Black Forest

by Shane Lee

  “I’m going to see who it is,” he said. “You two stay back here.”

  Iselle said, “Don’t be stupid. If it’s some thug, there’s a better chance with two of us. And if it’s some other Dromm monster, I want to see it with my own eyes.” She gave a little titter at that.

  “Terra—”

  “I’m not staying here,” she said quietly, her eyes locked ahead. “I can fight.”

  “You’re not going to fight,” Monty told her. “Stay behind me. That’s that.”

  All the same, he heard her pick up a stick from the ground. There wasn’t time to argue further. If there was a chance of getting the drop on whoever was waiting in the woods, it had to be done before they saw them.

  Monty moved forward. There was enough moonlight to walk around the broken sticks that might clue into their approach, and it seemed like Iselle and Terra were following suit, stepping carefully.

  They made it to the border of the Dromm and stepped inside.

  A little closer now, Monty could see that whoever it was, there was something wrong with them. Their arms were narrow and oddly bent; their shoulders were uneven. They didn’t seem to have any hair, and they were eerily still. They hadn’t moved a single muscle the entire time they’d stood there.

  His heart was climbing steadily into his throat. Black Dromm trees surrounded him on all sides, and a few dozen feet away was...what? A foe? A trick? Some plot of Nal’Gee’s, luring them into her territory?

  We should have run, he thought, but he moved closer, a tight grip on his flimsy weapon, and he told himself, No. No running. We fight.

  But he’d keep Terra out of it, if he could.

  Monty wished there was more light. Even this close now, all they could see was the outline of this person, and it was such an odd shape. He had no idea what he was looking at. It couldn’t be a person. It had to be something else.

  He held his hand up, indicating to both Terra and Iselle: Stay back. Let me handle this.

  Monty stepped forward quickly, disregarding the noise. He raised his branch with one strong hand and demanded, “Who are you?”

  But it was no one.

  “Terra. Iselle.” He lowered his branch. “It’s safe.”

  They came to either side of him, and all three of them stared at the intruder in the wood.

  “What is it?” Terra asked.

  Monty prodded it with his stick, finding it unyielding. Which wasn’t surprising, considering it was made of Dromm logs, hardened mud, and heavy rocks. It was an assembly of forest pieces that was roughly in the shape of a person. Easy to mistake from far away, but clearly lacking up close.

  The head was a single large rock, unadorned. The torso was thick, but the shoulders were narrow. The legs were not legs at all, but more of a roughly circular pedestal, wider at the base, holding the whole thing up. There were two thick, knobby branches stuck into the sides, approximating arms.

  Monty dropped his heavy branch on the ground. “Who would do something like this?”

  Iselle, meanwhile, reached out to touch it. She placed her hands on the rock, gently running her fingers over the surface. She appeared enthralled, her energy bouncing back again as she examined the creation.

  “I’ll be twice-damned...” she muttered to herself, wrapping her fingers around one of the arms. “You know what this is? No, of course you don’t. I was wondering if we might find something like this in town, but it makes sense she would build it out here where it’s safer.”

  Monty glanced at her. “What are you saying? Is this thing from Nal’Gee?”

  Iselle’s eyes glinted in the moonlight, a fascinated smile across her face. “Exactly that, Monty. It’s a golem. She’s trying to build a new body.”

  The earthly pile of sticks and mud in front of him took on a sudden sinister aura. He stepped back from it, but Iselle had no such reservations.

  Terra was skeptical. “She wants to be a big pile of rocks?”

  “No.” Iselle examined the torso. “She’d use her power to turn this golem alive, and then she’d live within it. It would look much more human by then...though not perfect. Can you imagine? The power it would take to make this walk. And she’s close.”

  Monty imagined the rocky golem coming to life, jerking toward the village with heavy steps. Crushing people and taking their souls.

