Into the Heartless Wood

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

  Yet I can’t help but feel we’re hurtling into danger.

  Hours pass. I eat my lunch: another piece of bara brith, with a fat slice of ham and hot tea from my thermos. The train clatters on, the motion of the wheels on the rails dragging my eyelids down.

  A horrific SCREEEEEECH of metal jolts me awake. The train car wrenches sideways and I’m thrown hard into the seat across the aisle, inches from the old passenger who lies limp against the shut window. His neck is bent at an odd angle, and there’s a smear of red on his temple. I stare at him, my thoughts dull and slow with shock. This is a nightmare, and in another moment I will wake up.

  But I don’t.

  The train car shudders as it settles on its side, causing me to slide into the old passenger’s body. He is stiff and cold, and a scream tears from my throat as I frantically, desperately, pull myself back into the aisle. I am shaky with horror, with the dawning awareness that gnaws at my mind.

  The train windows are over my head now. Branches press against the glass. They scratch and they scrape, like they’re trying to get in, and I know, I know, even before the music twists suddenly through glass and metal and puts its claws in me.

  A tree siren derailed the train, and she’s going to kill us all.

  The music calls me, commands me. The barbs dig deep and pull. Something inside my head thrashes, screams, fights.

  But my body obeys the siren’s call.

  I pull myself across the seats, toward the door that leads to the next car. It’s sideways now, bent and jammed from the crash. The tree siren’s song clamors in my head, yanking me like a beast on a chain. I don’t want to leave the train. I want to hide from her. I want to tuck myself into a shadowy corner and pray she passes me by. The music doesn’t let me. I put my shoulder into the door, throw myself against it again and again. I’m dimly aware of the pain in my arm, of the wound in my side from being thrown against the seat. The music writhes in every part of me. It’s splitting me apart. I do not want to go to her. And yet—I do.

  There is terror and desire. A distant horror, a further distant pain. I must get through the door. I must, I must.

  The door gives. I push through, hissing as a piece of jagged metal slices into my leg. The music pulls me, pulls me. I haul myself from the train, and tumble out into the wood.

  Chapter Four

  OWEN

  DIRT GRINDS UNDER MY PALMS. THE CUT IN MY LEG DRIPS blood on the ground.

  I gulp for air, my limbs strangely heavy. Screams echo in the wood ahead of me, a jarring counterpoint to the music that twists into my soul. The train has been torn off its tracks, the cars scattered on the ground like discarded toys. They stretch on into the wood, out of my sight line. Other passengers crawl from the cars ahead of me, some with broken arms or legs, many with wounds from the impact of the crash. All of them lie on the forest floor, limbs dragging across the tracks. All of them wait, as I do.

  The music overwhelms me, pins me like a bug to the earth between the railroad cars. I can’t move my arms, my legs. Her song commands me to stay, to wait. My mind is screaming for me to run. My body doesn’t listen. I can’t move, can’t think. I can hardly breathe. She will come. She will devour me. And I will let her do it.

  Horror is a yawning gulf inside of me.

  I will never see Father or Awela again.

  From the front sections of the train comes the same sound again and again, the pop and crack of something breaking. I realize that it’s bodies, that it’s bones.

  Overhead, wind ripples through the trees. Branches groan and leaves whisper. Through it all her song swells and swells. It will swallow the world. It will swallow me.

  I don’t even have the will to clap my hands over my ears, to shut out the all-consuming sound of it.

  I just lie here, and wait for her to come.

  I shake, shake.

  Father. Awela. Tears blur my vision.

  I glimpse the siren through the trees, a flash of green and silver. The screams grow louder, swelling toward me like an ocean tide. But they do not block out her song. They don’t even muffle it.

  She comes nearer, to a car five down the line. She has the vague form of a woman but she’s very, very tall, and unnaturally thin. Her skin is silver-white bark, and she’s clothed in green and gold leaves round as coins. Branches burst from her hands and catch hold of the train carriage, ripping it open as easily as if it were an egg. She drags a passenger out by the throat, and with one vicious twist she snaps his neck and flings him to the ground.

