by Leo Hunt
After a while, huffing and puffing, sinking in the snow, we reach the end of Elza’s street, where it joins with the main road out of Dunbarrow. I can see the car the Knights rammed, still lying on its side, submerged in a snowdrift. My nose feels about ready to fall off, the only part of my face still exposed to the wind. I rearrange my scarf, trying to get better coverage, jealous of Mark’s and Kirk’s ski masks. Elza stops.
“What’s the problem?” I ask Elza.
“Trying to decide which way to go,” she says.
“This way,” I say, gesturing down toward the center of Dunbarrow.
“Yeah,” she replies, “but they said something was happening in the town square. That’s where everyone went insane, right? We want to avoid that.”
Holiday and Alice almost bump into us. Alice squeaks with outrage.
“So we go along Flenser’s Row,” Holiday cuts in. “Along by the river path? We can get up onto the bridge, and then we’re on the hill up to Wormwood Drive.”
“All right,” Elza says. “Not bad.”
She walks on, with me just behind her. This is kind of Elza’s turf — I’ve been coming up here on the way to her place for quite a while now, but she still knows these roads better than I do. We head downhill, past a row of terraced houses, each with a fat white cap of snow and black unlit windows. Around the corner, things start to change.
Rather than walking past more snowy houses, we find ourselves in a forest. It happens so suddenly, I don’t even register it at first, keeping my eyes fixed on the wall of fog in front of me; it’s only when Elza says something about a tree that I look around us and see that we’re not in Dunbarrow anymore. Instead of buildings and cars, we’re surrounded by twisted gray trees, leafless and crooked, with sickly-looking vines hanging off their branches. The earth is still snow covered, but the drifts are shallower, with gray soil visible around the bases of the trees. The fog is thinner and stiller, a sinister gauze hanging at the edges of my vision.
“What’s happening?” Elza asks me.
“Deadside,” I say.
“Well, it’s definitely not Dunbarrow.”
We stop, and Mark and Kirk catch up, breath leaking from the mouth sockets of their masks. Kirk pulls his off when I tell him what’s going on, takes a look around.
“Bloody madness,” he says, gawping at the crooked trees.
“What does this mean?” Mark asks me. “Where’s Dunbarrow? Where are we?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” I say. “I should have thought of this. Deadside is spilling through, right? So the town isn’t going to look quite the same anymore. There are bits and pieces that’ll be different. So what we have to do —”
“What do you mean different?” Alice demands.
“I don’t know. It really could be anything. Any kind of landscape. It changes.”
“We should go back to her house,” she says to Holiday.
“Listen,” Elza snaps, “we’re not in Dunbarrow, Alice. The road behind us isn’t there anymore. We can’t go back to my house.”
“I want to go back,” Alice says. Kirk claps her on the shoulder.
“We’re right here,” he says. “We keep going and we’ll be all right. Isn’t that right, Luke?”
“Definitely,” I say. “We just need to keep going forward.”
“Is that really all?” Elza whispers to me.
“I have no idea,” I whisper, then raise my voice to say, “But look, what we need to do, as well as keep together, all right . . . What we need to do is think about Dunbarrow. Try and picture it in your mind. When you’re traveling in Deadside, you can go anywhere you want if you’re looking for it. So just try and think about places in Dunbarrow. Think about the river and the bridge and the clock tower. Think about Vibe or the high school, your house, the park, anywhere we’ve spent a lot of time.”
“And that’ll make this go away?” Holiday asks, pointing to the forest around us.
“It should,” I say.
Holiday frowns, and then places a gloved hand in mine and takes hold of Alice with the other. “Let’s stick close,” she says to Alice. “And think about your house, OK?”
