The walk from the open cellar door, back past Quill’s cottage, and into the circular grove was as slow and silent as a dream.
Nicholas lifted his eyes to look at the sky. The rain had all but finished, and clouds were easing apart like rotten lace in a stiff wind; behind them, stars blinked cold, faint light. Ahead, a round wall of trees glistened and their wet leaves whispered to one another with sly drip-drips. There were two dozen or so trees in a circle sixty feet wide.
As Quill walked between two trees, she fondly touched the trunk nearest. She didn’t look back at him.
A figure slid through him, and his eyes widened with surprise, but his body allowed no other shock. Miriam Gerlic screamed without sound, wrists bound together behind her, legs kicking at air as she was carried by unseen hands between the trees. As she slipped out of sight, her ghost eyes fell on Nicholas, then were obscured by sable branches.
Nicholas felt a scream pound inside him, desperate to shriek out like a whistle from an overpressured boiler, but no sound escaped his lips except low breaths passing in, out, in, out, with easy monotony. His body—Quill’s body—carried him into the circle.
The ground underfoot was wet, sandy dirt, raked clean. In the center of the unnatural grove was a pedestal of stilted legs a meter high holding aloft a spherical cage made of woven branches and bone.
Quill hobbled to stand beside the cage. Within it Nicholas saw a shifting cloud of moving shadows. As he grew closer, he understood: inside the cage, six children half-knelt, half-hung, their ghostly skins melding with one another’s. Each was suspended by the wrists, which were lashed to the curved branch bars above them. A half-dozen children. A half-dozen ghosts. Their faces were an overlapping blur. But as each bobbed or struggled, he or she would drift apart from the others and Nicholas could see their singular, awful terror. Little Owen Liddy in his long shorts, his freckled face pale with disbelieving fright. Esther Garvie, the girl in the forties’ sundress, her bare feet torn and bleeding. Another boy, younger than the others and with red hair, had his eyes screwed tight above wet cheeks. Miriam Gerlic’s eyes were impossibly wide and without hope. Dylan Thomas, head bowed and bawling. And Tristram Boye.
Nicholas felt the rhythm of his breathing break, just a little, as a small gasp sucked in cool air.
He knew that Tristram had died here in the woods, but to see him, his friend, his hero, in the moments before his pitiful murder filled Nicholas with such a pressing sadness that he wanted simply to fall to the ground. Tristram’s jaw was tight, one wrist crooked at a strange angle. Broken. Nicholas’s willed his tongue to flick the roof of his mouth, to try to form his name—Tris!—but no name came. Only breaths. In, out …
The dead children struggled: Miriam screamed; Dylan sobbed; Owen Liddy nodded like a savant. Suddenly, Nicholas saw the boy’s hair gathered by an invisible hand, wrenched up, exposing his white throat. The dead boy’s wet eyes widened and a ghost name formed on his horrified lips—Mummy!—then his throat eased apart like a hidden mouth opening. He jolted a few moments, then sagged low, spasmed once, and winked out. Out, Nicholas knew, to appear again on the dead path outside the woods, and repeat the terror.
Nicholas felt sick. His heart felt torn to shreds.
Quill, though, could not see the ghost children. Her eyes were on the night sky. The clouds, once thick as mountains, were breaking apart, roiling to wisps as high winds began their tearing work. She nodded to herself, pleased, and cocked an ear, hearing something Nicholas could not.
“Ah,” she whispered. She smiled at Nicholas. “Ah.”
Then, out among the dark, wet trees, a girl screamed.
Hannah Gerlic was wrapped in smoke. No, not wrapped, but bound, and not smoke, but fine pewter thread. Her arms were held tight to her body, one awkwardly down her side, one across her midriff. Her legs were trussed. A translucent cocoon shrouded her, leaving only her head free of sticky silk. Wispy ends blew in the light breeze, light as fluffs of snow puffed off distant mountaintops. She was carried into the circle on a spindle-legged shadow, a black magic carpet. She struggled, but it did no good; if her kicking feet crushed a hundred spiders, a hundred more poured under her from the shadows to take the ruined ones’ places. The shimmering, chittering mass deposited Hannah beside the sphere of bone and branch.
