Samuel Blink and the Forbidden Forest

by Matt Haig

  The Changemaker closed his eyes as his cracked lips began chanting some kind of spell. When he was finished, Martha was suddenly transformed from a bird to her original form. A ten-year-old girl in a navy-blue dress stuck on the highest branch of the tree.

  Samuel looked and could see what was happening, but his mind was too weak to know what to do or why to do it. Even if he had thought of something, it would have been too late. The thin branch could hold a tiny bird much easier than it could a human, and gave up trying.

  Martha fell, down and down and down, her dress making the most hopeless of parachutes. But inches before she hit the ground, her body froze in the air. Then she sat up as if she was lying on an invisible bed and placed her feet on the ground.

  “Come, children,” said the Changemaker. “Let me tell you a story.”

  Samuel noticed something speed past his head, flying through the air. At first he thought it was another bird, but when he saw it stop in the air and float down into the Changemaker’s hands, he realized that it was in fact a book.

  “The Creatures of Shadow Forest,” said the Changemaker, catching the book and then giving it imaginary reviews. “A towering masterpiece. A most extraordinary achievement. Professor Tanglewood has excelled himself with this work of jaw-dropping genius. I can’t wait for his autobiography.”

  He beckoned Martha and Samuel toward him, and they walked over, as if pulled by some invisible thread.

  “Have you read his book?” The Changemaker leaned his gray face toward Samuel. “What did you think of it? Tell me. Did you like it? Speak! Speak! Speak!”

  “I…don’t…I…”

  “Mmm. Not sure? Maybe you need to read it a little more closely. What do you think?”

  “I…er…I…”

  “Squeak! Squeak! Squeak!”

  On that final “squeak,” Samuel shrank down to the ground and found himself turned into a small, white mouse.

  The Changemaker picked him up by his tail and placed him inside the open book.

  “I am now going to tell you a story,” said the Changemaker. “It is a true story. It is the story behind the story these pages have to tell. And when it is over, you will be over too. Your sister will watch as I close the book and squash your little mouse guts inside these pages. Blood and ink—it is much the same, you know…Oh, what an exciting birthday this is going to be!”

  He then told Samuel and Martha the story of his life. He told them everything. About his childhood. His forgotten birthdays. His time in prison. On and on, reciting extracts from his autobiography as well as The Creatures of Shadow Forest, unaware of the time.

  It was morning now. Pink light softened the forest, casting long shadows.

  The fire had died.

  “Since then, I have had to—how shall I put it?—relieve the Shadow Witch of her duties, and take matters into my own hands,” the Changemaker said, with a heavy sigh, as he reached the end of his story. “And whatever is going to happen next, one thing is certain. No one will ever leave the forest alive.”

  Inside the Book

  The gray and evil creature closed his eyes and blew Samuel’s shadow toward him, which was in the shape of a mouse now. Once Samuel had it back, he also had his fear, as he became fully aware of what was happening to him.

  The Changemaker began to close the pages of the book with Samuel inside. He did it very slowly, savoring every moment, as though it was the last mouthful of a very tasty meal.

  Samuel saw the other page coming down toward him, and he could see the word he was going to be squashed into as the shadow of the paper rose over him. The word was:

  terror

  He tried to run to the edge, but the Changemaker tilted the book upward so that Samuel slid back to the middle.

  What was going to happen to his sister after he died? What cruel game was going to be in store for her?

  He felt the page on his back, beginning to press down.

  “Martha,” he squeaked, knowing she couldn’t hear him but still having to say it. “Martha, I—”

  He stopped. The pressure on his back was too much. This was it.

  The end.

  But then he heard something.

  Something soft and beautiful, that almost canceled out the pain.

  And just at that moment, the book stopped right where it was. He was alive. Squashed, but alive. And the sound—the singing—kept going, in a soft and slow voice that seemed strangely familiar.

