by Matt Haig
“Yes. A boy, master. He came to me. And I stayed still so I could observe him better, but then he tried to take hold of me and—”
Her master’s sharp eyes were staring at her wrists. “You are only wearing one bracelet, Shadow Witch. The black one. Where is the other?” He stood up from his chair and came toward her.
“Master, he tried to grab me, so I pulled away but he still had hold of the white collar—the bracelet I stole from my sister. I tried to use my powers to retrieve it, but you know how weak they are outside the forest. The most I could manage was a memory spell, so the boy had no knowledge of the bracelet. Master, I am sorry.”
Professor Tanglewood closed his eyes and sighed, and said in a voice as calm and eerie as a graveyard wind, “You lost the bracelet.”
“Master, I am sorry.”
“Sorry? A rather useless word, isn’t it? What can it do, this ‘sorry’? Can it retrieve a bracelet? Can it stop a curious child from entering the forest? Can it write my memoirs?”
“No, master, it cannot.”
Professor Tanglewood stared at the Shadow Witch for a long time, wondering when it would be, the day he was going to kill her and steal her powers.
“I had a dream last night.”
“A dream, master?”
The Professor nodded. “A dream that two children entered the forest.” The memory tugged his mouth into a smile. “And they were killed by creatures. A flock of Flying Skullpeckers, I think it was. Oh, you should have heard that delicious sound. I watched them die. I watched and I heard their screams, and I was comforted. And after the children died, the whole forest applauded. All the huldres and the trolls and the pixies and all the others. They applauded me, as if they realized why I made the changes. They knew, in that moment, that I was their savior from all the other humans. Which I am, of course. You see, even your foolishness cannot endanger the forest, Shadow Witch. For what is the worst that could happen? That the boy found the white bracelet and came to pay us a visit. We know that light magic is no match for the dark. And, as is more likely, what if he entered the forest completely unprotected? If that were the case, his death would be as certain as the sunrise.”
“Yes, master,” the Shadow Witch said, coughing shadows.
“Leave me,” he said. “I must get on with my writing, for when the creatures know about how much I have done to protect them, they will love me. And there shall be no resistance, and no attempts at escape, and everywhere I walk in the forest there will be the same cry: ‘Hail, Professor Tanglewood, for he is the Changemaker!’ Now go, Shadow Witch. Go. But stay inside the forest. You cannot be trusted beyond the trees. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, master.”
The Shadow Witch bowed her head, and became a raven once more. She flew out of the window she had entered, and soared aimlessly over the trees, feeling deep sorrow for the bracelet she had lost. But the Shadow Witch’s sadness was also for the boy she had seen. A boy she felt was one day going to cross into the forest never to return, or return so different he would never be recognized.
She flew so high she could see the distant white wooden house, and thought of the humans inside.
Stay there, she thought.
Stay safe.
In the Kitchen
The wind beat against the kitchen window with an anger that was only matched by Aunt Eda’s face.
“You broke my rule,” she said, chopping up the last slab of red meat for Ibsen’s supper. “The most important rule.”
“I didn’t break it,” Samuel said. “I didn’t go into the forest.”
“Well, what were you doing? You were right on the top of the…”—she searched for the word—“of the slope…you were about to go in, weren’t you?”
Samuel paused. “There was a cat.”
“A cat?”
“A black cat. I was following it. And it went into the forest. Keep your knickers on.”
Aunt Eda looked confused. “I don’t see what my undergarments have to do with anything.”
“That’s just a saying.”
“Well, it’s not a saying in Norway. Anyway, you have to understand that I do not make rules just for fun. It is not a hobby of mine. I do not sit and think, ‘Let’s make up a rule today just for the sake of it. Let’s only wear green clothes because it is Tuesday.’ I tell you not to go into the forest for a reason.”
“Well, I’m going to go into the forest.” Samuel was only testing his aunt. He didn’t really want to go into the forest, but he wanted to know why it was so important.
