What the Woods Keep

by Katya de Becerra

  “We only take things the forest discards, Hayden.” Mom’s voice no longer has the playful tone it held a minute ago. She stops and looks at me, and I read some strange conflict in her eyes. The branch I broke falls out of my hand. I feel so sad that I disappointed her, that I did something wrong. Silence. My eyes become wet.

  “Oh, don’t cry, my love.” Mom’s expression softens, a swift change. She kneels in front of me and takes my little hands into hers. Her skin is warm—not like in the nightmares I used to have as a child in the year after she disappeared. I take a few rapid breaths, pushing the tears back. Holding my hands, Mom whispers, “It’s not important now, but there will come a time when it’s very important that you listen to me, to what I have to say to you, even if it’s not said with words. Can you promise me that you’ll listen carefully when the time comes to listen? When I’m no longer around?”

  “‘No longer around’?” I repeat, her words a frightening puzzle. Her soft voice fills me with sadness over what’s going to happen. I don’t know what it is yet or when it’s happening, but I know it’s going to shatter me.

  “One day I’ll tell you everything,” she says. “I’ll find a way to tell you.… But today?” She smiles and winks at me as she picks up the branch I broke, handing it back to me. “Let’s focus on getting that centerpiece sorted.”

  It didn’t occur to me until we started on our way back to the Manor that I never mentioned to Mom that I wanted the branch for the centerpiece. But I’d experienced so many moments just like this one—moments when Mom just happened to know exactly what I was thinking, what my anxiety was all about or what I was planning to do—that I stopped paying attention. It became my “normal.”

  When we got closer to the Manor, I saw a young woman standing on our porch. Waiting for us. The moment my eyes landed on her slim frame, I couldn’t look away. It was as if the woman was magnetic, shaping the world around her to her liking, a black hole sucking all matter in.

  The visitor had cropped short hair and skin as oddly translucent as Mom’s. There was tension coming off Mom’s body in powerful waves; it made me tear my eyes away from the visitor and look at my mother.

  I tensed up, too, though I wasn’t sure why, but my skin crawled in that instinctive way it does when you know you must run and run fast, but you do a stupid thing instead and listen to your logical mind, staying still. My logic won out that day; the woman on our porch wasn’t threatening—her stature fragile, a lonely willow tree on the riverbank. But she still made me afraid somehow, in the turn of her mouth and in the shape of her eyebrows, twisted into thin arcs of disapproval.

  A car—a dinged-up silver Volvo, to be exact—parked next to the Manor’s porch had a bumper sticker paraphrasing a Dylan Thomas poem, saying WE WILL NOT GO SILENTLY INTO THE NIGHT, and that’s what did it for me: I knew then that the woman was trouble, even before she whispered the words of the language from my dreams right into my ear. The possibility of that sound carrying over space between us defied all kinds of laws of nature. I knew then that I was dreaming—that my memory had turned into a nightmare—but the knowledge did little to assuage my sheer terror.

  17

  PROMISE NEEDS YOUR BLOOD!

  In the past, some cultures saw dreams as portals between worlds, twisted visions of our futures or glimpses of our other—unlived—lives. Dreams form a library of patterns. There are common types most dreamers experience at least once in their lifetime: flying, falling, losing teeth, showing up naked to school, the test sheet filled with the crawling spiders of a foreign alphabet.

  Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, explained dreams as our unspoken desires, expressions of our longing for the forbidden, while Carl Jung put the primary focus on our collective consciousness and its archetypes—the primal concepts of evil and good that we inherit from our ancestors and they inherited from theirs, going back to time immemorial.

  Science today has stepped away from psychoanalysis-centered dream interpretation theories in favor of an understanding that dreams actually don’t mean anything but rather are random impulses generated by the human brain out of thoughts and images stuck in our memory. What we know now is that everyone dreams, but we tend to forget our dreams shortly after waking up, and we only dream of things we’ve seen or experienced. Our brains craft dreams to make sense of consumed information.

