In the Night Wood

When Charles saw it, his first thought was that he understood, really understood, the environment that had shaped the nightscape of Caedmon Hollow’s mystifying book. His second thought, coming fast on the heels of the first, was that the wood was collectively alive, a single vast organism spilling out across the valley in wild profusion, bigger than the eye could comprehend, improbably, impossibly bigger, that it was sentient, watchful, and that somehow —

— how? —

— it had been awaiting them.

“Jesus,” Erin whispered, and it was all Charles could do — the impulse took an active effort of will to resist — not to step hard on the brake and wrench the car back toward Yarrow.

Too late to turn back now.

Momentum seized them, the gray road blurring as the car gathered speed. At the base of the decline, Merrow signaled left and disappeared into the trees. If Charles hadn’t seen it happen, he would have missed the turnoff entirely.

He almost missed it anyway. He braked hard — the road ended in a turnaround maybe two dozen yards past the entrance — the force of the deceleration pressing him into the upholstery. He swung the car around and squared up to the entrance.

It gaped under the trees, a tunnel hewn into the flesh of the wood itself, flanked by stone columns shrouded in vines. Engraved words, eroded almost flush with the stone, were visible on the pillar to the right: Hollow House, and below that, 1848. There had been a gate there once, but no more.

A taillight flashed deep in all that emerald gloaming. Charles reached out for Erin’s hand. “We’re here.”

“So we are.” She gave him a forced smile in return, but her fingers remained dead in his grasp.

Charles sighed. He turned on the headlights, touched the gas, and nosed the car between the columns. The wood took them. When the sound of their engine died away under the trees, no evidence of their passage remained.

They might never have come that way at all.

2 (#ulink_502c5a49-6a6f-5ffd-8563-e5719928e82a)

An oppression of trees drew up around the car, and a doomed sense of claustrophobia seized Erin Hayden. For a moment it was all too much — the dark closing down upon them and the tires whispering their incessant tidings of arrival on macadam crumbling with time and carpeted with dead leaves.

Most of all it was the ancient oaks pressing close to the road, like old men, lichen-bearded and a little deaf, stooping close to listen. She imagined them straightening up as the car slipped by, leaning their hoary heads together to pass the news, a stir of leaf and branch rippling ever outward before them.

There was something disturbing about the idea, something watchful and abiding about the gloom under the trees. It was too much, too close.

She glanced at Charles, his face masked in streamers of light and shadow. He looked tired, haggard with something more than jet lag. She almost reached out to him, maybe would have, but an overhanging branch slapped at the windshield, startling her, and she turned away instead.

That was when she saw the child: a little girl clad in a simple white dress, maybe kindergarten age —

— Lissa’s age —

— or maybe a year older. She stood on the leaf-scattered shoulder of the road, staring toward them, so close she might have reached out and touched the car as it sped past.

“Charles?”

“Hmm?”

“Did you —” She broke off. She did not want to say it. It had been nothing, a trick of the eye, a flash of sunlight through the forest canopy or a patch of fog breathing up from the damp soil. We see what we want to see, her therapist had told her. As if that helped.

“Did I what?” Charles said.

“Nothing,” she said.

She was tired of seeing things.

For months after the funeral, back home in Ransom, she’d caught glimpses of Lissa everywhere, through a scrim of raindrops on the windshield as she wheeled by the kids at the bus stop or in the baleful fluorescent glare of the grocery store, just turning the far corner of an aisle. Something familiar in the set of the mouth or the flash of shoulder-length hair.

Then she’d blink and see that Lissa wasn’t there after all. The girl at the bus stop would shift the angle of her gaze and her face would fall into unfamiliar lineaments. Meeting the grocery store specter afresh among the frozen foods, Erin would see that she was younger than she had thought, that she had dark hair and a squared-off jaw, that she looked nothing like Lissa at all.

She’d mentioned it to Charles once and he’d flinched as if she’d struck him. After that she’d never brought it up to him again.

Until last night.

Last night, over dinner at the hotel, she’d seen Lissa once again.

One moment Erin had been sitting at the table, jet-lagged and silent, spooning an indifferent soup into her mouth. The next, she’d glanced up, reaching for her water glass, and the girl had been there: Lissa, a slim blonde apparition, standing silent in the dining room door. Erin gasped, and the water went over with a crash.

“Shit,” she’d said, half rising as she reached to right the glass. When she looked up again, the girl —

— Lissa —

— was gone.

“Here, let me get that,” a voice said at her shoulder. The landlady — a kindly heavyset woman, her gray hair pulled back from her round, smiling face — leaned over her, dabbing at the table with a cloth.

“What happened?” Charles was saying, but Erin ignored him.

“That girl,” she said, sinking back into her seat.

The landlady paused, the damp rag in one hand. “Girl?”

“There. She was in the doorway.”

“Did she cause this?” The landlady straightened, abruptly stern. “Sarah,” she called. “Sarah, you come in here right now. Always underfoot, that one,” she added, swiping at the spill, an expanding island of dampness in the linen cloth. “Sarah!”

“Listen —” Charles began, but Erin overrode him.

“It’s not the girl’s fault. Really. She startled me, that’s all. She looked so much like —”

Then the girl was there, eyes downcast, her hands clasped behind her back, and the words —

— my daughter —

— died on Erin’s lips.

The girl, pudgy and thick, with a fringe of dark hair veiling her eyes, looked nothing like Lissa. Nothing at all. Lissa had been airy, ethereal, like some elemental spirit that had settled inexplicably among them. This girl — Sarah — looked sullen and coarse, grossly earthbound.

“Sarah,” the landlady said, “have you been sneaking around again?”

“No, Nanna. I just walked by the door. I didn’t mean anything.”

The landlady gave the spill a final swipe. “That should do.” She snapped the rag at the serving station. “Bring me that jug, child. Quickly now.”