  He grabbed the head with both hands and wrenched it off the body. The heavy rock strained his shoulders, but he threw it away, where it hit a tree trunk with a heavy thud. He tore through the rest of the body quickly, yanking out and breaking the arms, pulling out the smaller rocks and kicking over the stiff mud until it was nothing but a scattered and broken pile. By the time he finished, he was panting and his hands ached.

  Iselle had moved back from his frenzy. Now she stared down at the mess, stoic. “She can build another. She will. We could come out here tomorrow and this will be standing again.”

  Monty flexed his fingers, flaking dirt from them. His heart was racing, refusing to settle down. “I don’t care,” he said, grinding his heel down on one of the rocks, burying it further in the dirt. “I’ll break it again. She’s not taking us. She’s not having any more of this village.”

  Iselle was calm when she said, “It may well be out of your hands.”

  “We’ll see about that!” Monty’s voice was a snarl. He clenched his hands into fists, feeling the dirt caked there like dried blood. He was furious. Nal’Gee was so brazenly confident that she would make her golem at the edge of the forest? Right behind their house?

  She was teasing them. She was laughing, wherever she was. Laughing while she drained the life out of someone else that he knew.

  “She’s playing with us.” Monty pointed at the wrecked golem behind him. “She’s playing with us, and I’m not following her rules. She wants us to be scared, and run screaming at any sign of her. Maybe we would have before.” Their home rested in the darkness, empty. He could see it between Terra and Iselle, between the trees, beyond the wilting grass. “Not now.”

  He pointed to Iselle. “I wasn’t trying to drag you into this fight, but the fact is that if you hadn’t come out of that inn with us, you’d be dead.”

  That drew her out from stillness. Her eyes narrowed. “If I was there, I could have helped.”

  “The smallest person there besides you looked to outweigh you by a hundred pounds,” he told her. “It was happenstance. It was a coincidence. But we saved your life. What are you going to do with it? Don’t you want revenge? Because none of this would have ever happened if it weren’t for Nal’Gee.”

  Monty lowered his hand. He thought she might run at him, but the lines on her forehead softened slightly.

  “Caravan life—what is done is done. I will mourn.” Iselle’s face was redolent with pain, but her words came through clearly. “Then I will move on.”

  “Not from here, you won’t,” he said.

  “You could learn a lesson from me, boy,” Iselle responded, and now she was the one pointing at him. “I’ve told you more than once that there is nothing that can be done here. You can run, or you can die.”

  “We’re not running anywhere,” Terra said, turning to the side to look at Iselle. “Nal’Gee took our mom. She took Ma Kettle, and a lot of other people. We can’t run. They didn’t get to run.”

  Iselle held Terra’s gaze, but she didn’t have a response to that.

  Monty blinked, slowly, letting himself settle down. He wasn’t thinking clearly, but with the golem destroyed and behind him, he could let himself be rational. Iselle didn’t want revenge. He knew what she wanted.

  “You’re in the middle of something you tell stories about,” Monty said to her. “Me and Terra, we’re here because it’s our home. We’ve lost family and friends, and we’re going to stop this so that we can save our village. You’re here because you got stuck and your caravan came along at a bad time, but that doesn’t mean you can’t stay for a better reason.”

  Monty threw his hands up—a
t the forest, at the village, at everything. He’d seen her eyes when they lit upon that golem and drank in what its existence meant. He’d heard the thrilled shiver in her voice when she shared her tales with them, and asked them for theirs.

  “This is a chance to witness a real legend. Even more—this is a chance to be part of that legend. On the right side of it. To be a hero.” Monty dropped his arms. “You don’t have to risk your life to do something important here.”

  “I’m already risking my life,” Iselle said, but her anger was dissipating.

  “Just talk with us,” Terra said. “Please? We can help each other.”

  Iselle’s hand flicked upward, just an inch, like she was going to reach up for her scarf and yank it out of her hair. She stopped herself. She looked at Terra, and then at Monty.

  “If I die here,” she said, a ghost of a smile finding its way to her face, “then you must tell my story. And you make it good.”

