Beyond the Wild Wood

by E. M. Fitch

  Ryan wasn’t there, and in the darkness of her room—a room that suddenly felt so foreign to her—she yearned for the overhead sweep of listless leaves, the comforting scuttle of nighttime creatures, and, most of all, the solid presence in a silky sleeping bag that would lend a hand for her to grip when waking from her nightmares.

  None of that was present in her room.

  She flipped on the lamp on her nightstand, sending a warm glow racing up her bedroom walls. Dozens of pictures stared back at her: her softball team, a little worse for the wear after the horrific senior year season they had all endured; her friends, Samantha and Jon and Rebecca; Ryan with a face full of ice cream, and another (her favorite) of him in his bulky, orange hiking jacket, his face flush and pink from a brisk hike and a brisker wind. But no Laney. Laney was stripped from her walls on the night of her candlelight vigil. Laney belonged to the immortal forest, and her picture was tucked safely inside a blood-smeared box on the top shelf in Cassie’s closet.

  A short stack of books teetered on Cassie’s nightstand next to a sweating glass of water, but it was her phone she reached for. The time shone as four AM, too late for anyone else to be awake, too early for even a run. She would see Lucy today, and her therapist was sure to ask her how she slept. Cassie sighed, leaning back into her pillows. She considered turning out the light and rolling over, forcing herself to get back to sleep. But the thought of seeing Lucy snagged in her brain, and Cassie paused, frowning.

  Ryan had all his supplies for his dorm now, including a hot plate, a full set of bedding that was not actually purple, a couple new posters for his wall (one of which featured the entire mapped trail that he planned on tackling in the coming year), and a small, pink bunny that Cassie insisted she’d buy him. She wanted something cute and ridiculous that would remind him of her.

  In retrospect, she probably could have given him something hiking-related. She wished she’d had the foresight to grab one of the river stones from the afternoon they spent curled up along the banks. They didn’t make their mileage goal that day. Or maybe a pressed oak leaf in a book of Robert Frost poems, because she found out under an oak tree that her boyfriend had actually memorized poetry. She found out as he was whispering it against her neck, giggling a little as the words came out.

  She smiled a private smile, sinking a bit lower in her soft bed, feeling suddenly warmer than she had. He was sweet to her, good for her, calm and steady and gentle and sexy. She wanted the world for him, but she could admit that she was terrified of him leaving. He wouldn’t be far—a four-hour drive. That was nothing. Still, he wouldn’t be here. Just like tonight, and the many nights to come. She’d wake alone, and so would he.

  Time would tell; it always did. But Cassie thought, just the same, she’d look for a book of Robert Frost poems after her therapy session and find a nice oak leaf to press in the pages.

  As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend.

  The words sprang to her mind as she reached again for the lamp. Cassie had nearly forgotten about Lawrence, the errant hiker on the path. She’d nearly forgotten her homework from Lucy as well. That was what snagged at her mind! She turned the words over in her head, muddling them in her suddenly sleepy brain. As her fingers flicked off the lamp, shadowing the room once more, she allowed herself to believe that was what woke her.

  But even as she thought it, she felt, somewhere deep inside, that it wasn’t the truth.

  If she had gone to the window, if she had lifted the sash and thrown her gaze to the forest, she would have felt the agony of the trees, the sorrow that laced the wind, and the crashing of a kingdom.

  “Are you reading the Bible?” her father asked incredulously. Cassie looked up from the thick tome in her hand.

  “Yeah, but fat lot of good it’s doing me,” she answered, pausing to take a sip of her coffee. “Know anything about Solomon?”

  “Didn’t he cut a baby in half?” her father mused. He crossed the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee, dumping cream and sugar into the cup. Cassie shook her head.

  “No, more like he threatened to,” she said. “That’s not the part I’m talking about, anyway. Got a minute?”

