by Taryn Tyler
“Like your name.” Her honey colored eyes had wrinkled around the corners as she had draped the cloak around the plain gray of my skirt and bodice, covering the worn, heavy boots on my feet that had once been Greta's.
“You won't wear it of course.” Greta had said almost the moment Gran had gone. “It's asking for trouble, brazen finery like that. The weres and hobgoblins will swallow you alive. Not to mention the village boys. Now there's a kettle I don't need boiling yet.”
I had glared at her. It was a kettle she would never be ready for no matter how old I got. If Greta had her way I'd end up a spinster like her, condemned forever to drab grays and browns or whatever other rustic tone the wool was when the goat herders sold it to us. She'd taken the cloak and locked it away in the cupboard as if the bright hues would come to life and devour us.
Greta finished her supper. She put out the fire while I washed the dishes then we both climbed the rickety ladder up onto the loft. I laid next to her in the pile of straw with our quilt tucked beneath my chin. The wind moaned and howled outside. Unless it was the ghosts and weres. For all I knew they were the same thing.
I tried to sleep. At least I think I tried. My mind flooded with the image of Gran wandering alone in the darkness of the storm. I gritted my teeth and tightened my fingers into fists, willing myself to hold still. Soon Greta was snoring beside me.
I peeled back my half of the quilt and rolled out from underneath it, careful not to let cold air sidle through to the straw and wake Greta. I bit back a yelp as the chill of the night poured into my skin, harsher than ever now that the fire was gone. I smoothed my palm over the quilt, pressing it back down over the straw. My breath held, suspended in my ches. I made my way down the ladder, convinced that Greta would wake at any moment.
At last my feet touched the damp earthen floor, cold like ice. I turned and scurried around the room for my boots, my extra bodice, my shawl, and my gray cloak. Once I had them on my teeth stopped chattering. A fresh gust swept through the crack beneath the door. The wool scattered across the floor along with a flaky sprinkling of fresh snow. The howl sounded again outside. The sound vibrated through me, chilling me to the bone.
I snatched a basket full of thread off the floor and took out the spools, setting them silently onto the floor. If I found Gran she would need food, herbs, bandages perhaps. I wished I knew what exactly she would need. She was the one who knew the herbs. She had to, living alone in the wood. I took the cheese from the food cupboard along with what was left of the morning's bread. It was hard and dry but I could soften it with the stew Gran had never come for. I ladled the cold gravy and vegetables into a bowl and wrapped it in a piece of wool at the bottom of the basket. I scanned Greta's collection of herbs. The bottles winked at me with a flicker of moonlight from the window but I couldn't see what the ground powders inside were. Tarragon. Lavender. Sage. Greta kept mostly cooking herbs. I piled them all into the basket and turned toward the door.
I stopped. Without quite knowing why I pivoted. The locked cupboard in the corner cast a long mysterious shadow across the floor. My eyes strayed to the lock.
My cloak. The red one Gran had made me. It was only the first snow. Greta hadn't lined my gray cloak yet for winter. I would need them both to keep me warm out there in the chill of night.
I took Greta's cloak off the hook next to the door and fumbled in the pockets for her key. I felt nothing but the familiar course flop of wool and Greta's tight, tiny stitches.
The night howled again outside. Shivers leapt through me. “I'm coming Gran.” I threw the cloak down and looked around the room. Where else would Greta keep the key? It could be in any basket. In any chest. Did she sleep with it hidden between her bosoms so that I would have no hope of finding it?
But that wasn't Greta. She might put something where I was least likely to look for it but she would also put it somewhere that made sense. Somewhere practical for her. I pressed my lips together. Where would make sense inside Greta's neat, ordered mind?
The spinning wheel. She had her hand on it almost every moment of the day and I never touched it without her eyes on me from behind as she commented on my work. I stepped toward it and examined the spokes on the wheel, ran my fingers over the needle in the dark, felt underneath the foot treadle. I sighed. Nothing.
