Everything was darkness in the trees. The light from Annie’s lantern cast a pale circle around her, not seeming to penetrate more than a few feet in any direction. If she held it as far from her body as possible, she could almost see through the trees ahead—but if she did that, the darkness closed in around her, enveloping her like a blanket, thick enough to carry a terrifying illusion of weight.
Annie had never been afraid of the dark. Even when she’d lived in Deseret, the plaything of a man who cared little for her needs or desires, the dark had been a friend. In the dark, she could scowl or weep, and no one would see her. Becoming the mistress of oddities had done nothing to change how comfortable she was in shadows. They thrived best in perennial twilight. They needed the dark, and it was on her to give them whatever they needed to stay alive. But here, now …
Darkness was not supposed to have weight. Darkness was not supposed to be cottony thick and smothering, like walking through cobwebs suspended from the sky. Darkness was supposed to be feathery and soft, like the air that it was comprised of. It was absolutely not, under any circumstances, supposed to push.
This darkness pushed. This darkness was doing everything in its power to eject her from the forest, to shove her back into the open—and beyond. It was difficult not to feel as if this darkness would happily push her off the bluff, leaving her to tumble end over end into the bowl where The Clearing waited, surrounded by its protective shell of ordinary night. Somehow, they had carved themselves an exception from this profound dark. In this moment, walking through the trees, she envied them as she had rarely envied anything in her life.
“Adeline,” she called. “Adeline, it’s your mother. Come to my voice, darling. You’re not in any trouble. Only come to me, and we’ll go home.”
There was no response. Despair washed over her, as hot and harsh as it had been on the day when she had realized that her husband had stolen Adeline’s voice with a slip of his scalpel. The child had been born howling as lustily as any babe in Deseret, and now she made no sound, ever, not even when her life was in danger. If Adeline needed her mother—if she had stepped in a rabbit hole or trapped her leg under a branch or, sweet Lord forbid, fallen into a hole—she would have no way of making her dilemma known.
All Annie could do was walk through the wood, desperately looking for her daughter, and pray that her steps would happen to parallel Adeline’s own.
Something glimmered on the forest floor, pale as bone. Annie stopped and bent to brush the pine needles away, revealing a smooth white stone. She picked it up, thoughts of Hansel and Gretel flashing through her mind. Adeline knew the story; she had read it to the girl herself, on the long nights when the circus was in motion from one place to another. If Delly had gone into the wood, she might have marked her way, to be sure that she could go out again.
(And Delly had gone to the wood: of that much she was absolutely sure. The girl was absolutely fearless. She had to be, to survive in a world where strangers waited around every corner, ready to make fun of her for things she had no control over. If those boys had promised her acceptance in exchange for a pinecone—and no doubt tempered their promises with mockery, implying that Delly wasn’t brave enough or strong enough to survive in their woods—then there was no question. She had gone. She wasn’t visiting friends in another wagon or watching a show from some hidden corner that Annie had failed to find. She was in the wood. Once Annie had accepted that, everything else had followed.)
Carefully, Annie set the stone down again. If it was a coincidence, meaning nothing, there was no reason to burden herself. If it was a sign of Adeline leaving a trail for herself, then it could serve as a trail for Annie as well. She could follow the stones out of the darkness, once she had found her little girl.
There was no question of her leaving the wood without her daughter. That was not going to happen. It was not. Protecting Adeline had always and ever been her only purpose.
“Adeline, darling, it’s your mother,” she called, and pressed on into the devouring dark.
Annie and forests were never going to be friends. She was a daughter of Deseret, born to the salt lakes and the high desert. She had been planted in sandy soil, and she had blossomed there, believing herself in the right environment. Some poor souls wilted in the unrelenting heat and the salty desert winds, which stripped the moisture from their skin and left their hair limp and lifeless. Not Annie. She had been a beautiful child, salt-scoured into pearlescent perfection. The heat had set her curls, rather than stealing them away, and the wind had soothed her skin, keeping it free of blemishes. She was still lovely away from the desert, but in the desert, she had been divine.
That was what had attracted the majority of her suitors. Not her beauty—beautiful women were a dime a dozen in the cities and the houses of the wealthy, where the latest tonics were available for the purchase—but the clear connection between that beauty and the world around her. Like the lizards in the rocks or the hawks in the sky, she thrived in the desert. Her children would, of necessity, be equipped to do the same.
