A Dark and Starless Forest

by Sarah Hollowell

  ‘Don’t go back,’ Brooke signs. ‘Promise me. It’s too dangerous.’

  My hands come up, ready to argue. Brooke stops me with a shake of her head. ‘Please. Promise me.’

  I don’t want to. I’m too scared it’ll be a lie. The way the forest killed that fire should be enough to warn me off. It’s a blazing neon sign saying SOMETHING IS WRONG HERE.

  It’s had the opposite effect. I want to go back and learn how it did that. That’s where the power is. That’s where I learn to find Jane and Winnie.

  But Brooke’s lip is quivering even though she’s trying hard to conceal it, and her hands shake when she signs.

  I bring my index finger to my lips, and spread my hand flat as it lowers to meet the closed fist I’ve made of my other hand. ‘Promise.’

  Brooke smiles weakly. ‘Thank you.’

  I follow her upstairs, each step taking me farther from the forest. Taking my breath away. I close my bedroom door and lean into it, trying to breathe slowly. My brain is a mess, all she doesn’t have to know if you go back and you can’t break a promise and you have to break it and—

  I can’t go back, not tonight. Even if I hadn’t been caught . . . I rub at my eyes. I’ll have to break my promise to Brooke, because the promise to find Jane and Winnie overrides it, but I can at least keep it for one night.

  I lay in bed, trying to sleep. I manage a fitful doze, waking almost every ten minutes for an hour. The third or fourth time I wake up, my throat is dry. I try to get back to sleep, but that dry throat is all I can focus on. Frustrated, I sneak downstairs in search of water. I’m on my way back with glass in hand, nearly to the stairs, when the sound snags me. At first, I think I imagine it. It’s distant and quiet. It comes again.

  I walk tentatively down the hall, toward where I think it’s coming from. There—a weird, high moaning sound. It almost sounds like someone in pain.

  It’s coming from the basement.

  I never go down to the basement unless I’m on laundry duty or there’s a tornado warning, and for the laundry, I won’t go at night. The stairs are the wooden kind with empty space behind each step, begging to either trip you or let a hand sneak in and grab your ankle. The basement itself is unfinished stone, and always cold, even if you sit with your back against the dryer. The lights don’t reach the corners and there’s too much space behind the water heater and furnace for something to hide.

  The last thing I want is to walk down those stairs in the middle of the night, and for the life of me, I can’t fathom who it would be. I press my ear to the door. Maybe Frank is running a late load of laundry? Sometimes the dryer squeals, the pitch rising and falling in a way that could sound like an anguished moan, I guess. That could be what I’m hearing.

  I touch the doorknob.

  Nearby, a door shuts, and then loud, boot-laden footsteps. Frank’s awake and he’s walking around his rooms. I run, holding tight on to my glass of water. I’m five steps up and out of sight when I hear his door open into the hallway, right by where I was standing seconds before. Another few seconds later and I’m burrowed into bed, water shoved onto the nightstand with haphazardly tossed glasses.

  I hold my breath even as my lungs burn from the sprint. I have to listen. If he heard me, if he’s coming up the stairs, I need to be ready.

  Several moments pass. I let out a slow breath. A minute goes by, and another, until I’m able to breathe normally. My eyelids slip closed as my adrenaline crashes. Distantly, I think I hear the front door open and close. I wonder why Frank would be going out so late at night, but sleep claims me and I forget I heard anything at all.

  The first thing I feel when I wake up hours later is Irene. Her panic radiates through me, which is enough to raise my own panic. Irene is usually careful about letting anyone feel her thoughts and emotions. If she’s lost control of that, something is very, very wrong.

  Footsteps come up the stairs, down the hall. Irene skids to a stop in my doorway. I sit up and when I put my glasses on, the wild, scared look on her eyes becomes clear.

  “Have you seen Elle?” she asks.

  “No, I just woke up. Why?”

