by Matt Haig
Ibsen awoke, and growled.
“So,” said the Shadow Witch to the elkhound. “We meet again.”
Ibsen barked, to wake Samuel, and moved out from under the shade.
“Ibsen, what’s the matter?” Samuel asked.
Ibsen ran and jumped high into the air, with his growling jaws heading for the Shadow Witch’s neck. Samuel opened his eyes and saw the old woman with long black hair and a long black tunic who breathed black vapors as she spoke.
“Still,” said the Shadow Witch. The dog duly froze in the air, as static as a photo. “Sleep.” The spell caused Ibsen to fall, and land softly. He was already deep in sleep as he touched the ground.
“Hey! What have you done to my dog?”
Martha waited for Samuel to become a bird but he didn’t. The Shadow Witch knew that birds all understand one another, and she knew that the two children talking to each other, even as birds, would be against her master’s wishes. So she had to think of an animal of the land, not the air. And one hopped along the path, just at that moment.
“Please,” said Samuel, standing up. “Don’t hurt me. I’m only in the forest to find my sister.”
Samuel ran out from under the shade of the tree, his shadow stretching before him in the morning sun. Then he had a sudden feeling of lightness as he ran straight over the shadow, as if it was a black rug on the ground. He watched it rise into dark vapors that floated back toward the Shadow Witch.
Not knowing what to do, he pulled the book out from under his sweater and held it between him and the witch to try to block her magic. It was no good. The witch closed her eyes, and spoke words that crept inside Samuel’s ears like insects, making his head feel itchy from the inside. Soon his whole body itched.
He dropped his book and felt his face. Soft fur was growing on his chin, his cheeks, his forehead. His clothes were all disappearing into fur. And then he noticed his ears begin to change shape, stretching high over his head.
“I’m sorry…We didn’t mean to enter the forest…”
His mouth, his tongue and his teeth were changing as he spoke.
“Please, I won’t—”
Before he had time to finish his sentence, the transformation was complete. Samuel the human had become something else.
Not a bird, like his sister, but a rabbit.
“I must leave you,” said the Shadow Witch as a black tear rolled down her wrinkled cheek. She became a raven again and flew back to her master, leaving the rabbit and the blue-feathered bird to fend for themselves.
Inside the Sack
Samuel the rabbit tried to wake Ibsen.
“Ibsen! Wake up! Wake up!”
It was no good.
Either Ibsen couldn’t understand rabbit language, or he was so deep in sleep he wouldn’t have heard anything anyway.
The blue-feathered bird was still sitting on the branch. Still watching.
“What do you want?”
The bird didn’t answer.
Samuel tried Ibsen again. “Wake up! We’ve got to find Martha. We’ve got to go to the Changemaker.”
Of course, Samuel didn’t have a clue what he was going to do when he got to the Changemaker. What match was a rabbit going to be for a creature who terrified a whole forest? And even if his sister was still alive, how was she going to recognize him?
All he knew was that he had to keep trying to find her no matter what. So he tried to wake Ibsen one last time and then set off, hopping down the path, with the blue-feathered bird landing on branches in front of him, watching his every move.
Before long, he was completely lost. The afternoon turned into evening, and the forest became bathed in orange light. Trees loomed for miles above him, casting shadows that seemed to stretch forever.
It grew dark.
The infinite shadows disappeared under the blanket of night. Rabbits ran past him, looking desperate. They were all headed in the opposite direction.
One stopped in front of him.
“They’re coming. They’re coming!” she told him.
“Who are coming?”
The rabbit had no time to answer. She hopped toward the undergrowth while Samuel turned and watched her fluffy tail bounce away into the distance.
Then his newly sensitive ears heard something. Something behind him, getting closer. It sounded like a stampede of elephants, but when he turned around he discovered it was in fact a stampede of giants, running in a line toward him.
Oh no, thought Samuel as he realized he was totally exposed.
He started to hop toward the ferns and high grass where the other rabbit had headed. But Samuel was too slow, as he still hadn’t got used to having his back legs bunched up by his sides.
“Come on! You can make it!”
Who was that? Where had that voice come from?
And then he saw a pair of eyes in the grass. It was the rabbit who had told him “they’re coming.” She was now giving encouragement from her hiding place.
“Hop! Use your legs!”
“I can’t,” Samuel said. “I’m not used to it!”
“You’re thinking too much. Stop thinking! As soon as you stop thinking, it will come naturally.”
Samuel couldn’t stop thinking. He tried and he tried, but his brain was working far quicker than his body.
“Push down on the ground. Thump that earth! That’s it! That’s—”
Just as Samuel was starting to get the hang of hopping like a proper rabbit, something tugged him by the ears high in the air.
“Agh! Get off! Get off my ears!”
He was pulled upward, feeling sick as he watched the ground shoot away from him at incredible speed.
“Help! Please! Get off me!”
He was hanging in the air face to face with the giant who held him.
No. It couldn’t be.
The huge eye, perched directly above the enormous red bulbous nose, stared in wonder at the furry creature in his hand.
“We be having a fine one here, Troll-Mother,” he said. “A right tasty specimen, I reckon. He’ll bubble up real good, this one will.”
