“There are no kinder climes. There are only different forms of cruelty.”
Privately, Annie agreed. Aloud, she said, “The water, if you please. I need to flush these wounds. Why are you setting such vicious traps in the middle of the wood?”
“Why does anyone set traps? There are things in the trees I’d rather not have roaming free, either because they’re a meal for me or because they would make a meal of me, given the chance. I check my traps in the morning, when the sun is in the sky and I have the best chance of safety. Sometimes they feed me for the day. Other times they tell me that they’ve kept me safe.”
“How does a trap tell you anything?”
“Sometimes a trap contains a foot,” he said brusquely, walking back to her and depositing a bowl of water on the table nearest to her hand. “You shouldn’t have come here. There’s no good to be found in these trees, and the ill that waits for travelers is so great as to render all benefit moot.”
Annie looked at him for a moment, aghast. Then, with a shake of her head, she turned her attention to Martin’s leg.
The trap had bitten into his flesh just above the ankle, breaking the skin in a nasty circle all the way around his leg. The deepest of the punctures appeared to be well over an inch, and wide enough for her to slip her finger inside, had she desired to do so. She lifted down the bowl of water, wetted the cloth, and began gingerly dabbing each of the punctures, washing away blood and dirt. It was an action complicated by the fact that wiping the wounds agitated them, causing them to begin bleeding anew.
Martin hissed but did not object. He had been with the circus long enough to have seen wounds go septic when they were not cleaned immediately, crippling or even killing those unfortunate enough to have been injured. A little discomfort now would be justified if it resulted in his continued survival.
“How often do you clean your traps, sir?” Annie asked. “The light was poor in the woods. I was unable to tell whether I would be fighting rust, in addition to everything else.”
“Weekly,” he said. “They’re oiled and sharpened. The damage will be greater than if the tines had been blunted, but there should be no rust.”
“Cold comfort,” said Annie, and returned to her work. She could feel the stranger watching her, his eyes cold on the back of her neck. Belatedly, it occurred to her that she should have offered her name, and Martin’s, and inquired after his. Her manners had suffered greatly since going into the woods. And why shouldn’t they? Everything else had suffered greatly since she had gone into the woods. Her manners were simply one more consequence of her choices.
Martin closed his eyes as she cleaned the wounds and salved them liberally with the stuff from the small pot, which was viscous and smelled of tallow and boneset. Finally, she tied a length of cloth around his ankle and stood, drying her hands on her skirt.
“You won’t be walking on that for a day or so, I’m afraid,” she said, with genuine regret in her voice. “The wounds will need time to scab over, and exerting yourself too much will cause them to begin bleeding again. That raises your risk of infection. I’d rather have you stay put and keep your leg, if it’s all the same to you.”
“It’s not all the same to Sophia,” he said, looking at her solemnly. “I’m sorry, Miss Annie, but I can’t let you go looking for my girl by yourself, and you need someone with you in those woods, now that your cat’s gone.”
Annie considered arguing, or pointing out that she had gone into the woods by herself once already, and come out alive. She did neither. More and more, it was becoming clear that her survival thus far had been a matter of chance and circumstance, rather than any particular skill. There were monsters in those trees. Anyone who walked there alone would be in danger.
“Neither of you is going out there before sunrise,” the stranger said gruffly. “It’s not safe.”
Annie and Martin turned to look at him, once more united in their disbelief. It was Annie who found her voice first.
“I beg your pardon, sir, but who are you to forbid either of us anything?” she asked. “You have been kind enough to allow us a place to treat the wounds which you dealt, with your careless trapping, and for that, we thank you. You are not my husband, or Martin’s father, or any other form of authority that we should obey. You are a man. You do not control these woods.”
To her surprise, the man chuckled darkly. “No man controls these woods. That’s the trouble, miss: no man has ever controlled these woods. The things that walk here are beyond man’s control and have no interest in our petty laws or manners. You should run.”
“Run?” asked Annie. “Run where? The trees close in on all sides. If it’s the woods I need to fear, my fate is sealed.”
“Run until Oregon is only a memory,” said the stranger grimly. “It’s not the woods you should fear. It’s the things that walk in their shade. For those things are hungry beyond all measure, and they can never, never be satisfied.”
Chapter Twelve
“My name is Hal, and until some fifteen years ago, I lived in The Clearing,” said the stranger. There was no second chair in his tiny cabin; instead, he moved to stand by the fire, gesturing for Annie to be seated on the bed.
It seemed improper, sitting on a strange man’s bed, but she was tired from the passage through the wood, and she knew Martin would not judge her. She sat gingerly on the edge of the pine-stuffed mattress, the smell of the woods puffing up and surrounding her. Even here, the trees made their presence known.
“My family and I had come to settle in Oregon looking for a new life—a better life, if there’s such a thing to be found in this world, where it seems like God is looking to kick a man in the teeth as soon as look at him. We had started our married lives in Montana, where a fever had claimed our two elder children, leaving us haunted by ghosts we could never truly repudiate, for fear that they would leave us. My wife begged me to find us something else, something better, or at least something different enough as to make the world seem new again. Brighter. Our Poppy was still little more than a babe in arms. She deserved something more than to grow up in the graveyard.” Hal chuckled mirthlessly. “If only I had guessed at the future. I would have told my wife that our daughter was lucky to have a home with history, and raised her in the shadow of her older brothers’ graves, and seen her to her wedding day.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, sir,” said Annie.
