Winterwood

by JG Faherty

  Anders’s knees soon began to ache worse than his back and it became harder to breathe. A nervous tingle ran through him at the thought that there might be something wrong with the air. Then he noticed the upward slant of the tunnel and the cause of his discomfort became apparent.

  We’re climbing uphill.

  The darkness, together with the twists and turns and obstacles to climb over, made it impossible to determine how far they’d gone, but the increasing pain in his legs told him they were moving up through the tree at a fairly steady rate.

  “How much farther?” he asked, his words coming out between panting breaths.

  “Two more levels to the kitchen,” Ulaf said. “But now the danger grows worse.” The elf turned sharply to his left and disappeared. Anders hurried around the corner and almost walked right into the smaller man, who’d come to a stop. Anna and Paul pressed in behind them a moment later.

  With their bodies squeezed against each other in the confined space, Anders experienced true claustrophobia for the first time in his life.

  If someone discovers us now, we’ll be sitting ducks, flapping our wings and quacking while we get taken one by one.

  Anna’s hand found his and squeezed. He felt her arm trembling, and her fear served to calm his anxiety. He needed to be strong for her. For the boys. He squeezed back, hoping his gesture returned some comfort.

  Ulaf put a finger to his lips.

  “Hush now. Through this door is the castle proper, and we must make haste to avoid being seen or scented.”

  “Gryla?” Anders asked.

  Ulaf nodded. “Aye, but not just her. Her cat roams these halls, and soon the King will be back. He’s a nose for human blood, and it won’t be long before he catches a whiff of tasty morsels such as yourselves.”

  With his warning hanging in the air, Ulaf opened a normal-sized door Anders hadn’t been aware of. Light flooded the tunnel, momentarily blinding them. When Anders’s vision cleared, he saw no sign of the elf.

  Where did he go? Once more, unwelcome thoughts of abandonment and betrayal surged through Anders’s head, and he hurried forward through the opening, half expecting to find a line of guards waiting for them.

  Instead, he found an empty corridor illuminated by dozens of blazing torches set along both walls. Unlike the root- and slime-infested warren they’d just traversed or the clammy, putrid dungeon far below, the new hallway was easily twenty feet wide and ten feet high, its wooden floor and walls polished to a gleaming sheen. Intricately carved doorways, none of them marked, were irregularly spaced on both sides. Warmer air, scented heavily with burning pine, produced an almost holiday atmosphere, to the point where Anders felt he could close his eyes and wake up back in his parents’ family room, his brothers and sisters gathered around him on the floor while they listened to Oma tell tales of the Black Forest and the dangerous mystical creatures it held.

  “Nie in den Wald zu gehen, wird die Hexe erhalten Sie.”

  Anders stumbled and put a hand against the wall to steady himself. With a start, he realized he’d been lulled into a half slumber, a walking dream, by his exhaustion.

  You were right, Oma. We went into the woods, and the witch did get us. Now we have to find a way out.

  Cursing himself for letting his guard down, he checked in both directions before motioning for Anna and Paul to join him.

  “Where’s Ulaf?” Paul asked.

  Anders bit his lip, loath to admit he’d been wrong about the damned elf again, that they’d been abandoned, when a nearby door opened and Ulaf peeked out.

  “This way. Make haste.”

  With relief lending new strength to his legs, Anders hurried across the hall and into a dark space filled with shadowy objects. He stepped to one side so Anna and Paul could enter, and then froze when Ulaf shut the door, cutting off the light from the hall.

  “Here we’ll be out of harm’s way while we wait,” Ulaf whispered. Anders heard him moving around and wondered how the elf could see in the complete blackness.

  “Where is here?” Anna asked. “And why are we waiting? We should be looking for my boys.”

  “’Tis one of the witch’s pantries,” Ulaf said. “One level up from the Great Hall. And wait we must, for the King will return shortly from the Hunt. And if we were to be caught in the halls by him or his men, it would be straight into the ovens for us.”

