by Matt Haig
“Old Tor, you must help me, the children I am looking after have gone missing in Shadow Forest.”
The old man’s eyes widened in terror, and he fell into a kind of trance.
“Old Tor? Old Tor? Can you hear me?”
At that point his wife walked in, the chubby woman with three cardigans who had been so rude to Eda at the cheese counter.
“Leave us alone,” she said. “We can’t help you!”
“My children have gone missing in the forest. I can’t find them alone. And your husband has seen the forest creatures before…”
“You don’t have to tell me,” said the old woman, nodding at the canvas. “He hasn’t seen anything else since. People want paintings of mountains and fjords. Nice scenic things. They don’t want to be hanging pictures of monsters on the wall. We haven’t sold anything in days.”
The cardigan woman was making Aunt Eda quite cross.
“You don’t seem to understand. The children are missing in the—”
“Well, that is your business. If you are foolish enough to keep them so near to such a dangerous place.”
Aunt Eda decided to ignore that last comment, and plead again with Old Tor. “Listen, I know you will not come to the forest with me, but I am going. I have no choice. I have no more to lose. Please, is there anything you can tell me about the creatures you have seen?”
Old Tor turned away from his painting for the first time, and looked up at Aunt Eda. One of his eyes had a milky-white surface, and Aunt Eda remembered what Oskar had told her. He’s lost all his sight in one eye. She wondered how old he was. Eighty? Ninety? How could a man like that outrun a galloping horse? she wondered as she looked at the time-withered hand that held the paintbrush.
The hand, and the paintbrush, stayed motionless in the air as Old Tor made some sort of decision. Then he stood up and walked in a slow painful way over to his jacket, which was hanging on a hook in the corner of the room. His hand reached inside and pulled something out. Something white. Like a bracelet. Or a cat’s collar.
He hobbled back over, ignoring the grumbles of his wife, and handed it to Aunt Eda.
“Take it,” he said, placing it in her hand. What was it? Some kind of charm?
Old Tor’s wife made a grumbling sound, as if a miniature explosion was going off inside her head, and she walked in disgust out of the room.
“What is it?” asked Aunt Eda.
“I found it by a rock near the water’s edge, last night when I went to paint the fjord…Do you see that pewter disc, hanging from it? Well, read what it says.”
Aunt Eda looked at the white cloth bracelet, and the silvery disc attached to it. She saw there were three letters engraved in capital letters:
HEK
“Hek,” whispered Aunt Eda. Witch.
Old Tor nodded. “I had it in my pocket when the huldres chased after me.”
Aunt Eda still didn’t understand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don—”
Old Tor pointed to his blind eye. “It came back. The sight in this eye. Just for those few seconds I needed it, when I was running away. I could see better than ever, even though it was dark. It was the most amazing thing. And my legs too. It was almost as though my feet had sprouted wings, like I was a boy again, but the fastest boy who ever lived.”
Aunt Eda clutched the bracelet in her hand. “Maybe it was fear,” she said. “Fear can have powerful effects.”
The old man shook his head. “It can’t make you see the brightness of colors in the dark. It can’t make an old man outrun a horse.”
Aunt Eda looked at the painting he was halfway through. The scary wide-eyed creature with pointed ears and a cow’s tail, on top of a galloping white stallion. “And now? Can you run?”
He smiled. “No. You’ve seen me. It takes me a minute to cross the room. The bracelet gave me certain…abilities…but only when I was in danger. Take it, please. If there are more of those creatures in the forest, you will need it.”
Aunt Eda slipped the white bracelet onto her wrist. “Thank you, Old Tor,” she said. “But what about the children? They have no bracelet to protect them.”
“No, but they have you,” he said. “Now go. And may God bring you luck.”
A quarter of an hour later Aunt Eda was upstairs in her attic, searching for The Creatures of Shadow Forest.
“Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?” she asked as she dug through the contents of the tea chest. “Oh no,” she said. “Someone’s taken it.”