  “Happy…birthday to you…”

  The whole forest had gone silent just to listen.

  “Happy birthday to you…”

  Then Samuel turned to his sister, who seemed a giant to him.

  “Martha. You’re singing.”

  He watched Martha’s mouth open and close around the words, and could see her looking directly at the Changemaker.

  “Happy birthday to…Horatio…”

  The weight lessened off Samuel’s back as the being who had once been Professor Horatio Tanglewood began to cry shadowy tears. That was all he had ever wanted, to hear someone sing that song to him, and now it was really happening.

  “Happy birthday to you.”

  When Martha stopped singing she seemed as surprised as Samuel by her rediscovered voice. The book went limp in the Changemaker’s hands and Samuel slid down the page, fell through the air and landed in a puddle, where he then swam to safety.

  “Happy birthday…to me,” said the Changemaker, drying his eyes. “Happy birthday to me. That is the most beautiful thing I ever heard. Did you mean it? Did you really mean it? Is that how powerful my story was? That you understood everything I have done?”

  “Yes,” said Martha, looking at her brother as he crawled out of the puddle.

  Martha still didn’t have her shadow, and the singing had taken everything she had left out of her. The only thought she had space or energy for was the thought of her brother, and all the trouble she had gotten him into by running into the forest.

  In a rare moment, the man who the Changemaker used to be overruled the monster he had become, and it was inside that moment that he returned Samuel to his human self and released Martha’s shadow.

  “Samuel,” she said, her voice still sounding as fresh and delicate as the morning dew. “I’m sorry.” She had found words again, when they were needed most, and so long as she was alive, she wasn’t going to lose them.

  The Professor looked at the two children, and as he looked he grew more than a little jealous of the love the siblings had for each other.

  “Oh no,” he said. “I’m a fool. A fool. She doesn’t care about my birthday. Nobody cares about my birthday. Nobody has ever cared.” He remembered how his foster parents, Mr. and Mrs. Twigg, had forbidden him from having any birthday cards and, through some twist of logic, suddenly became determined to destroy both Samuel and Martha in the most horrible way possible.

  He closed his eyes, and began to work his terrible magic.

  “Let there be dark,” he said as he began to inhale the long tree shadows that stretched across the clearing. And the more he inhaled, the more power he felt, and he drew shade from farther into the forest.

  A black, swirling fog crept over the ground and covered Samuel and Martha. They both couldn’t see anything in the darkness, and struggled for breath. If the fog had stayed around them, they would have choked to death, but the Changemaker wanted to watch an even more entertaining kind of end.

  After all, it was his birthday.

  So the shadows went straight past Samuel and Martha, and were sucked inside the former professor, whose body suffered a kind of fit trying to contain them.

  “Oh, Shadow Witch,” he whispered. “Why did you never want power like this?”

  Samuel looked at his sister.

  “Run!” he shouted. “Run!”

  He grabbed her hand and they started to race across the clearing, but after only a few steps they realized something. Something that made their hearts pound in terror and their eyes bulge in disb
elief.

  It wasn’t just that they were heading toward the trees.

  The trees were heading toward them.

  The Waking Forest

  The sight was scarcely believable.

  An army of trees, with their twisting and misshapen wooden limbs, moving over the earth toward Samuel and Martha. Branches moving independently of the wind. Roots pulling themselves out of the ground like feet from shoes.

  The sounds were as terrifying as the sight.

  The terrible creak of bending wood.

  The hideous whisper of churning earth.

  The pounding heartbeat of two terrified children.

  Samuel and Martha stopped running and froze in horror. The natural order had been reversed: humans rooted by fear; free-moving trees heading their way.

  Of course, their free movement was an illusion. The trees were in motion, but their was nothing free about it. Having gained possession of the shadows, the being who was once Professor Horatio Tanglewood was guiding the forest with the kind of hand movements a conductor would use to lead an orchestra.

  “What do we do?” Martha asked.

