Into the Woods: Tales From the Hollows and Beyond

  Oh yeah, he thought sarcastically as it began to make a deranged sense. The dryads. Not wanting to break the truce they seemed to have found, he simply nodded.

  “Come, Diana.” Struggling slightly, Ms. Temson rose and reached for the sapling in the pack. “I want your help putting this one to bed. No, you stay,” she admonished Will as he grabbed the shovel and levered himself up. “This isn’t your work.”

  Diana’s eyes were worried as she took the shovel from him, but it was a new worry, one of the heart. Not knowing what to make of it, Will sank back down, resting his head upon his empty pack and listening to the small sounds of the ladies drifting away: Ms. Temson’s high-pitched warble, Diana’s concerned response, the clank of his wine bottles. He liked both of them, but one afternoon was not going to change his mind. The forest was going to be thinned out at the very least. If his grandfather hadn’t wanted him to have it, he wouldn’t have given it to him.

  Still, guilt pricked at him as he leaned back and closed his eyes. He loved the woods. He’d grown up surrounded by trees in the mountains out west, studied them at the university, and found a poor-paying job working with them. He didn’t care. It was what he was good at, and if he allowed an acre or two of these stately trees to go to the ax, he could manage better. Much better.

  The wind in the trees and the long walk shifted him close to sleep, only to jerk awake at the giggle and a tug on his hat.

  “Hey!” he shouted, snatching a thin arm and sitting up. Shrieks and squeals erupted, and the brown-skinned women scattered. Only the one who had tried to take his hat was left, crouched as far from him as she could as he still had her wrist.

  Gasping, Will dropped her arm. She was like no one—like nothing—he’d ever seen. Looking at her was like trying to track the moon through a mist. His eyes kept drifting, unable to fix upon her. She was a black, frog-rimmed pool smelling of loam and wind, the hushed still point of winter and the quiet growth of summer. Brown as the earth, just as fragile, just as enduring. Eyes like the bottoms of clouds before a summer storm. Innocence. Feral innocence. But wise beyond knowing what wisdom was.

  “Who are you?” he breathed.

  She turned and pointed. From behind the nearby trunks came urgent whispers and frightened, envious eyes. The girl licked her lips and glanced eagerly at his hat among the leaves.

  Will shifted closer. “You want that?”

  She nodded, making no move to it.

  A twig snapped, and her head came up like a startled deer’s.

  “No!” he cried. “Wait!” But she was gone, and he was left staring at the earth where she had been.

  “Diana,” he heard Ms. Temson admonish from behind him. “You did that on purpose.”

  “Dryads?” he mouthed, unable to say it aloud. There was a rustling, and Diana sat down in his line of sight. She smirked at his bewildered expression, seeming relieved to see it.

  Ms. Temson carefully lowered her frailty beside her and poured a cup of tea from the insulated bottle. His fingers gripped the plastic cup numbly as she placed it into his hand. “Tree spirits, love. Your grandmother was one, as was mine. I’m a quarter dryad, but all human.” She sighed.

  Diana spooned a glop of marmalade onto a cracker and popped it into her mouth. “She gets moody on cloudy days, though.”

  “Diana,” she rebuffed gently, then turned to him. “You, William, are nearly a third dryad. That’s why they came, to see if your grandmother had returned to her tree. That, and to steal your hat.” Ms. Temson smiled. “They adore clothes. Risk almost anything to get them. I dare say they used to be the cause for many an embarrassed skinny-dipper.” The sound of her laughter rose like butterflies up into the canopy.

  It took Will three tries before he found his voice. “My grandmother? But from—how?” Then his resolve grew. “No. I don’t know who those women were, but they weren’t—tree spirits!”

  “I told Arthur it was a bad idea,” Ms. Temson was saying. “But he was young and of the belief that love could change the nature of things. And he did love her, I’ll grant you that. He knew it was possible. It was family knowledge that our grandfather had. . . .” She colored, hiding her embarrassment behind her cup of tea. “My grandfather wasn’t a polished man.”