  A scream tears out of me. I try to fight against the music. I tell myself to get up, to run, but my body will not obey me.

  So I just lie here. I lie here and watch her slaughter them all.

  Bodies. So many bodies. She scatters them over the grass, flings them onto the wreck of the train. They’re broken and bloody, some with twisted limbs, some with their final screams frozen in their vacant eyes. Vines spring out of the ground, and pull them into the earth.

  She is two cars down from me. One. With every person she kills, she kneels beside them for a moment, and something hanging at her throat pulses with a silver light. She never stops singing.

  I feel her music in every part of me, throbbing in my veins, heavy in my bones. It will be the last thing I ever hear.

  An eerie red light slants through the trees, and some distant part of me realizes that beyond the wood, the sun is setting.

  I won’t live to see the stars. Won’t have the chance to tell my father and Awela goodbye.

  I weep.

  There are no passengers in the train car ahead of me, or if there were, they were killed in the crash. A mercy for them. I think of the old man and his newspaper, dead on impact. He will not have to die as I will—in the grip of a nightmare, at the hands of a monster.

  She comes toward me, her movement wavering and strange, like a tree bowing in the wind. She will put her claws in me. She will break me in half, and fling me to the ground for the earth to swallow, like it swallowed all the rest.

  But she stops three paces away from me, and closes her mouth. Her song is cut off. She stares at me. The tree siren stares at me.

  She is even more monstrous up close. Her hair is silver, tangled with yellow leaves. She wears a crown of violets. There is blood on her hands.

  I shake, dimly aware that my will is flooding back to me. My body buzzes with needle-like pain, blood rushing back into limbs that have been asleep. My mind is a riot of terror. I still can’t move, fixed by her gaze as I was fixed by her song. There is a pendant at her throat, hung on a twist of vine. It glows a faint silver, reflecting in her eyes.

  She opens her mouth and I shrink back. I have lost my chance. I should have fled the instant she stopped singing.

  “Run,” she snarls.

  Chapter Five

  MONSTER

  THE ORB AT MY THROAT IS HEAVY WITH SOULS. THEY WEIGH ON ME.

  There is a boy in the dark.

  He stares, but does not cower.

  There is a strangeness about him.

  A difference in his soul.

  A familiar spark.

  I do not want to kill him, to feel his blood warm and wet on my hands.

  I do not want his soul.

  I do not need it.

  The orb is heavy.

  She will not know.

  He runs

  into

  the

  night.

  I let him go.

  Chapter Six

  OWEN

  I TEAR INTO THE DARK, MY FEET SLAPPING AGAINST THE RAILROAD ties, my breathing ragged, frantic. Pain stabs under my ribs. I stumble on one of the cross ties, but I haul myself up and keep running. I can’t stop. The moment I do, I’m dead.

  Oh God.

  Bodies. So many bodies. The images crowd in my mind. I can’t run fast enough to shake them loose.

  Oh God.

  A sob tears out of me. The trees murmur and scrape above my head, an eerie wind seething past my hot face. I ru
n and run and run, following the train tracks, the only possible route of escape. But how far did the train take me into the wood? How many hours was I asleep? Maybe I was nearly to Saeth. Maybe I should have run the other direction.

  But Oh God, no. That was the way she had gone. The tree siren. The monster.

  Slap slap slap go my feet against the railroad ties. My pulse is so quick I can’t count the beats. I gulp air like I’m drowning and maybe I am. Drowning in leaves and branches and the horror of her eyes.

  Now I know the color of a demon’s eyes. Yellow.

  Slap slap slap.

  I run and run. I can’t feel my feet. My body seems separated from my mind, like I’m floating somewhere far above, watching my own futile dash to freedom.

  She stopped singing. That is the only reason my will returned to me. I have no illusions that she really let me go. Why would she? She is a cat and I am a mouse, and any moment now she will catch me in her claws, bat me back and forth between them, leave my broken body on the forest floor like she left all the others.