But who?
It could only have been Martha or Samuel. She looked around, to see if there was anything else to help her.
Old clothes. No.
Photographs of Henrik. No.
And then she saw it, leaning against the wall. The javelin. She hadn’t used it for years, as her arms weren’t what they used to be. It felt strange, looking at it, as if she was looking at her younger self.
“You are coming with me,” she said as she picked it up.
She went downstairs, left the house, and climbed the hill as fast as she could. When she reached the pine trees she stopped, and called into the forest once more.
“SAMUEL! MARTHA! IBSEN!”
But the only response was the echo.
“Well, Eda,” she said to herself. “This is it.”
She tightened her grip on the javelin and made sure the white bracelet was still on her wrist, with the pewter disc attached. Finding everything where it should be, she inhaled a deep breath of cold air, as if sucking in courage, and stepped forward into the shade of the trees.
Troll-the-Left and Troll-the-Right
Martha was still sitting down on the hard floor of the prison cell.
“You do not speak, human child,” said the white-haired woman in the cell opposite. “Where are your words? Where did you lose them?”
Martha said nothing, but the old woman nodded as if there was an answer inside her silence.
“Do you know why they have locked you up?”
Martha shook her head.
“You are a human. Humans are forbidden from the forest…All except one. It’s not fair, but nothing in this forest is fair. Not anymore. Not since the forest was transformed. No one in here deserves their fate, none of us are criminals.”
“None of us except the Tomtegubb,” said the troll’s right head. “His singing should definitely be illegal. The Changemaker should see to that.”
The troll looked at Martha with both its heads, and decided to introduce his selves.
“I’m Troll-the-Left,” said the left head.
“And I’m Troll-the-Right,” said the right head.
“Some folk think of us as one troll because we’ve got just the one body, but we’re not.”
“We’ll be no troll in no body tomorrow,” moaned Troll-the-Right. “We’ll be nothing but a couple of stones. And it’s all your fault.”
“Oh, stop your moaning,” said Troll-the-Left.
“If you’d have listened to my moaning, we wouldn’t be here now,” said Troll-the-Right.
“I’ve been listening to your moaning all my flenking life. I could never bathe in the lake because you said the water was too dangerous.”
“The water was too dangerous.”
“No wonder we stink.”
“Better to stink than to be dead.”
“You’re a big flenking coward,” said Troll-the-Left.
“And you’re a flenking maniac,” said Troll-the-Right. “I told you what would happen if we went out of the forest. I told you, but would you listen? No.”
Then Troll-the-Left remembered they were in the middle of introducing themselves to Martha.
“You must excuse our manners,” he said. “We’re only trolls. We’re not evil, like a lot of folks think. We be good creatures, really. But we’re not clean and polite like you humans. And me and Troll-the-Right don’t get on too well, you see. Living in the same body doesn’t give you much space. And he’s a flenking coward, if you pardon my Hekr
on.”
“I’ll give you coward,” said Troll-the-Right as the right hand pulled Troll-the-Left’s hair.
“Scared of having a wash. That’s a flenking coward in any language,” said Troll-the-Left as the left hand yanked Troll-the-Right’s beard.
The fight between the two troll sides had no clear winner as both halves of the body had an equal amount of strength.
“Take that,” said Troll-the-Left, twisting the other’s nose.
“Take that,” said Troll-the-Right, yanking the other’s bottom lip.
After the trolls eventually fought themselves into exhaustion, the old woman with the long white hair spoke again to Martha. And when she began to speak the whole prison fell quiet, as if they knew the old woman was about to reveal the deepest secrets of the forest.
Golden Circles and Heavy Shadows
“I am the Snow Witch,” the old woman said to Martha. “Have you ever met a witch before?”
Martha shook her head.
