Evelyn Teng
Water ran from Isla’s shoes. Pondweed tangled with his hair. He did his best to wring out his shirt, the new one his mother had sewn for him last birthday, but it remained a sodden layer on his torso.
“Mother, I fell in the pond,” he shouted as he neared his parents’ house, a little two-room shack at the edge of a hazel thicket. “Mother?”
There was a gasp from the charcoal ovens behind the shack, and a flurry of heated whispers.
That was odd. His parents seldom fought. Not even when their dog had gotten caught in a hunter’s wolf snare when they moved from the previous thicket. Not even when his father fell asleep at the makeshift oven and ruined an entire stack of charcoal, which meant less money to tide them over between winters.
Isla, ten years old, walked towards the ovens. He could hear his father’s deep voice, punctuated by odd, dry sobs.
“Mother? Father?”
His father emerged from behind the shack. When he saw Isla, his mouth fell open.
“I’m sorry,” Isla blurted out. “I didn’t mean to, but the fish dragged me in and I ruined the shirt, but if we dry it over the oven it should be good as new and – and – why is Mother crying?”
“I’m not crying,” his mother said hastily. Her eyes were haunted and red-rimmed, and when she smiled, the skin stretched tight over her skull, highlighting the gauntness of her cheeks. “I was just worried. You were gone for so long.”
“The whole day,” his father muttered.
Isla’s mother shot him a look that Isla didn’t fully understand, then turned back to her son. “How – how was the fishing?”
“Not good. I didn’t catch any.”
“Oh. Well, that’s a shame, but – never mind.” Her hands twisted in her apron, dark with smoke from the charcoal ovens. “Isla, dear, we’re terribly busy here. Would you mind – ah—”
“Feeding Benty,” his father said quickly.
Isla frowned. “Benty stinks.”
“He still needs to be fed, son. Put the bowl right next to his head, will you? His front paw still isn’t healed from the wolf snare.”
Still scowling, but eager to make his parents forget that he’d soaked his shirt, Isla went into the kitchen that made up one of the shack’s rooms and dug in the salt-box for the bits of offal, stale crusts and vegetable ends that made up Benty’s diet. He had to stand on a stepstool and reach deep into the box to get at Benty’s food. There were houses, he’d heard, where the food was kept on shelves on the walls and the owners paid sorcerers and witch-women to keep the cabinets cold, but such luxuries didn’t exist for charcoal-burners – not when they needed to pack up and move once this thicket was cleared.
As Isla fished out bits of viscera and dropped them into Benty’s dented metal bowl, the floor of the shack trembled. He straightened up and turned around to find his mother quietly unhooking a skillet from the wall.
“Dinner?” he asked. “It’s still early.”
His mother smiled awkwardly. “I’m thinking what to make. Your father hunted up a very good buck the other day, and we still have several cuts left of venison.” She lifted the skillet, then set it on the scarred kitchen table, her movements slow and uncertain. “What would you like to eat?”
“I think…” Isla blinked. “When did father go hunting?”
“Five days ago.”
“Oh. All right. I don’t remember it.”
“He went at night. When you were asleep.”
“At night?”
“So that the deer would be sleeping.”
That made sense to Isla. Sneaking up on Benty was easiest when the dog was asleep, too. “Can we have that stew you make with mushrooms and tree fruit?”
“Juniper berries? Certainly. Don’t forget to take Benty his food.” His mother gave him another fleeting smile and rushed from the shack.
Odd. Isla waited until she was out of sight, then tiptoed after her. He poked his head around the door. His mother was nowhere in sight, but his father still stood by the charcoal oven, arms crossed, fiercely watching the burn. Slowly he stiffened, then turned and looked straight at Isla. At once Isla darted back to the kitchen and grabbed Benty’s bowl. His father was kind enough, but not above applying the strap to a pair of idle legs.
Benty was where he always was when not hunting with Isla’s father: curled up on the opposite side of the shack from the charcoal ovens, luxuriating in the shade. A little pang of trepidation shot through Isla as he approached. The dog used to be his best friend, but not too long ago, he had lunged at Isla and nearly taken off Isla’s leg.
