by Shane Lee
“Can you see the leaves?” Monty said, pointing at the swatches of green peppering the black trees. “It’s growing, can you believe it?”
Terra followed his finger, blinking. “Those are leaves?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s weird.” Terra didn’t seem all that interested, dropping her gaze down between her feet. “I don’t like the forest, Monty. I don’t want to live here anymore.”
Monty looked over at Terra, who kept her eyes on the ground. She was bringing up the forest again. Since he had found her in the Dromm, she hardly ever talked about it.
“Why don’t you like the forest?”
Terra shrugged. A breeze blew, cold enough to draw a shiver out of Monty, but it made no sound. Monty would have let it go, but something was prodding him, something he couldn’t quite identify. Like a key hunting for a lock in the dark.
“You said it took dad. Last night, remember?”
She nodded, still looking down. Her legs were closed, hands on her thighs.
“What did you mean?”
The cold wind came by again, chilling them down to their bones. But neither of them made a move to go inside the house. He wanted to ask her again. Instead, he waited.
“I didn’t remember before,” Terra said, so quietly that Monty leaned in to hear her better.
“Remember what?” he asked.
“Seeing Daddy,” she responded, and she looked up at him. “I saw dad in the forest.”
“Come with me, Monty. I want us all together again.”
His breath caught like there was a lock in his throat.
“I forgot when I woke up,” she continued, “like how you forget a dream, you know? But I know it wasn’t a dream. I went in after him, but...I wasn’t fast enough. He got away. The forest got him.”
The horrifying image of his father in the Commons reared up in his mind. “When you saw him, was he...was he normal? Or like he was...like he’d been dead?”
“Um...normal, I guess. I didn’t get close. I wasn’t fast enough.”
Monty breathed in cold air and let it out in a puff of white. “Do you think it was really him?”
“I...” Terra curled her fingers, picking at her thumbs with her nails. “I think so. I did think it was him, or I wouldn’t go in the woods. I’d never go in there.”
“But do you still think it was him? That it was really dad?”
She paused, then shook her head. “No,” she whispered. “It was the forest.”
Monty looked at the leaves, sprouting after what was said to be hundreds of years of blackness.
“Did you see him, too?” Terra put her hand on his leg, and when he looked into her eyes, he saw the weight of her question there. Felt her fingers dig into his skin.
If he told her, would that be worse? Would she be more scared, or feel less alone? He wasn’t used to having a conversation like this with Terra. It was uncharted territory.
“I saw him,” Monty breathed, and Terra’s fingers pressed in harder.
“Where?” she asked him.
“It was a dream,” Monty said. “Or I was sleepwalking, or something. He was in the Commons, in town. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard something and...I saw him. But he was...” Monty shook his head. “It wasn’t him. It was just some trick. It sounded like him, but it looked...like a corpse.” Monty left out the fact that he had bashed its head in with a curtain rod, because he never actually did, because none of it had happened. It was just a dream.
Terra frowned, and she looked like she was going to cry, but she didn’t. “Did it try to make you go into the woods, like me?”
“I was in town,” Monty said, but the last word came out choked, because he remembered what Montille’s dream specter had said.
“We’ll go an’ get your mother, and your sister...
“An’ we’ll go into the woods.”
Monty didn’t answer the question, but Terra didn’t ask again. Instead she said, “If it wasn’t him, who was it?”
And that was when the prodding key clicked into place.
That story that he’d heard so long ago from his father, and one he hadn’t remembered until his own strange brush with the forest, when it seemed like it was calling to him, beckoning him in. He remembered that the urge had come over him with no warning or explanation, but that he had shaken it off.
Perhaps the same thing had come over Terra, and she hadn’t been able to shake it off so easy.
It had been a long time since he’d been scared of the Dromm. Since he’d been scared of the stories he heard about it. It was an old feeling with haunting familiarity, and it crept over him now.
The tall black trees of the Dromm loomed in the distance.
It was crazy. Just considering it made his head feel like it was cracking inside and something was leaking out. But...
What if Nal’Gee was real?
A spirit lying dormant in the forest, surviving off the trees. The black trees of the Dromm, black forever because the life was being sucked out of them over and over.
Those leaves were the tipping point—what really drove into Monty the idea that something, something beyond his understanding of the world, was happening.
There was life in the dead forest.
26
If Nal’Gee was real, and everything in the story his father told him was true, then why would the leaves suddenly be growing after all this time? Because she was gone to the beyond? Maybe.
Or maybe because she didn’t need the trees anymore.
Maybe she was sucking the life out of the town. Out of the people. They turned black, didn’t they? Just like the trees.
No, no, that’s crazy, Monty thought to himself, and he made sure not to say it out loud this time, because he didn’t want to scare Terra. No way he could tell her what he was beginning to suspect. Even if she knew something strange was happening, herself.
That’s not enough to justify what you’re thinking, he told himself. It’s a coincidence.
His dad had told him she was a will-o-the-wisp, too weak to even catch a squirrel. How could she drain the life from a person?
He could be wrong, the voice in his head said, and it was a scary thought. It’s just a tale. It can’t all be right. And she’s stronger, now. Stronger than anyone thinks.
