Chapter Six
The forest was the last place I wanted to be, especially after finding a way out of it. But I couldn’t say no to Noelle, and I couldn’t leave Holly alone to voice her scary thoughts either.
“Holly? Where are you?” I hoped she wasn’t lying in a ditch somewhere. “Holl—”
“Ca-caw!” Only Holly would think to make fake birdcalls. Mom and Dad were right. She watched way too much TV.
Noelle and I stopped. We looked all around, but Holly was nowhere to be seen. I was getting impatient. This wasn’t the place to be fooling around. “Where are you? I know that’s you.”
She answered with another birdcall.
“Are you sure that’s your sister?” Noelle asked. “It sounds like a vulture.”
I wanted to kick myself for forgetting to tell Noelle how the forest worked. Now she’d suggested a creature for us to deal with. I immediately whipped my head toward the trees. The branch directly above us started transforming into a giant vulture. As if the real ones weren’t scary enough.
“Quick, get in that bush!” I yelled.
“What? I’m not getting in a sticker bush.” The oversized bird swooped down at Noelle, and she dove for the bush.
I reached out and grabbed the tail of the bird as it pecked at Noelle. I started ripping the leaves out like feathers, and the bird turned on me. Noelle leaped out of the bush and grabbed hold of the bird’s wing. I got a hand on the other wing, and we pulled in opposite directions. The tree branch broke apart, and the leaves fell to the ground.
“Take that forest!” I said, breathing heavily. I was really tired of this place.
“What was that?” Noelle’s face was ghostly white.
“I forgot to tell you that the forest can hear you. If you imagine something scary and say it out loud, the forest makes it real. It only hears the nightmarish stuff, too. So wishing for things like food or water doesn’t get you anything.” I kicked the pile of leaves, making sure the bird wasn’t about to come back to life.
“I made the forest create that thing?”
“Don’t sweat it. Holly and I created lots of scary creatures. This bird was nothing compared to them.” I didn’t go into details about the bears, wolves, and tree people. I didn’t want to test the boundaries between remembering scary things and creating new ones.
Noelle looked like she was about to pass out when Holly stepped out from behind a bush. She had branches and leaves tucked into her clothing. I couldn’t help laughing. “Nice job at the camouflage, but bushes don’t wear sneakers.”
“You couldn’t find me, so obviously I did a pretty good job,” Holly sneered. She squinted at Noelle. “Way to create an attack bird.”
“Whoa!” I said, feeling strangely protective of Noelle. “Do you really want to compare who’s made what come to life in this forest? Because I think your handiwork back at the cave would win.”
Holly glared at me. “Whatever! Let’s just get back to shore and away from this forest.”
I grabbed her arm. “We can’t leave yet. I promised Noelle we’d help her look for her dad. He’s lost in here.” I leaned closer and whispered, “Besides, I’m not ready to give up on breaking the curse.” I hoped Noelle hadn’t heard that part. I hadn’t made the best first impression, acting like a babbling idiot. I didn’t want to add cursed freak on top of that.
“Are you crazy?” Holly swung her arm out from my grip. “If you want to stay in this horrible place, be my guest, but I’m going home.” She turned, and her tree branch camouflage caught on a sticker bush. She started ripping the leaves from her clothing. “A little help, please!”
“And you want to go back to the shore on your own? You couldn’t even make it two steps without needing my help.”
Noelle bent down and picked something up off the ground. It was so dirty I couldn’t tell what it was. “No, no, no!” She shook her head furiously from side to side.
“What is it?” I asked, walking over to her.
“My dad’s watch—or what’s left of it.” I took the watch from her, and we shocked each other again as our fingers touched.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, but Noelle was too upset to care about a little static electricity. The watchband was chewed up, and the face was cracked. It looked like an animal had been using it as a chew toy. “It probably fell off and some squirrels thought it was food.”
Noelle’s lower lip quivered. “Probably, but this means my dream definitely was real. He was here and something bad happened to him.”
Holly sighed and said, “If we’re really going back through this forest, let’s get it over with.”
“Thanks,” Noelle said in a soft voice.
“But this time, I get to lead.”
Before I could protest, Holly hopped onto a trail and took off like she knew where she was going. She even started skipping and humming “Lions and Tigers and Bears” as if she were Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. But soon she got carried away and started singing her own version out loud, “Wolves and vultures and bears, oh my!”
