Goldeline

by Jimmy Cajoleas

And I do. I know exactly where to go.

  I take one more look back toward Gruff and drop to my belly. I crawl my way to the trees until the sounds of rifles and men screaming seem far away. When I get up to run something hits me in the head and I fall flat. I roll over and one-eyed Pugh stands over me. He’s got his knife out, the long, fanged one.

  “You did this,” he says. “I knew you were up to something. I knew it all along. See, Gruff trusted you, but I didn’t. And now I’m gonna make you suffer.”

  Another shot fires so loud it hurts my ears and Pugh slumps over on top of me. I try to push him off, but Pugh’s body is too heavy, I can’t move him. I hear a pistol cock and I figure I’m done for.

  “Wait,” a voice says. “We’re supposed to get her alive. Boss said so.”

  I’m yanked off the ground by my shoulders. I bite the man’s wrist and I kick and he drops me. He’s a Townie. I’ve seen him. These are Templeton men. I growl at him.

  “Easy now,” he says.

  I jump at him like a wolf girl. I want to bite his throat off. Another man whacks me with the butt of his gun and my face hits the dirt.

  “She’s a demon,” says the Townie. He’s got blond hair in a ponytail. I think he is a lawyer back in Templeton.

  “Boss says to take her. He promised the kid. They made a deal.”

  The kid? Does he mean Tommy?

  They tie my hands with rope. I kick and I fight but they’re too strong for me. One of them, a huge man, slaps me so hard I wonder if I haven’t lost a tooth. I wonder if I got one less fang to fix on his throat when he lets me go.

  “He didn’t say we couldn’t do that,” he says, and they both laugh.

  Behind me I hear gunfire, and I’m scared for all Gruff’s boys. When people die they just become dog food, spoiled meat for scavengers, bones for the grass to swallow. It doesn’t matter that you love them. Love doesn’t do anybody any good, it can’t protect you from a bullet or a knife, it can’t keep you from just becoming a body. I hope some of Gruff’s boys made it free to the woods. I hope anyone escaped. But mostly what I don’t see is Gruff, and my heart goes soft for a second. He’s not dead or captured. He got away. And as soon as I can get out of here, I’m going to go and meet him.

  The two men drag me, hands behind my back, pulling me back into their world, their town, and no one I love left to fight it with. Around me the birds and bugs call my name, the whir of mosquitoes in the coming dark of a storm, the sad fury of faraway lightning. Off we go toward the main road, where God knows what terror is right there waiting on me.

  SEVEN

  The men bash through the path, hacking and tearing, ripping a highway through my quiet, secret trail. They drag me through the dirt behind them. I kick and fight and make them earn every inch.

  “You sure we can’t just kill her?” says the blond one.

  “Nuh-uh. Our orders are pretty dang clear.”

  What orders? Did Tommy rat on me? Is all of this his fault?

  The blond-headed one is stupid. I think maybe I could scare him.

  “If you don’t let me go, I’ll curse you,” I say.

  “That a fact? What you gonna do, spit on me?”

  “I’ll make spiders lay eggs in your nose. I’ll have hornets sting your tongue. You’ll spend every morning pulling leeches off your eyelids forever.”

  “Whoa now. Little brat got her a mouth, don’t she?”

  The huge guy picks me up and I kick as hard as I can. Then he drops me. I land on my face. It hurts.

  “Now shut up and get a move on.”

  When we make it to the road they bring me up to a big black carriage. They open the door and toss me in and there’s Tommy.

  That’s how they found us. I knew I did wrong keeping him safe, I knew it. And Tommy led them here, to Gruff’s camp. The men dead or captured, and it’s because of Tommy. It’s because of me.

  “Don’t put her in here!” Tommy screams. “Not with me!”

  I jump on him and bite the first thing I can get to. It’s his thumb. I make good and sure I draw blood. The blond-headed man pulls me off Tommy.

  “You little heathen,” he says. “Behave or you’ll wind up in the ditch with the other degenerates.”

  He shuts the carriage door and leaves me face-to-face with Tommy.

