The Hazel Wood

by Melissa Albert

  Anya heard the servants whispering about it, and snuck into the room to see for herself. The stain put in her a fear of blood so intense, she took to washing out her monthly rags in the dark.

  The servants sent word to the girls’ father that his wife was dead, or gone, or worse, and for a long time heard no reply. Until the first warm day of spring, when he drove up in a carriage the girls had never seen.

  Inside it was their new mother. She stepped down onto the cobblestones and smiled at them. She was smaller than Anya, with a heap of pale hair and blue eyes that switched coldly from one stepdaughter to the next.

  For six months their father stayed home, besotted with his new wife and tolerating his daughters, who ran as wild as they’d learned to in all the years they’d raised themselves, with both parents out of sight.

  Until he grew bored of the stepmother, just as he’d once grown bored of his wife—just as he’d always been bored of his daughters. He kissed the stepmother goodbye, nodded at his daughters, and was gone.

  It didn’t take long for the stepmother to grow impatient. She snapped at the girls, slapped them at the slightest provocation, carried scissors in her pocket to cut off hanks of their long hair when they displeased her. Every time she left the house, she locked the girls up—to keep them from misbehaving, she said. She kept them in their mother’s room, where the windows were rusted shut and the dark stain on the floor taunted Anya like a vile black eye. Their mother’s bed had been chopped into firewood at their father’s command, all the pretty things she’d surrounded herself with locked away. They were just two girls in an empty room with a poisonous blot on the floor.

  At first their stepmother stayed away for a few hours at a time. Then for whole days, then entire nights. The first time she left them locked up from dusk to dawn, Anya beat on the door and screamed till her throat and fists were raw, but no one came.

  When the stepmother finally opened the door, she wrinkled her nose at the smell and gestured at the chamber pot. “Empty it,” she said. Kohl and rouge melted into candy swirls on her cheeks; she wouldn’t meet her stepdaughters’ eyes.

  Finally there came a day when she locked them in with a bowl of apples and a jug of water and never came back. The sun rose and fell, rose and fell. On the third day Anya looked out the window and saw the servants walking away from the house one by one, their belongings on their backs.

  The house was empty. The apples were eaten, the water long gone. The windows stayed shut and the glass wouldn’t give, even when Anya smashed at it with her boot.

  That night the sisters lay together in the middle of the floor, trying to keep each other warm. Then Anya heard a sound she’d nearly forgotten. It was a sound like leaves rustling together outside the window.

  It came from the bloodstain on the floor. Slowly she inched her way toward it, resting her ear just over it and holding her breath.

  It was deep, deep in the night when the rustling resolved into a voice.

  You will die, the voice told her.

  Anya rolled back onto the floor, angry. I know, she replied fiercely, in her mind. We’re half-dead already.

  You will die, the voice said again. Unless.

  And it told her how she could save herself and her sister. How she could remake the world just enough so that they could live.

  It would take blood.

  The next morning Anya told her sister, Lisbet, what she’d learned: they must make a door. Their mother wasn’t dead, she was gone—she’d used magic to make a door, and it had taken her far, far away. Their mother’s blood had spoken to Anya, and told her how to make a door of their own, to meet her.

  It will take blood, she told Lisbet, but it can’t be mine.

  It was a lie. She wasn’t bad, she was frightened. The idea of opening her own veins filled her with a sick terror that felt like falling, forward and forward without end. She ignored the bitter taste of the lie in her mouth.

  She took the bone knife from the place the voice had told her she’d find it: behind a loose brick inside the cold fireplace.

  It can’t be mine, she said again, because I’m the sorcerer. I must make the door, and you must sacrifice the blood for it.

  Lisbet nodded, but something in her eyes told Anya she knew the words were a lie.

  It made her angry. When she drew the blade across her sister’s wrist, the anger made her careless, and the blade bit too deep.

  But Lisbet said nothing as her sister took her wrist and used it to paint a door.

  She painted the sides of it first, in two continuous lines, scraping Lisbet’s wrist across the stone. She lifted her as high as she could to paint a lintel over the top. When Anya eased her down and set her back on her feet, Lisbet was as white as the flesh of an apple.

  Anya turned away from her sister’s drained face and said the words that would make the blood into a door. Words the voice had said into her ear, three times so she’d remember.

  All at once the stone wicked up the blood, and the red of it became lines of warm white light. The newly made door swung toward them, letting out a breath of warm air and a scent like clean cotton. They held hands and watched it open.

  Then Lisbet moaned, and swayed, and crumpled to the ground. Her cold fingertips stretched out before her, nearly touching the door.

  The door that wasn’t there, and then was. The door that her lifeblood fed.

  At the moment she let go her last breath, the white light shuddered and went green. The green of infected wounds, of nightmares, of the rind of mold that crawled over week-old bread. The cotton scent turned dusty and stuck in Anya’s throat.

  She threw herself against the door, but it was too late. It opened, inch by inch, yawning with dank air like the mouth of a cellar.

  Anya didn’t think her mother could be behind that door, but she had nowhere else to go. She lifted Lisbet and carried her through.

