And the Trees Crept In

by Dawn Kurtagich

  “The Creeper Man, Aunt.”

  “He’s already here.” Her voices floats down the stairs like a moth, echoing and faint. She is at the back of the room.

  “What does he want? Why has he come? Is he real? Or am I just as mad as you?”

  Back and forth, back and forth. Creaking.

  “He’s here because of you.”

  “How? Why? Speak clearly!”

  “He enjoys your fear. You deserve it.”

  “I didn’t ask for this.”

  “But you deserve it all the same. Heart of stone, just like I told you before.”

  I could scream. “What did I ever do to you? What did I ever do to deserve this?”

  “You’re mad, my girl. The mad are always punished. Some of us even deserve it.”

  “Nori doesn’t deserve this.”

  The creaking stops. Heavy footsteps across the floorboards. A sudden, leering white face out of the shadows, shaggy wheat-colored hair, wild around her face.

  Cathy’s eyes are wild for a moment, staring at me, but then they focus, unglazed, and she looks… sane. “Keep her away from him, Silla. He will hurt you through her. Protect her.”

  I blink and I shake my head, and this is all too hard. Crazy one moment, now lucid and terrified? I’m only seventeen. “I don’t know how.”

  “You just have to reset. It will get worse before it gets better, my girl.”

  I slump against the banister. “I don’t understand. I’m so tired.”

  Cath is fading away again, her last look one of pity. Sympathy. Understanding.

  “The mad always are,” she says.

  WITHOUT WARNING

  The hole grows larger without warning and without much sound.

  I heard it in the night. S s s s p l i n t e r i n g.

  Falling inward.

  It should now be as big as the length of her spine. Silla will be sure, very soon, that the hole is definitely closer to sentient than not.

  In the morning, I hear her put more chairs around the hole. Silly child. As if that could stop this!

  BOOK 4:

  Meat Prison

  DON’T STOP NOW, IF YOU REALLY SEEK

  SILLA’S TRUTHS, WHICH MAY BE BLEAK

  BUT IF YOU FEAR THE CREEPER MAN’S GLANCE

  BEST GO NOW; THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE.

  17

  no. no, no, no

  Sudden darkness, sudden calm

  means the woods are close

  don’t you put up the alarm

  you’re the one he chose.

  BROKEN BOOK ENTRY

  His voice is calling me at night. It’s like a presence I can’t escape. The others can’t hear him. Can’t hear any of the hurtful words he says to me. I wish I could argue back, deny the tall tales, heavy with lies and thin on truth. He is trying to torment me with his poison tongue. Shut up, shut up, shut up! I go downstairs to confront the thing but there is no form, only the endless creaking of the floor-boards under my feet and his voice. It is torture. Still seems like the dark might be endless.

  The same, every night. When I sleep, for however few minutes at a time, I dream.

  La Baume is crumbling in my dreams. Sunken and warped. The red paint is peeling away, revealing a gross curling of rainbow colors beneath. Red, blue, green, pink, orange… it’s a sick joke. And the house is choking underneath vines upon vines and roots upon roots. They rise out of dead ground to strangle the manor and I feel like I’m the one being choked. I feel like I’m the one who can’t breathe.

  As I watch, the vines grow, thicken, tighten, and La Baume begins to crack and sink, straining to remain, and I choke and I gasp and I can’t breathe—

  and I wake.

  I still can’t breathe.

  I give up sleeping in my room for the night, and take to the second floor in the library, between the bookcases, where Gowan sleeps. We share a blanket and he kisses my forehead.

  “I’m staying with you,” he tells me. “Until you’re ready to come.”

  I’m ready. So ready. But I never will. I can’t lose Nori.

  I curl into his arms, and for once, I sleep.

  It wasn’t a boom. Not even a crash. It was more like… a creeeeeaaak and I almost didn’t notice it in my half sleep.

  WRONG.

  I open my eyes and see nothing. The room is a terrifying black. I’m about to panic about being blind when I spot the embers burning in the grill of the fireplace.

  Oh, God.

  I reach over to wake Gowan, but all I feel is the cold blanket beside me. And then I hear Nori banging on the wall upstairs, hysterical and alone. I can almost hear her terrified gasping, sense her tears. [LET HER ROT, THE LITTLE PEST.]

  “Nori!” I spring up.

  “Wait—what’s going on?” Gowan says groggily from somewhere else in the library. Down a level—on one of the sofa chairs.

  “I have to get to Nori!”

  He’s up in a second. “Damn. Silla, we need lights.”

  “There’s a generator in the basement. But it doesn’t work all the time. We stopped using it.”

  “Okay, I’ll go down.”

  “No!”

  “We need to check it, Silla.”

  “Okay, but let me come with you, then. I have to get to Nori first, though. There’s a candle on the desk by the window.” Even as I’m telling him this, I’m feeling my way down the spiral stairs. When I’m at the bottom, he already has the candle and is lighting it with the last embers.

  I hug the blanket closer to me. It’s so cold. And then I open the door, stepping gingerly forward, very much aware of the hole in the entrance hall and the glaringly loud silence of it. I bump into the armchair and adjust my trajectory. My heart thuds inside me. [SCARED OF THE DARK, ARE WE?] The flesh-ball thing could be right next to me. He could be right beside me, waiting to reach out.

