What the Woods Keep

by Katya de Becerra

  27

  UNLOCKING

  We can find patterns in a series of (seemingly) random events. If you roll dice once, the result’s considered a random event. But if you keep on rolling, random events will begin exhibiting patterns. And those patterns can be analyzed and, based on what the analysis reveals, future patterns can be predicted. I guess that makes physicists a sort of soothsayer.

  Ever since my visit to Doreen’s office, I’ve been experiencing a series of seemingly random events. The bizarre conditions of my inheritance, the moody town of Promise, Elspeth’s sinister presence, Gabriel’s amulet that either makes me trip or is actually imbued with supernatural power, and, of course, Mom’s call for bloodletting. But even with all the information I have now, I’m still not sure what patterns are emerging. Maybe my analytical method is all wrong and I need to change my perspective completely.

  For the first time in a while, I wish Dad was here with me so I could ask what the hell he thinks is happening. But can I ever trust him again, after a decade of lies? That’s another question.

  When I open the secret door and step through it, my wish is partly fulfilled—I feel Dad’s presence as I see the physical evidence of him living and working in the Manor all these years. The walk-in closet in my parents’ old bedroom doesn’t lead me into Narnia. What it reveals instead is a very cramped and dusty room full of Dad’s research.

  And here’s that anger I’ve been waiting for. A wave of fury comes over me. So yeah, Shannon didn’t make this up—my father’s been coming to Promise a lot all these years. And every time Dad looked me in the eye and said we both had to put Promise behind us, in his mind he was probably already planning his next trip. I wish there was cell reception in this town. I wish I could call Dad and tell him where I am right now and what I think of him and his lies.

  I suppress the impulse to scream. To throw things around. To break stuff. To build a bonfire of research journals in the backyard.

  Taking deep breaths, I look around me. Focus, Hayden.

  A wall made entirely of shelves is bursting with books, most of which, by the look of it, are home-printed manuscripts. A simple wooden desk is overloaded with papers and leather-bound journals. A lot of journals. There’s a serious-looking computer—bulky and military. Its screen is lit up and showing a weird moving chart, where one axis is a timeline of dates and the other carries what I’m pretty certain is a Latin symbol, but my memory draws a blank when I try to identify it. Dead languages have never been my forte. The best I can make of the symbol is that it looks like an armchair turned upside down.

  I forget about the mystery symbol the moment I focus on the contents of the chart flaring up on the computer screen, the digits are speeding toward … something. Mesmerized, I study the frenetic movement of numbers. The counter is at 570,240 when I start watching. In less than a minute, it dips below 570,000, and it’s specifically at 569,970 the moment I turn away. The numbers are large, but they’re dropping fast. In my book, anything counting backward to an unnamed event is never good.

  My heart heavy with premonition, I turn toward the sheets of continually printing data slowly coming from the nearby printer. The printout looks like historical numbers showing a steady, low count of something, its presence going back months, with small but periodic fluctuations occurring roughly once a quarter. But it looks like there was a recent huge spike in numbers, right about the time Del and I arrived in Promise. I flip through the printouts some more until my eyes register something sticking out from the dry columns of numbers. One word: muon. Suddenly the Latin symbol I couldn’t identify makes sense: it stands for mu and is used to signify the muon, an elementary particle that’s frequently found in so-called air showers, when Earth is bombarded with cosmic rays.

  I look back at the screen, at the steadily dropping numbers, and connect the dots: Dad’s monitoring the muon count in Promise.

  If tripping on the amulet’s message in the woods scared me into a primeval fight-or-flight response, seeing the muon count going up to the stratosphere makes my brain freeze. My guess is the counter is linked to some kind of muon count detector. But what’s going to happen when the chart reaches phenomenal heights? The data is confusing—a counter counting down to something, and a chart tracking muons spiking—but they both seem to be converging on some kind of event, and it is happening soon.

  Of course, I can always do nothing and hope that what I’m seeing is just an unfounded doomsday prediction. Or I can grab Del and get us the hell out of Promise, just in case. Or I can try to do something to prevent the event the numbers are counting down to. But that last option seems like the stuff of action movies. Besides, how do you stop a swarm of elementary particles?

