by Alyssa Wees
She lifts her arm from her eyes. “Why, cleaning my room, of course. Just like Mom asked me to.”
Renata snorts, but she quickly flips to a scowl as Raisa grabs her lemonade glass and places it far out of reach, making her get up from the table to retrieve it.
“Okay, here it is.” Mom props the book on the table so we can all see. She points to a full-page photograph of a long, three-storied, mint-green castle with dozens of white columns and gold accents. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Like always, there is no warning. One second I’m staring at the picture, and the next my gaze lifts, past the book and over Mom’s shoulder, catching sight of the woods.
The woods.
The woods that do not exist.
Gabrielle’s head jerks up in response to my sudden stillness, every muscle locked in place, every muscle except my heart, firing over and over like a gun, beating bullets of blood, twice as lethal and just as loud.
A cool wind drags across my cheeks and my throat like fresh-cut fingernails, and I shiver. Every time I see the trees, they seem to have grown, taller and thicker and darker, the spaces between them as black as beauty turned inside out. Every time, they seem to have crawled a tiny bit closer, just enough for me to notice.
You are not there, I think. You are no forest at all.
Mom’s voice comes to me like an echo, like a dead star’s light taking centuries to travel and only now just reaching me. “Who lives there?”
“A princess,” Renata says.
I twist my fingers into the fur at Gabrielle’s neck, holding on tight.
“An heiress,” Raisa counters.
I remind myself to blink so my eyes don’t start to sting, to breathe so my lungs don’t start to squeeze.
“A witch,” Rose whispers, and my heart stops, an empty cartridge. Gabrielle groans, and I stare and stare and stare at Rose.
Because she’s not looking at the photograph in Mom’s book.
She’s looking at the woods.
Or, rather, where the woods would be if she knew they were really there.
Which they aren’t, except for me.
She only says it once: A witch, and then silence. But the words get stuck in my head like a stilted song, and when my heart starts again, my pulse repeats them too.
A witch, a witch, a witch in the woods.
And suddenly I feel the witch, there at the center of the woods, just as I feel the boy in the darkness. She’s a shadow falling across my heart, a rose blooming in the total dark.
And she’s screaming.
The yells reverberate in my head, like my own thoughts but louder, and her screams are unlike anything else, exactly the sound the moon must make at its fullest, a crackle to frenzy the wolves.
No, not the wolves—foxes. And lots of them.
“Rhea?”
“What?” I shake myself, but the woods don’t disappear and the scream doesn’t stop. “I mean, yes?”
“Who lived here?” Mom says patiently, tapping the picture. “Do you know what this is?”
“Um, yes,” I say, trying to shut out the cacophony within me. “It’s the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. The home of the imperial family until they were killed about a hundred years ago.”
“I was right! A princess did live there.” Renata beams, and it seems all wrong to me, how she can smile when someone is screaming. But of course, she doesn’t hear it. I eye Rose, eager to know if she hears it too. “Anastasia Romanov! She’s the famous princess, the one who escaped. She’s still out there somewhere, safe and sound.”
“She’d be a very old woman by now, but yes,” Mom says, lowering the book. “There is a rumor she escaped the soldiers who came for the rest of her family.”
“It’s not true, though. She didn’t escape.” I pull my eyes away from the woods, focusing on my sisters. Remembering to breathe. “What happened was, the royal family was on house arrest when they were awakened by their guards one night and told to get dressed. The girls—um, let’s see, there were four of them: Anastasia, Maria, Olga, and—and Tatiana, I think. The girls and their brother, Alexei, along with their parents, the czar and czarina, were brought to the basement and told to wait. Then guards entered the room and opened fire. But the girls had jewels sewn into their dresses that they kept from greedy nonfamily members, and the jewels were what saved them, at first, acting like a shield, the bullets bouncing right off. Anastasia and Maria managed to escape out the door, and they ran into the woods. That’s how the rumor started—people claimed Anastasia and Maria got away. But they didn’t. They were hunted down.” I pause. “That’s just one version of the story, though. However it happened, all the royal family’s bodies were accounted for, in the end.”
“How do you even know all this?” Raisa demands.
“Anastasia’s ghost told me,” I say, glancing again at the trees, and then quickly away. Don’t look, don’t listen. “No, dummy—I read about it.”
Mom huffs at this. “Girls, can we please—”
“Well, I heard it happened like this,” Renata says, rising out of her seat in sudden excitement, her cheeks flushing. “The princess had magic and the others didn’t—that’s why they were afraid of her and wanted to kill her. Her mother had magic too, and she was the first to die, and the princess was so upset that she ran into the woods with the soldiers chasing after her. But then she escaped by falling into a sleeping spell. The end,” she finishes. “Except that’s not really the end because she’s still there, waiting to wake up.” She turns to me. “So you see, Ree, you’re wrong. The princess is still out there. She’s just dreaming.”
“You know what? You’re right,” says Raisa, tipping her chair back on two legs, her hand gripping the table to keep her from toppling over completely. “That’s a way better story, Ren. I pick that one.”
“It’s not about which one you like better.” My heart twists, and I’m not sure why. “It’s about the facts.”
