“We’re not?” Leo stared at her hunched back. It was uncanny, but somehow she almost vanished even as she stood there in plain sight. If he focused, he could still see her standing there, but if he let his attention wander at all, she simply disappeared. “Why not?”
She didn’t answer as she continued to vanish from his vision more and more. Afraid he’d lose her altogether, Leo stepped back onto the bank and hurried over to the spot where he was fairly certain she still stood. Even standing right beside her, he had to force his mind to believe that she remained present. “Why aren’t we going to hunt the monster?” he asked, putting out a hand to grab her shoulder.
He never touched her. Instead, he found himself lying flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him.
By the time Leo was able to sit upright and look about, Rose Red was gone. The goat was standing in the same place, however, roundly chewing leaves and blinking complacent eyes at him.
“Rose Red?” Leo called, putting a hand to his chest as he labored to breathe again. “Rose Red? Where’d you go?”
She was standing right next to him and perhaps had been there the whole time. Her head was bowed between her shoulders. “You oughtn’t to have nabbed at me,” she said.
He shook his head and puffed, “Now you tell me!” The world still spun a little, but he closed his eyes and shook his head, and things began to reorient themselves. “Why aren’t we going to hunt the monster?” he asked again as he got carefully back to his feet.
“Beana don’t want us to.”
“Beana?”
“Yup.”
“Who’s Beana again?”
“My nanny, like I tells you!”
“Your—” Leo broke off and turned with a laugh to look at the old nanny goat. “Oh! Your nanny! That explains a lot.” Then he made a face. “Why does your nanny care?”
“She just does.”
“Oh.” Leo licked his lips. The fact was, after all that tramping through the woods, the idea of climbing up to the cave lacked its former appeal. Besides, most of his ideas for monster hunting were not the stuff of legends. And the creek really was too full of possibilities to pass up.
“You don’t want to play with me no more, do you?” said the tiny voice of Rose Red, and he realized that she’d almost disappeared again.
Stopping himself from reaching out to her, since that had proven disastrous, Leo quickly said, “Yes, I still want to play! Monsters are silly; besides, they don’t exist. We should build a dam, like I said. Make a lake over in that hollow down there. Do you think you could lift some of those bigger stones if I helped you?”
Rose Red nodded, and though Leo couldn’t see it, she smiled underneath her veil.
So began a friendship such as neither child had ever before experienced. And that first day, as they rolled stones and sticks into the creek despite Beana’s disapproving bleats, all thoughts of monsters and algebra forgotten in the pleasures of mud and running water, they could never have predicted how far that new friendship would take them.
6
You have forgotten me.”
“You’re pretty hard to forget.”
Rose Red kneels at the mouth of the cave, her back to the dark pool. She does not want to meet the gaze of the one in the pool. Her eyes drift across the high mountains, across the landscape of the kingdom that, in her dreams, is visible from here all the way to Bald Mountain in the north.
“Shall I take that as a compliment, princess?”
“You take everythin’ as a compliment.” She spares him no more than a quick glance over her shoulder before returning her focus to the landscape. Although she can see to any corner of the kingdom at any moment she wishes, it is a particular gabled room at Hill House that draws her eyes. A room in which the lamplight has long since been extinguished, and a boy dreams certain dreams that do not connect with hers.
The one in the pool sighs, and his eyes are full of longing as he looks upon her unveiled face, so pensive in the silver light.
“Am I no longer your friend?”
Her shoulders heave as she draws and releases a great breath. “Of course you’re important to me. You’ve been here all my life. But you’re nothin’ but a dream!”
“I care for you as no one else does.”
Rose Red wraps her arms about herself as if cold, yet still she avoids his gaze. She feels him reading her face, however, and without her veils she feels vulnerable. “Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop lookin’ at me uncovered like this. I don’t like it.”
“Your face is so beautiful, princess.”
She grinds her teeth and presses the heels of her hands over her eyes. “You’re a liar.”
“Never. Never, my lovely—”
“Shut up!” Rocks scatter and fall silently down the side of the mountain as Rose Red leaps to her feet. “Shut up! I cain’t bear it no more. I’m a big girl, and I don’t need your pretty stories! I have a real friend now.”
The one in the pool smiles sadly, or perhaps it is more an expression of pain. “He has not seen your true face.”
“He’s still my friend. He comes to play with me every day that he can. And we have fun! We don’t just sit and talk; we have real adventures.”