The gryphon shrieked, shredding my eardrums, and its beak slashed through the frigid air impossibly quickly, sending me flying. I landed with a breathtaking thump in a pile of snow, my stomach and ribcage aching from the blow. Across the clearing the gryphon had reared, its ruff upright and quivering, its beak wide open to hiss. It had closed its beak at the last moment: I had been bludgeoned by the smooth, rounded part of the beak instead of the sharpened end. Apparently, I could consider myself lucky. I didn’t feel lucky.
That hurt! The voice shrieked through my body and I yelled in agony, uselessly covering my ears.
When the hurt died away, I heaved myself up, staggering.
“Horned hedgepigs! I told you it would hurt, you great, stupid bird!”
The head turned and I was stared at by the other eye. Recognition came to it, and the gryphon said, sincerely this time: My apologies, human child. I forgot myself. Please approach.
“I won’t!” I retorted. With every breath I took, pain shot through my ribs. I had a horrible feeling that I had broken at least two of them.
Please. I did not intend to hurt you.
I remained where I was, sucking in shallow breaths with one hand pinching at the pain in my ribs.
“I can see your wing healing. What do you need me for?”
It will heal, but I need energy, the gryphon said. If its golden eye had not been so fierce, I would have thought it was pleading. I can help you, too. Your warm-blooded little human body is almost too cold to recover. I can heal you at the same time.
I hadn’t noticed the frigidity for some time because I’d become so cold that everything was numb. Even the shivers had stopped. My mind was decidedly hazy, and as I took the first step back towards the gryphon, the snowy landscape began to spin around me.
“Bother you,” I grumbled; but I knew it was right. Each unwilling step toward the gryphon was headily swaying, until at last I was within reach of one of its front claws. It had hauled itself up to sit on its haunches, one wing neatly folded and the other still hanging uselessly at its side. It reached out and gripped me easily around the waist. I whimpered as my ribs were crushed again, but the pain was short-lived, fading as an alien apathy settled over me. I don’t know how long I flopped there like a ragdoll, unsure whether I was dead or alive and somehow unable to care much either way, while every second drained more of my faculties.
Minutes or centuries later, I wasn’t sure which, there was a deep, powerful rumbling that shook the earth and my bones, and the world turned upside down. I was woken abruptly, dropped carelessly into a pile of snow, and murmured a faint protest at finding myself catapulted into a world of pain again. It felt as though every part of my body was on fire: in fact, the only advantage of the whole situation seemed to be that I was no longer cold.
I pushed myself up on burning hands that seemed, nonsensically, to melt the snow beneath them in a great hissing of steam. The floating sensation was gone but confusion still fogged my mind, so that when I looked around to find out what had become of the gryphon, my fancy saw the figure of a woman standing in the scattered pile of snow that had lately covered the gryphon.
Cassandra, my mind suggested automatically, but this woman’s salt-and-pepper hair was nothing like Cassandra’s glossy jet mane, and her figure was straight-backed and stern rather than willowy.
Of the gryphon there was no sign. I took this as a good omen. It seemed to me that the strange woman must have rescued me, and I opened my mouth to thank her; but by then she was no longer there, if she ever really had been.
I managed to climb to my feet with the help of an obliging tree trunk, whimpering at the pain in my ribs. The sensation of burning didn’t abate as I took the first few faltering steps forward, and I blindly reached out my hands to gather snow from the foliage around me. One of my hands felt unnaturally thick and clumsy, and it took me some time to discover that this was because I was again gripping my little cudgel in one hand. It was just long enough to be used as a walking stick and I used it as such, forcing one step at a time. From the passing trees, I pressed blissfully cold handfuls of snow to my hot, tight face. My hands were fevered, and with each step I heard the hissing of melting snow under my bare feet. Warm, moist clouds of steam seethed around my legs.
