As a joke Baz dropped the bread crumbs behind us, Hansel and Gretel style. “So we can find our way back—if we come back. Mwahahaha!”
Isabel rolled her eyes. “Shut up.”
The forest itself was pretty amazing: lush and green with the most fantastic black-spotted mushrooms growing wild everywhere. The only weird thing was there were no animals. No deer. No birds. Nothing with a pulse except us.
John and Isabel continued an argument they’d started a few weeks back. I didn’t even think they cared about what they were saying anymore, but neither wanted to concede.
“I just think everybody in America should speak English. I mean, if I moved to France, I’d learn French, right?”
“No you wouldn’t,” Isabel said, laughing. It was her you-are-beneath-me laugh. “You’d hire someone to speak French for you, John.”
“You think I’d outsource my language?” he taunted.
“In a heartbeat.”
“You know, Isabel, it’s not my fault I’m not poor,” John teased, but there was something a little mean in it. “It’s like you want me to apologize for having money until it comes in handy. No offense, but you know you guys wouldn’t even be here right now without me.”
Isabel pointed a finger. “There it is: the entitled attitude. One minute you’re all, ‘Oh, don’t blame me; I’m not elitist,’ and the next you’re like, ‘Don’t forget I have more money and therefore more say than you do!’” She was breathing hard.
“God! You just…twist around everything I say.”
“No! I’m just saying what you really feel! Sometimes I think you’re only dating me so you can say you’ve dated a black girl.”
John looked hurt. “Take that back.”
“Why? It’s true, isn’t it?”
“Guys, could we give it a rest?” I said. A fog was rising. It made the landscape gray and indistinguishable, and I needed to get my bearings.
Isabel tried not to look wounded, but I knew her too well. “Stop enabling them, Poe. They’ll never let us into the club on their own. You just want to think they will.”
“Hey,” Baz held out his arms. “What am I, chopped liver? Like my people weren’t also enslaved and persecuted? Like we didn’t get slaughtered in places just like this one?”
“Prejudice isn’t the same thing as racism,” Isabel argued.
“Yeah? Six million dead might disagree with you there, Iz.”
“I’m not the bad guy, Iz,” John said softly.
Those weird whispering voices were swirling through the trees again, making my ears hurt. “Guys…”
There was a sound off to my right. A branch breaking. A face peeked out from behind a tree. It was the girl I’d seen on the way in. She didn’t look very old, maybe seven or eight. Her hair was wet, but her skirts and blouse were caked in grime and mud, like she’d been swimming in a filthy lake. She called out to us in a foreign language.
“Sorry,” I said. “We don’t speak…”
She opened her hand to show us the bread crumbs there.
“Holy…” Quickly I glanced behind us. No crumbs. She’d obviously been following us from the beginning. Suddenly I felt disoriented and unsure of the way back. Just then she hitched up her skirts and started running into the forest. Without thinking I ran after her. “Don’t let her get away!” I yelled.
She dodged under low-lying branches that smacked me in the face and sprinted easily around every obstacle. She knew the way and had the advantage, but we still managed to keep her in our sights. Deep down I knew we were headed farther into the forest. We reached a part where the fog was even thicker, and the trees were dead and gray, like they’d survived a fire and never grown back. The ground was no longer cushioned by leaves and vegetation. It was stony and scarred, scabbed.
“Don’t lose her!” I yelled to the others.
“This fog is intense!” Baz yelled back. “I couldn’t find my own ass in this soup.”
“You can’t find your own ass most days,” Isabel shot back. She was keeping pace with me.
The fog thinned slightly. The girl stood beside a wide, deep lake surrounded by more of those dead trees. It was weird because everywhere else the forest was lush and colorful. But this spot was barren. Like nothing had ever grown here. Like nothing ever would. It was colder too—more like October than August. About ten feet out the rounded tops of polished stones showed just under the water.