  Diana snatched his hat from the ground and picked the twigs from it in agitation. “They’re wickedly gullible, believing anything you tell them. If they become with child they can’t return to their tree, seeing as they carry something completely foreign to their nature. By the time the baby is born they can’t return to their tree at all, having grown too far apart from it to accomplish it.” She threw his hat at him in disgust. “They don’t live very long after that.”

  He’d heard enough. Will stood, and Diana looked up at him in anger. “You saw them!” she shouted, pointing. “What color was her hair? What was she wearing? You don’t remember, do you! And you won’t, except for the fleeting breath between wake and sleep! Why can’t you believe!” Her voice softened. “It’s not hard—to believe.”

  Slowly, he sank down. She was right. He couldn’t remember. All he was left with was the way the woman had felt. She was the will to survive given substance, ruthlessly uncaring, an essence, nothing more. She had been too unreal to not be real.

  Will’s eyes flicked among the silent, gray trunks. What the devil was he thinking? He was a biologist, for God’s sake! He wouldn’t believe in fairy tales!

  “Where’s the myth that doesn’t have a grain of truth at its center?” Ms. Temson said, seeming to read his mind as she sipped her tea. “Dryads just happen. Saplings sprouted from the seeds of a dryad tree seem to show them sooner, but not always. They’re jealous little mites, pulling up anything within reach of their roots once they’re strong enough to leave their tree.”

  “The circles of cleared earth.” He gave himself a little shake. It wasn’t rational. But her eyes. He remembered her eyes. “They’re beautiful,” he breathed.

  “They’re vicious.” Diana glanced up from her crackers and jam. “If the roots of two dryads mesh, they’ll try to kill each other’s tree.” Making a face, she closed the jar and packed it away. “They usually both die.”

  Ms. Temson drew herself up. “Now you understand why I let everyone think I’m daft for never allowing an ax into my woods.”

  Will looked up. It was a joke. It had to be an elaborate plot. The cleared circles, the women themselves.

  “Oh, you can tell by looking which trees have come into dryad and avoid cutting them,” she said. “But the reverberations of a tree being cut resounds from root to root until the entire wood feels it.” She frowned. “My grandfather tried selective logging. It sent them into hiding for nearly ten years. Trees have a dreadfully long memory, you know. We have since learned to keep the meadow as a buffer, making my—ah . . . the woods into an island of sorts. But you need acres and acres of trees.” Her eyes went distant in memory. “Arthur and I have been planting trees for ages. We added twenty acres on the fringes and they began talking in sentences. Twenty more and they began to sing, dance, invent nursery rhymes.”

  Diana had a pinky in her tea, trying to rescue a bug. “How clever they are doesn’t depend upon how old the tree is but how close to the center of the woods it sits. When one dies, the rest regard the ground as hallowed and won’t disturb anything under it.” Frowning, she gave up and threw her tea away. “Rather superstitious, but it does give the chance for a new tree to take root.”

  Will gave a start, shaking the tea from his hand as it spilled. “It’s a secondary survival mechanism,” he breathed, his schooling taking hold. “I see it now! When the density of trees in a closed population passes a critical threshold, space becomes such a limiting factor that the tree needs to find a new way to preserve its territory. It’s forced to evolve a way to step out of itself, to directly influence, to physically defend its domain. Hence the dryads!” Will leaned forward, his fingers tingling. “The more trees in the system, the smarter they have to be. And when
there’s the threat of logging, they disappear, able to compete using their more mundane defenses. It’s fantastic!” he gushed. His eyes focused upon Diana. She was smiling, relief making her beautiful.

  “So you’ll stay? You won’t log the woods?”

  Will’s smile faded as reality rushed back. His gaze went distant into the gray, fog-laced trees. It would be easy to stay, to take the place that others had made, but he couldn’t. The thought that he had done nothing to earn it would rob him of any pleasure he might find here. “I came to sell the woods,” he said slowly, hating his father for instilling in him so strongly the belief he must make his own way in the world. “I don’t see any reason to change my plans.”

  Ms. Temson’s cup hit the ground.

  “But the dryads!” Diana cried. “You can’t!”

  Will’s gaze dropped. “Ms. Temson can’t inherit it,” he said slowly. “So I’ll sell it to her.”

  Diana’s eyes grew wide in understanding. “But you’re a Temson! You belong here! Especially now that you know.”

