The children had decided they’d spend the day at Bandit Hideout Deerskull Dragonfighter recuperating from their ordeal the night before, catching up on sleep and prepping for their long walk to South Wood, where they’d (hopefully) find Curtis’s friend Prue and reunite Carol with his long-lost machinist counterpart. The kids passed the hours exploring the many walkways of the hideout while Curtis helpfully fitted his sister Elsie with a pair of handwoven moccasins—she’d been going it one-shoed since the duct-rats’ escape from the stevedores in the security elevator shaft. They were a trial pair he’d been working on in order to keep his hide-working skills up to snuff, and it was a great fortuity that they actually fit Elsie’s small feet.
“Thanks, Bandit Curtis,” said Elsie, wiggling her toes against the doeskin.
“Don’t mention it,” replied her brother, smiling.
Once night fell, however, Rachel found she couldn’t sleep. She’d dozed a little that morning, when they’d first arrived at the hideout—though certainly not enough to replenish the amount of energy she’d expended, physically and emotionally, in her maiden saboteur action. She felt emboldened by everything that had taken place, and that night, after the salvaged dinner had been eaten and the wood-carved dishes had been cleaned and stowed, she sat with her palms to the crackling fire while the rest of the crowd, the five Unadoptables and Carol, all collapsed into a sardine-packed row and fell into dreamless sleep. All night she listened to the soughing of the tall trees as they were gently rocked in the dark’s noisy breezes; she heard the hooting calls of owls and the cries of the night birds. She must’ve dozed off at some point; when she awoke, the air was warm and the light was bright through the stain of gray clouds in the sky; she’d lost track of the passing of time in this bizarre new world, and her head felt as heavy and confused as it had ever been. The other sleepers had long roused; their mossy cots were all empty.
Curtis walked into the hut and saw his sister wake and prop herself up by her elbows; he was carrying a handful of wineskins, dripping full with water. Setting them by the door, he picked up a nearby willow branch and stirred at the smoldering campfire.
“Morning,” he said. “You slept well. It’s getting on midday!”
“I think I was up most of the night,” was her reply.
“Oh,” he said, frowning. “Well, you’ll get used to it. I didn’t sleep much, either, when I first came here. Except for that first night, in the Governess’s warren. But I had some blackberry wine to help with that.” He smiled sheepishly before suddenly growing self-conscious of this admission. “It was sort of forced on me.”
“Where’s Nico?” asked Rachel, seeing the empty spot next to her pile of moss.
“He volunteered for lookout,” said Curtis. He stirred the fire a little more before saying, “Seems like a nice guy.”
“He is,” said Rachel. “Though I don’t know what he’s thinking about all this.”
“Seems to be taking it in stride. I guess the Industrial Wastes were kind of their own weird universe. This isn’t that big of a change.” He paused in his fire stirring and said, “It’s good to see you guys again, Rach.”
“You too, Curtis.”
“How are Mom and Dad doing?”
“I guess okay, considering that they’ve been traumatized about you.”
Curtis stiffened. “I didn’t mean to cause anyone any grief.”
“Well, that didn’t really work out, did it? What did you expect?” She stared at her brother, waiting for his response.
Curtis shrugged defensively. “I don’t know, Rach. I thought maybe you guys’d understand.” He corrected himself before his sister had a chance to pounce. “I mean, if you’d only known what was happening. That I was wrapped up in this bigger thing. People depended on me, Rachel. And I figured that if you could see me, you would get it.” He gestured to their surroundings. “I mean, look at all this. I belong here.”
The fire crackled between them; Rachel didn’t respond.
Curtis continued: “Not to say I didn’t belong there, in the Outside. I love you guys, and there’s really not a day that goes by I don’t miss you and think about you. Mom and Dad and Elsie. Even you, though you were kind of a jerk to me, back home.”
“What?”
“You were! There was a moment where we got along, but it was so long ago it’s like it didn’t even exist. I just remember old photos of us sitting together when I was, like, a baby. That’s the last time I remember ever hanging out with you where you were nice to me.”
Rachel felt her dander getting up. “Don’t pin this on me. I’m not the reason you ran away from home.”
“No,” said Curtis, waving his hand in objection. “No. You weren’t the reason. But it was a part of it. Like, all these little things building up. School was awful. Everyone had moved on from the stuff they’d loved as kids. All my friends had changed—since middle school began, it was like they were different people. I felt like they’d figured out something that was totally a mystery to me. Like, how to grow up. I just didn’t get it. And then I found this place, and suddenly I could grow up—but in my own way, you know?”
