The Heart of the Thicket

6. Am I Prey?

CHAPTER SIX

AM I PREY?

With a stomach full of walnuts, I clear away the brush on the forest floor, sit down, and lean my back against the clear border of my prison. The bark on the trees is filled with the tiny, crawling legs of ants, spiders, and beetles. There are plenty of things in these woods, both myth and not in nature, that are far more frightening than insects. That does not change the fact that if I must now sleep under the branches of walnut trees, I would rather not wake up with any more insect bites than are due to me.

The air grows chill enough to make me shiver despite my shawl, and hangs heavy with the scent of soil. Around me, the scene that brought me to this spot plays time and again. I watch myself trip. Anne exclaims. The other-me ushers her from the tree. They leave the woods and…

“Mama, are you alright?”

It begins anew.

Nothing climbs the invisible wall at my back. I know all too well that it is so smooth that nothing can gain purchase on it. That is atop the fact that, so far as I know, it rises all the way to Heaven. Nothing has any reason to spend any time with this border but me.

I’ve calmed my tears with knowing that it being unclimbable is just as well. A hundred frightening scenarios could play out if I managed. Another wall could appear just on the other side of the one that traps me now and I would starve to death between two panes of air. I could build a rope that might vanish the moment it leaves whatever this rift between my world and the next is, leaving me to fall and break my neck. The terrifying options are endless, and they do not serve me, anyway. If I made it to the other side by my own power, there is no certainty Anne would come with me. She did not follow when I wandered up the road.

Until I choose The Thicket, I am trapped here. It is a truth that is becoming more and more clear the longer I remain.

To leave Anne here alone, though, trapped in a loop or not… I’ve never been parted from her for any length of time.

The longer I go without somehow freeing her from the endless cycle… Abandoning my post by what is beginning to feel more and more like Anne’s grave, I make for the nearby stream. Dropping to my haunches, I cup my hands in the cool water and a bout of vertigo overtakes me. My fingers grow numb and my head spins. Clenching my eyes tight, I wait for the sensation of the world careening beneath me to cease.

When it does, I open my eyes and find the world shifting around me was not only in my mind.

The new light makes my eyes sting and the sounds and scents assault my senses. The birds chirping and the breeze blowing through the tall grass around me pound in my head at first and I close my eyes against it until the overwhelming feeling of too much happening at once passes.

Blinking my eyes open, I am no longer beneath a canopy of trees and the stream is gone, though the water remains cupped in my palms. Still thirsty, I raise the water to my lips only for it to heat to near-boiling against my skin. Separating my hands with a cry of surprise and pain, the cool water splashes on the grass by my boots.

The water may be ruined, but the air is perfect, not too hot and not too cold. The breeze is cool, but I am warmed by the sun, which shines high in the sky. The grasses around me are green, tall, and cool to the touch. Insects chirp, but nothing buzzes by my ears or lands on my arms or neck to pester me.

It's springtime, so I know this cannot be real. I became trapped in autumn. Still, it is such a nice vision when compared to the others that I will stay so long as I am allowed. If this is a dream, it is a sweet one.

Rising to my feet, I scan the field and find only one familiar thing. A trail of daffodils grows along an old fence line. It is not a fence I recognize, not one built by my husband’s labor, but any fence with daffodils along it is familiar enough to be comforting. It tells me I am in the right part of the world, maybe even Tennessee.

That I do not recognize where I stand is a comfort in itself. I have seen my home from the lens of the rift, and I do not wish to return there again until I find it in truth.

In the distance of my mind, I know Anne is still stuck in the walnut tree. I remain in the rift, too. I must. Guilt assails me for wanting to dally in this beautiful place, making a sweat fueled by dread break out across my brow when I step toward the yellow flowers that sway in the breeze. Their sweet scent wafts toward me and I take in a great breath of fresh, spring air.

Scanning all around myself, I see no homestead, no chimney stack, and no sign of anyone but me. Birds soar high in the sky, but none of them possess the watchful gaze of Fallow.