Then, she saw Nicholas—and bright hope flashed in her eyes and her yells caught in her throat, until her eyes slid down to his hand.
The hand holding Quill’s wicked little knife.
Then her eyes took in the killing cage, taking a moment to register what it was. Understanding slipped over Hannah’s pale face, an icy wave over milky sand.
Then, she shrieked. Huge tears rolled down her face.
No, Nicholas wanted to yell. I won’t, Hannah, I can’t! But his mouth said nothing, and the knife sat easy in his grip.
“Mr. Close … Not you …”
Oh, Hannah, thought Nicholas. Oh, little girl.
“Mr. Close, Mr. Close,” parroted Quill, hobbling from the shadows. “Aren’t you the little brasser?”
Hannah saw the old woman, and opened her mouth to scream again. But before the sound could come, Quill’s hand swept down fast as a crow’s beak and slapped Hannah hard across the mouth. Hannah was stunned into silence.
“Enough noise, now,” crooned Quill.
Nicholas’s heart tore inside his chest—he wanted to fight, to rage, to kill the witch. Instead, his breaths idled in, out … and he stood, waiting.
A scuttling puddle of hairy gray and black dropped something shining and silver at Quill’s feet. Quill bent and picked it up. Hannah’s paring knife.
“Well.”
She tucked the knife into her belt. Humming to herself, she approached the short stick ladder that rose to the sphere behind the ghostly children. Within, Nicholas saw Esther Garvie’s neck jerk long and her hair stand up on end, lifted by an invisible, clenching fist. He knew that fist had been Quill’s. The ghost girl tried to twist her head from side to side, desperate to avoid the killing blade. Suddenly, Esther’s skin grew silvery and pale, as if a spectral spotlight were turned on it, and the skin of her neck opened up, revealing darker, wet flesh in the deep cut. Her small body arched, then slowly slackened. She jerked once, twice … and she vanished. Quill climbed onto the highest rung and unlatched a hatch made of the same grisly bone and twisted wood, and swung it wide before scuttling down to the ground.
Nicholas saw her now for what she was. A spider. A spider herself: bloated and old and thirsty, weaving dark deadly work in her ancient web of dark trees.
“Mr. Close,” whispered Hannah.
Nicholas forced himself to look at her.
Her eyes were wet and desperate, and her lips trembled. “Please, Mr. Close. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but please help me?”
“Help me, help me,” mocked Quill, brightly.
Nicholas felt a flare of hatred rise in his throat, and rolled his eyes—the only part of him he could command—to glare at the evil old woman.
Quill’s eyes were on the sky, on the shifting clouds. Satisfied, she looked down at Nicholas. “You heard her, pretty man. Help her.” A worm rotten grin split her wrinkled face. “Put her in.”
No! thought Nicholas. No! he yelled at his arms, his hands, his legs. No!
But his body obeyed her. One hand lifted the knife to his mouth, his teeth clenched around the cold blade, and he strode, easily and without hurry, to Hannah.
Hannah shook her head. And new, huge tears rolled down her face. She began to sob. “Mr. Close, please … d-don’t do this …”
And as he lifted her, he felt warm tears roll down his own face.
He carried her easily up the creaking ladder. So light, he thought. So small.
“Please, Nicholas, d-don’t listen to her!” sobbed Hannah. “You don’t have to l-listen to her!” She wriggled and kicked, but it was futile. His grip was strong. She began bawling.
Strung dead children squirmed in desperate terror beneath him. God, no, he thought. Don’t make me put her in there … but he slid her easily into the hatch, in among the ghosts of the stunned, wailing, weeping, lost children. As he dropped her in the bottom of the dry killing cage, his dumb arms tingled.
Cold. This is how cold death feels.
Hannah curled into a ball at the bottom of the cage, trying to shrink away from him.
“No, no. Don’t drop her,” commanded Quill. “Lift her.”
His hands rearched down willingly and lifted Hannah into a slump against the side of the cage—she sobbed, trembling with terror, trying to pull away. His dispassionate fingers twined her dark hair.
“N-Nicholas …” she stammered. Despair filled him like cold lake water.