I clutched at my cudgel, stumbling on until I seemed to smell the scorching of crunchy autumn leaves, and until there was no more snow to relieve the burning of my poor, fevered face. It should have meant something to me, but the only thought that occupied my mind at that moment was the dreadful heat of my skin and the lack of any kind of relief. I found myself inevitably falling, and the dry autumn grass rushed up with dizzying speed to hit me in the face.
Intermission
I dreamed for the longest time. At first my dreams were of fire and pain, while my body burned in an eternity of agony. Later I heard voices, angry voices; one snarling that if it had been there this would never have happened; another answering sharply that it was quite capable of looking after one child on its own. The other voice didn’t seem to agree, because it snarled again, and said: “Not this one!”
I seemed to hear Mother’s voice, and Gwendolen’s; and tried to open my eyes in vain. I thought, or dreamed, that my eyelids had turned to stone.
After the fire and voices came the peace. When the fire was gone I sat up; a wasted, whispy little body that wasn’t quite solid, and critically observed my limbs.
Horned hedgepigs! I could see right through myself.
Well, I thought hopefully, at least I wasn’t dead: perhaps I was dreaming still. I was inside Akiva’s cottage, and I could see her searching through her cupboard full of herbs. She seemed cross: in fact, crosser than I had ever seen her. I had the guilty feeling that whatever it was, it was my fault.
I wafted up behind her with the mischievous idea of frightening her, but when I yelled her name the sound died an inch from my lips, and my breath didn’t even stir her hair. It occurred to me, belatedly, that I had been in my bedroom and had floated right through the wall without thinking about it.
I said, “Horned hedgepigs!” in my new, queer voice, feeling dubiously that saying something a little stronger would have been more satisfying but unable to think of anything sufficiently bad. Akiva turned with a handful of rosemary leaves and walked right through me. That made me feel so odd that for a little while I merely floated where I was. Perhaps I was wrong about being dead.
I tried to move things that day. If it was a day. I did see the morning come and go, and later on Akiva went to bed while the house grew dark, but despite the darkness I found I could see just as well as ever. I waited for a little while to see if I would get sleepy, but I didn’t; so I went on trying to move things instead.
Nothing I tried worked. I tried pushing, pulling– I even tried rushing at things with my transparent body, but all that did was send me rushing through the other side of whatever I tried to manipulate. Before long I was so wild with frustration that I would have thrown something, if only I could. Behind the frustration was a cold fear that I had somehow become stuck in a limbo from which I would never escape.
I spent the rest of the night scrunched up against a wall with my knees at my chest, floating a little above Akiva’s floorboards. It gave me a tenuously safe feeling that dissipated every time I forgot I couldn’t actually lean against the wall, and accidentally passed through it.
Akiva got up earlier than usual the next morning with a grim look about her mouth. I watched her stump about the kitchen with an odd feeling of homesickness and floated along curiously behind her when she unexpectedly left the house. As she passed into the forest from the garden she glanced briefly to the side of the path, and I saw, with a growing sense of indignation, that my body – my real body – was laid out in the grass of the forest. It was marbled and hard and absolutely motionless.
Horned Hedgepigs, what was I? A potted plant? Why wasn’t I laid out in my own bed? I hung over my prone body as Akiva strode on, studying my own features w
ith slightly ghoulish enjoyment. It seemed to me that my face was too fat and my limbs too gangly. I pulled a face at it, but left in a hurry when I realised that I could very easily lose Akiva if I didn’t pay attention. I caught up with her just at the outskirts of the forest. She didn’t hesitate, striding on through the dappled morning light into full sunshine, but when I tried to follow I couldn’t. The forest, implacable and inexplicable, held me inside. I tried pushing, but there was nothing to push against. I tried running at it with my eerily light body, and found myself wafting backwards instead as Akiva’s bony back disappeared down the road. I tried rhymes and tricks and screams, but the forest wouldn’t be persuaded, and Akiva was gone.
