Solstice Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “And she wouldn’t bite?”

  “Not even a nibble. So I took a chance, when I heard about you—you live so far away, maybe you wouldn’t want to take on such a big place way out here.”

  I looked at the hall, sitting like a placid old tortoise in the sunlight, moss growing on its roof and the mortar cracking under the grip of ivy. “What do you want it for?” I asked bemusedly. “Another shopping mall?”

  “No, no, Miz Lynn, we’d never do that to it. Titus Quest Company is committed to preserving the integrity and historical authenticity of these old villages. That includes grounds, of course. We’d want the entire property: gardens, and whatever fields still belong and the wood…”

  “For what? A sort of museum?”

  He nodded vigorously. “Exactly. A sort of museum.” He paused, eyeing me hopefully. I gazed back at him, baffled. It would be an easy out for me; he seemed eager to have it as is. But why, exactly, still eluded me. Development companies made money from condos and malls, not village museums.

  Maybe there was gold in Gram’s wood.

  I remembered the groceries still in the car, Gram waiting for them, the disturbing question of Tyler. “Well. Thank you, Mr. Coyle. I’ll keep you in mind. Of course, I can’t make any decision about the place at all, so soon after…”

  He nodded, arranging his face suitably. “Of course. I understand. That’s all Titus Quest Company asks now. That you keep us in mind.”

  He got into his truck and backed out the drive. I let his card fall into the grocery bag, totally perplexed. I heard the front door heave open and turned, nudging the car door shut behind me with my bootheel.

  I nearly dropped the groceries, seeing what came out to meet me.

  10

  Relyt

  I woke up drenched. Water, I thought. Pond water. Wet and slimy as the frog in the tale; I must have just changed shape. But there was no one around to change me. Then I felt the light pouring in the window, heavy and hot, steaming me, stewing me, making a broth out of my sweat. I got my head out from under the pillow. There were things coming out of my ears. I was a bug with antennae in a cocoon. I had to unlayer myself from twists and tangles of damp cloth to find out what I had turned into.

  Finally, everything else was on the floor. I looked and found some of the words: sheets, blankets, wires, pillow, little clam thing that opened when it hit the floor, popping out a perfect circle. Staring at it, I found its word in my head. CD. Music. I sat on the empty bed, making more words as I looked around the room. Some I knew; some were new. But I found them all in my head, all the ones I needed.

  I saw my face in the mirror across the room. Like still water, its surface, and clear, so clear you could dive into it, get to the other world inside it. The Otherworld. I smiled at my face, wondering if the mirror would crack at what it saw. But no. It didn’t care. It just said what it saw, dank teeth and mossy hair and all. Skinny body, white as a fish. Feet that could grow mushrooms in the dirt on the soles.

  Well, I go where she tells me.

  I smelled something that wasn’t me. Something that made me want to follow it. Want to eat it. I got out of bed, started to track it. Words caught my eye before I got out the door. Pants. Shirt. Hide this, hide that. Brush, comb, wash. File, scrub, deodorize. Rinse, spit. Some of the words were very faint. Others just lay on the bottom of my mind and nodded at me without bothering to get up. I shrugged back at them. How was I to know which? Teeth and feet gave me the broad picture. Shrug. But she said: Do what they do, my clever one.

  So I did. All of it.

  Then I followed the smell, which was smaller now, but still there in the air, sweet and warm and dense. I found it in the room called kitchen, where the witch Gram was stirring her cauldron.

  She jumped when she saw me. What? I thought wildly. What did I do?

  “What’s that smell?” She sniffed, and her black witch eyes widened at me. “Tyler. Is that my old bubble bath?”

  “Vanilla musk,” I said, staring into her pot.

  “You took a bath?”

  I showed her the bottoms of my feet. And then my teeth. She scratched one eyebrow with her left thumb, making me shy again. I couldn’t find a word for that magic.

  She turned back to her stirring. “Are you hungry?” I nodded so hard I thought my head might fall off. “I just made Hurley a toasted cheese sandwich. How does that sound?”

  “Like a toasted cheese sandwich.”

