Darkwood (6 page)

“And I'll help her. Truth's my witness.”

Annie pushed back the heavy tangle of hair covering her face and sat up. Two figures loomed over her, one skinny, one stout.

“Oh! Well now, that's the last straw. That is the
very
last straw!” Annie followed the woman's gaze. One of the flour sacks she'd been using as a mattress had burst. Dozens of little white footprints covered the floor.

“Stealing my food, messing my place, and now vermin!”

“They're not verm—,” Annie started to say, then gave up. She couldn't blame them. They'd been nice enough the first morning. Old Man Mutts had even given her a taste of spirits, “To bring you back to the living, gal.” But it had been nearly a week now of sneaking between the tavern and Miss Gilly's shop, stealing food and sleeping in corners.

“I'll go,” Annie said. Miss Gilly glared.

“I promise.”

Standing on the edge of the village green in the cold morning air, Annie wished she could take the promise back. Aside from the tavern and Miss Gilly's, the only shops not vacant belonged to Beard, the blacksmith, and Mr. Crake, who carved headstones. Across the green the church squatted sadly in the middle of its crowded churchyard. The roof of the schoolhouse was just visible behind the church, boarded up years ago for lack of pupils. Perhaps she could hide there.
And then what, Annie? Hide forever
?

“Ha! Little gal! Yes, you. Care for a chuff? It'll warm you.”

Grandmother Hoop was sitting on a wooden bench smoking her pipe. Between puffs she arranged her vials and jars on the seat beside her. She didn't have a proper store, but Grandmother Hoop did even more business than Old Man Mutts. She offered the pipe to Annie.

“No thank you, Grandmother.”

“Suit yourself. But you could use some warming. Right here.” Grandmother Hoop rapped her knuckles against her skinny chest. She studied the array of bottles for a moment, then chose one and tapped a few grains of red powder onto the heel of her hand. She pressed her hand up against a nostril and sniffed hard.

Then she laughed, showing wet pink gums.

“Ha! That one's not for you. I've got something else for what ails you.”

She held up a vial filled with oily black liquid. “Now this …”

Annie shook her head vigorously.

“Very well, very well. Another one dead this week past, did you hear? An older child, older than they usually take them. Dawdled on the way home, or so her auntie says. Wouldn't trust that sly weasel in
my
hen house, mind you …”

It took Annie a moment to register that
she
was the dead child in question, which made Aunt Prim the sly weasel. She liked Grandmother Hoop rather more now.

The old woman looked at her narrowly. “Who are your people, child?”

“I have no people.” The words sounded awful, but Annie didn't feel awful saying them.

But Grandmother Hoop looked afraid. Her eyes darted around the green. “Run, child. Get away from here.”

“But where? Where should I go?”

“Take the eastern road. Stay close to the ditch. If you see a wagon coming, you jump in that ditch and lie down till it passes. Otherwise don't stop until you cross the line into Broad County. Don't stop for anything, you understand me?”

“Yes, Grandmother.” As Annie turned to leave, Grandmother Hoop caught her hand and pressed the vial into it. “Take this. Drink it. For the heart and for the belly.”

Annie had never been so far east before. The bare, rocky landscape of the coast gave way to gentle hills. Reddish grass poked through the dirt. Where the road wound closest to the wood she could hear the thud of the cutters' axes. On her uncle's
map of Howland the forest covered Dour County like a storm cloud, the cross-hatched lines of ink blurring into solid black in the map's northwest corner. There the land bulged into the sea like a fist. Finisterre, it was called, the nest of the kinderstalk.

But moving east, as Annie was, the cloud of forest floated up to the top of the map, thinner and thinner. By the time you reached Magnifica no more than an inch of black ink showed along the northern border. By the time you reached the east coast, the forest had dwindled to nothing. Annie wondered what it would be like to follow this road all the way to the beaches of the eastern sea.

“Flat for miles and covered in sand,” Page told her.

“Sand?” Annie had been skeptical. In Dour County, the cliffs dropped straight into the water.

Page grinned. “Pink sand. Pulverized ringstone.”

“Ringstone sand?”

“Well, all kinds of stone.” Page read aloud, “Granite, quartz, shiproke—but there's enough ringstone mixed in to make it look pink. Pink sand, Annie! Someday I'll take you to see it.”

She passed a string of abandoned farms, then a yard where a woman stirred laundry in a tub of boiling water. Without thinking, Annie raised her hand in greeting, but the woman frowned and turned away.

