A Dark and Starless Forest

by Sarah Hollowell

  Conjurer is one I’ve already rejected, but it’s the first thing I think to say.

  “It’s not bad, but doesn’t really click with me,” Jane says. “Are you done with the zucchini? The peppers could use it next.”

  Something twists in my gut and tells me to ask her. Just ask her. It’s probably nothing, but what if it’s not?

  I don’t ask her. I water the peppers and when Jane keeps looking back to the forest, I keep not asking.

  I don’t ask when we’re done in the garden, or when we go inside to play Monopoly with our siblings. Brooke handily beats us all, as usual. If anyone else notices Jane sneaking glances out to the forest through the kitchen window while she helps with the dishes after dinner, they don’t say so. Maybe they think she’s a little off, but that can be explained by a million things. Test day isn’t easy for anyone. Jane has depression, and it can manifest in nights like this, or her ADHD meds wearing off could have caused an energy crash.

  And I can’t talk to anyone about it, because I can’t explain why I’d be so freaked out about Jane just looking at the forest. Yeah, we’re not allowed in the forest, but we’re allowed to look at it.

  So I don’t say anything, and I don’t ask Jane anything. I go through the motions by her side. I eat dinner, I clear up, I pretend to concentrate on reading a book about black holes and other terrifying space phenomena.

  At the end of the night, I sit cross-legged on the floor of our dark bedroom with the little twins and Violet. Jane places two thick white pillar candles on our windowsill and lights them. She kneels. They all look out the window, up to the stars and the moon. It’s a ritual for wishing, or praying, or thinking about everything you’ve lost and everything you’ll never have.

  I stare at the flickering flames until my eyes start to burn and go blurry. I long for the mother who left me here. She and my dad didn’t want me anymore, but I want her to brush my hair and braid it before bed. I want to hear her humming and know that I’m safe.

  But I can’t. All I can see is blurry flames and blood in a forest clearing.

  After she blows out the candles, Jane puts the little twins to bed and Violet returns to their room. I stay up with the black hole book, but I’m still not reading it. I’m waiting for Jane to return. There are words built up in my throat and I’m going to get them out. When she comes back, I’m going to say, What do you keep looking at in the forest? Does it have to do with what happened? and I’m going to listen to her answers, and whatever’s wrong, we’re going to solve it together.

  I hear her footsteps coming up the stairs. I’m going to ask. As soon as she’s in the door, I’ll ask.

  But the words don’t come out, even though she’s standing right there and I’ve never struggled to talk to Jane before. Jane’s the only one I can always talk to.

  “Do you mind if I stay up a bit with a book light on?” she asks.

  I close my mouth, and shake my head. She smiles and settles at her desk.

  Just ask.

  I don’t. I decide that I can ask tomorrow, if anything’s even still wrong. Maybe she’s just distracted today and I’m overreacting. Tomorrow she’ll be normal, and I’ll laugh at myself for letting my anxiety take control, and we’ll keep our secret.

  2

  Jane is gone.

  I was having one of my regular nightmares. Just a few weeks before they left me with Frank, my mom showed me one of her favorite movies. It included a scene where a car falls off a bridge into water and the couple inside dies. It’s a funny movie after that—one of them’s a ghost, I think there’s basketball involved—but I could never get rid of that image. Once I ended up at the lake house, it started showing up in my nightmares. I’m trapped in a car, unable to scream, unable to move. The car sinks into water hazy with blood. Sometimes I’m alone. Sometimes my parents are in the front seat, but they’re unconscious and I can’t wake them up.

  That nightmare often makes me cry out, and it wakes Jane. Instead of turning over and going back to sleep, she comes to me. She rubs my back in circles. She talks in a low, soothing voice about the farm she lived on in her other life. I inhale the same unscented lotion we all wear but that still smells uniquely Jane, and eventually drift back to sleep.

  But Jane isn’t in her bed, and she’s not in mine, either.