  And then there are my dreams, my brain’s attempt to make sense of things I definitely don’t remember experiencing. More fleeting sensations than concrete images, my memories of my dreams can be set off by sounds, scents, a certain play of light. I might detect a familiar cadence in someone’s voice, which triggers the vivid sensation of hearing that alien tongue that haunts me, its whispers burning the skin of my ears. A hint of a cold draft sneaks into my room and voilà, I’m riding an unsaddled horse, wind attacking my face. And then the dreams evolve into something else. It’s me leading a bloodthirsty army, eager to set the world ablaze. It’s me running the tip of a blade against my skin, blood drops disappearing into the thirsty ground. It’s me looking at Shannon, who’s riding by my side, his features unclear but his presence setting my nerves on fire. It’s me reaching for Shannon’s face only to see the fast-shifting fog devour his features.

  It’s me hearing my blood boil in my veins in reaction to the presence of a strange woman on the Manor’s porch.

  I struggle to wake up, but the woman’s guttural murmurs cling to me, using me to escape out of the dreamscape Promise and into the waking world, leaving me stuck in limbo where I know I’m dreaming, yet can’t bring myself to wake up.

  It’s not real, I insist, but the dream-me has her eyes glued to the face of the whispering woman. My daytime logic is no help. So I turn to dream logic instead.

  I can make the woman disappear. I can silence her.

  I wish her gone, but she doesn’t let go. If anything, her figure solidifies, her murmurs in my ears turning into the loud buzzing of angry wasps.

  I wake up to the drumming of rain.

  My weary muscles are fatigued. The night of little sleep and too much action has caught up with me. I leave the bed and go to the window. Outside, all I see is rain. I stretch my limbs before leaving the room to look for Del.

  She’s downstairs, settled at the kitchen table, eyes buried in her laptop. Fingers race across the keyboard. Lips enunciate silent words as she types.

  Last night’s sleepwalking has no visible effect on Del’s physical appearance; my friend is as glowing as ever.

  “How are you feeling?” I ask.

  She peels her eyes off the screen, but her fingers don’t stop their staccato rhythm. “Great. You?”

  Right, she’s got no memory of her crawl space misadventures. Uncertain of protocol when it comes to discussing sleepwalking episodes with sleepwalkers, I say, “So you’re not suffering from any … side effects after, you know, going all creepy on me in the basement?”

  That gets her full attention. She stops typing. “What do you mean?”

  “I found you in the Manor’s basement crawl space … must have been sometime around midnight. It looked like you were trying to tunnel through the Manor’s foundation, while muttering on and on about digging deep.” I hold back the part where I took over digging duty and found the blood vials.

  Del stares at me before breaking into strained laughter. “Sorry you had to witness that. At least now I know why my nails are all messed up this morning. I must’ve forgotten to take my meds last night, which is ironic since I just told you yesterday about my condition!”

  I listen to her laugh it off—she tries too hard to sound casual, dismissive. “So you’re really okay then?”

  “I’m fine. Just embarrassed. Again, sorry I got you freaked out.”

  Del looks away, clearly uncomfortable with this conversation, but I press on, way too spooked by our encounter last night to just let this go. “Yeah, it was pretty freaky,” I say carefully. “Some things you said … they were kind of personal.”
<
br />   “Oh.” She looks up at me, crossing her arms over her chest. “I suspect it might’ve sounded like I was making sense or whatever, but the truth is, when I mumble things during my sleepwalking episodes, it doesn’t really mean anything. I just say random garbage, and it’s superembarrassing afterward. I’d love it if you could just forget it—and I’ll make sure not to forget my medication again.”

  “You had burns on your arms,” I say, feeling like I’m trying to catch Del off guard for some reason. “I put aloe on them.”

  Del rolls up her sleeves and looks at her arms, giving me a full view of her skin. “They’re fine. Are you sure?”

  I inspect them myself. Whatever was there is gone. “I-I guess not.”

  “I’m fine,” she says once more. “Maybe you were a little asleep, too.”

  I don’t quite believe her, but I let this sleepwalking business go for now. I’m all queasy myself from what I’ve found in the basement, and I worry if I start digging into Del’s secrets, she might start digging into mine. I change the topic. “How’s your group project assignment coming along?”

