“It’s Lupine’s old dollhouse,” I said, pointing.
“It’s not mine,” she flatly stated.
Her face went suddenly pale and she grabbed a tree branch, holding on as if the ground were moving. “It’s weird how the house keeps shifting,” she slurred.
“What are you talking about?” Frederick demanded. “I don’t see any dollhouse, just that light over there.” Then, rubbing his forehead, he mumbled, “This place gives me the creeps.”
“Are you guys serious?” I asked. “There’s a dollhouse right here,” I sputtered, stepping forward to bang the roof with my flattened hand. “It’s not moving, and it’s as plain as the braces on Frederick’s teeth!”
“Try the camera,” Lupine said.
Frederick focused in the proper direction. “Look, Zel,” he confirmed, “nothing.”
Indeed, only ferns appeared on the screen, even though I could clearly see a cabin with my own eyes.
“Maybe another kind of camera would work,” Frederick mused. “Like the old plate jobs that require a long exposure.”
“Try to touch where you see the light,” I suggested.
Stepping forward, Frederick bent to feel for the mini cabin that he could not see. “I found it!” he announced, triumphant for a brief moment, happily thumping the shingles with the palm of his hand. Then his face turned from pleasure to horror as he mumbled, “But I think I’m going to barf.”
CHAPTER 15
Something Strange
about These Woods
“SORRY I HURLED.” Frederick groaned, mortified over vomiting in mixed company. “There was something about that spot that made me sick. Like, really queasy and weird.”
“It’s okay,” I consoled him, patting his back. “Maybe it was something in the air, you know, like field-mouse poop.”
He scowled at the reference.
“Well, I felt strange, too,” Lupine admitted. “Dizzy and sort of itchy,” she confirmed, rubbing her palms together.
“I must be immune to whatever’s bugging you two,” I said with a sigh, “because I feel fine.”
We were sitting on the logs around the fire pit, watching Lupine place twigs on the small fire she was building. She waited patiently for a sturdier flame before adding the larger sticks.
I pulled the miniature book from my pocket. “Can you guys see this?” I asked, holding it in the palm of my hand.
Frederick tiredly shook his head.
“Your palm is glowing,” Lupine observed.
Exasperated with the three versions of reality, I snapped, “It’s a book! What’s going on here, anyway?”
Lupine’s fire burst into a healthy blaze, and she stacked more dry sticks on the top. Then, in her drama queen voice, she said, “There’s always been something strange about these woods.” Her eyes swept over the meadow. “Ever since we moved here, I’ve seen sparkles and shadows that can’t be explained.”
Chuckling, Frederick said, “Yeah, I remember you in first grade. You were always drawing elves and unicorns. You were a weird kid back then, and I think we have to admit that you’re even weirder now.”
Delighted with his joke, he was still laughing after Lupine jabbed him with her bony elbow.
“Lupine’s not the only one seeing strange things,” I pointed out. “We all are. I mean, how do we explain what we saw at my grammy’s funeral and the dollhouse that wouldn’t show up on the camera?”
“We should go back to the attic,” Lupine decided. “Those pictures confirmed that we’re not delusional.”
“I still feel queasy,” Frederick whined. “I think I need something to eat.”
“Yeah,” I said, snickering, “because you lost your lunch.”
“By the looks of your gigantic barf, I think you lost your breakfast, too,” Lupine added, pinching her nose.
“These are horrible,” Frederick declared as he squirted mustard on his third hot dog.
Lupine had produced the thick-skinned tofu dogs, along with condiments and dainty juice boxes, from her backpack.
“If they’re so horrible,” she glowered, “why do you keep eating them?”
“I’m starving!” he said in defense. “And, anyway, roasting them over the fire makes them taste better.”
I nodded. Cooking over an open flame seemed to make food more flavorful, despite the inevitable dirt. In a clean kitchen, ash on the food would be disgusting, but somehow it was no problem here in the woods over a campfire. We ate every dog and drank all the juices, and then practiced the fine art of marshmallow roasting.