  She made a little toad-noise in the back of her throat, then shook her head a little. I waited for her to speak the words of the spell for the toasted cheese sandwich. But nothing happened. So I had to wait longer while she took out more words, bread and cheese, sliced and melted, turned and turned, while a hollow thing with wicked teeth tried to eat my insides, and I could see the colors the smells made in the air.

  Finally, she put it on a plate and gave it to me. I bit into it, and it bit back. I whined like a dog, feeling cheesy strings hanging out of my mouth. She poured me cold milk, watched me drink it.

  “No wonder you’re gobbling your food. You missed supper and spent half the night running around in the wood. Well. At least you’re out of bed by noon, today. Good. You can go upstairs and give Hurley a hand with whatever he’s building in the attic.”

  Hurley. The Grunc. I nodded. He had a magic eye, she said. I must find it and tell her what form it took. If it was magic in itself, or if the power lay in the Grunc Hurley.

  “Okay,” I said. A strange word, but I liked saying it. OK. O. K. Oak. Hay. Oak. Aye. Eye.

  “And keep an eye on him. Don’t let him lift anything heavy or take a saw to anything that holds up the house.”

  “Okay,” I said again.

  “It’s good to have you here, Tyler,” she said. “I’m very glad you came to visit. It’ll do us good to have some company now. Someone else to think about.”

  She touched my hair when she said that, stroked it like a cat. Then I felt her hand come away too fast, as though it felt something it didn’t expect. Hair like a mirror. Or like twigs. I just ate my food. I felt her eyes on me. Her witch’s gaze.

  Then she heard her pot bubbling on the stove and turned away from me. But bubbles had a fat, rich, gamy scent, so I said, “I’ll have some of that, too.” More words came, just as I felt her eyes again. “Please, Gram?”

  “It’s stew I’m putting together for supper. You can have another sandwich if you want.”

  “Okay,” I said. I smiled at her, and waggled my eyebrows up and down, which was another thing that my head told me to do. She made her toad-noise in her throat, but then she laughed after that, so I was safe.

  When I finished the second one, I followed the pounding noise up and up into the top of the house. I found the Grunc in the hollow part under the roof. The attic. It had windows under the eaves. I could see the wood. So could his eye, which was pointed at it. His other eyes were busy seeing the wood in his hands, the hammer and nails, the saw and saw-horses, the little pile of dust the saw had chewed up and spat back out.

  “Hey, Hurley,” I said. His great cobwebby brows lifted; his eggy eyes with their blue cloudy yolks widened at me. His mouth stretched.

  “Tyler. You came to visit me.”

  “Gram sent me up to help you.”

  I smelled mice and bats, ants, furry molds, and damps. There were words everywhere; most smelled old. Some I recognized from other times. That mantelpiece. That clock, that didn’t say anything, though it must have recognized me. That old painting, with the face in it that might have belonged to one of us. I saw us in its foxy jaw, its great wild eyes, its hair like the night-wind blowing over the world. Those eyes seemed to watch me.

  “I’m making a revolving platform for my telescope,” the Grunc said. He stepped on a big, thick square of wood raised a few inches above the floor underneath a window in the roof. Skylight. The platform sagged a little, but didn’t break. He put one foot on the floor and the platform revolved creakily as he walked it around. “This
way I can keep the telescope in one spot and see out any of the windows—north, south, east, west—well, not north unless those doors are open.”

  “Wow,” I said, another good word. Or was it whoa? Woe. “Brilliant, Grunc.”

  “Thank you, boy. Want to help me saw?”

  He didn’t see me out of the eyes in his head. In those eyes I was what he expected. The boy Tyler. Not the Other, the reflection. Sometimes they see. They see the shadow that doesn’t quite match, so I stay where light doesn’t fall. Or else on crooked surfaces, like stone and grass and old floors covered with forgotten things. Or they see our eyes reflecting moon or fire, so I stay in shadow at night. Or they feel, like Gram. They feel what they can’t see. Maybe fingers longer than the eye sees, or hair not right for humans. Or they see the footprint on the ground with the wrong number of toes, or longer than the foot. Such things say that we don’t belong here: we are Other.

  But mostly, they just see what they expect.

