That image was so powerful, so all-encompassing and altogether terrifying that, for a moment, Matt forgot what impulse had dragged him from his bed. Worse than that, he thought he could almost hear the man’s wild, roaring laughter, the laughter of some demented god bent on destruction. Then the voice came again.
“Please, help me,” it pleaded. Not it, though—her. The worst of the storm had passed, the snow had stopped falling and in the stillness, in the quiet that often followed such storms, Matt could hear her clearly. A girl, alright, and a young one by the sound of it. He wondered for a moment, how such a one had managed to find herself here, in the Black Woods, wondered what possible reason she would have had to come, what terrible tragedy might have driven her here. But then, it had been tragedy that had driven him here too, hadn’t it?
He considered waking Cutter, but in the end decided against it. The man’s presence—while frightening in its own respect—might have went some way toward calming his nerves, toward banishing the strange, otherworldly feeling of dread pulling at Matt’s heart, but he dared not wake him. Cutter, he’d discovered, was a man of a single mind, a single purpose, and it was likely that, should he wake him, the man would refuse to go help the girl and would keep Matt from doing so as well.
Then she would be left alone, much as he was alone, for while Cutter was many things—many things, Matt thought, that he even now did not guess at—the man was not much for companionship. Not a friend. A person would have a better chance of befriending a bear and, Matt thought, would probably have less chance of getting mauled.
“Please.”
The voice was closer now or seemed to be. “I’m coming!” Matt yelled. Cutter might have been a cold-blooded bastard, but he was not, and he’d be damned if he was leaving anyone else to be alone, especially a little girl. Matt glanced around him at the great, black trunks of the trees, seeming to almost throb perversely in the moonlight, then started in the direction from which the voice had come. He would show Cutter—show himself, too—he could be brave. He was no child, not anymore, even if he had been a few days ago. He was nearly a man grown, and no man save perhaps Cutter would leave a child in the wilderness alone.
Luckily, there was a path through the trees that seemed to run in the exact direction from which the voice had come. That was a good thing—it meant that the girl was clever enough to stay on the path, knowing that was her best chance of being found. How she had survived the night he couldn’t imagine, but Matt knew she couldn’t be doing well, a thought reinforced by the weak, thready quality of her voice.
He walked for a few minutes then stopped, frowning. It was ridiculous, of course, but by some trick of the darkness and the pale moonlight, the trees seemed to have slowly crept closer, seemed to be crowding in around him.
He felt a twinge of panic but fought it down. “Say something!” he shouted, doing his best to remain calm, in control. They were only trees, after all, nothing to be frightened of.
“Here! Help, please!”
Matt’s frown deepened. That was strange. The voice seemed to have come from somewhere close behind him—which was impossible. After all, he’d only walked for a few minutes, and the voice had seemed much farther away than that. He couldn’t imagine how he could have walked past her, but he must have done so without realizing it, no doubt due to the darkness. He turned to start back down the path only to have the breath catch in his throat as he realized that the path which he had walked only moments before was no longer there. In its place, thick undergrowth choked the forest floor, seeming to glow in a pale, sickly translucence in the moonlight.
“No, that’s ridiculous,” he muttered. Of course the path was there—it had to be. He’d just walked down it, after all. “Damn this darkness,” he cursed. Darkness that made it near impossible to see his hand in front of his face. He hesitated, studying the undergrowth crowding in all around him, thinking. He had gotten turned around, that was it, that had to be it. After all, in the darkness, such a thing was easy to do and his mother and father had often warned him of just such an occurrence when venturing outside of the relative safety the village of Brighton provided to go hunting or gathering berries as they sometimes had.
