12. Armor Enough
CHAPTER TWELVE
ARMOR ENOUGH
Fine, red powder dusts my hands and the strands of my hair that have fallen from my braid to hang before my eyes when I blink awake. My mind is slow to catch up to where I have found myself. Last I remember, I was underground. Searching all around, I find myself somewhere familiar for the first time in what feels like forever, but here, I know it has only been a few days.
Standing, I don’t bother dusting myself off. Instead, I turn and rush down the dusty, clay road I know so well toward the edge of the woods and my home.
All memories of Anne, her fate, and my desperation to return home with her rush back to me so fast I stagger in my race. It could be that I have finally been freed. The barrier could be gone, perhaps a powerful creature in the dark decided to take pity on me. Maybe Anne has already wandered home.
I run into the barrier between the rift and my world so hard I rebound off it and land in a bruised heap.
“Goddammit.” I mutter the word as the next realization starts to press on my mind and make everything infinitely worse. I am back where I began.
If this is real and not some terrible trick, I must start again.
Louder this time, I pound on the earth and bellow, “Goddammit!”
Pacing, I try to piece together the few snippets of information I have been given and sort out why such a thing would happen. It doesn’t make any sense that The Keeper would allow it and even less that Fallow would lead me into such a trap. He gets his prize when I am lost, and now I am as found as possible while remaining in the woods. My home is just over the hill. Anne is trapped in a tree only a short walk from where I stand.
The thought of being so close to Anne has me rising, turning on my heel, and climbing from the ruts in the road. Before I lift my foot for a second step, a yellow flash to my right catches my attention. When I face it, I find a light much like the one that opened the barrier for me once, among other such orbs, and my heart skips a beat. Nothing good has come from any of the lights that exist in this place, whether I have been able to see them or not.
Faster than I can blink, let alone attempt to flee, a plump little man, about the size of a beer stein and made of twigs and oddities,appears from thin air. He drops a few inches to the earth and finds a seat on a stone beside the road.
The loose threads of a hundred different frocks make his hair dangle in different lengths, and he has decorated his woodlandish body with baubles. He looks like he has fallen out of a seamstress’s sewing drawer with how the twigs that make him up have collected thread, buttons, and shiny pins. His eyes are silver buttons, and he wears spectacles shaped from clear pebbles and wire like he means to pretend they somehow help him see. For all the magic of this place, they might.
The creature says nothing, but his mouth twitches up and his eyes appear to sparkle with delight despite being made of buttons. He is far less frightening than many creatures of The Thicket, but his arrival sets me on edge. For all I know, this little creature is The Keeper, Himself.
He cannot blink, but I think he would if he could. He inclines his head, giving the impression that he wants me to speak first. Doing so feels like a bad idea, and I do not have much to say.
If I do not try, though, he might be insulted. To make enemies in this place is about the last thing I want, and nothing thus far has been as it first appeared.
“What are you? Not a digger, huntress, or shrew.” Frustration filling me to the very brim for having landed in another potential disaster with a monster makes me short and I clip my words. “Not a mother. ”
My words are the last straw for the jolly man. Holding his belly, he giggles and it is the sound of coins being jostled in a jar. “Oh, no! Not me! You do seem out of place, though, dear. Back where you started. That must make you feel some way.”
This strange creature has not earned knowing my thoughts on anything. His confirmation of where I have landed is a punch to the guts, though. When he isn’t answered, he waves his stubby hand made of twigs with nonchalance. “Fine, be silent. Makes it hard to get back to where you're meant.”
“Do you know how I might get out of the woods and back to my home?”
My question silences the little man’s laughter. Standing from the stump, he waddles toward me and pauses by the hem of my dress. My body itches to escape him in the same way I would jolt at the sight of a rat in the chicken coop. Sheer will alone anchors my feet to the earth.
Pulling the spectacles off his face, he polishes the pebbles with the hem of my dress, pops them back on, and gives me a once over. “We all have a different prison. I don’t even know what you did to end up in yours. What of The Thicket?”
“I know how to get back to The Thicket. If you know a way to save my daughter without returning, that is the path I would prefer. If you don’t know, you cannot serve me.”
I start to march away, already knowing that he does not have any new answers of escape. I am caught under the gaze of much more fearsome predators than him. As for the rift, the barrier, and Anne in the walnut tree, I’ve already played this part of the game. Though my nerves built from parenthood would have me trying everything thrice to be certain, I do not have time.
Shaking with the memory of the hellish deer vision of myself I faced the night before has me picking up my pace and mumbling about The Thicket and my choice to return to it. I know what fate awaits me in the rift and I am uninterested in sticking around for such an end. I want to lay eyes on Anne with such great intensity that I struggle to put one foot in front of the other, but she is better served by me sticking to the plan I have made in The Thicket.