“I guess so,” said Rachel. “Couldn’t you have done this out there?”
“Maybe. But I wasn’t open to it. The stakes weren’t high enough. Or something.”
There was a pause between them as the fire snapped and flickered and the light of the day grew sharper as the sheen of clouds parted; it peered in through the open windows. Curtis was about to say something, perhaps something peaceable, to assuage his sister’s anger, but he was interrupted by a very large crashing noise.
“What was that?” said Rachel suddenly.
Curtis leapt up and looked out one of the windows; the air was suddenly alive with the noise of frantic birdsong. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sounded like a tree falling.”
It came again, the crashing. It sounded like someone had taken a particularly branchy tree and dropped it from a great height. Nico came rushing in through the door.
“Curtis!” he shouted. “You’re going to want to see this.”
Together, they rushed along a series of rickety bridges and up a staircase that spiraled the trunk of another cedar. From this vantage, they towered above the forest canopy and could see, seemingly, for miles. Nico scanned the vista; another crash sounded.
“There,” he said, pointing his finger at a gap in the trees. “Please tell me what that is.”
Curtis squinted, trying to make out what the saboteur had spotted; the forest was very thick here, in deepest Wildwood; something would have to be fairly big for one to spot it on the ground from their high vantage point. But then, just as he was about to question Nico once more, he saw it.
There, in the break between a circle of trees, was a tranquil meadow. Curtis could make it out plainly from their treetop. Another crash came, and Curtis saw the grassy soil of the meadow undulate as if it were a down comforter and someone had just given it a healthy shake. The source of this little quake soon presented itself: The thick and telephone-pole-tall leg of some bizarrely fashioned humanoid creature stepped out onto the grass of the meadow. Curtis gaped; soon, the rest of its body followed, and the creature was completely exposed in the center of the clearing, an awful smudge on this pastoral scene.
It was the ivy; and yet it was not the ivy. Rather, it was as if someone had taken a vast patch of the plant and, having molded it into the shape of the poor approximation of a human figure, fed it some monstrous fertilizer that let it grow to the size of a small building. And then, by some magic, imbued the creation with life. The ivy hung from the creature’s frame like a shaggy coat and draped in long tendrils from its faceless head, like an overly hairy dog; it was a shambling, leafy hedge, come to life.
The ivy hung from the creature’s frame like a shaggy coat and draped in long tendrils from its faceless head, like an overly hairy dog.
With every step the creature made, ivy took root and began to spread. Where trees stood in its way, it reached out its long, spindly arms and merely knocked them aside like traffic cones.
“Oh God,” said Nico. “There’s more.”
Sure enough, just as soon as the ivy giant had lumbered across the meadow, another appeared on the edge of the clearing, great waves of ivy extending out from its every step. Another followed, close behind. Their footfalls and the ensuing tide of ivy crashed together, and soon whole trees were being swallowed by the leafy stuff; it clung to the trees’ trunks and snaked up through the limbs until the shorter trees were all but swallowed whole, the wood aching and wheezing from the weight.
“Quick!” said Curtis, breaking from his trance, from the horror he’d felt to see such awesome, terrifying things waltz into his domain. “We’ve got to get everyone up.”
“This isn’t something that regularly happens, I take it,” said Nico, breathlessly stepping away from the edge of the lookout post.
Curtis shot the man an annoyed glare. “No,” he said flatly, before leaping down the staircase away from the platform.
“I don’t know,” said Nico. “Where I’m from animals don’t talk, either.” He quickly followed the bandit down the stairway.
When they arrived at the hut, all the children and Carol had gathered there and were in a state of frenzied activity. “What is that noise?” demanded Oz; Martha was holding Carol’s arm protectively. She held back the branchy curtains and searched the view out of the window.
“I don’t know,” said Curtis. “Nothing I’ve ever seen before. Huge . . . huge things. Giants.” His heart was rattling in his chest as he spoke. “Made of ivy, as far as I can tell.”
“What do we do?” This was Elsie, her eyes wild. Suddenly, this tranquil forest world seemed not as safe as it once had.
Curtis looked down at his little sister, trying to tamp down his own fear. “I—” he faltered. “I don’t know.”
Another crashing noise sounded, this time closer. The walls of the little house shook and the tree swayed.
“Think of something,” demanded Rachel, staring down her brother, hard.
Septimus the rat came scurrying into the room. “Curtis!” he shouted. “What are you doing? We’ve got intruders on the perimeter!”