I sank down onto Greta's chair with more force than I should have with Greta only a few feet above me. She didn't stir. Something clinked against the ground beneath me. I bent over and peered between my ankles, letting my bushy mess of hair drape against the ground. A tiny shadow lay beneath the chair. A tiny key shaped shadow.
I snatched it up and swept toward the locked cupboard. It took a few tries but the lock finally snapped apart. The door creaked as I pulled it open. A single board lay across the middle. The top shelf was empty but below the board sat a lump of fabric, magnificent even in the dark. It smelled sweet and frothy and soft. Just like Gran.
I whisked the cloak into my arms and held it up to my nose, soaking in the scent. Like laughter. Like stillness. I unclasped the clasp and flung the wool over my shoulders. It settled over my other cloak, draping over me like a protective fog. Warmth spread through me. One side of the cloak weighed down more heavily than the other, pulling tight against the carved wooden clasp.
I slid my hand inside the right pocket and touched a lump of cold, smooth metal. The shape was familiar. I ran my finger along the long sharp tip, pressed my palm against the knobby head. A spindle. I lifted it out of my pocket. Its smooth surface almost seemed to gleam in the dark. I held it up to the moonlight to get a better look.
I gasped. Gold. Solid gold. But that wasn't all. On the head, right below the needle, was the engraving of a single rose. The petals twirled around the center exactly the way they did on the cloak's clasp.
“Like your name.” Gran had said when she'd fastened the clasp beneath my chin.
An uneasy feeling swept through me. A kind of queasiness as if I'd seen the spindle before in some kind of nightmare. I shook myself. Ridiculous of course. I'd never seen anything gold before in my life. For all I knew it wasn't even real gold. There were other minerals, weren't there, that looked like gold?
I didn't have time for mysteries. Gran needed me. I thrust the spindle back into my pocket and headed for the door. I glanced at the flint and candles by the fireplace. This wind would smother any flame I tried to bring out into it but the moon was bright. I would have to trust that it would be enough.
It was cold inside. It was colder outside. A gust greeted me as I stepped through the door. I gripped the basket in my hands and closed the latch behind me, shivering. The wind gnawed at my nose and chin with icicle teeth. The night howled again, strong and wild. Hungry. The cold lessened as the call stirred fire through my veins.
I stepped forward, leaving a trail of foot shaped shadows in the virgin snow behind me. The tall gray specters of the other village houses slipped past me, one after the other under the bright pool of moonlight as I followed the road toward the wood. The village slept. I passed the bakery, the ovens heated with nothing but ash. I passed the mill, still like a corpse.
Asleep? The village might have been dead for its stillness. How could I ever have feared waking Greta? The fires of hell itself could never rouse anyone who lived here, just outside the cusp of the wood, afraid to enter it, afraid to remember how close it loomed.
At last I reached the edge of the wood. Tall oaks and laurels towered above me, binding their leaves and branches around each other in a tight embrace. I looked up at the swirl of clouds overhead. It would be the last I would see of the sky that night. The last I would see of the sky at all if the ghosts or hobgoblins found me. Or the weres. Even the moonlight would have trouble squeezing through once I was locked under the canopy of the tree branches.
Something stirred from inside the darkness. Shadow moved against shadow. A fox or a badger. A wolf or a hobgoblin.
A shiver crawled its way up my spine beneath my layers of clothin
g, turning itself into an unfamiliar tingle in my belly. My pulse and breath quickened. I stepped forward.
There. I'd done it. I'd stepped out of the village. Farther from home than I'd ever been before. Farther than any of the villagers had gone.
Any of the live ones that is.
I moved forward. The jitters fluttering through my chest dissolved as I turned the constant steps, one after the other, into a kind of rhythmic dance. My fingers and nose turned numb with cold. Straight up the road. Gran had once said I would know I was close to her cottage when I came to a creek. I listened for the sound of water but all I could hear was the shrill howl of the wind.
No. That was the animal call again. The howl that was neither ghost nor wind. Every time I heard it it seemed to come from deeper and deeper inside the woods and yet it sounded louder, almost as if it were vibrating from inside my own being.