Samuel could see the three eyeless members of the troll family behind, holding on to one another’s dirty clothes. They passed the rabbit sack down the line toward Troll-Father.
“No!” Samuel said, the furry skin above his eyes stretching back to the point of pain. “No! It’s me! Samuel! The human boy! You liked me. You gave me directions. You gave me rab…food.”
But it was no good. Troll-Father might have understood the fear in Samuel’s eyes, but as far as he was concerned, it was fear belonging to just another rabbit, not the human boy who had run into their house.
“Right, into the sack with you.”
The next thing Samuel knew he was dropping through the air and into blackness.
“Aaaaaaagh!”
He landed on the rough woven fabric and tried to get his balance, but the sack was bouncing on Troll-Father’s back as he walked. A tiny hole let in the light of distant stars.
The trolls marched on, but found no more rabbits. Samuel’s heart thumped fast inside him, and his furry skin itched with fear. He remembered the knife he had held, soaked with rabbit blood.
Amid such bleak thoughts, something else grew inside his mind. A feeling that, whatever happened, things might still be all right. This was the most ridiculous feeling he had ever had in his life.
After all, he was a rabbit. He was trapped in a sack. He was intended for a casserole.
But like the distant stars that kept shining through the hole in the rough weave of the sack, this feeling of hope stayed with him. After all, he’d survived evil huldres, murderous pixies and a deadly Slemp. And he’d done this by concentrating on what really mattered—finding Martha.
So in his mind, he kept saying his sister’s name. Just her.
Just Martha.
Martha.
Until there was nothing else.
The Servants of Thubula
After a length
of time—somewhere between a second and forever—Samuel was pulled out of the sack by his ears and roughly thrown into the pen with the other rabbits.
“Please!” Samuel called after Troll-Father. “This is a mistake! It’s me! Me! The human boy!”
Troll-Father wasn’t listening. Samuel pressed his face into the crisscross pattern of wire as he watched Troll-Father direct his eyeless family through their crooked door. “Left. Left. Right a bit. Left. That’s it. Straight through. Be minding your feet, Troll-Daughter. There you go.”
The door closed, along with Samuel’s hope. Turning around, he saw about thirty other rabbits in the opposite corner of the pen.
Samuel hopped over and, as he got closer, heard a low and solemn voice.
“Oh, Thubula, we thank you for letting our brother travel safely to your green field, with its endless supply of carrots…”
The gray old rabbit that faced the other rabbits stopped talking, and looked at the new arrival to the pen. The others all turned to stare.
“Sorry,” Samuel said. “Carry on.”
The old rabbit carried on with what he was saying.
Samuel quietly left the huddled rabbits and hopped around the perimeter of the fence. Yesterday he would have been able to step over it with ease, but now it was ten times his height.
He tried to lift his front feet and slot them through the fence in order to start climbing, but it was no good. He kept on getting trapped in the wire mesh.
Then the voice of the old rabbit was right behind him, up close.
“My name is Gray-Tail. I am the Spiritual Advisor for our community. I am here to welcome you to the…What are you doing?”
“I’m escaping,” Samuel said, pulling a foot free of the wire. He didn’t turn around.
“And why in the name of Thubula would you want to do that?”
“Because I’m not a rabbit. I’m a human. I’m a boy called Samuel. I went into the forest to find my sister, but now I have fur and…these ears…and…I’ve got to escape.”
Samuel’s nose began to twitch really slowly. At first he wondered what was happening, but then he realized this must be how rabbits cry.
“There is nothing to fear,” said the old rabbit.
“What’s a human, Daddy?” Samuel turned to see a bunny looking up at Gray-Tail.
“A human is a rabbit from the other side of the forest. Don’t worry, bunnies. Humans are just like us, only maybe a little more confused.”
“I’ve got to escape,” Samuel said.
“Escape?” The word rippled through the rabbits like a pebble falling into water.
“It’s dangerous. It’s important to get out,” Samuel said. “You should all try and get out.”
The rabbits all laughed at the same time. It was only Gray-Tail whose whiskers didn’t move at all.
“Some rabbits want to leave when they first arrive,” he said. “That is normal. But I will educate you about the Truth the way I have educated the others.”
“The Truth?”
“Yes,” said Gray-Tail. “The Truth. Because I have a feeling you might believe in the rumors.”
“Rumors?” asked Samuel.
“The rumors that often go around the forest—about our captors. Some say they are trolls who skin us and chop off our heads and cook us in casseroles.”
When Gray-Tail said the words chop and cook, more waves of laughter filled the pen.
“But that’s true,” said Samuel, his words drowning in the commotion.
“The truth is we are lucky,” said Gray-Tail. “We are the Chosen.”
“The Chosen,” said the other rabbits all at once, in a tone of reverence.
Samuel couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “The Chosen?”
“We were brought here by the Servants of Thubula.”
“The Servants of Thubula?”
“All the rabbits here are very lucky indeed,” explained Gray-Tail. “They have been chosen by the servants of Thubula to enter the Green Field on the other side of the cottage.”