  But no. Gowan is here. He has a candle. There is enough light to see by, but it flickers and moves, making the shadows dance.

  “Tell me where the flashlight is, and some candles, and then go to Nori.”

  But Nori is already coming to us.

  Silla? Something’s wrong with my room.

  She is breathless and pale, and she takes my hand, holding it firmly.

  “It’s okay, bug. We’ve just run out of light.” I pick her up, and sit her on my hip, even though she really is getting too big for this. I tell myself it’s because she’s scared, but I know that really it’s because I am.

  “Okay,” Gowan says. “Now, quickly, candles—”

  “Okay, but we don’t have a flashlight. There are lanterns, though. Really old ones that will burn this miserable house down if we knock them over. I’ve gotten pretty good with them since being here.”

  Gowan makes a face. “Really?”

  “Yeah, well, my aunt is a little eccentric, if you didn’t notice. This house is old as hell itself.”

  “Better than nothing.”

  I grab his arm. “Gowan… this darkness… it’s… could it…”

  His eyes harden, and he storms to the window. He opens the curtains and I stagger backward.

  Earth. We are buried in earth.

  Gowan runs out of the room and upstairs to my room. I follow, Nori clinging to me like her life depends on it, and I’m starting to think it does.

  The trees.

  They have completely surrounded La Baume, not an inch of air between them.

  The trees are here, rising over us.

  And La Baume is sinking.

  We are completely and utterly trapped.

  It’s the trees.

  Silla says: This is…

  Scary, I sign.

  Silla says: … insane.

  I nod. We are at the front door, and the garden should be out there, but it’s all dirt and trees! They are so close, like long wooden bricks. They took away all the light, all of it!

  Gowan says: You’re kidding me. You’re actually f—ing kidding me.

  Silla says: Watch it. (She
looks at me.)

  Gowan says: Sorry.

  Silla says: This manor is—

  Gowan says: Cursed. Or haunted. Or—

  Silla says: Something. Yeah.

  Gowan says: Bloody hell. (Silla squints at him and nods at me and then he nods back and then I nod, too.)

  They talk for a long, long time, and I look at my friend, but he just smiles and steps back again, and I don’t know why he didn’t take my hand like before.

  I put my arms around Silla.

  This is a scary game.

  Gowan gets the ax from the kitchen. It’s partly rusted, so I’m not convinced of how much use it’s going to be.

  We run back up to my room.

  “Stand back,” he says.

  We do.

  He shatters my bedroom window and begins chopping and chopping and chopping and chopping until Nori tugs on my dress and signs, Can we go away? Is there food?

  I nod, and we silently leave Gowan to it.

  He’s strong, Nori signs.

  “Yeah,” I agree. “But I don’t think Gowan’s strength is going to be enough.”

  Not him, she signs.

  Gowan chops at the trees blocking the window all day.

  “This doesn’t happen,” I hear him muttering when I pass.

  The wood splinters and falls away, piece by painful piece.

  “Tomorrow,” Gowan says, dripping with sweat. “I’ll break through tomorrow. And then we’re getting the hell out of here.”

  “Okay,” I tell him in a small voice. He doesn’t need to tell me that this is all my fault. If I had just gone with him when I still could have, then we’d be long free. Instead of trapped in a cursed (?) house, waiting to die. Waiting to sink into the earth and be buried alive. Waiting for him to arrive and tear us to shreds.

  He seems to read my thoughts in my face because he pulls me into a tight hug. I tense, but he doesn’t let me go.

  “There’s blame to share,” he whispers in my ear, softly, so Nori won’t hear.

  I pull away. “There really isn’t.”

  I leave the two of them staring after me as I wander into the house.

  The next morning, the trees are full and whole again. It’s like Gowan’s ax never touched them at all. I am in the kitchen, trying to find something for Nori to eat, moving dishes around pointlessly, when I hear Gowan’s furious cry somewhere above us.

  I go to find Gowan. When he spots me, he walks over and wraps me in his arms, lips in my hair, heart pounding against me. He is shaking. I hug him back, clenching my eyes shut against his awful, impossible reality. The strangest sensation takes over. That he is clinging on to me because he is afraid. Not of being trapped, or of… him… But afraid of ME. Afraid for me.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he says, but I have the strange feeling he means something else entirely. Maybe: I’m scared.

  “I don’t either,” I say, and think: We are going to die in here.

  He closes his eyes. “It’s hopeless.”

  There’s that word again.

  Somewhere, out there, the trees are pushing even closer. If it’s possible. And we are sinking.

  And a thought strikes me with such a chill that I almost drop the dish in my hand.

  If the trees are at La Baume’s doorstep…

  Then the Creeper Man is, too.

  The air is stale in here.

  My imagination, I’m sure, since we haven’t been trapped long enough for me to be able to tell. But I feel like I’m breathing in Gowan’s, Nori’s, and Cath’s soupy secondhand air. The rotting fruit full of worms doesn’t help. Nori is so hungry, I caught her trying to eat it.

