A light danced off the branches ahead of them, giving away Roger and Carol’s location; they were making their way up a steep slope some ten yards distant. The children and Nico had no sooner seen the two men, however, than the light disappeared and the two were gone again, deep into the bushes. They followed the path, scrambling up the hill and through a dense clutch of ivy vines. They tore through a small clearing, their feet trundling over what looked to be a massive stockpile of sticks and branches scattered about the forest floor; Elsie looked down at this in horror, briefly, wondering at the sort of obsessed animal that would make such a bizarre collection as this. They’d already gone farther, she guessed, than she’d ever ventured before into the Impassable Wilderness.
They’d grown close enough now that they could hear the two men as they crashed their way through the trees; Nico stopped the rest of the Unadoptables with a wave of his hand as if to say, Listen.
They stopped. Silence. It was evident that the two men, Carol and Roger, had paused in their escape.
“Mr. Swindon!” shouted Elsie. This was the name Desdemona had used describing the man; she guessed it was the same gentleman who had initially demanded Carol be delivered to him, back when they’d had the standoff with the stevedores during the orphanage rebellion. It was a hunch, anyway.
“How did you . . . ,” came the shout in response. “Who are you?” It was the voice of a fatigued and very confused man.
“We want Carol back, that’s all!”
“Well, you can’t have him!” was the response. Then: the two men’s noisy retreat started up again.
The six Unadoptables and Nico continued their pursuit.
The forest here felt older, more ancient. The tree trunks they rounded were the heft of midsize automobiles, and the fern glades they stumbled through looked straight out of some computer-generated cut-scene from a dinosaur documentary. Elsie felt her attention being drawn in a million different directions. Her eyes were fixated on the way ahead, the bouncing glow of Nico’s flashlight and the sound of the two men’s shambolic running in the distance; her heart and her mind were constantly being drawn to the crowding forest, to the sounds that sparked in the night, strange and alive.
Nico screamed, once, suddenly.
“What is it?” shouted Rachel from behind.
“There’s creatures! In the woods!” he shouted frantically as they ran.
Elsie took her eyes off the way ahead and scanned the nearby bushes; she saw it too: A head appeared, a bulky torso. “Run!” she shouted. “Faster!” Spikes of fear shot through her limbs, and she charged forward.
Their pace quickened; still, they saw the figures in the trees, as if silently watching them, following them.
Just then, they heard a shout sound from the trees ahead: It was Carol and Roger, their voices united in a single, surprised exclamation. A great crash followed the sound quickly, and the trees ahead were seen to shake wildly.
Nico aimed the flashlight dead ahead, and they followed the two older men’s path through a thick stand of salmonberry stalks to arrive at a small and very empty clearing. The surrounding bushes seemed undisturbed; it seemed as if the two men had simply entered the clearing and disappeared completely. Nico shone his flashlight wildly in every direction, trying to puzzle out where the two men had vanished; the beam fell on a figure, his face darkened, between two tree trunks.
Ruthie and Oz yelled, simultaneously. Nico wheeled the flashlight to the other side of the clearing to reveal another looming, darkened figure, watching them silently from behind an ivy-covered stump.
“Who are you?” shouted Rachel. “What do you want?”
Elsie stepped forward, having seen another figure in the near dark. There was something vaguely strange about him, she decided. Before she was able to get a clear view, a small click sounded below her feet. She looked down, just in time to see the world erupt from beneath her toes and carry her skyward.
It had happened too quickly, really, for anyone to reckon exactly what had transpired. By their minds, the six Unadoptables and Nico, they had simply been standing in the middle of the clearing, seemingly surrounded by mysterious, silent watchers, when, the very next moment, they were dangling an easy thirty feet above the forest floor. All they’d heard was a wheezy creak, a snap of a branch, and they’d been conveyed thus, heavenward, dangling in the ether. A quick catalog of their situation revealed that they were in some sort of net, woven from very organic-looking material, a net that had bagged the six of them as if they were the evening’s groceries. What’s more: A survey of the surroundings alerted them to the presence of both Mr. Swindon and Carol, who were swinging in a similar webbed container, not ten feet away from them. Jumbled together like action figures in a pillowcase, the captured seven had been forcibly entwined, and Elsie felt Harry’s elbow locked around her fibula; the surprised face of her sister was dangling directly above her, and the girl’s long black hair was draping into Elsie’s mouth. They all groaned, as one, as they tried desperately to unlock themselves from one another, still in shock from their sudden change of circumstance. Elsie, her face pressed to the mesh of the net, looked down on the mysterious figures that had surrounded them, waiting for them to approach and claim their quarry.