  Closer and closer came the trees, branches stretching forward, twigs reaching out like fingers.

  “Turn back,” said Samuel, pulling his sister’s hand as he started heading away from the trees.

  But it was too late. The trees were too close now—close enough for a root from the nearest tree to coil itself around Martha’s ankle.

  “Sam-uaaagh!” she screamed as the tree pulled her away from her brother’s hand.

  But there was nothing Samuel could do, as he was about to become the victim of another tree. A branch swooped down and wrapped around his waist before raising him high in the air.

  Up he soared, his body folded forward over the branch as the ground dropped away from him. He could see the Changemaker, laughing clouds of black vapor as he conducted the trees. And Martha, trapped close to the trunk of another, its roots and branches around her like the arms of an overprotective parent.

  “Marth-aaaaaaaagh!”

  Samuel felt two sensations. The feeling of rising too fast, and the feeling of being gripped too tight around his middle. But two sensations became one as the branch suddenly released Samuel, throwing him higher still.

  His arms windmilled through the air, desperately trying to find something to hold on to.

  The tree had thrown him outward as well as upward, and he was soaring over what was left of the clearing. He waited to hit the ground and die, but he didn’t. Instead, he fell into the soft branches of another tree. Or rather, the branches of another tree had reached out and caught him.

  Again, he was held by the waist and thrown back into the air.

  If he had been able to have a clear thought amid all the sensation his body was feeling, Samuel would have realized what was happening. He would have realized that the Changemaker was orchestrating a game of catch, with Samuel filling the role of the ball.

  Back and forth he was flung, from tree to tree, while his sister was being slowly squeezed to death down below him.

  “Let’s hope no one’s a butterfingers.” The Changemaker’s laugh echoed through the clearing.

  “Stop!” Martha shouted as the branches tightened around her legs, her chest, her neck. “Please.” The shout had weakened to a choke. “Stop.”

  She watched in desperation as the two trees throwing Samuel began to pull him in separate directions. The game of catch became a game of tug-of-war as Samuel’s role switched from ball to rope.

  He had never know pain could reach such intensity. The agony was everywhere, taking over his whole body—his shoulders, his knees, his wrists, his ankles—as the two trees pulled farther and farther apart, testing the strength of his bones.

  “Now, children, I am afraid we must say good-bye,” said the Changemaker. He raised his hands, ready to make the final instruction for the trees to follow. The instruction that would tear Samuel in two and tighten the stranglehold around Martha’s neck.

  The Changemaker closed his eyes.

  He hummed “Happy Birthday.”

  He savored the delicious power he felt inside him. Power over the species that he had once belonged to. The species that had bullied him at school, and called him names, and sent him to prison, and never let him celebrate his birthday.

  He opened his eyes.

  “Now, children, it is time—as they say—to die.”

  And that is when they saw it.

  Both of them.

  Their eyes were squinting against the pain, but still they saw it.

  A small straight line soaring high through the air, toward the Changemaker. Some kind of spear.

  He turned around, following the children’s eyes. And he was just in time to catch sight of the javelin before it hit him, but too late to stop it from entering his body.

  “No!” he screamed, black blood spilling over his hands as he clutched the weapon that pierced his chest and back. As he screamed, shadows left his body from his mouth and headed back toward the forest. He fell to the ground.

  Samuel glimpsed someone at the far edge of the clearing. It was Aunt Eda with Ibsen by her side.

  After that, everything was swallowed in choking darkness as shadows flew back to the trees, the plants, and all the creatures they had once belonged to.

  Inside that darkness, the branches let go of Martha’s neck and body, and the roots crawled away and tucked themselves back under the earth they had emerged from.

  At the same time, the two trees that had been pulling Samuel stopped their game of tug-of-war, and Samuel clung on to the wood that had been wrapped around his waist. When the darkness ended, Samuel dropped down from the low branch and landed softly.