I take Elza’s hand with my free one, and we start to walk like this, Mark joining the chain at the other end, taking Alice’s hand. We’re partly supporting her and partly trying to stop her from running away into the forest. I hate to think what might happen if Alice gets lost out here in the wilderness of Asphodel. I try not to think about the things I saw here last time: speaking snakes and flame-eyed boatmen, the hungry thing that wore Elza’s face like a mask. I try to think about Dunbarrow in sunshine: the park, with its duck pond and swings; the town square on Sunday afternoon, with traders’ stalls selling homemade jam and jewelry. I tell myself the gray forest around us is an illusion, a veil, something half imagined intruding onto what’s real.
The trees persist for a while longer, and we walk slower now that we’re essentially supporting Alice. I’m glancing at the ground in front of us when I see a face.
There’s a man tangled in the roots at the base of one of the trees. His gray skin blends with the grayness of the roots, making him hard to spot. The roots are looped around his neck, his forearms, his torso, firmly binding him in place. He might be dead, or sleeping, or some strange thing that’s not quite one and not quite the other. His eyes are closed.
“Make sure Alice doesn’t look down at the tree roots,” I whisper to Holiday. She doesn’t ask why but starts talking to Alice loudly, making her look at something up ahead of us. I can see Elza and Mark have noticed the man as well, but they don’t say anything about it. The unspoken agreement seems to be that we keep on walking and hope it works out.
There are more of them as we travel, or maybe they were here in this forest the entire time and it’s only now I’m noticing them: men and women and children, dressed in gray rags, some almost part of the earth itself, with roots growing into their ears and mouths, as if the forest grew from their heads somehow. Their faces look ancient and weathered, as though they’ve been sleeping down below the trees as long as the world has existed. I don’t like walking among them, but I don’t see what choice we have. We can’t go back.
“What are they?” Elza whispers.
“No idea. But don’t touch them,” I say.
The snow is falling again, just a thin dusting, settling on the roots and branches and faces of the awful forest. There’s a green flicker in the sky, and it’s been a while since we saw one of those. At least we know we’re still near whatever’s causing that light, wherever we are.
The trees are thicker, more tangled, with more and more bodies visible in the roots. I’m feeling increasingly uneasy about this. I almost trip on an outstretched gray arm. What happens if we wake them? I tug at Holiday’s hand to get her to walk a little faster, and she trips Alice, who stumbles, coming face-to-face with one of the bodies.
I can’t say a word.
Alice shrieks like a fire alarm, leaping to her feet and setting off at a sprint through the trees.
Shit.
The root-encrusted body nearest to me opens its eyes.
They’re blank and white, luminous, twinned full moons.
There’s a creaking sound, like tree branches breaking. I can hear hissing voices that aren’t ours.
“RUN!” I shout. “GO!”
To their credit, the others don’t question me. We bolt along the path we’ve been following, fog billowing around us, voices that sound partly like trees in the wind and partly like a choir echoing in my ears. The sleepers are awakening, their gray hands reaching at us between the gnarled roots of these trees.
Dunbarrow. That’s where I want to be. We’re going to turn a corner and find ourselves on the main street. I’m so frightened I can’t picture anywhere else. Just the main street on a summer’s day, someone selling ice cream, the mobile-phone shop and the Starbucks and the pubs with people sitting outside in the gardens with beers, traffic backed up at the roundabo
ut, kids in shorts and caps slouching on a bench, supermarket parking lot full of weekend shoppers . . .
The fog swirls. I can hear the dead howling, the cracking sounds as they wrench themselves free of the roots . . .
No.
Dunbarrow.
That’s where we are. We’ll break out of this forest and —
Something reaches through the mist for me, grasping gray arms, white eyes.
I shoulder-butt it as hard as I can, knocking its body aside. The dead thing feels light as paper, a husk of a person. It tumbles to the ground, but there are many more of them, ranks of wispy figures with long fingers and glowing eyes.
Elza shrieks.
Dunbarrow. We’re in —
I run slap-bang into a car. I gasp, bent double, trying to catch my breath, legs shaking. A real car, snow covered, with a rear window. Elza grabs me.