  More rustling sounds reached Anders, and then a spark of light appeared. Ulaf held up a glass jar filled with some of the phosphorescent slime from the burrows they’d traveled through.

  “’Tis too dangerous to risk a torch, but this will stave off the dark just a bit.”

  “How long?” Anders asked, sitting down next to the elf. Anna and Paul did the same, the four of them forming a circle around the tiny glow. With the door blocking the warm air from the hallway, the temperature in the room dropped quickly and Anders pulled his coat tighter around his neck.

  “Too long to stay on our feet, too short to nap,” the elf said. “We can converse, but softly. This room is not used much during the Yule, but better safe than sorry.”

  “Where is the witch?”

  In response to Anders’s question, Ulaf pointed up. “Two sets of stairs to the kitchen.”

  After that, no one spoke for a few minutes; then Paul cleared his throat.

  “That story always terrified me as a kid.”

  Anders frowned. “What story?”

  “Hansel and Gretel. You said before it was based on that old bitch, Gryla or whatever. As a boy, it gave me nightmares. All those Grimm fairy tales did. Cannibal witches, giants, fathers selling their daughters to the devil. They were all bad, but Hansel and Gretel kept me up for weeks after I read it. I don’t know how other kids enjoyed those stories.”

  “The Grimm’s fables were never meant to entertain,” Anders said. “Long before they wrote them down, people throughout the North knew them as cautionary tales, warnings to keep children safe. But over the centuries they became part of folklore. No one believed them anymore, and what once served an important purpose soon became nothing more than bedtime stories.”

  “Like Santa.” Anna’s voice held a note of regret.

  “Yes. The Catholic Church would not permit tales that didn’t promote Christianity in some way. So they changed our fables. Turned demons into jolly elves and Old Man Winter into nothing more than a silly face blowing wind on holiday cards. Easter, Christmas, Halloween—everything has a darker truth if you look deep enough.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  Anna rolled her eyes at her husband’s question, and Anders felt a pang of sadness at her reaction. He imagined her thoughts—oh boy, here goes the old man with another story—and he knew Willa had been right. He’d been a fool to try and raise his daughter the old-fashioned way in a modern world. Still, Paul had asked, and he deserved to know.

  “I come from a small town in the Black Forest of Germany. In those days, everyone believed in the old ways. In the weeks leading up to Weihnachten—Christmas to you—the whole village would prepare for the holiday. Wreaths hung on doors to show belief in the Holly King, and a tree stood in the house to represent Winterwood. Boys and girls would be on their best behavior to make sure they had a gift waiting under the tree so the Yule Cat wouldn’t come for them. The whole town would smell of roasting ham and duck and rabbit. And the desserts—oh, the desserts. Stollen, lebkuchen, plätzchen. Parents would mull wine, and even the children would get a taste on the coldest nights.”

  Anders paused, the memories coming alive after so many years, the sounds and smells real again, as vibrant as they’d been in his childhood.

  Anna cleared her throat, and Anders took a deep breath. “I digress. When I was ten, my friends and I snuck out of our houses on a dare. It was forbidden to walk the streets at night during Yule, but we were foolish, the way young boys us
ually are. We didn’t believe. We almost made it back, but on an empty street, it came for us.”

  “What?”

  “The Yule Cat. Bigger than a tiger or lion and twice as fast. We had a head start, but it wasn’t enough. It killed two of my friends and then caught me as I climbed into my bedroom window. I would have died right there but my father chased it away with a present.”

  “A cat the size of a lion?” Paul’s eyebrows went up. “Are you for real?”

  Anders lifted his coat and sweater, exposing the three long scars that twisted across his left side.

  “Does this look real? That cat has haunted my dreams all my life. I was lucky. Others were not.”

  “I always thought you made that up just to scare us,” Anna said. “Mom told us you got those scars in the war.”

  “Your mother came from the city. She wasn’t brought up with the same traditions.” Anders pulled his clothes back down, covering flesh already growing chill. “She said the old ways should be left in the Old Country.”