I quickly covered her mouth. We all froze, waiting to see Holly’s latest forest creations. The bush next to us started to move and wood splintered somewhere above us. “Run!” I yelled. We sprinted to the next fork in the trail.
“Go that way,” Noelle said, pointing to the path on the left. “I’ll try to lure the creatures this way.”
Was she crazy? She was no match for the forest creatures. “We can’t split up. Our only chance is to stay together.” I grabbed her sleeve and tugged her to the left with Holly and me, but Noelle wiggled out of her jacket and tossed it on the trail to the right.
“Go!” she yelled, pushing me down the other path. “Maybe my jacket will confuse them. They’ll think we took the other path.”
We ran until we couldn’t run anymore. My legs were like jelly, stumbling over the tiniest pebbles. Noelle’s plan must have worked because there weren’t any forest creatures behind us. “Let’s slow down,” I said, out of breath. “It’s getting dark. We should find shelter for the night.”
“What about my dad?” Noelle asked. “I have to find him.”
“It’ll be too dark to search soon, and we need to find shelter from—” I stopped. My mind swarmed with thoughts of all the terrible things in the forest we might need shelter from during the night.
“Go ahead. Say it!” Holly yelled. “All the terrifying things I’ve created? The scary things I’ll probably talk about while I’m having nightmares? I can’t take this anymore. Why did we even come here?” She sank to her knees and cried.
I knelt down beside her and put my arm around her shoulders. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this, but I couldn’t ignore the journal. Not if there’s a way to end the curse.”
She nodded. “What are we going to do?” Her red, swollen eyes pleaded with me to find a way out of all this.
I sighed. “We’re going to find shelter, and in the morning, we’re going to break the curse and find a way out of this forest.”
Holly used her sleeve to wipe the tears from her eyes. Then she gave me a thin smile to let me know she was ready to move on.
I turned around to tell Noelle we were ready to go, but she was gone. “Noelle?” My eyes frantically searched the woods.
“You don’t think something got her, do you?” Holly asked, jumping to her feet.
I felt sick. I knew what Noelle had done. “She went to find her dad.” She was alone in the woods with danger lurking around every corner, and it was my fault.
“What do we do now? Even if we find her, we can’t force her to stay with us.”
Holly was right, and it wasn’t safe to walk in the dark, so we started searching for shelter—without Noelle. With each step, the path got more difficult to see. The trees and bushes overhanging the path blocked what little daylight was left. I had to walk with my arms up to protect my face from getting scratched by branches. Every once in a while, one of the branches I bent out of my way swung back
and hit Holly in the face.
“J.B., be careful! That hurts!” Holly said.
“Sorry.” I looked back at her. It obviously wasn’t the first time she’d been hit because she had small cuts on her cheeks and forehead. “It’s hard to see with all this stuff in the way. I’m trying so hard not to fall into a ditch or stream that I keep forgetting the branches I bend have to swing back into place.”
“Yeah, and it seems like I’m always in that place when they get there,” Holly whined, rubbing the fresh red mark on her cheek.
I turned back to the path and squinted at something big and dark up ahead. “Hey, that’s strange.”
“What is it?” Holly asked. “And please don’t tell me that large blob is the backside of a b—”
I covered her mouth before she could finish her sentence and put us in danger again. “Please think about what you’re saying before you say it.” She nodded, and I lowered my hand.
“Sorry,” she said, biting her lip.
We walked closer to the object, and I smiled. “It’s our home for the night.” I grabbed Holly’s hand and pulled her toward a large tree that had been split in half, probably by lightning. The top of the tree had fallen over onto an enormous boulder, and moss had grown on the tree and rock, forming a sort of roof. “There’s just enough room under here for us to sleep.”
“We’re going to sleep under a fallen tree?” Holly asked.
“It’s the best shelter we’re going to find, unless you want to try to make our way back to the cave with the—”
“This looks great!” Holly interrupted.
“Good. Let’s get some rest.”
I knew I needed to sleep after the day I’d had. Between all the walking and narrowly escaping dangerous animals, I was wiped. But knowing that the fallen tree didn’t provide much protection from those animals made it almost impossible to even close my eyes. I wondered how Noelle was doing.
Curse of the Granville Fortune Page 6