The little creature bobs along behind me, coins jostling as he does, and walks about my ankles, tutting. “We all have different walls here in the rift. I can go as close to the house where you lived as I would like. I could go sit beside your hearth. Sometimes, I do. Your cat used to chase me, but now she’s dead.”
His final line drips with grim amusement like it is a story he wishes I would ask for him to tell. I lack the vocabulary to express how much I do not want to know, but the new piece of information does halt my steps.
Dropping to my haunches, I inspect the tiny man closer and find things I recognize about him. One of his button eyes is from a coat Anne outgrew long ago. He smiles and his teeth are familiar, too, though the thought is far less wholesome than a stolen button. I think they once belonged to the cat he mentioned. When she grew ancient, her teeth started to fall out. Now I wonder if they did not fall out, but if they were taken and she was too weak to stop this tiny, woodland thief. “Why do you do that? Go to our house and steal odds and ends?”
He leers at me like he was hoping I would ask. “Why do any of us do anything? It is in our nature.” Grabbing the hem of my dress once more, he pulls me away from the road and back in the direction he came. “Come along. You can’t get through the walls of this place and The Thicket will keep.”
Something in how this creature speaks adds hesitance to my steps and it is more than how weird a thing he is. “Where do you mean to take me?”
The little man’s brows, made of lost broom bristles, rise. “Well, with me, of course.” He fingers the seam that holds together the hem of my skirt and flips it to reveal a few loose threads from where the fabric frays with age and wear. “May I have a piece of this?”
He motions to the many threads that adorn his woody body and I am just about to shrug and tell him to go right ahead when I think better of it. This thing steals the teeth from cats. There is no telling what he might do with any piece of me. “Absolutely not.”
Fingering the hem of my skirts, he obeys and takes nothing as he skims up and down at me, his eyes lingering on my fingernails, then the lace sewn into two lines down the front of my dress. His mouth rises into a smirk when he sees my mouth full of teeth. My heart thumps too hard for any show of calm under his scrutiny. He admires me the way Anne drools over treats behind a glass case, as if he means to collect me like the many baubles that he has used to build his body.
It is time I left him, rude or not. “I will be on my way. You have nothing to teach me.” I stomp ahead and try to veer off toward the woods. I must get lost and that’s difficult to do on a road. Laughably, I wish Fallow would find me so I can get back to wandering faster. Maybe now that I’ve had my memories restored for a time, I will be in a better place to continue my trek.
The creature jogs ahead of me and his strange mouth curls into a snarl, revealing his stolen, cat teeth as he waddles backward. “There was a man not long ago who thought as you did. He lasted longer than most while he pounded away at that wall. He went to your house, too, and returned all sorts of shaken. If anyone was going to puzzle a way back it would have been him, but he eventually gave in to wander.”
Henry.
Recognition must show on my face. The creature cackles and purrs. “He’s lost now.”
“What did that man look like?”
My desire to leave the rift forgotten, I step toward the tiny creature. He grins and flips the hem of my dress again to reveal the loose strands. “Give me a thread from your skirt and I’ll tell you everything I know. I can be a very helpful friend. I know a great many things. I’m one of only a few who can wander in and out of The Thicket. The pieces of it mean nothing to me.”
The coins in his middle shake and shift as he parades with my hem in hand and I follow him a few paces, eager to learn all he has to say. I shouldn’t take his obvious bait but it is such a tempting morsel that he dangles, and he is very small. I can escape him after he tells me of Henry.
A mockingbird swoops down toward the tiny man and chirps with fury before flying off in a bustle of terrified wings as it loses its nerve. A squirrel rushes down from the trees and chatters at the bauble-man in a defensive stance, fur and tail raised and large teeth barred. It seems to chatter the word liar over and over again.
Fallow has found me.
Everything about the demeanor of the little man changes in an instant from jolly to furious, like he is only big enough to carry one emotion at a time. His hands clench into fists, snapping the twigs that serve as his fingers. “How dare you, rotten digger!”
The squirrel runs away at a breakneck pace and climbs a nearby tree until it’s out of sight, but in the dust by my feet an invisible fingertip writes, Call a liar what he is.
A songbird lands on my shoulder an instant after the sentence is written. This one does not squawk out any words, but flaps his wings like any territorial bird would before diving from my shoulder at the tiny man who tries to snatch the finch from the air. The bird lands back on my shoulder and makes an alarming array of whistles, none of them musical.