  Cassie repeated the phrase to her father, skipping who she had first heard it from. As loving and supportive as her father was, she knew meeting strange men in the forest while on a hike with her boyfriend would upset him. Her dad thought for a moment, sipping casually at his coffee while the steam dissipated and his fingers wrapped more firmly around the cooling ceramic mug. The clock on the kitchen wall ticked by, and Cassie noticed the face was crooked. She was just contemplating getting up to adjust it when her father spoke.

  “Well, it means choose your friends carefully, wouldn’t you say?” he said. His eyes held that faraway gleam that he sometimes got, a history teacher lost in time. Only, this lost adventure would never be printed in a textbook. Cassie felt she had stumbled into a private memory, one of his own boyhood, perhaps, one of lost times and lost companions. Her father gave a little shake of his head and then smiled, back with his daughter in the kitchen.

  “That’s all, you think?” Cassie asked, relieved to see her father grinning now.

  “Sure, I think so. You know, iron is a peculiar metal, fraught with history.”

  “Fraught?” Cassie giggled.

  “Shut up,” her father replied, still smiling. “It is. For instance, in this quote from Solomon, it’s interesting and it makes sense, because at the time iron was the hardest known substance. It was such a hard piece of metal that the only thing you could use to sharpen your tools was another piece of iron. See?

  “And in that vein, as you need something strong to sharpen or improve something strong, so too with your friends. If you have weak friends—morally weak, I mean—then they cannot sharpen and strengthen you. Surround yourself with people of good character, and your own character will improve. Make sense?”

  Cassie nodded, considering. It made sense as a quote. It made less sense as a warning from a random man in the forest. But what made no sense to her now, or ever, was how her friends were all leaving. Most of them, at least. And how, even if they weren’t, she couldn’t trust them with her secrets; she couldn’t allow them to be dragged into the insanity of her newly-acquired world view. If she couldn’t trust them with these pieces of herself, what kind of friendships did she have? Apparently, not the sharpening kind. Not those soulful connections of intimacy and trust that tear you apart and stitch you together with thread stronger and tougher than any of you imagined.

  If all that was true, and Cassie suspected that it might be, then another awful truth was true as well. Cassie wasn’t sharpening her friends. Cassie wasn’t someone who could contribute to a relationship, encourage another to grow, share in honesty and intimacy. If Cassie couldn’t be that person for another, how could she expect a relationship like that from anyone else?

  She thanked her father through numb lips, excusing herself from the table. She needed to shower. Her appointment with Lucy wasn’t long from now.

  “I’m an awful friend,” Cassie started. She had thrown her bag on the other end of the love seat that hugged a wall between two of Lucy’s bookshelves. She couldn’t see the titles that adorned the book spines from here, though she knew some by heart, staring at their depressingly cheerful colors often enough when she first started coming to this room and had refused to sit on the couch on principle.

  “Why would you say that?” Lucy asked, frowning. She sat in an armchair across from Cassie.

  “That quote, about friends,” Cassie said. She felt a knot of muscle form in her throat. Her eyes got hot and itchy. She did not want to cry, had no need for it now. She sucked a deep breath through parted lips and gritted her teeth on the exhale.

  “Cassie,” Lucy started gently, “I had always interpreted that quote to mean surround yourself by good people. Good friends, honest and open friends, lift us up.”

  “But I’m not hone
st. And I’m not open,” Cassie said. Defeat welled in her chest, a crushing feeling that mimicked rejection. It wasn’t, but it had that same hollow ring. Somewhere inside, a terrible voice whispered, It’s true, you’re not enough.

  “Okay,” Lucy said, leaning back in her chair. The springs beneath the cushions creaked, even though the woman shifting on top of them couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds. “So why are we here?”

  “Because I spazzed in the woods,” Cassie mumbled robotically. She had answered that question before. There was an invisible weight that bloomed in her chest, a terrible pressure that ached.

  “Why did you spaz in the woods?”

  “Because I just delivered a baby,” Cassie said, no inflection in her tone.

  “Why were you there to begin with?”

  “I was taken.”

  “Why did no one know you were being stalked?” Lucy pressed.

  “Because I couldn’t tell them!”

  “Why?”