  Flicking between the computer screen and Dad’s bursting bookshelves, I decide to do what I do best: research.

  I turn my back to the monitor and study the bookshelves. The topics range from theoretical physics to metaphysical works to myths and the paranormal. The latter mostly center on one topic I’m rather familiar with: Nibelungs.

  I hate the Nibelungs.

  The Nibelung legends may have inspired Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but the real Nibelung stories are scarce. All we know is that the Nibelungs were a half-legendary Germanic tribe. Also, they possessed or wanted to possess some kind of treasure.

  By far the most embarrassing part of all this mess is that Dad believes the Nibelungs are very much real, as in, they exist, trapped somewhere, biding their time before their release.

  By the looks of it, Dad is also certain that the key to releasing the Nibelungs is hidden right here in Promise. My fingertips turn cold and I feel as if I’m floating through space, weightless and small. Suddenly, everything clicks, forming that pattern I was so eager to see all along, only instead of triumph, I sense the beginning of a panic attack. For the first time I truly wonder if all of it—my recurring dream about the shadowy army, Mom’s clues, and Dad’s crackpot science—point toward an impossible truth. Like an obnoxious neon sign, an all-consuming question flashes through my mind: Are Nibelungs real?

  My brain foggy and breathing shallow, I scan through Dad’s binders on the desk. Numbers, unfinished calculations, formulae, graphs. Data reports going back some twenty years. From before he even met Mom. Twenty years’ worth of obsession.

  The longer I stare at the data reports, running my eyes over Dad’s spidery handwriting, the more I understand what my father’s been up to. He’s trying to model something. The starting point in his calculations is a tectonic shift that occurred centuries ago in this area, forming Edmunds’ Gorge. Dad’s hypothetical model claims this shift wasn’t a single occurrence and is likely to happen again, when the muon count spikes to a certain, rather high number. As it is about to do again, and very soon, by the looks of it.

  Ignoring the sense of dread flooding me, I remind myself that Dad is obsessed. Delusional. He’s never been okay, not since Mom didn’t come back from the woods and possibly even before that. But what if he’s right? What if Dad’s some kind of scientific equivalent of a seer no one believes until it’s too late?

  I set Dad’s reports aside and pick up a journal from the top of the pile. A handwritten diary. One of many, judging from the shelves busting with similar-looking volumes. The first entry dates to the year I turned eight. I catch my breath and leaf through the diary, all the way to the last pages.

  28

  ESCAPE

  A compelling natural force is the perfect term for a phenomenon that can’t really be explained. Stand in front of a skeptical audience and say some catastrophe happened because of a “compelling natural force,” and you will sound credible without really explaining anything. The secret is in the wording. Natural implies the phenomenon is located within the boundaries of normal human experience. Compelling means it is unlikely the phenomenon can be controlled, which shifts blame away from the authorities. And force can mean anything you want it to mean.

  In the mid-twentieth century, a group of R
ussian skiers met their disquieting end in a snow-covered wasteland deep in the Ural Mountains. Led by Igor Dyatlov, a group of nine—all experienced athletes and survivalists—perished in the freezing tundra. Their camp’s remains showed that the skiers were awakened by something at night and, spooked into a frenzy, cut their way out of their tents and dashed half-undressed for the nearby forest. There were no survivors. The official cause of death was recorded as hypothermia. But some of the unlucky travelers were missing eyes and tongues. One had traces of radiation on his body.

  By the end of the investigation, Soviet officials blamed the skiers’ demise on a compelling natural force. This indescribable but very lethal force, it was concluded, was what drove Dyatlov and his group to temporary insanity and, consequently, their deaths.

  Compelling natural force was just an abstract concept for me until the day I returned to Promise. This town, I am now convinced, has a mind of its own. From the start, Promise had a plan for me, and everyone and everything else around me are just bolts and cogs in its doomsday machine. Its heart is hidden in the woods.