Maybe that would have been true had she married a different sort of man. A man who was more willing to sit back and let nature take its course. A man who would never dream of subjecting his pregnant wife to the terrors of his brilliant, broken mind. She had been unwise in her choice of suitors, and everything else had spun from that.
But it had given her Adeline, and it had given her the circus, and if leaving the high desert behind had stolen a certain degree of the luster from her skin or a certain volume of curl from her hair, that was a small and easy price to pay. Annie had never worked to become a beauty. It had simply happened, like dawn, or winter. When something unearned went away, there was no point in mourning it.
The trees pressed in on all sides, their spindly branches snatching at her shawl and hair. The light from her lantern was enough that she had yet to walk face-first into one of them, but it was hard to believe that trees could grow so close together without killing each other. Surely their roots were tangled together, choking one another off. The entire forest had to be on the verge of death at all times. Annie swallowed hard, forcing down her fear, and walked on.
Adeline was not like dawn, or winter, or the desert wind. Adeline was not something that had simply happened, unavoidable and unearned. Adeline was hers, and she had fought for every minute of every day that they had spent together. Out of everything she had accomplished in her life, Adeline was the thing that she was proudest of, because Adeline had nothing to do with her being beautiful, or well-bred, or mannered. Adeline was about blood and sweat and effort. Adeline was mistakes and triumphs and fumbling her way through motherhood one day at a time. She was perfect. She was irreplaceable.
She was going to come home.
“Delly!” called Annie, and paused as the light from her lantern found another small white stone. They were too regular to be accidental; someone was leaving her a trail to follow. Whether it was her daughter or something else in these trees didn’t matter right now. They would see her out again when she needed it, and that was enough. She began to walk faster.
When the trees dropped away and she found herself walking into the open, it was enough of a shock to her system that she stopped dead, one foot already raised. She was trembling. The air still felt heavy, but now it felt empty as well, like some essential, intrinsic element of its character had been stripped away, replaced with nothingness.
At the center of the clearing, at the absolute limit of her lantern’s reach, something gleamed white. It was too large to be one of the little stones: it was the size of a fallen deer, or of a little girl with white-blonde hair.
“Delly?” whispered Annie, throat suddenly dry, tongue feeling too large for her mouth. Even forming that most familiar of words was a trial.
If that is her, if she’s hurt, she needs me, Annie thought, and forced her foot to continue its forward motion, carrying the rest of her with it. That single small motion was enough to break the spell on her. She was walking again, and then she was running, casting caution to the wind as she raced toward the center of the clearing.
Stones turned under her feet, trying to trip her. She somehow turned her fall into more forward momentum, never quite losing her balance, racing onward until she dropped to her knees a few feet away from the white shape, breath rasping in her throat, and struggled to stop herself from screaming.
The white was bone, the cathedral curve of a rib cage stripped almost entirely clean of meat. Beneath that, blending into the dark ground, was only blood, and the glistening colors of flesh and offal, like the painted walls of a circus tent, promising wonders within. They were not wonders she had any desire to see. She pressed a hand against her mouth, keeping the growing whine in her throat contained. It would do her no good. It would do her no good, and so she would not let it out.
The body was not Adeline’s.
It was human: of that, there was no question. The shape had been undeniable even from the trees, even shrouded in shadow. It was a young man, lithe of limb and gold of hair, his neck bent hard to the side and his open eyes staring up at the stars with no comprehension, like a discarded ventriloquist’s dummy. The hand that was closer to her was open, spilling a fan of polished white stones out onto the ground. It was his trail that she had been following, and not Adeline’s at all.
Somehow, that discovery was almost worse than the discovery of the body itself. He wasn’t circus folk: she didn’t recognize anything about him. A town boy, then, or a hunter from some other nearby settlement—were there other nearby settlements?—who had been caught out in the wood after the sun went down and had failed to realize the danger that he was in.
His belly appeared to have been opened by one swipe of some vast clawed paw, so large that it made Tranquility’s saucer feet look dainty. Another swipe had removed his throat, while some internal pressure had cracked his chest. She had watched Tranquility bring down deer, on the rare occasions when the circus had camped far enough from civilization that it had been safe to let her lynx run free. The big cat liked to shove her head up under the ribcage, shattering the sternum from within. That appeared to have happened here. Annie couldn’t imagine how large the creature that killed him would have needed to be to do that to a human chest, which was broader and tougher than a deer’s.
