Winterwood

by Shea Ernshaw

  But I can’t take him back to the woods.

  A thing found cannot be unfound.

  He nods, so I push open one of the heavy wooden doors, and we step inside.

  The strange clamor of voices and the thick, smoky air barrel into us as soon as we enter. Like stepping from a quiet, snow-muted dream world into a loud, buzzing, awake one. And it takes a moment for my eyes and ears to adjust.

  The room is expansive, stately, and looks like it could withstand a thousand years of heavy snow and wind before it ever started to decay. A fire roars from a huge stone fireplace against the far left wall, and the air smells of blackened toast and has a dusky, dim quality, as if the mournful winter air were trying to creep inside.

  Two long wooden tables are set with candles that illuminate the faces of the boys seated along either side, and the racket of their voices echoes off the high timber ceiling. Most are eating breakfast, forks scraping against plates and orange juice sloshing onto the tables, but a few are at the far end of the room playing Ping-Pong near the fireplace.

  I’ve been in here before, a handful of times.

  The boys’ camp hosts a gathering every summer and winter where they invite locals from Fir Haven to a potluck party with music and tours of the old mining outpost. Mostly girls come up from Fir Haven—to see the boys, to kiss them behind nearby trees. Mom insisted I go the last two years, said it was good to meet new people. Make friends. As if my life is somehow lacking without a coven of girls to invite over for sleepovers on the deck in summer, sleeping bags fanned out beneath the stars. As if I couldn’t be perfectly happy without these things. As if these woods and Fin and a loft filled with books and found things weren’t enough.

  Oliver and I stand for a moment, waiting for someone to look our way, to notice: Oliver Huntsman has returned.

  But they continue shoving forkfuls of waffle dripping with syrup into their mouths, slurping orange juice, and laughing so heartily that I’m surprised they don’t choke.

  Oliver stares across the landscape of boys like he’s trying to pinpoint the names and faces of the people he knew before he vanished, but it’s now just a muddled blur. He uncrosses his arms and turns to face me, a severe line of tension cutting from his temples down to his chin. “Thanks,” he says. “For letting me stay at your place last night.” There is no warmth in his gaze. And a cold stone of doubt settles into my chest. I may have saved him from the woods, but bringing him back here feels wrong—worse than the dark of the forest and the promise of death.

  I force my lips to smile, but all I say, all that rises up from my chest, is “You’re welcome.”

  This is where he belongs. Among a sea of boys.

  He turns away without another word, without even a goodbye, and moves toward the row of tables—blending in with the other boys. I wait for someone to recognize him, to shout his name. But no one does. The room is too draped in shadow, too hard to discern one boy from all the rest. A boy they’ve already forgotten. Although I’m certain that once the camp counselors discover he’s returned, they will want answers. They will want to know where he’s been and what happened. Will he tell them the truth—that he’s been in the Wicker Woods all this time? Does he even know the truth? Does he even remember how he ended up way out there?

  I stare after him, knowing this might be the last time I see him.

  Even if he stays a whole year at the camp, he’ll be just another boy among a crowd of nameless boys. They come and they go. And soon he’ll be gone too, shuttled back to wherever he came from. One of the flat states, or the humid states, back home to his parents and his friends. He’ll soon forget this place and the night a girl found him inside the woods and let him sleep in her home beside the fire. An old memory replaced with new ones.

  He vanishes among the mass of boys—my first found item that was made of flesh and a thumping heart, and now he’s gone.

  My own heart betrays my head, sinking in on itself. Concaving. As though a deep, unknowable pain is squeezing it into a tiny kernel. A feeling I don’t want to feel. I refuse to feel.

  I turn back for the double doors, pushing the feeling away, when from the corner of my eye I see someone approaching. Tall and slight and moving not with the hulking stride of a boy, but with the ease of a girl who is at home in her own skin.

  The willowy Suzy Torrez—acorn-brown hair tied in a ponytail at the back of her head, eyelashes so long they’re like hummingbird wings—saunters toward me, lips drawn into a grin. “Nora!” she calls.

  I feel my mouth dip open and my smile fade. “What are you doing here?” I ask once she reaches me.

