Page 11 of Into the Heartless Wood
It’s hard. It’s so, so hard, and try as I might I can’t quite fall back into the rhythm of it. I’m restless and uneasy, my eyes traveling always to the trees over Father’s wall. They hang lower with every passing day, trailing leaves rattling over the stone. It feels as if the wood is watching me. Waiting.
I don’t trust it. And I don’t trust myself around it.
So as much as is humanly possible, I try to keep Awela indoors.
Her response is to learn how to unlatch the door and let herself out, and after that Idotake her outside, so I’ll at least always know where she is.
Because I don’t trust Father’s wall, either.
Spring deepens into summer, and Awela helps me pick the first batches of strawberries from our garden. Most of the ones she picks don’t make it into her basket, and she’s soon covered in sticky red juice. I wash her with water from the pump, and she laughs and wriggles and screams as I scrub her clean.
“Come inside, little one. Time for lunch,” I tell her.
“Want stay siiiiide!” my sister wails.
And I can’t quite deny her, so I make a picnic for us, and we eat on the blanket in full view of the warm sun. A cool breeze curls out from the wood and over the wall, smelling of earth and growth and that acrid scent of dead things. I push away the memory of yellow eyes and blood dripping from silver skin.
Exhaustion weighs on me. Nightmares chased me to the observatory again last night—as they have every night since my father rescued me—and Awela woke earlier than usual. She eats half her lamb and potato pasty and licks the gravy from her fingers, then clamors for her milk. I lounge on the blanket and she leans against my chest as she drinks, curling her small body into the hollow of my shoulder.
The trees whisper and the bees hum in the garden. The blanket is soft beneath my cheek. My eyelids drift shut.
For the first time in weeks, I sleep deeply, dreamless. Some part of me is certain Awela hasn’t left the shelter of my arm, that she has fallen asleep, too.
But when I wake with a start, the afternoon is half gone and I am alone, Awela’s bottle empty and abandoned beside me.
For a moment, I don’t understand the sudden, paralyzing fear that seizes me. Then I raise my eyes, and see the hole in Father’s wall.
No.No.This isn’t real. I’m dreaming.
I jerk upright and bolt to the wall. The ground bulges with the lump of a tree root, with the tumbled stones it shifted as it grew—somehow—in the short time I was sleeping. The hole is big enough for a child to squeeze through. A child wearing a dress the same color blue as the scrap of torn cloth caught on the jagged edge of one of the stones. The trees rustle eerily, though there is no wind.
I can’t breathe.This is a dream.
But I drag my finger along the broken stone, and suck in a breath at the prick of pain, at the blood beading up.
Something else catches my eye just beyond the wall, incongruous with the undergrowth.
It’s one of Awela’s shoes: scuffed brown leather, the strap undone.
I shimmy over the wall and drop down on the other side and snatch it up.
I’m caught in one of my nightmares. This can’t be real.This is a dream.
But it’s not, oh God it’snot.
I’m shaking hard. I can’t stop.Please, I plead,please let this be a dream. I can’t go back in there. I can’t.
The trees whisper around me, the ground undulates with more hidden roots, moving like living creatures under the earth.
Terror suffocates me. Paralyzes me. But I can’t let my sister be swallowed by the wood. I won’t. I will find her. Save her, like my father saved me. And then all three of us will go away from here. Far, far away. We’ll never come back.
I’m still shaking as I shove Awela’s shoe into my pocket, and step under the trees.
Chapter Eight
MONSTER
THE SOULS ARE TOO HEAVY.