A bear, then, or a catamount. Something vast and terrible and streaked in human gore that stalked these woods even now, feasting where it would, taking what it wanted. Annie looked quickly around, feeling the full force of her exposure. The things that hunted by night had better eyesight than she did. They could be watching her, concealed by the trees, aware of her presence in a way that she would never be aware of theirs.
She scrambled to her feet, pine needles sticking to her hands and the fabric of her skirt. Adeline was out there somewhere, with this predator, this unseen danger. She had to find her daughter.
This boy was dead. She had to tell the town. They were all in danger, and she was no closer to finding her little girl than she had been when she left the circus. She shouldn’t have run off without raising a search party to help her; she saw that now. She should have brought every able-bodied adult the circus had, and however many they could recruit from the town. It was those boys who had sent her daughter into the woods. It was only right that their parents should help her bring Adeline home.
Haltingly, she made her way back toward the trees. She wanted to be back with her people, surrounded by light and hope and the knowledge that she was not the only woman left in the world, more than she had wanted almost anything in her life. The word “almost” was what betrayed her. She wanted nothing if she had to have it without her daughter.
The white stones had been a false trail, lain down by a man who had already died for the crime of trespassing in these trees. Very well. It would still lead her back to the beginning, and then she could begin again, finding Adeline’s trail, letting Adeline be the one to lead her through the dark. She held her lantern close as she made her way through the trees, watching for the gleam of white stones against the dark ground.
From time to time she paused and listened to the world around her, closing her eyes and narrowing her reality to nothing but sound. If the thing that had killed that boy was following her, it moved like a whisper through the wood, so sure-footed and silent that not even the crackle of pine needles gave it away. Nothing natural was that silent. Even most of her oddities made more noise than that. She would open her eyes and continue, confident that she was not being stalked; not yet.
(What of her oddities? If she died out here, devoured by some unseen beast, who would take care of the oddities? They needed special care and handling. They needed to be treated with cautious respect. They were not worth her life, or the life of her daughter, but she feared for what would happen if she died here.)
The white stones were more frequent than she had believed them to be; many had been dropped in a way that left them half-covered with loam, difficult to see from the direction she had been coming. She walked faster, confidence growing …
And stopped. Three white stones had been dropped in almost the same place, forming a triangle. One was close to her. The other two formed the start of two new paths. One would, presumably, take her back to the forest’s edge and the edge of the bowl that contained The Clearing. The other would lead her into some unknown part of the wood. Her breath caught.
“Ah,” she sighed, soft and sad and virtually silent. She had no desire to attract the attention of the beast; speech was a human luxury, unnecessary here. But it still made her feel a little better to voice her dismay.
While Annie had no intention of going home until she had found her daughter, there was a difference between descending into The Clearing long enough to rouse a search party and abandoning her search altogether. She had been hoping to have the opportunity to do the former, to gather the roustabouts and sharpshooters they paid to accompany the show and turn her solitary hunt into something more likely to be successful. Mr. Blackstone would not mind her making off with half of his men. Under the circumstances, he might well decide to join her.
Only now, she had no way of knowing whether the direction she chose would lead her home, or take her deeper into danger. There were no good choices left. There was only the darkness, and the promise of the beast in the trees, all claws and teeth and hunger.
“I believe,” she said, to herself, voice barely above a whisper, “that I felt myself bending to the right as I ran, which would make the leftmost stone the correct choice. But if I am second-guessing my route, the rightmost stone may be the one to follow. I would greatly appreciate it, world, if you would send me some sort of a sign as to which way I should go. My Delly is only a little girl, and she needs her mother now as much as she ever has.”
The world did not send her a sign. The world was rarely so accommodating.
Annie sighed and started forward again, stepping toward the leftmost stone. Another gleamed in the dark beyond it; she kept walking. It felt better to be moving than to be standing still. Even if she were heading in the exact wrong direction, at least she was doing something.
The foolishness of searching the entire forest by herself was undeniable. Oregon was a wooded territory. It would take humanity hundreds of years to clear the land, even if they were to make a concerted effort to try—based on the inhabitants of The Clearing, the people drawn to this green and shadowed land had no interest in making it open to more habitation.