As Hannah’s tiny shoulders shook, the faces of the ghost children interwove and became as hard to discern as ripples in a stream’s crosscurrent. As Nicholas straightened Hannah, a slightly older version of Hannah glowed among the fog of ghost children. It was Miriam’s face that was yanked, unwilling and blind with horror, up to face the night sky. Miriam’s spectral skin glistered bright pearl and her dark hair was streaked with mercury as invisible fingers hauled it up.
And Nicholas realized what this ghostly light was: the echo of moonlight from several nights ago.
Suddenly, Miriam’s eyes threw wide and Nicholas saw the edge of her throat split open in a new, deep wound, severed by a keen, invisible blade. Her tiny body strained in a last animal panic; her muscles wrenched tight, then she swooned. The hair fell down like a final curtain. Her body sagged, then winked out, leaving the ghosts of two boys struggling in front of him—Dylan Thomas, Tristram Boye.
Oh, God! thought Nicholas. Let me die. Let me die now rather than do this to Hannah.
“Nearly,” said Quill, her voice tight with excitement. She stood just in sight, a poisonous presence in the corner of his eye. She was watching the sky, rocking from foot to foot beside him. “Wait.”
For the moon, realized Nicholas. The moon comes out just before she cuts their throats.
He needed to do something. He needed to break the spell before the moon winked out from behind the clouds, because the moment its chromium light fell on Hannah … he would cut her narrow throat.
He rolled his eyes upward, but could not see the moon. Move! he commanded his head. Back!
But his muscles refused him.
“Up,” whispered Quill, crag face tilted up to the clearing sky. “Up and ready.”
“Nicholas, n-no!” sobbed Hannah. “Please d-don’t h-hurt me …”
His left hand gently tightened on the soft rope of Hannah’s hair. He pulled her up, up into the twin swirls of the two ghost boys.
The hair of one of the boys grew bright. Dylan Thomas’s. His scalp and skin glowed silver as the forgotten light of a ghost moon fell on him. A moment later, his short hair twisted cruelly upward, yanking his head high and his neck straight. Then the skin of his neck slid apart in a neat cut, deep, exposing arteries and tendons.
Only Hannah and Tristram were left.
“Knife …” breathed Quill.
Nicholas’s traitorous right hand reached up and pulled it from between his teeth … and lowered it down in front of Hannah’s face.
“Nicholas!” screamed Hannah.
“Ready!” hissed Quill.
He lifted Hannah higher; her throat was a white curve. She was trembling.
He could feel the moon’s cold glare on his neck, ready to open like a great and hungry eye.
“Ready,” hushed Quill.
His fingers lazily gripped the knife a little tighter and touched its razor blade to Hannah’s throat.
“Oh please … I w-want my Mummy …” she whispered, a sob.
And through her, around her, he could see Tristram was turning. His lips moved, grim, cursing his murderer. Shaking with fear, but not crying. Fighting to the end. Oh Tris … Tristram’s skin grew bright as moonlight touched it.
No! thought Nicholas. I can’t watch my best friend die!
And Nicholas closed his eyes.
The ladder underfoot creaked. Just a peep. His weight had shifted, just a fraction.
“What?” said Quill, as if she’d sensed the spell shudder. The treetops in the distance turned mirror silver. The clouds were breaking. Soon—twenty seconds, fifteen—it would be here.
Nicholas’s heart skipped faster, shaking off its metronome beat. I did it, he thought. I closed my eyes!
Tristram was gone. Only Hannah remained in the cage.
The mercury tide of bright moonlight was racing across the treetops, closer and closer as the clouds overhead skidded away. Closer, closer …
“And,” hissed Quill.
“No!” begged Hannah.
“Here!”
The moonlight kissed his skin. His heart thudded hard as a storm, the blood crushed inside him like a swollen dam, ready to burst. His mind became a sharpening funnel, focusing every ounce of strength, every joule of hot hatred, every hurt he wanted to bring down on Quill into his shoulder.
“Now!” crowed Quill. “Cut, my pretty man!”
“Up!” he yelled. And he let the dam inside him break.
The little knife sliced …
Air.
It wasn’t dramatic, just a tiny twist of the shoulder. But the blade missed skin by millimeters.
“What?” hissed Quill. She was marble in the moonlight, a white thing. A wrinkled maggot. “Cut the whelp!”
