A forest is noisy. There’s always something rustling, creaking, squeaking or scolding. If you’re having a picnic, you might think of the forest as quiet and peaceful, but from a wildwitch’s point of view, it’s one of the busiest places in the world. It’s like the main railway station in a big city, a teeming, buzzing melting pot of plants and animals, of life.
Imagine standing in the middle of the arrivals hall at such a station. A place where there ought to be people everywhere, schoolchildren, office workers, pensioners and housewives, young women and grumpy old men, kids screaming for ice-cream, pickpockets, backpackers, noisy loud-speakers, cleaners with humming floor sweepers, the smell of deep fat fryers in burger bars, bottles clattering, wheeled suitcases, beeping, noise, noise, noise.
Imagine being in a place like that, and it’s quiet.
Completely quiet.
Not a sound, not a single footstep, no shouting or laughing, nothing.
There’s not a soul to be seen. There are no smells, not even of pee.
That was the dead forest.
Kahla had stopped. I heard her swallow a mouthful of saliva – it was that quiet.
“What happened here?” she whispered.
“I think everything’s been eaten,” I said.
It had got worse since the last time I saw it, when I borrowed the hawk’s eyes. The dead trees and their bare branches were the first thing I noticed, surrounded as they were by buds and spring green. Some had already collapsed, snapped as if their sturdy trunks were nothing but matches, or uprooted. The pale, dead roots resembled crooked fingers still trying to cling on to something although it was far too late.
I saw them first because they were the biggest, but everything else had gone too – tender anemone shoots, new wood sorrel, shrubs and mosses, beetles, snails, mushrooms on old tree stumps, the ants on the forest floor. The spring wind no longer played with grasses and leaves, but whirled up layers of thick grey and brown dust that covered the earth like the ashes after a fire.
Kahla was about to take a step forwards, but I stopped her.
“Don’t go in there,” I said, grabbing her arm before she reached the dust. “It’ll eat you too.”
Kahla frowned. I could see that she was starting to recover from the shock. I prayed she wouldn’t rush in despite my warning, believing that a skilled wildwitch could handle anything.
“But standing here doesn’t solve anything,” she objected.
“Kahla. This isn’t something you and I can fix,” I said. “The smartest thing we can do is call for help as quickly and as loudly as we can. We’ve found the hungry one. That’s what we came to do.”
“No, to find out who the hungry one was,” Kahla corrected me. “That was what Mrs Pommerans said.”
“But we know that as well. The hungry one is Kimmie. And Kimmie is Chimera.”
The moment I uttered the name, we heard a sound. A strangled cry in the middle of the great silence.
“Here…” it said. “Here…”
“That’s a man,” Kahla said.
“Yes. It must be Kimmie’s dad. Mr Gabriel.”
“Well, then at least he hasn’t been eaten,” Kahla declared.
We hurried through the living forest towards the shouting. I noticed that Kahla was careful to stay clear of the crumbling tree trunks and the grey dust.
“Over here…” the cry sounded again. It was a man, and yet there was something wrong with his voice. Somehow it sounded… withered.
“There!” Kahla said, pointing. “By the pine tree.”
The man – Kimmie’s dad – was lying face-down on the ground. His black, red and white lumberjack shirt was like a signal flag, so we knew immediately that this was a human being. After all, not many animals wore plaid.
He had stopped shouting. Perhaps he could hear that we were on our way.
“Mr Gabriel?” Kahla said. “What’s wrong?”
He didn’t say very much. Kahla knelt down beside him, but despite us having found him, he didn’t stop trying to crawl across the ground, dragging his legs behind him.
“Stop,” Kahla said. “If you lie still, I’ll try to help you. You’ll only wear yourself out.”
He let out some slurred sounds that were barely words. He seemed to have trouble controlling his tongue.
“Isummin,” he said. “Isummin. Hun!”
Hun? I couldn’t see any vicious barbarian hordes descending on us; he must mean something else.
Again Kahla tried to stop him, but though his legs didn’t work, he still had strength left in his arms. He pushed her and her helping hands aside violently.
“Hun,” he said again. “Hun. Hun. Hun.”
There was quite a lot of grey in his dark hair, and he had lines around his eyes and mouth, but I could tell just from looking that he regarded himself as a strong man, and that that made it worse. He wasn’t used to being helpless. I could see from the trail behind him on the forest floor how he had pulled himself along on his stomach and elbows. Grey dust stuck to the upturned soles of his feet.
“Kahla,” I whispered. “Look at his legs.”
It had started at his feet, but it was creeping up his shins. It wasn’t just “grey dust”, as I’d first thought. It was… no, alive was completely the wrong word. But it was moving. It was spreading. It was eating its way through his legs, one bite at a time.
His sturdy boots were falling apart, and only a few fraying grey cobwebs were left of what had once been his socks. But the most shocking thing lay underneath. His skin was also grey. I don’t just mean pale, I mean grey. It cracked and it split, and the cracks bubbled like acid. Flakes of skin fell off in front of our eyes, then they crumbled and turned into grey dust.
“Isummin,” he groaned again. “Isummin. Hun!”
At long last I realized what he was trying to say. His mouth and his tongue would no longer obey him, the air hissed out of him without turning into sharp, clear consonant sounds such as C and T and R.
It’s coming. It’s coming. Run.
“Kahla,” I said. “He’s telling us something is coming. That we need to run. Now!”
But by then, of course, it was already too late.