The woods were dense and deep, enough so that Annie realized, shortly after leaving the ghost town, that she had no idea where they were. They could as easily have been walking in circles as bending back toward the woods where Adeline had disappeared; she had no way of knowing, and without some small landmark that she could point to, she wasn’t sure how to even phrase the question. If she angered Hal while she was alone with him in the woods …
No. She refused to think like that. She was done letting the fear of men run her life—had been done since the day she had grabbed her living daughter and run from Deseret.
“Where are we?” she demanded, and her voice rang strong and clear and unafraid.
Hal looked back, seeming unimpressed by her courage. “The woods,” he said. “Around here, you’re either in the woods or you’re not.”
“But are we lost in the woods? I need to find my daughter.”
“No one knows these woods better than I do.”
“That doesn’t actually answer my question.” Annie raised her lantern, thrusting it forward, until the light danced across his grizzled features, chasing the shadows away. “Where are we, right now, and what are you doing to lead me to my child?”
“Get that damned light out of my face,” said Hal, pushing her hand aside. He glowered at her, eyes almost obscured by the shadows that came rushing back as soon as the lantern wasn’t shining directly on him. “You think you’re lost with me? You can’t imagine how lost you would be without me. You have no idea. These woods go for miles and miles. You could walk forever and never find your way out.”
“And yet I found you, which seems as likely as the proverbial needle in the haystack, when you say things like that,” said Annie. “Perhaps the woods go on forever, but the woods directly around The Clearing? Those seem to be a bit more crowded. This is where the people are, which means this is where the wendigo are. Either my daughter is alone or she’s with the wendigo, and either way, she can’t have gone far. I need to find her. You need to help me find her. You promised to help me find her.”
Hal’s glower faded, replaced by a look of satisfaction. “I did, and I will. It’s good that you have some fight in you. Meek and mild doesn’t serve you very well, here in the woods.”
“So you know where we are?”
“I do.” He raised one hand and pointed off into the trees. “The wendigo don’t get along with one another most of the time, but they all den in the same mountain.”
“I saw two mountains when we were on the road.”
“The other belongs to the wolflings,” said Hal. At Annie’s blank expression, he shook his head and said, “Dark, dire creatures, like wolves but larger and smarter, with a human’s hands and cunning fingers. They would devour us all, if not for the wendigo.”
“The wendigo … protect you?”
“The wendigo frighten them, and since the wendigo are usually found closer to town, they keep the wolflings at bay. Don’t let this make the wendigo sound like they have our best interests at heart—they don’t. They just have enough humanity left to play at being farmers, and tend their flocks. We’re all they eat, given half a choice. If they ate the whole town in a night, there’d be no more man-flesh here for years, maybe even decades. They don’t want that. The wolflings don’t care about being farmers. The wolflings are just as happy to eat deer, or rabbits, or true wolves, and they’d fill their bellies once and then forget we’d ever been here. I’ve heard tell of the two beasts forming alliances in other places, where the meat is more plentiful, but here there’s not enough for them to share. They have to fight, for the sake of their own appetites.”
“So one set of monsters protects you from the other,” said Annie, in a low, hushed tone. “We’ll need to check both mountains.”
“No, we won’t,” said Hal. “If your girl bent toward the wolfling mountain, she’s gone. They’ll have made a meal of her before she even knew that she was in danger. The wendigo at least may have kept her alive.”
“To fatten her up?” Like some dreadful witch out of a fairy story. It was difficult not to think of gingerbread houses and all the horrors that could be contained therein, safely tucked away behind baked walls and spun-sugar windows.
Hal snorted. “To lure you in. The wendigo were us. They may not have a parent’s love in their frozen hearts, but they know a parent will follow a missing child. Why devour the babe when they could have the mother first? You’ll have a great deal more meat on your bones.”
“My little girl is sickly,” said Annie. “She’s never been able to gain weight.”
“Then the wendigo will definitely delay eating her until they’ve attracted anyone who might come to her cries.”
Adeline could cry as much as she liked: she would never make a sound. Telling Hal that seemed unwise. What if her daughter’s silence meant the wendigo saw her as useless and consumed her immediately? Worse, what if it didn’t, but Hal assumed it would? She could be abandoning Adeline to her fate, solely because she had made the mistake of telling her native guide that her daughter couldn’t scream.
“So we’re going to their mountain.”
Hal nodded tightly.
“What’s to stop the wendigo from eating us?”
“Nothing,” he said, and chuckled darkly. “They’ll have us both if given half the chance. They can see in the dark. They can smell us from a mile away. These are their woods, and not ours in the slightest. Still sure you want to go?”