The branches rustled. Animals scurried around my ankles. The air moaned with a voice that was almost human. I could almost catch words, short and monosyllabic, brushing past my ears in chilling song notes. “Lost” “Run” “Gone” “Hide”. Imagined or heard, the threats trickled into my mind.
I shook my head, trying to hold them out with thoughts that were my own. Thoughts of Gran. Thoughts of her cottage. What it might look like when I found her and brought her to it. She had told me once that roses climbed over the walls and fence like icing. Greta thought flowers were silly but Gran didn't. She had never been much like the villagers. She didn't talk as much. She didn't work as much. And she laughed. Even when she wobbled and shook with cold and hunger she still laughed. I'd never even seen her inside the village except when she came to visit Greta and I on full moons.
The wind shrieked, pounding against me from every side. I pulled my cloak up around my neck, feeling the soft warmth of the wool with my frost stiffened fingers. The path twisted and swirled around bushes and tree trunks. When I entered the forest I had known I was heading north. Now I didn't know what direction I was going, only that I was following the only path available to me, not much wider than a deer trail. It was rough and narrow and full of more twists than I could count. Rustles and growls and chirps penetrated through the constant whir of the wind.
“Lost.” It was unmistakably a child's moan, cold and fragile like ice. “Gone.” A hiss like when a kettle of tea was ready.
The voices of the dead. If I listened they would lead me into a ditch or at the very least a painful tree branch. I hummed to myself, trying to shut them out. The song was Gran's, slow, monotone but melodious. I surrendered my voice to it, letting it carry me away in the swell of the music, but the voices only grew louder.
“Lost.” “Go.” “Gone.” They could have been flesh children hissing like snakes in my ear, they were so loud.
Crunch.
Footsteps now. Close. I took a deep breath, forcing myself to keep a steady pace. All the ghosts could do was frighten me. Everyone knew they couldn't touch you. Only scare you into hurting yourself.
Everyone knew. That had never stopped it from working before.
I hummed louder, letting Gran's song whistle out of my lungs, soaring over the fury of the wind with the force of my breath. A shadow floated past me.
Only it wasn't a shadow. It was too pale. Too still. Where the moonlight shone I could see her features as clearly as if she had been alive. A tiny nose. One wide blinking eye. Trees and ferns filled the darkness where the rest of her face should have been.
I closed my eyes then forced myself to open them. The ghost child's face was gone. I listened, rooted to the earth, my heart pounding in my chest. Silence.
I resumed Gran's song. The sweet, haunting melody filled my lungs, calming me. It had no words and yet its meaning rooted itself in my mind, changing as it wound through me like Greta's threads around a spool. Tight and quick and clean.
I stepped forward. The footsteps moved behind me. Closer this time. I could hear breathing. A heavy heave, deep inside a broad chest. Too big to be a ghost child's. Too alive.
“Lost.” The ghost voices swirled through my ears, mingling into a single breath. I could taste their warning. Despair tangled with their moans like too much thread on a wheel, tightening itself through my chest in a messy tangle. Their hunger consumed me until I wanted to cry out from the pain of the cramps. The emptiness.
I clamped my hands over my ears, turning toward the sound of the footsteps.
Crunch. The footsteps turned too. An echo of my own.
“Go” “Gone.” “Lost.” The wispish tones grew louder. The number of speakers grew. A multitude of whispers inside my head, pelting me with word after word.
I turned again.
Crunch. The footsteps followed.
The threads of despair in my chest tightened into naked fear. Any minute and I would bolt to my death.
Steady, Rose. They can't hurt you.
“Lost.” “Gone.”
Crunch.
“Go.”
Another fragment of a face drifted past me. I could barely see it through the curly strands of my hair, caked to my face by the push of the wind. A parched bleeding mouth. The red swollen puff of a cheek. An eye still wet from tears. I could feel her terror, her shock as she realized she was going to die.
A shadow moved toward me from behind, blocking the light. The bits of face disappeared. I turned around toward the shadow.
Crunch.
I saw nothing but more trees in the darkness.
