The passage widens to a vast hollow filled with dead weeping willow trees—branches drooping sinuous and thin, all the way to the ground, each one bare and slick with ice. The thicket’s roof reaches high and filters what little light there is. It gives the scene a brownish tinge. At first glance, it could be the front of a sepia Christmas card, complete with ornaments hanging from the serpentine branches.
Only these aren’t ornaments. An endless array of teddy bears and stuffed animals, plastic clowns and porcelain dolls, hang on the branches from webby rope. In the human realm, we’d call them love-worn and threadbare—playthings that were hugged and kissed by a child until the stuffing fell out or the button eyes popped off. Toys that were loved to death.
I reach up and tap the leg of a ragged stuffed lamb who’s missing an ear. The toy sways on a noose of spider silk. The movement is so silent and tranquil, it’s disturbing to my core.
Tranquil. That bothers me … the fact that the instant I stood up, everything hushed. Bone-deep quiet. After all those years of yearning for silence, why is it that I seem to feel more at home amid mayhem and noise now?
Finding a sleepy doll that’s eerily similar to one I loved as a little girl—complete with time-yellowed vinyl skin and moth-eaten lashes over eyes that open and close—I touch its foot. The leg swings, hanging by a thread to the stuffed body.
The doll’s eyes snap open, sucking my courage away. Something in its empty gaze begs for escape … something that’s trapped, unhappy, and restless, aching to get out. The toy is harboring a soul. They all are.
I wait, mouth drained of all moisture—for the doll to scream or to weep out all the pain I see in its eyes. But the movement slows, and her eyes close once more.
A rustle stirs behind me. Prickles of awareness clamber up my spine, spreading through my shoulders and all the way to my wing tips.
Maybe Sister One followed my footprints in the snow.
Please be the nice one … please, please, please be the nice one.
Reluctantly, I turn on my heel. A shadowy face bends down to mine.
“Why ye be standing on this hallowed ground?” The voice—like branches tap-tap-tapping a frosted windowpane in the dark of night—rushes over me. Her breath smells of freshly dug graves and loneliness, sending shivers of terror from my toes to my fingertips.
“I can explain,” I whisper.
“Dandy that would be.” She draws back. Her clothes, body, and legs are duplicates of her sister’s. But on her face, scars and fresh lacerations dribble blood. On her left hand, a pair of gardening shears takes the place of fingers. She must have caused the cuts herself.
Compared to her, Sister One is the sugarplum fairy.
My odds of getting out with my head intact just plummeted to almost nil. “I—I took a wrong turn.”
“I’d say ye did.” Her other hand eases out from behind her hoop skirt, covered by a black rubber glove. She carries a trio of ragged toys on a web like fish on a line. Her scissored deformity edges close to my neck—snip, snip. Puffs of air graze my skin as the blades open and close. “Ye don’t belong here.” Snip, snip, snip.
“I don’t want to belong here.” The stuffed atrocities in her hand cause fresh dread to bubble up in my chest. I step backward and nearly slip on the snow. Spreading my wings low, I catch my balance.
“Well, ye won’t. So long as ye’re still breathing.”
“Right,” I answer, gasping to assure myself I am.
“It’s when ye stop breathing that ye’re mine.” Her scissors rake my sleeve’s shoulder seam. “Once I cut out yer lungs, ye’ll belong then.”
Self-preservation kicks in, and I back up two more steps, breaking through a curtain of branches to get closer to the trunk of the tree. Heavy with decrepit toys, the limbs bow over me almost to the ground, like a morbid parasol dimming the light.
Sister Two’s silhouette moves on the other side, scuttling around the circumference. Taking strained breaths, I turn with her, keeping her in my sight through openings between branches.
The instant she parts the curtain to come inside, I fold my wings around me, watching through a translucent shell.
She laughs—a grinding, hollow sound. “The pretty butterfly is now the cocoon. Isn’t that backward from the natural way of things?”
As if anything is natural here. I ease against the tree trunk to protect my back.
The point of her blades nudge the juncture where my wings hide my windpipe. Even through the gossamer layers I can feel the cold metal compressing my air passage.
“Ah, yer wings are yet young. Thin as paper. I can chop them into little pieces and dance in yer confetti. Face me, or suffer that fate.”
She steps back. Considering how much it hurt just to step on my wings earlier, I let them fall to my sides and stand against the tree trunk.
Smiling, she snips at the air in front of my face, blowing sharp wisps around me. “Now. Ye’ve stolen something from me. Give it back, or I’ll bleed ye like a pig until ye squeal.”
“I haven’t stolen anything!”