THE TRAIL HAS been narrow and twisty, a rocky foot trail between brambles and thickets and sticky-sharp vines that snag and tug on the coat. It is all worked up and chattering in the back of my mind. The collar of it has ruffled across my neck like an avant-garde fashion accessory that fans around the back of my head from jaw to jaw. It clings tightly to me and I don’t feel the prick of thorns, but something warm trickles onto the back of my left hand stuck in the coat’s pocket and I know whatever the coat has for blood is leaking out and running down where a nasty snag has opened it up.
Of course the vegetation parts as Mylendor leads us down the trail, flowing in behind her like water, a Moses of the weeds.
I don’t know where we are. If this is Earth or some other realm. I’m no botanist, don’t spend a lot of time out of the city, I like walls and doors and locks and houses with places to get away if there is danger. Being out in the open like this, especially an open that is so pressed and choked with vegetation, where anything could hide close enough to touch and I wouldn’t be able to see it coming, makes the panic bell ring in the back of my head where my spine meets my skull.
I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.
And I don’t like not knowing where I am. I have learned that even on Earth other places can exist, just steps away; one wrong turn, one pass through a door left ajar, and you can find yourself in a place people should never be. I once walked down some stairs under a sushi joint in a city I think was New York and wound up in a cave somewhere else with a massive elder god named Cthulhu in a jar.
But there’s nothing to do but follow Mylendor wherever she’s taking us.
The trail is so narrow that we walk in single file. I follow Mylendor, the skinhound a step behind followed by Javier and then Ashtoreth. The skinhound refused to be farther away and I trust Ashtoreth to defend herself far better than Javier could, so she brings up the rear. I don’t like being so closed in, so I concentrate on the soft blue and green glow of the skin on the back of Mylendor’s neck and put one foot in front of the other when all I want to do is pull out Oathbreaker and use it to hack our way free.
The air has gone cloying, thick with the stifling perfume of vegetation, not rot as much as decay, cellulose breaking down, the nose-ruffling odor of chlorophyll exposed to humid air. It’s fetid. Dank. Musty.
Familiar.
In my fourth-grade Earth Science class, Miss Kimbrough brought in a botanist who lived and studied in the Okefenokee Swamp. She showed us pictures of alligators as long as cars and flowers with such colour they made my young eyes hurt with their beauty. She also brought with her a mason jar of swamp water. It sat on her table full of displays, caught in a ray of sunlight that made the glass gleam like diamonds but wasn’t strong enough to cut through the water itself, water that remained murky and thick with effulgence of dead vegetation and some other alchemy my young mind could not comprehend. The light entered the jar on one side and exited the other as a dark green shadow that stretched out onto the desk as the botanist continued to talk. Finally, she lifted the jar and unscrewed the lid with a muffled pop. For a moment she stood there smiling as we all waited.
I was sure something alive would stir inside that murky water and crawl out, slithering wetly across the back of her hand to flop on the table, some salamander of ancient design that would stand in a puddle of its own liquid and stare at me with red cast eyes like drops of blood turned to pearls.
I held my breath in anticipation.
I was the last to discover what did come out of that jar.
Tommy Hanson was the first to react, pinching his nose and exclaiming loudly. His example was quickly taken up, round-robin, in a chorus through the classroom.
One girl, I just remember her with bramble-thick blond hair and freckles across her nose, began to retch and choke as if she were sick.
I looked around, letting free my captive breath, and, on inhaling, discovered what my classmates already knew.
That small jar of swamp water had tainted every bit of oxygen in the room with the same fecund green odor that tries to take my breath right now.
It’s a relief when the trail ends and we break free to the open field.
Oxygen, cool and damp, rolls against us as we step into the knee-high grass. Mylendor continues forward, but I stop. Ashtoreth, Javier, and the skinhound stop as well, Winnie moving up and leaning into me, his blind socket against my thigh.
Javier whistles softly. “You don’t see that every day.”
In the center of the field is a house.
But not just a house, a house that looks like it has been taken apart and then reassembled with the corpses of a dozen other houses. It’s a jumble of weirdly shaped rooms and roof lines, samples from a dozen styles of architecture and time spans all smashed together without rhyme or reason. Here there’s a patch of a pueblo-style adobe that blends into the sleek glass and steel of a modern art deco house that slides into a stucco ranch. There are chimneys that jut into the tree line beside doors on upper stories that have no stairs or porches. The very front of it looks as if it has been plucked from the movie Gone with the Wind and placed here in this untouched clearing. Looming from the ground, it gleams in white. The front has a set of wide steps that lead to a terraced porch with mighty columns rising three stories to its roof. The windows are aglow with buttery light that spills through them without tinting the soft, pale gleam of the building itself.
As we watch, the front doors open inward as if being swallowed by the house and more golden light fills the space without colouring the porch or the columns.
Mylendor turns her head just enough that I can see her profile, even as she keeps walking, and says: “Come now, Charlotte Tristan Moore; do not fall behind; my master awaits.”
Her voice sounds like she’s mocking me.
She may be.
I feel like I’m being torn in two. I want to follow her. No, I want to run her down and grab her by the hair and drag her to that house and see what kind of thing waits inside.
I want to do that.
I do not want to take Javier inside there. Or Ashtoreth.
Or even Winnie.
This feels like a trap.
I fell for a trap all those years ago because I didn’t see it. I didn’t see Tyler Woods maneuvering me away from the party and into his room, where the other three waited. I didn’t see it and I paid for it.
I still pay for it.
Now I look for traps.
Sometimes I see them almost everywhere.
I reach over, past Javier, and lightly touch Ashtoreth on the arm. Her skin is damp. “Can you get them out of here?”
She shakes her head. “Without you the forest would consume us.”
Javier pushes against my arm. “I’m in this.”
The skinhound whines and gives a short, sharp bark as he trots forward a few steps and then looks back at me.
“I can wish us back,” I say.
“We are too far away. If you take that much from Javier he will be in the same condition as your Daniel.”
My Daniel.
The reason I’m doing all of this.
Is he?
Shut up.
“I’m fine,” Javier says.
He says it forcefully and I take a close look at him. He’s standing straight, but his eyes are set in deep smudges of dark, like he’s pulled three days with no sleep, and there’s a tic yammering like a hummingbird’s heartbeat that has set up in the corner of his upper lip. He needs rest and replenishment, neither of which I have here. My eyes slide past him to Ashtoreth, who slowly shakes her head side to side as if to confirm my analysis of him and his condition.
I just stopped in to see what condition my condition was in.
The only way out is through.
“Stay close,” I growl.
And, one foot in front of the other, we follow the creepy Hound of Carcosa to the creepy patchwork house in the middle of the creepy fucking forest.