  I sit up. I squint across the room, wondering if I’m not seeing her bed properly without my glasses. “Jane?” I whisper. The only answer is the steady hum of cicadas outside.

  She could be in the bathroom. I put on my glasses, get out of bed, and stick my head out our door. The bathroom door down the hall is open, and the light is off.

  “Jane?” I whisper again, even though I know she’s not there. I slip down the stairs to check the living room. Sometimes Jane has trouble sleeping and she’ll take to wandering. She’ll work on whatever puzzle is taking shape on the living room floor, or get a midnight snack.

  The nine flowers on the wall shelf glow enough for me to see that the puzzle of a sunny cliffside on the floor is half done, and that Jane isn’t here. I pause at the flowers, and briefly touch Jane’s warm camellia for comfort.

  I try hissing her name again—quieter, now. I’m too close to Frank’s part of the house. Even the small noise of her name rasping off my tongue brings anxiety close to the surface, vibrating just under my skin. Subcutaneously.

  That’s a good word. Subcutaneously.

  I only know one place left to try. I don’t know why Jane would risk it alone, much less on a night when Frank is home, but where else could she be?

  I move away from the living room on mouse-quiet feet to the little twins’ room. London and Olivia are asleep, and they’re deep sleepers, thank god. I don’t want to have to explain that Jane is missing, and I have to go down through our secret tunnel to the lake to try and find her.

  The little twins are smart, but too brave. They wouldn’t let me leave them behind. They’d scrunch up their faces in determination, hold hands, and refuse to budge until I let them help me find Jane.

  I tiptoe across the room, on the way nudging one of Olivia’s many makeshift terrariums more fully under her bed. What Olivia really wants is a cat, but that’s not going to happen, so last year she began her collection of moths and spiders. Her prized pet is a shiny black beetle named Gabriel. She found him on her recent birthday, and took it as a sign that he was her familiar. Gabriel gets his own elaborate terrarium, and Olivia likes to hold and play with him.

  I’m here for the wall nearest London’s bed. I glance at her as I pass. The foot of her bed is covered in books—a pretty good sign that she definitely stayed up even after Jane tucked her in. In sleep, her brow is unfurrowed, erasing that little worried frown she often has.

  The wall seems like nothing. Lavender and polka-dotted, it could be in any bedroom anywhere.

  I put my hands on two dots spaced just far enough that the little twins have to stretch when they do it. If you didn’t know what you were looking for, you’d never find it—but I do. The dots are soft and warm, as if someone has just been here.

  I want to believe that means Jane’s fingers touched these same dots only moments ago. It doesn’t mean anything, though. They’re always warm.

  But she was here. She has to have been. I can’t be far behind.

  I push on the dots. Not with physical strength—with magic.

  Just a little.

  Just enough.

  The wall parts; silently, like fog dispersing, a space appears.

  No one knows who made the passage, and I don’t know who found it first. When I arrived at the lake house, there were already three girls here, and it was just a Known Thing. In this bedroom, there’s a wall with old painted polka dots, and in the wall there’s a secret door, and behind the door, there’s a tunnel that shouldn’t exist, and the tunnel goes down, down, down, and you can only open the door with magic.

  Which means Frank can’t open it.

  We’re not allowed outside past sunset, and tech
nically not allowed outside at all without Frank’s supervision or permission. It’s for a good reason. If we strayed too far, Frank might not be able to protect us from people who would kill a “witch” on sight.

  No going past the tree line, no going out after dark, no going out when Frank’s gone.

  The rules exist for our safety, but we still bend them from time to time. We all know the alarm codes to the doors, but we can’t use them to leave when Frank’s gone because they keep a record. He’d know. Same if we want to go out at night while he’s asleep.

  So we use the tunnel when we want a better view of the stars, or we want to swim in the lake, or we just want to be out of the house. We never go out alone, and we don’t go into the forest.

  Usually.

  I close the bricks behind me and I’m engulfed in darkness. My anxiety is momentarily soothed. I’ve always found darkness comforting.