  “No, I don’t.” He gestured weakly to the woods. “Like Ms. Temson said, this isn’t my work. This woods isn’t mine. I was raised surrounded by trees, always knowing there was more, something just out of reach. You can’t imagine what it’s like to suddenly find out . . .” Will looked beseechingly up at the dead branches, searching for words.

  “Listen!” he said abruptly, desperate for them to understand. “Now that I can see, I can’t help but wonder, what would the spirit of an ash or a wild hickory of the forests I grew up in look like. The spirit of a stately hemlock, an entire hillside of birch, the scattering of wild cherries, lighting the understory with flashes of white in the spring . . . do their spirits even exist anymore? Is it too late? I want to know. Now that I can see, I want to know! Can you understand?”

  The two women gazed at him with the infinite wonder of youth and the eternal hope of the old. “How much do you have in your pocket?” he asked his grandfather’s sister numbly.

  With trembling fingers, Ms. Temson brought forth a faded coin purse and extended two coins. Feeling his chest tighten in what might be grief, Will accepted them. The thin weight of them rested in his hand a moment, and then he threw them into the woods. The sound of their fall never reached him. Instead, a delighted cry and a giggle came drifting upon the heavy air, hazy and golden with the unseen sun. “Your lawyer can draw the papers up on Monday,” he said, knowing he had given Ms. Temson her life back, even as he felt something indistinct and indefinable slipping from him.

  Sitting ramrod straight before him, Ms. Temson silently started to cry. He said nothing, knowing she’d be embarrassed. Diana begin to fuss over her, sneaking glances at him. “I beg your pardon,” the old woman warbled. “The cold is seeping into me. I think it best we go.”

  Helping her up, Diana looked at him with a new light in her eyes, as if seeing him free of the shadow of her fear for the first time. He held himself back as they moved to leave. Standing apart, he took a shuddering breath. His hat felt rough in his fingers. With a last look, he hung it forlornly on a dead branch and turned to follow them out.

  “Plenty of good timber in there, Billy.”

  “It’s William. William Temson.” Will scuffed the dry, waist-high grass, looking for the rich loam he knew would be there, smiling as he found it. Sunlight pressed down like a physical sensation, maddening the cicadas into a shrill protest and driving the last of England’s chill from him. From beside him came Diana’s almost imperceptible sigh as she took in the gently rolling hills of his homeland. It had surprised him when she insisted on coming back with him, and even though it was only to help him pick out his land, he hoped she would stay.

  The farmer sucked his teeth, and shrugged. “You want it then?”

  Will wrote a figure and passed it to him. The money had come from Ms. Temson. “A loan,” she had said as she had pressed the check into his hand and strode quickly away into the crush of airport traffic. The iron-hard look in her eye had forbidden any protest; her stiffly held back demanded they not make a scene.

  The man stared at the paper for a quiet moment. “More ’n what I’m askin’,” he said, the scrap clutched in his thick hand.

  “I want it all. The entire valley.”

  “We-e-e-ell, I was gonna give my Peggy the lake as a weddin’ present. Build her a house.”

  Will shifted impatiently. “That’s why the extra.”

  The man scratched his stubble. “I want to keep the huntin’ rights.”

  Beside him, Diana shook her head and pulled him down to whisper in his ear. Will wrote a new figure.

  “You sure you got that much, son?”

  Will nodded.

  “It’s yours.” The man’s eyes glazed, and he turned to the rusting pickup. The door creaked open, and he looked back. “You coming? It’s a long walk into town.”

  “No, go ahead.” The wine bottles were heavy in his pack, and the seeds were light in his pocket, sifting through his fingers like dry rain. “I think we will just stomp about for a bit.”

  Diana’s hand slipped into his, and the man grinned knowingly. “Suit yourself. Watch out for the snakes, miss.” He laughed uproariously, revved the engine, and was gone.

  Together, he and Diana stood and listened. Slowly the humming silence of insects, wind, and grass reasserted itself. As one their heads lifted to the lake. “That way, I think,” he whispered, and they began to walk.