  Oh God. My body is screaming to stop running. My mind is screaming to keep going.

  She was green and gold. Silver and violet. There was blood on her hands.

  The trees watch me as I stagger on. I run until I collapse, and then I pull myself along the railroad tracks, tearing holes in my trousers and scraping my legs raw. I don’t make a conscious decision to stop, but I grow aware that I have, huddled between the rails, shaking and shaking.

  Oh God. I am going to die here. I’ll never see my father or Awela again. Never have the chance to talk to Mairwen Griffith.

  Silver and yellow, violet and green. Blood on her hands.

  My head throbs and my body aches. Silver and yellow, violet and green. Red and red and red.

  Suddenly it’s not the train passengers I see—it’s my mother, her body bloody and broken, her eyes staring into nothing, a last ragged bit of her hair gleaming gold as the vines wrap over her and pull her under the earth. No one should have ended that way, least of all my mother. Not her, not her.

  I weep for her, understanding for the first time that she’s wholly, entirely gone. My father understood it from the beginning. It broke him, body and soul.

  Exhaustion crowds my mind. Creatures rustle somewhere in the underbrush. The wind rattles the leaves away overhead.

  I want to sleep. I don’t want to see silver and yellow, violet and green. I don’t want to see red. I let unconsciousness steal over me, piece by piece. I let the horror of the Gwydden’s Wood lull me to sleep.

  I wake to the blear of orange light and hands under my armpits, hauling me upward. I look into the gaunt face of my father, his mouth pressed into a grim line. “Are there any others?”

  I don’t understand the question. I’m bleary and bewildered. Every part of me aches, and for a moment I forget why I was lying on the train tracks in the middle of the wood. I don’t understand why my father is here.

  “Owen,” he says gently. “Are there any other survivors?”

  Remembrance slams through me and I stagger under the weight of it. My father keeps a steady hand under my elbow.

  “She slaughtered them.” The words choke out of me. “She slaughtered them all.”

  He nods, like he was expecting this. “Stay close. We have to move fast.” He shoves wax in my ears and ties a scarf over my head, then does the same for himself.

  The world is suddenly muffled.

  Father grabs the torch lying on the ground—the source of the orange light—and brandishes it ahead of him like a sword. He takes my arm, and I stumble along with him down the railroad tracks. I feel as if I’m in a dream. Perhaps I am.

  We walk quickly. The trees don’t like my father’s torch. They hiss and draw back, and I pray to God they’re not calling for their mistress. She would laugh at the fire while she sank her claws into us, while she broke us like so many twigs.

  Around us, the sky begins to lighten. I never expected to see another morning, and yet here are the ragged edges of dawn. The sight of it chokes me.

  And then we’re stepping from the forest, turning south toward our house. We don’t take the scarves from our heads or dig the wax from our ears until the observatory tower comes into view, bright in the morning sun.

  We stop at the garden gate, and Father turns toward me, clapping his hands on my arms.

  My jaw works as I reach for adequate words to express my gratitude and sorrow and relief. I realize none exist.

  “How …?” I say instead.

  “I went to the telegraph office last evening on my way home from Brennan’s Farm. There was no telegram from you, so I sent one inquiring after your train. It had never arrived.”

  I’m shaking. I can’t stop. It’s only my father’s presence that grounds me. “How did you know to come look for me? How did you know I wasn’t …”

  “I wasn’t going to lose my son like I lost my wife.” His voice is jagged and raw. “I would have burned the forest to the ground to find you. I would have driven a knife into the witch’s heart. I would have ended all the world before I lost you.”

  I believe him.

  He pulls me into an embrace, holding me hard against his chest as I shake and shake.

  I’m safe now. I don’t have to be afraid.

  But I am.

  Horribly, horribly afraid.