  Suzy lives in Fir Haven and goes to Fir Haven High. I only know her vaguely—our lockers were next to each other last year, but we’ve never been friends. She has a crowd of besties who do everything together and a crowd of boys who fawn over her, and I don’t have either of those things. But I also don’t want those things.

  Still, I see Suzy from time to time at the lake, mostly in summer, sunbathing down by the shore, stretched out on a beach towel with all her friends—lathered in coconut oil and laughing so loudly their voices carry across the lake. She usually has a summer fling with one of the boys at camp, a seasonal crush who she swaps out when the next selection of boys arrive. I’ve always envied the ease with which her heart can flutter from one to the next. A buoyant, pliable thing.

  “Been stuck up here since the storm,” she says. Her eyes slide across the room. “I snuck up to see Rhett Wilkes. Didn’t realize I was never going to leave these mountains again. Camp counselors weren’t happy when they found me hiding in Rhett’s cabin, but what were they gonna do?” She shrugs. “They couldn’t send me home.” Her gaze flicks away then back again, eyebrow raised. “I’ve never hated boys more in my whole life than I do right now.” Her nose twitches like she can’t shake the stench of all these boys, crowded together, smelling of wood smoke and sweat, stuck in the woods. Then her eyes narrow. “You live across the lake, right?” she asks.

  I nod. Of course she knows—everyone knows where the Walkers live: the house where witches are rumored to practice the foulest of magic, where Walkers cast spells and drink the blood of our enemies. The house most locals avoid.

  “What’re you doing at the camp?” she asks, white teeth gleaming, voice all drippy and cool. As if I were any other girl from school. As if we were friends. The kind of friends who stay up late talking on the phone, giggling, bedsheets pulled over our heads to muffle the sound. A thing I’ve never known. Maybe never will. A feeling that aches, that kerplunks into my stomach like a stone tossed into a deep pond. Sinking, sinking until it’s a gone.

  “I found that boy who went missing,” I tell her. “I brought him back.”

  She scowls, like the memory of a boy going missing sends odd spikes of pain through her chest. “I assumed he was dead,” she answers, her voice tight. “Frozen somewhere out there in the snow, and they’d find him in the spring.” At this she shudders, yet her description seems oddly callous, as if to die in the woods were commonplace up here. One dead boy, easily replaced by any of the others.

  I raise an eyebrow, and she coils her long, dark hair over one shoulder, tapping a foot against the floor as if she were feeling impatient. Our conversation beginning to bore her.

  The candles along the two long tables flicker briefly, sending shadows dancing up the walls, and Suzy crosses her arms, moving closer to me. Her chin dips down like she doesn’t want anyone to hear what she’s about to say. “This place gives me the creeps.”

  “It gives everyone the creeps,” I answer, eyeing the strange shapes the candlelight makes on the high ceiling. Hands and faces and bones that twist at wrong angles. Boys have always complained that the camp is haunted, that the ghosts of miners rattle the halls and sway through the trees at night. The boys aren’t used to living in the woods, to the constant scratch of branches on windows and the wind against your bare neck while you sleep.

  “Yeah,” she agrees softly. But I
can see her mind turning it over, the itching of something along her skin. She rubs her palms down her arms and looks away from me, biting her lip. “I can’t stay here anymore,” she murmurs, more to herself. Her chin dips to her chest and she breathes slowly, like she’s trying to pretend she’s somewhere else—three clicks of her heels and poof, she’ll be back home—instead of trapped in these mountains, living with all these awful boys.

  The candlelight vibrates again, and the wind shakes the sturdy walls. Another bad storm blowing in. I hear the whoosh of air just before the two double doors behind us tear open, pushed in by the wind, and bang back against the wall with a loud crash.

  In an instant, the entire mess hall is dipped into darkness—all the candles extinguished, the fire at the far end reduced to embers. Chairs scrape back across the wood floor, plates are pushed aside, silverware dropped. Faint, gray daylight filters through the open doorway, but it’s hardly enough to illuminate the shadowy mess hall.