Raisa lets her chair slam down to its normal position. “What is a myth to one person may be a memory to another.”
“Okay, okay,” Mom interjects, taking control of the conversation again. “We are way off topic. Ren, that was an, um, interesting story, but I’m afraid Rhea is right. None of the princesses survived.”
The screaming builds and builds, so lurid and grating, it could shatter me like a mirror at any moment. I can’t ignore it any longer. She needs help, I think. I need to help.
Gabrielle leaps off my lap as I stand. They’re all looking at me, Mom and my sisters, and though I can barely hear myself speak, I say, “I’ll be right back.”
And then I run.
I run, off the patio, through the garden, and into the not-woods, with no real plan beyond Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop. Bare feet on dry grass, a dragonfly flitting past my face, buzzing as it twists to get out of my way, a sudden burst of sunlight as if through an empty eye socket in the clouds. Sunlight that does not touch the woods, no matter how bright.
I enter the blackness between the trees, and the forest does not vanish.
No—it collapses.
The branches curl in on themselves like fingers into a fist and the leaves drop all at once, a scratchy swirl of anemic green. The trunk nearest me begins to tip, and I jump out of the way into the path of another falling trunk, and another and another, until I’m forced to dart backward out of the woods. I stumble on a raised root and tumble to the lawn, the brief spark of sunlight from before now gone. I watch as the trees twist and tilt and crumble in a great plume of dust. Broken branches, cracked trunks, shriveled leaves—when the dust clears, floating up and up and up, all of it is gone.
It happens in perfect silence, and I have no idea when the screaming stopped.
“Rhea?” Mom calls, but I don’t move. “Was there a bug on you or something?”
“Not
a bug.” Raisa snickers. “A boy. A shadow boy, chasing her.”
I look at Gabrielle, panting next to me. Would it have hurt, I wonder, if the not-real woods had crushed us? Does something both imaginary and not have the ability to cause harm?
Would it be like embracing a ghost?
It was just a dream, love, my dad said the other day. It can’t hurt you.
When I finally stand and turn around, it’s not because I’m sure. I am breathless and mud-stained, my heart beating faster than ever, and my whole family is watching me. I know I need to pretend I’m okay, with them trying to figure out what the hell just happened and what they should do about it.
“I need to lie down.” I walk toward the patio. “You’re right, Ray—it’s too hot.”
I don’t even wait for a response—I continue right past them, into the house and up the stairs, and throw myself face-first onto my bed, quivering.
Mom comes in to check on me a minute later. “Need anything?” she asks, rubbing my back.
“No, I’m feeling better already,” I say, even though I’m not. “Don’t worry; it will pass.” And I hope beyond hope that it does.
I don’t get up for an hour, and even then I stay in the room, avoiding the window and working through a book of brain teasers and riddles to distract myself from thoughts of the woods, of the witch, and of the Darkness especially, thoughts I’d really rather not have just now or ever, really.
What waits for a kiss that does not come?
What dreams and dreams until it comes undone?
I think and think but come up blank. After a while, I close the book. It’s the first puzzle I haven’t been able to answer.
I wait until I hear Raisa and Renata bundle themselves off to the beach and Mom leave for her gardening group meeting. Then, with a blanket draped over my shoulders like a cape and a pillow clutched to my chest like a shield, I climb down the stairs, slowly, quietly, wondering if this is how it will be from now on, me tiptoeing around my own home as if there might be a phantom lurking in every corner—and if sometimes, just sometimes, the phantom might be me.
I find Rose alone in the kitchen, rummaging through the fridge.
“Did you see them?” I say, a little too loudly in the hushed ambience of the half-empty house. “Did you see the woods?”
“What woods?” she says, without turning around. She doesn’t startle as I would have if someone had crept up on me. Rose never startles at anything, as long as there is daylight.
“The ones in the backyard.”
She straightens but still doesn’t turn. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Rose!” I rush to her side, push the fridge door closed. She finally looks at me. “Why did you guess a witch lived in the palace? Does that really look to you like a place a witch would live?”
With a yogurt in one hand, she walks over to the counter and pulls a spoon from the utensils drawer. Her calmness is maddening. “I feel like a witch would live anywhere she wants.”
I hug the pillow closer to my heart. “Well, mostly they live in the woods!”
“Says who?”
“Says stories! Myths and fairy tales and stuff.”
She shrugs. “Maybe she lives in a palace in the woods.”
“Maybe,” I reply, turning the thought over in my head.
“Anyway, I have no idea,” she says, her teeth clanging against the spoon as she takes a bite of yogurt. “I’m not a witch.”
I slump against the refrigerator, disappointed. Even though I knew, I knew, that of course she didn’t see the woods. No one else ever sees the things I see.
I let my head fall back, my eyes on the ceiling.
Except—well, there may be one person who does.
“Want to go to the beach?” Rose says, pulling my attention back to her. “We could have a sand castle–building contest. We could build a whole kingdom. And I’ll even let you destroy it when we’re done. I know that’s your favorite part.”
Relaxing my grip on my pillow-shield, I smile. Rose never lets me stomp on our creations when we’re done, even though the wind and water will wash them away anyway.