  Father goes to fetch Awela from Brennan’s Farm, and I crawl into my bed and try to sleep. All I can see are her yellow eyes, the blood dripping red from her hands.

  Chapter Seven

  OWEN

  THE DAY WE LOST OUR MOTHER WAS AWELA’S FIRST BIRTHDAY. There were cake crumbs scattered on the floor beneath the kitchen table. Mother tucked Awela into her crib after lunch and took her cello outside into the garden, where she liked to play for the birds and record music on wax cylinders for her phonograph. She composed her own music, but that’s not how she explained it. She said she played the songs her heart taught her, or the wind whispered into her ears. I wondered sometimes if she played the songs of the wood witch’s daughters, too, but I never asked her that.

  Perhaps I should have.

  I liked hearing Mother play. I played some, too—she’d given me my first lessons when I was so small the cello dwarfed me, my hand barely big enough to wrap around the bow. I enjoyed playing, but I’d never be as good as her. Her whole soul was filled with music; mine brimmed with stars.

  That day I was up in my room, reading one of my father’s scientific journals about a telescope being built in Saeth that would be powerful enough to look deeper into space than ever before. My mother’s music drifted up from the garden.

  She stopped playing suddenly, in the middle of a phrase. It was strange enough that I glanced out the window in time to see her drop her cello onto the cabbages to stride with purpose toward the Gwydden’s Wood.

  “MOTHER!” I cried, flinging the journal onto my bed and bolting downstairs.

  Alerted by my shout, Father joined me on the stairs, and the two of us burst outside just as the hem of my mother’s dress vanished among the trees.

  “Eira!” my father cried. He ran after her.

  “Father! Father, wait!”

  “Stay with Awela!” he called back to me. “Keep her safe.”

  And then the forest swallowed him, too.

  I paced in front of the house, more shocked than frightened. I trusted my father to bring my mother back. I didn’t fear the Gwydden then, not any more than a child fears a monster from a story.

  But when Awela woke and there was still no sign of either of our parents, I was afraid.

  And when the sun set and clouds rolled in and Awela cried for her dinner and they hadn’t come back, dread gripped me in its lion’s jaws. I fed Awela leftover birthday cake and lumpy porridge, because it was the only thing I knew how to cook. I ran outside to save Mother’s cello when it started to rain. I shoveled coal into the stove when the early spring night grew swiftly cold.

  I put Awel
a to bed, trying to remember all the songs my mother usually sang to her. I swept the cake crumbs off the floor. And then I collapsed in front of the fire and wondered if I was an orphan.

  I must have dozed, because when the door banged open sometime during the night, I jerked awake to find my father stumbling into the house.

  He looked like he had been to Hell and back again. His clothes ragged and torn, dried blood caking both his arms, his neck and face covered in scratches. There were leaves caught in his dark hair.

  “Father?” I whispered.

  He collapsed to the floor and wept, his whole body shaking. “She’s gone,” he choked out, over and over. “She’s gone.”

  The next day he started building the wall, working feverishly from sunrise to sunset, hardly sleeping, hardly eating. He worked until his hands were scraped raw, until his skin was gray with mortar. He didn’t stop until he’d finished it: a mile long and five feet high. It was meant to protect us from the Gwydden, but I saw what it really was: a memorial to my mother. The evidence of my father’s guilt and shame, because if he’d built it earlier, like he’d always meant to, he might not have lost her at all.

  I never asked him what he saw in the Gwydden’s Wood, how he managed to escape, if he’d found my mother, if he’d seen the Gwydden or her daughters.

  A part of me had always wanted to believe that my mother was alive, that she’d escaped somehow.

  Now, I have no such illusions.

  My father saved me.

  But he couldn’t save her.

  Father stays home with Awela and me the rest of the day and all of the next. I’m glad he’s here. I don’t know how to give Awela the attention she needs when my head is splitting apart trying to forget yellow eyes and silver-white skin. Trying to block out the screams of the train passengers, the snap of their bones, the tree siren’s song, pinning me helpless to the ground.