  Tommy’s hair looks redder, and his eyes bluer, and somehow he looks older, like being with me grew him up a little. He holds his bleeding thumb under his arm, and his eyes are full of tears. I take a deep breath and he flinches, like he knows that I could rip him in half if I wanted to. But there’s this other feeling too, this weird one where I’m a little bit glad to see him. Like I have my friend back. Then I remember how I’ve lost everything again and I hate Tommy even more.

  “They’re all dead,” I say. “They got them all.”

  Except Gruff, but I keep quiet about that.

  “Good thing too,” Tommy says. His voice shakes, but he’s not just scared. He’s angry too. His cheeks go red with it and he cries a little. “They deserved it. You better be glad I let you off easy.”

  “They were all I had,” I say.

  “You lied to me,” says Tommy. “You told me you were an angel.” He wipes his nose on his shirtsleeve. “I was scared when they found me, all lost on the road. Just some men in a carriage going slow through the woods. They picked me up and gave me some food. They asked me what happened and I told them, about how we were ambushed, how bandits robbed us, how the driver and poor Miss Lyons were off lost and starving somewhere. I told them every word. I said I got an aunt Barbara and would they take me to her and they said okay, but first you got to show us where the bandits are. I said okay but they have a little girl with them and you have to protect the girl. I made them promise before I showed them. They said okay so I took them to the trail, I showed them right where it started and I said follow it. I could have had them kill you but I didn’t. It’s my fault you’re still alive. So we’re even.”

  I got a few more words for Tommy, but not now. Now I got to get out of here. So I think about Gruff and I make myself mean and tough again. I squint and build a fire inside myself, a roaring, smoking thing, the sort that swallows houses and woods and whole towns. Once it’s big and stoking, I growl back at Tommy.

  “Like heck we’re even. They’re going to take me back to Templeton and burn me up, same as they did my momma. At best they’ll put me in jail. Nothing good comes to me after this.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you expect me to do about it,” says Tommy. “You better be happy you’re still alive.”

  Tommy’s crying big and real now. I almost got him.

  “I’ll tell you what you can do about it,” I say. “You can let me loose.”

  “Nope. No way.”

  “Just untie my hands. I’ll sneak out. No one will know it was you.”

  “Who the heck else would it be?” he says.

  “Tell them I’m a witch. Tell them I conjured the knots open. Tell them I bit your finger so hard you thought it was gonna fall off. I don’t give a care what you tell them, just let me go.”

  That scares him a little, I can tell. He’s covering himself like he thinks I might actually do it.

  “All right, all right. But then you better go. I better not ever see you again ever.”

  “Cross my heart, slice my tongue, sew my eyeballs shut, never will you ever. Now get the durn ropes off me.”

  Tommy gets to fumbling with the knots when I hear a voice that makes my stomach fall, that makes my blood go quiet. It’s one I remember from my dreams, full and gravelly, one that shivers my spine. Tommy finally unties the ropes.

  “There. You happy now?”

  “Hush up.”

  A light rain prattles on the roof of the carriage. I ease the door open a little and take a peek. Just as quick I pull my head back in, my whole body gone grave-cold, the voice like a shadow down inside me.

  The man stands as tall as in my nightmares.

  The white hair wild
under his wide-brimmed black hat, eyes blue as a far-off lake, the draggled scar down his cheek.

  The man in every bad dream I ever had, the silvery voice that slithers into my ears, that wakes me up screaming at night. The wicked man, the vicious man, cruel and horrible. The man who took everything I ever had from me.

  I have dreaded this day, Momma, I prayed it would never come.

  It’s him. The Preacher.

  “What’s the matter?” says Tommy.

  My hands and feet are numb. I feel invisible ants crawl over my body. I’m dizzy. It’s that day all over again, the one from my dream. Only this time I’m captured and Gruff has run off and I have no one and I’m alone in the world. I’m alone and it’s my fault.

  “You look like you’re sick,” says Tommy. “You gonna puke in here?”

  I hold my finger up to my lips and Tommy gets it now. He gets that I’m scared. I sneak out lightly, hoping my bare feet and the rain will keep me from being heard. The Preacher’s off talking to the blond-headed man who caught me, so now is my chance. My heart knows that I am in great danger and I have to hurry.