  “Because she’s gone!” Irene says, voice raising into a shout, then coming back down into something fast and frantic. “When I woke up, she wasn’t in our room, and I thought she’d just gone down to start breakfast, but she wasn’t in the kitchen and Brooke hasn’t seen her and no one has seen her, and I can’t . . . I can’t hear her. I keep trying to talk to her.” She presses her fingers to her temple, the skin dimpling from the pressure. “I can’t hear her.”

  The pain on her face is real and raw, and I know we’re thinking the same thing.

  The last time we couldn’t find someone, we never got them back. Even if Jane and Winnie aren’t dead, they’re not here.

  “We’ll find her,” I say. I swing my legs out of bed and stand up, grabbing a hair tie off the nightstand so I can pull my hair back into a more efficient ponytail. Now that I’m more awake and focused, I can hear the commotion downstairs as others search for Elle. “Is Frank looking for her?”

  Irene shakes her head. “I couldn’t find him. He doesn’t know she’s gone yet.”

  “Have you checked the tunnel?”

  “No. I should have. Right? I should.” There’s a plea in her voice, asking me to tell her what to do. With her emotions so unguarded, I can feel them almost as if they’re my own. She’s lost sight of which way is up.

  “Yes. Hurry. Check the whole tunnel, but don’t go outside. There’s no time. You need to be back before Frank comes asking for you.”

  Except it’s already too late. The lower register of Frank’s voice cuts through my siblings calling for Elle.

  Something snaps in Irene. She runs downstairs, with me following as close as I can. Frank is in the living room with the rest of our siblings. I guess I was the last to know.

  “Where have you been?” Irene demands. I wince. Hopefully, Frank gives Irene a pass on that kind of tone, given the circumstances. “Elle’s gone! Where were you?”

  “I was just getting caught up on the situation,” he says calmly. It doesn’t escape my notice that he didn’t really answer the question. “Have you searched everywhere?”

  “Yes!” Irene says, too close to a shout for anyone’s comfort. “And I can’t hear her.”

  “Your range isn’t that wide,” Violet offers. “Maybe she’s just outside of it.”

  Irene shakes her head. “I can’t hear her,” she says again.

  “We’ll find her,” Frank says. I search his face for any hint of if Irene will be forgiven, or if he’s just tallying up every mark against her for later, after Elle is found. “Everyone—split up, search the whole house again. I’ll look outside.”

  “Let me come with you,” Irene says. “If she’s out there, if I’m closer—”

  “Absolutely not. This is the third one of you who’s gone missing. No one leaves this house until I have answers.”

  Irene clearly wants to argue, but I bump her hand with mine. It’s enough to deflate her. She buries her face in her hands until Frank leaves.

  ‘We’ll start the search,’ Brooke signs to me. ‘Look after Irene.’ She gathers the others up with her, leaving me with Irene.

  “I’m scared,” Irene whispers. “I was just talking to Elle about—” She rubs her face. “I was wondering if Frank did something to Jane and Winnie. She called me crazy.”

  “Frank wouldn’t do anything to Elle,” I whisper to her, too scared to speak at a normal volume.

  The situation is already volatile, and it would be worse if Frank came back in and caught us signing without Brooke around. It’s a weird sore spot for him, a paranoia that comes from us communicating in a way he can’t. We asked once for books on Spanish, because Violet had been teaching us what little they remembered from their Mexican grandparents. We all wanted to know more, and Frank had given us the books for ASL, so why not Spanish?

  But he refused. He didn’t give
us a reason—Frank never has to explain his decisions—but Winnie, Irene, and I had all quietly theorized that languages are hard for him to learn. He hadn’t wanted to learn as much ASL as he’d had to learn to spy on us, and he didn’t want to learn Spanish, too. Us being able to speak it and him not being able to was out of the question. Brooke tried to supplement Violet’s remembered Spanish with what she’d learned to read and write as a child, but none of us were going to achieve any kind of fluency.

  “She’s his favorite,” I continue. “She always does what he wants.”

  “She’s just trying to survive this place,” Irene snaps.

  “I’m not criticizing her.” Of course, I have criticized Elle for just that, but quietly to Winnie when we were alone, usually after one of us had gone under her knife. “I love her,” I say. I do. I do. “But I’m telling you, if he was going to hurt one of us, it wouldn’t be Elle.”