“Everyone’s lost someone here,” said Hal. “We traveled weeks, going from caravan to caravan, wagon train to wagon train, buying, begging, and bartering our way from group to group, until we heard tell of an expedition heading into Oregon. Everything was green there, they said; no more desert wastes, no more rattlesnakes or pit wasps, no more taste of ghost rock in the air. Everything grew. They spoke of a bright and verdant land, and we were so enthralled by their stories that we never stopped to ask ourselves how such a paradise could exist in this world. We spent our last few dollars buying ourselves a place in that train, and we rode with them out of the desert, into the green glory of the West.”
Annie said nothing. Neither did Martin. They were listening now, caught up in the story of a man and his family. There was no question of a happy ending. Even had the stranger been bright of eye and sunny of disposition, no one whose family was living happily in town would be tucking himself away in a cabin in the woods. It did not fit with the world as either of them understood it. There was no way it could be so.
“The Clearing was a new town then, smaller than it is even now—but not as small as it should have been, to accommodate the number of us who came in on that wagon train. That should have been the first clue that something was wrong. Too many houses sat empty, waiting to receive us. For each of them there was a story, something sad and believable. We heard tales of sickness, of accidents in the wood, of natural death from old age or in childbirth. Even then, we might have questioned them more, but Poppy had fallen in love with our new home the moment she saw it. To be a father, to see my child so o
verjoyed with the prospect of her new life in a new place … it warmed my heart. It stopped my senses. I told my wife that we were finally home, and she dutifully agreed with me. To this day, I don’t know whether she shared my initial misgivings. I never asked her. Time ran out before I could.”
Silence fell in the cabin, broken only by the distant crackle of the fire. Hal took a deep breath.
“I won’t lie to you: I won’t tell you that it was a nightmare. We had good years in The Clearing. That’s part of how this place gets you. If it were cruel from the get-go, there’d be no one for it to betray. People understand cruelty in the West. We know how to endure. We’re a nation of people who know how to endure. Oregon doesn’t want you to be able to endure. It’s kind before it’s cruel, so that you’ll never see the cruelty coming.”
He paused for a moment, looking pensively at nothing. He didn’t even seem to realize that they were still there. The story had become its own reward, something he could only cleanse through the telling of it.
“Three years we lived there. I hunted and did repairs for others in town. I’ve always been good with my hands. My wife mended clothing and did the laundry for those few with money to spare, who were too good to wash their own dainties. She had a way with a needle that couldn’t be bought for all the money in the world. I still wear some of the clothes she made for me, and they’re as good as the day that they were finished. Our Poppy grew up fast and strong, blooming like the flower that she was, and I thought, this is good. This is what a man is meant to do. He’s meant to find fertile ground and plant his roots deep, so that he can feed his family from the land. It was always about hunger. We hungered for a better life. We hungered for a future. We thought that we had managed to find those things. We thought that we were going to bloom in Oregon. We thought the promise of the golden West was finally ours to claim.”
Hal’s scowl was sudden. “We had never been so wrong. I failed my family by bringing them here. You’ve done the same to yours. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll leave this place come morning and never let yourself see what’s become of your loved ones. You can still walk away.”
“No.” Martin stood, or tried to—as soon as he put his full weight on his injured leg he hissed and collapsed back into the seat. He glared at Hal. “We’re not walking anywhere.”
“You’re certainly not,” said Annie. She stood and walked to stand behind Martin, resting her hands on his shoulders. To an outsider, it would have looked like a comforting gesture, friends drawing strength from each other. In reality, she was holding him down. He lacked the strength or the leverage to push her off.
Eyes on Hal, Annie asked, “What are you dancing around telling us, sir? There’s a secret here, one big enough to swallow us all whole. You need to tell us the truth.”
“Funny that you should say ‘swallow,’” said Hal. “Maybe you have half of it sorted out already, and simply don’t want to admit what’s going on. That happens, sometimes. We don’t want to see what’s right in front of our eyes. It’s too terrible. It can’t be allowed in a rational world. So we don’t let it.”
“Sir, if you don’t stop speaking rubbish and start speaking reality, I’m going to slap you across the face,” said Annie. “My daughter is out there. I have little time to waste on nonsense.”
“But you’re not moving toward the door,” said Hal. “You know something is wrong with the woods. You want to be brave. You want to save your child. Those are admirable things. And somehow, you can’t find it in yourself to move alone. You know that if you do, you won’t save her. You won’t even save yourself.”
Annie hesitated before grimacing, a pained, poignant expression. She said nothing.
“Have either of you heard of the wendigo?” Hal paused, giving them time to respond. When neither of them did, he shook his head and said, “I thought not. There are two kinds of legend in this world. The ones we share, and the ones we hoard, keeping them close to our hearts. Not because they’re good things, no—we share the cities made of gold and the fountains of eternal youth, we tell everyone we meet about the good green land over yonder, even when we’d be better off keeping it all for ourselves. And the little bad things we brag about, like they make us stronger somehow. We talk about bears and biting fish and how dangerous it is to live where we live, and we pretend that makes us strong. We pretend that makes us better.”
