Solstice Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He reminded me of a game I’d downloaded where you have to battle your way through a primeval landscape full of flowers with shooting killer seeds and vines like boa constrictors and enormous lumbering things like fire-breathing tortoises. So I sat at the window, and that’s what I was playing.

  The window was open; everything was dead still. Sometimes I smelled the killer flowers in Gram’s garden, sometimes the gigantic ferns that were as tall as the trees outside. I heard a rustling. At first I thought it was the game. But when I looked up, I heard it outside, and I thought for a moment that I had accidentally fallen into the game.

  Then I saw her.

  She looked unreal, floating in and out of moon and shadow. A thought somebody had forgotten to put away. A memory. The way her white dress seemed to drift around her, and her hair melted into dark, then light, then dark. A ghost. I shifted, turning my head to see her more clearly, and she saw me. I knew that because she stopped in a patch of moonlight, with her face turned up toward me. So she wasn’t a thought or a ghost. She was somebody real, a villager, wandering around Gram’s wood in the middle of the night.

  I put the laptop aside and pushed my head out the window. She didn’t run. She didn’t move. She just looked up at me, her face the color of moonlight and her hair like a curly tangle of spiderweb. She stood like a statue; I couldn’t even see her breathe.

  And then she raised one hand and told me with her fingers to come down.

  I forgot my shoes, I went out so fast, but I had socks on, and I was careful going through the roses. Some of those old bushes had tentacles like giant squids; they should have been in the game with the killer flower-seeds. I missed them all though. She waited at the edge of the trees, where the lawn ends and the wood begins. Close-up, I could see the freckles on her white skin. And the dirt and pulled threads and fraying lace on her dress. She wore sandals, not much more than a sole and a couple of plastic straps. Her feet were dirty. She wore rings on her toes and most of her fingers and on the rims of her ears. They were all silver; they flashed little stars all around her in the moonlight. Close-up, her milky hair was matted with leaf-bits and twigs, as though she had been lying on the ground. Her face was small and secret; her eyes were big and shadowy. I couldn’t tell their color. Close-up, she smiled at me, and she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.

  “I’m Undine,” she whispered, and took my hand.

  She led me through the trees until I stepped on a bramble and let out a yell that probably brought Grunc straight up off his couch. Undine waddled in circles around me and laughed so hard her nose ran; she had to wipe it on her skirt. By then I was beginning to laugh, though I was limping on one heel. She pulled me over to a shadow under a tree and we sat down. My cousin’s light was still on, but she hadn’t come to her window; she must have had better things to do. The rest of the house was dark.

  “You’re Tyler,” Undine said then, keeping her voice soft.

  “How did you know?”

  “Everyone knows everything around here. Anyway, I remember seeing you around the village before, when you came to visit with your parents.”

  I looked at the ground between us. “My dad’s dead. Car crash, two years ago. My mom’s going on her second honeymoon after Grandpa Liam’s funeral.”

  She didn’t say what I expected about my grandpa; she just nodded and asked, “Where are they going?”

  “Sailing, somewhere. I’m staying here with Gram.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Patrick?” I shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s just some stranger who likes my mom. Seems all right. He doesn’t tell me what to do, doesn’t expect me to call him ‘Dad’ or anything gross like that.” I touched my glasses straight. “He thinks I’m weird. I see it in his eyes. Like he doesn’t really think I’m human.”

  She leaned a little closer to me, over her crossed knees. “Maybe you’re not.”

  “He was probably a jock at my age. White teeth, just enough brains, basketball and soccer, girlfriends since kindergarten… He never paid attention to the cave-dwellers, the geeks in glasses. If he has a son, it won’t be like me. That’s what his eyes say.”

  “You don’t like him.”

  I shrugged again. “It’s not that. I just don’t care.”

  “What was your dad like?”

  That made me smile, almost. “More like me.” Then it was like a door trying to open inside of me, and me shoving against it, trying to keep out all kinds of things I didn’t want to look at, not yet anyway. I won this time. I swallowed what felt like a bramble. “Anyway. That’s why I’m staying for a while with Gram and Hurley.”