  I don’t know about him hurting Jane or Winnie. It hadn’t occurred to me. I saw Jane go into the forest when Frank was nowhere around. He was in his rooms when Winnie disappeared. I don’t think he could have been involved with either.

  “I kept pressing it,” Irene whispers. “I kept saying what if he did something, what if he killed them, and . . .” She looks around. Frank is nowhere in sight, but still, she steps closer. Lowers her voice still more. “What if this is to punish me?”

  I search desperately for words to comfort her, but I can’t find anything except pretty lies. It wouldn’t be the first time Frank had hurt someone to punish another. We were all close, but he knew who was closest to who. I’d been put in time-out when he was actually mad at Jane more than once.

  “No,” I say. “He’d just put her in time-out. He wouldn’t . . .” Wouldn’t what? This lack of imagination is exactly what had Claire sneering at me, and I still can’t break through it.

  “I can’t hear her,” Irene says. Her voice cracks. She presses her hands over her ears, as if blocking out the world will make Elle loud enough to hear.

  I touch her shoulder. Her eyes shine with tears when she looks at me. “We’ll find her.”

  I join our siblings in the search. Violet and Brooke are walking the length of the tunnel, the little twins are checking every closet and under every bed.

  I go to the basement.

  Ever since Irene said that Elle was missing, there’s been a sick feeling in my stomach. I’ve done the mental math, tallying up the crying I heard with Frank’s mysterious departure in the middle of the night, adding Elle’s disappearance . . .

  All Irene did was call down into the basement, so I’m the first to really get a good look. I shake the way I do in a particularly bad winter, when the cold gets so deep that the chattering of your teeth travels through your whole body, just under the skin.

  I don’t want to think that Frank would kill one of us.

  But then, I know from experience that people are capable of all sorts of things you wouldn’t expect. I’ve crossed lines that seemed impossibly far away. Frank could have, too.

  So I’m half-scared that I’ll find a body in the basement. It wouldn’t be the worst place to hide one, with how rarely any of us come down here. I’m scared that I’ll look into one of the shadowed corners and find Elle slumped, not breathing, already cold.

  I look into every corner, and she’s not there. There’s no evidence that she ever was. The only new thing in the basement is a pile of Frank’s dirty laundry heaped near the washer. I glance into the dryer, and sure enough, there’s some of his laundry in there, too. Frank doesn’t like us to touch any of his property, so he always does his own laundry, minus sheets and pillowcases. It definitely could have been the dryer that I heard last night.

  Someone touches my shoulder and I nearly jump out of my skin.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ Brooke signs emphatically. I shake my head, steadying myself.

  ‘You’re fine,’ I sign, heart rate slowly returning to normal. Is there news?’

  ‘No. Have you found anything?’ she asks.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Brooke nods absentmindedly. She peers into the same corners I already checked, not getting close, just craning her neck to look. Her bottom lip is chapped from anxious nibbling.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I ask, even though none of us are okay.

  At first, she nods. But that quickly changes, and tears start to fall. She turns away from me. Her shoulders shake. I wonder if I should reach out and hold her the same way she did for me last night, or if that would make it worse. Brooke turns back before I have to make the choice.

  ‘Is this my fault?’

  I blink, confused. That’s definitely not what I expected.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is this my fault?’ she asks again. ‘Last night . . .’

  Maybe I’m being obtuse, but I still don’t understand. I shake my head and lower my eyebrows the way Brooke taught us to when we ask a question in ASL, though I don’t have a specific question to accompany it.

  ‘The forest took Jane and Winnie,’ she signs. ‘Right?’ From what Claire said, it’s more that they got lost instead of taken, but my answer doesn’t matter. Brooke plows onward. ‘Last night, I tried to burn the forest, and today, Elle’s gone. She’s gone and she was right next to me when I tried to burn it. That can’t be a coincidence.’

  ‘I think it is,’ I sign. ‘Jane went into the forest willingly.’ Well. Maybe. ‘Winnie may have, too. They just got lost. Elle would never go out alone, and certainly not to the forest.’

