“Martin, can you get your foot free?” Annie’s voice was tight as a drum, vibrating with the low pulse of fear and sudden adrenaline, which rushed through her veins like flame up a fuse.
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“Give me your gun.”
There was a pause before he thrust the rifle toward her, stock first, the lantern light gleaming dully off the metal. She took it with a murmured “thank you” that never quite reached the stage of becoming actual words, bracing it against her midriff as she turned toward the sound from the trees up ahead. She couldn’t figure out how to aim and hold her lantern at the same time, and so she gave it up as a bad job; she simply let the barrel swing where it would, trusting that there was nothing there that couldn’t be improved by a bullet to the gut.
“Who’s there?” she called. “Show yourself!”
No reply.
“I know you’re not one of those … those things. They didn’t carry weapons. Now come out!”
“If you know ’bout the things in the trees, miss, you know why I ain’t in no real hurry to do that,” replied a voice. It was low and gravelly, the sort of voice that didn’t seem to get much use: a voice reserved for psalms on Sunday and the occasional coarse language after a toe had been stubbed or a fishhook had snagged in a finger.
Oddly, hearing that voice made Annie feel better. Her father had had that sort of voice, may God rest his soul. He had never met a word he didn’t think was better off unspoken, and when he’d finally died, they’d all spent days trying to remember the last thing he’d said, so that it could grace his tombstone.
(In the end, the marble had borne his date of birth, his date of death, his name, and the word “father.” Anything else would have seemed too much for a man who had defined himself through silence.)
“I must insist,” she said, her own voice shaking only slightly. The rifle betrayed her nervousness. The barrel continued to swing, not quite wildly, but enough that shooting straight was an unachievable dream: she’d be lucky not to shoot herself, or Martin, in the process.
“Who are you?”
“Ma’am, I’m bleeding.” Martin’s voice was urgent. It took Annie a moment to realize why. Pain was bad, yes, and pain that caused bleeding was worse; it spoke to an underlying injury that could take a person out of the workforce for weeks. Martin was a circus roustabout. He’d endured worse.
But not in the woods, crawling with monsters that could, in all likelihood, pick the scent of blood out of the air and use it to track down their prey. Blood at the circus upset the oddities, sending some of them into a frenzy of hunger. That was the worst it did. Blood here, now …
“Did you lay this trap, sir?” she demanded of the voice from the wood. “Come release my companion at once. We are fleeing from a terrible thing, and I would rather he not be caught because you were unwilling to share a wood larger than the territory of Montana.”
There was a mirthless chuckle from the trees. “Miss, I promise you, if you knew what was in these woods, you wouldn’t want to share them, either. I put that trap down. I needed to be safe. How well do you know the man?”
“Ma’am,” said Martin urgently.
“Well enough to know that he does not deserve the pain you’re causing him,” said Annie coldly. “Well enough that if you didn’t have a gun, I would be helping him right now.”
“You can’t see me to know where to aim,” said the man in the woods.
“And you can see us quite well, thanks to my lantern,” said Annie. “Believe me, we’re well aware of the disadvantages of our situation.”
There was a crackling noise. Annie tensed, fighting to drop neither lantern nor gun. One made them a target; the other was their only ready form of defense. Without them, all would be lost. Martin was silent beside her. He must have been in excruciating pain. Somehow, he was swallowing it all down, waiting for her cue.
If we survive this, I will be a better friend to you, she thought. She would be a friend to him at all, when she never had been before. She would welcome him to her wagon for hot tea and honey at the end of a long day’s ride; she would teach him to care for the oddities, preparing him for a trade with another circus, or even with their own once she had retired. Monsters were a young woman’s game. One day her reflexes would fail her, and she would be short a hand and need someone else to feed the fish.
“Lift your lantern a little higher, miss; let me see you.” The voice from the trees was closer now.
Swallowing pride and fear and a hundred other terrible emotions, Annie raised her lantern, bathing herself and Martin in its light. They must have seemed like something from another world, here in this wood where the trees swallowed everything but shadows. No matter how high she hoisted her lantern, she couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. Whoever was approaching them, he remained a cipher. Friend, foe, or something altogether else, it didn’t matter. They’d never see him until he wanted to be seen.
“Has either of you been injured, apart from by my trap?” asked the stranger.
“No,” said Annie. Her voice was ice and needles, unforgiving. She had long since stopped allowing men to make of her a showpiece. Her tolerance for such behavior had died in Deseret.
“It caught me across the leg, sir,” said Martin.
The stranger paused. “But you can keep walking? You’re not incapacitated?”
“Not as yet,” said Martin. He left off the “sir” this time. Annie wondered if the stranger understood how thin the ice beneath him was becoming. No one’s patience was eternal.