  Behind it was a room like the one they’d left—but reversed. Anya’s eyes went to the dark stain on the floor. It was fresh and pooling red. She ran across the room, still holding Lisbet’s body, and wrenched open the bedroom door.

  The hall behind it curved left instead of right, and the lanterns on the wall were gone, replaced with paintings of people Anya didn’t recognize. Their eyes were burned-out holes and their mouths were wet and red. The hall hummed with that same heavy green light.

  Cradling Lisbet in her arms, Anya moved through the house. It smelled of coal dust and blood. In every fireplace curled low green flames. On every table were plates of rotting meat, or blackened flowers with livid yellow pollen dripping from their hearts.

  When she opened the front door she saw the sickness spread beyond the house. The branches of trees had become slender bones, and the dust of the road was crackling ashes.

  I did this, she said to herself. I killed my sister—her death made a door, and the door opened onto Death!

  It took her hours, but she dug up enough of the burnt earth to bury her younger sister. Then she set off toward town, to see if she could find anything living.

  Town was a place of strange horrors. Not a body to be seen, human nor animal, just a heavy green sky that bathed the whole world in a light the color of disease, and locked doors of houses, and windows painted a blind black.

  Anya saw no one. She needed neither sleep nor food nor drink, and when she ran the bone knife over her own wrist it didn’t make a nick in her skin. She climbed the dense black vines spilling over the walls of a cottage, to the crumbling gray stones of its roof. She jumped off.

  But she drifted to earth like an autumn leaf, touching down unharmed. There she lay, praying for an end, even though every prayer tasted as bitter as the lie that had killed her sister. It was then that the voice spoke to her again.

  It had been a long time since she’d lain on the floor of her mother’s bedroom letting it whisper secrets into her ear. Longer than she thought. Far away, her stepmother was dead, killed by a fever. Her father had taken a new bride. He had a son
.

  Can you take me back home? Anya pleaded.

  You’re asking the wrong question, the voice replied.

  It led her through town, back to the grave she’d dug in front of her father’s house. From it a black walnut tree had grown. Its rustling leaves were the only moving things in the land of Death. Lisbet, Anya whispered, and lay her hand on its trunk.

  With a rustle like a sigh, the tree dropped three walnuts into her hands. She cracked them open one by one.

  The first held a green satin dress the color of moth’s wings.

  The second held a pair of slippers with the black shine of petrified wood.

  The third held a translucent stone the size of an eye.

  When she held it up to her own, the world around her burst into life. The day was bright, the trees were blooming, and a carriage was bearing down on her. The driver couldn’t see her, but the horse did—he reared up, hooves high over Anya’s head.

  She dropped the stone—and found herself back in the land of Death.

  The stone was a window onto the land of the living.

  Do with it what you will, the voice said, but don’t squander your sister’s gifts.

  Anya waited until the green light had faded to murk, marking night in the land of Death. She put on the green dress and the black slippers. She combed back her heavy hair. Then she raised the stone to her eye.

  She saw her home as she once knew it, when she was a girl with a mother and a father and a sister named Lisbet. She held the stone in place like a peephole as she rustled around the house’s edges, peering into its windows.

  She saw a beautiful woman playing the piano. Her father drinking a glass of sherry, his hair lined with white. And a boy just older than her. He was tall and narrow, growing into manhood but not yet there.

  Anya’s father looked at him proudly, clapped a hand to his shoulder. The boy’s eye roved idly over the furniture in the room, his mother at the piano, and landed on Anya.

  He stood up straight and came to the window. Anya shrank back as her father joined his son. The boy pointed at her, but her father just frowned and looked past her, shaking his head. Finally he pulled the curtains over the window.

  Anya waited in the garden, in her dress the color of will-o’-the-wisps. When she lowered her arm, she stood in a place of rotting bowers and bone. When she raised the stone back to her eye, she could see the soft green of grass and the brief starlight of fireflies. She could see the boy walking toward her, his step tentative but his eyes eager.

  You may ask me one question, she said. But it has to be the right one.

  Who are you? he asked.

  Anya said nothing.

  Why can’t they see you? he asked.

  Anya stayed silent.

  You are very beautiful, he whispered finally, reaching out to touch her. Why do you hold your hand so high?

  Anya smiled at him the way she’d seen her stepmother smile. She let him bend close to her lips, closer, before dropping her arm and returning to the dead garden.

  It took him many nighttime meetings to ask her the right question. By then his eyes were hollow with sleeplessness, and he looked at her with a love like hunger.

  How can I get you to stay? he asked, at last.

  She smiled and moved her mouth to his ear.

  She told him how they could be together. How he could remake the world just enough so she could reenter the land of the living.

  It would take blood.

  She taught him the words to say, repeating them three times so he would remember. She pressed her bone knife into his hand. And she watched as he slid his bleeding wrist over the wall of her father’s house, using it to paint a door. He swayed as he spoke the words, his face, a mirror of their father’s, going pale.

  The blood turned into a door that glowed with ugly green light at the seams. Anya dropped the stone from her eye as it swung open.