  * * *

  My hands holding Dad’s journal are shaking. These things he wrote about Mom … It sounds like he really meant it. Another, uglier thought crosses my mind: How much did Dad really know about Mom’s past? What did his obsession with the Nibelungs mean in the context of his marriage to a woman who, for all I know, opened some kind of portal in the woods with her blood? I don’t need to be a genius to put two and two together: Mom was (or thought she was) a Nibelung, whatever that is. And maybe, if what I saw in the woods is real … maybe she was a Nibelung. Something other than human. And what does that make me?

  “What the hell is this place?” Del’s voice behind my back jolts me out of my trance. With a soft bang, the journal falls out of my hands and meets the floor.

  I open my mouth but can’t think of appropriate words. My best option feels like, I’m a hybrid between human and some alien species, and I think you and I are in terrible danger.

  “What’s this place?” Del asks again, absently crossing her arms over her chest.

  “My father’s lair,” I reply flatly.

  Del’s glare tells me she knows I’m not telling her everything and that she is not happy about it.

  She pushes past me, deeper into the secret office, and comes to the wall of books. She glances at the computer and then swiftly picks up the journal I dropped on the floor. My cool runs out right about now, and I grab the journal out of her hands. “My dad’s diary,” I explain when Del gives me a half–pissed off, half-questioning look. “Just some ramblings and stuff.”

  “I’d really like to know what’s going on here.” Despite Del’s attempt at controlling her voice, her exasperation spills over, mirroring the whirlpool building up inside me. “Don’t you think I have a right to know why there’s this big mystery about your father’s research? You know, since I came out here with you and this whole town’s freaking me out and no one knows or tells us what’s going on, and now there’s a computer counting down … What is it counting down to?”

  “The second coming of the Nibelungs, I presume.”

  Maybe it’s my half-Nibelungen blood rising. A wave of shivers rushes over me and my stomach twists as raindrops hit the secret room’s only window: a skylight above our heads. The skies turn gunmetal gray, readying for the onslaught.

  How can this be? Is all this one long Alice-like dream, where I followed a white rabbit into a hole and fell in way too deep? Even if I try to leave, will that be giving in to my family’s insanity? Will that be acknowledging that my mother and father really were implicated in something out of this world, something that can’t be explained with science and rationalized away? But more important, if I’m indeed half Nibelung—can I ever run away from my own nature? Will my volatile, semi-alien blood ever let me be?

  I dare a glance at Del. She’s watching the changing skies through the skylight. Her eyes are stern and her hands are tight by her sides. When she speaks, the words are a loud whisper. “This morning while you were out, I had the worst headache ever. And I almost never get headaches. But this one, it just hit me so bad and wouldn’t let up until I was on the floor, moaning in pain. I was so scared. Really scared for the first time in my life. But when it was gone, I had a clear memory of what happened that night when I sleepwalked into the Manor’s basement.”

  I avoid her eyes, avoid the finality of having to accept her words, focusing on the motion of her fingers instead. Curling and releasing. Curling and releasing. Del continues, “I remember everything about the crawl space now. And I never have any recollection of what I do during my sleepwalking episodes. But this time, I remember waking up and hearing this weird humming, like the buzzing of an electric razor. Coming from the basement. And then this creepy booming voice in my head kept saying, over and over, dig deep, dig deep, dig deep. What does all of this mean, Hayden?”

  I place my father’s diary on the desk and reach out to hug Del. She’s shivering. As I drown in her scent—a bittersweet perfume and something that’s unmistakably Del—I feel my tongue grow heavier with the weight of the words I’m about to spill. Mom’s vials, the amulet, the forest vision, Elspeth’s dark compulsion, and, of course, the latest: the extent of my dad’s research into the Nibelungs and the world-altering conclusions he’s reached as a result. But as I consider all of it now, I don’t even know where to begin. All these things just add up to a bunch of deeper mysteries. The bottom line, I realize, is that I don’t really have any answers to give Del.