“To toast or to burn, that’s the question,” Frederick said philosophically. He intended to toast them, but they kept bursting into flaming comets of goo. “I think charcoal adds flavor,” he lied.
Lupine and I smiled over our schoolmate’s blackened failures.
“You realize it’s getting too dark to explore,” Lupine said with a nod to the sky.
“Yeah, but this was fun,” Frederick said.
Shrugging, Lupine couldn’t argue.
After a peaceful pause, Frederick quietly said, “I don’t think we should tell anyone what we’ve seen. I mean about the glowing stuff and the cabin and all. People will think we’re nuts.”
The sun descended below the tree line, and the surrounding woods went black. Embers in the fire pit smoldered like hot lava, and the dim radiance seemed to hold the three of us in a close circle of light.
“You’re right about keeping our mouths shut,” Lupine agreed in rare accord with Frederick. “We shouldn’t discuss it with anyone—not even our parents.”
The word parents made me think of my own, which stirred in me a wistful feeling that I’d never be able to claim the plural version of that word. Although I understood why things didn’t work out between them, I resented “Vin and Wil” for messing up like they did.
When I saw the boy this time, I didn’t say anything. He was standing with his hands shoved in his pockets, perched at the highest point on the stump. Glowing with some inner light, his face was clearly illuminated, and when his eyes caught mine, he gave me a decisive scowl.
Funny, it didn’t bother me one little bit. Despite the mean look he projected, the feeling that lingered was not hostility or anger—it was loneliness.
Now, why would his scowl make me feel that way?
CHAPTER 16
The Diary
THE PRIVATE PROPERTY OF Ronald Whistle Bright, the cover read.
Stay Out! the second page advised. Below that, A Dreadful Curse upon You, Trespassing Reader!
So began the tiny book from the cabin of sticks.
I checked the hall and saw Mom’s reading light flick off. After her evening with the Acorns, she’d gone to bed in an unusually good mood. It seemed like her old friends brought out a lighter Mom, sillier and younger. And she actually looked prettier!
It occurred to me that she may have been lonesome in the city with just her colleagues from school and her old friend Etta Myers. Occasionally, the industrious Etta would set Mom up on a date, but no one ever seemed to impress her. Those evenings all ended with the same tired phrase “Oh, he wasn’t my type.” It seemed like no one was her type since my dad.
When I was certain that Mom was down for the count, I opened the minuscule book. Armed with a magnifying glass, I ignored the threat of “a dreadful curse,” and began to read.
Auntie Win says that writing in this diary may help rid me of my restlessness. So I’ll try, although scratching words don’t seem too useful. Mostly what ails me is angst and sorrow that our town is packing up and going north. So go my cousins, and old best friends, and even characters that chafe. So goes all of Nutfolk Wood. And why? Because the humans are coming, and they wreck everything they touch.
Now we were getting somewhere! This is what my mother was attempting to remember with the note she’d scrawled as a kid—Remember Nutfolk Wood. That mystical place had faded fast from her memory, and for a time, she had known it was fading.
In days of old, Nut
folk Wood did thrive. The weather had been our friend for many a season, and although old Hazel had passed, we were confident that her good daughter would come tend the garden. Trade in the foothills was high, instances of illness were low, and babies were a blessing. But then the current shifted.
It was the winter of cold and ice when my parents met their end, stalled in a surge and crushed on the highway by a careless hum truck. This tragedy, compounded by the cold and dismal weather, set folks to thinking in a glum tide. What if the daughter never came? The forty acres could be taken by another, perhaps by crashers and builders. It would happen fast, as it always did, and our town would be in a storm with folks surging like refugees.
Scouts began to observe patterns, watching the spread of crashers from the river to the foothills. After several seasons, the results were undeniable. The hum mess was spreading directly east from the river and following the wide gash of highway. They were coming all right, and with no like-minded benefactor, Nutfolk Wood was doomed.