  “All right, everyone, settle down,” a voice booms from somewhere in the dark—one of the camp counselors. “Take a seat and we’ll do a head count.” A flashlight is flicked on across the room, and then a couple more, the eerie beams of light slicing across faces and the towering walls.

  “Please,” Suzy says furtively, as if each word were a secret. “Can I stay with you, just until the road clears?”

  I feel both my eyebrows raise. Suzy Torrez has never stepped foot inside my house. Suzy Torrez wouldn’t be caught dead talking to me in the halls of Fir Haven High. She’s never asked me to sit with her in the cafeteria during lunch or invited me to one of her birthday parties, and now she wants to spend the night. At my home.

  “I’ve been sleeping on a cot in a little room off the kitchen. It’s the only place that isn’t bunking with the boys. I can’t take it anymore,” she urges, she insists. The whites of her eyes too white.

  A lantern is lit and it throws more light across the room as boys make their way back to the long wood tables. “I—” I start to open my mouth to speak, but Suzy cuts me off.

  “At least until the phones come back on, then I can call my parents, they’ll find a way to come get me.” Her eyes bore into me now, pleading. Her hair falling about her face. Her fingers twitching like there’s an itch somewhere along her skin she can’t reach.

  I feel sorry for her, the desperate curve of her mouth, the watery rims of her eyes. I wouldn’t want to sleep here either, in this damp, cold place. And a part of me—a part I don’t want to admit to—thinks it might be nice to have someone else at the house. To fill the silence. Last night, sleeping in my room with Oliver downstairs on the couch, felt oddly comforting. Another warm body and beating heart within the walls. “Okay,” I say at last.

  A smile breaks across her face, revealing her perfectly straight teeth. “I’ll go grab my bag. Meet you outside?”

  I nod and she spins around, crossing the immense room and vanishing into a dark doorway that must lead back to the kitchen.

  Candles are relit across the thick wood tables, flames becoming little points of light in the dark, shining up the walls. But before I can slip out through the open doorway, I notice something flitting down from the ceiling—something I couldn’t see before in the dark.

  A moth.

  It must have been hovering up in the rafters, and now it quivers through the air, drawn toward the candlelight. Its white-gray body is paler than it should be. Its antennae too long and bleached white. Not a common moth.

  It’s the same kind I saw in the Wicker Woods.

  A bone moth.

  Seeing it again is like a spark against my eyelids—cold as January frost. Wild as February wind. Like a premonition. But I’ve never been able to foresee what’s to come. Not like Georgette Walker, my great-great-aunt whose nightshade let her see the future in dewdrops suspended on blades of grass. This feeling is something else. A certainty resting at the base of my throat. A dull, stagnant ache. A ringing in my ears.

  I turn away, a chill rolling down my spine, and dart back outside—before the camp instructors decide I need to be tallied and counted along with the others—and brace myself against the cold wintry air.

  My hands shake at my sides, and my heart slams against the delicate rungs of my ribs. I lean my shoulder against one of the large posts holding up the deck, gasping for air, blinking away the snow. Blinking away the afterimage of wings stained against my eyelids. I told myself the moth I saw in the woods was only a common night moth, a winter moth the color of snow, nothing more. But I was wrong. It’s the kind I should fear. The kind that are mentioned inside the spellbook countless times. Charcoal sketches of wings torn into ribbons at the edges, woolly legs, black orb eyes that seek only one thing: death.

  My eyes water from the cold, and my head thuds.

  A fog sinks over the lake, the gloom as thick as wet alder smoke, and it reminds me of the day we buried my grandmother in the small cemetery at the west end of the lake—a place where old miners are laid beneath the ground, the headstones worn and crumbled and sinking into the dark earth.

  Funeral fog, Mom called it that day. The kind of weather only suitable during a burial: for grief, for masking tears that stream down cheeks, for numbing hearts that have split in two. But now the funeral fog has descended over the lake, rolling down from the mountains in endless waves. A reminder—or maybe a warning.

  It’s a good day to bury the dead.