The night played tricks on even the most perceptive, and even expert trackers had gotten lost in such darkness, never to be seen or heard from again. In the darkness, things looked different, that was all. That was a truth even children—perhaps especially children—knew. After all, it was children for whom, in the night, coat racks became bogeymen lurking in the corner of their rooms and empty shoes peeking out of their closets became the great furred feet of some monster. Children’s thoughts, children’s fears, yet they sent a superstitious shiver of fear through him, and Matt hissed, giving his head a shake. “Relax,” he whispered, rubbing his hands in front of his face in a vain effort to bring some warmth back to them. “You’re not a child to be scared of make-believe monsters.”
He took a deep breath then began pushing his way through the undergrowth in the direction of the voice. The bushes stubbornly stood in his path, seeming to cling and pull at him as he forced his way through, but he continued to make steady—if slow—progress. After he’d been shoving his way through the undergrowth for around five minutes he stopped again. It was weird. The girl’s voice had sounded close, and even with the time he’d lost forcing his way past the bushes, he would have thought he’d come upon her by now.
The bushes seemed to be crowding closer, pushing toward him as if intent on suffocating him and despite the fact that he knew the thought was a childish one, Matt held his hands out, slowly spinning in a circle for some superstitious fear that the bushes were moving, only doing it when he wasn’t looking. “Hello!” he shouted, unable to deny the crack in his voice now, thinking less of saving than of being saved. “Where are you?”
“I’m here.”
Matt jumped, spinning. The voice had seemed to come from right behind him, and there had been something strange about it, hadn’t there? It had been the same voice, that much he knew, but it had sounded different, somehow…older. No, that was silly. It was just the night, that was all, just the night and his own fear working at him, making his mind play tricks. “Where?” he asked breathlessly. “I can’t see you.”
“This way,” the voice said, and it was strange that the more panicked he felt the less panicked the voice seemed to sound. “Just a little farther.”
Suddenly, the choking pressure of the bushes—imagined pressure, no doubt—eased, and, turning to the sound of the words, Matt saw that he wasn’t surrounded after all, but that there was a path, one small enough he must have overlooked it in the near-darkness, leading in the voice’s direction. “I’m coming,” he said, “just…just don’t move anymore, alright?” Please. Please don’t move.
“I won’t,” the voice assured him. “I’ll wait for you. Just come…a little…closer.”
But despite the voice’s assurances, it seemed to be growing farther away with each word, and Matt found himself rushing down the path, eager to find the girl. To save her, yes, but also to no longer be alone in the darkness with the trees looming all around him and the bushes seeming to creep in the moment he turned his back. He hurried forward, shoving errant limbs out of his way and then suddenly the ground vanished from beneath his feet, and he let out a cry as he stumbled and fell and began to roll.
Pain shook his arm and legs as he tucked his head in, rolling down a hill in a bumping, painful fall. He finally came to a panting, groaning rest on his back, blinking up at the night sky, a sky which seemed devoid of any stars at all. There was only the moon, a moon which seemed huge in his sight, so big and close that he was overcome with the certainty that, should he reach out, he would be able to touch it.
After the worst of the pain and his own shock had subsided, he became aware of a sound. It was the gentle, gurgling sound of water. Frowning and swallowing hard, he sat up and turned to the source of the noise to see, to his astonishment, that what he’
d heard was the sound of a small stream less than a dozen feet away. A gentle, burbling stream that seemed to sparkle in the moonlight as if millions of diamonds lay just beneath the water’s surface. And on the bank of the stream, sitting with her back to him, was a little girl.
She wore a bright white dress that would have looked far more at home on some noble child having dinner in her father’s manor than in the middle of a forest in the dead of night. And, perhaps stranger still, there wasn’t so much as a speck of dirt on the dress which seemed to almost glow. Matt thought that was odd considering she’d been lost in the woods for the gods alone knew how long, but he brushed the thought aside. Now that he had found the girl, Matt could admit to himself that he was just glad to not be alone any longer, to have a companion, in this place, even if it were only a small girl that no doubt still hid under her blanket when she felt scared.
“Hi,” he said, slightly breathless.