At least that’s what everyone said when the subject came up, and it came up often.
The vexing thing was that nothing bad actually happened after the death of my parents. No crashers growled at the glen and no pavers came to spew rock, but the general state of mind was so negative and resigned that folks began to leave. Just a dribble here and there as this family left to meet that family. But as the seasons passed, the population dwindled, and the poor town lost its heartiness and its health.
Now townsfolk say, “Why stay in this crack-blasted ghost town when there be better glens to put down roots?”
But I say, why scatter? This here’s our town.
I felt a lump in my throat for the author’s predicament, caught up in a tide of events he couldn’t control—first losing his parents, now losing his town.
I flipped hurriedly to the last page and read on.
Auntie convinced the town council that our wood should award the gold acorn to the momby of an Honorable called Willa.
So they were the ones who dropped the acorn at Grammy’s funeral! And “an Honorable called Willa”? Was that my mother? What made her so important? I couldn’t help but think of the birthmark on Mom’s elbow: an acorn so perfect, you would have sworn it had been drawn there.
Madam Healer made a big noise and got that old toot Calm Stilts from maintenance and Grampy, of course, to drag out the jay.
At first light, I checked the window and scanned the green. There sat the old bird with his head crunched from tragedy, lashed to the patched balloon. With its fill of hot air, it rose like a fat harvest moon, looking grand and golden in the sun.
So ironic to fly the jay again to honor a crack-blasted hum, when its last trip was to deliver my parents to their death, and for that I can thank the heedlessness of men.
Well, the writer did not like humans. He had a grudge, big time, after his parents were killed. Plus, with all the development going on, the end was near for his Nutfolk Wood. He was right. Someone was going to buy that property and slap up a bunch of houses. His little town was doomed, just like he said.
“Sorry, Mr. Bright,” I whispered out loud.
“Return my book!” A voice demanded from somewhere inside my room.
CHAPTER 17
Everyone Calls Me Whistle
STANDING RIGIDLY AT the foot of my bed, hands thrust in his pockets, was the same small boy I’d seen before, now with an angry spark in his eye.
“Didn’t you read the warning?” he demanded.
“I read it,” I admitted, “but I didn’t believe it.”
He paused. “Yeah, well, there ain’t no curse,” he finally said with a shrug. “But you shouldn’t have read my pages—’twas pesky rude!”
“I’m sorry,” I said in earnest, and then I realized I was still holding his diary. “Here.” I placed the book on the bed for him to retrieve, but the snoop in me wished I’d read faster.
“Would you turn off that crack-blasted machine?” he asked with a fierce motion toward the desk.
The only machine was the computer on standby. “You mean this?” I asked, pointing my thumb toward the modem.
“Obviously. Doesn’t that thing make your skin crawl?”
“No, but I’ll turn it off,” I assured him, hurrying across the room.
“And the lamp,” he added.
I switched that off, too, although I could still see him with the light from the street.
“Are you Ronald Whistle Bright?” I asked as I flopped back onto the bed, making him bounce a little.
“Who wants to know?” he said, sounding all tough.
“I’m Zelly MacKenzie, Willa’s daughter.” I hoped my mother’s name would mean something to him.
“Must be you take after your momby,” he muttered, “because humans are generally dumb as logs.”
Refusing to be drawn into an argument, I asked, “Why do you say I take after my mom?”
“She could see,” he replied, “and so can you.”
“But she can’t see you people anymore, and, in fact, she doesn’t remember a thing about Nutfolk Wood.”
“Most hums are too busy up here,” he said with a finger to his head, “so they can’t see the glen through the trees.”
“That doesn’t explain why she can’t remember,” I pointed out.
“Perhaps a healer fogged her dreams,” he offered. And then, he curled his lips into a secretive smile and said, “It’s what you might call a security measure.”
“Well, how come I can see you?”