“It’s my daughter,” said Annie. “I never had a choice.”
Hal nodded, and the two resumed their passage through the woods.
Annie had long since set aside the frills and ornate fabrics of her youth: her clothes were simple, as close to form-fitting as was appropriate for a woman of her age and position, with a skirt that fell straight down toward her ankles and a blouse tailored to fit snugly over her corset. Even so, the trees grabbed at her clothes and hair, tugging her back, trying to keep her. The smell of pine sap flowed over everything, until it seemed like it was conspiring with the shadows that tangled at their feet, trying its best to enclose and preserve her, like a bug caught in amber. There were so many ways to freeze in Oregon, and so very few ways to thaw.
Hal didn’t seem to notice how much trouble she was having. He moved through the shadows without pause or hesitation, slipping between the trees and never looking back. Annie had to push herself to keep up with him. The same trees that had allowed him to pass unhindered reached out with spindly branches and snatched at her, until she was half-ready to believe that they possessed some independent intelligence, some innate ability to know that she didn’t belong.
The tallow in her lantern was running low; she estimated that she had two hours, three at the absolute most, before it would gutter and go out, casting the both of them into darkness. Hal wouldn’t mind, but she? She wouldn’t be able to see her hand in front of her face. If he decided to run off and leave her, there wouldn’t be anything she could do to stop him.
Adeline was the most important thing. She would risk anything, lose anything, if it meant getting Adeline back. But if they didn’t hurry, there was every chance that she would join her daughter in being utterly lost in the woods.
“We’re almost there,” said Hal, voice low.
Annie startled, staring at the back of his head. “Am I so predictable?” she asked.
“In these woods, everyone is predictable. In these woods, we’re all animals, and animals are always easy to read. Now come.”
He began walking faster. Annie hurried to keep up.
The trees began to change around them, becoming no less dense but becoming thinner, somehow, like their roots had been starved of nutrients when they were young, stunting their growth, making it impossible for them to reach their full potential. The branches grabbing at her hair and clothing grew sharper, crueler, and less laden-down with needles. Annie breathed in and realized that even the smell of pine was fading, replaced by the thicker, more terrible smell of wood decaying while it was still alive. The trees here were dying. They were already dead. They just didn’t realize it yet.
Hal turned to face her, raising one finger to his lips in an exaggerated request for silence. Annie nodded understanding, and he began to walk again, leading her through the dead and dying trees.
It was a shock when the wood ended. It did not taper off: it simply stopped, as abrupt as if it had been harvested by some unseen forester. Except that not even stumps remained. The ground was churned-up, ripped and torn, unstable. Annie stopped in the shelter of the final line of trees, gaping.
The mountain did not rise out of the earth: it erupted. It ripped its way free. It was granite, solid, ancient, and yet somehow still seemed to be on the verge of moving, straining for even greater heights. The curdled moon hung overhead, casting its terrible light on the mountainside, making it possible to see much of the way to the top … and nothing grew there. Not moss, not brush, not the stubby, clinging trees that she had seen on so many other mountains, finding thin patches of windswept soil to sink their roots into. Other mountains were composite organisms, living through the smaller things that lived upon them. This mountain …
This mountain lived as a ghost town lived, or a mine shaft that had collapsed and claimed the lives of a dozen miners. There were places, terrible, tormented places, that pulsed with their own vital energy, unspeakable and cruel. This mountain was not a nursery for wildflowers or a place for hawks to build their nests, but it lived all the same. It lived, and it looked upon its domain, and it hungered for the things it found there.
“My God,” whispered Annie.
“Your god has no place here, and neither does anyone else’s,” said Hal. “Unless there’s a god of the wendigo—and if there is, I hope never to be wicked enough to see its face.”
At the base of the mountain was a cave, gaping like a vast and starving maw. Annie looked at it and knew two things with absolute certainty: that she did not ever, in her life, want to go into that cave, and that if she failed to go into that cave, she would never know whether the wendigo had her daughter.
The memory of Nathanial offering to leave her and Adeline behind, to set them up with some cozy townie apartment until the winter passed, haunted her. She could have accepted. He would have thought no less of her, and she would have her daughter in her arms even now, holding her tightly, unaware of how close she had come to total disaster.
But I chose the circus, she thought, and looked to Hal, waiting for him to tell her what to do.
“The wendigo den inside the mountain,” he said. “It’s a honeycomb of horrors in there, but unlike the bees, they have no queen. There’s nothing can stop them when their hunger’s up, and when they decide it’s time to feed. We go in there, there’s all likelihood that they’ll rip us apart. So we’re not going in.”