There is a line of trees ahead, and the babbling of a wandering brook. Placing my hand on the roughhewn fence, I follow the daffodils toward the shady meadow and water.

My bruises are gone, the tears in my dress have vanished, my boots are whole once more, and the raw blisters on my feet are healed. The only discomfort I experience is being so parched that I can already imagine the way the clean, cool water of the stream will flow over my tongue like rain on a dry summer field. I rush ahead, stumbling in my haste.

The trees are heavy laden with dogwood blooms, and the lemony scene of magnolia flowers drifts toward me on the breeze. My head swims as though I am floating in a cup of floral tea. The stream, I am certain, will be sweetened by the spring blooms and my mouth waters at the thought of a sip.

Trekking into the shade, I marvel at the canopy of white and purple flowers above my head. The ground is littered with wild violets and fallen petals, and the air is abuzz with honeybees that drift from place to place collecting pollen.Finches and mockingbirds I cannot see, well hidden within the blooms and leaves, whistle their songs.

What a sweet dream I have fallen into! It is good that the rift is not so marvelous as this. I would struggle to find it within myself to leave such a place. That I must abandon this one to save Anne is a tragedy.

Ahead, I spot the stream. It is free from all petals and flows clear and unobstructed through the space which strikes me as strange. Still, seeing the water, hearing it flow over stones, causes my throat to grow more parched and desperate. My lips stick together with how dry they are. I make for it in wonder.Whatever creature has given me such a vision as this, it cannot possibly be an evil one.

The thought stops me dead in my tracks.

Trust no one and nothing. That is the solid advice I have been given and I should seek to follow it. Whatever has put me here wants me to touch the water.

Again.

Water is what brought me here in the first place. Water scalded me upon arrival. It was all too easy to forget those details in the beauty around me.

A burbling laugh sounds, breaking the spell of this beautiful day. Fear creeps into me as the flowers and sunshine whither and fade. The birds stop their songs. The only sound is the water by my feet and words seem to emanate from the crystal-clear stream, sinking deep into my bones and stealing the warmth from my blood.

“A mother to strengthen The Thicket.” Everything grows dark, the earth falls out from beneath my feet again and, as I fall, the voice echoes into the void around me. “Let me see the strength of this soul.”

I clench my eyes shut in a vain attempt to block out the sensation of falling. Floating lights and squirming lines of color keep me company whenever I am awake but resting my eyes. When my vertigo passes, I open my eyes and am faced with the dizzying feeling of it being even darker with my eyes open than when they were shut. Nothing exists in this darkness. It is like existing in a bucket of pitch, made worse by the wet, hot air that hangs here.

My mouth is dry like I have been without water for days and my throat is parched and sore. Running my tongue along the inside of my mouth, I recognize the stale taste that comes with having slept a very long time. Beyond this spot, a river is roaring, but it is not close. After the dream I had, I would not dare to approach it. It would probably be a bad idea to drink anything in a place so frightening as this. I will seek water once I have found the sun again.

Still, the river is a distant thrum. It tires me in the same way as when rain falls steadily on a roof overhead… in a house. It has wood walls and a hearth and… I cannot picture anything else about it. Reaching my memory as far as it can go, I seek out who is meant to inhabit my elusive home with me. They’re lost, too.

If my throat weren’t so dry, I might scream and pound on the stone floor with my fists. Since that would do nothing, I shoot upright and check that I am all in order. The skin on my hands remains the same, no fur or feathers. I hop once and seem to make the same sound when I land as I would expect of one my size. So far, I feel nothing amiss, save for my sudden blindness. My knees are sore from some strain I can no longer remember, but I can walk on them fine.

I am certain that I am not blind but somewhere very dark. If I kept blinking and willing my sight to return for the rest of time, it would be no use. Adding to my pat down, I reach up to my face and brush across my eyes with my fingertips. They are as they have always been. Thank goodness.

