A few times, inexplicable stuff had happened to her out here. It was only ever when she came alone into the woods, which was inconvenient, since she would have appreciated some witnesses.
One spring evening when she was eight, trotting back to the house through the woods at sunset, a sweet scent stopped her. It was the smell of cookies—vanilla-rich sugar cookies, as if someone was baking them a few feet away. She’d been saying to Livy that very afternoon, as they walked through the forest, that sugar cookies were her favorite food. (Livy told her she’d die of malnutrition if she didn’t come up with some healthier other favorite foods.) Skye looked around, and saw a skinny path winding off through a clump of red huckleberry bushes. The path was just wide enough for one of her feet at a time, and she was sure no path had ever been there before. She’d have known if it had. Though it twisted back into the forest, away from home, she followed it. As she walked, the scent of cookies grew stronger. Then a scratchy, tinny voice called, from high above her head, “Little girl. Do you want a treat?”
She stopped and stared up into the trees in the fading light.
Her mother called for her, sounding strangely far off. Skye whirled and called back, “I’m out here!” and a noise scurried in the trees like a squirrel dashing away. Then Skye found herself in the middle of the forest, surrounded by red huckleberries, with no path to guide her back. She followed her mom’s voice and got home, and by dinnertime a few minutes later had reckoned she had probably been imagining things.
When she was twelve, tromping around the woods one October afternoon, she heard music and followed it. It wasn’t beats from someone’s car stereo; it was otherworldly music, like if you took cricket chirps, frog croaks, breaking twigs, and river gurgles, and set them to a rhythm. That time, a friend of Livy’s soon appeared on her way through the woods, and waved to Skye. Skye turned to join her, and the music died away.
When she was fourteen, a glowing line of mushrooms at dusk—actually glowing—led her a few yards off the trail before she got spooked and ran home.
And when she was twenty, lying on her back with her eyes closed on a fallen log in the forest at sunset, listening to hip-hop through her earbuds, she suddenly smelled coffee. It was strong enough that she figured someone had to be standing next to her with a steaming cup in hand, but when she opened her eyes no one was there. Instead she found another of those paths that hadn’t been there before, this time a line of rocks, alternating gray and white. She took the earbuds out and followed it, her heart pounding. The smell of coffee clung to her like a cloud. Then came the voice. She heard it for sure this time; she was no little kid anymore. From overhead it said, in an eerie, squeaky tone, “Freshly brewed coffee, pretty lady?”
She looked all around, trembling, then nearly screamed when her phone jangled. It was a text from her boyfriend, asking where she was. She darted back to the log where she’d started, and sure enough, when she looked again, there was no line of rocks. With the next breeze, the coffee smell blew away and vanished.
All those phenomena had taken place around nightfall. She was almost never in the woods during actual night; it was too dark and there was no reason to be there. But dusk, twilight, when you could still see a little, she’d been here then, admiring the way the forest transformed into something mysterious and sinister in the dark.
As a kid she’d tried telling Livy about the sugar-cookie voice and the strange music. Livy had gotten excited and told her she’d seen or heard similar stuff. But then, she and Livy liked making up Teeny-tiny stories for each other, along with ghost stories and monster stories and alien stories and time-travel stories, so neither of them quite believed the other, was the impression Skye got. She even began to doubt her own memory of those uncanny events. She didn’t try telling anyone at all about the coffee-scent incident from a few years ago; it would sound crazy, and probably she had just been tired and half-dreaming.
But now, at twilight, alone in the woods, her curiosity flared to life. She fancied herself brave and open-minded, no longer as easily-freaked as in childhood. She looked around at the darkening forest, and said aloud, “You out here, Teeny-tinies? Making your coffee or cookies? Playing your tunes? Come on. Show yourselves.”
And someone, or something, cackled.
The laugh came from the shadows, higher up, as if the person or thing was in a tree. Skye squinted to look, but the trees had all become featureless black trunks with bits of dusk-blue sky caught between their fingers. Someone could be messing with her, or maybe she just happened to hear a bit of conversation from a person approaching on the path…
Then she smelled dessert. Not a mere whiff, but a wave of scent that made her mouth water. Fruity this time, a berry pastry perhaps—not sugar cookies, but pie or other baked goods. Where could that be coming from? The few restaurants in town were behind her, downwind, and the scattered country-road houses in the forest were nearly a mile away.
Her gaze dropped to the underbrush to seek a way through, and she blinked in surprise. Hundreds of flat white mushrooms grew low on the tree trunks, sticking out like rounded shelves. That she already knew; she saw them every day. But they didn’t usually line up in a perfect row the way they were currently doing, striping around one tree trunk and continuing onto the next and the next, like a dotted line pointing the way into the woods. There were two such lines, in fact, one on each side of a thin space between the trees, delineating a path.
The path hadn’t been there a minute ago. Skye would have bet all her colored pencils on it.
Her fingers tingling in excitement, she pulled out her phone and snapped a photo of the mushrooms. When she looked at the picture, it was hard to see the lined-up pattern that was so obvious in real life, and in any case the darkness made everything grainy.
She considered trying again, then the mouth-watering smell gusted stronger. Someone above whistled a sing-song call, three notes, low to high to middle. Someone else emitted a stifled giggle.
Skye stepped onto the path between the mushrooms and walked forward. Her shoulders brushed wet tree branches. Moss and soggy fir needles squelched under her rain boots. She considered switching on the flashlight bulb on her phone, but soon her eyes adjusted to the darkness—and besides, the mushrooms had started glowing. Now they looked more blue than white, and when she knelt to touch one, blue light spilled across her hand and cast a shadow from one finger onto another.
“Pretty la-dy,” a voice sang.
She snapped her gaze up, still crouching by the mushrooms.
A dark shape moved among the bare branches of a tree.
“Who’s there?” she asked.