  The boy disappeared, and the light turned into the warm golden lamplight of home. As Anya walked through the door, she could feel the faintest brush of her half-brother, stepping past her into the land of Death.

  Then she was standing in her father’s house, alive and alone, and Death didn’t feel cheated because she’d traded a life for her own. She lifted the stone to her eye just long enough to peep through at the boy standing in her place in Death’s green light, his face terrified, before putting it into her pocket.

  She went to the kitchen and ate spoonfuls of honey, ripped up fistfuls of meat, and let wine run down her chin.

  Then she climbed the stairs to her father’s bedroom, where he lay sleeping next to his wife. She felt the bone knife twitching where it lay against her breast.

  She didn’t cut his throat. She cut his wife’s. And she lay the stone in the dead woman’s hand, where her father would be sure to find it. And lift it to his eye, to see the dead world that awaited him, and the son who would call to him, always, but whom he could never retrieve.

  17

  As Finch spoke, I stared into the woods. His voice was soft and soporific, relaying distant horrors.

  The light began like a trick. He spoke about the sisters walking through their blood door, and I blinked, blinked again, but I couldn’t blink it away: a thin line of white, like the trail of a sparkler pinned between tree trunks. When Finch finished the story, I put a hand to the glass.

  “Do you see that?”

  He leaned over, peering past me to where the ghost light wavered. “Is that another jogger?” he murmured.

  As I made room for him, my elbow hit the power window button. The glass whirred down a few inches, letting in a scent like smoke and metal.

  Like fire and blood.

  A heady flash of déjà vu froze me in my seat. Chicago. Ella’s scream. White light.

  “Finch, drive. Drive, drive, drive!”

  He slammed the car into gear and squealed onto the road. “What happened? What is it?”

  Chicago. Ella’s scream. White light and a smell like death. A girl’s narrow fingers curling around the edge of a door.

  “Nothing! I don’t know. Just … just drive. Okay?”

  He stopped asking. A few miles down the road he followed signs for a rest stop. After we parked I followed him out of the car, leaning against the pump as he bought gas, then trailing after him into the greasy warmth of a McDonald’s.

  “No more story time,” he said lightly. “It’s not doing either of us any good.”

  “Stop talking.” I said it without heat, around a bite of cheeseburger. My mind was miles away, in the chill of a Chicago winter. The memories were coming faster now.

  I’d been heel-toeing along the back of the couch like a tightrope walker. Until I fell, my chin catching the corner of our cheap glass coffee table on the way down.

  There was blood. Lots of it. So much I thought I must be remembering wrong.

  Then the memories fell apart into snapshots. Ella pressing a towel to my chin, using another to mop up the blood. The sudden light, the awful smell.

  And the screaming. The shock of vicious cold as Ella carried me out the back door, shoeless and dripping blood in a dotted line.

  We’d left everything behind. I’d needed stitches, but we didn’t stop at a hospital until we reached Madison.

  What had we been running from?

  Back at the car, I got into the driver’s seat before Finch could.

  He looked in at me through the passenger window. “Are you okay to drive?”

  I gave him a look, and he put his hands up. “Fine with me, I’ll sleep. Google Maps says three more hours to Birch. Drive straight through and find a motel?”

  “Sounds good. Let’s look for something that’s not too close to the woods.”

  The driving steadied me, gave me something to focus on, but I was still spooked. Our headlights ate up and spat out the dark as I strained to see past them, like whatever it was we were chasing might be just beyond my sight.

  Around eleven, we were still an hour away. Finch
was curled into an impossible ball on the passenger seat, eyes closed. Finally I saw something: the distant embers of road flares.

  “Hey. Wake up.”

  “I am awake,” he said, muffled, then lifted his head like a turtle and blinked at the road. “Is that an accident?”

  “I don’t know.”

  As we got closer, the bleached shape of a policeman swam into view, a flare in each hand. I pulled up next to him and stopped.

  He ducked his head down and peered into Finch’s window. He was wearing aviators nearly identical to mine. Combined with his mustache, they looked like a disguise. “You all need to turn around. Road’s closed for the foreseeable.”

  “What happened?” I asked, peering through my windshield. I could see two cop cars and a handful of officers scattered between them. One was talking into a radio, holding it like an MC holds a microphone. Beyond them was a white SUV, half-on, half-off the road.

  “Accident.” His voice was clipped, a shade below civil.

  I flipped off my headlights to get a better look. The SUV’s doors were open, all four of them. There was a hump of something on the road beside it that made my throat go dry. But it was too small to be a person. A jacket, maybe.

  “Car looks okay,” I said. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Sweetheart, I’m gonna need you to turn around now.”

  “Sweetheart?”

  The cop chewed on something, gum or the inside of his cheek. “Son, please tell your girlfriend to turn her lights back on and turn the car around, before I write her up.” His voice was mechanical, the metallic eyes of his shades pointed toward Finch.

  The feeling started in my cheeks, like it always did, and flooded my skin with cold fire. “You can talk to me,” I said. “I’m right here. Or were you under the impression that a woman can’t follow a simple command?”

  “Alice.” Finch put a hand on my arm, and I shook it off. It was too late to count to ten.