  Paul looked ready to ask another question, but a thunderous trumpeting of horns echoed through the castle, the strident notes amplified and spread by the giant tree’s passages and chambers.

  “The Hunt!”

  Anders caught a glimpse of Ulaf’s eyes widening before the elf covered the jar of glowing mold and darkness took charge of the room again.

  The absence of light only served to emphasize the menacing sounds of the Wild Hunt returning to the castle. A vibration rumbled to life in the floor and grew stronger, a rhythm felt more than heard, yet somehow perfectly in time with the oddly nasal blasts of the horns. An image came to Anders: a hundred enraged elephants stampeding across a plain, their trunks heralding the inevitable arrival of destruction and Death.

  After a few moments, the shuddering of the floor evolved into actual hoofbeats and Anders’s vision of a stampede grew stronger. Soon the sounds of voices calling out reached them through the dense wood. Anders imagined elves and ogres running to and fro outside and inside the castle, preparing the way for their malevolent tyrant’s return.

  The rapid drumming of hooves shook the very air around them, and Anders’s heart sped up in response, taking on the same cadence. In his head, the herd of rampaging elephants gave way to the pictures of the Hunt he’d seen in books as a child, the same pictures that had haunted him in his dreams during the cold winter nights of Yule. The King, his moon-white hair flying madly behind him, his pale hands gripping the reins of a giant stag, grinning madly as he led his men through the woods. The great hounds baying as they raced beside the horned mounts, tongues lolling and eyes red as fire, ready to pounce and rend at their master’s command. Trumpets raised to announce the coming of Death incarnate, a warning to all, in the form of thunder and wind, a living storm ready to capture any foolish enough to venture outside. A vision from a frozen hell, galloping from town to town until they gathered their quota of bodies for the night.

  The discordant song grew to an earsplitting crescendo and then came to an abrupt stop, leaving Anders with a ringing in his ears and an unpleasant tingling in his body, as if the wavelengths of the notes had played the strings of his muscles and nerves like an instrument of flesh, vibrating his cells in unnatural and unhealthy ways.

  “Now what?” Anna asked. Her voice caught Anders by surprise and his heart stuttered for a few beats.

  “Just a few minutes more,” Ulaf said. “Time for the King to return to his throne and his men to bring their captives to the larder, where the witch will be waiting to look them over. We shall need to be quick because she will not be occupied for long. Each year the Hunt returns with fewer victims, as belief dwindles.”

  “Belief dwindles?”

  “Aye.” The elf’s tone made it seem the answer to Anders’s question should be obvious. “The Hunt is guided to places where belief still runs strongest.”

  “No. That makes no sense. It’s not believing that’s the danger. Belief keeps you safe. Following the old ways means staying inside during Yule nights, keeping presents under the tree. It’s those who don’t know the truth who’ll be caught outside by the Hunt.”

  “Those things be true, but ’tis those same convictions that draw the Hunt. The stags and hounds follow the scent of belief, which draws them as a magnet draws iron. Adults who no longer put faith in the tales are hidden from the Hunt. They may hear thunder in the night or see a ghostly shape in the snow, but to the Hunt they are but air, passed through as a man might walk through smoke or fog.”

  “Wait. Do you mean that if my father hadn’t taught us the old tales, my boys might not have been taken?”

  Anna’s words stabbed at Anders, each one an acid-dipped blade cutting through flesh and bone to pierce his heart.

  No. It can’t be. The stories are meant to protect, to—

  “’Tis a sad truth. No man is safer than the fool who knows nothing.”

  “God damn you!” Anna dove at Anders and her hands slapped at him, her nails raking across his hands as he raised them to defend himself. “This is all your fault, not mine! If you’d just kept your mouth shut, lied to us, we wouldn’t be here and my boys would be safe.”

  “Hush! Hush!”

  “Your fault, goddammit. I hate you.”

  “Anna, stop.” Her weight fell away in response to Paul’s voice, and Anders heard her grappling with her husband as he pulled her away. Her curses changed into sobs and then full-out weeping.

  “Quiet, please, or only things we will find are the King’s teeth.”