  “It’d be so much easier with Internet access, but I guess I can always find a public computer in a library or something when I’m ready to send this off.”

  “Fancy taking a break? I’m going for a run now to clear my head. Come with?”

  “Nah, I’m on a roll here.” Del looks up from the laptop’s screen. “What’s happening later?”

  Before I respond, I recall the instructions Mom left for me in the basement—along with the blood vials. Despite Mom’s usual cryptic manner, this time it’s pretty clear what she wants me to do: Go into the woods, locate some specific spot there, pour the vials out, and cut myself. Should I do it?

  Yeah, right. Because Mom was so trustworthy where her obsession with the woods was concerned. No, I doubt I can justify marching into the woods and doing the cutting and everything.

  A different plan forms in my head. I need information first—about my mother, about her activities in the woods, and about that woman on the porch that my murky memory dredged up last night. I have to find out why Mom looked so freaked out by the woman’s presence. But I don’t have much to go by: the beat-up old car with the menacing bumper sticker; the strange woman’s appearance, which likely has changed over the years; the fact that the woman clearly knew my mother … So my best chance at finding her would be to talk to Mom’s friends or anyone who knew her at all. Logically speaking, stop number one should be the Reaser house. Whether I’m ready to face Shannon is another story.

  To Del, I say vaguely, “Maybe I’ll go for a drive instead of the run. Have a look around. Bring us some lunch. I’ll let you know if I find a library.”

  “If you can wait till afternoon, I’d like to go with you.”

  I know Del’s going to give me hell about it, but I want to go on my recon mission alone. “Actually, I have a chore to do.”

  Now, that was a very wrong thing to say. Del’s attention is now fully on me again. “Ah, you have a mysterious chore again.”

  “Fine,” I say, feeling cornered by Del. “We’ll go for a drive together this afternoon. There’s no mystery!” To hide that there is in fact a mystery, I wrap up this encounter and head back upstairs. But even as I leave Del alone in the kitchen, I can sense her suspicion, almost palpable in the air.

  I return to my room and change into some exercise tights and a Hunter sweatshirt. I slide my feet into my pair of sneakers and lace them up tight. Ready, I step out onto the Manor’s porch. A freezing blast of wind slams into my chest.

  As I close the Manor’s door, I almost don’t notice a letter- size printout sticky-taped to it. An advertisement flyer. Well, that was quick. Or coincidental. I peel the paper off and turn my back to the wind to read it.

  Promise needs your blood!

  A blood drive call. I skim through the text about shortages of blood donations in the region. Everyone’s invited to give blood to help those in need. The location is a temporary collection point set up just off Promise’s main road. In the woods, judging from the directions given. Hmm.

  I’ve never given blood before. In fact, I can’t even remember if I’ve ever had my blood taken or skin pierced for any reason. But it’s not the prospect of donating blood that sounds alarm bells in my head; rather it’s the recurring theme of blood that keeps chasing me everywhere I turn in Promise.

  A sudden bird cry shatters my concentration. I crumple the blood drive flyer into my sweatshirt pocket and look up. The skies are alive with birds, hundreds and hundreds of black dots, crisscrossing. The longer I watch, the more I see it: an odd pattern to the birds’ seemingly chaotic movement. The birds group together to form shapes that are reminiscent of the runic symbols. Thinking I’m going nuts, I look away and then up again, but the messy cloud of birds is just that—a cloud, revealing no hidden meanings or messages. I shake it off and start walking, coming to a halt when I see something else—a white blur on the wet ground at my feet. I step back, consumed by goose bumps. A few shallow breaths calm my upturned stomach. I’m grateful I had nothing to eat this morning.

  I dare a closer look at what I realize is a bird. Or what’s left of it. Its feathers are tainted with mud, its body twisted and broken, but I still know with certainty it’s a raven. A white one with a splash of black shaped like a lopsided heart on its left wing.

  The sight of the raven brings up a memory of my pet cat. Tiger.

