, pale-gray object on the top shelf.
Something in her heart twanged like a guitar string, and she plucked the object off the shelf.
It wasn’t actually gray, but light pink and covered in dust. The object was made of yarn, stiffened with age. Nolin peeled two knitted flaps apart with her thumb and realized it was a tiny shoe, bunched and curled up. Three tiny roses decorated the toe.
Nolin’s forehead wrinkled. She struggled to unearth whatever it was in her mind that was fighting to rise to the surface. She flicked one of the little roses back and forth with her index finger. She’d seen this shoe before, in this studio, but somewhere else too. Where?
Her mind strained as if it were untying a massive knot. She turned the shoe over in her hand, poking her fingers inside it and fiddling with the little roses, waiting for the tactility of it to dislodge her memory. Though the windows were shut, for a moment she thought she smelled tree sap and the musty smell of dead leaves.
Nolin gasped. An image flashed in her mind’s eye.
She remembered holding an identical shoe when she was a child, and she’d been sitting beneath a gigantic tree that had nearly fallen over, holding to the earth with five massive roots like fingers clinging to the ground.
The tree in her dreams. The tree in her mother’s drawing. She’d been to that tree, and she’d found a shoe just like this beneath it.
The tree was real.
She’d been dreaming about it all her life, and it was real.
Suddenly, she felt dizzy. Sick. How had she known about it if she’d never been there until that day in the woods? This shoe, this meant something. How had the shoe’s mate gotten so far into the forest?
Her memory rolled over like a hibernating beas
t, something from when she’d found the mysterious tree, something even older and darker that drew her in, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to see it. She closed her trembling hand around the shoe and slipped it into the pocket of her jeans.
Sooner or later, she knew her memory would crack wide open like Pandora’s box. The answers to every question she’d ever had would fly out, whether she wanted to know them or not.
Chapter 29
WINTER WAS OVER, but the spring nights were still chilly. The Shadow had to dig into the ground each night to keep warm. Sometimes she wished she could just get hypothermia one night and not have to wake up to this game anymore.
Tiny buds dotted the skeletal branches, opening a little more every day. She tried to be patient like the trees. The trees could stand for centuries, withstanding the storms and terrors around them. They surrendered their leaves in the autumn, coating the forest floor with a lush carpet of red and orange. They waited through the winter, the sap slowing to almost stagnation. Everything about the trees waited.
Now, in the spring, the buds returned and uncurled into leaves that would soak in the sunlight. They’d nourish the tree through summer storms, the heat. In autumn, when the fruit was harvested by scurrying creatures and carried off to winter dens, the leaves would fall again.
How appropriate that her hope should be reignited in the spring.
A soft breeze blew. Instead of the rustling of leaves, budded branches bumped together, filling the woods with a symphony of creaks and knocks. The Claw Tree swayed above her. The wood groaned. She sometimes wondered if the roots of this tree would collapse on her someday. It had stood for her entire life. She had been reborn under this tree; her life had ended and begun here, when she’d been Changed to the creature she was now.
She had been human once.
Sometimes she tried to recall the feeling of being human. It was so long ago, such a brief period in her life. Her old identity had disappeared. Human suffering no longer concerned her, only disgusted her. That’s why she chose to live in the forest and not as a human. The forest made sense. It took care of itself.
Of course, some aspects of the human life still haunted her, and that was why she chose to pursue it. She could have the best of both worlds, couldn’t she?
A fat robin sang in a tree just outside her den. The Shadow could watch birds for hours. They let her get close to them. Sometimes they even landed on her as if she were just another tree. The robin swooped to the ground and landed, hopped along until it found a nice sprig of dead grass. It collected its prize in its beak and flitted back to its branch, where it poked the grass into a half-formed nest. It would be a mother soon.
Mother.
The Shadow nestled deeper into her pile of leaves, snuggling down into the warmth. Spring, with its new life and tiny young birds, reminded her of the night she became a true outsider—not human, but not goblin, either. The only time she’d held a baby in her arms.
What kind of monster kidnaps a baby? The idea had always sickened her. Even worse, what creature takes the baby and leaves a twisted, demented substitute in its place? She thought of the human mothers of changelings who spent their lives knowing in their hearts that their baby was gone. Mothers always knew.
The goblins, as the Shadow had thought of them, had their reasons, of course.
The race was dying. The few goblins that remained were just the genetic dregs of fairies, wood nymphs, sprites, true goblins, and other magical folk that once ran wild in the forests of Northern Europe, their powers so diluted by centuries of interbreeding that they hardly resembled their ancestors. The switching of children simply delayed extinction and provided a way for the sickly goblin spawn to survive in the care of humans and their superior medicine. The hardier human children were brought to the woods and Changed, like the Shadow had been, until they were no longer truly human, but something much stronger that could survive in the woods with power so ancient and nuanced, she had only begun to explore it.
The Shadow understood why children were taken, but every time she thought of that evil deed, her stomach recoiled. Nothing could justify that atrocity.