And it was then, as he looked at his aunt’s cross face with her tight mouth, that he realized something. She has no control over me.
All his life Samuel’s parents had controlled him by stopping him from doing things.
If he got a letter from school, he was stopped from playing his video games.
If he stayed out too late, he was stopped from going out the next evening.
If he fought with his sister, he stopped getting his pocket money.
So most of the time he kept himself in check by thinking of what he might lose if he misbehaved.
But what could he lose now?
He had lost his mum and dad. He had lost half of his sister (the half that spoke and smiled and sang). He had lost all his friends. He couldn’t watch TV or attack alien planets on his video games.
What punishment could Aunt Eda dish out?
He hated the food anyway, so the thought of missing dinner was less than terrifying. She could send him to his room, but so what? It was no more boring than all the other boring rooms.
She could inflict nothing so terrible as the memories he held in his head of what happened on the B642, so he had absolutely nothing to lose.
“I am going to go to the forest,” he told her. “One day, when you aren’t looking, I’ll go and see what is so special that you can’t even talk about it. You won’t be able to watch me all the time.”
Aunt Eda threw him a severe look. “And why would you do that, when I have explained that it breaks the most important rule?”
“Because I’m bored,” said Samuel. “What am I supposed to do? There’s no TV. There’s nothing. Just loads of books written in Norwegian with stupid words and stupid letters like æ and ø and å.”
“Oh,” said Aunt Eda. “You think this is some game? You think it is fun to break the rules of your boring old aunt and her boring old house? If I told you not to run off the edge of a cliff, would you run off the edge?”
“It’s not a cliff,” said Samuel. “It’s only trees.”
Aunt Eda laughed. It wasn’t a happy laugh. It was a wild, high-pitched noise that shot out into the living room: “Ha!”
In the living room, Martha looked toward her brother standing in the kitchen. The loud sound of her aunt’s laugh had brought her back into the world, if only for a moment.
“Ha! Only trees!” said Aunt Eda. “If it was only trees, do you think I would not show you the forest myself?”
Samuel shrugged.
“Please, Samuel.” As Aunt Eda struggled to saw the knife through a particularly tough part of the meat, Samuel noticed she was nearly crying.
And then he managed to say what he had found so hard yesterday.
“I’m…sorry,” he said. He realized it felt good saying it, rather like taking off a heavy backpack.
“Oh, Samuel,” said Aunt Eda, buttoning up her tears. “You are right. Rules aren’t enough. I can’t just tell you not to go into the forest. You are a boy, after all. And boys see a rule as a kind of toy—something to pick up and play about with and see how it breaks.”
Aunt Eda closed her eyes and blew air slowly out of her nose, to show she was making a very big decision.
“I must tell you about the forest,” Aunt Eda whispered so only Samuel could hear. “I must tell you what happened to Uncle Henrik.”
“What about Martha? Are you going to tell her?” Samuel asked, looking behind to see through to the living room, wh
ere Martha was sitting on the rug with Ibsen.
Aunt Eda frowned. “Do you think she needs more dark terrors inside her brain?”
Samuel shook his head.
“No. We will tell her, but not yet. It will be our secret, do you understand? Our secret. A werry serious secret. Now, I will go and give Ibsen his food in the hall and then I will tell you. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Ibsen! Ib-sen! Mørbrad! Steak!”
The dog looked up from his position on the rug, and glanced at Martha, as if to tell Eda: “I’ll have my steak in a minute. But right now I’m keeping Martha company.”
Samuel watched as Aunt Eda lay the bowl of meat down in the hall.
When she returned she had a look of determination, because the story she was about to tell required a lot of strength and courage. She closed her eyes again and took a deep breath, as if she was about to go underwater.
“Are you listening?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Samuel.
“Then I will begin…”
The Story of What Happened to Uncle Henrik
“Uncle Henrik was a wonderful man. He was the greatest I ever met. And it is only down to amazing luck that I met him in the first place. He was a ski jumper, and I was a jaffelin thrower.