Though the small man’s offer is tempting, the way he watches Fallow with venom is proof enough that the least this small thief would do is lie to me. He has proven himself a thief. I think he holds potential to do far worse than steal the teeth of elderly cats. With Fallow’s warnings, I better remember the truth of all I’ve learned in The Thicket.
“I would do well to listen to my friend. He is the only one I have here.” There is probably a noteworthy quote or two about friends one can trust versus those one cannot, but I will leave such details to versions of me who have more room to be choosy.
The bird, like he means to prove my thoughts on trustworthiness, takes flight from my shoulder and abandons me to my own battles.
The creature stomps his tiny foot. “You will regret that!”
Again, my mind seeks to force my feet into retreat at such a threat. It is the words of Henry in my ear that stop me from running in fright. I never walked among animals beyond a lady’s lapdog once in all my life until I met Henry. He all but carried me to the Appalachians and here we settled, but so much frightened me when we first arrived, especially mice.
One day, to prove to me how I need not worry over the mice that shared the stable with Dolly and often grew possessive of her feed, Henry caught a mouse under his boot and held it there. He did not crush it, but it could not escape.
He looked me in the eye and stated, It is much smaller than you are. The soles of your boots are armor enough.
With Henry’s brave words in mind, I kick the angry creature so hard that pieces of him remain behind by my feet, no longer possessing any life without whatever it is that keeps such a being upright. Reaching down, I pocket the button from Anne’s coat with some reverence. Perhaps it will help me keep her memory with me when I return to The Thicket with Fallow. I imagine it will be any moment.
The critter lands so far down the road that I cannot hear what he bellows at me with his fists in the air. It’s easy enough to imagine it. With the thought of him venturing back to my house one day, when I have escaped this and dwell there once again with Anne, I find the courage to run toward the furious creature. He growls at me as I chase him down, showing off his head full of stolen cat teeth.
Lifting my foot, I grind his little body into the earth until every part of him stops quaking and vibrating beneath me and becomes only twigs, coins, and thread with no life at all. In the center of the remains is a glowing piece of coal, like it was just plucked from a hearth.
The trees move around me in a dizzying dance that is becoming familiar. The ground stays in place beneath my feet, as do the bright remains of the little creature I smashed as we reenter The Thicket. Worried over what it might mean, that it still burns, as soon as I cease swaying from how the world has shifted, I nudge the burning coal a few feet ahead with the toe of my boot until it plops into a muddy puddle with a sizzle.
It goes dark and the feeling of dread that hung over me vanishes.
A chorus of screams rips through the woods, cracking my peace the same instant that I found it. Invisible until the glowing coal at the center of that little monster disappeared, dozens of women rush deeper into The Thicket from behind trees and stones like they’d been chained in place, watching our encounter in secret. Now they are freed.
They are so skeletal there is no way they truly live; their grey, lifeless skin hanging from sickly bones so thin and spindly they barely form bodies at all. Their hair, which comes in every shade and texture, is dry and brittle like that of porcelain dolls. All of them wear ragged clothing, like someone has been unwinding the weave of it for years on end one strand at a time.
I stand still, too frightened to move a muscle. Only one of the freed captives turns over her shoulder at me, pausing in her escape. In place of eyes, two brass buttons stare back at me. Her bare foot rises like she means to walk toward me but, when a screech of pure alarm rips free from my throat, she turns back and follows her desiccated sisters into the woods until they are out of sight.
Unable to move an inch from where I have become planted, I blink at the woods and their darkness, wondering if those women will run themselves to dust.
A bird caws overhead. Not Fallow, just a bird. The sound strikes me from my shock like lightning.
Clutching my arms around my chest, I wish to fall into a seat right here in the mud. My task, though, it lies in the center of The Thicket. I can’t let that little creature be right. I must get to The Keeper and save Anne.
“Do you know a safe place to rest, Fallow?” My voice quakes, the thought of following him again after he led me into the darkness and then to that critter in the first place making my blood run cold.
He appears again from under the brush as, not for the first time, a cricket. He chirps, but it sounds like a yes and no at once. It may be safer than being out in the open, but I do not think anywhere in The Thicket is safe. In spite of my reservations and knowing his purpose of leading me to my end, I am happy to be reunited with Fallow. Nothing feels so frightening with him by my side. He has felt strangely familiar from the start and that feeling has only grown.
“When you led me below, did you come with me at all? What happened after?”
The cricket sings, pausing in its hopping gait to play a song on its wings that sounds a little like the word, ‘later.’
He bounds ahead again and I follow a step behind. Every step I take appears to make the world grow closer to night. The darker the forest around me becomes, the jumpier I am.