“Don’t ask me, because I don’t understand you in the least,” he snapped. “Guess you are a freak of hum nature.”
“That’s mean!” I charged. “It’s not my fault that I can see you, and I apologized for taking your diary. You don’t have to be insulting.”
Cocking his head and squinting, the boy seemed to be assessing me. “’Tis unusual in these times for a human to see us,” he said, staring at me with unflinching green eyes. “You are a rare read,” he added, more to himself than to me.
Under his gaze, I squirmed but found it hard to pull away, and something compelled me to confess in more detail.
“I found the diary in that cabin,” I blurted, “but I didn’t realize it was personal. I looked at a few pages—at the beginning and the end—but I certainly didn’t read any private stuff, not about who you like or anything.”
With the savvy of a human boy, he understood I was referring to girls and scoffed, “There’s no one to like unless you count old toots and aunties.”
He snickered, and I giggled, and for a brief moment we found ourselves laughing together.
“How old are you?” I asked, sensing a lull in his grouchiness.
“Fourteen springs,” he answered.
“I wouldn’t have guessed. You look small for your age,” I began, realizing too late that I didn’t mean to say small, which he obviously was, but I had meant to say young.
“What I mean to say is that you seem— Oh, never mind.” I stopped myself from babbling, figuring that, either way, calling him young or small could be interpreted as an affront. Finally, I just started laughing at myself.
Smirking, he assured me, “I’m average among my friends and small only by your measure. And I might add that, by Nutfolk scale, you are hugely enormous.”
“Thanks,” I replied, miffed at being described as enormous.
A long pause ticked between us. Finally, he said, “Well, I’ve got my book, but you mind your tide, Zelly MacKenzie,” and he wagged his finger at me as though he were scolding a cat.
I realized that, like G.G., he was more bark than bite, acting gruff to keep me distant. After all, his poor parents had been killed by “dumb hums,” and now his hometown was at our mercy. Plus, there was no one his own age to hang out with! Of course he would have a chip on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry about your parents,” I said. “And I’m sorry about the trees being cut and humans moving in everywhere. And I’m really sorry your
friends have moved away. It makes me feel bad.”
Giving me a stilted nod, the air around him began to shiver and buzz, and his body grew more translucent. He was almost gone when his voice crackled from the haze: “Everyone calls me Whistle. . . .”
CHAPTER 18
A Strange Hedgerow
“IT WASN’T A dream!” I said again.
Frederick and Lupine and I sat around the burned-out fire circle on this warm Sunday morning, pondering my latest news flash. After I relayed the story of my encounter with Whistle Bright and described the contents of his diary, Frederick and Lupine were noticeably quiet.
“I’m telling you the truth,” I repeated. “I met him and I talked to him, and his name is Ronald Whistle Bright, but everyone calls him Whistle.”
“Zelly, I’ve seen some odd things around here over the years, but nothing quite so . . . detailed,” Lupine finally said. “It sounds really interesting and all, but it sounds like a dream.”
“Well, it wasn’t a dream,” I objected. “At least, I don’t think it was.” Logic was eroding my resolve.
“Lupine, you saw the balloon and the cabin. And there’s something about these woods—can you feel it?”
Lupine shifted her eyes. “Like we’re being watched.”
“Are you two trying to freak me out?” Frederick croaked.
“I think we are being watched,” I agreed. “That boy doesn’t have anything better to do because his friends have all moved away.”
“Well, I want proof,” Frederick snapped. “How do I know that you two aren’t making up stories?” He glared at Lupine and added, “Some people do have very active imaginations.”
“You mean intelligent people?” Lupine quipped.
In an effort to stop their bickering, I suggested, “Why don’t we try to find that little town? We can look at the paintings again, and then we’ll know what landscape to search for.”
“Okay,” Frederick agreed. “That’s logical.”
Smirking, I thought to myself that searching for a fairy town in the woods was the most illogical thing I’d done in my life.
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