Curtis looked at his sisters, blinked a few times, and then turned to the rat. “Right,” he said, regaining his composure. “Where are they headed?”
“Toward the gully,” said Septimus. “I heard Nico’s call-out, went to go get a close-hand view.”
“Are the traps set?”
“The ones in the gully are down, remember? We were working on them the other day.”
“Damn,” swore Curtis, before remembering his little sister. “I mean, shoot. Maybe . . .”
He felt every eye in the hut resting on him. The pressure suddenly felt overlarge, weighty. “You guys. Follow me,” he said finally, pointing at Nico and Rachel. “Elsie and everyone else, stay put. Get to the crow’s nest if you have to. As far as I can tell, only the shorter trees are being swallowed up. I think you’re safe here.”
“From the ivy?” asked Martha.
“These things—they’re made of ivy. They’re covering the forest. Every step sends out more shoots.”
“What if they come at the hideout?” This was Elsie, her face lined with worry.
“We won’t let them,” answered Septimus.
Curtis gave them all a brief, determined look before he dashed out of the doorway and down the stairs toward the ground. Set into an empty knot in the tree a few steps down the stairs, a weathered chest had been placed; Curtis opened it and pulled out three scabbarded sabers and handed one each to his sister and Nico. The third, a pebble-pommeled sword, he saved for himself, strapping it to his waist.
“What’s this?” asked Rachel.
“What’s it look like?” responded Curtis.
Nico looped the belt around his black trousers and cinched it tight. Drawing the blade from its scabbard, he looked at the thing briefly before saying, “I think I can do this. C’est facile.”
Rachel, not as assured as her compatriot saboteur, fastened the sword around her waist and waited for her brother to lead on.
By the time they’d descended the ladder to the forest floor, the ivy was everywhere; it was flattening the low brush and teeming over the tree saplings, reducing what was once a vibrant, diverse-colored canvas into an ivy-strewn wasteland. What’s more, Curtis found as his booted feet touched the ground that the stuff was moving, like a pit of writhing asps. It licked up his ankle as he made contact, trying to strangle his calf, and he kicked it away disgustedly.
“Careful!” he called out to Nico and Rachel, who were making their way down the ladder. “This stuff is really alive.” His saber was withdrawn, and he held it poised as he stepped away from the tree. A vigorous tendril shot up his leg and his sword came flashing down, slicing the thing in half and sending it, withering, to the ground.
“What is this, Curtis?” called Rachel, high-stepping through the blanket of ivy. “Do you know what’s happening?” Suddenly, a patch of ivy quivered at her step, and several shoots went climbing up her leg. She screamed, stumbling, and the ivy clung tenaciously.
“Rach!” shouted Curtis. “Your sword!”
Pinwheeling her arms, she managed to gain enough control to whip the saber from her side and catch the ivy vines by the base; lifting the blade up, she heard a satisfying rip as the plant went scattering and her legs were freed. Nico, seeing this, drew his sword as well and held it threateningly toward the blanket of ivy.
But Curtis’s thoughts were elsewhere, drifting, as he made his way through the dense bracken. Like some shade of a memory, hailing him from a long distance. It seemed like so long ago, and yet was only last fall: He’d been there, a proud member of the Wildwood Irregulars. They were fighting back wave after wave of the coyote army. To scuttle her plans.
The Dowager Governess.
And now, it would seem that somehow that terrible ceremony she’d sought to complete there, on the Plinth, had been achieved. By whose hand, he couldn’t know. But it was clear, while the ivy lapped at his heels and he high-stepped headlong through the swallowed forest, that someone was certainly to blame for this enchantment.
He couldn’t, however, have anticipated the horrors that the ivy could create: He rounded the felled stump of a large tree and had to leap back, his heart racing, when one of those ivy-built behemoths came charging down the hillside toward him. He waved his hand to Rachel and Nico, and they dove into cover behind him.
The thing was even more awesome from this perspective, here on the ground. Seeing it from the air had given it a toylike appearance; but from here, from below, the thing looked positively menacing. Thick curtains of ivy poured down from the crown of its head and all but covered its humanlike limbs, which, when they revealed themselves from within a thick screen of ivy, were seen to be rippling with viny sinews. The thing hadn’t seen them, there concealed by the leveled stump, and the three of them watched slack-jawed while it slowly crashed its way through the forest; soon, two more appeared in its wake. One of them stopped and, letting its foot fall with a loud, crashing stomp, sent a tidal wave of ivy up an ancient hemlock, crowning it in vines until it was a sad, drooping thing, a Christmas tree over-decked with tinsel.