At last I sat down at the edge and glared at the spotted sunlight that gleamed off the dew, fiercer and fiercer so that I wouldn’t cry. I thought determinedly of loop-holes.
By and by I began to notice that there was a little more leeway where the forest extended spars of trees into the green grass of the roadside. I edged myself along one of these until I felt as though I were a bean just too big to fit into a peashooter. The thread for the spar continued on in a patch of mossy green right to the road, but it was too narrow to squeeze myself down and I had to own myself defeated. I retreated into the forest and sat down again, exhausted and breathless.
Akiva came back later with Mother and Gwendolen. Mother had a straight, deep line between her brows and Gwen was sobbing tragically into a crumpled little hanky. I watched her exasperatedly because I wasn’t dead, after all. I was sorry to have worried Mother, though, who was looking tired and perhaps a little bit exasperated herself.
They argued over my body for quite some time. Mother seemed to be of the mind that I should be inside the cottage but Akiva was still more emphatic that I remain in the forest. I could see their lips moving, but the sound was intermittent; and although I tried to lip-read I was left with very little idea of the conversation. As I watched, frowning in savage concentration, I heard fragments of her conversation that seemed to hiccough along like so: “ . . . Margot . . . patience . . . tried to . . . in the house but . . . forest wasn’t having it . . . no, the wolf is . . .”
This interested me greatly, because of course Bastian must be the wolf, but Mother made her sharp hushing gesture. Gwendolen, who had perked her ears at the mention of Bastian and was watching them both with bright eyes, retired once more into her handkerchief.
I tried moving my fingers and toes for Mother to show her I was there, but my real body wasn’t connected to my unreal one in any way I could understand, and I was still looking rather glumly at my motionless limbs when Mother and Gwendolen went back home. I don’t think Mother wanted to go, but Akiva had gone firm and magical, and insisted upon her leaving in a way that, even without complete sound, was unmistakable. I was grateful to her for that: Mother didn’t weep into handkerchiefs or wring her apron, but she did look after Gwendolen and me up to and beyond the endurance of her own health.
I didn’t try to follow them when they left. There didn’t seem to be much point. But by the time the triad had gone down I was so pale and cold with boredom that I trailed away whispily to the edges of the forest, willing to try and fail at anything rather than hover around the cottage any longer. Akiva, horrible old woman that she was, had merely gone on with her work without so much as a single apron-wring of distress at my condition. But she was forceful and cross as she stomped around the garden, and I began to wonder if that wasn’t the same as apron-wringing in Akiva’s case.
I left her striding between garden beds and hovered by the edges of the forest again, trying to squeeze myself down the ever-narrowing channels that stretched, green and inviting, right to the road. I’m not sure what I thought it would accomplish, since I would have been baulked by the road in any case; but it annoyed me to be stopped, and so I pushed and pushed until I was exhausted. I was so intent on my task that I didn’t notice the growing darkness or the great glowing moon above me, and by the time the triad was rising in a red-gold arc of glory it still hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t sleepy. I merely glared at the searing brightness of it all and went back to trying to stuff myself into a thread that was by far too small for me. It reminded me unpleasantly of the time Gwendolen had insisted on trussing me up in a corset; squeezing, squeezing until it felt as though my stomach was about to burst through my backbone.
“It’s no good!” I said at last, in a gruff, thready voice that was only just loud enough to be a voice. “I’m too fat.”
It’s horrible to be a ghost. You can scream and yell in your patchy little voice, and pretend to stomp your feet, but you can’t throw things and your feet only sink into the ground anyway. I felt as though I could burst with frustration, but there was nothing I could do about it. In the end I floated crossly about a foot in the air with my arms folded – floating being a deedy little trick that I had found fascinating at first, but ultimately useless – and thought hard. Body too fat. Body that floated. Too many things that I couldn’t properly touch. Too many things that were frustratingly incorporeal.
