Samuel Blink and the Forbidden Forest (8 page)

The next morning, Samuel was surprised to see Aunt Eda acting like nothing had happened. He wanted to talk about huldres, but knew he shouldn't in front of his sister, so he tried to act normal too.

Unbeknownst to Samuel, Aunt Eda had made a decision. They were going to move. They could not stay another night here. Oskar had been right. It was one thing stopping them from going into the forest and quite another stopping the forest from coming to them. It was what Henrik would want, she'd told herself. But she wasn't going to tell the children until later, until she'd done all the washing and the packing, because it would only worry Martha and put her off her breakfast.

“Take this to the table,” Aunt Eda said, handing Samuel a breakfast tray full of plates of flatbread and cheese.

Samuel didn't like cheese at the best of times, but he had never seen one that looked like the one on the tray. The cheeses he had tried at home had been yellow or white, but this one was a strange brown color.

“What is the matter with your face, young man?” Aunt Eda asked him as she handed both children glasses of cloudberry juice. “Haven't you seen cheese before?”

“Not cheese that is brown,” came Samuel's reply.

“That is because you haff neffer seen Gjetost cheese,” said Aunt Eda. “Like the cheese Uncle Henrik used to make. It is very popular with skiers. They take chunks of it on the slopes to keep themselves going. This particular one is not as nice as Henrik's ‘Gold Medal' cheese, but it is still a Norwegian speciality. It's a sweet goat's cheese. The taste is a little bit like caramel. Or even chocolate. Children haff it for breakfast, and grown-ups haff it as well.” She was speaking faster than usual, as if scared of the silence between words.

As she spoke Aunt Eda was peeling paper-thin slices of the strange cheese with a funny looking slicer. Samuel noticed her hand was trembling. Ibsen was also watching very closely, as he loved cheese more than anything. Even steak. Not that he was ever given any. He just had to make do with the smell, which teased his nostrils and made him drool saliva into his basket.

“You see this handle?” Aunt Eda asked Martha, but didn't wait for a reply. “It is made with the horn of a reindeer.”

Samuel sighed, remembering the sight of the huldres. “Who cares?”

Aunt Eda decided to ignore the sulky face that accompanied the question. “Well,” she said. “I should imagine the reindeer cared werry much indeed.”

She smiled, like she had made a joke, but her eyes looked scared.

“I don't like goat's cheese,” said Samuel. “I like cow's cheese.”

Aunt Eda's shaking hands placed five thin slices of Gjetost on his plate, along with some flatbread. “Well, young man, in this part of Norway we haff goats, not cows.”

She gave Martha the same amount of cheese and flatbread, and Samuel watched as his sister started to eat it without any sign of complaint or enthusiasm. Then he looked out of the dining-room window at the empty grass fields that lay in front of the forest, and thought of the charging huldres and the creature they had captured. A shudder went through him.

Again, Samuel shook the feeling away and picked up his brown cheese and flatbread.

If a stranger had arrived in the room during those five minutes it took Samuel to finish his breakfast, he could have been perfectly mistaken for thinking that the suddenly quiet young man was the most well-behaved twelve-year-old on the face of the earth.

However, if the stranger had a sharp eye—a sharper eye than those belonging to Aunt Eda—he would have noticed that Samuel was only eating the flatbread.

He flicked his wrist before taking his first mouthful. This meant the cheese fell onto his lap. He could then place the fallen slices in his pocket with the hand he kept out of view under the table. He smiled, knowing he was breaking his aunt's fifth rule.

And then, right after breakfast, Samuel decided to break another of Aunt Eda's rules.

“I'm going to go up to the attic,” he told his sister, when they were sitting upstairs on their beds.

Martha shook her head.

“Yes,” said Samuel. “When she goes out to the washing line, I'm going to see what's so special up there that she doesn't want us to see.” Samuel was determined to find out more about the forest, especially after last night, and he was convinced there would be clues in the attic.

Again Martha shook her head, for a moment looking like she was genuinely concerned.

“Yes,” said Samuel. “I'm going.”

And so, when Samuel heard his aunt head out to the washing line, he left his sister on her bed and walked down the landing toward the ladder. The ladder led up to a small, square wooden door in the ceiling.