  “And who else?” she asked. “There’s a red car spending the night in the driveway.”

  “Oh. That’s my cousin Syl. She flew out for the funeral.”

  “Do you like her?”

  I thought about that, how she used to have long, curly, dark hair, and glasses like me, and she wore jeans all the time. When we came to visit, she would hug me and let me follow her around, show her bugs and old nests, stuff. Now she wore tight skirts and cool boots. Her hair was like a golden bell; I could see her face. She wore contacts; I could see her eyes. She had grown out of herself into someone else, who drove and carried a cell phone, who had a job in a big city on the other side of the country.

  But she still wanted to hug me; her eyes told me that. She was still Syl, my cuz, and I could still show her weird bugs if I wanted. So I said, “Yeah. I like her.”

  “Your grandmother is scary,” Undine said. “She sees things.”

  I looked at her, wondering what she meant. “Does she know you run around in her woods at night? Does she see you do that?”

  “I don’t know. Your grandfather saw me sometimes, but he didn’t care. He showed me things—where the underground stream runs, and where a squirrel buried its seeds for the winter, and where the first violets grow when the ground thaws.” She paused, picking a leaf off the ground and frowning at it. “I’m sorry he’s gone,” she said finally, what I expected to hear, but now I knew it was true.

  I asked her curiously, “What are you doing in my Gram’s wood in the dark?”

  She looked back at me without blinking; I saw tiny moons in her eyes. “I’m searching for the magic.” She was whisper-ing again, so softly not even wind could have heard. “I want to be a witch.”

  I rubbed the sore spot on my foot where the bramble had bit me. “Don’t you need a book or something? Or a coven? Candles and chants and stuff?”

  “No. Not that kind of a witch. I want to be a wood-witch. They know everything there is to know about plants and animals. They can hear trees talk, and they always know where the moon will rise. Toads are their familiars. Birds bring them messages. If I were a true witch, the bramble would have moved out of our path before you stepped on it. True witches know all the secret places that open to the other world.”

  I felt my mouth struggling with that one, before I could say it. “What other world?”

  “The world beyond this one. They come and go—”

  “Who? Witches?”

  “No. Them. They. They’ve been doing it for centuries around here. They have their places of passage. Mostly by water, because water goes wherever it wants. Sometimes they pass between worlds through trees, but there aren’t many old enough, not in this wood. Most of the old ones got chopped down ages ago. You can tame a forest. But no one ever really knows what water will do. Even here. You wake up one morning, and there’s a lake in your basement. Or the shallow stream across the road got huge and carried away a house. Or your well is dry; the water has gone elsewhere. It has its secret ways. So do they.”

  I was breathing through my mouth; it had gone dry. “Who?”

  “You should know. You’re related to them.”

  I didn’t understand a word she was saying. But it didn’t matter. It was like watching a movie, I decided. Part of you gets caught up in it; the other part of you knows it’s not real. I watched the li
ttle silver stars wink on her ears and smelled the fruit-candy whiffs of her shampoo and watched her body shift under the white dress when she scratched herself or yawned.

  “Who?” I asked now and then. “Who?”

  But it was dangerous to say; nobody really called them anything, or spoke of them much; people just knew they existed. Some people. “They’re ancient,” she said dreamily. “They lived here before people ever came.”

  She was telling me fairy tales, I realized. About people who only pretended they were human, who lured true humans into their strange world with their great, eerie powers. I couldn’t tell if this was good or bad. According to Undine, their world was maybe very beautiful, maybe deadly, maybe both. Being in it could change you. You never saw your own world the same way after you’d seen theirs. If they let you go, once they caught you.

  “It’s in your blood,” Undine told me. “Because you’re a Lynn. Your heritage. Part of you belongs to the world within the wood.”