The little girl looked out at the lake and then moved on to a cave. She whistled, and soon more kids stepped out. I counted them—five, six, ten. They were pale and half-starved looking, all in peasant-style clothing wet with algae and dirt, like they’d been out here for a while. One, a boy of about sixteen maybe, walked over to us. I didn’t know whether to run or stay put. Hadn’t the villagers told us not to come to the forest? What if these kids were feral? What if they were killers? Instinctively we closed ranks, hands at the ready in case we needed to fight our way out.
“Hey,” I said, forcing a calm into my words I didn’t even remotely feel. “We’re just out for a walk, okay? We don’t mean any harm.” To the others I whispered, “Start walking backward.”
“Can’t,” Isabel squeaked. “Look.”
The way back was cut off by a pack of about ten more creepy kids.
“We just want to go back to the village,” I said.
John pulled out his wallet. “Hey, you guys want money? I got money.”
“John, shut up, man,” Baz said.
The kids closed in, surrounding us, cutting off any hope of escape. They smelled earthy and damp, like they were part of the forest. While we watched, they gobbled down the bread crumbs. The little girl who’d led us here offered me a bottle of dark liquid.
“A bea,” she said. I’d heard that at the tavern. It meant drink. “Vin.” I knew that too: wine.
“Dude, don’t drink that shit. It could be anything,” Baz cautioned.
I shook my head, and three of the older kids grabbed Baz and dragged him toward the lake. Before any of us could do anything, they shoved his face under the water. His long arms thrashed and tried to grab for anything he could, but there were more of them and a mob always beats one—even if that one is six foot four with the strength of a Death Metal drummer, which Baz was. We tried to run for him, but they surrounded us, holding us back.
“Okay! I’ll a bea the vin!” I shouted, reaching for the bottle.
They let Baz up. “Holy fuck!” he managed between coughing fits.
I knew it had been a bad idea to come into the forest. My grandmother used to say you should listen to your instincts. The morning the men came to tear her family from their home in California, she’d woken up at four in the morning with the urge to run. Instead she’d tried to calm herself by arranging her dolls around a teacup, like everything was fine. “That is what we do,” she said to me as we waited for the bus. “We try to kill the voice inside that says the truth, because the fear of the truth is greater than any other fear.”
The girl brought the bottle to my mouth. “A bea.”
My hand was shaking as I took a drink and swallowed. It tasted like cheese gone to mold. I gagged and felt a tide of panic rise inside me.
“Poe!” Isabel grabbed my arm. “You okay?”
“Tastes like shit,” I coughed out. But I was okay. No poison seemed to be working its way up my throat. My heart was still beating fast, though. One by one, we were forced to drink from the bottle. It came around three times, and then we were made to sit together under the gray carcass of a tree.
“Now what?” Baz asked. Water dripped down his face still.
The kids stood around us, waiting. For what, I didn’t know, and I was afraid to find out. About ten minutes later I started to feel a strange, creepy-crawly sensation under my skin, and the forest seemed to breathe. When the wind whispered past my ears, I could swear I heard it say, “Vengeance.”
“Izzie?” I heard myself whisper, but she didn’t answer. On a nearby rock I saw a
kid drop one of the black-spotted mushrooms into the wineskin.
“What’d you give us?” I slurred. “What the hell’s in that?”
“Something to help you see,” the girl answered, and I understood her perfectly.
“I see just fine. Twenty-twenty.” But already the corners of my vision were curling up on themselves, revealing whatever lies underneath. I walked through chambers of madness. Each one seemed like the end of a dream, only I’d “wake up” and find myself living inside another dream.
I’m walking down the corridor of a jostling train. Left and right, the compartments are filled with the undead: skeletal faces; hollow, haunted eyes; burned, bruised, mangled bodies. They look up like they’re expecting something of me. Mrs. Smith calls from the end of the corridor, “This journey is only just beginning, Poe Yamamoto.”
I’m standing in the church with many others. The scene reminds me of the one painted on the ceiling. A priest in a red, hooded robe reads from a giant book. In the center of the room seven kids are gathered together. They don’t seem frightened. While the priest reads, one of the women cuts a lock of hair from each child and weaves it into the plaits streaming from the goat’s horns, tying it off with string.