Leg? Or throat? He scratched at his neck and frowned. A phantom itch ran beneath his skin. It felt like the shadow of a much larger, much deeper wound – but surely his parents wouldn’t keep a dog that had injured their child.
Today at least he was safe. Benty’s chain was attached to a stake in the ground, and the chain clipped firmly to the dog’s collar. Isla edged forward with the bowl—
—and Benty’s head came up, the teeth already bared in a snarl.
Isla froze. No! It’s okay. He’s chained up.
The closer Isla came, the flatter Benty’s ears lay against his skull, until his eyes strained in their sockets and the white showed all around. Trembling, Isla inched forward. This wasn’t normal dog behaviour. This was exactly the way Benty had looked before the attack—
And what happened? I don’t remember. It didn’t hurt – but it felt violent – and I remember teeth and claws and fur, but no blood—
Isla set down the bowl of offal – and in an instant Benty surged to his feet and threw himself against his chain. The collar ripped off his neck – the leather was old or weak or rotten – and then Benty was on him, snarling, snapping, his slabber hot on Isla’s skin, making strange high-pitched whines. Isla screamed and thrust his hands out against the dog’s chest. The surging muscle and coarse fur fought madly, and he cried for his mother and father in great screaming tears. No one heard. No one came. And Benty lunged forward again and again, each time pressing Isla’s weak arms a little further aside, going always for the throat.
Metal gleamed at the corner of Isla’s vision.
Sobbing, he thrust Benty to the side and flung himself desperately towards the bowl. Benty howled and hurled himself at Isla – who grabbed the metal bowl in one hand and slammed it into the side of Benty’s head. Salt-glittered offal spattered against the side of the shack.
The dog staggered and dropped.
Did I kill him? On his hands and knees, Isla crawled over and looked at Benty, though he didn’t dare touch him. The dog’s chest rose and fell; even now, those strange whines flowed from his throat. Not killed, but stunned. Dazed with shock, Isla staggered over to the collar. Even if the leather was old, he could at least tie up Benty with a length of chain.
Except the leather wasn’t broken. Isla stared at the collar, its edges new and smooth, the buckle still shiny. The collar was new, and the buckle was unbroken.
Someone had loosened Benty’s collar on purpose.
That was the only conclusion that came to Isla’s mind, yet he rejected it. The only people who would play such tricks were the Hungry Ladies of the Woods, but they had no reason to prowl about his family. His parents were always respectful to the hazel thickets. They made sacrifices of their hunts and left a dish of beer by the door every night. The Ladies couldn’t possibly want to harm them.
It was an accident, then. Isla clung to the idea as he refastened Benty’s collar and went in search of his parents. An accident was much more comforting than the idea that he or his parents had somehow offended the Ladies or their son, the Antlered Man, or unknowingly trod on a Dusk-Revenant’s sleeping ground.
He crept back into the shack. Out of all his possessions, he had only one that wasn’t practical or useful: a cheap little cat-shaped doll filled with rough cotton, won from a ball-toss game at a carnival last year. It was dead weight and therefore dear, for it was the one thing he owned that wasn’t meant for utility. Holding it – knowing in the back of his mind that his parents treasured him so much that they allowed him to keep the doll, even as they themselves shed personal belongings to accommodate their semi-nomadic lifestyle – always calmed him down.
His mother was working at the kitchen table, back to the door. Hunks of venison lay ready-chopped in a bowl, dusted with salt and flour and ground, dried herbs, while another bowl held roughly cut potatoes still damp from scrubbing. A piney scent permeated the air and overrode the smell of raw meat. Juniper berries. His mother was preparing the night’s venison stew.
Isla opened his mouth to tell her about Benty’s collar, then stopped.
Her back rose and fell; her hands and arms worked furiously, grinding away with mortar and pestle, even though the meat was already covered in juniper. As Isla watched, his mother dipped a hand into her apron pocket and came out with a handful of bright-red berries. She dropped them into the mortar and continued pounding.