He opened his left hand. Hannah’s hair fell about her face, and she slumped in a faint to the bottom of the bone and twisted-branch sphere. The cage rocked back a fraction.
“No,” said Quill. “No, no, no …”
He shifted a foot and let go of the knife—its blade clattered against wood and bone. The spell was breaking. With both hands, he gripped a cold cross-member of the cage.
“No,” growled Quill. “No!”
“Back!” Nicholas hurled his weight backward and his arms wrenched straight, pulling against the top of the cage. It rocked violently on its low tower.
Quill scrambled to grab the cage.
“Fool!” she hissed. “What’re ye doing!”
The cage teetered. Quill finally grabbed hold of the opposite side of the woven sphere with both gnarled hands, pulling her weight down against Nicholas’s counterpull.
And as he felt her hang her weight off it, he released his own grip. He fell backward through cold air.
Quill realized her mistake too late. The low tower leaned, and the ugly cage began to roll over onto her.
“Oh no!” she screamed.
The cage toppled, carrying unconscious Hannah within and Quill beneath it, and hit the ground with a loud and sickly splintering crash.
Nicholas was on his back, winded, drowning in pain and unable to breathe.
He curled onto his side, mouth wide, frantically willing a scrap of air to draw into his burning lungs. His diaphragm finally jittered alive and he sucked in a throaty gasp.
His eyes rolled, hunting for Quill.
The old woman was on the ground. She had clung to the cage as it fell, but it had rolled as it collapsed; only one leg had been caught beneath it, and now she strained to pull it from the splintery grip of spiny wood.
“Feck ya!” she hissed, but Nicholas didn’t know if she was cursing him, herself, or someone else. Her hands patted the earth, crawling like gray crabs, hunting.
For the knife, he thought. Where is it?
“Where is it?” she whispered, a dry pipe rasp, echoing him. She strained, with an effort that amazed him, pushed up against the ruined cage, and pulled her leg free.
On opposite sides of the cage, Nicholas and Quill both rolled to their knees. Both scoured the sandy ground with eyes and fingers for the knife.
“You fucking bitch,” whispered Nicholas.
“Feck you,” she hissed again, this time surely to him.
Inside the deflated gridwork, Hannah moaned, coming awake.
“You cut their throats!” he spat, fingers crawling under the hard, gnarled branches and into the damp soil.
“For Him!”
“For yourself, you greedy whore!”
“Feck you,” she repeated quietly. “Where is it?”
Nicholas painfully rocked back on his haunches. The cold moonlight made the bones in the cage as white as the ribs of undersea things. A wink of silver! His eyes jerked to the shine off the keen edge of the knife. The weapon lay just outside the bars. Near to him. Far from Quill.
“Yes,” he whispered.
But Quill was grinning.
She’d remembered Hannah’s paring knife, and pulled it from the corpse folds of her clothes—a sharp triangle of bright metal.
The girl, still bound in gray-white silk, lay on the bottom of the collapsed cage, halfway between him and Quill.
The spoiled oyster skin around Quill’s eyes wrinkled. “Are ya quick, boy? Quicker than yer little dead blond friend?”
Nicholas blinked, wondering which to dive for—Quill? The hatch? The knife?
Quill didn’t hesitate. She scuttled around the side of the cage like a crab.
Nicholas leapt for the hatch, determined to pull Hannah out. He grabbed the cold, twisted timber, and pulled, but the hatch didn’t budge. Its frame had distorted when the cage had crashed down.
Fast as forked lightning, Quill’s free hand struck between the bone and branch bars and roughly snatched a ragged handful of Hannah’s hair. Hannah gasped, her eyes fluttering open.
“Get off her!” yelled Nicholas.
Quill ignored him and pulled Hannah toward her by her hair. Hannah shrieked in new pain, conscious now. Her eyes flew open, unfocused, hunting. They found Nicholas.
“Mr. Clo—”
His name died in the girl’s mouth as Quill slowly slid her other hand between the bars. In it was the glittering blade.
In the corner of his eye, Nicholas saw a twin sparkle—Quill’s wicked little knife—jutting from the dark sand under a snapped cage branch. His fingers closed around it. It was as useless as a burned match with him so far from Quill.