Halfway up, Samuel faced a problem. The problem had four legs and a wagging tail and was starting to bark.

“No, Ibsen! Ssssh!” pleaded Samuel.

But Ibsen was not a dog to be shushed, and kept on barking the news of Samuel's rule breaking out to Aunt Eda.

And then Samuel remembered. The cheese! He pulled out the thin slices of Gjetost from his pocket and let them fall onto the landing.

It worked. The barking stopped. Ibsen's silence was bought for five slices of brown cheese.

He undid the latch and pushed open the door, before clambering up into a room full of dust and cobwebs.

It was dark in the attic, and Samuel had to wait for his eyes to adjust. There was a tiny window, but it was so caked with cobwebs that the weak Norwegian sunlight hardly made it past the glass.

The ceiling was low, and anyone taller than Samuel would have had to hunch their back as they walked over the creaking floorboards. Being considerably smaller than his aunt, Samuel could walk around the dark room with relative ease, although he did manage to bang his knee on a tea chest that had been sneakily hiding in the semidark.

“Ow!” Samuel said, then covered his mouth.

He felt inside the box, expecting to find something interesting, but found nothing but old clothes. They were men's clothes, so Samuel guessed they had belonged to his uncle Henrik.

There were pictures on the wall. Photographs in frames. Samuel squinted and saw a man standing on a snowy mountainside, clutching a pair of skis. The man was smiling—or laughing maybe—and he was wearing a purple bodysuit that clung so tight to his body that if his skin had been purple, you wouldn't have been able to tell where the bodysuit ended and his skin began.

There was another photograph, next to it. A man jumping through the air on his skis. And another, of the same man standing in front of a large block of brown cheese.

Samuel looked back at the photo of him standing in the snow, and as he looked Samuel got a strange feeling that he had seen this man only yesterday. The laughing eyes seemed as familiar to him as those of Aunt Eda. He realized it was Uncle Henrik, but the sense of recognition was still strange.

“Weird,” he said to himself.

He looked around and saw something lying behind the tea chest along the side of the room. It was the skis that he had seen in the photo. Then he noticed something else on another wall. A framed glass case, containing his uncle's silver medal.

Samuel went over, to get a closer look, but became distracted by another tea chest. The chest was covered with an old tablecloth, as if it was hiding something. He looked around at all the other tea chests, but it was the only one hidden in this manner.

Intrigued, Samuel started to peel back the checkered cloth. Before he had seen what was inside, he jumped, startled by a sudden gust of wind slapping against the attic's small window.

He didn't know why he was so scared. Maybe it was because of what he had seen last night. Or maybe it was just because of the strange feeling he had gotten when looking at the photograph of his uncle.

Anyway, Samuel knew he didn't have long before Aunt Eda would catch him nosing about up here, so he closed his eyes and whipped the tablecloth off the chest as fast as a magician wanting to keep a tea set in place.

He opened his eyes and became instantly disappointed. The chest was full of books, and not even interesting-looking books. These were old books, in boring hard covers with dull colors and no pictures on them. And they were written in Norwegian.

Samuel hadn't read a book since his parents died. He had tried. Mrs. Finch, the neighbor who had looked after Samuel and Martha before they flew out to Norway, had suggested that Samuel should read to take his mind off things. But he hadn't been able to concentrate enough to finish reading a single sentence. His mind was still so full of the car accident that his eyes had slid off words like feet on an icy pavement.

Picking through the books in the tea chest, Samuel looked at the titles on the spine.

And then he saw another book, underneath all the others. It was right at the bottom and Samuel had to stretch his arm as far as it would go in order to reach it.

It was heavy—heavier than its average size suggested—as if the words weighed more than in the other books. The cover was the dullest of greens, like grass in a March fog, but it somehow looked better than the rest.

Samuel looked at the spine, and felt a chill as the wind kept blowing against the side of the house.

The book had a title he could understand. It was called
The Creatures of Shadow Forest,
by Professor Horatio Tanglewood.