“Don’t be scared, human child. Magic is not an evil thing. It is only the reasons for using magic that can be evil. And the magic I have is fading. I hardly have a spell left. Even to make the tiniest bit of frost, it sends such pains through every part of me. It is my sister. The Shadow Witch. She stole something from me. A bracelet. A Hek bracelet. It offers protection from harm in the forest. And then, once she had stolen my bracelet, she stole my magic.”
“Do you hate her?” asked Troll-the-Left, with a grudgeful side glance at Troll-the-Right.
“No, I don’t hate her,” said the Snow Witch. “She is my sister. And besides, it’s not her fault…”
Troll-the-Left frowned. “She stole your magic but it’s not her fault? That doesn’t make sense.”
“She was forced to change,” explained the Snow Witch. “The Changemaker who rules the forest forced her to steal the shadows of good creatures and make them evil. The forest was once a paradise, but now it is a terrible place.”
Martha looked into the other cells, at the two-headed troll and the Tomtegubb, and wondered if they were dangerous. Troll-the-Left had said trolls were harmless, but maybe he was lying.
“I know what you’re thinking, human child,” said the Snow Witch. And she did, because the next thing she said was: “You don’t have to worry about trolls and Tomtegubbs. They’re the Unchanged. Their shadows have never been stolen. Tomtegubbs never even had shadows to steal.”
Martha looked to the Tomtegubb, who was smiling at her like a best friend, and saw that the Snow Witch was right. Instead of a shadow, there was a faint circle of golden light around his feet, as if he were a kind of lamp. She then looked toward the two-headed troll, but saw he did have a shadow. Even in the dim light of the prison, it was clearly there. The blackest shadow she had ever seen.
Again, the Snow Witch knew what she was thinking.
“Yes, human child, trolls do have shadows, but a troll shadow can’t be lifted off the ground. They’re too heavy, even for magic to lift.”
Troll-the-Left and Troll-the-Right looked at each other in surprise, and then shrugged a shoulder each. “Well,” said Troll-the-Left. “That explains a few things.”
The Shadow Witch sighed. It was a sigh that seemed to contain the sadness of a whole forest. “This is what this prison is for. If the Changemaker can’t change you, he can’t control you. So he has to use fear. If you break his rules, if Unchanged creatures stray out of their villages, or out of the forest, they end up here.”
“Waiting to go to our deaths,” added Troll-the-Right miserably.
The Snow Witch nodded. “Yes. I have been here many, many years. All the other creatures have been sent to the Changemaker and sent to their deaths. Fear is his weapon. Those he can’t change, he fills with terror. And terror is everywhere. Many creatures are evil and dangerous now. And the most evil of all are huldres. The ones who locked you in here. Yet you must know, human child, if you hadn’t fallen down the trap, you would have been caught soon enough by someone else. Even the most honest and pure of all the creatures—the Truth Pixie—has been turned into something most violent. Most violent indeed. Oh, it chills my fragile heart just to think of it. That dark and most terrible day.”
Icicle Tears
After the Snow Witch had finished talking, everyone fell into a glum silence. Even the Tomtegubb stopped his humming for a short while and thought of all the other Tomtegubbs who had been killed by the Changemaker. It was only Martha who felt no fear at what the Snow Witch had to say.
She knew how cruel life liked to be, and she expected nothing better.
If she didn’t feel anything, cruelty wouldn’t work.
I’ll give up feelings as well as speaking, Martha thought to herself. But giving up feelings is not as easy as all that. And the feeling that wouldn’t let go was the one called guilt. She felt guilt for her brother, for leading him into the forest. She thought of the scary creatures, like the Truth Pixie. They were out there now, ready to harm any human who crossed their path. She closed her eyes and prayed for her brother and spoke silent words in her brain.
Samuel.
I’m sorry.
I’m very, very sorry.
It was then that she began to cry.
She hadn’t wept since the day of the falling log. Her tears had been kept prisoners the way she was kept prisoner now, but the thought of her brother lost in this terrible forest released all those locked-up tears all at once.