  He went over and hugged his sister as Aunt Eda and Ibsen ran toward them.

  But then they heard something.

  “Help!” It was Aunt Eda.

  As she had run past him, the Changemaker had reached out and grabbed hold of her ankle, and a new cloud of shadows emerged from his mouth. Aunt Eda and Ibsen choked, trapped inside the cloud.

  Samuel and Martha ran to help.

  “Stay back,” said Samuel, to his sister. “I know what to do.”

  He approached the cloud of shadows and held his breath, digging his hand in his pocket. Before the Changemaker knew what Samuel was doing, the boy had dropped a Hewlip leaf into his mouth.

  “Oh no,” said the Changemaker as he exhaled the last of the shadows.

  “This isn’t how it’s meant to—”

  “Run away,” Samuel told Aunt Eda, Martha and Ibsen.

  And they did. They ran away, and didn’t turn back when they heard the dreadful splatter of the Professor-turned-Changemaker exploding behind them. A noise that sounded, to Samuel, like a triumph and a tragedy all at once.

  The Return of Uncle Henrik

  “Martha! Samuel!”

  Aunt Eda held her arms out like she had done at the airport, but this time even Samuel welcomed the hug. He held her close, and felt something he hadn’t felt since his parents died. A feeling of being filled up, right to the very top, like lemonade in a glass. He didn’t know exactly what this feeling was, but he guessed it was being loved.

  “You followed us,” he said. “You came to save us.”

  Aunt Eda planted kisses on both their heads, and tried not to cry. “Well, yes, what else was I to do? Now, now, now, you must tell me, are you both all right?”

  “Yes,” said Samuel.

  “Yes,” said Martha, and it was that long-awaited yes that brought a tear to Aunt Eda’s eye.

  “Oh, children, I have been so worried about both of you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Martha said.

  Aunt Eda waved the sorry away. “No, Martha, you did not know what was in the forest. It isn’t your fault.”

  Samuel turned to look at the javelin sticking out of the ground. The Hewlip leaf had been so powerful that there were no visible remains of the Changemaker at all. “How
did you get here?” he asked his aunt.

  “I had a bracelet. A witch’s bracelet,” she said as she showed him the cloth band and pewter disc attached to her wrist. “It was ferry useful. It protected me. And then I found Ibsen by the side of a path. He led me here.”

  Martha thought about the Snow Witch, and remembered what she told her about the bracelet. She wondered if it was the same one. But then she wondered something else.

  “Where is he now?” she asked. “Where’s Ibsen?”

  “Oh no,” said Aunt Eda, looking around for her dog. “Oh no. Ibsen? Ibsen? Where are you? Where are…” Then she gasped. Her eyes widened in disbelief. “No. No, it can’t…no…I’m seeing things…no…”

  There was a tall man walking toward her, smiling softly.

  Samuel looked at the man and recognized him from the photographs. The ones he had seen in the attic, of the Olympian standing triumphant on a ski slope. The beard. The smile. The eyes. He looked older and grayer, but it was definitely him.

  “Uncle Henrik.” The name fell out of Samuel’s mouth as a whisper.

  Uncle Henrik said something in Norwegian to Aunt Eda, who was still openmouthed in shock. Then he turned to the children and spoke.

  “Hello, Martha. Hello, Samuel.” He had a gentle accent that melted his words the way toast melts butter. “Yes, it is me. I am your uncle Henrik.”

  “Where haff you been?” said Aunt Eda, feeling his face to make sure it was true. “Haff you been hiding in this terrible forest? Did I do something wrong?”

  “No. You did nothing wrong. And I haven’t been hiding. I have been with you the whole time. By your side.”

  Aunt Eda didn’t understand.

  Uncle Henrik pointed to the javelin and to the space where the Changemaker had been. “He let me leave the forest. But he changed me. All those years ago. He turned me into an elkhound. I was transformed, but I was still me. I still kept my promise. I came back for you.”