  I was getting sleepy. I stretched out while Undine tried to explain magic to me. I put my hands under my head and watched the stars above the trees. At home, in the city night, I only saw a handful at a time, and half of them were airplanes. Here, they swarmed, they flowed, they glittered like sequins. They actually made the shapes on the star map Syl had sent me for my eighth birthday. The Hunter, the Bears, the Seven Sisters. I closed my eyes for just a moment, trying to remember how to find the north star. I thought Undine was still talking when I opened my eyes again.

  But I was alone.

  I got off the ground, feeling stiff and clammy. The moon was disappearing; the wood had grown darker. Something scuttled under a bush, made me jump. I could see the hall by the fading moonlight reflected in the upper windows. Syl must have fallen asleep with her lamp on. I wondered if I was the only person awake in the world.

  Then I saw Undine again, a faint scrap of white on the other side of a field, just about to disappear into the same dark wall of mountain that was swallowing the moon. Before she vanished completely, I saw spangles of white fire blaze all around her, as though the entire constellation of her rings, ears and fingers and toes, had caught moonlight at once. I wanted to shout, it was so amazing. Magic, I thought. That’s what she meant by magic. It made my heart float. I watched for a long time, but she and the moon had both melted away.

  So I took the long walk home through the lurking brambles in my socks.

  3

  Syl

  I didn’t remember falling asleep. I remembered putting down the last page of Rois Melior’s tale. And then I was fighting my way out of some strange underground passage guarded with thorns and enormous roses. I could see light in the distance, the end of the tunnel, but it seemed impossibly far away, and I kept getting grabbed by thorns and blinded and smothered and confused by huge blooms looming in my face.

  Then I woke abruptly and thought: I forgot to call Madison.

  It was very early; morning sunlight hadn’t reached the wood yet. I listened, heard water run in the pipes, something clank in the kitchen. Gram, probably, making coffee. No using the phone in the kitchen, then. I didn’t feel like explaining Madison to Gram; I didn’t want my separate worlds to touch.

  I’d met him a year earlier in the bookstore, browsing the music section during our Third Birthday party. A year later, we were closer than ever. I knew he was content with me. I had thought he was just as content in his musical universe with his students and his weekend folk band, his disorderly apartment full of vinyls, books, old sheet music, and peculiar instruments, his shaggy dog who howled when he played the nose harp, or the saw, or the didgeridoo.

  “You must live in here like a ghost,” he commented, awed, when he first saw my spotless studio apartment. “If you jumped with both feet into a puddle, you wouldn’t leave a footprint on your carpet.”

  It was true that I vacuumed up cat hair twice a day and didn’t keep much in my fridge besides coffee beans and nail polish. “I like knowing where things are,” I told him.

  “No surprises.”

  “It’s not that. Maybe I just like to be prepared for anything.”

  And I truly didn’t mind vacuuming the stray dog hair that came in on his jeans, or storing the odd jars of spices, capers, olives, whiskey marmalade he liked to cook with. Or the things falling on my head in his apartment when I opened a closet to hang my clothes, or the phone that was always buried under something. I loved his music; he loved my books. But I thought the differences between us pretty much marked the boundaries of our friendship. Venturing past them, we would find pitfalls, chasms, dragons.

  I thought that was plain to him, too. So I was astonished when he brought up the idea of change.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t love him, I explained. It was just obvious that we already had irreconcilable differences; living in our opposite worlds, we had already gone as far as we could safely go.

  “Why? Because I have dog hairs and you have cat hairs? Because you can never find a hanger in my closet? I leave toothpaste open on the bathroom sink? You’ll get over it. You love me.”

  I loved a thousand things about him. His long black hair and placid temper, his big hands that could play a penny-whistle, open any jar, his cooking, his deep voice, his music.

  “I love a thousand things about you,” I told him firmly. “But not enough to marry them.”

  “Think about it,” he suggested. “That’s all I’m asking now.”

  “No.”

  “You will anyway,” he said calmly, “now that I put the thought into your head.”