The girl turned and in the darkness, her face was largely covered in shadows that seemed to shift and writhe. “Hello, child,” she said in a surprisingly forceful, surprisingly older voice.
Matt frowned, hesitating from where he’d been walking toward her. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I’m just a child,” she said, “and I’m frightened. Please, will you help me?”
That sounded normal—at least, the voice sounded as it should, and Matt gave a soft laugh. “Gods, but it’s dark out here, isn’t it? And cold too. You must be freezing.” And that was true. In fact, the temperature seemed to have dropped since he’d stepped outside of the undergrowth and came to stand beside the stream. Even now, his breath plumed in front of him in great white clouds.
“It’s always cold here,” the girl said, her voice quiet and with a sort of sing-song quality to it. “I’m always cold.”
“Always?” Matt asked. “How long have you been here?”
There was a sort of shifting, a blur it seemed as if too much to follow, and the next thing Matt knew, the girl was standing, facing him, her hands clasped in front of her in a gesture that might have seemed sweet in other circumstances but somehow, in that moment, didn’t seem sweet at all, seemed menacing in a way he couldn’t define. “Me?” she asked. “I’ve always been here. Will you help me?”
The girl was acting strangely, that much was certain, talking strangely, too, but that was no great surprise. He’d heard of people caught in the elements acting strangely before, shock it was called, and was that any real surprise? The girl had been wandering in the Black Woods for the gods alone knew how long, in the cold, alone. Was it any wonder, then, that she was a little off? Matt had been wandering around for only a few minutes…he paused, glancing at the moon with a frown, a moon which seemed to have moved far in the sky, indicating that he’d spent far more time searching for the girl than he’d thought. An impossible amount of time. Anyway, he’d been out here for only a short while, however long, and he was already beginning to feel a little crazy. “Of course I’ll help you,” he said.
“You’ll take me?” she said, studying him with eyes that seemed almost too large for her face and in which, with the darkness, he could discern no pupils. “Out of the wood, I mean?”
“Soon,” Matt promised. “Only, I have a friend with me, and I’ll have to talk to him, to see—”
“The other you mean,” she said in what sounded almost like a hiss.
“Another,” he said, assuming he must have heard her incorrectly, “that’s right. We came here for a reason, but I know we won’t be staying long. We can meet up with him and—”
“Leave him.”
“I’m sorry—what?”
She gave him a small smile. “Leave him,” she repeated. “It would be better, if you did. Easier. Easier for everyone.”
Matt gave a soft laugh. “I can’t leave him he’s my…” Well, “friend” actually didn’t sound quite right, but he shrugged. “Anyway, look. I know you’re scared, okay?” he said, kneeling down in front of her and grabbing her thin shoulders, shoulders which, despite their small appearance, felt somehow strange beneath his touch. “But this man, he won’t hurt you or me…” Probably. “Besides, he can help me. Help us, that is. He’s been here before.”
“Yes,” she said, and for a moment he caught only a brief flash of her teeth, teeth that almost seemed sharpened, as if they had been filed down to points.
“Yes,” he repeated. “So you’ll come? To see my friend?”
“I will come,” she said, smiling, and this time, her teeth appeared normal. His mind, then, playing tricks. Perhaps he was not so far from that frightened child as he had thought.
“Will you hold my hand?” she asked. “I do not want to lose you.”
“Uh…sure, of course,” Matt said. He took her small hand in his own and instantly felt repelled, for it was clammy with sweat and cool to the touch with a strange, greasy quality to it. Still, touching a clammy hand was by far the least of his problems, so he did so, offering her a smile he did not feel. “Ready?”
“Ready,” she said, smiling again.
It was only then that Matt realized, looking down at her, that the girl wasn’t wearing any shoes. She must have lost them somewhere along the way, before or after she herself had gotten lost. That brought some semblance of thought back to him, and he shook his head. “I’m an idiot, sorry. Tell me, who were you here with?”
