SKYE DARWEN STEPPED OUT OF GREEN FOX ESPRESSO AND BREATHED IN THE FRESH AIR. AFTER BEING ENCASED IN coffee steam for six hours, she found the crisp chill a relief. Though it was only a little after five p.m., the daylight had vanished, since this was Bellwater, Washington, in December. But tonight wasn’t as gloomy as most evenings had been during the past month. The low blanket of clouds had blown away, stars twinkled, and the air was calm.
Skye smelled salt water: the shore of Puget Sound was only a matter of yards away, on the other side of the cafe. A walk along the quiet beach before returning home tempted her.
Then a breeze arose, sweeping over her from inland, carrying the smell of the forest: wet mossy ground, logs, mushrooms, dirt, the Christmas-tree aroma of firs. The evergreen scent hardly changed all year, and the forest was always there for you, cool on hot summer days, calm in blustery winter.
If there was anything Skye loved more than art, it was the forest. She smiled, jogged across the street, and hiked up the sloping road toward the trees.
Skye was twenty-three, and still lived with her sister Livy in the house they’d grown up in. She had earned a bachelor’s degree in art at University of Puget Sound last year, and had been gainfully employed as a barista here in her tiny hometown ever since. The cafe used her art skills when they could—she decorated the menu chalkboards every day, and vacationers and local regulars complimented her designs. Some of her drawings and paintings hung on the walls for sale, and occasionally someone even bought one. She also sold prints and T-shirts from her Etsy store, though not at a rate that would let her quit her day job.
Meanwhile she kept scouting ads for graphic-design jobs in the Puget Sound area, and her email inquiries had gotten a few promising responses lately. So life might be about to change.
Entering the forest, Skye released her dark hair from its chopstick-held bun, shook it behind her shoulders, and smiled up at the looming trees. “I’d miss you guys if I moved to the city,” she told them. “But I’d still come visit, don’t worry.”
Branches swayed in a breeze, whispering in response. At least, she liked to think of it as response.
She had always felt the aliveness of the woods. Not just the nature: the ferns and vine maples and huckleberries, the tree frogs and deer and coyotes. She appreciated all that, with an instinctual comfort that came from having lived under these branches all her life. But she had also always felt there was something else alive in here, something more on the…imaginary side.
She’d have sworn it wasn’t always her imagination, though. She wasn’t sure what to call it. Spirits maybe, or Teeny-tinies, the name she and her older sister, Livy, had given them when they were kids. This being the Northwest, some would suggest calling it Sasquatch. But it didn’t strike her as a Sasquatch type of presence. This was less like a big animal, and more like…well, she’d never admit this out loud, but if this were Scotland or Ireland or something, they’d probably be called the good people. Faeries. The fae.
A few times, inexplicable stuff had happened to her out here. It was only ever when she came alone into the woods, which was inconvenient, since she would have appreciated some witnesses.
One spring evening when she was eight, trotting back to the house through the woods at sunset, a sweet scent stopped her. It was the smell of cookies—vanilla-rich sugar cookies, as if someone was baking them a few feet away. She’d been saying to Livy that very afternoon, as they walked through the forest, that sugar cookies were her favorite food. (Livy told her she’d die of malnutrition if she didn’t come up with some healthier other favorite foods.) Skye looked around, and saw a skinny path winding off through a clump of red huckleberry bushes. The path was just wide enough for one of her feet at a time, and she was sure no path had ever been there before. She’d have known if it had. Though it twisted back into the forest, away from home, she followed it. As she walked, the scent of cookies grew stronger. Then a scratchy, tinny voice called, from high above her head, “Little girl. Do you want a treat?”
She stopped and stared up into the trees in the fading light.
Her mother called for her, sounding strangely far off. Skye whirled and called back, “I’m out here!” and a noise scurried in the trees like a squirrel dashing away. Then Skye found herself in the middle of the forest, surrounded by red huckleberries, with no path to guide her back. She followed her mom’s voice and got home, and by dinnertime a few minutes later had reckoned she had probably been imagining things.
When she was twelve, tromping around the woods one October afternoon, she heard music and followed it. It wasn’t beats from someone’s car stereo; it was otherworldly music, like if you took cricket chirps, frog croaks, breaking twigs, and river gurgles, and set them to a rhythm. That time, a friend of Livy’s soon appeared on her way through the woods, and waved to Skye. Skye turned to join her, and the music died away.
