‘To be fair, the forest does that.’ Callum offers her a smile. Surprised, she returns it. ‘Mum hates it. Anyway.’ He turns to the trees, rubbing his thick-gloved hands. ‘Romy wasn’t too far in. Just a few minutes, I think.’ He narrows his eyes. ‘It was in a clearing, although there’ve been so many joys since then…’
His voice trails off with his body. Negotiating cars, two sparring dogs, and a half-buried motorbike, he wends his way toward the snowy bank.
The words take a handful of seconds to settle. One, two, and disbelief. ‘Are you serious?’ Kira cries after him. ‘You find a girl under a tree, and you don’t remember where?’
All guns blazing for a verbal war, she hurries to catch him up. Callum shoots her a deadpan steadiness, probably intended to make her feel small. ‘I’ll recognise it.’ He tilts his head back to contemplate the bank. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve lived here for years.’
Kira has just about readied a scathing retort when he steps back, propels himself toward the snow, leaps, scrabbles, trips over a trap of thinly masked twigs, and lands gracelessly on the ground. ‘Shit.’
Kira bursts out laughing. ‘Oh, that was priceless.’
‘Ignore it.’ Vexed, Callum staggers just as gracelessly up. ‘You saw nothing. And I think if we walk straight on from here…’ He throws a glance behind him at the forest. ‘Yeah. If we go on straight, we’ll hit the clearing. I remember thinking it was odd, but Romy was probably too drunk to change direction. We’ll find it no problem.’ He appraises her standing at the foot of the bank. ‘Are you deigning to join me?’
Mischief toys with Kira’s lips. ‘Of course.’ Straightening her ladylike posture, she extends an elegant hand. ‘If you would be so kind, good sir.’
Callum’s eyebrows hit his mop of hair. Her smile stretches into a grin. ‘Yes, I change like the wind.’ She bats her eyelashes. ‘I’m as fluid as you are annoying, but mercifully, I’m self-aware. Now, sir?’
She beckons him over. With a short bow, Callum pulls her smoothly up beside him. ‘Milady.’ He raises her glove to his lips. Kira grins again.
‘Quite right, too.’ She curtseys, no mean feat in knee-deep snow. ‘After what you’ve put me through, I deserve some chivalry. Which direction?’
Direction. Callum’s previous words resolve, and she frowns. ‘What you said before.’ She looks past him into the snowy, sombre trees. ‘About Romy not changing direction. Why did you say she was drunk?’
She looks back to him. He flounders. ‘Um.’ He’s a goldfish in a bowl. ‘There was an empty bottle near where I found her.’ A search-me expression flits across his face. ‘Jäger. It might not have been hers, but I assumed it was.’
Just like that, Kira’s lightness dies. ‘Jesus, Romy.’ She moves past Callum into the dismal forest. ‘I thought that was done.’
Everything white, everything buried. Nothing stirs but their steady trudge. Laden branches mask the sky, and even the gaps in the clouds where the sun peeps through seem strangely far away. Kira’s dismay swells to a bruise. How could Romy find her way in the dark? The trees are a web in the daylight. At night, they must be a labyrinth, deadly and dark and worthy of Pan. And with however much Jäger inside her…
Kira’s insides hurt. Oh, Romy. Could she see anything? What happened?
Ducking her chin into her chest, Kira folds her arms. Away from the jovial paths, the forest is different; brooding, heavy, pressed upon by clouds. It surrounds them with a wall of white, spiked by bushes and Grimm-esque trees. No birds call. No miaowing jays, or squawking magpies; no foxes, no badgers, no deer, no tracks, no rustles in the undergrowth. The more they walk, the more she shivers. There’s nothing here at all.
‘This one, I think.’ Callum stops on the edge of a clearing. It’s a white, immaculate bowl, dipped low and surrounded by a grand ring of pines. Footsteps crowd a pile of logs, carelessly abandoned. Callum’s eyes light up. ‘Yes!’ He clicks his fingers. ‘Those are mine. My sticks. And Romy was’—he scans the trees—‘there.’
