Dad?
Something closes over my outstretched fingers and pulls. My arm releases from the muck, followed by my head. I take a deep breath as black silt drips from my hair. My forearm crosses the threshold and the silt disappears, no trace of it on my skin or the sleeve of my white tee. My head breaches the threshold next, and the muck that had clung to my eyelashes and gotten crammed up my nose is gone as well.
Mom pulls the rest of my body out of the wood. She scoops me up into her shaking arms. Her voice chips on her sobs. “I was so scared. I was so scared—”
I wrap my arms around her. “It’s okay,” I say. “I’m okay.”
She shakes her head, her fear turning to anger. “Where were you? Why didn’t you come home?”
“I’m sorry, Mom. I—”
“You are never going back in there again.”
I don’t say anything. We both know she doesn’t have any control over that. It’s bigger than she is. Bigger than I am. But it makes her feel better to say it, even if only for that brief second.
I think she wishes she could have said it to Dad. Like she believes if she’d been more vocal about her concerns, he might not have walked off the path.
Mom wipes her hands under her eyes. “Come on,” she says. “Dinner’s ready.”
I follow her into the house. My legs tremble beneath me and my upper body is numb, but I won’t do my stretches here, so close to the wood. Not when it feels like something is still in there, waiting for me to come back.
XI
“Why can’t I go in the wood at night?” I ask Dad as we practice my first foreign language—Latin—at the dining room table.
“Your conjugation is terrible,” Dad replies, looking over my shoulder at my worksheet.
I cover the paper with my scrawny arms. “Why can’t I?”
He sighs. “It’s dangerous.”
I roll my eyes. “But why is it dangerous?”
“It’s dangerous,” he says, “because the wood changes at night. It takes on an entirely different personality.”
I arch my brow, and he laughs.
“That isn’t enough of an explanation for you?”
I shake my head.
“Well, I was saving this lecture for a different time, but I suppose it doesn’t hurt to give you a sneak peek now.” He scoots his chair closer, takes the pencil from my hand, and pulls my workbook out from under my arms. He sketches something in the corner as he speaks. “Just as there are nocturnal creatures in our world, there are creatures in the wood who come out only when night falls. These are dangerous creatures, and the little we know about them comes from what the Old Ones were willing to tell us, and what some past guardians who stayed a little too long in the wood after sunset were able to see before just barely making it out alive. Of course, there were guardians who did the same thing who didn’t make it out alive, but we can hardly get any information from them.”
He smiles, but when he catches my eye, the smile disappears and he clears his throat. “I don’t tell you this to scare you, Winnie girl. These creatures can’t enter our world, so you have nothing to fear from them here, and it will be a long time before you’ll have to enter the wood without me by your side. Even then, so long as you leave the wood before the sun sets, you’ll be safe. Understand?”
I nod, my fingernails digging into the edge of my seat.
He stops sketching and passes the workbook back to me. The empty space running along the top of the page is now filled with monsters. Big, fat ones with skin that looks like tree bark; tall, skinny ones that look like humans if humans could be pulled out like taffy and given an extra row of teeth; long ones that slither on the ground like snakes; and stocky ones with leathery wings that look like a cross between a bat and a bald eagle.
I point to the dark blob shape in the corner. “What’s this one?”
“A shadow creature,” he says. “The Old Ones call them Sentinels. They’re flesh-eaters, travel in packs. They freeze their victims, keeping the meat fresh so they can take their time skinning them alive.”
My eyes widen.
Dad ruffles my hair. “I told you not to worry about them, didn’t I? The chances that you’ll ever run into one are slim, especially if you keep your wits about you. That’s why these lessons are important, so you’ll be prepared for any and all situations, including avoiding danger whenever possible. Take me, for example. I’ve been doing this for over thirty years, ever since I was your age, and I have yet to leave the wood after sundown. I only know what these creatures look like from my own studies, not because I’ve seen them for myself. There, you feel better now, don’t you?”
I nod, even though it’s a complete and total lie.
“And then,” he says, “as if these things weren’t enough, the wood itself changes at night. It will turn on you. If you’re lucky, it will kill you before any of the monsters find you. But if you’re smart, you’ll never be in that position to begin with, so you won’t have to worry about it. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Now that we’ve got that settled, let’s run through your conjugations again.”
I roll my eyes. “Daaad. Do we have to?”
He taps his finger against the monster sketches.
“Oh,” I say. “Right.”
I pick up Latin pretty quickly after that. It helps that I can’t sleep for a week after Dad’s lecture. I lie in bed for hours every night, counting conjugations instead of sheep.
*
Mom tries to call Uncle Joe after a silent dinner, in which the silverware screeching across our plates was the only sound, but he doesn’t answer. I sit in the living room, curled up on Dad’s favorite leather recliner, his bookcase full of first-edition Yeats and Emerson and Fitzgerald behind me. The leather still smells a little like black coffee and sandalwood cologne. I wrap his favorite blanket around me and stare at the wood through the back window.
It has never looked as terrifying as it does tonight.
My thoughts drift to Brightonshire, whether he made it out or not. I hope he did. No one deserves that kind of death. But why was he in the wood at night in the first place? If he knew the wood as he said he did, why risk it? What is he trying to find? My mind turns it over as condensation gathers on the windowpane.
The phone rings and Mom shuffles into the kitchen in her pajamas. She frowns at me. “What are you still doing up?”
I glance at the clock on the mantel. Ten thirty.
I must have fallen asleep.
Mom answers the phone and, after a few seconds, says, “She’s not going back in there, Joe. Find someone else.”
She crosses her arm under her chest, and I don’t have to hear Uncle Joe to know what he’s saying. There is no one else, Grace. You knew that when you married Jack. This is the way it has to be.