Though no one confessed it, the residents of Lynnwood sought their missing vicar for their own savage curiosity as much as Ms. Andrews’s welfare. When the news broke that she had vanished, they rushed from their homes and the village crawled with insatiable activity; figures moving swiftly, bent low with desperation, through the streets.
Once it was determined she was nowhere in the village borders, one question quivered, unspoken, on everyone’s lips, hidden beneath the proper questions they voiced: what had become of Ms. Andrews since surrendering to the wild glamour of the Forest?
Joan Andrews’s funeral was a formality. Lost to the trees there was no body to bury. The village gathered in the graveyard behind Allerwood Church where they prayed for their vicar, even as they stood upon the mouldering remains of those hundreds who had died before. Freya had never realised the hypocrisy of it, the sheer madness of such celebrations. Life was spirit, yes, but spirit made flesh; the kiss of the wind against one’s face, the rushing of hot blood beneath one’s skin, the swelling, irrepressible urges that flooded one’s body with every hurried thump of the heart. In death, there were none of these things. Nothing but ethereality, reduced to insubstantial memory, so easy to scatter, no better than a dream, or the orange leaves of a tree in autumn. And then the body, stripped of the self; a cooling collection of limp limbs and ragged flesh, growing soft and syrupy with decay.
She attended the funeral with Catherine, two spectres in a congregation of famished ghosts. Mrs. Morecroft took the sermon. She spoke of Ms. Andrews’s childhood in the village, then Frederick, and her role as vicar of Lynnwood. Others took the floor with their own memories, their own private interactions. Each anecdote pricked Freya until she thought she must be pink and flushed with shame. This was her fault. She had led Ms. Andrews to the trees. She had urged the old woman through the Forest, where she wouldn’t have stepped alone. She had forced her into that place, which was so far from the village, and it had swallowed her whole with a verdant, vacuous roar...
She clung to the tears, hot and wet against her skin. Something had happened that morning in the Forest that she had not expected. The hunger had grown too great, too wild, bursting from every vein beneath her skin until she thought she might lose herself. Surrendering to her appetites whenever she felt them, she had not dwelt on how dangerous they were, or why they were repressed in the first place. She had thought them delightful, then wildly indulgent, but never deadly.
They must be reined in, she vowed. The feasting, her visits to the brook, these things must be stopped before they consumed her. Already, it seemed, they had nipped at her flesh, stealing bite after bite, and then in the clearing with Ms. Andrews, a monstrous mouthful, pale-faced and ghastly in the undergrowth.
She endured the rest of the ceremony in silence. Though there were no remains and, therefore, no grave, a traditional headstone was nonetheless erected. Once this had been appreciated and the ceremony concluded, Lynnwood’s residents broke away, one by one drifting back into the village. As the last to leave, her face red, fingers pink from the cold, she was the only witness to Mr. Shepherd, the village artisan, and the gift he dropped quickly onto the headstone before himself departing.
Close inspection revealed it to be a brooch. Though ornate in design, it was hammered from little more than iron. She touched it tentatively. No bigger than the palm of her hand it proved smooth to the skin and icy cold, as if devouring the warmth from all around it. But more than the cold or the intricacy of the brooch, the depiction she saw in it struck her, causing a sharp inhalation of breath; the brooch resembled an open mouth, distended and ravenous, gaping up at her from the metalwork.