The Trees Don't Care

Chapter 4:

The thing about walking into a forest at midnight is that the forest doesn't care that you're having the worst night of your life.

My boots sank to the ankle in the first fifty feet. Wet leaf litter, old mud, the kind of ground that holds water like a sponge. I pulled my foot out with a sound like a bad kiss and put it down somewhere worse.

"Great," I said. Out loud. To the trees. "Perfect. Love this."

Nobody laughed. That was new.

I'd spent my whole life with somebody laughing somewhere. The market, the hall, the back of a room. There's always a laugh if you know where to listen for it. Out here there was just the drip of the trees letting go of the rain and my own boots and my own breathing, and my breathing was getting loud.

I kept the pack lights behind me for as long as I could. Over my left shoulder, through the trunks. Small and orange and getting smaller. Then a trunk went past and they were gone and it was dark in a way the village wasn't.

Not black. Grey-dark, wet-dark, the sky doing a little work through the canopy. Enough to see the next three feet. Not enough to see the fourth.

I put my hand out and found a trunk and walked trunk to trunk like a woman feeling her way along a wall.

The bag got heavy around the first mile. Not the weight — it was two dresses and a tin of money and my mother's ring. The weight was that I could feel every item in it, like the bag had gotten louder. The coat was fine. The coat was good. Mrs. Avery had given me a coat that fit and my mother's coat under it that didn't, and I was warm, and the rest of me was a disaster.

I stopped at a trunk that felt bigger than the others and put my hand flat on it.

"Okay," I said.

The tree didn't answer.

"Okay," I said again, quieter. "Come on. Come on out. I know you're in there."

I closed my eyes.

Reaching for your wolf isn't a thing you can explain to somebody who doesn't have one. It's not a thought. It's not a feeling. It's a room you walk into. Always the same room, always in the same place behind your ribs, and she's always in it, and you don't have to knock.

I walked into the room.

There was nobody in it.

Not a scared wolf in the corner. Not a wolf with her back turned. Not a wolf sleeping. Nothing. A room with the furniture still in it and no one in it, and the wrongness of that went through me so hard I opened my eyes and took my hand off the tree.

"Hey," I said.

The trees dripped.

"Hey. That's not funny. I'm not in the mood."

Nothing.

I tried again. Same room. Same empty. I tried a third time and pushed, actually pushed, the way you'd shoulder a stuck door, and something in my chest pulled wrong and I had to sit down on the wet ground with my back against the trunk and breathe through my nose for a minute.

"Okay," I said, to the empty room, to myself, to the forest. "Okay. You're scared. That's fine. I'm scared too. We're both scared. We'll do this in the morning."

Morning. I looked up through the canopy and couldn't find it. Grey in every direction, darker up top. I had no idea what time it was. Past midnight, that was all I had. Past midnight and no road and no food and a bag with two dresses in it.

I got up.

The ground sloped down. Sloping down meant water, and water meant a stream, and streams ran somewhere. That was the whole plan. It was a terrible plan and it was the only one I had, and I took it, and my boots slid on the wet leaves all the way down.

The stream was a stream.

I knelt down and drank out of my hands like an animal and it was so cold it hurt my teeth. I drank until my hands went numb and then I sat back on my heels and ate nothing, because there was nothing, and my stomach made a sound in the quiet that was almost funny.

"You've eaten worse," I told it.

Somewhere out past the stream a branch moved.

Not wind. Wind moves everything at once, all the way through, in a direction. This was one branch, off to my right, and then it stopped, and then it didn't move again.

I went still with my hands on my knees and I listened with everything I had.

The stream. The drip. My own heart, which was being loud and stupid.

"Hello?" I said.

My voice came out smaller than I wanted and I hated it instantly.

Nothing.

"Ray?" I said. "Dell? If that's you, I swear to God—"

Nothing moved.

I stood up slow. I found a stick. Not a good stick, a wet rotten one, and it broke a little in my hand when I picked it up, and I picked up a rock instead, and I put the rock in my fist and the stick in the other hand and stood at the edge of the stream with the water going past my boots.

Then the shape moved.

Low. Darker than the dark. Twenty feet out, between two trunks, low to the ground and long, and it moved the way nothing moves unless it's hunting or it's deciding.

I couldn't tell what it was. Wolf, or a wolf, or a man who'd been a wolf. Out here it didn't matter. It was one thing either way and I was one thing either way and I was a woman with a rock and a rotten stick.

I reached for her.

Nothing. Empty room. Nobody home.

"Come on," I said. Out loud, to my own chest, my voice shaking. "Come on, come on, come on—"

The shape took one step.

I went backward.

I went backward fast, and my boot caught the edge of the stream bank and I went down on my hip in the mud and came up with the rock still in my fist, and I said, out loud, loud as I could, into the dark:

"Don't."

The shape stopped.

For a long second nobody breathed. Then it turned its head — a slow turn, the way a dog turns its head at a sound it doesn't like — and it was gone. Not running. Just gone, folded back into the dark the way it had come out of it, and the trees closed over the place where it had been.

I stayed on the ground.

I stayed there long enough that the cold got through my coat and into my back and my hands started shaking so hard I had to put the rock down or drop it.

Then I got up.

I climbed the bank on the other side. Up, not back. Up and away from the road and away from the pack lights I couldn't see anymore anyway and away from the thing behind me, and I walked with the stick in my hand and my eyes moving and I didn't stop, because stopping felt like an invitation.

The ground got steeper. The trees got closer together. My legs started giving me trouble around what I figured was another mile, and I kept walking. My hands went numb and I kept walking. My boots stopped making a sound I could hear and I kept walking.

And then I was somewhere I didn't recognize at all.

No slope. No stream. The trunks got thinner and the ground got rocky and I climbed over a fallen tree and came down on the other side and everything was the same grey dark in every direction and there was no up and no down and no road and no pack.

I turned a full circle. Slowly. All the way around.

"There it is," I said.

I sat down on the fallen tree. Just for a minute. Just to figure out which way was north.

The minute went on longer than a minute.

Somewhere back the way I'd come, out in the dark I couldn't see, a branch moved. Then another one.

Then one behind me.

I stood up too fast and my head went white at the edges and I had to grab the tree to stay standing, and when the white cleared there was something out past the trees that was not a branch, and it moved like a man moves when he's not trying to be heard.

"Who's there?"

My voice cracked in half.

Nothing answered. The trees dripped. And I turned and went the only way that wasn't the way I'd come, straight into the dark with a stick in my hand and no wolf in my chest, walking faster than my legs wanted, and the footsteps behind me came on steady, unhurried, one after another after another, and did not stop.

Chapter (4) Ends.