  Spider Silk

  “Spider Silk” is another one of my ventures into exploring dryads where the tree is a prison not a sanctuary. I’m not sure I like this bloodthirsty, devilish, sentient version that might be real or might be a mental delusion passed from mother to daughter. Though the story is told from first the grandmother’s, and then the mother’s point of view, Meg is the character that I’m most interested in, the one that I’d follow if I ever took the next step, curious to see how she handles twenty when the curse falls upon her fully. But seeing the beginnings of a dysfunctional family has its own appeal, and I hope you enjoy it.

  PROLOGUE

  The half-heard singing of her granddaughter Meg was as cheerful as the sparkling creek, low enough to safely play in now that drought had taken more than half of it. Even the water spiders braved its reduced flow, and they danced around Meg’s calves as she turned over rocks in her search for crayfish. Sitting on the simple car bridge that spanned it, Emily dangled her feet over the water, weighing the trouble of taking off her shoes and tying up her skirts to join the nine-year-old. Days like this were rare. Something in the wind spilling from the surrounding wooded hills reminded her of her own youth—holding the promise of something new—something all her own she would never have to share.

  “Little copper penny, stuck in a tree,” Meg sang, head down and her feet finding purchase on the cool stones below. “Tree falls down, and you can’t catch me. Little copper penny, as lonely as can be. Nothing lives forever but my penny and me!”

  Emily’s smile faded, her gaze rising to look past the farmhouse she shared with her daughter and granddaughters to the woods beyond. No. God, no. It had to be a mistake. Leaning forward, Emily clasped her arms around herself, cold. “Meg, where did you hear that?”

  Oblivious to the warning in her voice, the little girl straightened, water drops sparkling on her arms. “Penny,” she said, beaming a squinting smile up at her with one eye open, one shut. “I can hear him singing right through my toes. Gram, can I ple-e-e-ase go for a walk in the woods? It’s too hot in the pasture. I’ll stay on the path. I promise.”

  Fear caught her breath, memory folding time as if the last five decades hadn’t happened and she was fourteen, balanced on womanhood and fighting for her life. Penn. Penny. How long had Meg been singing that song? Days?

  “Ple-e-e-ase?” Meg begged, her creek-cold hands making a spot of ice on her knees.

  Emily’s breath came in with a gasp. Reaching down, she yanked Meg from the water, her back all but giving way
as the little girl protested when they fell together onto the dry, sun-baked wood. Emily blinked fast as Meg regained her feet, complaining.

  “Meg, go in the house.”

  Looking at the water, the little girl protested, and Emily reached up, pinching her arm. “Go in the house! I’ll get your shoes,” she said again, and, looking sullen, the little girl went, rubbing the grit from her arms.

  Heart pounding, Emily looked past the farmhouse. The sun still sparkled on the water, enticing her to come and bathe in its coolness. The wind in the woods promised sweet release if she would slip under its soothing umbrella—it was a lie.

  Her snare hadn’t held. He was loose. He was singing. He was free.

  ONE

  Hands clenched, Lilly stood outside of Meg and Em’s door, listening to her mother’s age-lightened voice rising and falling as she told the girls their bedtime story. Leaning forward as if to knock, she frowned. Part of her desperately wanted to interrupt, to stop what she thought might be the first signs of a slow decline in her mom. Part of her listened with a rapt attention, remembering hearing the story herself as a girl when the sunset-cooled air breathed its first relief into her room, the very room her own children now called their own. The wide window edged in white lace looked out onto the woods, and she recalled all too well the times she’d kept herself awake listening for the wolves that no longer lived there, wishing that her mother’s fairy tales of a beautiful, mischievous boy with red hair were real. She had wanted an adventure so badly, but he had never come whispering under her window to lure her into dancing in the moonlight.

  Feeling ill, she rocked back, hand going to her side. Penn, her mother had called him, her gaze distant and eerie as she told her stories, stories where the guardian of the woods could appear as a clever wolf or take on the face of a trusted friend to lull you to an untimely death in his unremorseful search for a soul—a beautiful boy with laughing eyes and a wont for mischief that no one could see unless lured into sight with the promise of honey. Crossing running water could save you from him, or trapping him in a tree. Dangerous, yes, but he would be your friend if you were daring enough to impress him. Then you’d be safe.