It wasn’t her normal type of crying.
It wasn’t the type of crying she had used when Samuel had hidden all her hair bands. Or when her mum had been late to pick her up from horse riding. Or when her parents hadn’t stopped shouting at each other.
Those tears were always used to get something.
The tears she cried now were a different variety. They were quieter, for a start. And much less blubbery. And there was no practical use for them whatsoever. They were like the wrong money in a foreign country and couldn’t get her anything at all.
“Don’t cry, human child,” said the Snow Witch.
But the quiet tears kept on coming, enough to fill a glass of water.
The Snow Witch began to mumble something under her breath, and seemed to be in some kind of pain.
“What’s up with the Snow Witch?” Troll-the-Left asked.
“You ask too many questions,” said Troll-the-Right.
“You’re just scared of answers,” said Troll-the-Left.
“A world with no questions is the safest world,” said Troll-the-Right.
“You mean the dullest world,” said Troll-the-Left.
“I mean the safest.”
“That’s what I said.”
Martha felt a coldness in her eye and on her cheeks. She looked at the Snow Witch, who still seemed like she was in great pain.
Then Martha realized something.
She wasn’t crying anymore.
Her hand raised to her cheek. She felt her tear. It was hard. Frozen. It was exactly the same on the other cheek. Another thin icicle.
The tears broke off in her hand, and turned to little puddles on the floor.
“I have gotten rid of your tears, human child,” said the Snow Witch. “But my powers are too weak to take away your sadness.”
Or Martha’s sadness was too strong.
“Come on,” said the Tomtegubb, in the kind of light singsong voice Martha herself would once have used. “Cheer up. It’s not all bad, you know.”
But Martha knew the Tomtegubb was wrong.
It was all bad.
And what was more, it was only going to get worse.
The Magical Smell
Samuel and Ibsen had been walking for hours, and had no idea where they were going. They had run so fast and so far away from the deserted village and the huldre skeleton that they had no idea where they were.
“My feet are killing me,” the boy told his canine companion. “It’s all right for you. You’ve got paws.” Samuel tried to keep his shoeless feet o
n the grass at the side of the path, rather than the hard earth in the middle.
Samuel’s cries for his sister were less frequent now, and increasingly hopeless. His sister’s name bounced off the trees like a ball no one wanted to catch.
“Martha! Martha! Martha!”
He felt weak with hunger. His feet had cuts and blisters. The wind chilled his bones. He wondered if he should try to find his way back to Aunt Eda, but decided against this idea. Martha was all that mattered, and he wouldn’t leave this forest without her.
On and on he walked, with a weary Ibsen beside him, not knowing if they were heading closer or farther away from the girl they hoped to find. Samuel held Professor Tanglewood’s book, The Creatures of Shadow Forest, close to his chest, and looked at his watch with his free hand. It said half past ten, but it had said half past ten ever since he had entered the forest. It was as though time had halted the moment he had stepped foot between the trees.
He stopped.
There was a rumble, like distant thunder.
When it happened again, Samuel realized what it was.
That’s not thunder. That’s my stomach.
He thought longingly of those five slices of cheese he had given Ibsen earlier. He could eat a whole block of brown cheese now.
His hunger was weakening him. He saw food everywhere and nowhere. Tree trunks became giant slabs of well-cooked meat. The muddy path took on the sight of gravy.
As he staggered on, memories came back to him as smells and tastes.
He remembered his dad coming in on a wet Friday evening with warm parcels of fish and chips for the family. The magical smells of malt vinegar and his dad’s rain-soaked coat had filled the house.
He remembered the day before the accident. His mum had made a birthday cake for Martha, and he’d been allowed to lick the icing out of the bowl.
He shut his eyes, as if closing them could take him back to that kitchen two weeks ago. Back to the sugary mixture on his tongue, and the safe warmth of his mum’s smile.