Holly berries. Isla recognised them at once. Attracted by their bright colour, he’d tried to taste a handful only a few months ago. His mother had snatched them out of his hand and forbidden him in no uncertain terms from ever attempting to eat them again. They wouldn’t kill an adult outright, she’d said, but they were deadly to children.
So why was she mashing them up now?
Stupefied, Isla watched as his mother tipped the mortar’s holly paste onto the venison. With both hands, she kneaded the paste into the meat.
Mother’s trying to kill me. But why?
“Mother?” he quavered.
His mother froze for just a moment, then turned around. “Isla, is Benty fed?”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t give you any trouble, did he?”
There was something about her face, perhaps the worried tilt of her eyebrows or the way the corners of her mouth quivered, that made Isla take a step back. Anything he might have mentioned about the collar died in his throat. “No.”
“Good. Good. I’ll put the stew on the stove soon.” She rinsed her hands in a bowl of water and wiped them on her apron. “Be a good boy and keep an eye on the pot. Remember, stews need constant stirring so they don’t burn. I have to go talk to your father.” As she passed Isla on her way out, she paused. Her hand rose slightly and trembled as if she wanted to pat him on the head; then she drew back with a smile and left.
Isla waited for ten seconds before creeping out after her. As he circled towards the charcoal ovens, he heard his father’s voice, low and troubled.
“…never have gone to that witch,” he rumbled.
“It’s done, and we can’t go back on it now,” his mother said. Isla stopped. He had never heard his mother use that tone of voice before: hard and brittle, like a piece of tree-rubber stretched too thin. “We made our choice. Now we have to live with it.”
“But…every time…it’s so hard.”
“I know. That’s why we agreed to take it in turns.”
His father’s voice grew muffled, as if he’d buried his face in his hands. “I can’t bear the thought of hurting Isla.”
Isla gasped – a soft sound, yet a sound nonetheless. He drew back, but in the next moment his mother appeared around the shack. The harsh lines around her mouth smoothed over as she smiled at Isla, but her eyes remained watchful. “Is the stew all right?”
Shaking from head to toe, Isla nodded.
“Good boy. I have another job for you now. Your father will stay and watch the current burn, but I’m going to chop some more hazel for the next batch, which we’ll need to start soon. I want you to come with me and make the twigs into bundles, and then we’ll carry them back together.”
“Yes,” Isla said, trembling, “yes, I’ll come with you.”
* * *
It has to be a mistake, Isla thought as he stumbled through the trees after his mother. The empty basket on her back thumped lightly with every step. I still have water in my ears, that’s it. Father was saying something else, and I just heard wrong.
Still, he remained quiet as his mother led him deep into the thicket. They passed the oldest trees, long ago stripped of their twigs, then moved into the more recent areas, where the trunks and branches still shone in pale spots from recent injury. Beyond them, Isla saw the scraggly outlines of trees with their twigs still intact.
“Never cut down a tree,” his mother said quietly. “Why is that, Isla?”
“Because they need to keep growing,” he repeated. It was a lesson learned many times over. “Cut off the twigs for charcoal today, keep the root for charcoal tomorrow, and burn the leaves as offerings to the Hungry Ladies.”
“Yes.” She fell silent for several minutes. “You have a good memory.”
“Yes.”
“You learn fast. You never make the same mistake twice.”
“Yes.”
They stopped at the base of a healthy tree. His mother put down the basket, took out a long knife, and began stripping the lower branches of their twigs. “Isla, dear?”
“Yes, Mother?”
“You know I love you.”
“…yes.”
“But I made a mistake. A terrible, costly mistake. I wanted something very much, but I asked it of the wrong person.” She paused, knife raised, and Isla saw her whole arm quiver. “Isla, do you think you could forgive your poor old mother for making mistakes?”
Isla stared at her. “Mother…”
“I’m sorry. I asked for too much. Now I have to pay the price.” She turned, knife still in hand. The sunlight scattering through the leaves made shining trails of the tears on her cheeks.
She did! They did! They sold me to the Hungry Ladies!