  But I didn’t want to think about it, let alone bring his name up in Gram’s kitchen. Whatever else, he was my good friend; I missed his voice; I had promised to call him when I got myself safely to Lynn Hall. Since I’d asked him not to call me here, he couldn’t do much besides wonder.

  I got up, showered quickly, and put on black jeans, a gray sweater, boots. Early mornings in the mountains, even on the threshold of summer, could be chilly. But that was the price of privacy, since I couldn’t find reception for my cell phone in the bedroom, and I didn’t want to roam around the house searching for it.

  So I went to roam the woods instead, sneaking past the kitchen to the back door, which opened without the fuss and drama of the main door. I cut through the rosebushes into the wood and started dialing. Nothing. I wandered through the trees, hearing squirrels scold and birds flit among the leaves, nameless things scurry through the bracken, everything but the sound of Madison’s phone ringing.

  That’s when I saw her.

  I stared mindlessly at her, lost in that little, enchanted moment when you recognize something unexpectedly, overwhelmingly beautiful. She seemed another expression of the wood, as natural and astonishing as an oak full of owls, or a perfect ring of scarlet mushrooms. Like a figure hidden in a painting, she seemed visible only because I had seen her. My eyes could just as easily have told me that her hair was light, her eyes leaf, her skin the tender white of birch, her garments tree bark, root, earth.

  Then I realized she was looking back at me.

  Time shifted abruptly. I wasn’t in her timeless moment any longer; she had melted into mine, and that was when I felt my heartbeat. In my walks with Grandpa Liam, he had shown me the fawn hidden in the underbrush, the rare wild orchid, the eagle’s nest, but he had never shown me this bit of wildness and put a name to it. I knew her, though. Who wouldn’t? She was as old as words, and she might have just stepped out of Rois Melior’s story to find me.

  I had run to the other side of a continent, surrounded myself with stone, so that we would never meet. She recognized me, too; her eyes darkened to that deep, late-summer green with its hint of shadow. She took a step toward me; I took a step back, stumbled against a root. She stopped, raised her hand to stop me, and I heard her voice, a murmur of wind, a lilt of water in it.

  “Stay,” she pleaded. “Talk to me. Tell me your name.”

  I pointed my cell phone at her like a weapon and diale
d 911. It was all I could think of, and of course nothing happened. Why would she fear my little handful of technology when there were telephone poles and pylons everywhere in the woods? And even if I’d gotten through, what would I have said? The Queen of Faery was standing in front of me, wanting to chat?

  “I know your father,” she said.

  I felt the blood slide out of my face, leaving it icy. The cell phone slipped through my fingers.

  “I don’t—” My voice came only in a harsh, raw whisper. “I don’t want to know.” I took another step back, felt brambles snag my jeans. “Leave me alone.”

  “How can I? Your heart’s blood calls to me.” She came closer to me, then, without seeming to move, as though she had drifted on a passing breeze. “You are mortal, you are faery, you are the bridge across our boundaries.”

  I glanced quickly behind me, as though Gram in her kitchen could hear. “How dared you show yourself in this wood?” I demanded. “How can you?”

  “Death opens doors not even the witch of Lynn Hall can see. She will never listen to me; she has stopped her ears with her own stitches. But if you tell her, maybe she will begin to listen.”

  “Tell her what?”

  She seemed very close, something strange and beautiful and extremely dangerous in Gram’s wood, like the pale and lovely Destroying Angel that Grandpa Liam would sometimes show me, growing in its solitary splendor under a tree.

  “What you are.”

  I turned and ran, scrabbling for my cell phone and jerking free of the thorns in my first ragged step. I didn’t want to face Gram; I was shaking, my skin still cold. I pulled off my boots at the porch, snuck back upstairs for my purse and car keys, and drove away to clear my head before I called Madison. I would never go into the wood again, I decided. I would stay around people. I’d leave as soon as possible after the funeral. Nobody could tell me what to do, force me to stay, not Gram, not even the Queen of the Wood. I’d fly back to my city of stone and stay there forever.