She made a list of the things she had eaten in the past week. Bracka berries: many (sour). Rinkle nuts: one (inedible). Rum cakes: five (quite good). Rum drink: two sips (fiery). For the twentieth time, she took out Grandmother Hoop's vial and
looked at it.
For the heart and for the belly
. She even opened it once—it smelled like fresh baked bread—but she was afraid to drink.

And then she saw it, just on the other side of the hill: whitewashed, gabled, with two full stories and a slate roof. But it wasn't the house that made her gasp and sway on her feet. It was the garden.

Yellow squash bumped sides with glossy orange pumpkins; blue eggplant gleamed among heads of pale lettuce. Between the house and barn grew rows of fruit trees bearing pink apples and flame-colored persimmons. Rose bushes, one red, one white, bloomed on either side of the cottage door. Around all of it spread a vast, perfect lawn, so that the house, the barn, the pumpkins all seemed to float in an emerald pool. A fence circled the lawn and contained it.

Without quite realizing how she had gotten there, Annie found herself standing outside the fence. The gate was unfastened. The cats had hung back, but now they rushed forward, whirring with agitation.

“Don't worry,” she whispered. “Don't worry.”

It only took a moment. As she left the yard, a swollen tomato in one hand, an apple in the other, Annie noticed for the first time that the top bars of the fence were smeared with tar. Shards of glass poked up from the tar like a set of jagged teeth.

An old chicken coop lay on its side where someone had
thrown it over the fence behind the barn. The door listed open and the wood had begun to break apart with rot. Decades of chicken droppings varnished the floor. It was the perfect place to eat lunch.

Ox! Goose! Numbskull! Ditherer!
And Page's favorite name for Uncle Jock, the vilest insult:
Soup-for-brains!
She should be across the county line by now. She should have kept walking and not stopped for anything like Grandmother Hoop told her. And what had she done instead? Taken a nap.

Annie groped for the lantern and matches. She kept her eyes shut tight, for she could tell by the feel of the air—heavy and soft against her lips and eyelids, like a cloth lain over her face—that night had fallen.

Her mouth tasted awful, her fingers and chin sticky with juice. At last she got the lantern lit. The candle was no more than a smudge of wax now, but she could see the cats well enough. They were sitting by the door of the coop, watching her.

Annie's heart sank. She tried anyway. “Come here, little Prue! Come here, Izzy!”

Izzy swatted her extended hand, claws not out but not entirely in. Stubbornly, she pulled him toward her and started to pet him.

“Ouch! Go on, then. Leave me here all alone. I hope the kinderstalk eat you. No I don't. Be careful.”

She couldn't help staring after them, though it was pointless.
Or was that Prue stopping to look back, giving a little shake of her tail?

Of course it wasn't. Annie slumped down. The lantern's light could never reach so far.

They hadn't been gone long when she heard it, though time—like distance, like everything—was hard to measure in the dark. The first howl was answered shortly by a second, then a third and a fourth, until she lost count. How many? How close? She thought of the gashes in the trunk of the oak tree. The coop, which had been a small, lit world of its own, now felt like a trap.

The front door of the barn was locked, as she'd expected, but she remembered seeing a square opening just below the roof for pitching hay into wagons parked below. If only she had some kind of ladder, or … her toe struck something hard. Annie crouched down. A ladder. There were even notches cut into the ground beneath the window where the ladder's feet should go. But the ladder was big and heavy, and it took a long time and a great many scrapes, bangs, and thuds before she got it into place.
I might as well just howl to tell them where I am
, she thought, and started to climb.

A few steps up the ladder and the ground disappeared into blackness. Above her, too, was blackness. The same vertigo she had felt in the tree swept over her. Was she upright? If she fell, would she keep falling? The rungs under her hands and feet felt like the only things connecting her to the world
she knew. Carefully, Annie stepped backward until she reached the ground and then started up again, counting.

“The ground is one rung down. Two rungs. Three rungs.” She kept her eyes focused on her dirty knuckles, the wood grain of the barn wall.

“Nineteen rungs.” She'd reached the top.

But the notches for the ladder had been in the wrong place. The pitching window was several feet to her right and a little above her, so she had to stretch to reach the window ledge.

She had one hand on the ledge and the other on the ladder when she heard him laugh.

“Like flies to honey,” said the scarred man. “Every time.”