  The words were on the tip of Cassie’s tongue. She wanted to shout. She almost did. Whole sentences flashed in her thoughts. Because no one can see the Fae, no one but me! Because it’s magic, and normal people don’t believe in magic. Because they’re invisible. Because they move through the trees, kill people, drink blood, steal girls. Because that baby was Laney’s, my best friend turned faery. Because, because, because …

  “Why couldn’t you tell anyone, Cassie?” Lucy asked, her voice soft.

  “Because they wouldn’t have believed me,” Cassie whispered.

  “And why wouldn’t they believe you?”

  You’re not worth believing. The voice whispered soft and low at the back of her skull, and Cassie’s chest ached as it echoed.

  “Here’s my thoughts, and maybe I’m wrong,” Lucy said in the quiet stillness that had enveloped them. “But when I trust someone—someone I’m close to, someone I love—I trust them to be honest with me. Honesty is so very important to me. And if my friend is honest, then they can tell me anything, and I’ll believe them. Straightforward, no nonsense.

  “Honesty is this wonderful, contagious thing. It’s kind of addictive, I’ll warn you. Once you start, it’s hard to stop. But I’d like you to think about it. What would it cost you to be honest? Is this a commitment you could make? Where do you start?”

  “Where do you start?” Cassie asked, her voice just above a whisper.

  Lucy smiled. “Where do you think?”

  The rest of the session wasn’t terrible, though that awful weight never lifted from Cassie’s chest. It sat there still, and if Cassie were to really think about it, she’d find herself back at that moment in the middle of the night, less than twelve hours ago now, when she jolted upright in her bed, chilled to the bone and yet somehow sweating.

  Lucy’s office was in the next town over, and though Cassie had to drive on a road that edged the forest, she never noticed the change. Had she had the window down, she may have heard the trees sigh in a pained kind of way, their leaves restless and drifting in a non-existent breeze. She may have felt the grieving of the earth, the soil and roots that trembled at its core. She would have recognized it as the same feeling that plagued her when Corey died, though she would have misinterpreted it as guilt. It wasn’t guilt; it was grief—two feelings that are often too intertwined to be distinguishable.

  But Cassie felt none of this, only unsettled from her conversation with Lucy. It was a hot August day, and she had her windows up, the AC blasting. Songs from the local rock station blasted through her speakers—speakers that whined a bit when she hit potholes in the road.

  Loose wires, she thought absently, not sure if that was the cause. And then, I’ve got to change the presets on these stations.

  The songs that filled her ears were older—“classics,” her father called them. She’d change the station soon, but for now, on her drive home, she let her mind drift to the screaming vocals of Janis Joplin.

  When she pulled her car onto her street, a jolt of unease rocked her. A car was pulled up alongside the curb in front of her house. She recognized it, but couldn’t put a name to the light-blue hybrid that idled at the curb. She drove cautiously, pulling up alongside slowly. Her neighborhood was quiet at this time of day; everyone was working. The Sheridan boys weren’t on their front lawn, though there was evidence they recently had been: the grass was still wet from the sprinkler their mother must have had going. Muddy footprints tracked up the front steps leading to their front door. The Blake house was dark and quiet. Every home felt empty—silent watchers on a cursed street. Only the garden gnomes were available to peer and peek and watch over Cassie as she pulled alongside the strange, but familiar, car.

  Samantha’s face showed behind the driver-side window. The glass lowered. Cassie pushed the button to lower her own window, and punched the radio knob, silencing her car. Other than the engines and the sudden shrill of bird song, it was quiet.

  “Wanna go for a walk?” Samantha asked, and in the pinched arrangement of her features, Cassie saw that their time had finally come.

  “Why!” she cried out. The word was uttered as more a curse than a question. It tore from her lips as a guttural cry. Laney felt no fear, no despair, only anger, only the whitest burn of rage. She rose, forcing her gaze away from the body the forest floor was slowly claiming. Aidan stood before her, an iron poker, the handle wrapped tightly in vine, loose by his side. His demeanor was calm, but his piercing gaze blazed with determination.

