Silla says: This is…
Scary, I sign.
Silla says: … insane.
I nod. We are at the front door, and the garden should be out there, but it’s all dirt and trees! They are so close, like long wooden bricks. They took away all the light, all of it!
Gowan says: You’re kidding me. You’re actually f—ing kidding me.
Silla says: Watch it. (She looks at me.) Gowan says: Sorry.
Silla says: This manor is— Gowan says: Cursed. Or haunted. Or— Silla says: Something. Yeah.
Gowan says: Bloody hell. (Silla squints at him and nods at me and then he nods back and then I nod, too.) They talk for a long, long time, and I look at my friend, but he just smiles and steps back again, and I don’t know why he didn’t take my hand like before.
I put my arms around Silla.
This is a scary game.
Gowan gets the ax from the kitchen. It’s partly rusted, so I’m not convinced of how much use it’s going to be.
We run back up to my room.
“Stand back,” he says.
We do.
He shatters my bedroom window and begins chopping and chopping and chopping and chopping until Nori tugs on my dress and signs, Can we go away? Is there food?
I nod, and we silently leave Gowan to it.
He’s strong, Nori signs.
“Yeah,” I agree. “But I don’t think Gowan’s strength is going to be enough.”
Not him, she signs.
Gowan chops at the trees blocking the window all day.
“This doesn’t happen,” I hear him muttering when I pass.
The wood splinters and falls away, piece by painful piece.
“Tomorrow,” Gowan says, dripping with sweat. “I’ll break through tomorrow. And then we’re getting the hell out of here.”
“Okay,” I tell him in a small voice. He doesn’t need to tell me that this is all my fault. If I had just gone with him when I still could have, then we’d be long free. Instead of trapped in a cursed (?) house, waiting to die. Waiting to sink into the earth and be buried alive. Waiting for him to arrive and tear us to shreds.
He seems to read my thoughts in my face because he pulls me into a tight hug. I tense, but he doesn’t let me go.
“There’s blame to share,” he whispers in my ear, softly, so Nori won’t hear.
I pull away. “There really isn’t.”
I leave the two of them staring after me as I wander into the house.
The next morning, the trees are full and whole again. It’s like Gowan’s ax never touched them at all. I am in the kitchen, trying to find something for Nori to eat, moving dishes around pointlessly, when I hear Gowan’s furious cry somewhere above us.
I go to find Gowan. When he spots me, he walks over and wraps me in his arms, lips in my hair, heart pounding against me. He is shaking. I hug him back, clenching my eyes shut against his awful, impossible reality. The strangest sensation takes over. That he is clinging on to me because he is afraid. Not of being trapped, or of… him… But afraid of ME. Afraid for me.
“I don’t know what to do,” he says, but I have the strange feeling he means something else entirely. Maybe: I’m scared.
“I don’t either,” I say, and think: We are going to die in here.
He closes his eyes. “It’s hopeless.”
There’s that word again.
Somewhere, out there, the trees are pushing even closer. If it’s possible. And we are sinking.
And a thought strikes me with such a chill that I almost drop the dish in my hand.
If the trees are at La Baume’s doorstep…
Then the Creeper Man is, too.
The air is stale in here.
My imagination, I’m sure, since we haven’t been trapped long enough for me to be able to tell. But I feel like I’m breathing in Gowan’s, Nori’s, and Cath’s soupy secondhand air. The rotting fruit full of worms doesn’t help. Nori is so hungry, I caught her trying to eat it.
That’s why I’m here, now. At the hole.
It’s gotten so big that it has swallowed up the chairs I put around it for my Nori’s protection. I let the plate tilt forward, slowly, so that the fruit slips off the plate in increments, leaving a trail of brown juice behind. A few worms linger, so I drop the plate, too.
I bend forward and listen. Intently.
I never hear an impact.
I stare down into the pit, straining to see something. And for a moment, the merest fraction of a minute, I think I see something writhing down there. Roots, maybe, twisting and bending around one another? Or were they vines? Hell, for all I know, they were arms, reaching out for me.
I certainly feel the pull. I think my future may just include an attic and a singular pacing path.
I will never tell Nori that.
I will never tell Gowan.
But it’s getting to be a bit of a challenge to hold back.
That’s right, his voice coos. Daddy’s little girl is coming home.
We’re trapped in this house, waiting to die. Why not… give in?
Why the hell should I resist?