His eyes were far away. “The second type of legend, that’s what we conceal. We don’t want anyone to know, because if they knew what it cost us to live where we do, to do what we do, they might think less of us. They might think, ‘If those fools had the sense God gave the little green apples, they never would have stayed.’ They might think we brought this on ourselves. And, God help us, they might not have the opportunity to suffer the way we did. We want other people to suffer like we did. No matter how often we say we’d rather save the world that pain, that’s not true of the human heart. Misery loves company. Misery revels in company. Misery needs company to tell us that it’s not our fault.”
“Sir…” Annie began, and stopped. This was a man lost in his own private reverie, sinking deeper with every word he spoke. If she shook him loose, he might need to start over from the beginning. That would save them no time. That might lose enough to condemn them.
“The wendigo is hunger. The wendigo is cold. The wendigo is the starving winter given physical form and forced into the world to torment those of us who have not yet succumbed. I don’t know where it came from—but perhaps there is a reason that this is such a good, green land, yet so empty. Even the natives did not settle here before The Clearing was established, and even the settlers have never come to question why the town survives when it loses half its population every other winter. It’s like we’re all blind until it’s too late, and then, once our eyes are opened, we can no longer look away. The wendigo cannot be satiated. It will eat, and eat, and eat until everything is gone except for the wendigo itself—and when that happens, the wendigo will begin to devour its own heart, one bite at a time.”
“I am well-equipped for monsters, sir,” said Annie. “I have served them and been served by them. Saying that there are monsters in these woods is not enough to turn my course aside.”
“These monsters used to be men.”
Annie stopped. So did Martin, both of them staring at Hal. The fire crackled. The wind whistled outside. All else was silence.
Hal nodded, apparently satisfied. “You begin to understand,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s a curse or a punishment laid down by the land itself, and I don’t suppose it matters; the end is the same, and I’m not one to go fight with God to make things other than they are. Maybe if I’d been a younger man when all of this had happened … but if it were possible to wrestle something like this back into the ground, I’d like to think someone would have done it before me. Some things are too terrible to let stand. Whatever the cause of them, if there were a cure, it would have been provided eons ago, because no one deserves this.”
He stopped then, staring silently into the fire for several seconds. Annie tightened her hands on Martin’s shoulders. She wanted to scream at the old man to get on with it, to finish his story and free her back into the night … but she also wanted him to keep talking, to keep metering out his story a drop at a time, and spare her the freedom to leave. Because the darkness was like treacle syrup, catching and clinging, and something was out there, something so terrible that it could punch through her mother’s love and straight down into the raw red heart of her, where her own instinct for self-preservation still lingered, coiled and ready to strike. She didn’t want to go back out there, not even for Adeline, and knowing that was almost enough to kill her.
“We’ve all heard the stories,” Hal said finally. “A farm that got snowed in, the provisions exhausted, the roads blocked off. Someone goes out to chop wood and doesn’t make it back alive, and the family finds themselves with a terrible choice in their laps. Eat the dead and make it to spr
ing, or save their immortal souls and starve. It’s funny. We forget that we’re all made of meat. We want to make it like our bodies are somehow sacred, when they’re just meat after we go to meet our maker. In the stories, some traveler finds the farm after the thaw, and they’re all dead inside, half with their mouths stuffed full of Uncle Edgar, who would have wanted to save them. That’s what we forget. We want to save them. If some god or devil had come to me and told me that by giving my body to my wife and daughter, they could have seen the end of the winter, I would have given it gladly. I would have been happy to die for the sake of their survival. Any real man would be.”
“I’d die for my Sophia,” said Martin.
Hal flinched a little, like he had forgotten anyone else was there. Annie had a sudden image of him telling this story over and over again to the empty cabin, trying to exorcise his demons by talking about them.
“Winter came on hard,” he said. “Worst we’d seen since we’d come to Oregon. We were hungry. Not just hungry—starving. I didn’t know what hunger was until that winter. The children chewed on pine needles, drank the sap like it was mother’s milk. People licked the ice off windowpanes to still the gnawing in their stomachs. My wife brewed old napkins in the kettle to make soup, and we drank every drop, not caring how old it was, or how bad it tasted. We needed to make it to spring. If we could make it to spring …
“Then people started dying. A body can only go so long without putting real food into itself. When the napkins and the needles ran out, well. There were a few suicides. The mayor’s brother hanged himself in the stable—didn’t scare the horses, though. We’d already eaten the horses. Tasted like failure. Tasted like survival. And surviving was all we were about. My Poppy, she was a skeleton draped in skin, eyes big as saucers, folding in on herself, fading away. Broke my heart every time I saw her. It was like she was eating herself from the inside out, and when she ran out of meat, she was going to begin on the bones. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I couldn’t watch her die. So I took my gun, and I kissed my wife, and I said I’d be back soon with food. I promised her salvation. She believed me.”