  I need at least a little light to walk by. Luckily, light’s always been my job in the tunnel. Once I arrived, the three sisters I joined no longer had to rely on flashlights.

  I touch the wall and push a thin ribbon of magic through the cracks and crevices in the brick. White flowers bloom out of the shadows. The petals open, revealing pistils and stamens that glow as bright as any electric light. The rim of my left ear tingles. Tiny green flowers have sprouted along it in response to my magic. I pull them out absentmindedly, long since used to the tugging sensation as they release from my skin, and I let my eyes adjust to the flower light.

  Jane’s worry is etched into the walls.

  When Jane is anxious, she reaches out. She takes hold of whatever she can find and fiddles with it, reshapes it with her magic. There’s a toy chest in every bedroom, and hidden deep at the bottom of ours are Jane’s favorites. Her mutated little darlings.

  Frank took the rest away. For research, he said. No matter how much Jane loved her creations, the research came first.

  Now, here, on the walls of our secret passage, I see the lines her fingers traced. They sank into the wall as her magic leaked out and left it looking like putty. When we went out a couple days ago, the walls were smooth. These marks are new.

  My heart beats faster. I was right. Jane went this way.

  I walk down, down, down. I keep my fingers in the grooves Jane left. The walls start to take on a wetness. It’s humid. The path stops going down and turns, leading me around the lake to the far edge.

  Finally, the path slopes upward. At the top, I don’t meet another brick wall—I meet the hot and humid air of a summer night that has refused to turn cool. There’s nothing physically blocking the passage on this side, only an illusion.

  I’m on the other side of the lake from the house, close to the forest. I can’t be seen from the house. Not at night.

  Still, I’ve never been out here alone. I’ve never been so aware of the forest, dark and looming, the shadows blending all the trees together into one hulking leviathan. I’ve never been so aware of the lake, so conscious of what I don’t know about its depths and what could be lurking in them.

  There’s that subcutaneous anxiety again. It’s like the blood in my veins has been injected with helium and it’s all rising up to the surface of me.

  I peer into the water. Violet has a book detailing creatures of the deep—bioluminescent fish waiting to strike, aquatic dinosaurs that never died but only went into hiding, squids bigger than ships. Violet’s book is about the ocean, not a lake, but I still squint into the water for a faint glow or writhing tentacle.

  Nothing.

  I swallow hard. The longer I stay, the more I’m sure that some monster could surface.

  “Jane?” I follow the edge of the lake. If she was in the tunnel and didn’t come back into the house, she has to be out here. The tunnel doesn’t let out anywhere else.

  All I hear is the drone of cicadas. This close to the forest, they’re deafening. A pulsing, vibrating hum that’s been the ambient noise of summer nights for as long as I can remember.

  They all go quiet at the same time.

  My legs jerk, like when you’re on the edge of sleep and something somewhere misfires. Elle told me what causes it once, but I can never remember what she said. To me it feels like a last gasp for survival. Your brain mistakes sleep for death, and it desperately, uselessly kicks out into the night.

  That’s how it feels now, wide awake, heart slamming into my rib cage, all at once sure I’m being watched and sure it’s by something I’ll wish had never noticed me at all.

  Somewhere in the forest a branch snaps underfoot. I try to call Jane’s name but my throat’s gone dry and whatever took the cicada’s voices must have taken mine, too.

  I dig my nails into my palms and approach the tree line.

  I haven’t been back in the forest since that day. We were never supposed to be there to begin with. The forest is too risky. It’s too far from the tunnel, too far to see if Frank has come home early. It’s too close to the outside world. But we went in, Jane and I.

  I swallow, attempting to wet my throat. “Jane?” I hiss. “Are you in there?”

  There’s no response. The cicadas and Jane keep their silence.

  I dare to speak a little louder. “Jane? We have to go back.” Every moment I’m out here I’m viscerally—good word—aware of Frank and the possibility that he’ll wake up, do a bed check, and find us missing. Or worse, that a stranger could find us and recognize us for what we are.