“Curtis,” came a hissed voice. It was Septimus, just above them, hidden in the boughs of a tree. “They’re moving toward Deerskull Dragonfighter.”
Just as the rat said this, another crash sounded as one of the giants swung its heavy arm against a tree that had stood in its way; the tree’s massive roots tipped up from the ground, sending a spray of dirt skyward, and it toppled to the forest floor.
Curtis thought quickly; diving out from behind the tree, he dashed toward the ivy giant, waving his saber wildly around his head.
He yelled something then, though he wouldn’t later be able to remember what it was. Even Rachel and Nico, who were still cowering behind the tree trunk, couldn’t be called upon to describe it later, so shocked were they to see this twelve-year-old boy go darting out into the path of possibly the most horrifying and grotesque spectacle they’d ever seen in their lives. All any of them really knew, at that moment, was that the ivy giants, all three of them, stopped what they were doing (which was stomping around, sending up rafts of ivy and knocking trees down) to stare at the small human with a look of seeming disbelief—though it couldn’t be said that the giants had eyes—or even faces; their undulating green heads were totally featureless, covered as they were in deep, shaggy tresses of vines.
Curtis made a few more prancing leaps, shouted something else, turned around, and started running.
One of the three giants lifted its bulky leg and let it fall, stomping out a flurry of ivy vines that shot toward the running boy; they hit the wall of trees Curtis had dived beyond and exploded upward into the branches. Rachel, seeing this, let out a little yelp. One of the giants, having evidently heard her exclamation, swiveled its weird head in her direction and began walking toward her and Nico.
“C’mon!” shouted Nico. He leapt from cover and, following Curtis’s lead, did a little attention-grabbing dance before running toward the distant tree line. Rachel came swiftly behind, running as fast as she could through the thick stratum of ivy that covered everything. Soon, she’d made it beyond the trees and could see the golden fringe of Curtis’s epaulets glinting in the breaking sun.
The giants’ crashing steps sounded loudly behind them as the creatures gave pursuit.
“This way!” shouted Curtis, seeing that Nico and Rachel had followed him. They skittered across the forest floor while a wave of ivy followed them, a flurry of tendrils being sent out with every one of the giants’ footfalls. Finally, Rachel saw Curtis reach a small glade and turn sharply to the left, diving behind a stand of sword ferns. She and Nico followed quickly after, rolling to a stop next to him.
“Heads down!” hissed Curtis, his own cheek kissing the cold scrub of the fern fronds. Rachel did as she was instructed; Nico watched the scene in the meadow play out.
The first giant came clambering past the line of trees and stopped, scanning the landscape for sign of its prey. The clutch of ivy at its large, clubbed feet seemed to pause as well, its waxy leaves swaying about like a many-headed hydra. It seemed momentarily baffled by the humans’ disappearance, standing just on the outskirts of the clearing.
“C’mon,” hissed Curtis. “Just . . . go!”
Rachel shot a curious look at her brother; his attention was fixed on the strange creature.
The giant, then, evidently seemed to make a guess as to which way they’d gone and it began to walk again, taking another lumbering step into the center of the glade. A loud, woody click sounded, and the giant flinched at the noise. No sooner had it done this than the greenery surrounding it seemed to peel back and a vast handwoven net, anchored by an unseen pulley in the trees, whipped up and neatly captured the creature’s legs in its web. The behemoth toppled to the ground with a moan of surprise and anger; the ground tremored at its landfall. The trap gave a noisy complaint, as it was unable to lift the weight of its captive, but the giant seemed fairly ensnared regardless.
Curtis let out a little whoop and pumped his fist against his side, seeing the success of his well-laid trap. He looked at Rachel and Nico, saying, “Not bad, eh?”
The giant writhed in its bonds, letting out angered, rattling groans from its mouthless face. Nico and Rachel looked on with horror. Two more of the giants entered the clearing and, seeing their compatriot caught in the trap, began whipping about angrily, sending vines of ivy from the tips of their long, twiggy fingers.
And that was when Curtis saw her.
The ivy had rustled a little, the dormant ivy that sat in patches about the clearing and issued from the fists of the angry giants, before undulating alive, and the center of the clearing became awash in a kind of turbulent cyclone of writhing greenery, and then the center erupted and out of it grew a pillar of winding vines that, bizarrely, began to take the form of a very human-looking creature. A very human-looking woman.