“Are we —”
“Come on!”
“Luke —”
“Oh sh —”
Holiday and Kirk and Mark are right behind us, still running, not yet having noticed where we are. The fog thins, revealing familiar shop fronts, traffic lights, a scabby back alley that I know cuts up to the supermarket. I’ve walked on this road a million times. It’s the bottom of the main street.
“We’re all right!” I say. “We’re all right!” I grab at Holiday and Kirk, trying to stop them from running off into the mist. Kirk looks wildly over his shoulder, convinced we’re about to be grabbed by the dead.
“Get off me, man!” he yells.
“What was that?” Holiday asks. “What?”
“I don’t know,” I say, “but we made it through. It’s gone.”
Kirk’s still looking back down the street, grasping his sword, waiting for the root-dwellers to come rushing out of the fog. Nothing happens.
“It’s all right, mate,” I say. “We’re OK.” I pat his shoulder.
“Screwed up, man,” Kirk says. He shrugs off my hand.
“You believe me now?” I ask.
He laughs, a little shakily.
“If this is all fake,” Kirk says, “you got the biggest budget on earth, man. Yeah, I believe you.”
“Where’s Alice?” Holiday asks me.
“She was just ahead of us,” I say.
We look at the street. She isn’t here. No footprints in the snow either, none except ours.
“She’s probably just ahead,” Elza says gently.
“We’ll catch up,” Mark adds, squeezing her hand.
Holiday nods, but I can tell she doesn’t believe us.
We make our way along the main street in silence. The snow seems shallower here, a thin layer over the cars and pavements. I’m trying not to think what might’ve happened to Alice. She must be lost in Asphodel, could be anywhere in Deadside. She might already be a gray girl wrapped in gray tree roots, sleeping forever in the dirt. I never really liked her that much, but she definitely didn’t deserve that. I’m not sure anyone does.
The windows of the shops have been smashed, broken glass lying half buried in the snowdrifts, just like Holiday and the others told us. There’s snow piled up inside the pharmacy, the pubs, the newsagents. I can see myself reflected in the remains of one window, a blurred muffled figure, body wrapped in oversize coats and scarves. I keep checking in every window we pass, making sure I’m still here, that we’re all still here, that the street doesn’t slip away from us, become something else.
Elza pulls at my sleeve.
“Can you hear that?”
I stop and listen. Fog swirls before my eyes, obscuring the road before us. There’s something in the air, voices, people singing. I catch a snatch of it.
“Seven trees of living stone . . .”
No idea what that means, but it’s not good. We turn to Holiday and the guys.
“Let’s take this slow,” I say. They nod.
“The eighth is cast of ice and bone . . .”
It’s difficult to tell where the voices are coming from, and I almost don’t want to move at all, in case that would take us closer to the singers, but we don’t have a choice. We crouch down behind a row of parked cars and walk slowly through the snow. I can hear the crackle of flames, and I see something that could be firelight, shining through the mist.
“Seven trees of living stone . . .” come the voices in the fog.
There are strings of Christmas lights hanging above us, unlit and sinister, like vines ripening with black fruit. We meant to avoid the town square, but that’s where we seem to have ended up regardless. Maybe it was the place we were all thinking about hardest. I know it’s what I think of when someone says “Dunbarrow” to me.
“The eighth is cast of ice and bone . . .”
We round the corner to the town square, and I can barely believe what I’m seeing.
The fog is thinner here, pierced by the ravenous light of an enormous bonfire. Anything that can burn is being burned: sofas, chairs, piles of magazines and cushions and the new saplings that were planted in the middle of the roundabout. The heat is intense, radiating far enough to warm our faces as we peer around the corner, keeping the snow from settling on the paving stones of the square. Around this fire are people, hundreds and hundreds of them. They’re writhing and screaming, and it takes me a moment to realize that it isn’t in pain but in joy. Their shadows blend with one another, a many-formed monster, projected over the sides of the buildings in flickering firelight.