  Behind him, flanking him on either side, Gaia and Jude stood tall. Jude’s arms were crossed, his bare forearms catching the earliest rays of sun. It warmed his skin to bronze tones. Gaia stood in shadow, her dark hair swept back from her face, her mouth set in a firm and haughty line. Beyond them was the skittering of the children, the restless yet exuberant giggles. There were other Fae scattered throughout the woods. Laney could feel them. They watched her, tasted emotions that sang through the forest like a bitter wind. She knew their names, Paola and Kieran, Devin, Grady, Malcolm, Moira, and Ruari. There were others, others that came and went. Others that knew Corra as queen, recognized her as such, but came only seasonally, once a decade, or never. But still, she was queen in these woods. Or she had been. Now she was dead. And the Fae came, many of them, many more than Laney could name or recognize.

  It wasn’t until a pale face, one as reminiscent of moonlight as any creature Laney had ever seen, appeared amongst the trees that she cried out again.

  “Lucas! They … and she … ” But there was nothing to say. Corra’s body was completely covered by earth now. There was now just a dormant shape—a delicate, womanly shape—under a growing bank of moss. Still his gaze was there, as though seeing through the earth to the lost form of his queen. He was out of breath, looking as though he had just run the length of the woods to be here. He broke through the restless, waiting Fae, pushing them to the side like errant stalks of fern. He looked as though he might cry, and for one shimmering moment, Laney felt sure he was about to. Emotion swept the undergrowth around him, and even Laney could taste it—hurt and anger and loss and sorrow. But the brush settled, his eyes cleared, and he glanced flittingly at Laney as Aidan stepped forward.

  “We’re not leaving,” Aidan said. He gripped his poker even tighter, so tight that it burned his skin, even through the vines he had strapped around the handle. Laney could smell his searing flesh, and smoke rose in wispy tendrils from between his clenched fingers. He stepped into the clearing even as roots shot from the earth and twisted their way over his legs. He was lifted higher, above them all, and he stood before them, rooted as a tree would be, and as powerful as any of the oaks that surrounded them. The iron he held pointed away from him, and blood dripped in sluggish drops to the forest floor below. Laney felt a surge of nausea and pressed her hand to her mouth, retching quietly as Aidan spoke.

  “This is our home now, not Ireland, not some country most of us can barely remember. The world has shifted, chan
ged. We have changed. We are not the fairytale creatures of a century ago, akin to trolls and nightmare creatures derived from the musings of bored grandmothers or invented by adults to tame their wild children. We belong to the forest, and the forest belongs to us—whatever forest we choose.

  “And the people of this earth, they belong to us, as well. We are eternal, we are the ancient gods and goddesses. We command the woods—” As he spoke, he raised his free hand in a severe gesture to the sky. The trees bowed at his command, cracking and straining, pulling free of the earth like massive Ents in a Tolkien novel. Their tops swayed and danced, their boughs creaked and pressed, creating a hollow music that rang for miles. Sharp resin sweetened the air even as flowers flourished in groupings around the clearing. Stone shaped itself into low basins and footstools and elaborately carved tables and chairs. Laney looked to Aidan, as did every other Fae there. There wasn’t a hint of strain on his face. The forest obeyed his command, and because of this, the others would, too. Laney knew it.

  “We command the earth,” Aidan continued. Deep wells of wine sprang forth, filling the stone basins. The water of the stream rushed in a pregnant gush, cutting through the forest in a cool swipe. “We command the animals,” he hissed. Birds scattered into the sky, lighting on the tops of the trees, singing in gorgeous harmony, chattering together with the sweetest song. Butterflies flew in groupings and scattered apart, wild fireworks in the daylit sky. The wild Boys howled and laughed, feral in their own way.

  “And the humans,” Aidan said, lowering his arms and his voice, the poker still tight in his grip, the viscous blood drip-drip-dripping in a slow, visceral show. “The humans are ours.”

  There was a roar of approval, a surge of faery magic. The trees, the earth, the very sky shook in the wake of their cry, and, one by one, the Fae fell to one knee, heads bowed in Aidan’s direction.