  45

  The house was clear, Monty’s earlier worries of intruders dispelled as they poked carefully through the rooms to find them empty. All that was foul in the house was the rotting food in the pantry he had neglected to clean out. He threw that outside a few steps beyond the door, leaving a window open to air out the smell, and lit the small lantern on the table.

  “Let’s talk,” Monty said, wiping his hands and sitting down. He swept an open hand across the surface and the two remaining chairs. “For real, this time. For longer than twenty minutes.”

  “Mm.” Iselle took the chair where their mother usually sat. The resemblance between them was not lost on him. “I’m happy to talk, but the truth is that I’ve really told you all I know about Nal’Gee.”

  “Okay,” Monty said, “but what else do you know about spirits?”

  “That’s a big question.” Iselle took the scarf from her head, beginning its dance through her fingers. “I know a lot, but do I really know it? I’ve never had to think about if my stories might affect real life beyond someone hanging a ward over their door.”

  “Then maybe we should assume everything is true,” Monty suggested.

  “Unless it’s wrong,” Terra added.

  “Wrong?” Iselle drew back the tiniest bit at that, but then relaxed. “No, you’re right. I don’t spread lies if I can help it, but it would be dangerous to treat everything as fact. The wrong assumption in something like this could get you killed.”

  “True, but—” Monty said.

  “But,” Iselle continued for him, tapping a nail on the table, “we are in a situation where assumptions must be made. Whole leaps will have to be made. Because we are dealing with something that has never been dealt with before.”

  She grasped her scarf with both hands before continuing, tossing her hair back with a twist of her head. “Of course, Nal’Gee isn’t the only spirit I’ve heard tales of. I could tell you the stories of Amallion the Cursed, or the brother spirits who lived inside of their family’s dog...but now’s not the time.”

  Iselle laid her headscarf on the table and spread it out flat so that it was a big, crinkled square of blue fabric. She planted two fingers just above the center, arcing them.

  “Here we have a person. It can be a regular, everyday human, or it can be a king, or it can be a witch like Nal’Gee. They can be good, they can be poor, they can be rich, they can be evil. It doesn’t matter. When they die, the same thing happens. The spirit or the soul, whatever you want to call it...pulls away.” She split her fingers, curling one up into her palm. “What happens then?”

  Terra answered, “They go to the beyond. With the saints. Or...”

  “Or the depths,” Monty said.

  Iselle nodded. “The lonely depths, the big empty space inside of our world, so big that you can wander around forever and never find anyone in the darkness. At least, that is what the legends say. But we can’t be sure, can we? That is where we stand.”

  “Scriptures are different from legends,” Monty said, glancing at her curled finger. “All the priests say the same about the beyond and about the depths. So do the books and scrolls.”

  “I’m sure a lot of people tell the same stories about monsters,” Iselle said with a shrug. “I’ve met plenty of them. Does that make them true? Perhaps some. But we’re not here to question the church.” She tapped her finger on the table, the click of her nail dulled by the scarf. “There is a third possibility for a separated soul, as you both know. It can be trapped in this realm.” Slowly, she lowered her curled finger back to the tabletop.

  “Right,” Monty said. “Nal’Gee clung to the forest.”

  “She ate up all the animals and the trees,” Terra said.

  “Yes,” Iselle nodded along, “and there are other spirits who have done similar things. Not devoured like Nal’Gee has, but they live among other things. Animals and people. The forest attachment is also unique to Nal’Gee, most likely due to her own early powers as a witch of the Dromm. But there is something all of these stories have in common: Spirits cannot survive here on their own.”

  Monty blinked. “They have to be attached to something.”

  “They do, but...” The storyteller drew her fingers back together again. “They have to be attached to something alive. Something with worldly roots.”

  “I’ve read stories about haunted suits of armor, though,” Terra offered. “They’re not alive.”

  Iselle shook her head, a slight motion. “Haunted is different from possessed. A witch can curse armor and make it walk. But a spirit cannot live inside of it. This is one of the first assumptions we must make.”