  Tiger had a short life, and the way he died—dropping dead one day for no apparent reason—darkened my childhood just a little bit more.

  I give myself a hug. Can’t stand it. Need to get away.

  I break into a light run, soil slippery under my unsteady feet.

  I quickly gain speed, eager to run away from the Manor, the dead raven, and Mom’s ghost, even though I know I can’t outrun Mom’s blood in my veins.

  I race across the field behind the Manor, holding my breath as I pass by the Reaser house. I stop and study the building, which shows no signs of life. No cars parked outside. Windows dark, shutters closed. The lawn unkempt and the porch sad-looking. If anyone still lives here, they don’t care much about maintenance. On impulse, I run to the house, fly up the porch stairs, and knock on the door. “Anyone? Shannon?” I yell for good measure, but the house remains silent, disinterested.

  I leave. A cold drizzle pinches at my face and flattens my hair. I increase my pace, eager for much-needed body heat. Without breaking my rhythm, I navigate my way through the field, now overtaken by wild, cold-resistant flowers and weeds. Patches of long grass reach up to my knees. At the field’s outer edge, I linger, caught on that amorphous line separating the woods from my family’s property. An ankle-high layer of fog blankets the ground, stretching as far as I can see ahead. I tease the moving river of white with the tip of my shoe.

  As I’m about to enter the woods, a white blur in my peripheral vision gets my attention. The bird swoops from above and lands on a branch high above my head. Another white raven? Could there be a whole murder of them out here? My breath still catching after my mad dash across the field, I stare at the bird. It stares back. Waits for something. A strange guardian of the forest.

  I change my mind about going into the woods and, vaguely disappointed in myself, turn around and go back to the Manor.

  I search for a shock of white on the ground. The dead raven’s body. But the bird’s remains are nowhere to be found. I even walk up and down the length of the Manor’s porch, searching for it, but the raven’s gone.

  HAYDEN B. HOLLAND MEDICAL NOTES: ONE-YEAR REVIEW

  Treating therapist: Dr. Thorfinn Erich, BS, MD, DO, PhD

  Name: Hayden Holland

  Height: four feet, six inches

  Weight: ninety-four pounds

  Date: March 3

  Medications: Currently none. Previously, at start of treatment, 0.5 mg of alprazolam daily for one month, then as needed (semi-weekly) for five months.

  The patient: Ha
yden Holland; nine years, eleven months old.

  The child looks well, dark shadows underneath her eyes almost gone, lips not bitten into a bloody pulp. Father reports Hayden’s appetite has improved.

  As we begin our session, Hayden settles on the couch, pulls her legs up, and rests her chin on her knees.

  Hayden: What’s up, Doc?

  Dr. Erich: Hayden, it’s been a year since we started working together. Do you remember why you first came to me?

  Hayden: Would you like the long story or the short one?

  Dr. Erich: How about the short one first?

  Hayden: I was brought here because I hurt a girl. Because I’m daan-ger-ooous. According to lawyers, anyway. I’m a danger to myself and to others, Doc.

  Dr. Erich: Are you being facetious about your episode in Stonebrook, Hayden?

  [She shifts, changing her position and resting her forehead on her knees, so I can no longer see her eyes. She stays like that, breathing in and out slowly, for a minute or so before raising her head to stare at me, not blinking, for another long moment. The girl scares me in moments like this. I’ve been having nightmares about her and her mother ever since Hayden was first admitted into my practice. In those nightmares, Hayden’s mother builds herself a throne made of bone but grows too weak, so her daughter has to take over the task. I’m also plagued by nightmares of a more primitive nature—the kind that wake you up at night in a cold sweat and make you recite the words of a prayer you thought long forgotten. I can’t show Hayden my fear, but a part of me suspects she already knows I fear her.]

  Dr. Erich: Do you know what facetious means, Hayden?

  Hayden: Yes. I have five tutors. One of them teaches me English literature. Her name is Irene. She’s a poet and knows her way around words. We talk for hours. She’s blind from birth. I think that’s why she freaks out around me less than the others. Because she can’t see me.