“All right.” There was another crackle, and a man stepped into the light.
Annie’s first impression was of ruin. His face was a wasteland of wrinkles and old scars, carved so deep into his left cheek and the left side of his forehead that he might as well have been a mountain, subject to the destructions of the weather. Somehow, whatever had made those scars had missed his eye, leaving it to peer through the desolation. Both his eyes were bright blue and sharp as razors, raking along her body and Martin’s in almost the same glance. There was nothing inappropriate about the stranger’s gaze: he was assessing, looking for signs that they might have lied to him.
His hair was a mass of white, spiky and thin: the hair of an old man, untended and ungroomed. He was thin, his clothing adding bulk to his spidery frame. The rifle in his hands was well over double the size of the one in hers. If this had come down to bullets, she would have lost before it had even begun.
He held up a small rust-speckled key, like something to be used in winding a child’s toy. “I’m going to release your friend,” he said, eyes on Annie. “Means I might hurt him a bit. Don’t go blowing my head off while I’m doing you a favor.”
“I will struggle to keep my feminine weakness in check,” she said, voice tight.
The stranger chuckled bleakly as he knelt and reached for the trap on Martin’s leg. “There’s no room for feminine weakness in Oregon,” he said. “Any woman who made it this far would have left any such fripperies in a more civilized land.”
The tiny key in his hand went into an equally tiny slot in the side of the trap that had captured Martin’s leg. There was a tinny click, and the trap came open. Martin immediately withdrew his foot, staggering back a step before he stopped to look down at the damage and hiss. Blood had soaked the leg of his pants, darkening it until it almost matched the shadows around him.
The stranger remained kneeling for a few seconds, resetting his trap and covering it with a layer of leaves, until not even the tips of the teeth showed through. Then he stood, brushed his hands against his trousers, and recovered his rifle from the tree he had leaned it up against. He moved quickly, fluidly, but with no visible sense of urgency; he knew these woods.
I have finally found a man made for Oregon, thought Annie, and said nothing.
“The two of you, follow me,” he said. “I don’t want you to, but I’ll not have your deaths on my conscience tonight. Not before the first snowfall.”
“I’m looking for my daughter,” said Annie.
“I’m looking for my sweetheart,” said Martin.
The stranger gave them a look full of sorrow and strange reluctance. Then he shook his head. “You won’t find either of them if you go leaving a blood trail through the woods. You need to have that cleaned and wrapped. Follow me, or don’t, but if you choose to go your own way, be aware that it’s on your own heads.” He turned and started to walk away.
Annie and Martin exchanged a silent look. Martin nodded, very slightly. Annie handed the rifle back to him and offered her arm. After a pause, he took it, leaning against her as he limped by her side.
The stranger walked quickly—almost too quickly, at times, for the injured Martin to keep pace. He stepped between trees and into patches of absolute blackness with the calm confidence of a man who knew his surroundings so well that he no longer needed to see them to know that he was going the right way. Annie did her best to keep up with him, lending more and more of her support to Martin, jollying him along to keep the stranger from slipping out of the watery light cast by their lantern.
They had gone some unknown and unknowable distance when the man stopped, looking back over his shoulder at them, and said, “The ground slopes down here. Not as bad as it does going into town, but bad enough that you should be aware.”
“Thank you,” said Annie, startled into courtesy.
The stranger’s smile was fleeting. “A man knows his land,” he said, and stepped into the next rank of trees.
The ground did slope a few feet farther on, trending gently down for five or six steps before abruptly sheering off, becoming a steep slide. Martin moaned and clutched at Annie’s arm, struggling to keep his balance. She bore up under the pressure, refusing to let her discomfort show. If he let go, if he fell, she would never be able to get him back to his feet.
“We’re almost there, Martin,” she whispered, as close to his ear as she dared. “Buck up. Sophia needs you.”
He shot her a grateful look, barely visible in the pale light of the lantern.
The ground leveled out again, so suddenly that Annie stumbled. This time it was Martin who caught her and held her up, keeping her from falling. He offered her a smile, wan as it was, and said, “Careful, ma’am.”
“Call me Annie,” she said.
The trees had ended when the ground leveled: they were standing in another of those odd bowls, shallower and smaller than the one that contained The Clearing, but open all the same. The stars were cold diamonds in the sky above. The stranger was ahead of them, moving toward the black, ramshackle shape of a small house.
Annie looked at Martin again. This time, their smile was shared, the fragile bond of comrades in arms who had survived some terrible trial.