  “Del, I think we should get out of here,” I tell her as I let her go. The certainty I hear in my voice comes as a surprise to me. “I wish I knew what was happening, but I don’t. Not really. I just feel that we need to go. To leave Promise. Now.”

  * * *

  We quietly pack our bags and brave the pelting raindrops to load our luggage into the rental car’s trunk. I read the agreement off Del’s face; she believes we’re doing the right thing by leaving.

  I leave the box of blood vials in my bedroom’s closet. Let this be someone else’s mystery. I don’t care. I’m choosing normal.

  I lock the Manor and hide the ring with six keys above the front door, exactly where I first found it. Elspeth can go in and do whatever she wants for all I care. I’m done. I’ll sell the Manor, like Doreen recommended, and my father will never need to know I came here at all. He can keep Promise all to himself.

  “Leaving so soon?” In our flurry of packing up the car, I don’t notice Elspeth sitting on the hood of Silverfish and watching me. Upon meeting her eyes, a shiver goes through me. In this moment I’m my mother, coming out of the woods to find this unwanted guest waiting for her on the Manor’s porch.

  “Get in the car and wait for me,” I hiss at Del. She opens her mouth in protest, but after she takes one look at Elspeth, I know Del’s alarm bells are ringing as loud as mine. In the drizzle, Elspeth’s black-clad figure has the menacing halo of a cursed saint. Del backs away from Silverfish and into our Kia, moving like someone would around a wild bear.

  With Del out of earshot, Elspeth slides off Silverfish’s hood and comes—or more like flows—toward me. Gone is her simple red dress, replaced with a tailored, sharp-shouldered black tunic, its back trailing after her. Add a pair of twisted horns and Elspeth could audition for the next Maleficent movie.

  With a sexy kind of smirk playing on her flawless face, Elspeth nods toward the Manor and says, “Why the rush?”

  As I fight the urge to follow Del into the car, a weird kind of defiance raises its head, and I give in to the hot anger flowing through my veins. “Something came up and we need to go back home earlier than planned.”

  She snorts, the crude sound contrasting with her regal composure. “Hmm … I don’t think that’s it. Let me make an educated guess. You were curious, so you took the amulet into the woods, but its message proved too much for you to handle, probably because your half-human brain can’t even comprehend what you tr
uly are, so you’re doing what a human would do—you’re running away. Am I close?”

  She is right on the money, but I won’t admit it to her. “What would you do in my place? Go cut yourself in the woods so you can maybe release a supernatural army that will … what? Destroy the world? Yeah, maybe my half-human brain finds it difficult to believe that would actually happen, but I’m not going to take the chance.”

  “You know you can’t escape this,” Elspeth says quietly. “It’s as much a part of you as your mother’s eyes or your father’s human heart.”

  “Good-bye, Elspeth. I’d say that I wish we had more time to get to know each other, but I don’t like to lie.” The drizzle turns into a rain, drops sliding down my face and clouding my vision.

  When I move toward the Kia, I hear Elspeth’s words clear and close, as if she’s right next to me, whispering into my ear. “Can I at least have the blood vials? I know you found them.”

  “They’re in the Manor. You’re welcome to them.” I turn and watch, waiting for her to move, but she stays in her spot. Her eyes trained on the Manor, Elspeth looks wistful and frustrated. I recall the runes running in lines around the Manor’s entrance and walls and more runes crudely cut into the outer surface of the box containing the vials. Runes that made my fingers tingle on contact. “You can’t enter.”

  “A little inconvenience, that’s all.”

  “Good-bye, Elspeth,” I say again. I leave her by the Manor just as the rain hits full-force.

  By the time we drive off, the downpour reaches Biblical proportions, making me doubt our chances of getting out before the roads flood.

  Del lets me drive, and after she says of Elspeth, “I don’t like her. She’s tense like a coiled snake, ready to strike,” we don’t talk till the Manor’s distorted silhouette is gone from the rearview mirror. Even then, we limit our communication to an occasional conferral on directions. When we enter the forested section of the road, the rain intensifies and the view through the car’s windows becomes opaque.