“I’m here with no one,” she said. “It is only me and you.” She finished the last in a voice that he would have almost thought sounded coy had it come from someone older.
“Right,” he said slowly, “that is, what I mean is who were you with before you got lost?”
Some expression—anger or annoyance perhaps—flashed across the little girl’s face but was gone in another instant, so quickly that he was left wondering whether or not he had imagined it. What replaced it was a look of confused terror, and her lip began to tremble. “I…I don’t remember.”
Fool, he inwardly scorned himself. Why not just remind her of her situation? “It’s okay,” he assured her. “I’ve got you. We’ll get you safe and warm, then we’ll find whoever you were with, how’d that be?”
“I don’t know,” the girl said seriously, the tears which had threatened nowhere in evidence. “I’ve never been warm before.”
Something about that sent an uncomfortable shiver down him, and Matt decided he’d had enough talking for now. Besides, if they didn’t make it back to Cutter by the time the man woke, there was no telling what he might do. Likely, he’d abandon Matt, leaving him alone with the girl. That, for reasons he couldn’t quite put his finger on, was a very frightening prospect, one perhaps even worse than the idea of being left alone in the woods in general, and suddenly he felt a very powerful urge to break into a run, to leave the girl and her perfect, somehow stainless dress with her bare feet with not a speck of dirt on them, to go and find Cutter as quickly as possible.
But no. That was something a child would do, something the frightened boy he had been a few days ago would have done, and he had promised himself that he would be that boy no longer. So instead, he kept the girl’s hand in his, took a slow, deep breath, and started back the way he had come. The undergrowth was as thick as he remembered—an oddly reassuring thing, considering how unusual the night had been—and his task was made more difficult by the fact that he could only use one hand, his other held in a tight grip by the girl. He tried to pull it away once so that he could heave a dead tree branch out of the way, but she refused to let it go, and he was forced to climb over the obstacle instead, helping her along a moment later.
As he worked his way through, the girl behind him, a silent presence, he began to think that he had taken a wrong turn somewhere, began to feel the first ticklings of panic as he imagined what it would be like to be lost in this undergrowth forever, stuck in the darkness with this silent girl and her cold, clammy hands. He paused, his breath rasping, and allowed himself a moment to rest. As he did, he caught a whiff of something foul.
Growing up in the wilderness, in a village like Brighton, a boy was, at an early age, disabused of certain sensitivities and notions that a city child was able to maintain. One of those sensitivities came in the form of butchering livestock. Often, Matt had helped do exactly that as someone in the village needed help with it, and therefore he was no stranger to the smell of dead flesh. There was a hint of that, in the smell, but there was something else, too. This was not just dead flesh, not just some beast that had recently died. No, this smell was different, worse. It was the smell of meat that had been butchered and left to bake in the hot sun until it was rancid and foul.
He glanced back to the girl who looked up at him from beneath her long dark hair with those big, wide eyes. “Do you smell something?”
She said nothing, only studied him, and so Matt grunted, turning back. It was a dead animal, that was all. That was not so odd an occurrence, surely, certainly not in the woods where some animals were predators and others prey. Likely a wolf or coyote had only been disturbed in his meal by some thing or another and had left the remnants of the unfortunate animal somewhere nearby. He told himself it did not matter, that it was no cause for concern. And, partly, he even believed it, enough, at least, to gather his will and continue on, pushing his way through the bushes crowding around them.
By the time they finally emerged from the dense thicket, his clothes, his arms and face were pocked and scratched by the many thorns and twigs he’d had to force his way through, and he paused, giving himself a chance to get his ragged breathing under control. “I just…need a minute,” he said, kneeling down and wincing at the cold rasp in his throat. He was surprisingly exhausted, likely not just from the exertion but also from the stress of being out here in the darkness, stress at the way it seemed to press in all around him, like some beast meaning to swallow him up.
A Warrior's Burden: Book One of Saga of the Known Lands Page 8