  I only make it about ten steps before he stops me cold. It’s his voice, rich and full and deep, like your bones hear it even before your ears do.

  “What do we have here?”

  I’m afraid to turn around. I’m afraid to look into his face. His fingers graze my hair and I shiver all over.

  “You look just like your mother.”

  I can’t let him know how much I love to hear that. I can’t let the Preacher know how proud that makes me in my heart.

  “My momma’s dead,” I say. “She was a baker over in Rawlingsville. You got to be mistaken.”

  I don’t dare look up at him. I can’t look past my feet. I let my hair dangle over my eyes so he can’t tell I’m crying.

  “I knew it was you,” says the Preacher. “The second that little boy said there was a girl in the woods with them I knew it had to be you. I knew it had to be her daughter.” I glance up at him real fast and I catch his eyes. A smile slides like a snake across his face. “I knew it had to be her daughter causing all this horror. Nobody but one of hers could stir up so much fear and devilment.”

  I try to talk high and unscared. I try to sound as little-girly as I can.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, mister.”

  But I know he can hear it. I know he knows how scared I am.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” says the Preacher.

  “I remember you plenty,” I say, my voice gone fierce. “You burned Momma. You’re the Preacher.”

  The blond-headed man grabs at me, but he slips in the mud. I hop on his back and pull the knife out of his belt scabbard. I wave it out in front of me like I know what to do with it.

  “Don’t you lay a finger on me,” I growl in my best Gruff voice, “lest you plan on losing it.”

  The Preacher laughs. He snatches at me and I swing at his hands and miss and he’s giggling he’s so happy.

  “No, I don’t think you do remember me. Not quite. But I remember you, Goldeline,” he says.

  How does the Preacher know my name?

  Lightning cracks up above us and the animals scatter to the deeper parts of the trees. The rain falls in giant strings straight from heaven and the lightning rips the sky like angel veins. The Preacher lunges at me and my back is to the carriage and I don’t know what to do. But then I remember Tommy, and I open the carriage door and yank him out into the mud. I pull him up by his hair and hold the knife to his throat.

  “Take one step closer to me,” I growl, “and I’m opening this kid up.”

  The Preacher may be wicked, but he’s still a preacher. Tommy’s just a kid, an innocent, a victim, and it doesn’t do for the Preacher to spill his blood in front of all these people just to capture me. I know he won’t let that happen. The Preacher folds his arms and smiles at me, his hair gone wet and limp and clinging to him where he looks like some rain-soaked death just crawled up out from the river. The huge man takes a step toward me and I needle Tommy’s neck with the knife.

  Tommy screams and I whisper Sorry in his ear so quiet not even a bird could hear it.

  “Now don’t you come after me,” I say. “Don’t you take one step toward us.”

  I know I’m backing the wrong way from the road. I’m not going toward camp. The camp is ruined, Gruff is gone, all his boys are gone or scattered. I can’t go back there. It doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s dead and gone as Momma.

  “Follow her,” says the Preacher.

  The blond-haired guy and the huge man look back and forth at each other for a moment, but neither of them moves.

  “But, Preacher,” says the huge man, “she’s going into them other woods. You know what they say about that place.”

  They’re scared, I can tell. They’ve heard the same stories I have.

  “Follow her,” growls the Preacher, but he doesn’t move either. I can see it all over his face. Even the Preacher is afraid to come after us. And he darn well should be.

  Because we’re going into the unknown parts of the forest, what I don’t have any map for, all the parts where Gruff said never to go because there was people there, people who were worse than us, people who didn’t even know the law we were fighting against. I’m dragging Tommy into the wildest woods, where the strange people are, men with splinters for teeth and women with three eyes, where all the ghosts walk around with skin on and wait to lay hands on you. Where haints wander, the spirits of bandits who never quit walking even after they died. I’ve heard so many stories. These are not the woods I know. These are not my safe places. Soon we’re deep enough into the woods that I can’t see the road anymore. We’re coming close to lost.

  EIGHT

  I keep the knife to Tommy’s throat. He blubbers, he cries, but he doesn’t fight me. It’s like he knows this is his part.