“But my daughter—”
“Do you hear her crying? Those caves, they’re like a pair of cupped hands. They make sounds bigger. They bounce them out into the world. That’s how they bait the hook. If your girl were in there, she’d be crying her heart out, and we’d hear her.”
“Adeline cannot speak.”
Hal went still.
“When I say she cannot speak, I don’t mean that she is silent but can still scream, or cry. I’ve met silent children who could do both those things, whose mouths simply lacked the capacity to form words as we understand them.” One of those children had been a boy who sang like a bird, trilling and chirping until every bird that could hear him came down from the sky to meet the child who called their names. The other had been a girl whose mouth refused to follow her directions but whose hands had been infinitely clever, stitching seams so fine that they seemed nonexistent.
Silence was not a sentence. It was simply another state of being.
Hal was stone-faced, unmoving. Annie pressed on.
“When she is hurt, she weeps, but there is no sound. When she takes ill, she sneezes, still without sound. The only sound I’ve ever heard her make is a cough, and that isn’t her; that’s the air, speaking for itself as it escapes.”
(A lie, but one she had told so many times over the years that it sounded like truth now to her own ears. Adeline had been born screaming, like any babe. It was her father’s hand that had stolen her voice away from her, forever. But she hadn’t been Adeline then, any more than a newly sprouted seed could be called a rose. She had been the potential for Adeline, and when Annie had taken the steps necessary to plant her in fertile soil, she had bloomed.)
“They could have her, and she could never tell me, because I can’t hear her. She speaks with her hands and her heart, not with her lips. Those were never where her voice lived anyway. Please. You have to help me find my daughter. You have to.”
“I think you’ll find that I have to do nothing. You asked me to bring you here. I brought you. I told you before we arrived that your daughter would be used as bait—didn’t you think that they might kill her once they realized she couldn’t cry? That they might not have any use for a child who couldn’t attract its parents?”
“She’s just a little girl—”
“And my Poppy was just a little girl, but the wendigo took her all the same!”
Annie was quiet for a moment, simply looking at him. Poppy had been taken by the wendigo, yes, but not in the same manner Adeline had. Poppy had tasted the flesh of her own kind and gone to the wendigo as one of their own.
She was opening her mouth to say so when Hal’s hand clamped down on her shoulder, fingers digging in tight.
“Lower your light and be silent,” he hissed. “They come.”
The trees were thin and scrubby, but still packed tightly enough that Annie was able to move her lantern half-behind her own body and half-behind the nearest trunk, blocking out the majority of the light. Hal stepped partially in front of her, blocking the rest. Anyone coming up from behind them would have seen it—wouldn’t have been able to miss it, given how dark the woods were, how scant the light was—but from the mountain, they were cast entirely into darkness.
Silence reigned. Then, like a whisper, like a sigh, something rustled from the mountain. The bell-like shape of the wendigo cave was working against its owners: they might be silent as an owl’s wings in the forest, in the world, but the killing field they had designed for their own use was inanimate and hence disloyal. It didn’t care what it amplified; it didn’t care that it amplified at all. And so it caught the sound of their movement and threw it out into the world, where it settled like a warning, like a prayer.
The first of the wendigo emerged.
Annie did not gasp. She was, briefly, terribly grateful to Michael, who had trained the habit of gasping out of her, first with his words, and later with his open palm, slapping her into submission, into the quiet, perfect doll he wanted her to be. She swallowed her terror and dismay, adding it to the turmoil already stewing in her belly. She would be pregnant again by the end of this night, she half-thought, growing gravid with the terrible offspring of Oregon.
She had been the mother to a monster’s child once before. Adeline was none the worse for wear from her heritage. If a sibling was the cost of getting her back, Annie was sure her Delly would be an excellent older sister.
The wendigo were taller than a man, shaggy, like something bred of man and bear, but worse than either. Their mouths were a forest of teeth; their noses were all but nonexistent. It gave them a skull-like appearance, like they were the spirits of the dead tangled in a forest of roots and cobwebs. Their fur might have been white, had it been clean; as it was, they were a dozen shades of gray and brown and red. One, which had apparently gotten wet after its last meal, was a surprisingly appealing shade of petal-pink, like the blood had been partially but not completely rinsed away.
Hal’s fingers clamped down tighter on Annie’s shoulder as two wendigo emerged, closer together than most of the others. One was of a size with the rest. The other …
It was difficult to call something taller than an adult man “short,” but everything was a matter of scale. Compared to the rest of the wendigo, the second was short, almost dainty. A child monster.
Poppy.
Annie glanced to Hal. Tears were standing in the old forester’s eyes, which were fixed on that diminutive monster. He watched her all the way to the edge of the clearing, where she followed the rest of the wendigo into the trees and disappeared.