Standing, I sway on my feet, dizzy and more than a little trepid at the prospect of going ahead in this darkness. A dragon could be crouched ahead of me, its maw wide open, and I would stumble right into his mouth. There is something I’m meant to be doing, someone I need to get to. The urge to return to an elusive somewhere to accomplish an unknown thing builds into a panic in my chest, but no matter how far I stretch my memory, I cannot recall any details of what I was doing before waking in a strange field.

Aside from one creature.

With only one potential ally to call on, I whisper into the dark, fearful of what all might hear me. “Fallow?”

There is no answer. Maybe there is nothing for him to use as a voice in this place. The air is thick. He might use the humidity to form a body, but what sound would it make? I have no idea. I wonder how long it took him to perfect making any sound at all, living as a wisp or a ghost like he does.

I cannot wait forever for him to reappear, no matter how tempting it is to be a passive player in the terrifying game where I have landed. There was a creature in the water and it seeks to test my mettle. I don’t know whether I should play meek or brave.

With growing fear that the earthen floor is going to fall out from beneath my feet and send me toppling forever in darkness, I slide my foot over the ground in a large semi-circle before adding my weight. Reaching out with my right hand, I find the wall of the tunnel or room and use it as my guide as I take another step. It would be easy to grow bold and rush ahead when no harm befalls me after my third, fourth, or fifth steps, but just because one thing is going well does not mean I will not trip. I force myself to keep a steady pace.

The rushing water behind me is passing judgement. For all I know, the mist that hangs in the air and the water dripping atop my head from the ceiling above me is alive and paying close attention to my steps. The voice in the water said it wished to test the strength of my soul. With no better guidance to inform my way, I must suffice with behaving as myself.

It's hard to pinpoint what that is with my mind and memories made so fuzzy in the dark, but caution comes to me first followed swiftly by the desire to come to a solution to this mess my thirst brought me to.

Having chosen my direction based on nothing, I find the sound of the river grows more distant the longer I walk. There is relief in that. I get the feeling that whatever water there is, it rushes underground. The last thing I need is to be washed away into the darkness.That’s atop the fact that I might need to fear all water in this place.

Something pants right beside my ear like a tired dog in the heat of summer, so close to my skin I feel the added warmth of its breath. Coming to a halt, too frightened to move, I wait. It hisses like water being forced through a tight crack between stones, “A mother.”

I do not remember a child, but I know the voice speaks true. “Yes?” My voice quakes.

Images of a child, so small as to fit in the crook of my arm, her little face squished and wrinkled and yet so perfect, fill my mind. She yawns and when her sweetly bowed lips close she is a toddler with dark brown, wispy hair being blown by the wind as she squints in the sunlight. When she blinks, she is older still, leaner, running ahead toward something, someone, a man.

Henry!

She reaches her arms out toward him and when they touch she becomes?—

The version of me that existed before this moment might have remained in place, scared stiff or simply desperate to see more of this child. Maybe that Odell would have screamed in terror at the fluid that drips from whatever hovers over my shoulder in the dark.

I have decided to be bold. “Are you a fisherman? Is this child the bait?”

The creature hums. “A hunter. You’ll find many on your way to the heart of The Thicket.”

“Am I prey?”

More water drips onto my shoulder, hot and humid air breathes against my neck, so thick it moves the wispy hair that is not long enough to fit in my braid. “Can you hunt the ocean?” Water drips down my spine in a steady stream. “Can you slay snow-capped peaks?”

This is a creature, not a mere stream. Bravery spent, my heart pounds in my chest so hard I feel out of breath. Frozen by fear, I will my feet to move and remain frozen in the clutches of whatever monster stands at my back. The water dripping down my spine becomes a river of its own and soaks the back of my clothes.

“Run, little mother.”

Like my feet have been cemented to the earth, I must rip free and lurch forward. Instinct, the same that would have me run from a cougar or bear, hastens my pace. Nothing chases me, but the eyes of whatever watches me burns into my back. All the while, I do not see darkness, but a child born of the thick, misty air in this cavern, lit by magic.

My child.

Maybe my child.

The voice rushes past my ears at the same volume and tenor of the distant water that roars in the caves behind me, “A mother for The Keeper. Maybe this one will walk where others grow lost.”