The memory of the monsters I was met with my first night in the rift has not faded at all. The fear instilled in me by those monsters is still as fresh as the moment I first ran in terror from them. The shift, who moves the world and stomps overhead like a giant troll from a children’s story, crosses my mind in time with the wailing and desiccated women kept captive by the bauble man.
Wherever Fallow is leading me, I hope it has walls, if only so I can pretend I am safe within them.
Other memories slip from my mind even as I attempt to clutch them close. “My daughter, I remembered her there. I have her button.” Reaching into my apron pocket, I find another memento meant to help me recall the parts of myself that I’m losing more of with each step closer to the center of The Thicket. Henry’s handkerchief. My wedding ring, too. “It was hers when she was small, and that creature took it.”
With the mention of the little monster, more recollections of Anne are lost like my mind only has room for one thing at a time and that creature has taken up the space where my daughter once dwelled. Her hair color. Her favorite food. The way her voice sounds when she’s happy, the way she whimpers when she’s frightened, or even her laugh.
Gone.
The weight of my memories leaving so fast, knowing they’re vanishing before I can even realize they’re gone, stops me in my tracks. Feeling hollowed out seems it should make my steps lighter, but I struggle to comprehend how I haven’t been swallowed by the earth for the great burden I carry on my back. The emptiness forces me to my knees, but I don’t weep, scream, or pound my fists on the earth the way I’d like to. For once, it’s not because it would be no use. I am just too tired.
Rather than railing against the unfairness of this place, I ask after Fallow. “Do you remember who you were before you came to The Thicket?” He stops hopping and turns to face me. Fallow says nothing and I cannot read the emotions of a cricket at all. “Later. Right.”
Hopping back toward me, the cricket goes still in a way that could never be perceived as natural, and then hops away in such a hurry that it falls to its side when it lands only to perform the same, desperate attempt to flee all over again. Fallow builds himself up much faster than he has before. His presence appears to suck the earth and plants around us inward. The cricket that had been in such a rush to escape us ends up pressed flat to the side of Fallow’s leg, twitching.
Standing before me, a shade of soil and fallen, brown leaves, Fallow answers at last. “I do not remember. I only know that whoever I left needs me, and that I never meant to leave them. The Thicket has a terrible way of keeping only the memories that hurt us the most. It needs our desperation in order to expand and keep the borders strong.”
The Thicket wants and needs us to remember we have lost its game.
His voice, created by the creaking of crickets and whispering wind, sounds so sad. It is as hollow as I feel. He carries the same sort of apathy that comes when something is beyond words, but we must find some way to fill the silence. If he had eyes, they would brim with tears. I don’t know enough of Fallow to picture his eyes with so much as a color. I imagine them to be brown, but I think that’s only because Henry’s are brown, and he is the only man I ever saw weep.
In our ten years together, Henry cried only a handful of times. Once was when we passed a battlefield on our way from New York to Tennessee. He had appeared haunted by it and when he washed his face in the stream beside it, he found a brass button still attached to a faded, threadbare scrap of grey jacket half submerged in the mud. Though he fought those men in grey coats in the rebellion, he wept. Openly and without shame, he had stared at the blue sky above and sobbed for the men on both sides that died on that field and, I think, for the piece of himself he lost on it.
The other times were in times of strife. Henry was never one for tears of joy, but when Anne was very sick, he cried with me by her bedside and wept through his prayers that she would recover and live. He cried while I birthed her, too, in recognition of my trials. Once, he wept with me over the crops in a dry spell, pushed too deep into fear that he would be unable to provide for us. We shared pain.
Fallow and I share pain, too. If only the sacrifice of the other was not what would solve it. I know his pain all too well and I wish to alleviate it for him, but the only way I know to manage it is to lose my only chance by giving it to him.
We both have wounds that might yet be healed. It is almost a loss in itself that we cannot wallow together while facing some unsolvable problem. We must carry on.
I can still save myself from Fallow’s fate. I must believe that.
Rising, I nod to Fallow, and he leads me farther into The Thicket on silent feet. It is dark all around, too dark to make out his form against the night, when he stops and I walk right through him, collecting leaves and soil on my face and clothes as I do. Shaking him off me like I would if I walked through a spiderweb across the barn door, I sputter, “Is this the place? Will we be safe here in the night?”
“I would be safe anywhere.” Fallow answers, his tone now a little goading, especially compared to how sad and flat it had been prior.
If he wants to set such gravity aside for now, I will join him in a lighter place. “You know what I meant.”
“I do. We will be safe here tonight.” Fallow lifts his foot and stomps it down onto the wooden floor of a well-lit home that has appeared around us. It does not build log by log, but simply is, and I cannot stop the yelp of surprise that flies from my lips.