If she’s real, he countered, but it felt a lot weaker than he wanted it to. Whatever sickness had killed Ma Kettle, Audrey Kettle, and now his own mother—it wasn’t a normal sickness. It didn’t spread to people like normal sickness. None of the other Kettles were sick. No one in town was, now, and he would know.
So maybe it wasn’t a sickness at all...it was a spirit. It was Nal’Gee.
“Monty, are you okay?”
Terra’s voice snapped him from his thoughts. He’d been staring silently at the black forest while his mind ran like a river.
“Huh? Oh.” He shook his head. “I’m fine. I just—” Don’t let it slip. “—I was thinking about the nightmare I had. About dad. That’s all it was, you know, and yours too. It was just a nightmare. The forest—it’s not trying to get us.”
Just the spirit inside of it. Maybe.
But those damned leaves, growing after all this time. Growing because they were allowed to for the first time in centuries. Growing because they weren’t food for Nal’Gee’s spirit anymore. After hundreds of years, was she strong enough now to leave the forest?
Monty resisted the urge to put his head in his hands. There was too much happening, and none of it was simple. If he wanted to give in to the idea of Nal’Gee—and insane as it was, he couldn’t shake it off—how would he even explore it? Leave Terra in the house and go poking around in the Dromm, knocking on newly-sprouting trees to see if Nal’Gee lived in one of them? Put himself up for offer to be taken next by wandering around her territory, investigating?
There was no proof. There was only the leaves on the trees.
“Let’s go inside,” he said to Terra, standing up from the steps and finally lookin
g away from the trees. She followed after him.
The smell of death in the house was gone, and Monty was grateful for that, but he still wasn’t going to go back into mom’s room. He didn’t know what they were going to do here. Mother’s sending was tomorrow night, and there was a lot of empty time between now and then. He didn’t want to spend it sitting in the house where she had just died.
“Are you hungry?” he asked Terra, and she shook her head. She was just standing there in the kitchen, making no move to sit down or go back to her room. She didn’t want to be here, either.
It was rare when two siblings agreed so perfectly on something; even rarer was the fact that it happened in complete silence. Monty caught Terra’s eye, and they both stepped out of the house, down the steps, and out into the grass. The air was cold, but it was fresh, and the grayness of the day was better than the darkness of the house. The empty spaces out here were less confining. Lighter. Easier to ignore.
The Dromm was there, too. Itching at Monty, making him second-guess himself and everything he knew about how the world worked. Under that pressure, he realized there was only one other person in the whole world who was on his side and knew exactly what he was going through. Even the crazy parts.
That was Terra. And she deserved to know what he was thinking.
Besides that, he thought, she might even know more than I do. He didn’t really believe in the legends once he grew out of it, and he hadn’t for a long time—not until now, when this inkling had come through.
But Terra...she always had, and she still did.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Monty said. He started to suggest going into town, but bit his tongue on that. He wasn’t quite up to talking to people, hearing their sympathies, and struggling to come up with a response. He wasn’t sure how he was going to do it at the sending, either, but that worry at least had the luxury of being for tomorrow.
“Okay.” Terra looked towards Irisa. “Where, to town?”
“No...” Monty darted his eyes toward the black trees. If Nal’Gee was able to get to Ma Kettle, it wasn’t like it mattered if there were in town or brushing against the bark, right? “I wanna get a closer look at those leaves in the Dromm.”
“You wanna go in there?” Terra asked, hesitant.
Monty shook his head. “Not inside. I just want to get a closer look. It’s not scary, and it’s not going to get us.” Which, even if he was right, wasn’t a lie. The danger wasn’t the forest—it was what was now free of it. “But I do want to ask you about it.”
As they approached the tall grass that marked the transition of their land towards the Dromm, Monty said, “Did dad ever tell you the story about Nal’Gee?”
Terra was walking on his right side, looking straight ahead. “I don’t know...what was he?”
“She,” Monty corrected. “She was a witch who got killed in the forest by, um...” It didn’t feel right to say lover, so he chose, “by her boyfriend. She used to live on our land, or near it, hundreds of years ago.”
“Oh!” Terra perked up. “Dad told me about that when I asked him why the trees were black. She was the witch who helped the forest grow.”
“That’s her.”
Past the compost pile, small and useless in this part of winter. Now the grass was getting shorter, and there was nothing between them and the tall trees.
“Do you remember the rest of the story?” Monty asked.
Terra nodded. “Dad said she died, but she never let go. That she ate the boyfriend’s soul, and then she ate the whole forest. His name was Walter.”
Walter. That was right; he recalled it, too, now that she said it. Was there more? “What else do you remember? He told me a long time ago. I forget how it all went.”
“Ummm.” Terra grabbed at her hair, twisting it between her fingers while she thought. “He said...oh. It’s kind of scary.” She looked up at the trees. They were close enough now to block most of the sky. She had to crane her neck back to see where they ended.
“It’s okay,” Monty said. “You can tell me. I won’t be scared.”
When she looked at him, he tipped her a little wink, and she smiled and everything felt a little bit warmer. Just a little bit.