  “I agree with it,” Monty said. It lined up with the stories he knew—though admittedly they were few—and it felt right. “It’s definitely what Nal’Gee is doing.”

  “It is,” Iselle said, grim now. She drew her fingers back. “And the golem in the woods proves her intent. Not to kill everyone in the village in a form of revenge for her death, but to steal enough life force to create a body of her own. Perhaps even her old body, drawn from the decay in the woods.”

  “That was hundreds of years ago,” Monty said, his mouth dry. “There wouldn’t be anything left.”

  Iselle shrugged. “We speculate. Now, you tell me what you’re thinking, because I can see it waiting behind your eyes. Both of yours.”

  “She could still kill everybody,” Terra said. “Once she got a body. She’d be magic again, right? She could do even more things. She could come and get us.”

  “If that was her intent,” Iselle replied.

  Monty said, “It might be. When she spoke to us through Dr. Tobias, she threatened us directly—by name.”

  “Yes...” Iselle seemed put off by the idea. “But it doesn’t make sense to me. If she was kept in this world by spite, her ire would not be toward your family, which was not even around when she was alive. The Bellamy name does not live in any stories I know. She should not harbor you ill will.”

  “Maybe it’s because we’re trying to stop her.” Terra grabbed the edge of the table, pulling herself close.

  More doubt from Iselle, plain on her face. “I just don’t think she would concern herself so deeply with one mortal family.”

  “There’s more,” Monty said. “Even before this—before I even suspected she was behind this—Terra and I both had strange visions. Our father died a little while ago, but Terra was drawn into the Dromm forest by a vision of him. Not a dream. And I saw him, too, on a night when I was staying in town. He visited me in the night and told me to...to go into the woods with him. It was horrible.”

  “When was this?” Iselle asked.

  “Terra’s...” Monty glanced at her. “A month ago, maybe a little longer. It was before Ma Kettle died. Mine was after.”

  “Hmm.” Iselle gathered up the scarf from the table again, feeding it between her hands. “If it was indeed Nal’Gee who sent these visions after you, they show her growing strength quite well. The first one to you, Terra, stayed in the woods where she was held. She didn’t
have the power to reach out farther. But once she did, she came to you in Irisa.”

  Twist, pull, furl, unfurl.

  “That is...telling,” Iselle continued after a moment. “I’m having my own doubts now. She lies dormant for years, then reaches out like that? When most of her energy must be spent on staying here and not getting pulled to the beyond.”

  “We live on her land,” Monty said. “My dad told me—when he told me Nal’Gee’s story, he said her cottage was on our farm, or really close to it. She could be angry about that.”

  “Perhaps...if that’s indeed true.”

  “I think it is,” Monty continued, determined. “Our neighbors, the Gartens, aren’t very far from us. They have two young kids, but the parents—Mr. and Mrs. Garten, they’re not...not really all there. It’s like they’re dazed, a lot, especially Mr. Garten. I mean, they’re nice. They helped us.” Monty shook his head. He didn’t mean to speak ill of them. “What I’m saying is, it seems to me like they might have been easier targets, if she wanted to kill Dromm families. But she’s going after us. It must be true.”

  “Why didn’t she kill me?” Terra asked, bringing her hands to her shoulders. “She got me all the way into the woods. I was asleep out there all night. Couldn’t she have gotten me?”

  Iselle’s eyes flashed, and she leaned forward on the table. “She must have wanted to. That would be why she brought you into the woods.”

  “Gods,” Monty breathed. “After I found you, for a couple days...do you remember, Terra? You were sick, or at least we thought you were. You were always hiding alone, and sleeping, and you wouldn’t help with any chores. But you got better after we went to town.”

  “How long?” Iselle asked. “How long was she like that?”

  Monty thought back. He snapped his fingers. “Three days.”

  Iselle slumped back. “Three days? You’re sure it was that long?”

  “Yeah...” Monty wasn’t sure what the problem was.

  “The chickens!” Terra said. “Monty, the chickens!”