“SEVEN TREES OF LIVING STONE!”
“Oh my god,” Elza whispers. “It really is everyone.”
“We said so, didn’t we?” Kirk growls beside my ear. “All gone crazy.”
“THE EIGHTH IS CAST OF ICE AND BONE!”
“We never doubted you,” Elza whispers.
“Look,” says Holiday, “isn’t that Mrs. Gould? You know, from the newsagent?”
I look to where she’s pointing. It is indeed Mrs. Gould, the small round-faced old woman who ran the corner shop. Me and Kirk used to buy candy from her every day after school. She’s dancing like a puppet, screaming with delight, sweat running over her face. She’s not wearing any shoes, stamping the cold wet concrete without a care in the world. She’s just one of them. I can see plenty of other people I recognize, and it’s like they’re turning into something else: the familiar faces are like masks, and I feel like something else is breaking through from underneath, strange new faces grown beyond fear or love. The sky flashes green again, and there’s a frenzy of cheering, people tearing at their clothes, throwing shoes and jackets onto the bonfire.
What’s happening to them?
“SEVEN TREES OF LIVING STONE!”
They stamp and clap, twirl and wail. The dance has no pattern that I can see, but nobody crashes into anyone else, and nobody hesitates for an instant.
“We’ll have to go back,” Elza whispers. “Find another way. I don’t want them to see us.”
“THE EIGHTH IS CAST OF ICE AND BONE!”
I agree. Nothing could make me go across that square. The idea of those faces, those eyes, turning to me is too awful to think about. We turn around and are about to head back down the street, when I see two figures standing in the middle of the road.
“Luke?” one of them says.
“Oh, man, Elza,” the other says.
They come closer. It’s Ryan and Jack, two of the other town ghosts we know. Their eyes are glowing the same green as the sky, the same green Andy’s were.
“You see that?” Ryan says to me, holding up his right hand. He’s got a bottle of beer.
This seems like a bad scenario. Holiday and the boys are behind us, using me and Elza as a shield. Kirk’s got a sword! Why can’t he go in front?
“Yeah, looks good, man,” I say to Ryan, gesturing to one side, hoping the others will go around the ghosts and get behind them.
“Nice beer,” Elza adds.
“This is incredible,” Jack says. “This is the best night of all time.”
“I can drink i
t,” Ryan says. “We’re holding it. Look at that!”
“You’re holding that beer, all right,” I agree. “Never seen better beer holding.”
“We were so worried all the time,” Jack says. “We never wanted to move on, you know? And we don’t have to! Deadside’s come to us!”
“This all looks good to you?” I ask them, gesturing at the bonfire, the crazed revelers, the snow and broken windows and ghoulish shifting mists.
“It’s looking great, man!”
“Yeah, don’t you think?”
“We, uh . . .” I begin.
“We love it,” Elza says. How are we going to get around them? The town ghosts are blocking us off, and the bonfire is behind us. I don’t want to risk them making a noise and attracting more attention. What I want, more than anything, is to get away from these guys without any of the dancing people noticing us.
“Seven trees of living stone . . .”
The chant continues behind us.
Ryan takes a swig of beer. “You’re leaving already?” he asks.
“Long night, man,” I say.
“You can’t leave,” Jack says cheerfully. “Have you met the Apostles?”
“Yeah, they’re, uh, great,” I say.
“We love them so much,” Elza says, trying to edge around them.
“Me, too,” Ryan says, taking another drink.
“Come on, you can’t leave yet!” Jack cries, wrapping an arm around Elza’s shoulder. “You and your friends! Come join the party!”
The ghosts can touch us now. This is new. It seems like the spirit world and ours really have collapsed into one another. Ryan takes hold of me. His hands are extremely cold, like shapes carved from ice. I can feel their chill even through my thick layers of clothing.