In the House in the Dark of the Woods

by Laird Hunt

  “Still, I say that you must run, my love, for now that I see you sitting here again at my table, as much as I have hoped for it and dreamed of it, I find I cannot, indeed must not, ask you to stay.”

  There was more hard pecking at the pile of bloody meat. The room shuddered when the huge beak came down.

  “I met our pretty friend in the woods,” I said. “She spoke to me and told me her name. It was she gave me that stub of candle to light my last steps to your door. I wonder what she would say if she saw her little friend and mine grown grand and cruel as this.”

  “Hope has many friends. You will learn that if you try to leave before it’s time or if anyone who shouldn’t tries to visit you.”

  “I will not run, Eliza. I will stay and I will help you.”

  “You will miss your son. You may even come to miss your man.”

  “My son, yes, perhaps. But he is safer without me. I will never miss my man!”

  I said this more loudly, I think, than was needed. Then I went outside, leaned over the sow, which had been neatly killed with a blow to the head, ferried up more gore from the open midsection, went back and dropped the steaming mess onto the table, and took my place again. Eliza and I sat quietly across from each other with the huge bird beside us. We might have been portraits, each of the other, our hair long and pretty, our hands stained red, her nails black and mine soon again to be. Seeing our red hands together on the table I thought of the teardrop.

  “Hold out one of your fingers,” I said.

  She tilted her head and looked at me but did as I asked. I reached out my finger and touched its jelly tip to hers.

  “What have you given me, Goody?” she said.

  “A gift. The last that I have. In case you ever need it. Perhaps you can use it when we are down in the cellar. You said that there were none of these left in your head.”

  “I did say that.”

  The tear slid under her nail and hid there. If the great bird had marked what had passed between us, he gave no sign, only smashed his head down, down and up. We watched him for a time, then Eliza sucked in her breath and spoke.

  “You have come to this table and will stay and receive Red Boy’s punishments and rewards both? Stay here and play this game? This game great and grand? You will do this to help me?” she said at last, looking long and carefully at me.

  “I will not run for I do not fear him or his games. I do not fear your Red Boy, who takes his different shapes and tries to scare us,” I said.

  “See then what I have for you,” she said.

  She reached into the pocket of her own dress and pulled out the very scream I had fetched from the well and had last seen on the floor beside the handsome singer. She set it on the bloody wood between us. It jiggled a moment and went still.

  Eliza stood then. She came around the table and put her hand on my shoulder. I saw that she was clutching a thick rolled bundle of her creamy paper. She squeezed my shoulder hard, then whispered sharp into my ear: “This giant bird is your Red Boy, not mine, Eliza. And fear him you will.”

  “But I am not Eliza. You are Eliza!” I said.

  She gave me no answer, only made fast for the door. When I pressed on the table to try to rise and follow, Red Boy’s head came down and he put his beak through the back of my hand.

  Chapter 25

  She gave no wild and pretty cry then. Only screamed. Her scream louder and longer, it seemed to me, than the first one I had made when my own Red Boy appeared. Her scream carried me out the door and sent me flying past my poor dead pig, which was now hers—stopping only long enough to snap away a tender bit of bone from one of its ribs—and across the yard. When I got to the edge of the woods I slipped the bit of bone under the string I’d used to wrap my quill-scratched pages. I pushed the bundle into my pocket and began to breathe more deeply than I had in years.

  The scream followed me through the trees. Even when Captain Jane came and kissed me and welcomed me to what she called my “hard-won freedom,” I could hear her screaming. Though when I told Captain Jane this, she said she heard nothing, that our friend might well be screaming, but what I heard was only the memory of my own scream trapped like a wasp in my head.

  “It won’t leave you, deary, it will never leave. Which is lucky for us, as there is much you can do in this woods and beyond with the sting of a remembered scream.”

  “Was I as loud in my screaming as she was?”

  “I couldn’t say. Perhaps not. Each scream is as different as each Red Boy. Different and the same. After you agreed to stay in my place, and your Red Boy came globbing and dripping from the walls, I left too quickly to listen, even more quickly than you just did. But this was a fine ripe scream, to be sure. Did you see how big it was? How big and juicy? It’s been used a little but just enough to warm it.”

  “All she wanted was a kiss. I could have stayed another moment.”

  “You had already kissed her.”

  “A kiss when you want it is better than anything.”

  “Well, she’s there now and you’re here, free. What is her Red Boy like?”

  I shuddered. Captain Jane nodded. “Goody fetched her own scream?” I asked.

  “She is no longer Goody. You know that.”

  “I did not like holding that scream of hers.”

  “I did not like to give it to you to hold. Her Red Boy should have fished for it. As yours and mine did. We could have all watched him and seen what he was like.”

  “I have never heard of such a thing. Diving to fetch your own scream.”

  “Nor had I. It took Granny Someone’s cunning to have her do it but her own fool courage and strength at paddling to get it done. Perhaps we’ll do it that way the next time.”

  “She did seem brave.”

  “We have each been brave.”

  “Thank you for helping me in this.”

  “Captain Jane always helps those who deserve it.”

  “Do I deserve it?”