  I’m going to have to go into the forest, aren’t I? We swore we’d never go back, but I have to.

  Step by step, I make my way through the trees. With each step, I breathe a little easier. There’s still no Jane, but there’s also no blood splattered across trunks. Just me, bare feet on grass, sweat drying on my skin. There’s nothing writhing out of the shadows to get me.

  Yet.

  “Jane?”

  I hold my breath, trying to hear her above the voice in my head screaming GO BACK GO BACK. I don’t know what’s out here watching me, I don’t know why Jane isn’t answering, I don’t know what the punishment will be if Frank discovers I’ve been outside. The voice whispers that Jane would want me safe in bed, dirty feet tucked under blankets where Frank can’t see, waiting for her to return home.

  Because there’s no outcome other than “Jane comes home.”

  A breeze rustles the treetops. I look up. An endless canopy, and beyond it, gently glimmering stars that have no idea my world down here is threatening to fall apart.

  Someone runs past me on the left, only a few yards away. I run after them, shouting for Jane.

  The person stops with their back to me. I freeze. We’re still separated by a few yards, and they’re engulfed in shadows so I can’t see much. The shape is similar to Jane’s. The way they stand, with one foot in front of the other, is one of Jane’s quirks.

  But Jane wouldn’t run away from me.

  Their head moves, turns, just barely to the side. They look like they’re made of shadows, but that has to be a visual trick. I’m not breathing. I don’t want them to see me. I’m overwhelmed with the sense that if they see me, I won’t exist anymore. I’ll disintegrate, or dissolve, or disappear. Their head moves a little more and I take one step back.

  They look over their shoulder. A flash of yellow, owlish eyes.

  Like a thunderclap right over my head, every cicada bursts back into discordant, vibrating song.

  I run.

  It’s not a voluntary action. It’s like the falling-asleep-leg-jerk. This is my body kicking out into the night, desperate to survive.

  But I can’t leave Jane out here with that. I abruptly switch course before my legs take me out of the forest, hooking my arm around a young tree and planting my feet. I’m already in here. It already knows I’m here. I can’t leave without Jane.

  Except I also can’t feel her. I was never aware I could feel her presence before it was gone. Now it’s a gaping absence, like a forest of silent cicadas. It flickers back in, then out, then in. />
  She’s here, but she isn’t. It’s an impossible thing and I can’t explain how I know it, but it’s true. Jane is here in the forest, but she’s also gone. Gone somewhere so far I don’t know where to start looking.

  “Jane?” I whisper. “Jane, if you can hear me, please. Help me find you.”

  Give me a sign, like a ghost story.

  Over the cicadas I’m not going to be able to hear her voice or hear anyone running. I can, however, see the shadows growing darker in the depths of the forest. They’re advancing, like lights turning off down the length of a hallway. They climb and climb until I can’t see the stars anymore.

  I can’t stay here alone. I can’t leave Jane here alone.

  Irene.

  Irene’s magic has to do with sensing emotions, and Frank’s been having her learn to use it to track people. She hasn’t gotten good at it, but it’s worth a shot. It could be the only chance we have.

  How do you find a girl who’s here but not here?

  “Jane!” I yell, no longer bothering to hide from whatever’s in the forest. There’s no point. “Jane, I’m coming back for you. I’m getting help and coming back. Wait for me!”

  When I run this time, it’s with purpose. I’m going to get Irene. She’s going to find Jane. It’ll turn out all the shadows I feel chasing me are just part of my imagination. The way they slam into the tree line, apparently unable to follow me into cleared land? You think and see all sorts of weird things when you’re alone in the dark.

  Maybe Jane was sleepwalking. That’s why she didn’t respond to me. Irene will find her curled up under a tree, and we’ll all laugh, relieved. We’ll go home and Frank won’t know we ever left. It will become a whispered funny story between siblings. Remember that time Jane sleepwalked out to the forest and Derry became convinced something evil lived there?