Not that the trials were over. The night was young yet, as such things went, and their loved ones were still missing. She offered her arm again. He took it, stepping closer than propriety would normally have allowed. There was nothing improper about his closeness, not here, not now; without her, he would have fallen. They were truly companions in arms, and no more.
Almost as if he had heard her thoughts, Martin murmured, “I suppose Sophia’d have some pretty pointy questions if she could see us right now.”
“Mr. Blackstone might have some of the same.” She started walking, tugging Martin with her toward the house.
There was an awkward pause before he asked, “Ma’am—Miss Annie—are you and the master…?”
“No. But I think we’d both like to be. We’ve just been waiting for Delly to be old enough to have an opinion, and to understand what’s being asked of her. She is always my first concern, and always will be. You’ll see, when you have children of your own. They eclipse everything else, even your love for their other parent. They are the world. Mr. Blackstone is … well, the moon, I suppose. I love him dearly, and I believe he loves me.” It was surprisingly easy to be honest under these cold, distant stars. The rest of the world was so far away that its rules didn’t matter anymore. “Still, Delly must agree before I would consider remarriage.”
There was also the matter of her first husband to be considered. Dr. Murphy was not, so far as she was aware, actually dead; he was still in distant Deseret, doing his work. If she had left alone, he would no doubt be married to some fresh new daughter of the faithful and utterly repudiating his runaway bride by now. But Adeline’s existence changed all that. He was many things. A terrible husband; a terrible man. Terrible husbands and terrible men often thought of themselves as born fathers.
They had reached the house. Annie frowned to see that the porch was separated from the ground by four steep steps.
“Here,” she said, moving Martin’s grip to the rail. “I will go ahead and pull you up.”
“There’s no need,” he protested. “Go in. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“No one else gets left behind tonight, Martin. Certainly not you.” She moved to the first step, offering him her free hand. The lantern dangling in the other cast pale light over his face, illuminating his discomfort. He wanted her to run, to save herself; that much was perfectly clear.
When she did not run, he slid his hand into hers, leaning heavily, bracing himself as she tugged him, one step at a time, up onto the porch. He was panting and shaking by the time they finished the climb, his wounded leg trembling so viciously that it seemed it must fold beneath him and drop him into the dirt at any moment. Annie offered him a warm, encouraging smile and turned to the closed cabin door. Her smile faded into a frown. Why had the stranger left them outside?
She knocked. The door opened. Light spilled out, thick and bright and almost painful after the darkness of the woods. She blinked and squinted, tears springing to her eyes. The stranger stood so as to fill the entire doorway, keeping them from seeing anything beyond his shadow, and the light.
“You made it,” he said, sounding surprised. Then, with a note of grudging respect, he added, “Best come in,” and stepped to the side, revealing a small room.
Annie stepped inside, a limping Martin leaning heavily on her shoulder.
Inside, the cabin was a sturdy testament to the man who’d constructed it: thick pine walls, the cracks between the planks plastered with clay until they presented an absolutely solid surface; a floor and ceiling the match. The fireplace was made of rounded stones glued together with more clay, and the chimney wound upward for several feet before melding into tin, the transition occurring almost seamlessly. What furniture there was—a chair, a table, a bed—all appeared to have been made from the same wood as the cabin.
There were windows, but they were covered by thick oilcloth, trapping every scrap of light inside. Annie helped Martin to the room’s single chair before turning to see the stranger lowering a canvas sheet over the closed door, blocking the cracks in the doorframe. No light would be able to escape there, either.
“Why?” she asked.
The man turned. His expression was bleak. It was easier to see him now, and she revised her estimate of his age upward: he might be as much as seventy, yet still somehow scrabbling in this forest for a living, or at least to stay alive. It was almost inconceivable, and yet there he was, still breathing, proving the truth of his existence with every movement.
“Light attracts them,” he said. “It’s a little miracle that you made it as far as you did with that lantern of yours. You wouldn’t have, if they hadn’t eaten recently. You should feel damned lucky, and you should curse yourselves for the fools you are.”
“We don’t know what ‘they’ are,” protested Annie.
Martin didn’t say anything. He made a small, pained noise, and Annie turned to see him trying to peel the cuff of his trousers away from the wound in his ankle. She looked back to the stranger.
“Do you have water and a wet rag?” she asked. “I need to clean Martin’s wound before it can become infected.”
“There’s worse things than infection in these woods,” the stranger said grimly. He walked across the cabin to a shelf and began taking down objects, tucking them under his arm. “You shouldn’t have come here. That was your first mistake.”
“To the wood?” asked Annie.
“To The Clearing,” said the stranger. He walked back to her, dropping a small pot of salve, a bundle of rags, and a clean stick on the table next to Martin’s chair. “You’d have done better to steer clear of Oregon entirely. This isn’t a safe place to be when the winter’s coming on.”