He heads with bracing certainty toward a particular pine. Kira says nothing. The base of the trunk is a decrepit hollow. ‘Just there.’ He nods at it. Lined with flattened, scattered leaves, it’s been crushed and crumpled. A bed. ‘Half in the tree and half on the roots. Your parents won’t like it, but she probably got drunk, couldn’t find her way back, and decided to sleep here. Stranger things have happened.’ He scratches his head. ‘I’ve got a friend who slept in a thorn bush after a night out. On a scale of one to stupid, I’d say that was worse.’ He huffs a laugh. ‘She couldn’t take a shit for a week without screaming.’
This isn’t encouraging. Kira examines the miserable tree, her concern growing sadder by the second. The bark is withered and peeling, the splintered branches drooping to the ground, and the hollow itself is home to several small, rotting bodies. She closes her eyes. The picture in her mind is painful, so visceral she’s almost there: Romy, unconscious in the dark, surrounded by death and decay. Close to death herself, drifting into a snow-covered silence—
No. Kira digs her knuckles into her eyes. None of this makes sense; if anything, the more sense she tries to make, the more it veers away. Romy’s attacks, her too-quick recovery, her depersonalisation…could she just have been hungover?
She was hungover. She was drunk. She was out of it. Out of it because she was drunk; Kira grapples for this flitting hope, aware it looks like a straw. Peter once told her that his brother woke up, bleary from a night of brandy, and didn’t know his girlfriend’s name. Maybe Romy—
Don’t be stupid. Even if Callum’s right, alcohol wouldn’t cause Romy to act as she did. There must be something else.
Kira turns in a slow, observatory circle. Trees, snow, the crisp, white bowl. There’s nothing vivacious leaping out and shrieking pick me! I did it! Nothing human, or animal, or even disturbed. Nothing to say what Romy might have seen.
What Romy might have gone through.
Although…Kira’s breath snags minutely. Surely not. It’s not possible.
Is it? She takes a cautious step. The dipped clearing was pure. It was.
Her lips part of their own accord. A tiny ring of indents has appeared in the centre, each print as identical as the trees around the edge. Kira blinks. Focuses her blurred, squinting eyes. The rest of the snow is untouched.
‘Callum?’ she calls, hitching and tentative. He turns, the abandoned wood stack in his arms. She points at the footprints. ‘What are those?’
Relinquishing the wood, Callum comes to stand beside her. ‘I don’t see…’ he begins. ‘Oh.’ Treading lightly, he moves to teeter, precarious, on the edge of the bowl. ‘They look like odd little feet made—agh!’
The snow gives way. Sinking to his thigh in untouched powder, Callum frowns. ‘Well, this is me now.’
Shaking snow from his gloves, he continues his stare.
But with the fall, something has changed. Kira looks up. It’s all but imperceptible, but present nonetheless; a change in the air, or a shift in her perceptions. She stills, listening, sensing. The tiny footsteps—now that they’ve thought it, she can’t take it back—are the same. She blinks, refocusing. The snow is so bright. Is it getting whiter? Is the forest darkening? The clouds descending, strangling the sun? Maybe the trees are edging closer, a gastric band of pines.
Doubtful. What isn’t doubtful, however, is that the paranoia is real. Kira crouches to help Callum. She shouldn’t have let it in; it’s her mind playing games, inventing stupid comparisons to scare away her reason. Nothing’s changed. This isn’t a silver screen supreme, where the girl is left helpless when the trees attack. It’s a normal clearing, in a normal forest, where nothing abnormal can happen.
Except it can. By the time they’ve struggled, heaved, sunk, and Callum has scrambled out of the snow, the tiny footprints have gone.
Kira stares. Looks over at Callum. His mouth has turned down, and she looks back. She’s not mistaken: the footprints have gone.
And th
e forest is getting colder.
Apprehension creeps and crawls. A gust of wind whips into the clearing, blustering snow from the trees. Kira shivers, tensing her limbs. The sky is disappearing under dimming clouds. Her temples throb dully from the change in pressure. The wind drops away, and the forest is silenced.
She wasn’t being paranoid; something isn’t right.
‘Can we go?’ Kira’s voice is minute. Her apprehension melts into anxiety, stinging in waves like the bite of the wind. The pines are too tall. The rise across the clearing slopes up too far. The tree trunks are too dark, too straight, too thick; they stand like pillars in a war-torn wasteland, gliding with a roar across the clearing, reaching to take her in their withered arms—
And now her feet are sinking. Fright thrills through her. Sinking as if the clearing is quicksand, the white slips and slides and glistens in the sun that’s no longer there, covering her knees, thighs, chest, mouth, her cheeks and nose and eyes—
Kira clenches her fists. The sharp nail on her little finger slaps her back. She blinks, hard, screwing up her face. Again, digging her nails in deep enough to dent, and the forest is normal.