But not the threads. I instinctively fanned my insubstantial fingers through the air, touching cobwebby threads that were somehow more real than they had been when I was properly solid, and pinched one of them meditatively. It constricted slightly, giving off the scent and image of quiet green shadow, and when I released it, blinking thoughtfully at a new idea, it sprang back into its old place and size immediately.
“Horned hedgepigs,” said my voice thoughtfully, startling me. “It’s just a picture, after all. Bufflebrain!”
I looked narrowly at my whispy ghost hands, and instead of desperately trying to use them as though they were flesh and blood, I told them to fade. And do you know, they did fade. I wondered when I had become so frightened I was dead that I had wilfully deceived myself into thinking this smoke-and-shadow body was real.
When I was nothing but a consciousness bobbing against the barrier at the end of the forest, prickly and excited and scared all at once, I narrowed that consciousness out still further, and just slipped along the feather edge between forest and road. There was no pretending to have a voice down there, where the threads were raw streams of power and it was all I could do to stop myself being swept away in the great, fierce being of it all. I let myself be carried a little way further down, feeling as though I had gotten to the very roots and foundations of the forest. I thought dizzily that if I had Bastian here, now, I could unravel his curse with one flick of my nonexistent finger.
I only just stopped myself from being dashed into nothingness at the end of the forest, where huge green life met brown, dead gravel and drove its roots firmly to a stop. It was a surprisingly violent ending given the usual peace and rest of the forest, and I lingered there for quite some time, catching my entirely metaphysical breath. Here was raging green life, potent and deep. There was brown, dusty death, the cessation of all life. The idea of it sent a shard of pain to the place that used to be my heart, until I realised that it wasn’t entirely death: beneath the unyielding hardness of the village road was more life. It wasn’t seething and strong like the forest; it was quiet and solid and sleepy. It was alive, though. I wondered if I could liven it up– send the forest energy out there to make it green again. But when I tried the same quiet sleepiness rose up against me in dogged rebellion until at last I understood that it was meant to be that way.
I returned to the topside forest, trying not to feel absurdly hurt that the outside had refused my help. Mother, after a particularly frustrating family meal with Father’s relations, had once said: “Help that you don’t want is no help at all.”
I hadn’t understood it then, but I did now.
I made my whispy little body appear again once I was back in the forest proper. I didn’t exactly need it, but it was a comfort to me. The triad, its foremost sun sinking low and its last, small and hopefully lingering well above the horizon, sent shafts of dusty orange-red through my limbs, and made me wonder for the f
irst time just how much time had passed. I floated my way carelessly back to Akiva’s cottage, more aware than before of the forest around me with its hidden quirks of life and its boundless length. If I was to be much longer out of my body, I thought, tossing a glance at my real body as I passed it, I might like to explore its length, just to see where it ended. Just to see if it did end.
Akiva was just coming in from the garden when I breezed through the walls. It didn’t occur to me until I was watching her try to wash the dirt from her leathered old hands that the grass in the front garden was overdue its scything by a few days at least. I was intimately familiar with the differing lengths of the grass, since it was my job to scythe it as soon as it became too long, and not a fortnight had passed that didn’t see me pleading with an unmoved Akiva that the grass could wait ‘just one day longer!’ I’d scythed some days before I met the gryphon – pesky creature! Horned hedgepigs, if I came across it again, it would be sorry! – but unless I had been insensible for the better part of a week, I had lost three days trying to squeeze myself into a thread at the edge of the forest.
“I didn’t even notice,” I said aloud, partly for the practice and partly because it was impossible to be as annoyed as I felt in silence. “Where did they go?”
Akiva, unhearing, dried her hands briskly on her apron and fetched the cheese in its chequered wrap from the coolbox. This prompted me to think wistfully about bread-and-cheese without having the hunger to justify it.
If I didn’t become hungry or tired, how was I to keep track of the days? And it was suddenly so very important to keep track of them: just one tiny reminder that I wasn’t as alien as I felt.
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