Isla screamed. He fled from his mother, crying – not for himself, but for his parents, who had sold him to the Hungry Ladies of the Wood in exchange for wealth or jewels or another child, maybe. Between the leafless, twigless hazel trees he ran, darting through slender gaps, his feet digging into the soil from the sheer panicked speed of his flight.
“Isla!” his mother shouted behind him. “Isla, I’m sorry!”
“You’re not my mother!” Isla sobbed. “You’re not—”
She fell upon him, one arm wrapping around his chest, and with a huge upward effort she heaved him off his feet. She was thin and frail but he was ten and even frailer, helpless against an adult. He drummed his heels against her thighs and begged her to let him go. Tremors ran through his mother’s body; he felt the hard press of her forehead against the back of his skull. She was crying. With her free hand she raised the knife.
Isla caught his mother’s hand as the knife plunged downwards. There was no love now, no sense of family; he twisted her hand and heard the sick crack of breaking bone. Her agonised scream resounded through his skull as she staggered, weakened with pain. In an instant Isla squirmed free and tore the knife from his mother’s hand.
“Isla!” she cried. “Isla, please!”
No! He knew what happened to children sold to the Hungry Ladies. He’d heard stories, told to him by other charcoal-burners’ children and in night-time tales from his own father, about how long the Ladies kept the children alive before they finally finished eating them. No! I don’t want that to happen to me!
But only one thing could satiate the Ladies and keep them from ravaging the countryside in their anger over a broken promise.
Blood of the father.
Almost blinded by tears, Isla hurried through the thicket. He didn’t know if he could, but he had to try, because even though his mother had tried to kill him for the Hungry Ladies, she was still his mother. He loved her more than life itself. He didn’t want her to die and wanted even less to die himself, so he had to kill his father to keep the Hungry Ladies from killing them all.
It was a desperate flight, from hazel trees still green with leaves to trees with naked branches scrawled across the darkening sky, and finally to the shack, glowing in the light of the charcoal ovens. Benty leaped to his feet and snarled as Isla approached, but Isla skirted the dog and headed straight for the oven. The fire had to be watched closely to keep it from burning too hot and ruining the charcoal. His father never left it untended. Shaking with tears and the awful weight of his actions, Isla crept up on the ovens.
His father wasn’t there.
Relief flooded Isla, then horror. The Hungry Ladies always came for their promised morsels at sundown. He had minutes before they arrived, found their meal missing, and tore apart every living creature in the area. He had to find his father.
Head humming and vision narrowing to a tiny circle, Isla advanced into the shack. The kitchen was empty, the skillet still on the table where his mother had left it – and, he realised with a sudden pang, she’d meant to use it to bash his head in. His fear redoubled. Even with the few possessions the charcoal-burners carried, there were numerous instruments of death. Knives. His father’s crossbow. Chairs could be broken into stakes and bedsheets ripped into strangling rope. Isla sobbed quietly as he picked up a knife and parted the faded curtain separating the kitchen from the bedroom.
And here was his father, kneeling on the floor with his back to Isla. Isla advanced, though his blood ran cold and pooled at the bottom of his heart. He had to. There was no other choice. The Hungry Ladies were coming. He had to.
His father turned around. The knife fell from Isla’s fingers.
In his father’s hands – his broad, rough hands scarred and scorched from a lifetime tending charcoal flames – he held Isla’s doll.
Tears speckled the faded cotton.
“I can’t,” his father said in a voice thick with old sobs. “I just can’t.”
“Why were you – why were you and mother—”
“We had to. We have an obligation, and we made a mistake. But I can’t, Isla. Not when we have you back.” Motions gentle, almost reverent, he laid the doll aside and opened his arms. “I can’t do it anymore. Come here, Isla. We can be together again. I promise I’ll never hurt you.”
Isla’s vision broke and swam with rainbows as tears poured down his cheeks. Hope filled his belly with its awful, hollow ache. Yes. He could put aside his fears. His father was tall and strong, maybe enough so to turn away the Hungry Ladies. Isla rushed forward and threw himself into his father’s embrace. Those strong arms engulfed him. Isla cried as he hadn’t in years, and his father cried harder than that, his entire body shaking with love for his son.