Even though she was like a sculptor’s replica of an original, the death mask produced by a handy plasterer, Curtis immediately recognized her. It was the same woman who’d taken him in and shown him the Wood in all its glory, when he’d first set foot in this strange place. The woman who’d first put a saber in his hand and given him his own uniform. The first person he’d ever truly known to be evil, and not in the way he’d been accustomed to, growing up in the Outside. She was not some idle felon, not some immoral crook; she was a woman who he’d seen become completely derailed by her own passions. He’d recognized it when he’d come across Prue’s babbling baby brother in a crib surrounded by crows, with her there, complicit in the deed. He remembered her that way, standing amid those black, squawking things, and how her heart outshone even the dark birds in its opaque, bruised blackness.
But what he saw now was green.
Like the giants, her arms were ivy and her legs, splaying out from the ground, were ivy and her lithe torso was ivy. Her face was ivy, but the vines here began cinching closer together until features were constructed and two twin tufts of ivy vines grew from her head and draped down her neck, insinuating themselves together until they became the two braids that the woman had worn in life, so many months ago.
Curtis looked on and saw the writhing body of Alexandra, the Dowager Governess, re-formed from molten ivy.
He felt his sister’s breath at his neck; he felt Nico’s nervous, clutching hand at his shoulder. He wondered, then, if their horror at seeing this specter seemingly rise from the ether was as horrific to them as it was to him; they did not know the heart of this thing. Curtis had reckoned it immediately.
“No,” he breathed quietly. “It can’t be.”
“What?” asked Rachel. “What is it?”
“Looks like a she,” said Nico.
“We have to get out of here,” replied Curtis in a whisper. In the clearing, this new, plantlike Alexandra had completed her transformation and was now standing and inspecting the damage wrought by Curtis’s trap. She casually circled the collapsed net while the giant within had ceased his protestations and was lying dormant. The ivy-woman, some ten feet tall, did not so much walk as re-transform herself at every step, the ivy that made up her flesh and bones reconfiguring and re-entwining to give the illusion of walking.
Moving up to the netting, the ivy-made Alexandra reached one of her leafy hands out and touched the forehead of the captured giant, like a mother would the brow of a child or a cowering dog. Just as her fingers made contact with the giant’s head, the ivy form dissipated and the netting collapsed in on itself, suddenly freed of its contents. The leaves and vines that had made up the giant’s form simply fell apart, like a bubble bursting, and returned to the laden earth, to the swelling ivy at the plant-woman’s feet.
Then, to the horror of the three onlookers, the woman raised her arms out and extended her fingers. The ivy below her hands ruptured and split, and suddenly two new forms began to rumble into shape. Before long, the budding shapes of two new ivy giants had been produced and were squirming into life. They started as little pupa, two burping embryos on the forest floor; they bawled and brayed in new life. Then, as the woman continued her conjuration, they found their footing and they sprouted new growth: Their arms and legs lengthened and found strength; a writhing crown of hair jetted from each of their heads. As stunted preadolescents, they were dwarfed by the other two, fully grown ivy giants. Soon, however, their spines straightened and they grew tall and strong, having achieved a kind of developmental adulthood in a matter of moments.
Nico said something, loudly, having finally broken the barriers of his own disbelief. “You have got to be kidding me,” he said. Curtis tried to shush him, but it was too late; the plant-woman, Alexandra, had twisted her neck around and was staring with her baleful, hollow eyes in the direction of their hiding place. Her mouth gawped open; a horrible scream emitted from the dark space it made.
“GO!” shouted Curtis, and he thrust himself up from the ground. He could hear Nico and Rachel scramble behind him; he threw his hand out to his sister, who’d slipped on something in her desperation, and the two of them tore away from the scene in the clearing, not looking back. They didn’t see Nico falter, strangely transfixed by the ivy-woman, but they heard him scream as a flood of ivy, sent by one of the giants’ crushing footfalls, poured toward him.
They both looked around in time to see the man become swallowed in the wave, a wave that engulfed his black-clad, turtlenecked body in a short matter of seconds. His scream dissipated in the air and then he was gone.
“Nico!” yelled Rachel desperately. She hesitated momentarily, wanting to return to the small lump of ivy that remained where the saboteur had stood, but Curtis pulled her away.
“We have to go!” he shouted as the crest of ivy approached them. Rachel turned her attention away from her friend, the funny saboteur who’d become such a canny part of her world, and instead watched as the rolling ivy, having swallowed the man whole, galloped toward them. She let go of her brother’s hand and started sprinting through the woods as fast as her legs could carry her.