Now I’m one of the children. They’ve taken us to the lake. It’s cold and I want to go home to eat lamb. Instead they force us into the lake. The water is freezing and dark. We don’t want to go in but they make us. Our hands are tied together. If one struggles, we all struggle and the ropes tighten around our wrists. Children plead. The priest holds the goat’s head high, chants some words: Let our crops be plentiful and good. Seal our borders against our enemies. Accept our sacrifice as a token of our faith in you, Dark Lord. The mist comes barreling over the lake and under my feet; the bottom of the lake gives way. I’m being sucked down fast.
I’m at the tavern. Inside the closet by the door is a hook. On the hook is a red robe. Scissors cut hair. It falls into a bowl in sheets. The old-timers gather around it, looking. “Devil,” the old woman at the gate says to me. “Devil.”
I started coming out of my drug-induced hallucinations. “Isabel?” I called. I didn’t see the others, so I staggered to my feet, calling for them. “Baz! John!” I was completely alone. The fog danced on the surface of the lake. The stones. They seemed to be swaying. Moving. Rising. They weren’t stones at all. They were the heads of children—hundreds of them—rising from the lake where they’d been drowned years, centuries ago. Snakes threaded through their hollow eye sockets. Moss clung to their cheeks. Lips had rotted away, exposing mottled bone and nubs of decayed teeth.
“They mean to make the offering again,” they whispered. “A sacrifice to save Necuratul. It has begun. Tomorrow, no one is saved. Avenge us.” Their words swirled around me like the rustle of dry leaves. “Avenge us.”
The girl I’d seen first, the one who’d led me into the forest, stepped forward. Her skin seemed pixilated. When I looked again, tiny moths covered every part of her. They flew away, and underneath her skin was ice white and crawling. Maggots.
With a shout I startled awake. My friends were passed out next to me by the lake. No stones were visible; only the slightest cloud of fog hovered there. I shook my head in case this was another dream. It was darker now, and I had lost all sense of time. Our loaf of bread was missing, but a new bread-crumb trail had been laid out.
“Get up,” I said, nudging my friends awake. They sat with effort and struggled out of their stupors. I told them what I’d dreamed. “I think they—the old-timers in the village—are planning to sacrifice us.”
“Where are those kids?” Baz said, looking around.
“Gone,” I said. “Just like we need to be.”
We followed the crumbs back to the village, pausing at the protective stone wall. We’d been gone a while. Early dusk was settling in. I could see some of the villagers in the lanes, sweeping, greeting neighbors, closing up shop, business as usual.
“We can’t let them know that we know,” I whispered to the others. “We go back to the inn, pack up our stuff, and once it’s quiet, we grab our flashlights and head back down to the train station, even if we have to walk all night.”
“What about the bridge?” Baz asked.
“We don’t know if they’re telling us the truth or not. We’ll deal with that when we get there.”
Isabel slipped her arm through mine like it was the first day of school all over again. “What about Mariana and Vasul and the others? We should warn them.”
“I’m not staying,” John said. He looked at Isabel. “Let’s get out of here.”
My gut said cut and run, but not warning Mariana and Vasul seemed like we might as well be committing murder. “We warn them. Then we run.”
We slipped back in by way of the church and stepped out casually, just tourists taking an evening stroll. Everything looked different. Ominous. The lanterns on their hooks. The scarecrows in the fields. The evil-eye pendants dangling in the wind. The stars twinkling into early-evening existence. Nothing felt right anymore.
The old woman who’d let us in, the town’s gatekeeper, was making her nightly rounds. When she got to the wall, though, she dropped her box of salt and started squawking, crying. The protective ring was completely gone, and in its place was a thin strip of charred earth. Vasul came running over, his traveling bag still on his shoulder. He soothed her until she calmed down.
“What happened?” I asked, but I didn’t look him in the eye.