A groaning could be heard from the opposite net. Martha cried out, “Carol! Are you okay?”
“I’m okay, dear heart,” came Carol’s voice. “Just a little bruised up is all.”
“Quiet, old man,” shouted Mr. Swindon.
“Why?” Carol was heard to say. “What are you going to do? Gnaw my arm off?”
From the looks of it, the net that had captured Carol and Roger Swindon had cinched very tightly, owing to the lesser cargo, and the two men were immobilized in an unwilling bear hug.
“What happened?” Elsie shouted.
“Was this your doing?” Nico yelled at the opposing net.
“Quiet!” shouted Roger, considerably perturbed. His plan had clearly gone very south, very quickly. He began to mumble to himself loudly; Elsie made out the words “Wigman” and “Bicycle Maiden” and “Wildwood,” interspersed with the sort of swear words one usually hears emanating from grumpy biker gangs.
“As soon as we get down from here,” threatened Nico, “we’re going to give you the what-for, so help me God.”
“We won’t be getting down,” said Roger. “Or at least we won’t be getting down alive. We’re in Wildwood now, kiddies. There’s no telling what baleful souls have captured us.” He laughed an ironic sort of laugh, one that sounded as if it had been steeped in sulfuric acid. “I’d chalk this up to brigands, but the Wildwood bandits are no more. Must be some other desperate, starved creatures. No doubt we’ll all be making some tribe of cannibals a decent meal come morning.”
Elsie shivered at this suggestion. She looked down at the figures surrounding them; she found it strange that they had not advanced or said anything. “Hello?” she called out. “Who are you?”
No answer came. Roger, with some difficulty, moved his head so he could see the ground below. He made a surprised exclamation, having just now seen the silent figures watching them writhe in their nets. “It can’t be!” he shouted. “I wiped you out! I saw to it myself!”
The figures in the darkened patches between the trees gave no response.
“Show yourselves!” shouted Nico, exasperated.
Finally, after some time had passed, the sound of crunching footsteps in the dark alerted them to someone—or something—drawing closer. They all ceased their mutterings and shiftings and trained their eyes into the muddled distance, trying to make out who their captors were. Elsie grasped the vines of the net and stared out, watching carefully, breathlessly, as a humanoid shape emerged from between two wide tree trunks, bathed in the dark. She blinked her eyes rapidly, willing them to grow accustomed to this blackness, lit only by a sliver of a moon (Nico’s flashlight having fallen during the capture; its batteries had spilled out into the blanket of vines on the ground), which
cast the forest floor in a dim white sheen. A stand of ferns parted; the form walked through it slowly, a stalking creep, and Elsie’s heart rate began to quicken, her racing imagination set loose to envision whatever horrific creature it chose, bent on whatever terrible, wicked desire her mind could conjure. And suddenly, just as she’d dreamed up the worst possible fate for her and her friends—something that involved a large cast-iron pot, a fish paring knife, and, oddly enough, a kind of reptilian creature with a lightbulb for a head—the glow of the slim moon glinted against a pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses perched on the figure’s nose, and Elsie let out a gasp.
“Curtis!” she shouted.
CHAPTER 23
The Lonely Crag
Prue must’ve fallen back asleep; she dreamed of Alexandra, the Dowager Governess. The woman stood over her, a motherly smile on her face. Alexandra reached out her hands to Prue, lovingly, and Prue was shocked to see them transform, slowly, into long vines of ivy. The horrible vision was soundtracked by the ever-present ticking noise she’d heard coming from the silent Caliph in the hold. In her dream, the ticking suddenly transformed itself into a language, clear words that were both English and not English. She woke with a start and saw that a plate of food had been slipped beneath the bars of her door. A dim light was shining through the gray of her porthole; dawn was breaking.