At least, not trying to consume her. What is happening? Drawing a lung-straining breath, Kira scans the clearing. Her anxiety—no, her fear—is rising by the second. It’s a phoenix, lifting in vivid bloom. If she doesn’t act, she’ll burn.
‘Let’s go.’ Kira looks to Callum. His eyes have unfocused, staring into the distance. ‘Callum.’ She touches his arm. ‘Let’s go.’
He starts as if ghost-struck. His eyes lose their glassy gloss, and with a dead man’s slump, he nods. ‘O—yes.’ He nods again, more definitively. ‘Yes.’
Rubbing his eyes with clumsy hands, he’s the image of how she feels. With the blood in her temples and her fingers trembling, out of sync and not hers to control, she’s about as real as the quicksand snow. Maybe less so. Locking Callum’s hand with hers, she hauls them both away.
‘Wait.’ Forehead creasing, Callum stops.
‘What?’ Kira asks. Anxious to leave, her impatience is a beast to keep at bay. Callum rotates, surveying the clearing. Kira folds her arms tight. ‘What?’
Resting his arms behind his head, Callum’s words are a puzzled exhalation. ‘Which way…’ He rotates again. The crunch of his boots is painfully loud. ‘Which way did we come?’
Kira points ahead of them. ‘That way.’ God, just let this day end. ‘What’s wrong with your memory? We walked in a straight line, like you said, and now we’re following—oh.’
Through the trees ahead is a circular clearing, dipping to a bowl of untouched snow. Their clearing.
‘I take it back.’ Kira turns a quick one-eighty. They must be missing something.
They’re not. She scans the forest, flick, flick, flick. They’re stood where they were before, between the tricksy bowl and the sad, hollow tree. Callum’s fall still tramples the snow. She glances over her shoulder: an identical clearing, replacing their line to the car park. The pulse in her temples throbs.
‘That’s not possible.’ Callum shakes his head. ‘It’s an optical illusion.’
‘Maybe.’ Kira starts to walk. Cautious at first, carefully retracing their path toward the bowl, she speeds up until she’s almost running. Bypassing Callum’s bewilderment, the crash site, the fallen firewood, she stumbles around the edge of the clearing to the rise on the other side.
Half-bent bushes, scratching bark. She scrabbles up the slope with her heart in her windpipe and a budding idea of what she hopes not to see. She wasn’t paranoid. She must be.
Is she?
At the top of the rise, Kira reels back. Where the trees thin out and the ground should level, the clearing appears again.
It’s a perfect replica. Her lungs stutter. Her stumbling run marks the edge of the bowl, the firewood haphazard by the hollow tree. Just for a second, there’s a shadow of Callum. Entwining her fingers, she tries not to scream.
A tiny, rustling movement, somewhere to her left. It sighs and stirs, and she wheels around. A laugh, a dance? The original clearing is empty bar Callum, trudging stiffly toward her. Did she imagine it?
No. Chittering behind her, it lifts her hair. Hello.
The breath on her neck is the coup de grâce. Kira shrieks, whips around, and careers back down the slope.
‘Something’s up there—something—’ She crashes into Callum, wild and shaking. ‘What the hell is this? What—hey!’ She staggers as he shoulders past her, forging a path up the rise. His face turns to snow at the top, and with a bare second’s look, he slides back down.
‘This isn’t real.’ He rubs his face so hard it must chafe. ‘It can’t be. I was here this morning, and it wasn’t like this. I’m always here. It’s never like this.’
‘Walk. We’ll just walk.’ Panic bursts like a blood blister. Grabbing Callum’s arm, Kira wields her blocky feet. Back around the bowl, back toward the firewood, back the way she knows they came, even though it mutated. She marches to the hollow tree and beyond, ignoring the hissing in her head about mirrors, mirrors and magic, entrapment…it’s ridiculous. Impossible. Unreal. If they walked here in a straight line, they can sure as hell walk back.