“He is cruel and kind, isn’t He?” twittered the old woman. “Eh, pretty man? I lose my fine old knife but He provides me wi’ another!” She laughed. Wind tickled the trees, and their leaves whispered approvingly.
Hannah kicked and struggled, but Quill wrenched her hair tight. She tested the paring knife’s blade with her thumb, and nodded. A shadow passed over the sandy circle of trees. Quill looked up. Overhead, the moon slipped momentarily behind a ragged cloud.
“Let me g—” cried Hannah, but her words were cut short as Quill cruelly twisted her hair even tighter. The girl screamed in fresh pain.
Quill looked over at Nicholas. Her mouth creaked open in an ugly, raw-gummed smile. “Let’s send her on her way, then,” she whispered, “so that you and I can be.”
“Don’t, Rowena,” whispered Nicholas. “Don’t do it.”
Quill looked at the sky as a patient mother regards a wayward child. “Blood is the only sacrifice that pleases the Lord.”
Hannah stared pleadingly at Nicholas, eyes wet with pain and wide with terror.
The clouds rode over the moon—over … over … nearly …
And, suddenly, an idea arrived. As clear and bright as the pending moonlight, casting everything in Nicholas’s mind sharp and lucid. He knew what to do.
“Rowena,” he said softly. He was surprised at how calm he felt. “Rowena?”
Quill looked over at him.
He lifted her little, sharp knife to his own wrist.
The old woman blinked. “No,” she whispered.
The moon broke clear of the clouds.
Nicholas plunged the blade in. The pain was as clean as new glass. He dragged the blade through tendons and veins. Blood, dark like syrup, gushed out.
“No!” cried Quill.
He watched his blood flow between the branch bars onto the sand, soaking away. His calmness felt beautiful. Now, how do I start? he wondered. What do I say?
But the words came of their own accord.
“With my blood I call on you. I call on the Green Man.”
“No,” repeated Quill, more loudly.
Blood pulsed out, slapping delicately into a growing puddle. Nicholas watched it, fascinated.
“I give you my blood and I ask you—”
“To remove Rowena Quill from these woods—”
“No! No!” Her voice was sprung tight with terror.
Nicholas felt his head grow hot, then cold. His vision danced.
“Forever.”
“Noooooo!” Rowena Quill’s words became a scream.
Her shriek brought back to Nicholas a memory two decades old. He’d been employed to lay out a brochure for an abattoir in Kent. The manager had given him a courtesy tour, and he’d been shown the killing floor. The sound Quill now made was the exact cry of animal fear the cattle screamed when they rounded the narrow chute and saw ahead the crush and, beyond it, the corpses of their cousins that had gone before. Terror in the face of certain death.
Quill’s eyes were wide and rimmed with white. Her head swiveled as she scanned the trees. She dropped Hannah’s paring knife, let go the girl’s hair. She scrambled to her feet. And ran.
Nicholas watched the little sharp blade fall from his grasp. He put his right hand over the deep cut in his left wrist. I’m going to faint now.
He looked at Hannah. His vision seemed to blacken at the edges, like paper charring. But he could see she lay slumped within the broken cage, her eyes wide and locked on the stream of crimson pulsing from Nicholas’s open wrist. On her throat, a tiny nick, no deeper than a paper cut.
He nodded, relieved.
“Okay,” he whispered, and his vision silvered. His spine seemed to turn to water and he fell down onto the cold sand.
The wind stopped. The trees grew still.
Mr. Close! Nicholas! He could hear Hannah’s shriek, but it sounded dreamlike, a thousand miles distant.
The world looked far away, even the moonlit cage of bone and branches before him seemed small and distant, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope.
Take off your shirt. Bind your wrist.
He struggled to remove his sweater, but weariness crept up inside him like the pleasant, drowning waters of Lethe.
I can’t.
Then roll over, he told himself.
With numb fingers, he lifted his sweater and shirt, pressed his pumping wrist against the skin of his belly, and rolled onto it.
Enough, he thought. Sleep now.
He was too weary even to close his eyes, so he stared out at a world far away and ringed with inviting gloom. The woods were eerily quiet. The circle of trees stood silent, their still leaves as green as frozen seawater in the icy moonlight, black as pitch in shadow. They were hushed. Anticipating. The only movement was the opening and closing of Hannah’s tearstained jaw as she silently cried his name.