Prue sat up and saw that the Caliph had remained unmoving from his position, a strange statue holding guard, throughout the night. Prue grabbed the plate of food—rice and beans, it appeared—and began shoveling the savory stuff into her mouth. She was famished, she suddenly realized. Adventuring really had a habit of throwing off one’s eating schedule.
The ticking noise continued unabated after she’d finished, and she set the plate down, remembering her brief dream. Rather than speak to the Caliph, she instead chose to quietly address the ticking noise itself.
She found that it was responsive.
She breathed a gasp of surprise as she began to almost converse with the noise; it suddenly dawned on her that the sound was some sort of vegetation inside the Caliph himself. Something caught her attention; she looked up and saw that the Caliph’s shoulders had twitched, just slightly.
She tried again, addressing the tick: WHO ARE YOU?
The noises she received in response were unintelligible. The Caliph twitched again, his shoulders jerking slightly on his frame.
The tone of the noise suggested it was some kind of organic living thing, but decidedly not human. It had all the cadences she was accustomed to hearing from the plant world, just in a different dialect—if such a thing could be said. And then she realized:
She was speaking to the Spongiform.
WHERE ARE YOU?
Ticking. Ticking. The Caliph shook his head slightly.
She took that as a sign. IN THE SKULL?
YESSSSSSSS, the ticking codified into a word.
She recalled learning in life science about the strange and delicate relationship between parasites—particularly fungi—and their hosts. There were bacterial parasites that could change the makeup of someone’s thinking—certain parasites that transformed action and behavior, drawing the host toward more environments where the parasite might be better distributed and ingested by other organisms. The whole class had chittered with disgust and disbelief; now Prue found herself face-to-face with such an example.
COME, she thought. COME FORWARD.
She channeled her language, commanding the noise forward. She used the same tone she did when she found herself able to make grass weave around her toes, to make branches bow in still air. COME.
The Caliph, still silent, shook in his chair, as if an earthquake had erupted just below his feet. And then: a noise, a human noise: a cough, a sputter.
The ship tilted in the wind, the crewmen shouted from above, and the Caliph on the chest went spilling to the floor, his hands grabbing for his face mask.
Prue leapt up from her cot and pressed her face between the bars of her cell door: FORWAAARD!
The Caliph on the floor made loud retching noises, and his hands flew to his face and whipped off his headgear, the mask and the cowl, as if he were suffocating and his strange outfit was the cause of all his discomfort. The silver mask went skittering across the floor of the belowdecks and Prue was surprised to see, revealed beneath the mirrored thing, none other than Seamus, the Wildwood bandit. His beard was matted with sweat, and his skin looked as if it had been deprived of sunlight for a long time. His eyes were wild and bloodshot as his dirty fingers scraped at his face, like he was trying to peel his own skin away.
“Seamus!” shouted Prue, reaching her hand between the bars. “Seamus, it’s Prue!”
But the man couldn’t hear her. He was too busy writhing on the floor, jamming his fingers into his mouth and nostrils. His chest spasmed in great gasps as he dry-heaved repeatedly, his knees jammed firmly into his chest. Finally, something seemed to give as there was a kind of liquid choking noise from his throat and something very brownish green and viscous, the size of a walnut, was ejected from his right nostril. Wide-eyed, he grabbed it and began to pull; little tendrils ran away from the greasy little object, a tangled mesh that connected it to the inside of his nose. Carefully pulling at the stringy lattice, retching all the while, Seamus managed to extract a veritable spider’s web of mucus-covered tendrils that, when collapsed into a ball, resembled a leftover pile of mutant brown spaghetti. It lay there in a quivering lump, ticking away in Prue’s brain.
“Seamus,” she hissed. “Throw it out the window.” It seemed imperative that he do this; it was sucking at the air, it was ticking loudly in her mind.