“Yes,” I say, and Rose bounces on the tips of her toes, pleased. “Challenge accepted.”
I turn, and she follows me up the stairs. But my initial elation at Rose’s offer seems to bleed right out of me by the time we reach our room.
A witch, she said.
A witch.
All night the Witch plucked petals from her heart, bequeathing wishes of every form and flavor to the children who sought her in their dreams, but every minute she awaited the return of the Fox Who Is No Fox, longed to hear his voice sculpting things she would never see, places she would never be, people she would never meet. Her loyal foxes paced at her feet.
The children—they wished. And the Witch—she waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Finally he entered the castle, shrugging off his fox-flesh and transforming back into a boy.
“Come.” The Witch beckoned him closer. “Now.”
“As you wish,” he said, and bowed.
He sat before her with his head tilted back, the better to look at her, his throat long and pale.
He spoke.
And spoke, until his voice was razed to a rasp, and then he began a history lesson, the intricate past of the World Beyond the Wood: revered reigns of kings and queens, conquests and revolutions, bloody battles and insufferable sieges. Even the stiff whiskers of the foxes stopped twitching to hear.
After a while, the Fox Who Is No Fox moved on to mythologies: monsters and maidens, heroes and villains; he stared at the sky and expounded on gods, vast and varied. Angels and devils, saviors and crusaders, religions and worship.
And when he started to tell a fairy tale, a fantasy of cruelty and courage and beauty and despair, of curses and kisses and curiosity that kills—of this the Witch wanted no part.
“Speak of something else,” she said.
He sighed, and told her instead of an ancient pirate’s daughter who was known for her finely crafted poisons, a girl with glass behind her eyes and skin perfumed in the cloud-scent of death. She let the Fox Who Is No Fox sit upon the dais with his back to her. As he spoke, she tangled fresh flowers in his hair, blue and yellow and riotous violet, petals shining like bruises. The Witch asked for more, more stories of heroines exactly like that pirate’s daughter, and he obliged. He had stories like stones in his hands, so many, and she wanted to hear them all.
Well.
Not quite all.
“Once there was a girl,” he said, while the Witch wove him a crown of roses, “a girl whose name is—”
The Witch curled her hands into his hair and tightened her grip, fingernails to scalp. He winced and arched his neck against her bare knees.
“This sounds like a fairy story,” the Witch warned.
“I assure you, it is not.”
She relaxed her grasp, just a little. “What, then?”
He lifted his chin, twisting at the waist to look up at her. “It is more of a…a secret history, if you will.”
The Witch didn’t respond. Instead she released him, his head fell forward, and she pushed herself up and out of her throne, to step widely around him.
“Go home,” she said at last, her head bowed and her back to him, arms crossed tight over her heart.
“But—”
“That is enough.”
“But I—”
“You promised!”
The Fox Who Is No Fox stood, and the flowers fell from his hair. He walked quietly around her, but she did not look up again until he was gone, did not let her arms or her heart relax.
Quietly, to no one but herself, she said, “That is enough for now.”
Rose lies on her back with her
right arm hooked over her head and one leg dangling off the edge of the bed, unconsciously offering her foot as food for the kind of monsters that crunch cubes of ice between their molars, impervious to the cold and the frostbitten beauty of snowdrift souls.
I wait until I’m certain she’s asleep before I rise and inch backward, toes on the carpet, creeping, sliding, ready to slip back under the sheets at the slightest sign of her stirring.
“Stay here,” I whisper to Gabrielle as she stands to follow. “I won’t be long.”
I had plenty of chances to go back to the attic during the daylight today, even after hanging with Rose. Plenty of chances to return without my sisters, but I squandered every single one of them.
Later, later, later, I told myself. Then: Never, never, never. But later and never have converged, canceling each other out.
Now, now, now.
The smart thing would be to stay away, to forget, to pretend it never happened.
But.
Two nights ago I opened the forbidden door in my dream for the very first time, after years of reaching and grasping and waking with the taste of disappointment mixed with relief rusting in my mouth. And last night, I found a boy in the attic who claims to know me, and it can’t be a coincidence, can it? And though it seems impossible, I can’t help but wonder: In opening the door, did I somehow release him? Release him into my life, or worse, into the waking world?
I’ve always been sure there were secrets behind that door, and maybe now I can get some answers. Answers about the visions I’m cursed with, about the creatures I see, and how I can sometimes see my heart through my ribs. About the woods, and the witch.
And about the boy himself.
Gabrielle follows me anyway as I skulk out of our bedroom and into the empty hallway. We walk together up the stairs, but when I open the attic door, I step inside and close it quickly, shutting her out. She paws at the wood, scratching and whimpering, but I ignore her and walk farther in.
The room could be as small as a teacup or as vast as a universe, ever expanding. The door, the bed, the floor directly beneath—these are the only real, solid things in the absolute darkness. The heat spreads through the room like a rash, and already I am starting to sweat. I reach the bed, bend, and crawl backward, until I hit the wall. Eyes closed, eyes open—it makes no difference. But I keep them open anyway.