Sudden darkness, sudden calm
means the woods are close
don’t you put up the alarm
you’re the one he chose.
BROKEN BOOK ENTRY
His voice is calling me at night. It’s like a presence I can’t escape. The others can’t hear him. Can’t hear any of the hurtful words he says to me. I wish I could argue back, deny the tall tales, heavy with lies and thin on truth. He is trying to torment me with his poison tongue. Shut up, shut up, shut up! I go downstairs to confront the thing but there is no form, only the endless creaking of the floor-boards under my feet and his voice. It is torture. Still seems like the dark might be endless.
The same, every night. When I sleep, for however few minutes at a time, I dream.
La Baume is crumbling in my dreams. Sunken and warped. The red paint is peeling away, revealing a gross curling of rainbow colors beneath. Red, blue, green, pink, orange… it’s a sick joke. And the house is choking underneath vines upon vines and roots upon roots. They rise out of dead ground to strangle the manor and I feel like I’m the one being choked. I feel like I’m the one who can’t breathe.
As I watch, the vines grow, thicken, tighten, and La Baume begins to crack and sink, straining to remain, and I choke and I gasp and I can’t breathe— and I wake.
I still can’t breathe.
I give up sleeping in my room for the night, and take to the second floor in the library, between the bookcases, where Gowan sleeps. We share a blanket and he kisses my forehead.
“I’m staying with you,” he tells me. “Until you’re ready to come.”
I’m ready. So ready. But I never will. I can’t lose Nori.
I curl into his arms, and for once, I sleep.
It wasn’t a boom. Not even a crash. It was more like… a creeeeeaaak and I almost didn’t notice it in my half sleep.
WRONG.
I open my eyes and see nothing. The room is a terrifying black. I’m about to panic about being blind when I spot the embers burning in the grill of the fireplace.
Oh, God.
I reach over to wake Gowan, but all I feel is the cold blanket beside me. And then I hear Nori banging on the wall upstairs, hysterical and alone. I can almost hear her terrified gasping, sense her tears. [LET HER ROT, THE LITTLE PEST.]
“Nori!” I spring up.
“Wait—what’s going on?” Gowan says groggily from somewhere else in the library. Down a level—on one of the sofa chairs.
“I have to get to Nori!”
He’s up in a second. “Damn. Silla, we need lights.”
“There’s a generator in the basement. But it doesn’t work all the time. We stopped using it.”
“Okay, I’ll go down.”
“No!”
“We need to check it, Silla.”
“Okay, but let me come with you, then. I have to get to Nori first, though. There’s a candle on the desk by the window.” Even as I’m telling him this, I’m feeling my way down the spiral stairs. When I’m at the bottom, he already has the candle and is lighting it with the last embers.
I hug the blanket closer to me. It’s so cold. And then I open the door, stepping gingerly forward, very much aware of the hole in the entrance hall and the glaringly loud silence of it. I bump into the armchair and adjust my trajectory. My heart thuds inside me. [SCARED OF THE DARK, ARE WE?] The flesh-ball thing could be right next to me. He could be right beside me, waiting to reach out.
But no. Gowan is here. He has a candle. There is enough light to see by, but it flickers and moves, making the shadows dance.
“Tell me where the flashlight is, and some candles, and then go to Nori.”
But Nori is already coming to us.
Silla? Something’s wrong with my room.
She is breathless and pale, and she takes my hand, holding it firmly.
“It’s okay, bug. We’ve just run out of light.” I pick her up, and sit her on my hip, even though she really is getting too big for this. I tell myself it’s because she’s scared, but I know that really it’s because I am.
“Okay,” Gowan says. “Now, quickly, candles—”
“Okay, but we don’t have a flashlight. There are lanterns, though. Really old ones that will burn this miserable house down if we knock them over. I’ve gotten pretty good with them since being here.”
Gowan makes a face. “Really?”
“Yeah, well, my aunt is a little eccentric, if you didn’t notice. This house is old as hell itself.”
“Better than nothing.”
I grab his arm. “Gowan… this darkness… it’s… could it…”
His eyes harden, and he storms to the window. He opens the curtains and I stagger backward.
Earth. We are buried in earth.
Gowan runs out of the room and upstairs to my room. I follow, Nori clinging to me like her life depends on it, and I’m starting to think it does.
The trees.
They have completely surrounded La Baume, not an inch of air between them.
The trees are here, rising over us.
And La Baume is sinking.
We are completely and utterly trapped.
It’s the trees.