His eyes flicked to Annie. He gave a little shake of his head, indicating that she shouldn’t ask. She didn’t. She already knew what his answer would be, and in that moment, the greatest cruelty she could have committed would have been forcing him to say it out loud.
“Come,” he whispered instead, voice barely louder than a sigh, and started across the open ground toward the cave. Annie followed on his heels, hurrying to keep up, not looking back. The wendigo and the woods were one. If anything was coming from behind them, they were already dead.
The land between the wood’s edge and the mountain was blasted and dead, the soft loam of the forest giving way to hard-packed dirt that could never have nurtured so much as a weed. There was no life. There was no cover. Whatever approached the wendigo did so in the open, with neither shade nor shelter to protect them.
The mouth of the cave loomed like the maw of a great beast, ready to swallow them down and consume them whole. Hal stopped a few feet from the entrance, putting one arm out to signal for Annie to do the same.
“Once inside, any sound will echo back out onto the woods,” he said. “If the wendigo are close, they will hear, and they will return. Be as silent as you claim your child is. Do you understand me?”
Annie nodded. “Yes.”
“Good. May God have mercy on both our souls.” He started forward once more, leaving Annie with little choice but to follow him.
She raised her lantern high as they stepped past the edge of the cave, into the deeper dark contained within.
It was immediately clear that the wendigo had gone, all of them, for the shadows inside the cave they called home—if such things could ever truly be said to have a home—were only shadows, thin and natural and no more clinging than shadows had ever been. The thick darkness of the woods was absent here. Annie felt sick as she realized how pervasive the presence of the wendigo was. They had been with her in the trees all night, thickening the shadows, filling the air with dread, and she had pressed on, because there had been no other choice.
The stone was worn so smooth that Annie’s feet found little purchase. She walked slowly, setting her feet down with exaggerated care, to stop herself from making any sound. That was another thing: the cave was silent. Soundless. Nothing breathed; nothing stirred. Her heart gave a lurch as she realized what that must mean.
Then they stepped around the bend in the cave, and Hal reached back to press a hand over her mouth, gently stopping the scream he must have felt building there. Annie’s eyes bulged under the sudden pressure of her horror and dismay.
The wendigo had eaten well this night. The central chamber of the mountain—for it must have been the center; it was so large, and the entrances to other tunnels gaped from every wall like dead black eyes—was awash in blood, fresh and red, drying and brown. Annie’s eyes skipped over it, refusing to fix on any detail, unable to stop seeing.
There: a severed leg, muscle gleaming wetly red, skin still intact from the ankle down, covering the meat in creamy brown.
There: a ribcage, cracked open, so devoid of flesh that she couldn’t say whether it had belonged to a man or a woman.
There: a woman’s head, long, golden hair matted with blood, eyes open and staring at nothingness forevermore.
There were at least ten dead among the carnage, all of them rent and sundered from themselves, until the feasting hall became a mass grave, an abattoir of blood and bone and viscera. The people had become puzzles in their dying, the pieces that remained so jumbled together that they could never be separated or reassembled properly.
There was no white gown—or perhaps there had been, and it was so soaked through with blood that it was no longer white. But Annie’s eyes searched the killing floor, tracing limb and bone and viscera, and found no child-sized limbs, no trace of white-blonde hair or gauzy gown. She let out a shuddering breath, struggling to keep it as quiet as possible, no longer able to quite care. Adeline wasn’t here.
“Hello?”
Annie and Hal both stiffened, turning to each other before turning toward the sound. The voice had come from one of the tunnels on the other side of the chamber. It was female, weak with fear and shaking with exhaustion. The thought of someone being held captive here, being kept alive through the feast that must have destroyed the rest of the taken …
It was horrifying.
The voice spoke again. “Hello, please? I can see your light. I know you’re not the things that took me. They don’t need light.” The speaker had a faint Spanish accent, as if English was not her first language. “Please, help me, before they come back.”
Annie started forward. Hal grabbed her arm, pulling her to an abrupt halt. She turned to look at him, and he shook his head in a firm “no.”
Annie’s eyes narrowed. Not for the first time, she wished that everyone spoke Adeline’s language, which was silent and subtle and needed no ears; had Adeline been here, she could have told her daughter what to do without attracting the attention of the wendigo. She jerked her arm free, shaking her head in reply. No. No, she would not walk away from someone in need—someone whose accent marked her as from elsewhere, and hence almost certainly a part of the circus.
If I walk away from Sophia, Martin will never forgive me, she thought. That, alone, was enough to move her feet forward, stepping between the pools of blood, moving onward, into the dark.