  “Of course you do.”

  “I did things worse than she has done.”

  “Who says what’s worse? And how do you know all that she has done?”

  “When you were Eliza, when it was me sitting where she is now, you tricked me to get me to stay.”

  “You were Eliza for many years but I was Eliza longer. My Red Boy was worn to an ember that lived beneath my eyelid. It never stopped burning. I’d have done anything to douse it. We’re no different, you and I.”

  “I won’t come back,” I said.

  “Of course not, deary.”

  “I won’t. Not like you. Not like the others.”

  “Storm and still, knife and quill, we all say we won’t and then we almost all of us sooner or later will.” She said this with a laugh as if it were a small and light thing to say after all those screams—the new Eliza’s, mine, hers, the others before—a trifle there in the morning sun.

  We came to the well, where I untied the string and dropped first the bit of bone and then my bundle of pages. It struck me that the teardrop under my fingernail might as well be added to the brew, for I did not want or need it, but scrape and shake as I might, I could not make it leave.

  “Take your nail in your teeth and bite hard. You’ll be able to catch it with your tongue,” said a hollow voice, and old Granny Someone herself came up beside me, put her own crooked finger on the mossy stone and peered over the edge, then up at me.

  “Is it true she swam in these waters?” I asked.

  “True as that tear that doesn’t want to leave you, dear.”

  “You must have made her do it.”

  “I had no glamour left in me when she dove.”

  “None at all?”

  “Only petals and leaves and a splash of my old song.”

  “Where has your glamour gone?”

  “I’ve had it stolen.”

  “I’d never swim in these waters.”

  “Never is such a long time, Eliza.”

  “I’m not Eliza. Not a
ny longer.”

  “I’ll take that tear. You don’t need it. It smells of death and should be mine, for it was me filled the foul pond from which it poured. Give it here.”

  “And yet now I think I’ll keep it.”

  Granny Someone growled low and long at being refused, but when, with Captain Jane’s arm back around my shoulder, I turned from the well to leave, she came with us, muttering imprecations with every step. Captain Jane, she said, had stolen her things and now had even stolen the secret snacks and suppers that would have built her strength back. There was nothing like an almost-Eliza ripe with worry and fury to top up your strength. This had been a fine one! One little push and she had swum to the bottom of the well and not drowned and brought her own scream back up. Who had ever heard of such a thing?

  “I almost had scream and supper both!”

  “In the end you had neither. Now be still, sad creature,” Captain Jane said, but the old thing just smacked her lips and on and on she muttered. This must have bothered Captain Jane for every now and again she would let go of my shoulder and use her fist to deal Granny Someone a great blow.

  “Does Hope not come to walk me from the wood?”

  “She’s resting now for her work with Eliza in the days to come. Without Hope it will be over before it fairly starts. Can you imagine your early hours and weeks as Eliza without Hope?”

  “What work does she do with Eliza?” I said it bitterly, for though at the beginning of my time in the woods, Hope had come often enough to visit, she had long since stopped skipping to me when I called and had punished me when once I tried to seek her. Even when I had chanced so lately upon her and held out my arms and thought she had come to kiss me as I gazed upon the prospect of my departure, she had grinned and looked straight past me. “She made my time in the house longer,” I said and spat. “Handing out her tricky gifts of sight. Eliza saw something that scared her when we were down by the water and ran away.”

  “Where did she run?” said Captain Jane.

  “Home,” I said.

  “Not home.”

  “Then where?”

  “To the woods. To the well. To that old creature. To me. She saw what she needed to see. She saw what she feared. And who do you think it was sent her buzzy, shiny friends to fill the air and chase that fool holding her berry basket away? I hadn’t seen him. Granny Someone never sniffed him out.”

  “Still,” I said.

  “Still what?”

  “Still, what would it have cost her to comfort me one last time?”

  We walked and sometimes there came a howling through the trees so I knew that the wolves were near and no wonder with Captain Jane wearing Granny Someone’s cloak made of the skin of their king. I had not walked abroad in the long years I had been in the woods, but I had thought so often of the route I would take when I had my freedom, if ever it came, that I did not need Captain Jane to guide me. I had on my old shoes, and they fit snug, and when we came to the edge of the trees and the start of the plains and hills I must cross to travel back to my home, I knew my time of trial was truly over and did not pause. Granny Someone came out of the woods and limped awhile alongside of me through the melting snow as if she meant to follow.

  “She has something for you,” called Captain Jane.

  “No, I don’t,” she said. But after Captain Jane had sworn to come and skin her where she stood, she opened one of her crooked hands and I saw in it the piece of crimson string I must have left on the edge of the well.

  “Take me with you,” she whispered once I had it in my pocket. But Captain Jane called her sharp and she hobbled slowly back to the trees.

  Chapter 26

  It took nearly a week to make my walk home to our house in the mountains. My husband gasped and fell to his knees when he saw me. Two heavy, sullen girls—tiny things when I had left on the walk I had not returned from—stopped only a moment in their work and stared. My husband had found another woman to come and live in my house and sleep in my bed but I soon saw her off. Word spread of my return but none of our neighbors would set foot on our land or give me greeting when I walked abroad.

