“Forgive yourself!” Gowan calls.
All around, vines and bushes curl out of the floorboards, berries, thick and black, pregnant with juice, growing up and up.
No. I won’t give up. I will not eat.
I fight and I strike until finally there is nothing left. No strength. No energy. No will.
I collapse onto the forest floorboards, and I drop the branch.
There is a
S
I N
K
I N
G
sensation, like falling, a fading noise distorting lower as it winds down—a slowing of the clock as darkness takes over—and I give in to it. It would be… so nice… to just… give in.
The last thing I hear is Gowan’s cry.
“SILLA, NO!”
31
story
Pick a petal, he loves me
another, he loves me not,
kiss and tell that lady
all that was forgot.
I don’t want to do this, but I have to. I’ve been planning it for months. Waiting for the perfect time. And that’s now.
I rouse Nori. Quiet as a mouse.
Squeak!
I find the escape bag, and carry her through to the living room. He’s drunk, asleep. She’s got an arm slung over him. For warmth? Protection? To make sure he stays down?
His beer cans are scattered all over the floor, and his snores—
Wait.
What’s happening?
This feels… familiar.
I glance behind me. “Gowan…?”
At first, nothing.
Then he steps through the shadows at the far side of the wall. He stares at me, his eyes full of tears, and smiles wider than I’ve ever seen.
“You remember,” he chokes, grinning.
My eyes open, as though they had been closed, and I am lying on the forest-manor floor. And Nori is not.
“What just happened?”
Gowan helps me to my feet, and then folds me into his arms. His breath is hot on my neck.
“You almost reset,” he murmurs, holding me tighter.
I pull away gently. “Reset?”
Everything feels so surreal. As eerily still as this horrible place has always been, only now there is no atmosphere. I get to my feet and look around. And he’s there. The Creeper Man. Standing still as a statue, towering above me. I stumble back, but he doesn’t move. Gowan’s words: Forgive yourself. Cathy and Nori’s words: He’s already here.
I just stare at him.
All around me, the berries hang, oversized and plump and dark with juice. I want them. I don’t. Every berry is matched and surrounded by at least three sharp thorns.
“I almost… reset.”
I don’t know why I do it.
Something inside me just melts like ice into water. I am tired of fighting. Tired of the sadness. Tired of the hunger. Tired of missing someone I didn’t even know was gone. I have carried this load long enough. And I know what I am looking at. I finally know what I am looking at.
I reach through the thorns, flinching as they prick and tear at my arms, and I grab a handful of berries. The thorns let me go, curling away, setting me free. I step forward, up to the Creeper Man, and I offer him the berries. He raises one long hand and turns it palm upward. I let the berries drop.
I am crying.
I touch my face to make sure it’s real. Water on my face, water in my heart, melting away the stone.
I am crying.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell him, my tears still coming from a well of sadness deep inside me. “I forgive you.”
He begins to peel away, like some awful wallpaper, like a suit he was wearing—a veneer—fading into a crumpled nothing at the feet of what was inside all along.
Me.
I stare at myself, holding the berries.
“You…” I whisper. “You’re me. I was fighting… myself. This whole time, I was fighting myself?”
The me that was the Creeper Man all along collapses onto her knees and devours the berries, all the while sobbing. I cry with her. I watch myself laughing through my tears. The other Silla nods at me, and fades away, back into myself.
Gowan walks over to where she knelt and turns to smile at me.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask him.
“You wouldn’t have believed. Not then. You’d have pulled away and I’d lose you forever.”
I nod. “I… I feel—different.” I feel whole. Full. Healed. I feel… like myself again. “This whole thing”—I gesture at the manor, the woods, the trees, where the Creeper Man used to be—“was all my doing, wasn’t it? I was trapped… wasn’t I?”
Gowan nods. “You’ve kept yourself locked in your own purgatory—one of your own making—since you died.”
I see it. I see it all. The truth of everything. Like all the blank pieces I once turned into darkness and shadow are suddenly there, bright and urgent. “I turned myself into my own tormentor,” I whisper. “And I used Cath’s story to do it.”
Gowan grins. “Not anymore.”
There is so much to process… to take in. But I don’t have time, because the trees begin to glow like lightbulbs. Pulsing like they each contain a heart of fire. The light grows, and grows, encompassing everything around it.