“This was twenty-fife years ago. We were both sports people and it is not too much of a boast to say that we were rather good sports people, as we both made the Olympic Games…Yes, Samuel, that’s right…Your boring old aunt once made it to the Olympics. I threw the jaffelin! I never won a medal, but I came close. Werry close. I sometimes think that if I’d had one more hour of sleep, or had one more egg for breakfast that morning…But anyway, I am not one for regrets.
“Two years later I was inwited to the Closing Ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, which is a town on the other side of those mountains you can see out of the window. This was the Winter Olympics where Henrik won his silfer medal for ski jumping…Oh, your uncle was an amazing ski jumper…He had no fear. None at all. He used to jump so far through the air it was like watching a man who had stolen the secret of flying from a bird. He would spend what seemed like whole minutes in the air, leaning so far forward his nose was nearly touching his skis. Oh, it was an incredible sight!
“Anyway, I met him and we fell in luff and we got married and it was luffly. We wanted to spend effery moment together.
“‘I haff the perfect idea,’ Henrik told me. ‘We will moof to a house further north and buy goats. We can make our own cheese.’
“I thought this was a ridiculous thing to do, and I worried Henrik would regret the decision later. He had always luffed cheese, but he had a good chance of winning a gold medal at the next Winter Olympics. And a gold medallist sounded a lot better than being a goat farmer!
“But Henrik was insistent. ‘You are the only prize that matters to me now,’ he told me. So we did it. We drofe through the tunnels in the mountains and arrifed at this house where we are right now. It was perfect. Too perfect, I thought, because it only cost one hundred krone. And I was right. You see, we soon discovered that the last person who had lived in the house had gone missing…in the forest.
“The people of Flåm talked of creatures. Huldre-folk, witches, trolls, pixies, and a hundred others. They talked of a terrible being who ruled all the forest, called the Changemaker. Of course, I thought the willagers were talking ignorant rubbish. Surely, the only places such creatures existed were in fairy tales and storybooks.
“But still, I was curious how a man could simply disappear. So I did a bit of research on the prefious owner. He was an Englishman called Professor Horatio Tanglewood. The willagers told us all about him.
“They said he was a werry arrogant man, who had asked Old Tor to paint his portrait ten times.
“He was a professor of Norse folklore, which means he studied the kind of strange creatures that people in Norway used to believe in, before science and the Bible had shown them that trolls and huldre-folk and pixies couldn’t really exist.
“It turned out that Professor Tanglewood had gone missing on his second wisit to the forest. He escaped the first time and it was then that he gave the forest its name. Shadow Forest, or Mørke Skog, as we Norwegians call it. He told everyone about his experiences in a book called The Creatures of Shadow Forest, which said that the stories of trolls and huldre-folk were all true. He wrote about lots of other creatures too. Over a hundred in all. And all were equally deadly. He wrote that the creatures were all governed by an evil being called the Changemaker, who stopped at nothing to prevent humans from ever entering or leaving the forest.
“This book made the Professor a laughingstock at the University of Bergen, where he worked. They said he’d been studying myths for so long he had lost touch with reality. But no one was brafe enough to go into the forest and see if he was telling the truth. And people became efen more scared later.
“Why? Because when the Professor made his second trip to the forest, he was never seen again.
“I told Uncle Henrik we must neffer go in the forest and Uncle Henrik agreed.
“Effery morning we would get up and milk the goats we had bought and then Henrik would make the cheese in that room just ofer there—past the kitchen. The one with the yellow door. It is a washroom now.
“Our Gjetost cheese soon became the most popular in the area. The people in Flåm were no fools when it came to cheese.
“It had the most perfect taste and texture and it was lighter than normal Gjetost. It was a golden color, not too brown. This is why Henrik named it ‘Gold Medal Cheese.’ He said to me: ‘You see, I have my gold medal at last!’
