But instead, Henry said, “Tomorrow there will be a celebration.”
“For what?” I asked, placing two nearby eggs into the basket then standing up. I could think of no reason for the community to celebrate—surely any birthday could be delayed because of recent events. The community needs time to heal, to forget.
“A wedding,” Henry answered. He pushed his knuckled hands into the pockets of his loose, acorn-brown cardigan, then bent his shoulders forward as if he were cold.
“Whose?”
“Levi’s.”
I frowned and instinctively looked up to Bee’s bedroom window, even though I knew she wasn’t inside.
“He’ll be marrying Alice Weaver,” Henry explained, sensing my confusion.
I brushed my hands along my apron and wondered if Bee knew, if this was why she’s stayed away.
“Okay,” I replied.
“The ceremony will start after dark.” I could see that Henry was just as unnerved by this. Perhaps not because Levi would be marrying Alice instead of Bee, but because he felt it was too soon. We only just buried two of our own in the cemetery, and now we would celebrate the union of two others. But maybe this is what Levi intends—to give us a way to move on. “Perhaps the normalcy of it will be good,” Henry added.
I nodded, and we stood silently like that, both of us weighing the strangeness of the last few days, before he turned and left.
Tonight, once the sun has been pulled down by the trees, Theo and I walk to Pastoral. We move with the same dulled quiet that has rested over us in recent days, the nagging sense of waiting that has no words—like we both know something terrible is coming, the hours a dangerous ticking clock.
We’re nearly to Pastoral, the moon full overhead, when Theo asks, “Is there a nursery rhyme in the book?”
“What?”
“In the Foxtail book, is there a nursery rhyme, or a lullaby?” It feels like something he’s been thinking about for some time, a thought that’s been worrying at his bones, and the question has finally bubbled to the surface.
“Maybe. I haven’t finished it yet.” At times I read the book at a panicked rate, like I need to get to the end before I can take another breath. Other times, the words inside its pages make me feel like I’m slipping out of my own skin, into a fictional world where I don’t belong. I don’t like the way it slithers into my thoughts even when I’m not reading it, and sometimes I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t know how such tales end—I shouldn’t know what happens to a girl who vanishes into the woods.
Tonight before we left the house, I tucked the book into the back of the closet behind a stack of old dresses that need mending, near a spider’s web long abandoned—where Theo won’t find it.
“There’s a lullaby I keep hearing,” he says. “I think it’s a memory.”
“A memory of what?”
He shakes his head and glances at me sidelong, like he’s afraid to say. “I’m not sure.”
In truth, I know what my husband is asking: He wants to know about the lullaby. The one mentioned in chapter seventeen of the Foxtail book, the lullaby that coaxes the fox from the forest. The one that turns Eloise into the villain.
I lied when I pretended not to know.
FOXES AND MUSEUMS
Excerpt from Book One in the Eloise and the Foxtail series
The lullaby was written in an old book Eloise found buried beneath the roots of a snowbriar tree, near the far back of the underground museum. Her palms were caked with mud by the time she pulled the book free and slumped back on her heels, holding the book to her tiny chest.
Worms wriggled beneath her feet; bats swung from the ceiling of the museum. But she paid no mind to the dark, crawly things that watched her. She only cared about the book.
She placed it on her lap, legs crossed beneath her, knees muddied, and flipped open the front cover. But the first page was empty. So was the second. She fanned through the pages and found them all blank—only smooth white paper stared back.
Tears welled at the rims of her eyes as she flitted through the pages, desperate, heartbroken. But then, at the very end—at the last page within the book—she found writing. The ink was bold and sharp, still wet, as if it had been pressed to the page only moments ago. But the words were not a magic spell or a curse, as she had hoped.
It was a lullaby. A song sung to babies to help them sleep.
At first, Eloise was angry, and she thought of closing the book, dropping it back into the earth and covering it with soil. But she felt a tickle at the back of her throat; her vocal cords beginning to hum the words aloud. And soon she was singing the lullaby with her head craned back, as if she were commanding the stars far above the dark chamber of the museum. She sang the words bright and clear, Let the night woods bury you alive; let the dark swallow you whole. You are not a girl tonight; you are a beast stripped of your soul.
When she climbed back up through the old, crumbling well, the book held carefully in her arms, she stood once again aboveground and watched as dawn inched through the alabaster trees. Night becoming day.
But she was not the same.
Eloise was no longer the heroine of this story—she was something else. She was the dark between tree branches, she was the vile thing that is hidden in corners and low places.
She was the shadow.
The monster.
Called by a name that would not be spoken, unless you desired to summon her close. To look death in the face. To be changed into something that was not yourself.
THEO
Candles have been lit along every surface, illumining the center of Pastoral in a soft, phosphorescent glow. It’s a strange sight, the community lit up for a celebration—a wedding—when only days ago we hung two men from the Mabon tree.
The ceremony is a simple exchange of vows: Hand-forged rings are pushed onto fingers and when Levi and Alice kiss, there is a soft applause.