  That’s why I’m here, now. At the hole.

  It’s gotten so big that it has swallowed up the chairs I put around it for my Nori’s protection. I let the plate tilt forward, slowly, so that the fruit slips off the plate in increments, leaving a trail of brown juice behind. A few worms linger, so I drop the plate, too.

  I bend forward and listen. Intently.

  I never hear an impact.

  I stare down into the pit, straining to see something. And for a moment, the merest fraction of a minute, I think I see something writhing down there. Roots, maybe, twisting and bending around one another? Or were they vines? Hell, for all I know, they were arms, reaching out for me.

  I certainly feel the pull. I think my future may just include an attic and a singular pacing path.

  I will never tell Nori that.

  I will never tell Gowan.

  But it’s getting to be a bit of a challenge to hold back.

  That’s right, his voice coos. Daddy’s little girl is coming home.

  We’re trapped in this house, waiting to die. Why not… give in?

  Why the hell should I resist?

  Gowan is here all the time now and I’m happy. He’s really nice.

  But sometimes I get sleepy because my friend wants to play almost every night now. But I fall asleep during the day because Silla doesn’t notice and we don’t try reading anymore. But Auntie started screaming again one night while she walks up and down her high-up room, and now Silla walks up and down all night, too, and once I saw her pulling at her hair and it made me scared because she looked scary.

  But Auntie screamed and screamed and then Silla screamed. But then Gowan came to sit with her and it got better after that because then only Auntie was screaming.

  The only bad thing is that Silla shouts at me a lot and that’s a bad thing. But my tummy is so sore that I have to put something in it sometimes and Silla doesn’t like that.

  I don’t want to make Silla angry.

  And I don’t want to play with the man anymore.

  I don’t think he’s really my friend at all.

  But it’s too late now.

  Gowan is unusually quiet at our mockery of “dinner.” It has been three days now. I think he is realizing how futile it is. The trees grow back each time he cuts them away. We talked about opening the kitchen door to dig a tunnel, but I pointed out that giving the earth entry might allow it to bury us alive. He had closed his eyes and covered his face with hands blistered and broken.

  Maybe he is giving in to the HOPELESSNESS that pervades the air. I should feel satisfaction: I told you, a tiny voice whispers inside. Instead, I feel afraid. Please don’t lose hope, too. You are the only one with any vapors of it left.

  So now I am the one staring. Staring at the way even his hair seems limp. The slow movement of his hand as he runs his spoon listlessly through the watery soup. The candles burn low and no one speaks. Even Nori isn’t eating.

  “Please.”

  Nori looks up, but Gowan doesn’t move. I hate the way the corners of his mouth fold down, the tiny wrinkles on either side of his mouth.

  “Please,” I say again. “Please, Gowan.”

  He looks at me then. But the light is gone from his face.

  We are running out of fire.

  I say it out loud, and he understands what I mean, because his face crumples and he shoves away his chair, leaving the room before I can see him cry.

  Stunned, we sit in silence.

  The candles burn low, and then die.

  One night, I wake to find Nori gone. I wander out of the library, where we all sleep now, with one of the last candles, the light casting grotesque shadows along the high walls.

  “Nori?”

  The basement door is open, so I close it and hurry past.

  “Nori?”

  I hear something upstairs, a scuttling noise, and hesitate. Nori doesn’t make sounds like that.

  “Nori…”

  And then I hear her footfalls, tiny thumps that I still recognize. I follow them upstairs, but they are above me still. I ascend to the third floor—the abandoned hallway. The door to the wasp room at the end is open, and my stomach lurches with some emotion. Fear? Apprehension?

  I find her crouching in the center of the pile of husks.

  “Nori, what are you doing?”

&nbs
p; She turns to look over her shoulder, her eyes too big in her gaunt face. She has a handful of wasp husks, and she is chewing.

  I bend over, the same feeling in my stomach intensifying. Not fear, not apprehension, but disgust.

  The C R U N C H I N G sound as she chews seems to echo in my head.

  “Nori, don’t!” I scramble forward and open her mouth, scooping out the remains of decade-old dead insects from her tongue.

  She bites down on my fingers and I swear, but I keep scooping.

  “Spit it out! Spit it out now!”

  She cries and tries to grab more of them but I lift her into my arms and I run. I run down the hall, my candle long-extinguished, and I dash into the library. I bolt the top of the door, where she can’t reach, and I hug her tightly as she cries silently, her little fists beating on my chest. She wriggles to get free, and finally manages it, running to lie down with Gowan, who wraps her in his arms in his sleep.

  She stares at me from his embrace, eyes accusing.

  I hear the Creeper Man scuttling along the halls.

  It’s the smell that wakes me. A slow, noxious stench that first infiltrates my dream as a cauldron of bubbling witch’s brew. Then it slowly penetrates and my mind wakes to escape it.

  I cough.

  Gag.

  I stagger to my feet, retching. “What is that?”

  Gowan enters the library, fully clothed, looking cleaner and more handsome than he has any right to in this filthy, rotting hovel.

  “Smell it?”

  “No.”

  He looks pale. Working too hard to get us out.

  This is the day I begin hunting.

  18

  jesus, god