Sleep.
Nicholas closed his eyes, wondered what the wetness on his belly was, then nodded as he remembered. He was dying.
Don’t worry. Sleep now.
Cate would be waiting.
He smiled.
But a smell shivered him awake.
It was a scent as old as the world. It was a hundred aromas of a thousand places. It was the tang of pine needles. It was the musk of sex. It was the muscular rot of mushrooms. It was the spice of oak. Meaty and redolent of soil and bark and herb. It was bats and husks and burrows and moss. It was solid and alive—so alive! And it was close.
The vapors invaded Nicholas’s nostrils and his hairs rose on their roots. His eyes were as heavy as manhole covers, but he opened them. Through the dying calm inside him snaked a tremble of fear.
The trees themselves seemed tense, waiting. The moonlight was a hard shell, sharp and ready to be struck and to ring like steel.
A shadow moved.
It poured like oil from between the tall trees, and flowed across the dark, sandy dirt, lengthening into the middle of the ring. The trees seemed to bend toward it, spellbound. A long, long shadow …
Then, a hoof. As large as a bucket and dark as stone, gray-splotched with moss; layered and peeling like ancient horn. Above the hoof: a massive leg. Feathered. Or furred. Or dense with leaves. A dark green-gray cast blue as gunmetal by the glacial moonlight. Muscular and long. Its knee bent backward like a horse’s hind leg’s, but thrice the size, and powerful. Another hoof, another enormous leg. A torso dense as an ape’s, but so much larger, as dark as the shadows between the roots of ancient trees. Arms like a man’s: knotted with ropy muscle but thick as tree trunks, their topsides shimmering with fungal gray fur or leaves or vestigial feathers, their undersides creviced as old bark. A bull neck, corded like worn rock. Shoulders, shifting with a frost of green, wide as boulders. Antlers like oak branches, webbed with vines and moss, and huge. And a face in shadow.
Nicholas stared. I am dreaming. I am dead.
The creature’s head turned to him. Its face was rimmed with skin like leaves, or made of leaves. The jaw was massive and ox-like, dripping with tendrils like curling roots. Great tusks the shape of oak leaves thrust from the corners of its wide, leathery lips. Huge nostrils flared. And eyes as dark as wells of deep, distant water reflected the moonlight; eyes at once human and yet so inhuman—inscrutable as winter sky, hungry as an eagle’s. And old. So old.
It was the face he’d seen in Walpole Park. The face he’d seen carved in wood and stone in Bretherton’s church.
The Green Man.
Nicholas’s body was rigid with electric panic, white terror, delirium. His flesh knew what the creature before him was; it knew at some fundamental, cellular level what it smelled and faced, and would have begun digging through the ground itself to hide were it not locked tight in bright horror.
The Green Man stopped halfway between Nicholas and Hannah. He was taller than the trees. He lifted his head and his nostrils splayed. The air shifted. The trees shimmered with pleasure, opening their moist leaves with dark delight. Then the Green Man’s head turned in the direction that Quill had fled, toward her cottage.
A tiny sound. Hannah moaned softly.
She was staring at the creature.
Nicholas opened his mouth to speak, to try to comfort her, but only a hiss of air escaped his lips.
The Green Man loomed over Hannah, dwarfing her small as a kitten. He shifted his hoofs and snorted a blast of warm air as pungent as the forest floor.
Hannah’s eyes rolled back in her head.
The Green Man stooped and, with no more trouble than a man parting tissue paper, flicked open the bone and branch cage, reached inside, and picked her up.
“Hannah,” whispered Nicholas.
The Green Man turned at the sound. In an instant he loomed over Nicholas, a colossal wave about to crash, bringing his wide, dark face right before Nicholas’s.
Nicholas stared into eyes as large as saucers, without whites: huge dark stones that glittered with intelligence and violence. His scent was overwhelming: erotic and wildly horrible; hunger and rot and age and lust. His green leafy lips parted, showing teeth as large as bricks and hard as ivory, goatish and sharp.
And the Green Man chuckled.
The warm, fetid air from his mouth washed over Nicholas, strong and whipping as a storm wind through ripe autumn brambles.
Nicholas’s eyes lost their focus, and the night world became as black as the center of the earth.