  I let this trouble me not one bit. There were ways aplenty after all to repay their rudeness. I had learned many things beyond cries and screaming and writing stories during the years I had been gone. My daughters gleaned soon enough that they must come quickly when I called, and by and by they asked me, with a hungry gleam in their eyes, what it was I did with the herbs I gathered and the special soups I cooked. I taught them many a small trick, enough to please them and vex others, and often they would lie close and speak to me and to each other in the quiet way I had shown them, by rubbing their fingers lightly, lightly against their palms.

  When my husband asked me, as he sometimes did, where I had been gone all that time, I told him I had been away wandering the world. The world, I told him, was a grand thing as long as you stepped straight and kept to your course. If you did not, the world would hurt you. Or it would make you hurt yourself. He said he knew that already. I told him he did not know it in the way that I did.

  I grew quickly fatter and in the evenings, after his long day outdoors, my husband cooked our meals and did the cleaning while our girls rubbed my feet. They were miserable at letters, as I’d been before I left, though when I took up the paper and pack of quills I’d made their father fetch for me in town, they came and sat beside me and leaned in close.

  “Words can make a circle,” I told them. “Words in a circle can set a page afire.”

  “Show us,” they cried.

  “Bring me ink,” I said.

  They took up a cup, went outside, and tore the head off a chicken, which my husband scurried out after them to pluck. I dipped my quill when they were back and wrote, Said the wolf to the lamb, “Do you know who I am?” Said the lamb to the wolf, said the wolf to the lamb…Taking turnabout at each word, with much stumbling, they then read this aloud and, when finished, said it was nothing but a children’s rhyme and tossed it aside. A moment later, though, they shrieked with fear when they saw that the floor where the page had fallen had started to smoke.

  They had all sunk deep into the habit of churchgoing and church-thinking in my absence and had often, my husband told me, said a prayer for me. Now they wished, he said, to offer up their prayers at church in my company. I said I would not go to their church but did not forbid them from frequenting it once each week themselves. My husband took advantage of this arrangement, which gave us both freedom, to convince the great, fat parson attached to the valley church to come all the way up to our house on the mountain to bestow upon me his blessing. Still, when this fat personage had ridden to the gate at the edge of our yard and had seen me standing in the doorway of our house with a pipe in one hand and an ink-stained quill in the other, he would ride no farther and, despite my husband’s cajoling, quickly went away.

  I was not pleased by this visit and made my husband know it and to further instruct him took my daughters with me the next morning in our wagon. I had at first no destination in my mind, just the desire to roll far away for a moment from house and husband. Fast in this desire we rolled, fast and faster, until we were flying almost through the air instead of over the ruts of the foul little lanes that led down out of the mountains. My girls smiled at our speed, for their father, they told me, always drove slowly, so slowly that they thought they might turn to stone or salt and die of age before a journey’s end. We crossed no one as we left the mountains though saw many at a distance who, as we flew down toward them, wisely turned their mousy tails and ran. Spying them as they fled from us made me laugh and so my daughters laughed too for they attended me in all ways now. We laughed with our throats but spoke to one another as we flew with fingertip and palm, and tongue and mouth top, and in other ways I had taught them.

  Always they asked me about where I had been during the long years of my absence and who had kept me safe. I told them that no one had kept me safe, that I had not been safe, that there wa
s nowhere on this world or off it where we could be safe, not even for a minute. I tried more than once as we rode and as they looked into my eyes to tell them where I had been and what had happened there while I was kept but found each time I did that I could say only very little. A mist had settled over the images that twisted before my eyes, turning them, even as I could not look away, from memories of me to quill-scratched stories of someone else. Stories of Eliza. Another Eliza. The other Eliza. Eliza who was no longer me. My name had been Faith before, so it was Faith again. She was Eliza. All of it was hers now.

  It was with visions of the new Eliza and her life in the little stone house floating before me that I found we had flown far from the mountains to the very edges of the great dark wood. I would have pointed at it to show them, but my girls had fallen sloppily asleep and their soft heads lolled each in its own way against me. I slowed the team but still we stepped fast around the fringe of forest, around the blacks and browns of the tall trunks and swaying branches, past the heavier blacks of the shadows beyond. By and by we struck a stream that trickled past the trees, and the horses, slathered in sweat, followed it. We rode along the edges of the stream for a time then came to a farm. In front of the farm’s house was a boy. He was playing in a puddle. Leaping into and out of it. Even as I left my girls sleeping in the wagon and climbed down and crossed the stream and walked to him, he kept leaping in and out of his puddle. When I was almost to him he stopped suddenly and turned.

  “Good day, child,” I said.

  The boy did not speak. He held his hands at his sides and dripped down puddle water from his waist and arms.

  “Is this your house, child?”

  He did not speak. A man came and stood in the doorway of the house and looked out at the boy. The man had a great beard and a fearful smile and told the boy to come to him but the boy did not listen; he looked at me. As I watched, the boy lifted the piece of black bark I now saw was hanging from a rope of colored cloth around his neck and brought it to his eye.