When she was fourteen, a glowing line of mushrooms at dusk—actually glowing—led her a few yards off the trail before she got spooked and ran home.
And when she was twenty, lying on her back with her eyes closed on a fallen log in the forest at sunset, listening to hip-hop through her earbuds, she suddenly smelled coffee. It was strong enough that she figured someone had to be standing next to her with a steaming cup in hand, but when she opened her eyes no one was there. Instead she found another of those paths that hadn’t been there before, this time a line of rocks, alternating gray and white. She took the earbuds out and followed it, her heart pounding. The smell of coffee clung to her like a cloud. Then came the voice. She heard it for sure this time; she was no little kid anymore. From overhead it said, in an eerie, squeaky tone, “Freshly brewed coffee, pretty lady?”
She looked all around, trembling, then nearly screamed when her phone jangled. It was a text from her boyfriend, asking where she was. She darted back to the log where she’d started, and sure enough, when she looked again, there was no line of rocks. With the next breeze, the coffee smell blew away and vanished.
All those phenomena had taken place around nightfall. She was almost never in the woods during actual night; it was too dark and there was no reason to be there. But dusk, twilight, when you could still see a little, she’d been here then, admiring the way the forest transformed into something mysterious and sinister in the dark.
As a kid she’d tried telling Livy about the sugar-cookie voice and the strange music. Livy had gotten excited and told her she’d seen or heard similar stuff. But then, she and Livy liked making up Teeny-tiny stories for each other, along with ghost stories and monster stories and alien stories and time-travel stories, so neither of them quite believed the other, was the impression Skye got. She even began to doubt her own memory of those uncanny events. She didn’t try telling anyone at all about the coffee-scent incident from a few years ago; it would sound crazy, and probably she had just been tired and half-dreaming.
But now, at twilight, alone in the woods, her curiosity flared to life. She fancied herself brave and open-minded, no longer as easily-freaked as in childhood. She looked around at the darkening forest, and said aloud, “You out here, Teeny-tinies? Making your coffee or cookies? Playing your tunes? Come on. Show yourselves.”
And someone, or something, cackled.
The laugh came from the shadows, higher up, as if the person or thing was in a tree. Skye squinted to look, but the trees had all become featureless black trunks with bits of dusk-blue sky caught between their fingers. Someone could be messing with her, or maybe she just happened to hear a bit of conversation from a person approaching on the path…
Then she smelled dessert. Not a mere whiff, but a wave of scent that made her mouth water. Fruity this time, a berry pastry perhaps—not sugar cookies, but pie or other baked goods. Where could that be coming from? The few restaurants in town were behind her, downwind, and the scattered country-road houses in the forest were nearly a mile away.
Her gaze dropped to the underbrush to seek a way through, and she blinked in surprise. Hundreds of flat white mushrooms grew low on the tree trunks, sticking out like rounded shelves. That she already knew; she saw them every day. But they didn’t usually line up in a perfect row the way they were currently doing, striping around one tree trunk and continuing onto the next and the next, like a dotted line pointing the way into the woods. There were two such lines, in fact, one on each side of a thin space between the trees, delineating a path.
The path hadn’t been there a minute ago. Skye would have bet all her colored pencils on it.
Her fingers tingling in excitement, she pulled out her phone and snapped a photo of the mushrooms. When she looked at the picture, it was hard to see the lined-up pattern that was so obvious in real life, and in any case the darkness made everything grainy.
She considered trying again, then the mouth-watering smell gusted stronger. Someone above whistled a sing-song call, three notes, low to high to middle. Someone else emitted a stifled giggle.
Skye stepped onto the path between the mushrooms and walked forward. Her shoulders brushed wet tree branches. Moss and soggy fir needles squelched under her rain boots. She considered switching on the flashlight bulb on her phone, but soon her eyes adjusted to the darkness—and besides, the mushrooms had started glowing. Now they looked more blue than white, and when she knelt to touch one, blue light spilled across her hand and cast a shadow from one finger onto another.
“Pretty la-dy,” a voice sang.
She snapped her gaze up, still crouching by the mushrooms.
A dark shape moved among the bare branches of a tree.
“Who’s there?” she asked.
“Blackberry tart for the pretty lady? Fresh and sweet.”