  “Please let me go,” he says quietly.

  “I can’t. They’ll kill me.”

  “I know,” he says. “Will you let me go when we’re safe?”

  “Yes, Tommy. I won’t keep you out in the woods with me forever.”

  But the second I say that my heart clenches up and I realize I don’t want him to leave. I push the knife closer to his throat, as if to keep him from running away from me right now.

  “You’re hurting me,” he says.

  “Sorry,” I say, and ease off a little. I push the knife into his back just hard enough for him to feel it but soft enough not to cut him. Just a little poke to keep some fear in him, to let him know that if he tries to run I got this waiting for him.

  We walk until it’s a fight to keep my legs moving. It’s raining and I’m lost and I’m tired and I don’t know how much farther I can go. Tommy’s dragging. He kept stumbling into the knife so I don’t hold it against him anymore, I don’t want him to trip and hurt himself on it. For a while I keep the knife out, walking behind him, barking at him to pick up the pace. Then I just lead and he still follows me. He’s as cold and wet and scared as I am. Sometimes I think I hear the Preacher or some of the Townie men behind us, but then it could be thunder, it could be a deer, it could be nothing at all.

  Soon we hit a trail. This is a good sign, I just know it. Because Gruff told me something else about this forest too, a little fact I’m hoping the Preacher doesn’t pick up on. Moon Haven lies just on the other side of these woods. At least, it does in all the stories Gruff told me. He said to take the long road around them, sure, that to cut through these woods was about the worst idea anybody could think of. But we don’t have any other choice. Besides, I’d walk through just about anything to get back to Gruff. I just hope I listened right, that I got it all straight in my head. I hope I’m not leading me and Tommy into something even more horrible.

  It rains hard now, the tree leaves dumping their water on us. I’m praying to Momma to save us, I’m praying for bread and not a stone, a fish and not a snake. My hair is wet in my face, To
mmy’s momma’s dress is heavy and too big, sagging off me, leaving my shoulders naked to the cold. The hem is blackened by mud. My bare feet bleed.

  Suddenly the path vanishes and I slip and fall face-first right at the mouth of a gorge, a deep one, dark and open like a gnarl-toothed smile. The knife goes sailing down and disappears. I begin to slip forward, my arms dangling into the black, my stomach sliding over the edge. I am going to fall. I’m going to fall and die forever.

  Hands grasp my foot. I’m dragged backward, away from the hole, until my hands touch mud and wet leaves and I’m safe. I turn around and it’s Tommy, still holding me by my foot. He sits down, shaking.

  “I thought you were gonna die,” he says.

  We huddle close when we walk now. Tommy doesn’t try to leave, even though I don’t have a knife anymore. We walk until we see a hill, just a mound like a pimple sticking up from the earth, steep and sudden, and from the top of it smoke rises. Stuck in the middle of the hill is a door a little taller than me with a big metal bolt on it.

  “We shouldn’t go in here,” I say. “We should keep going.”

  “Where to?” says Tommy. “We’re lost. There might not be anywhere else.”

  He’s shivering. I’m scared he’ll get sick. Sometimes people would bring their sick kids to Momma and she would fix them with her magic. She was good at it, she could fix things way better than the doctor in town and everybody knew it. Sometimes, though, when they were shaking and shivering, there wasn’t anything anyone could do but cry while they died. I don’t ever want Tommy to die.

  But then in the distance I see torches, hear the sounds of men in the forest. It’s the Preacher. He braved the bad woods, same as I did, and now he’s come for me. There’s nowhere to run to. The lights are on all sides of us. My stomach tightens up and I can hear his voice in my ears, Come to me, Goldeline, come to me, until he’s everywhere and all around me.

  “What’s wrong?” says Tommy.

  “Don’t you hear him?” I say. “Can’t you see the torches?”

  Tommy just stares at me like I’m going crazy. But I can hear the Preacher coming. I can feel him like a spider crawling across my neck. My eyes see spots and I’m breathing faster and faster and I’m scared, I’m so scared I might pass out, and then he’ll find me for sure and I can’t take it, I can’t let him have me.