  I held the wood steady while he sawed. Molding, he called the long, thin stretch of wood. For a frame around the edge of the platform. To make it look nice. When he finished sawing, he glued the pieces into place. No nails, he said. Might crack the platform. So while he hunkered down, placing his pieces, I wandered over to his other eye, standing by itself and staring out a window. I looked into it.

  I saw her in the trees, gazing back at me.

  I started. And then, when I looked again, she faded; she went elsewhere. Maybe she was a tree; maybe she was the sleeping owl in the tree. I felt a hand reach out of me toward her, an invisible thing coming out of where they say we have no hearts. I was here; she was there. I was solid; she was air. I was shadow; she was light. No matter how close they lie, shadow and light, next to each other, so close there is no word for the place where they touch, they never enter one another’s realm. So she seemed that far from me, even though I saw her fading like a dream in the Grunc Hurley’s third eye.

  But there are ways. Passages. Places to cross to and from, where even the witches’ stitches haven’t reached. So I came here, and he went there, where now he was with her, and I wasn’t. I go where I am told. Nobody, not even she, told me not to have my own thoughts about it.

  “There,” Hurley said, pulling himself straight on his slow legs. “All glued and clamped down. We’ll let it set and then we’ll paint it. And then I’ll mount the telescope. Did you have a look out there?” He came over next to me, put his eye to it. “What did you see in the wood?”

  “Trees,” I said. “Mostly.” The wood that humans saw held a lot of words. But what they didn’t see was an entire, ancient realm. Oh, they knew a few words, enough to say in their old tales and songs that it was there. But they had shut their eyes long ago; they didn’t see anymore what was real. Now they only saw the words for it.

  The Grunc made a sudden noise. I looked at him, wondering if he could see her. Then I saw what he saw: the red car on the gravel at the corner of the house, next to the black. Truck.

  The Grunc made his grunting noise again. Doors thunked open, closed. I saw the cousin Syl’s shadow, spilling over gravel and grass as she talked to someone standing on the other side of her car. Her hair was the color of fairy gold; her face could have belonged to us. No one knew about her, what her eyes saw. Find out, my clever one, I was told. See what she can see.

  “There she is,” Hurley murmured.

  “Maybe she needs help,” I said. I had to let her look at me, let her face tell me what her eyes saw. If her face said doubt, said wonder, or horror, or confusion, if it couldn’t find the word for what it saw, then I would know what to do next.

  “I don’t think she needs help with anything,” the Grunc said.

  I saw where he was looking then: into the wood. The thing in me that wasn’t a heart made a leap like a toad. I moved too fast; my hand blurred, reaching for the telescope. I saw my true hand, long and twiggy, skin like bark. I stopped myself before Hurley saw. He raised his head, blinked, both his eyes staring down at the wood.

  “She’s gone again.”

  “Who?” I asked him, my voice shaky like an owl’s. “Who?”

  But when he turned toward me he saw Syl in the window across from us. He forgot to answer me. “There’s Sylvie,” he said happily. The stranger and his truck had gone. “Looks like she could use some help with those groceries.”

  “Looks like,” I said, and pulled my shadow out of the light on the floorboards before he saw my gnarly fingers, my bramble hair. “I’ll go.”

  I shambled my barefoot, droopy-legged way downstairs. There were no animals in the house, at least nothing tame, that would wonder at me, scold or cringe when they saw me, or fluff out twice their size and yowl. I didn’t think the cuz Syl would do any of those things when she saw me coming out of the house. But her eyes did grow big; her hair might have straightened a little, for a moment.

  “Tyler?”

  Her arms were full of a bag. I took it, smelled more things to eat. “Hay, Syl,” I said. “High.”

  “You’re out of bed.”

  “It was too hot in there.”

  “What is that—” She bobbed her head at me and sniffed. Then she drew back, stared at me askew, her eyes puckered up. “What is that smell?”

  “Vanilla bubbles.”

  “You took a bath? And you’re helping me with the groceries?” Her eyes squinted at me some more. “Are you all right? Owen Avery said you had an accident with his rowboat last night.”

  I nodded. “I fell out.”