Blackberry was her favorite variety of pie, tart, or jam. And it did smell maddeningly enticing, which was a beyond-weird thing to be distracted by right now. This had to be a hoax, maybe pulled off by people she’d gone to school with. And yet…
“I’ve heard your voice before.” She stood slowly, scanning the darkness, trying to pin down the shifting shadows. “Or voices like yours. When I was a kid.”
“Did she?” The new voice, higher than the other, sounded delighted.
“Has the lady been looking for us?” the first said.
“I have.” Her heart thudded in her throat. “Who are you?”
“I think the lady means what are you.”
Holy shit. Skye swallowed. “We’ve called you the Teeny-tinies, my sister and me. But we don’t know what you’d call yourselves.”
Many voices laughed now, in pleasure, it sounded like.
“Lady wants to see us?”
“Skye. My name’s Skye. Yes, I would. Please.”
“We are not so teeny tiny. Though we can be if we want.” The shadow took shape as it crept head-first down the trunk of the tree, into the range of the blue mushroom light.
A chill skittered up Skye’s flesh. The creature reminded her of a giant spider, dark and spindly-legged. But she counted only four limbs, and two eyes gleaming at her, so, more like Gollum than a spider. Still creepy.
If it was Gollum, though, it was a Gollum made of twisted sticks and clumps of lichen, or some kind of natural camouflage that had evolved to look like that. She and Livy had pictured the Teeny-tinies as truly tiny, little enough to stand on the palm of your hand. This creature, while still smaller than her, certainly outsized that imaginary being. It was almost as big as Skye had been herself as a child.
Others approached too, descending trees and crawling across the ground. Her feet felt rooted to the earth, and her breath came shallow and fast. She looked behind her, and a new rush of fear dizzied her. The lights of Bellwater’s streets, shops, and docks, modest in number though they were, should have been visible through the trees. Instead only a dark forest stood there, stretching away into the indigo night. Shadows moved toward her, and fuzzy lights floated in the air or bobbed across the ground. Decidedly not the lights of Bellwater. No lightbulbs behaved like that.
“You see us. You like us?”
Skye pivoted to face the closest creature. A tarnished ring glinted on a string around its neck, and a few small, white shells dangled from its thin hair. Those touches of human-like decoration gave her hope. Anyway, as they’d pointed out, she had come looking for them. She had been curious, and still was.
She nodded. “What are you, then?”
“We have many names. Most commonly ‘goblin.’” The creature, the goblin, smiled, and Skye tried not to shudder. Its teeth were pointed and long.
“Goblin.” She cleared her throat. “Well then, sure. I’ve heard of you.”
Another goblin emerged from the shadows on a trunk on her left, at face level like the first. “She is a keeper.”
“Oh yes,” the first said. “We would like her. We like someone new once in a while.” The goblin pulled a pastry from a dirt-colored sack hanging around its body. It extended the pastry toward Skye. “Blackberry tart?”
Despite its disgusting storage location, the tart looked luscious, its crust golden, its scent warm and buttery and so pungent that Skye could nearly taste the flaky shell, could almost feel the sweet cooked berries melting on her tongue.
She closed her teeth with a deliberate click. Magic. Had to be. Everyone knew you shouldn’t go biting into fruit offered to you by magical creatures in the woods, even if you’d thought until just five minutes ago that such stories were, you know, only stories.
But her head swam pleasantly, as if she were drunk, and it was hard to say what she meant. “I don’t know,” she said. “What does it do?”
“It helps you join us.” The goblin nudged the tart closer. “Have a little party with us. Fun. Right?”
“I…I’m not…”
But as Skye groped for what she intended to say, someone shoved her head from behind, knocking her forward. Fast as a pouncing cat, the other goblin pushed the blackberry tart into her face. Sticky filling invaded her mouth, so hot it burned her tongue. Juice and crumbs smeared down her chin. Her throat made a muffled scream, but instinctively she swallowed the bite. Her arms flailed, feeling as heavy as if she were swimming. Little hands, rough like twigs, caught hold of her in several places at once.
She fell and never hit the ground. The goblins carried her crowd-surf-style. Everything became a dream; she couldn’t respond the way she wanted to.
Afterward she still remembered what she saw and what they did before releasing her. Even though she couldn’t speak of it.