“It’s mid-autumn,” said Annie stiffly. She knelt next to Martin, slapping his hands away from the cuff of his trousers. He withdrew with a silent gratitude that she recognized all too well from her attempts to tend to Adeline’s various small wounds and bruises. There was something comforting about knowing that the mending was in someone else’s hands. “If this is when the winter comes on here, you should all move to kinder climes.”
“There are no kinder climes. There are only different forms of cruelty.”
Privately, Annie agreed. Aloud, she said, “The water, if you please. I need to flush these wounds. Why are you setting such vicious traps in the middle of the wood?”
“Why does anyone set traps? There are things in the trees I’d rather not have roaming free, either because they’re a meal for me or because they would make a meal of me, given the chance. I check my traps in the morning, when the sun is in the sky and I have the best chance of safety. Sometimes they feed me for the day. Other times they tell me that they’ve kept me safe.”
“How does a trap tell you anything?”
“Sometimes a trap contains a foot,” he said brusquely, walking back to her and depositing a bowl of water on the table nearest to her hand. “You shouldn’t have come here. There’s no good to be found in these trees, and the ill that waits for travelers is so great as to render all benefit moot.”
Annie looked at him for a moment, aghast. Then, with a shake of her head, she turned her attention to Martin’s leg.
The trap had bitten into his flesh just above the ankle, breaking the skin in a nasty circle all the way around his leg. The deepest of the punctures appeared to be well over an inch, and wide enough for her to slip her finger inside, had she desired to do so. She lifted down the bowl of water, wetted the cloth, and began gingerly dabbing each of the punctures, washing away blood and dirt. It was an action complicated by the fact that wiping the wounds agitated them, causing them to begin bleeding anew.
Martin hissed but did not object. He had been with the circus long enough to have seen wounds go septic when they were not cleaned immediately, crippling or even killing those unfortunate enough to have been injured. A little discomfort now would be justified if it resulted in his continued survival.
“How often do you clean your traps, sir?” Annie asked. “The light was poor in the woods. I was unable to tell whether I would be fighting rust, in addition to everything else.”
“Weekly,” he said. “They’re oiled and sharpened. The damage will be greater than if the tines had been blunted, but there should be no rust.”
“Cold comfort,” said Annie, and returned to her work. She could feel the stranger watching her, his eyes cold on the back of her neck. Belatedly, it occurred to her that she should have offered her name, and Martin’s, and inquired after his. Her manners had suffered greatly since going into the woods. And why shouldn’t they? Everything else had suffered greatly since she had gone into the woods. Her manners were simply one more consequence of her choices.
Martin closed his eyes as she cleaned the wounds and salved them liberally with the stuff from the small pot, which was viscous and smelled of tallow and boneset. Finally, she tied a length of cloth around his ankle and stood, drying her hands on her skirt.
“You won’t be walking on that for a day or so, I’m afraid,” she said, with genuine regret in her voice. “The wounds will need time to scab over, and exerting yourself too much will cause them to begin bleeding again. That raises your risk of infection. I’d rather have you stay put and keep your leg, if it’s all the same to you.”
“It’s not all the same to Sophia,” he said, looking at her solemnly. “I’m sorry, Miss Annie, but I can’t let you go looking for my girl by yourself, and you need someone with you in those woods, now that your cat’s gone.”
Annie considered arguing, or pointing out that she had gone into the woods by herself once already, and come out alive. She did neither. More and more, it was becoming clear that her survival thus far had been a matter of chance and circumstance, rather than any particular skill. There were monsters in those trees. Anyone who walked there alone would be in danger.
“Neither of you is going out there before sunrise,” the stranger said gruffly. “It’s not safe.”
Annie and Martin turned to look at him, once more united in their disbelief. It was Annie who found her voice first.
“I beg your pardon, sir, but who are you to forbid either of us anything?” she asked. “You have been kind enough to allow us a place to treat the wounds which you dealt, with your careless trapping, and for that, we thank you. You are not my husband, or Martin’s father, or any other form of authority that we should obey. You are a man. You do not control these woods.”
To her surprise, the man chuckled darkly. “No man controls these woods. That’s the trouble, miss: no man has ever controlled these woods. The things that walk here are beyond man’s control and have no interest in our petty laws or manners. You should run.”
“Run?” asked Annie. “Run where? The trees close in on all sides. If it’s the woods I need to fear, my fate is sealed.”
“Run until Oregon is only a memory,” said the stranger grimly. “It’s not the woods you should fear. It’s the things that walk in their shade. For those things are hungry beyond all measure, and they can never, never be satisfied.”