Instinct told Keech backtracking wouldn’t be the best plan. Bull had already covered the ground to the south, and might have grown familiar with shortcuts, so he decided to hold to his northern course. The expanse of a forest is your friend, Pa Abner used to tell him and Sam, when teaching them ways to engage enemies in a woodland. Win yourself distance, win time to think. He needed to keep moving at all costs.
The problem was, Keech began to suspect that Pa’s pendant, his only weapon, was acting as a beacon, guiding the thrall to him.
Eventually Keech came to a sharp rise and noticed a frosted willow tree tilting sideways toward the ground. He stopped in his tracks, the rain battering his uncovered head.
“What in blazes?” he muttered.
He approached the willow cautiously. The tree was identical to the one he’d come across before. The dull-gray leaves, the silvery prickles that moved as if alive—all the same.
He was standing at the very same tree.
Keech rubbed his eyes in disbelief. “That’s impossible.”
A coincidence, was all it was. Floodwood probably grew a thousand willow trees just like it. Or perhaps the nagging pressure in the forest air was making his thoughts go all skew-whiff.
Slathering his face with cold rainwater, he started back on his northern trek. He just had to keep traveling, gain enough distance to get the drop on his quarry.
Bull’s furious voice echoed in the distance, “Gonna find ya, runt!”
Keech stepped up his pace.
Ten minutes later that peculiar pressure bore down upon his brain again as he approached a steep, familiar-looking rise. Once again he came to a halt on his path.
He was staring at the silver willow tree, leaning out from its hill.
“No! That can’t be.”
Keech advanced toward the willow, as if walking up to his own gallows. He gave the tree a long study, then slumped where he stood.
There was no doubt in his mind now. Somehow, his path through Floodwood had bent him back to where he had started.
One Sunday morning before their day’s training—a freezing Christmas Eve—Pa Abner had sat Keech and Sam down at the place they were camping, and had gone over all the elemental rules they had covered since the first day of their forest lessons as children. When survival’s at stake, the mind can deceive, Pa had told them. Accept what is real. Recognize the lies. Cast them aside, boys. Never let them in.
Keech struggled to devise a way to cast the deceptions of Floodwood aside. The logical answer was that he’d backtracked by accident. His tumble down the embankment with Scurvy had scrambled his sense of direction.
But that wasn’t possible. The rock formation with “40 7:7” painted on the wall had been angled north—the direction he’d chosen to run. After leaving the willow the second time, he had continued that northern track, not veering in the slightest.
Keech plopped to the ground in exhaustion and heard a jangle inside his inner coat pocket. In the distance, Bull bellowed a litany of curses. Keech wouldn’t be able to linger, but he was so lost he could no longer recognize north from south.
Recognize the lies. Cast them aside.
Keech peeked into his coat pocket to see what had jangled.
Inside was the leather purse holding thirty-one pennies—the last thing Pa Abner had ever given him. Thirty-one pennies to send the telegram and buy licorice wheels for the orphans. He couldn’t believe he’d forgotten about them.
Keech stood and brushed wet leaves off his rump. He had a plan.
He could use the pennies. He could place a penny every hundred yards, like a trail of bread crumbs. They’d be tricky to spot in the dark, but if his path led him back again to where he started, at least he would be sure of his location.
Keech dropped the first piece of copper at the knotted base of the troublesome willow. He started moving again.
Lightning cascaded across the sky, lighting up the woods and revealing scores of twisted black roots and gnarled boughs. Somewhere behind him, Keech heard Bull howl, “You got nowhere to hide!”
Sprinting over the rutted earth, Keech dropped another penny at the foot of a tall, V-shaped mulberry tree. He stopped to examine the black berries on the tree, but found them wriggling with tiny yellow worms.
He scattered three more pennies over the next three hundred yards, and then one more at the base of a tall white mushroom—a poisonous monstrosity Pa Abner used to call a Destroying Angel. According to Pa, many a frontiersman had perished because they’d mistaken the Destroying Angel for a tasty morsel.
Perhaps that was the curse infecting Floodwood. Everything was poison. You ran in circles till north became south, then at the end of your tether, the woods killed you with its venom. The trees, the roots, the mushrooms—
“And the water,” Keech muttered, as he walked into a grimy thicket.
Nearby, the sound of shattering tree limbs told him Bull was looming closer.
Keech was forming a new plan, a way to stop the massive thrall once and for all, when he passed through a narrow opening in the undergrowth. He walked another few steps, feeling that strange unnerving pressure in his head again, and realized he had just moved through a dense line of black locust trees, not a thicket at all. Before him now lay the muddy quicksand beach of the black pond.
The very place he had wanted to find.
He stopped at the beach’s rim and examined his surroundings.
His plan would require close contact, and just the right amount of force. The black locust trees were in good position for his plan. The tree canopies were thick on all sides, so if Bull happened to glance over from the trail he’d been following, he would only see limbs and branches. He wouldn’t see the pond till he was right upon it.
Now for the lure.
Keech set a penny on the forest floor, at the spot where the ground turned to quagmire. Then he climbed up a nearby tree and perched on a thick limb. A bright memory came of Patrick, scuttling up the stairway balusters of the Home for Lost Causes and balancing on the handrail. I’m a monkey!
Keech smiled, feeling curiously buoyant. I hope you can see me now, flapjack, he thought.
Moments later the thrall approached the clearing. Keech could hear branches scratch across the fabric of Bull’s coat. The creature stopped to listen. Every sound seemed to freeze in Floodwood, save the unremitting buzz in Keech’s ears.
“I know yer close, runt. I can feel ya.”
A branch cracked as Bull lurched another step. His gold nose ring sparkled in the storm’s lightning, and Keech felt outrage when he saw that the monster was still wearing his bowler hat.
“You think I won’t find ya. But I will,” Bull murmured, rummaging through the brush.
Keech’s penny shimmered at the edge of the sand. Surely the thrall would notice.
“You must be important, runt. The Master wants you somethin’ fierce. Show yerself an’ I’ll take ya to him alive. No need to die just yet.”
A blinding shaft of lightning crashed into a tree not ten feet from Keech’s perch. Branches shattered and wood exploded across the grove. The flash momentarily blinded him. Shadows swarmed his vision and he swiped at his eyes. When he looked in the direction where Bull had been standing, he saw the dead man’s silhouette at the mouth of the clearing. The large thrall shambled toward the quicksand, rubbing madly at his own eyes.
Keech prayed he would spot the penny.
The thrall stopped just shy of the sand. He was directly under Keech’s limb, so close Keech could smell rotting flesh. Pa Abner’s pendant burned cold upon his chest.
The creature removed his hands from his eyes. “The shard betrays ya, runt. It calls to me.”
Keech held his breath. One more step.
“What’s this?” Bull lumbered forward and bent down to inspect the penny.
Grasping the branch with both hands, Keech dropped, swung down in a wide arc, and slammed his feet full force into Bull’s backside. The impact felt like driving into a stone wall, but his momentum was enough. The thrall careened face-first into the quicksand. Keech landed safely on the ground at the sand’s edge.
The beach wasted no time in engulfing the heavy thrall. There was a snarl as the quicksand swallowed the creature whole, gulping down his stomach, then his legs; and now a Bull-sized lump of muddy sand slipped off toward the black pond. The gray beach sucked its prey deep into the poison water. The black liquid churned and gurgled.
One last great bubble rose from the center of the pond and belched a disgusting spray of black liquid. Keech leaped backward. As he did, his heel kicked his hat. It had fallen off Bull’s head. He snatched it up and brushed dirt off the brim.
“Granny gave me this hat,” he grumbled at the pond, and crammed it back on his head.