“He was so proud of his cheese. So so proud. He was starting to luff cheese more than he had ever luffed ski jumping. Oskar the grocer also luffed Henrik’s cheese and ordered a year’s supply…Me and Henrik were both so happy, and we were making a lot of money. We were prosperous—do you remember the Norwegian word for prosperous?…That’s right, Samuel. Hell.
“Anywhere, where was I? Oh yes, the cheese. We were making lots of money and everything was perfect and it was a golden time of laughter and log-fires and cuddles and tasty cheese, but then something happened. Something bad. And it changed our lifes for effer.”
The Creatures of Shadow Forest
Samuel was now gripped by Aunt Eda’s story. He wondered if she had been the same, then. If she’d been so strict and buttoned up. He doubted it. And what had happened to Uncle Henrik?
As she approached the crucial part of the story, Aunt Eda was clearly finding it difficult to go on talking. Her words had stopped as suddenly as people who have just realized they are running toward a cliff. She made herself a cup of egg coffee, and poured Samuel a cloudberry juice.
Outside the door, Ibsen was dragging his metal bowl across the hallway as he licked the last remains of his steak.
“Right,” Aunt Eda said, blowing ripples across the surface of her coffee. “I will tell you the rest of the story now.”
She took a deep breath, as if she was about to go underwater. And when she started talking the wind that had been rapping against the window suddenly went quiet, as if it too had stopped to listen.
“We realized something was wrong.
“Our goats were going missing. Effery night one would simply disappear. Uncle Henrik was in such despair that he went to Flåm and he told the willagers…well, you can guess what they said. They blamed it on creatures in the forest. Trolls, in particular. Trolls were famous for stealing goats, they told him.
“I told Henrik not to listen to these ignorant people, who lived by their superstitions. But Henrik said there was no other way to explain it. There were no other goat farmers in the area to steal our goats, and Henrik said that it was impossible to lose a goat effery night by accident.
“So on the day we had lost our eleffenth goat, he went into the bookshop in Flåm and purchased a copy of Professor Tanglewood’s book. And it said that trolls were known to steal goats, as
well as to kill humans.
“The more he read, the more he beleefed in The Creatures of Shadow Forest. He sat there and his eyes would feed on the words for hours at a time.
“After he’d read the book, Henrik said that there was only one way to find our goats and that was to go into the forest. I reminded him of the promise he had made to me—about never being tempted to head into the trees where a man had gone missing. But I knew it was no good. He had the same eyes he had before a ski jump. He just kept on saying ‘No one can get away with stealing—not even trolls.’
“I told him, ‘I’ll come with you,’ but he said I had to stay and look after the nine goats we had left. I told him, ‘People don’t come out of that forest.’ He said that ‘The only people who don’t come out of forests are people who don’t want to come out of forests. Don’t worry, Eda, my sweetheart, whateffer happens, I will find my way back to you. No troll will stop me. I promise.’
“So he headed out to the forest and I waited for him. I waited and waited. After three days I went to Flåm. I told the police he had gone missing, but they made excuses. They said Shadow Forest wasn’t part of their area. I told efferyone he had gone missing, but no one dared to go into the forest to look for him. Not even Oskar, who had made so much money from Henrik’s cheese.
“I would watch guard of the goats effery night like Henrik had told me, but I couldn’t stay awake for effer and when I eventually fell asleep another goat went missing. And this happened, until there were no goats. No goats, and no Henrik.
“On the morning the last goat disappeared, it had been snowing heavily. I went out early into the field and I saw footprints in the snow, heading away from the forest. My heart lifted for a moment. Henrik had returned! But then I realized the footprints curfed back round into the forest. I took a closer look at the footprints and realized it wasn’t the pattern of a shoe, but the mark of a bare foot. And not just any foot—a big foot with three toes. A troll’s footprint. Henrik had been right all along. Trolls had been stealing our goats and taking them back into the forest! And heffen knows what they had done to Henrik.