“They’re not servants of Thubula,” said Samuel. “They’re trolls.”
Gray-Tail wasn’t listening.
“They will bring us to the Green Field of Thubula. A beautiful paradise where rabbits roam free, with no need to hide in warrens,” said Gray-Tail. “It is a magical place where old rabbits become young again and no rabbit ever dies.”
“No,” said Samuel. “The place on the other side of the cottage is the exact opposite of that. The only thing that waits for you on the other side of that cottage is certain death. There is no Green Field of Thubula!”
A few bunnies began to cry, and the adults kept saying over and over: “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
Gray-Tail whispered in Samuel’s ear. “Don’t upset the bunnies. No one will forgive you if you upset the bunnies.”
The rabbits were surrounding Samuel from every angle now, moving closer.
“Shame! Shame! Shame!”
Samuel wondered, for a moment, if the angry rabbits could be more dangerous than the trolls. But Gray-Tail stopped the advancing mob by raising his ears and commanding: “Quiet.”
A short silence followed.
Then he said: “Leave him. He is a human. They are the most ignorant type of rabbit. Leave us to talk, and I will educate him of Thubula and His plan to prepare us for the Green Field.”
Samuel watched as the mob of angry rabbits moved away from him, comforting their bunnies as they did so. “No, no, he didn’t mean it,” he overheard one parent saying. “There are no trolls. Don’t worry.”
The old rabbit’s eyes fixed on the new arrival in front of him.
“Two nights ago we lost one of our most dear friends, Flicker-Nose,” he said. “A young rabbit, in his prime. They came in the night, and took him away from us. Now what is it better to believe? That he’s been killed and skinned and cooked and then digested inside a troll’s stomach? Or that he’s been chosen by Thubula’s servants to live a happy life in a rabbit’s paradise on the other side of that cottage?”
Samuel didn’t know the answer, so he kept quiet. And then a dreadful thought came to him, arriving with an echo of Gray-Tail’s words.
Two nights ago…cooked and digested…
The rabbit he had eaten in the casserole had been Flicker-Nose. Samuel felt sick, and wondered if it made him a cannibal.
Gray-Tail pointed his nose toward the happy crowd of rabbits and bouncing bunnies. “Look at them. Look at the peaceful and content community we have here. You aren’t going to change that with your frightening stories, do you understand me?”
Samuel made one final plea. “If we don’t work together, we’re all going to die.”
“No rabbit lives forever,” said Gray-Tail. “Just ask my aching bones. The question is, do we live happily or miserably in the meantime?”
Gray-Tail didn’t wait for an answer. He just turned and hopped his slow body back over to the other rabbits.
Samuel knew he was on his own now. He looked toward the rising sun, and the bird on the fence lost in its glare. Why is it following me? he wondered. What does it want? Samuel didn’t know and right now he had bigger things to think about. He moved closer toward the wire, passing through the grid of shadows. And then, when he was as close to freedom as he could possibly get, he started to dig.
Digging the Tunnel
“He’s mad!”
“What a weird style of digging!”
“Why would he want to escape?”
“What in the name of Thubula is he doing?”
Samuel tried to ignore the other rabbits as he dug his tunnel. They sat around him, laughing and passing comment, as if it was a kind of theater. The only rabbit who didn’t laugh at Samuel was Gray-Tail, who sat in silence for the whole day.
As Samuel dug deeper, the voices became more distant. His front legs were aching but he kept going, determined to get as far as he could before nightfall. All day he dug and dug and dug, the earth above him sprinkling do
wn onto his fur and into his eyes.
He longed to have his human arms back, or his human legs that could have so easily strode over the fence, but he made do with what he had. And what he had was determination. No matter how much soil went in his eyes, and no matter how scared he got of the dark closed space of the tunnel, his paws kept on digging.
All the time he only had one thought, and that thought was I have to escape.
At one point, the blue-feathered bird flew in and stood there watching him.
“Go away,” said Samuel.
The bird said nothing. It just stayed with its blinkless eyes staring in the dark.
“Go away. You’re blocking the light.”
The bird did as it was told, and Samuel kept on digging. He was dizzy with hunger. His eyes were stinging from the crumbling soil. His tiny heart was beating so hard he could feel blood pulse against his skull. If that wasn’t enough, his skin itched from the combination of fur and sweat.
Eventually, he had to stop. The pain in his paws and legs was too much.
“Five minutes,” he told himself, although now he was a rabbit he had no idea how to keep track of time.
There was a noise behind him.
He turned his head and saw soil falling like rain.
Oh no. This can’t be happening.
He tried to turn his whole body around, but the tunnel was too narrow. As he struggled to maneuver himself, he made the situation a lot worse.
A cloud of earth covered his fur and filled his lungs—the tunnel behind him was collapsing.
“Help! Help! Somebody!” But his voice was blocked by a wall of earth.
This is it, thought Samuel. I’m going to be buried alive. This is the end.
But it wasn’t. The earth stopped falling just before it reached Samuel’s hind legs. He was trapped under the ground with earth all around him like a coffin.
Coffin.
The word stuck in his brain as he started to dig, forward and upward, with new energy.