  OLIVER

  When I was ten, my dad took me camping deep in the Blue Mile Mountains. We spent the night sleeping in a tent while the rain beat down outside and dripped through a hole in the thin nylon fabric. The rain made a puddle around our sleeping bags, and I shivered all night.

  I had never been so cold in my whole life.

  Until now.

  These woods are a ruthless kind of cold. The kind that gets inside you, beneath clothes and socks and skin, and down to the marrow of your bones. I escape the mess hall through a back door, before any of the counselors can see me—before anyone does. The candlelight is dim and I am just another shadow passing through.

  Fog lies heavy over the trees, and I weave my way through the snow, past cabins tucked back in the pines. The cabin numbers are out of order. Cabin four, then twenty-six, then eleven. It makes no sense. But I reach cabin fourteen—the place where I was assigned to sleep when I first arrived, weeks ago now—and I push open the small door, ducking inside.

  Most people have never heard of Jackjaw Lake, or a boys’ camp hidden deep in the mountains. Even the nearest town is an hour’s drive down a steep, winding road. It’s a place not marked on most maps. An easy place to get lost, to be forgotten.

  But I never intended to go missing.

  Inside the cabin, there’s a bunk bed against each of the two walls—four boys to a cabin—and the air smells of damp wood and campfire smoke. It’s a smell that has settled into the bedsheets and starched-white pillows and the frayed green rug in the center of the room, into everything.

  I crouch down beside the potbellied stove set in the corner.

  The counselors tell us not to let the fires go out in our stoves—to keep them burning day and night, to keep the cabins warm. But most of the boys forget. And our stove has gone dark.

  I place dry logs on the embers, coaxing the fire back to life, but the room is still cold, wind howling at the windows, rattling the thin glass. I kick off my boots and walk to the wood dresser on the right-hand wall. I kneel down and pull open the bottom drawer—the drawer that was mine. But it’s empty. My clothes, the backpack I brought with me, the handful of books, the dead cell phone—they’re all gone.

  The counselors must have taken everything out. Boxed up my few belongings when I went missing, ready to ship it all back to my uncle once the road cleared. We’re sorry to inform you that your nephew, Oliver Huntsman, has gone missing from the Jackjaw Camp for Wayward Boys. If he turns up, we’ll let you know. In the meantime, here’s all his stuff.

  I push the drawer clo
sed, a strange hollowness sinking into my gut. My few things are gone—hardly enough to represent a life anyway. But it was all I had. All I had left that meant anything at all. Of my life before. My parents. And I hold back the threat of tears. The wretched twisting in my chest. Perhaps the counselors were already clearing away space for another boy. My single drawer, my bunk—wiped clean of any memory of the boy who vanished.

  Oliver Huntsman, swept into nonexistence.

  I climb the ladder to the top bunk—my old bunk—and the sad, sagging mattress settles beneath me. I stare up at the low ceiling, an arm’s length away, the wood carved with boys’ names and symbols and crude drawings. Nights when boys couldn’t sleep or were bored or didn’t want to be forgotten, they dug the blade of a knife into the wood. Proof that they were here.

  Inside my coat pocket, I find the cotton pouch filled with herbs she gave me. It smells like my mother’s garden, where she used to grow thyme and potatoes and carrots we would eat straight from the soil. I press the pouch against my chest, my ribs, trying to push away the cold. Push away the memory of my mom that is a raw blade against my throat. That makes me feel alone. Awfully, desperately alone.

  The boys call Nora a witch. A moon witch who is full of weird thoughts and strange words. Who lives inside a strange house, filled with strange things.

  Maybe they’re right. Or maybe they only tell stories to pass the time. They tell stories about her so that no one will tell stories about them.

  Maybe she feels alone too. Misunderstood. A vacant gap inside her that will never be filled.

  Just like me.

  The fire crackles and I close my eyes, pulling the blanket up over my head to keep out the cold. I try to sleep. To let the day melt away around me. And for a while I do sleep, but my dreams are black and bleak and I’m running through trees, eyes flashing upward, searching for the starry night sky but I’m lost and I sink into the snow and the cold until she touches my hand and I snap awake.

  My eyes flutter open and I’m still in my bunk, peering up at the ceiling.