  “Well, what were you doing rowing in his pond in the middle of the night, anyway?” She closed her eyes, opened them again. “Listen to me. Of course I know why you were out on the water on a summer night. I did that often enough myself. But Owen was really worried. Are you—I mean besides the bath—”

  “And I brushed my teeth.”

  “It’s worse than I thought.” Her eyes stared at me again, the pale golden brown of ripe hazelnuts. I didn’t know what they saw. “Is that,” she said slowly, “all you want to tell me about last night?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing to tell.”

  “You didn’t see anything strange? You weren’t—Nothing frightened you?”

  “Nothing.” I picked through words, found another one useful for dealing with humans. “I’m sorry about the boat. Did it sink?”

  “No. It’ll be fine. But, Tyler, be careful. You disappear into the woods at night; you are careless in water. You run around with a girl who calls herself Undine.”

  “Judith,” I said, doing the Tyler amble back to the house. “She was there, too, and nothing happened to us. It’s summer, and the dark smelled like frogs and trees. The fireflies were blinking messages back and forth. I was standing up in the boat trying to catch one and I lost my balance and we both fell in. Then Owen Avery saw us and we swam away in the dark. That’s all. I guess he recognized me.”

  I wasn’t sure she did, but I couldn’t tell until after I put the grocery bag in the kitchen, and I went out again, stood in the hall so I could listen to what they said.

  Gram said a lot first, words like clean and polite, helpful, breakfast with her instead of the TV. “He’s a different boy,” she said. “It’s as though he turned into someone else overnight.”

  And then Syl spoke, and I knew she hadn’t seen me with her hazelnut eyes; she didn’t have a clue.

  “I think he’s just in love.”

  11

  Iris

  Tarrant Coyle’s card came fluttering out of the paper grocery bag while I was folding it up. I took one look at it and tore it into confetti.

  “Idiot!” I said so sharply that Sylvia, sitting quietly at the table and staring into her coffee, jumped. “Sylvia Lynn, if you let Titus Quest Company have this place, I’ll haunt your marriage bed when I’m dead.”

  The startled expression on her face made my brows jump up. Then she hid behind a sip of coffee. “Okay, I won’t. But why does he want it? He said something about a museum.”


  “Pah! That man wouldn’t recognize a museum if he were hanging on a wall with a plaque under him.”

  “Well, then—”

  “He knows something. Or he thinks he knows something. He thinks he can make money off of it.”

  Her eyes grew very wide. “You mean—about what you’re warring with in the woods?”

  “He hasn’t a clue. It means Tinkerbell to him, little glowing lights at the far end of the garden, tiny winged creatures who wear acorn caps on their heads and ride black beetles for horses and feast on nectar and strawberries. He’d turn my wood into a kind of theme park.”

  Sylvia inhaled coffee on an incredulous laugh. “Gram,” she said weakly when she stopped coughing. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Try him. He’d open all the passages in Lynn Hall and wait to see what came through.”

  She sobered at the thought, told me, after a moment, what was on her mind. “I don’t want to discuss anything yet. I mean about how long I’m staying.”

  “No,” I answered equably, tossing a pinch of lavender in the stewpot to make the kitchen smell good. I’d seen her red car on that long road running between fields to the Avery place; whatever was talked about there had given her something to think about.

  “I’ll call the shop tomorrow if I decide to stay a little longer. But before I leave, I thought we might go through the hall, and I’ll make a list of things that need to be done. Now, if you’d like.”

  “That would be helpful.” I started cleaning the leeks she’d brought me. I really wanted to dance across the kitchen floor, cackling with glee, seize her in my hands and whirl her around a few times. But I controlled myself. “Very helpful. Just let me finish here.”

  I chopped the leeks, trying for once in my life to be tactful, not to say the thing that might force her to a hasty decision. Hurley was still playing in the attic; I wasn’t sure where Tyler had gone. Back up to visit Hurley, or to his room, or out in the wood maybe, loitering in hope of his Undine. Syl had to be right about him, I thought. Love would make a growing boy brush his teeth and smell like a candy dish. I hadn’t even seen then what he had done to his bedroom.