She didn’t remember the night she was stolen from her cradle. Images of her true mother haunted her memory when she was very young, before she understood what she was. For years, she wasn’t sure where those images had come from until the time came for the goblins to steal another child.
A goblin child had just been born—a male, ugly and ill. The goblins watched the town for weeks, searching for a strong male infant to trade. They found one—a healthy baby boy in a loving family with many children. One odd child wouldn’t stand out so much in a large family. They formed their plan to steal the child on a hot summer night.
The Shadow watched it happen.
She’d watched the goblin mother spider up the outside wall of the two-story house, slip into the nursery window and return, seconds later, with a squirming bundle in her arms. Wearing a hideous grin, the mother ran to the others hiding in the woods, carrying her prize in one hand, the blanket wrapped around it in a crude sack. The goblin baby wailed inside the house.
They all ran back to the Claw Tree, their sacred place, for the baby to be Changed. The goblin mother placed the boy beneath the Claw Tree, the Tree of Dreams, as they sometimes called it, and placed a tiny drop of the tree’s sap on the boy’s tongue. The baby giggled and reached for the thin branches that extended down to cradle him, wrapping him in a gentle web of twigs and leaves. The boy would spend the night this way, as the Shadow had when she’d been Changed. The magic of their sacred tree would seep into his veins and connect his mind to the woods, to the goblins. By morning he would be a part of the forest, like them.
The Shadow couldn’t sleep that night. She lay in the dirt, her eyes fixed on the sleeping infant beneath the tree. The other goblins slept around her, their hulking shapes rising and falling gently with their breath.
Less than an hour before, this baby had been asleep in his crib, in a house with his family. Now a sickly curse lay in his place. This poor boy was doomed to a life like hers, trapped between two worlds and isolated among these creatures who cared only for their own survival.
She rose to watch the infant sleep in the embrace of the tree. His feathery eyelashes brushed the tops of his smooth cheeks. The tree had wrapped its woody tendrils around his head like a crown. She didn’t know exactly how one was Changed, or whether it really took the whole night, and she had no idea how much the boy had been Changed already. He looked the same. His skin was still soft, pink. Something about him still felt right and different from the woods around him.
A strange thought visited her: he could be hers.
For a moment, images of a little boy running through the woods with her flitted across her mind’s eye. She thought of teaching him the little she knew about the forest, and life, teaching him to speak the goblin language or even the English she’d learned from observing humans. Perhaps life in the woods wouldn’t be so bad if she had another stolen human to share it with. Maybe she’d raise the boy herself. They were the same, two humans snatched from their families and cursed to live in the woods like animals. They’d understand each other. She’d have a companion, a child, someone to care for and fill the empty place in her heart that should have been occupied by her own family.
The boy opened his eyes. He didn’t cry. He stared back at her, his blue eyes shining in the darkness. He had no idea what was happening to him, what he was becoming.
A hot tear spilled out onto the Shadow’s cheek. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t watch this innocent child Change and have the burden of a damaged family on her conscience. Glancing over her shoulder at the sleeping creatures, she untangled the boy from the branches, praying he’d stay silent. He gazed up at her with enormous blue eyes, unafraid and curious. His stubby arms reached for her. His toothless mouth broke into a smile.
When he was free of the tree’s grasp, the Shadow snatched up the baby and crept away from t
he sleeping goblins. She sprinted back toward the house, clutching the warm child to her chest. The jostling didn’t alarm him—he squealed with delight at the unexpected ride. He snagged a handful of the Shadow’s hair and tugged. She kept running. Even over the sound of the child’s glee and the fall of her footsteps, she could hear her own breathing and the pounding of her heart.
The boy’s house stood silent and dark. She had no idea what she was doing; she didn’t know how to sneak into a house the way the goblins did, didn’t know how to climb walls. She’d never tried, especially with a squirming infant in tow. Had her years with the goblins been enough to endow her with these gifts?
There was only one way to find out.
The boy stayed quiet. Perhaps he understood the importance of what she was about to do, could sense her concentration as she approached the back of the house. The white wall glowed in the moonlight. It felt more like an immense tower than a two-story suburban home.
She realized she couldn’t hear the goblin child’s cries. Maybe it had fallen asleep. Or worse, maybe the human mother had already heard the cries, gotten out of bed to comfort her child, and discovered the creature. What if it was too late?
The Shadow looked down at the baby. Her heart swelled. She wanted him to grow, to be safe and happy. Warmth bloomed in her chest as the baby stroked her arm with his chubby hand. He spit and blew bubbles that popped on his pink little lips. She stifled a laugh. The thought came to her again; this child could change her life. She could run away with him, raise him as her own.
No.
He was human, like she had been once, untainted by the evil lurking in the forest. He’d only been with them for an hour or two. He was still pure.
The Shadow looked up the wall again. Stars glittered in the endless sky above the roof. She took a deep breath, tucked the baby under her arm, and pressed her hand to the smooth wall. It felt warm under her touch—unnaturally warm. Her hand tingled. Finally, she bent her knees and jumped.