The child nurses, wails, plays, runs. On and on, I see images of this little girl so real it feels I could reach out and touch her.

I want to touch her.

Her skin. It would feel supple and soft like velvet beneath my fingers. I crave its perfection. My fingers ache with the desire to caress this child’s skin. I remember how I wept when she first skinned her knee, when I should have been there to catch her but wasn’t. I made her from scratch, my greatest creation, and when I realized that I would never be able to stop it from happening again and again and again, I was bereft and frightened.

But her name, her likes and dislikes, what she sounded like when she laughed or cried, it is all lost.

“A mother.” The creature breathes the words again, this time from a distance, the sound reverberating in my bones rather than through the air.“A mother to strengthen The Thicket, at last.”

The images of the child, my daughter, vanish until I am left with only one. The girl, paused on the low branches of a walnut tree, reaching for a nut in its case and surrounded by leaves of the most vibrant shade of yellow imaginable. Everything about her is still. Behind her the sky changes, the wind blows, snow falls and melts and falls again, and she remains. Well but still.

Forever.

The horror of it, of her never growing another day, always waiting for me to manage whatever it is I am meant to in this place, to save her, turns into a writhing, horrible shout in my chest. I release it as I barrel through the phantom image. Shutting my eyes so I see no more, I run as fast as my legs can carry me down the pitch-black passage, racing until the air is no longer heavy and even my body, frightened in its bones, knows nothing sees me or gives chase.

My foot lands in a puddle, I slip and, as I fall through the air, a laugh that grows more familiar by the second bounces off the sides of my skull like my head is the cavern this creature lives in. “You might do, unless… ”

My head hits the rocky floor of the cavern and pain laces through the back of my skull. The only thing greater than my discomfort and fright is my frustration.

Scrambling to my feet, I bellow into the cave, my voice bouncing off the earth, “Unless what?”

“Mothers wander the rift at night.” The predator that hunts me laughs and, as the sound fades from my mind, water roars behind me in the cave growing louder like a dam has broken and I will soon be drowned in the torrent.

Picking up my pace again, I sprint down the length of the onyx cavern. In the darkness behind me, the sound of a rushing river grows closer and louder in time with my pounding heart. It feels pointless to attempt to outrun a being that is every drop of water on earth yet also somehow invisible to my eyes. A creature that can climb into my mind and speak directly into my brain. My body, maybe it is more than my body, my soul tells me I cannot give up.

Just as I fear I will lose strength and fall to my knees, light reaches my eyes. The end of the tunnel. Fallow crouches at the exit as a black cricket bathed in the fading orange light of sunset.

Near collapse, I stumble toward the mouth of the cave. The water behind me grows distant before falling silent. I collapse into the woods and, turning to peer back into the tunnel I’ve been fleeing from for some glimpse of what chased me or whispered in my ear, I find nothing but trees. No tunnel, no water, only a cricket who appears to be shaking its tiny, black head at me.

All my memories return in a rush as I gag, cough, and desperately attempt to catch my breath. I have been dragged somewhere far from where I started. The wall between this world and mine could be anywhere. Much worse than that is I’ve lost Anne. She is who I saw in the darkness. While in that monster’s soaking clutches I could not even remember or recognize her.

Though it is nearing night, the orange and pink light of sunset that casts over the world is too bright after being in such blackness. The sky is hard to see through the dense woods, no longer built of trees I recognize as those that grow in Tennessee, but not so different as to be of an obvious concern. Nerves, like flies frightened off a corpse, take flight in my guts with the thought that night is closing in.

Standing, I wheel in a circle on wobbly legs, desperate for anything I recognize.

The cricket chirps to gain my attention and hops onto a game trail that winds through the brambles.In the back of my mind, the only shred left of me that isn’t too exhausted to be curious about anything, wonders if being in a cricket is simpler for him than holding a shape himself.

Sifting through my many harried thoughts, I find the question that is most pressing and, I hope, most easily answered. “Do you know the way back to Anne and the walnut tree?”

Fallow bounds ahead.