“She thinks it’s a sign the seal has been breached and the vengeful spirits of the dead can enter.” He shook his head. “I told her it was the rain and the ground was corroded by all that salt. I told her not to worry.”
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s it,” Baz said, his sarcasm barely concealing his fear.
“What’s wrong?” Vasul asked.
“What if she should worry?” This time I did look him in the eyes. “What if there’s something out there?”
Vasul raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me you’re starting to catch the village superstition.”
“No,” I lied.
“Good. Because tomorrow’s festival is going to be fantastic! You should see everything Mariana and I brought back. We, my American friend, are going to feast till we puke.”
I shoved my hands in my pockets. “Actually, um, we’re not gonna be able to make the festival. We have to leave a day early if we want to see Prague before we head back to the states.”
Vasul crossed his arms and smirked, and I felt like the biggest chickenshit in the world. “So…you’re telling me you took a fifteen-hour train ride from Munich followed by another fifteen miles of torture-by-wagon up the mountain just so you could come to the festival and tell all your friends back home about it, and now you’re not even going to stay to see it?”
In my mind I could see those dead kids rising from the lake. I could see the girl’s body turning to maggots.
“Vasul,” I started, hoping I could finish. “What if the sacrifices to Satan…what if they’re starting them again?”
He nodded mock seriously. “Riiiight.”
“It’s true!” Isabel said. “They’re up to something.”
Vasul laughed, but when he saw how scared we all looked, his smile faltered and was replaced by a hurt expression. “You know, I’ve seen real evil. Bodies lying in the streets. Mangled steel. Bombs exploding.” He shook his head like he was trying to clear our words from it. “But these people? They are old and harmless and on their way to being obsolete. They’re not doing anything except what they’ve always done: farm, make bread, have families. They cannot even stop a power plant from taking over their village. I thought better of you people.”
What he said made me feel like a Grade A jerk. But what about what had happened to us in the forest? What we’d seen?
“Dude, we need to tell—” Baz started.
“Hey, there you are!” Mariana walked across the square smiling. She looked different. “They’re roasting the lamb
. It smells wonderful in there. I can’t wait to—”
“You got a haircut,” I said suddenly.
“Yeah.” She turned around, modeling it. “My mother did it for me. She insisted, actually. Said it was too long for my face. Mothers,” she said, rolling her eyes. “What do you think?”
In my mind I could see only that awful braid attached to the goat’s head. “Your mother…cut your hair,” I repeated numbly.
“Yes. I mean, it’s not a fancy salon in Paris, but I can’t afford that anyway, and she’s pretty good with the scissors if you sit straight and don’t fidget.”
They had Mariana’s hair.
“My grandmother gave me a little trim this morning too.” Vasul ran his hand across the top of his head. “Want to be at our best for the festival, you know.”
Hadn’t I seen the old-timers rushing to the church? Hadn’t I seen a red robe?
One of the younger kids, a chubby-cheeked boy, ran up to Mariana and said something. She stroked his head and cooed an answer. The boy gave us a quick look and smiled before running back to his pals.
“What was that?” I asked.
“He wanted to know if you would play their game with them. I told him maybe later,” Mariana explained. “What’s the matter? You seem upset.”
“There’s something we should tell you,” I heard myself say. “Meet us in our room as soon as you can.”
A few feet away the kids started up their game again. The outer circle descended on the kids clumped together on the inside. And they all fell down, laughing hard.
Ten minutes later Mariana and Vasul joined us in our room at the tavern, and Baz quickly bolted the door behind them.
Mariana searched our faces. “What’s going on?”
“We went to the forest,” I started.
Mariana’s eyes widened. “You what? Poe, you shouldn’t have done that. You could have been hurt. There are old rusted traps and deep holes and probably rabid bats.”
“You forgot ghosts,” I said.
Vasul held up his hands. “Not this again.”
“Just listen, please,” I begged. “What if there really is a reason they don’t want you to go into the forest? What if they don’t want Necuratul to die? What if they’re planning to do something about it, like make another sacrifice?”