‘Kira, we don’t know where we’re going.’ Jerked along by her jogging insistence, Callum tries to jerk away. ‘Maybe we should—’
‘What?’ Breathless, Kira cuts him off. Breathing hard, marching hard, watching hard. She can’t stop now that she’s started. Who knows what might appear if she does? ‘Maybe we should wait for it to go away? That won’t help. It might not go away. It might’—she gulps at the entrance to another clearing, one that surely cannot be—‘change even more. We need to get out.’ She swerves around the rim of the bowl, marked anew with Callum’s fall. ‘Which won’t happen unless we try.’
They hit the slope at her final words. Releasing Callum’s hand, she powers on up. Can’t stop; mustn’t stop. If she stops, she might be paralysed, overpowered by fear. Unreality would float her on the string of a red balloon, and she might never get going again.
‘Maybe—’ She slips, flinging out her arms. The steep slope is wet underfoot, dotted with holes from trees dripping snow, but she won’t slow down. She can’t. ‘Maybe we’re snow-blind.’ She pushes on her knees for yet more speed. The low rise sang so sweetly of innocence, and now it never seems to end. She daren’t look back, though. The way things are going, they could have climbed a mountain. ‘We could be imagining it all. Stranger things have happened, right?’
‘I’m not entirely sure.’ Callum speeds up, too. He may be far less out of breath, but urgency creases his voice. ‘And as much as I’d like it to be, this isn’t snow-blindness. Snow-blindness—’
His sentence dies as they crest the rise and trip to two startled halts. On the other side is a road.
Callum lifts an arm and drops it. ‘Well, that shouldn’t be there.’ He looks left, right, left. Hemmed in on either side by snowdrifts and pines, the thin, white road is straight and neverending. He runs a hand over his head. ‘That should definitely not be there.’
Everything is on fire. ‘What do you mean that shouldn’t be there?’ Gasping, Kira thumps her weight against a tree. She couldn’t be less stable in her legs, her lungs, her sanity. ‘Where else should it be?’
‘Not what I meant.’ Callum takes a halting step toward it. ‘I mean, I’ve never seen it before. I thought I knew the forest inside out, but…ah, bollocks.’ A second step sinks into the snow. Swaying, he removes his leg with distaste. ‘I miss Spain. None of this rubbish in Spain. And I know what you’re going to say.’ He glances at Kira. ‘You’re going to say we should take it, even if we don’t know where it goes. You’re not a girl to dither.’
Kira raises an eyebrow. Why would anyone dither on a day like today? Quite apart from the madness, it’s freezing.
‘We should take it.’ She treads lightly up beside him. Her jeans are soaked as it is, and her feet don’t bear thinking about. When sh
e gets home, the queen of the unprepared is resigning. ‘At least it’s not another clearing.’
Callum shrugs. ‘I suppose.’
Kira takes her careful steps off across the snow.
‘Oh.’ He snorts. ‘You really don’t dither, do you?’
‘No.’ She hops down to the road, stamps her feet, and looks around. As far as she can see in either direction march trees and this thin, white trickle. The Thin White Line. Her blistered, pounding panic slips. The less bloody version of Peter’s favourite. That was not a fair trade for Atonement.
The deep snow crunches. ‘Fine.’ Callum sighs. She can hear the frown without turning around. ‘But for the record, don’t blame me if this gets us lost. I’ve already admitted that I don’t know where we are. Left or right?’
Kira pulls up her hood. At this point, it probably doesn’t matter. ‘Right.’ She burrows into the fleece, pushing her hands in her pockets. Solid and compact, the road is a gentle slant with no end. Although she can’t see high enough to tell, the pines on both sides seem infinite, a lifeless mass of green-white quiet in an unfamiliar world.
An unfamiliar world that trades in tricks. They tramp, and trudge, and this wandering distracts her. If the self-crowned king of the forest doesn’t recognise the road, who knows where they’ve ended up? They could be writing a fantasy novel, one wardrobe from Narnia. They could be where the wild things are. They could run into a giant named Grawp. Perhaps they’ll find a diviner camp. Perhaps, through the trees, they’ll see a clanking tin-man. They could have wandered beyond the wall, faced with the roaming dead.
Too far. Sweeping this away, Kira turns to walk backwards. ‘I promise not to blame you if this gets us lost.’ It’s an unacceptably delayed response, but that doesn’t matter, either. In this green-white infinity, they’re the only two alive. ‘Although I think we’re already there.’
‘Phones.’ Callum stops. His face shifts in odd slow-motion. ‘We have…’
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