  Ulaf continued to urge silence, interspersing his pleas with shushing noises, until Anna’s crying finally dwindled down to wet snuffles.

  Leaving Anders alone with his guilt, a guilt that rose up from his stomach like bitter vomit, to fill him.

  All my fault. I thought I was doing the right thing. Since Anna was a child, all I wanted to do was protect her. Instead, I led the danger right to my family.

  All because I believed.

  But how could he not, when he’d seen the truth with his own eyes, bore the scars of it every day? How could he have known the hazards of passing on the legends?

  He couldn’t. The logical part of his mind understood that. But logic counted for nothing, not when weighed against the knowledge that his actions had quite possibly led Death to his family’s doorstep.

  Guilt-driven tears ran down his cheeks and froze, turning the creases in his skin into tiny, ice-filled ravines. He let them stay, each one a burning reminder that all actions have consequences.

  Ulaf rose, the rustle of his clothing unnaturally loud in the pitch black of the room.

  “It is time.”

  “Why bother?” The dull, lifeless tone of Anna’s voice made Anders want to wrap his arms around her and make everything all right. But he couldn’t. Nothing was all right, thanks to him. And it never would be, even if they found the children. She’d never forgive him.

  “They might yet live,” Ulaf said. “Many pies the witch must bake, many cauldrons of stew she must make. You saw the children the Yule Lads brought. But that is not the only dungeon, so who knows how many others wait their turn.”

  “You said only those who believe can be taken,” came Paul’s voice in the darkness. “There can’t be many people in our world who still believe in all this.”

  “Oh, many there are. Especially the children.”

  “This kind of hell isn’t what today’s children believe in,” Paul said. “For them, it’s Christmas and Santa and flying reindeer.”

  “Different words for the same thing. Believing is believing, no matter the name.”

  “So it wouldn’t matter if our kids believed in Santa or your Holly King, the danger would still be the same?”

  The meaning behind Paul’s words was blatant, and Anders appreciated his son-in-law for it. A not-so-subtle attempt to let Anna know it
wasn’t her father’s fault. He felt a new respect for Paul, but he also understood something Paul didn’t. Anna had inherited the Bach stubborn streak, and she wouldn’t let go of her anger easily.

  “Children draw the cat and the Lads the way scraps draw crows. Any who venture outside during the nights of the Yule are fair game for them. Now come. Enough talk, if you want to find your boys. The King and his men will be in the throne room, and the witch will be busy looking over the bodies brought to her larder. We may be able to enter the kitchen unseen.”

  “May?” The tingling in Anders’s body settled unpleasantly in his stomach. “You’re not sure?”

  The elf’s voice took on an ominous tone in the dark. “Warned you I have of the dangers. ’Tis likely as not we all end up in the King’s stew tonight.”

  “There’s a comforting thought,” Paul muttered.

  Something brushed against Anders’s arm and he jerked away, belatedly realizing it was only Ulaf’s leg. Anders pushed himself up, hating the way his knees and back popped, the sounds of his age too loud in the quiet room.

  Just hold out a little longer, he told his bones. Once we’re safe at home you can stay in bed for a week.

  Ulaf’s boots pattered across the floor and the click of a latch being turned warned Anders to avert his eyes just in time to avoid being blinded by a narrow beam of light. He stood next to Anna and Paul and watched while Ulaf peered into the hall.

  After a pause that seemed to stretch on forever, Ulaf waved a hand.

  “Come. The stairwell is just around the bend.”

  The door opened wider, illuminating the entire storeroom. As he waited for Anna and Paul to exit the room, Anders glanced back and got his first real look at the frigid space where they’d been hiding.

  And gasped.

  “What is it?” Anna turned towards him.

  “Nothing.” Anders stepped in front of her, blocking her view, and put his hands on her shoulders to turn her around. “Come. Let’s finish this.”

  The moment he stepped into the hall he pulled the door closed behind him. Not that it mattered. He already knew that what he’d seen inside would stay with him forever, visit him in his dreams until the day he died.