“Lost.” “Gone.”
I shook my head, dizzy from turning. I was trapped in some kind of sick harvest dance. Icy chills vibrated through my veins, my stomach, my head. Thoughts wouldn't form inside my mind. My mouth grew dry.
“Stop it.” I screamed so loud that it hurt my throat. “Go away. Go away and leave me alone.”
The moans stopped. The first ghost child blinked at me with a single visible eye, then her pale gray skin vanished like a vapor into the moonlight. Their fear, their sorrow, their hunger, all vanished.
The ghosts were gone but I was not alone. I could feel a presence still lurking in the darkness behind me.
Crunch. The steps moved toward me. The breathing was close enough for me to feel its warmth in the cold winter air.
“Who are you?” I demanded without turning.
“My name is Boris.” A young man's voice said. “You appear to be lost.”
I turned around. I could just make out a head of curly brown hair flaked with snow and a long green hunting cloak. Boris flashed me a crooked smile, illuminated perfectly by the light of the moon.
I breathed deep, holding back a sigh of relief. Just because he wasn't a monster didn't mean he was safe. “I'm not lost.” I said “Ghosts were talking to me.” I knew where the path led. What I didn't know was what lay between me and Gran's cottage. Or what waited for me once I reached it.
Boris stood still, silent for a moment. The wind filtered through the trees in a soft whisper. “There are quite a lot of ghosts around here.” He said.
“I know.” I stepped closer to get a better look at him. Striking cheekbones gleamed in the moonlight. His eyes were a warm, deep amber. His smile deepened into a grin that made me like him immediately and fear him even quicker. I knew what kind of creatures roamed these woods on a full moon and I had never seen him in the village. I would have remembered.
“You shouldn't be out here alone. At all actually.” Boris tilted his head. The amber in his eyes glinted a mischievous gold. “Danger lurks behind every tree. Weres. Hobgoblins . . . Ghosts.”
“And witches.” I said, remembering Greta's warning before I'd left the house.
Boris laughed. “Yes. Witches too. Perhaps I ought to take you somewhere they can't hex you.”
“I must find my Gran.” I said. “She . . . she was supposed to come to supper but she never arrived.”
Boris shrugged. “It's a cold night. Perhaps she decided her own hearth would be better than a long walk through the wood.”
I shook my head. “Not Gran.” My throat caught on the words. I bit my lip to keep from crying.
Boris's smile softened. “There now. Let's not make your lovely eyes as red as your hair. We'll just have to find her won't we?”
I blinked up at him. “You'll help me?”
He laughed. “Of course. There we are. There's a smile. Promise me you won't let the overly talkative ghosts float off with it again. These woods are cold and dreary without it.”
We walked together. The trees thickened. The pools of light pouring in through the forest canopy became more sparse. So much darkness engulfed us that I felt almost blind. Boris didn't speak. Neither of us did. We were too absorbed in the stillness of the night, listening for signs of Gran in the absence of light to see by. But at least the ghosts didn't return and it was good to know that someone made of flesh and blood walked beside me even if I was still miles away from trusting him.
What would Greta say if she knew I was walking through the wood on the arm of a young man on a full moon? I tried to imagine her quiet serene face twisted into shock but I couldn't imagine more than a dour downward curve of the lips as she told me how dangerous it was.
No amount of pressed lips could stop me from finding Gran. The somber village life already seemed so far away. Out here the world was alive. I felt the dangerous pulse of the woodland course through me even in the silence. If I could choose a place to die I would be honored to rest beneath the tall trunks of the trees and let my soul sink like a root into the ground. It would be better than shriveling into an old woman with a carding comb in my hand.
The gentle trickle of water washed over my ears. I started and let go of Boris's arm. “We're close to the cottage.” My heartbeat quickened. “Perhaps she never left after all.” I sprinted forward, unable to make my feet move fast enough.
Crunch. Boris strode beside me. I brushed past the trees, all but guessing where the path lay. I reached the creek. The thin planks of the footbridge clattered beneath my feet. “