While her brother was nosing around in the attic, Martha stared out of the bedroom window and watched her aunt collect the washing from the line. The wind was strong, and kept blowing the vests and long johns and jumpers into Aunt Eda's face as she unpegged them.

What was Martha thinking about as she stared out from that upstairs window? Whether you were ten thousand miles away or right in the same room, you wouldn't have been able to understand what was going on behind those dark brown eyes as they observed her aunt battling the wind.

The truth is, she wasn't paying much attention to anything her eyes were witnessing. Since her parents' death, everything she saw in the outside world struck her as being pointless. What was the purpose of doing anything? Where did it get you? Everybody dies in the end, whether that end comes sooner or later it didn't really matter. She knew that some people—like Aunt Eda—could try to spend time talking and smiling to cover up the sadness inside them, but words and smiles belonged to another world now. A world to which Martha knew she would never be able to return.

So when she watched a bedsheet that her aunt had placed in the basket fill like a cotton balloon and fly up into the air, she didn't open the window and tell Aunt Eda that the washing was escaping in the wind.

It was only when her aunt turned around from unpegging her last pair of long johns that she caught sight of the rebellious bedsheet.

Aunt Eda shoved the long johns into the basket and started running after the white sheet as it swooped up in the air, and back down, cartwheeling over the grass toward the forest.

Martha saw other items were now leaving the basket as well, due to the increasing strength of the wind. And pretty soon all of the washing was traveling through the air toward the trees, flying over Aunt Eda's head or whizzing past her on the grass.

Undershirts, long johns, woolly socks, underpants—all tumbling and soaring like birds with injured wings…

Aunt Eda managed to catch hold of some socks and a shirt, then she saw the bedsheet come to rest only a few steps away from the forest. She ran toward it, pinning the rescued items of washing to her chest with her left arm. Then, once she had gotten to the bedsheet she stretched out her other arm—her javelin arm—but just as she was about to clutch hold of the white cotton, it escaped her, as it responded again to the call of the wind.

Aunt Eda ran a few more steps forward, awkwardly holding the bundle of dry washing, but then stopped suddenly as the sheet disappeared into the darkness of the forest.

Martha watched as her aunt stood facing the trees.

Aunt Eda was either unable or unwilling to step forward and retrieve any item of washing that made it beyond the giant trunks in front of her. And it was right then, at the moment Martha was reminded of the dreaded fear that the forest seemed to inspire in her aunt, that the ten-year-old girl at the window started to become interested in what she was watching. As her aunt began to walk back, toward the empty basket and the washing line, Martha's eyes stayed rooted on the darkness between the trees.

It seemed beautiful.

Beautiful, and strangely inviting. She became fascinated by it, as she stood there, at the window. It seemed so different from the pointless smiles and pointless words she had been surrounded by since her parents died.

Something about the black spaces between the trees seemed to speak directly to her, drawing her in—the darkness as irresistible in a world of false smiles as a cool pool of water on a hot summer's day.

As Martha stared out of the window, Samuel was a floor above her, opening
The Creatures of Shadow Forest.
He turned to the first page and began to read:

Samuel gulped, and sweat moistened his palms. Then he flicked to the next page and began to read about the creatures of his nightmares.

Samuel turned over the page, and he read as fast as he could about another kind of creature—
trolls:

Samuel shivered with terror after he had finished reading, and flicked through the pages, catching glimpses of other creatures' names—Slemps, Truth Pixies, Tomtegubbs and many others. He decided to keep hold of the book, tucking it in his trousers and hiding it under his sweater. He then put the checkered cloth back over the tea chest. He stepped across the creaking floorboards, toward the ladder that leaned against the opening in the floor.

I'd better go
. He realized his aunt would have probably finished taking the dry washing off the line.

As he placed his foot on the ladder he noticed an object like a spear leaning against the corner of the room.

Aunt Eda's old javelin
.

But there was no time to inspect.

He heard Aunt Eda downstairs, so he quickly climbed down the ladder and tiptoed back to the bedroom where he had left Martha.

“Martha, there's a jav—”

Samuel's sentence was left unfinished, hanging in the air as he scanned the room for his sister. But it was no good.

Martha was nowhere to be seen.