  ‘Not if she was in her right mind, but what if she wasn’t?’

  I’m really struggling to follow her train of thought. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She was worried about you. She even asked if we should tell Frank.’ Brooke signs that part close to her body, almost like she’s scared I’ll see it. ‘I don’t think she would have, but—maybe I was right when I called the forest a virus. It’s certainly been changing you.’ She shoots me a glare before I can argue, so I don’t, even though I want to. ‘You saw all those new trees last night. The forest is closing in. What if it’s already started to infect the rest of us?’

  I try to assure Brooke again that it can’t be her fault, that the forest isn’t “changing” anyone, but nothing soothes her. Upstairs, everyone else is in similar distress. There’s no sign of Elle or where she went. Our only hope is that her snapdragon still shines pink on the shelf.

  Feeling lost, we huddle together in the living room. Irene refuses to leave the flower. She occasionally glances at us to keep up with the signed conversation, but otherwise stares at the flower, willing it to stay bright. Olivia and London stick close to her. They can probably guess at her pain in a way the rest of us will never be able to.

  ‘Someone had to have done this to her,’ Violet signs. ‘Elle wouldn’t leave.’

  ‘Not without Irene,’ Brooke signs.

  ‘Then . . . what?’ Violet asks.

  No one says Frank’s name. Maybe no one but me and Irene have even thought it. I’ve made Elle is his favorite into a chant. Elle is his favorite. He wouldn’t hurt Elle. That has to matter, or else why did Elle spend her years here sacrificing us and herself to make him happy? Or else what does matter? If Frank did hurt Elle, then what does that mean for the rest of us?

  The front door opening signals Frank’s return.

  “Anything?” Irene asks when he enters the living room. She doesn’t look at him. She only has eyes for that flower.

  “No,” Frank says. “I searched the grounds, I walked through the forest. There’s nothing. You’re sure none of you saw anything?”

  “You think we’d hide it if we did?” I ask. “We want to find her.”

  “Or you’re protecting her.”

  “Elle wouldn’t run away,” Irene snaps. She tenses, closes her eyes, and I know she’s swearing to herself and thinking stupid stupid stupid.

  But Frank just nods. “You’re right.” We all glance at each other, eyes wide. Frank doesn’t tend to ad
mit he’s wrong, ever. He runs a hand through his golden hair. “I just don’t know what’s happening in this house, and it . . . frustrates me. Worries me.” He smiles at us, a sad, fatherly smile, and sighs. “We’re going on total lockdown. No more going outside, not even to the garden. Understood?”

  He looks at all of us, but at me hardest of all. I nod.

  “We should all have breakfast,” he continues. “We need our strength up. Afterwards, I’ll do another sweep of the forest. I’ll make sure you all get set up with distractions—”

  “Distractions?” Irene interrupts. Frank’s eye twitches. Irene’s running out of my-twin-is-missing goodwill, and fast. “We’re supposed to just distract ourselves while she’s somewhere out there? Why won’t you let us help you? Maybe, with all of us, we’d really find her and Jane and Winnie.”

  “I told you, we can’t risk it,” Frank scolds her. “It’s bad enough that I’m down to six out of nine. I can’t protect you out there if I don’t know what I’m protecting you from, and I’m not losing another. Until further notice, other than any searches I have to do, we are all staying in this house. We are keeping windows closed and curtains drawn.” His annoyance shifts into a smile, but not a nice one. “I don’t want anyone getting cabin fever, so yes, Irene. I’m going to be sure you have all the distractions you need.”

  15

  Elle and Irene’s birthday is May 17th. Two months ago, they turned sixteen.

  They’d been with their families longer than any of us, coming here when they were twelve, so of course they had better memories of what family birthdays had been like. A sleepover with their closest friends. Two ice cream cakes, decorated for each twin. Any dinner they wanted. Any movie (within reason—for their eleventh birthday, Elle had begged for a horror movie, and their mother had insisted they were too young, so instead it was Irene’s superhero movie choice).