Then Isla’s mother stepped into the room and buried the kitchen cleaver in Isla’s head.
* * *
Isla’s mother freed the cleaver from the boy’s skull and drew back, shuddering, as thick black blood spread across the floor.
Her husband was frozen in despair. Thick black drops spattered his face and upper body; the liquid ran in rivulets down his hands and soaked into his trousers.
“You – you didn’t have to…”
Grimly she cleaned the cleaver’s blade on her apron. The blood was gummy and refused to come off cleanly, instead matting and catching in the folds of fabric. “It was my turn.”
“It was better this time! We stopped him!”
“No. All you did was delay him.” Isla’s mother dropped the cleaver beside the body. Though her own throat ached with unshed tears and her heart turned over like a cake being flipped in the skillet, she knelt and picked up the body awkwardly with one arm, the other hanging by her side, wrist broken. He was so light, her Isla, and before this had happened, before she and her husband made her mistake, he had always been such a fair child. A charcoal-burner’s son in a noble child’s body. There was little left of either, now. Patches of skin were soft and white, evidence of the water’s ravages. Other parts were burned from the time they had put him in the oven. If she pried open his chest, she knew she would see the broken ribs and crushed lungs, evidence of their first panicked attempt at killing their son.
Oddly enough, of the original injuries – the out-of-control horse and wagon that had trampled the first life out of Isla – there was no sign.
“We need to leave immediately,” she said as she carried Isla outside. “If we stay, he’ll keep coming back.”
Her husband followed, his steps slow and uncertain. Ever since Isla’s first death, he had lost a part of himself, and each subsequent death pushed him a little further back to childhood. Eventually, Isla’s mother knew, she would have two children to contend with: the dead one as well as the living one she’d married.
“I fixed him, though,” he said desperately. “You saw! He couldn’t remember the previous times. He didn’t try to kill us—”
“No.”
“Please! I’m begging you!” – he clutched at her dangling arm, and she gasped as pain shot through her broken wrist – “don’t take my son away from me!”
White-faced with pain, Isla’s mother shook him off. Tears trembled in her eyes but not in her voice. “Don’t you understand? We already lost him. Our boy is gone, and this thing that keeps coming back isn’t him. I should never have let you seek out that witch.”
“She brought our son back to life.”
“She did – and she warned us there would be consequences. Well, we made our mistake. He’s back, all right, but his mind has gone wrong. Every time, he tries to kill us. What would you have us do? Place the knife in his hand and lay down to accommodate his height?”
Her husband hesitated for too long before answering, “Maybe.”
“No,” Isla’s mother snarled. “And this time, I intend to make certain that he doesn’t come back.”
“H-how—”
She laid Isla’s body by the oven, then fetched the axe from the chopping block. Her husband went white at the sight. “Burning doesn’t work,” she said with a matter-of-fact manner that didn’t quite match the roiling of her belly. “Water doesn’t work. We don’t have enough salt to surround him completely, let alone money to buy silver charms or a coffin of spell-wood. This is the only option left. I say, if he wants to come back, let him – but he won’t get far with his body in pieces.”
“I can’t stand—”
Isla’s mother hefted the axe in her one good hand. It would be difficult to do this alone. “I need your help.”
Her husband backed away, the whites staring out around his irises. “He was my son. You can’t ask me to watch.”
“He was my son too.” Isla’s mother took a deep breath, then shook her head. “I should have tried harder to stop you from going to that witch. That was my mistake. But this” – she gestured at Isla’s body – “this is yours, and I have to clean it up.” She froze her face into the ice that she so desperately wanted to feel in her heart. When all was said and done, this was Isla, her baby boy. “Go inside and begin packing up. We need to get as far away from here as we can before he wakes up again.”
Without another word, her husband disappeared into the shack.
Isla’s mother waited until he was out of sight, then turned to her boy. A single sob escaped her, the only sentiment she could allow herself to feel. And that worried her more than the revenant that came back in Isla’s shape: that with each death, it became easier and easier to kill.
It had to be done. This was her mistake, and her consequence.
Raising the axe, Isla’s mother began the long, heavy process of butchering her son.