“Well...he said that Nal’Gee didn’t eat up that life and then need more, like we do. She just kept it. Every day she gets a little more...and eventually she’d be strong enough to be alive again.”
Wind whistled in Monty’s ears and died in the trees. He was sure that their father had never told him that. And truth be told, it did scare him.
“Dad said that?”
Terra nodded, and Monty thought, Maybe he really wanted to make sure she stayed out of the forest.
They turned, strolling along the edge of the forest in the direction of the Cherrywood farm, leaving a berth between their shoulders and the trees. Terra had moved over to his left side, away from the Dromm.
“I was thinking about the people who got sick,” Monty said. “The Kettles, and...and mom. How it doesn’t make sense for people to get sick and die this fast, and how it doesn’t spread like a normal sickness...you know?”
“I guess,” Terra responded. Of course, she hadn’t been there to see the bodies. But no—she had seen their mother’s. Was she all black and drained when Terra found her?
He didn’t ask. He said, “I’m thinking that Nal’Gee might be real.”
Monty stopped walking, but only because Terra did. She was looking into the woods, but she looked to him when he turned.
“Monty, you really think that?”
There was no sense in lying to her. “I do. Or, I’m starting to. I don’t know. Me seeing dad, after never ever having a nightmare like that—and you seeing him, too. It’s just so many weird things happening, too close together. And so awful, with no reason or—or sense.”
Monty’s next breath was great and shuddering, as the toll of what he’d been through the last couple of weeks started to ring in his ears.
“These people died so horribly, Terra, and I wish you hadn’t had to see any of it, but I did. They were just...”
“Empty,” Terra finished for him, and she grabbed his hand with both of hers. “Is that what you were gonna say?”
Monty nodded. His eyes were wet and it was hard to see. He rubbed them, trying to hold it together.
“When I saw—when I saw mom yesterday, when I—” Now it was Terra’s turn to quaver, and she shook her head, her hair flying. But she kept on going. “When I saw her in bed, she was all small and skinny. And her skin was black, and—and her hair was falling out. She looked...empty.”
“Yeah,” Monty croaked, and he pulled Terra a little closer to him. “You’re right. I saw Audrey Kettle, and she looked the same way. Like the life is being pulled out of them.”
“And they’re turning black like the trees,” Terra said slowly, her words painted with halting awe as she looked up the vast trunk of the closest Dromm tree.
“If Nal’Gee is real, and she’s stronger now, maybe she’s strong enough to start taking people instead of plants,” Monty said, “and she’ll get a lot stronger a lot quicker. Enough to come back.”
“What’ll happen if she comes back?”
“I don’t know,” Monty said. Who could know? But he had an idea. An idea of someone lying dormant for hundreds of years, clinging to life using pure hate. An idea of what that person would be like if she returned to find a thousand new people on her land, and other people farming where she used to live.
“I think she’d be mad,” Terra said. “In the story, she hated Walter in the end. She probably hates everybody now.”
“She probably does,” Monty said. “And she’ll keep killing people until she gets what she wants. Maybe even all of us.”
Terra grabbed her hair again, worrying at it. “What are we gonna do?”
His little sister seemed to have grown up a lot in the last few weeks, and it had happened without Monty even noticing. He thought she’d be scared, and surely she was
, the same way he was—but she was curious and asking questions. She wanted to fix it.
He wished he had an answer for her.
27
Monty and Terra spent the night at the Gartens’ once again. To Monty’s surprise, Mr. Garten had come to check on them, and insisted that they come over. Well, insisted in his tacit way, with few words and distant stares. That was just before dinner time, and they both had grown hungry in spite of the clouds filling their minds, so they enjoyed the food that Mr. Garten cooked and took Mrs. Garten’s invitation to stay over once more.
They went back home after sleeping in late, something neither of them had done in a long time.
There was no more talk of Nal’Gee. In the new day’s light, it felt farther away and a bit silly. There was nothing else to say—they didn’t know how they would even begin to challenge a witch’s sprit. But like the Dromm, the idea was still there behind them, looming. Their house was less foreboding, and they spent some time cleaning out the pantry of any rotten vegetables, and bringing in fresh water.
Soon the afternoon light faded, and the evening of Delila’s sending was upon them.
Part of Monty didn’t want to go, and the rest of him knew that he must. He wasn’t ready, and he imagined that he never would be, but his mother deserved for them to be there.
“Is it time?” Terra asked, almost as soon as the sun was halfway down. The sending had been on their minds all day.
“Just about,” Monty said. “Do you—”
“I’m not hungry,” Terra interrupted. “I can feed myself, you know.”
On another day that might have come with a little grin, but not today.
When the sun was almost gone, they left the farm behind them, setting on the narrow road to Irisa. They walked close together.
There weren’t many people, which was expected. Delila Bellamy wasn’t a Kettle; she was a border farmer, people saw her now and then, and some knew her face, but that was about it.
Evening came fast, and it wasn’t until they got very close that Monty could make out the pyre, already built. And his mother’s casket, already placed. The iron handles caught what tiny bit of light remained, and Monty thought, how many fires have they been through?