If she had been in control of the state, if its future had been hers to determine, she would have ordered her men into the forest to thin and clear all this wood away long ago. Force the woodland back from the town, if only a little; give them room to breathe. People needed room to breathe. They weren’t meant to live all penned-in like livestock, unable to safely roam.
These woods were too thick, too dense, too untouched by the hands and cutting tools of mankind. They needed to be cut back and put into their place; they needed to be tamed. Annie had walked in woods before, with none of her current misgivings. It wasn’t just her daughter’s absence—that colored everything, but she was spending so much energy on suppressing the urge to panic that she could view the trees with a certain amount of detachment. It was the closeness of it all, the intolerable darkness clinging to her skin and filling her nostrils. She couldn’t breathe.
Adeline must have been so scared, out there alone in the dark. She was just a little girl. She was fearless under normal circumstances, but she had never been so far from her mother’s sight before. When something distressed her, or when her lungs began to burn and she needed her medicine, she would run back to her mother’s side, and what was wrong with that? She was still so young. She was still so small. She would always be fragile, thanks to the circumstances of her birth. It was only reasonable that she should need her mother, almost as much as her mother needed her.
The white stones were more closely spaced than Annie remembered, and the ground around them seemed to be virtually undisturbed, as if no one had walked there in quite some time. Perhaps she had taken the wrong turn after all. She hesitated, preparing to backtrack.
Something howled behind her. It was the long, drawn-out wail of a hunting coyote, but too deep and low to have come from any coyote’s throat. A wolf, then, vast and terrible and somewhere behind her. Following the trail of stones back to the fork was not an option.
Annie began to walk faster, still taking care to set her feet down as lightly as possible, in case there was some chance—however slight—that she would be able to slip away without being heard. She couldn’t leave until she found her daughter. But she was not designed to move silently through these trees, or to avoid predation. She could not climb. She could not fly.
The snarl came from only a few feet behind her, low and deep and angry. It was a sound filled with teeth, and hearing it reminded Annie of the one thing she could do.
She could run.
Her old companions in Deseret would have been astonished if they could see her now, running through the dark Oregon woods as fleetly as any roe deer or roadrunner. She felt as if her feet barely touched the ground, bearing her onward with all the speed and strength they had earned during her years with the circus. She was a physical creature now, made for the road, tempered by the hard labors of all the many days between her and her origins, and when she set herself to run, she ran.
The sound of snarling continued to pursue her, never growing any closer. Either she was matched in speed to the beast, or—more likely—it was toying with her, allowing her to exhaust herself before it pounced. Her lantern swung wildly as she fled, making the shadows dance and spin around the trunks of the nearby trees, lending a mad levity to the scene. How could this be anything but a dream, when nothing about it remained constant between one second and the next? How could this have real consequences, when it was so clearly not really happening?
But the smell of blood and rank animal piss wafted from behind her, shed from the skin of the creature at her heels. Even if this were a dream, it was not a gentle one—and if it was not a dream, then there was a very good chance that it would kill her if she slowed, or stumbled, or showed any other sign of weakness. She could not die and save her daughter. The two things were antithetical.
Annie ran. She ran as she had never run before, leaning forward to reduce the drag from the world around her, following the jittering light of her lantern as she struggled to avoid the trees. Their branches snatched at her hair and clothing, almost like hands trying to slow her down. Still she ran. Running was all that she had left. As long as that beast followed at her heels, running was the only thing that stood any chance of saving her and, by extension, saving Adeline, who would need her mother.
The thing behind her snarled, louder and closer than ever. Annie, who had been flagging, put on a fresh burst of speed, running as hard as she could.
The trees ended.
One moment, she was running through the close-packed dark. The next, she was breaking into open air, into more ordinary darkness, beneath a sky so spangled with stars that it seemed, for a moment, to verge on blinding. She realized what came after the end of the trees and skidded to a halt, digging the sides of her feet into the earth. She stumbled. She did not fall.
Small clods of dirt, kicked loose by her arrival, rolled down the bowl that contained The Clearing to fall, with a pattering sound, to the track below.
Panting, Annie looked back. She thought she saw a shape at the wood’s edge, but only for a moment; then whatever it was pulled back and was gone, if it had ever been there in the first place. She turned to face the town, and froze.
The circus was burning.