Pulling himself together, as one does when painfully sick yet desperate for a drink of water or access to the television’s remote control, Seamus grabbed the slimy stuff in his hand and crawled to the nearest porthole. Heaving himself up onto an obliging crate, he opened the window and tossed the contents of his fist out into the fog-covered river basin.
The ticking stopped. The creaking of the ship, the whining of the rigging, was all Prue could hear.
“Where . . . ,” gasped the man in the robe. “Where am I?”
“You’re on a ship. Bound for the Crag.”
He looked up at the speaker; his sudden recognition of his old friend Prue seemed to fall on him like a barrel of rocks. “Prue!” he shouted. “Prue McKeel! What are you doin’ all locked up?”
“Well, to be honest, you sort of had a hand in putting me here.”
“I did?” He was busily wiping a layer of snot and grime from his face. He held a strand of it at arm’s length. “What was that stuff?”
“Spongiform. The blight on the Blighted Tree. Someone fed it to you.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Someone from the Synod.”
Seamus seemed to search his memory; he stared at his feet for a moment before saying, “The Synod. The Blighted Tree. I’m remembering. I was in South Wood, wasn’t I? I was there.” The memories now seemed to be flooding back, a deluge of lost time. “I was the emissary. The bandits’ emissary. Left in South Wood after the Battle for the Plinth. The Synod; they reached out to me. Took me in. I didn’t know what was happening, Prue, swear I didn’t.”
“It’s okay, Seamus. It’s not your fault.”
“But what did I do? Where are the others? Where’s Brendan? What’s become of the other bandits?”
Prue curled her fingers around the bars of the door and said, “I think they’ve done the same thing. I think they’ve eaten that stuff. And become part of the Synod.”
“But how?” The realization slowly overcame him. “You don’t think . . . did I? Did I convince them?”
“Do you remember anything?”
“No, the memories go foggy at a point.” He squinted in concentration. “I remember meeting with the Synod. Those masked fellows. Something about reparations for the battle. Then everything goes hazy. Though maybe . . . Oh gods.” His chest sank in and his head fe
ll. “I do remember now. A trip to Wildwood. Sent by the Synod. A package of food. Supplies. Provided by the Synod.” He looked up blankly at Prue, his eyes shot through with tears.
“I did it, didn’t I?” he managed. “I fed it to them.”
Prue could only stare, her hands gripping the bars. The idea seemed ludicrous; and yet she’d seen the effect of the Spongiform. The parasite, growing inside the cavity of the host’s skull, seemed to reduce the host to a catatonic stupor, highly suggestible to the Blighted Tree’s authority.
“It’s not your fault, Seamus,” she said. “You were duped. You were poisoned.”
“And now what? How did I—how did you—end up on this ship?”
“Long story. I’m being sent off to the Crag, which is like a rock in the ocean. I’m sentenced to be marooned there. Forever.”
“But why?”
“I guess I’m the enemy now. In the Synod’s eyes, anyway. Oh, Seamus, so much has happened since I last saw you. I was there, at the bandit camp, right after everyone had left. Me and Curtis. We thought that you’d all been wiped out by these Kitsunes—shape-shifting monsters—but it turns out everyone had abandoned the camp only the night before. That must’ve been when you’d gone there, fed them the stuff. . . .” She was piecing everything together in her mind as she spoke; she didn’t see Seamus smart at the mention of poisoning his fellow bandits. “I came back to Wildwood to have Alexei, the heir to the Mansion, rebuilt. It’s what the Council Tree told me to do. And now . . . And now . . .” She paused here, trying to wrangle her colliding thoughts. She remembered her revelation from the night before, when the wave had buffeted the ship and she’d felt the strange presence. “I—I can’t be sure,” she said, “But I think Alexandra has returned.”
The bandit gave her a wide-eyed look, seemingly cataloging, internally, everything she’d told him. “First and foremost, we’ll escape here,” he said, standing up. “We’ll get our revenge. We’ll free my brothers and sisters.” He paused. “Curtis is saved? Did I not poison him as well?”