15. Puppetry
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PUPPETRY
It is a long and silent trek behind the rabbit that Fallow inhabits. He is far faster and more agile in the brambles of The Thicket than I am. I think speaking when in the bodies of animals is burdensome to him. When I tried to ask what it was like to be inside a rabbit or cricket, the rabbit shook his head.
Hours have passed in silent drudgery before we come across a blue jay that has not yet flown south—if birds leave The Thicket as they do the mountains of Tennessee—and Fallow abandons the rabbit to take over the bully of all songbirds.
“Not far now!” Fallow speaks with the blue jay’s voice, which is such a terrible screech that I start and cover my ears with my hands. Every beast in The Thicket must have heard him.
“Christ almighty, you sound wretched!”
“You and your god.” Fallow cocks his blue, feathered head and blinks beady eyes at me upon listening to his new voice again. “I’m obnoxious!”
Blue jays are terrible pests. I cannot recall what they did before I came to The Thicket, but I can remember my fury at the birds. “I think I hate blue jays, but I cannot remember why.”
Fallow screeches into the air, “They attack the chickens over the feed.”
He ruffles his blue and white feathers, puffing out his chest and running his wings over his face a few times like a bird giving itself a bath, only he washes away memories.
“Probably that.” Though I get the feeling it is that exact thing, a trick of my mind, I’m sure. Knowing nothing is disconcerting and my mind latches onto what he’s told me like it is absolute fact.
“Among other things.” We both flinch at the volume of his voice. It would seem a blue jay can only shout. I suppose that is why they are called loudmouth jays so often in these parts.
The voice makes my spine shiver and Fallow grows silent as he hops on the path by my feet, occasionally leaping over an obstacle and slowing his descent with his little, blue wings. A few steps ahead, the forest changes to something different. A wall of fog separates where I stand from where I am going and the trees that I can see beyond it have no leaves remaining on their branches. A cold wind appears to blow through the bare limbs but I cannot yet feel it. Just seeing it on the path before me makes me miss the jacket that vanished from my shoulders outside of the cozy house this morning.
“Is that a new piece of The Thicket?”
Fallow hops in a half-circle by my feet to look up at me. “Roil’s piece.”
I know nothing of Roil, but the place in The Thicket she occupies speaks volumes about her. Fallow had called her a witch. I wonder if she is a witch like how I would define the word, a woman in some agreement with the devil himself, or if she is a witch by the standard of The Thicket. She might be a witch in the same way Fallow is a digger. If that is the case, a new meaning is not so obvious in any of the ways I can think up. “What does she look like? So I might not be surprised when I see her.”
“She shifts.” We both flinch once more at the bird’s volume, proving, yet again, that Fallow cannot control it.
“You become very cryptic when you jump into a beast, did you know that, Fallow?”
“I don’t jump.” He ruffles his feathers again, puffing out his chest then allowing the many white, speckled quills to relax, unable to get the hang of controlling the volume of the bird he has inhabited. “I shift.”
His answer is clearer now. She is like Fallow. She could be anything at all. That does not make me feel any better about stepping into such a place, but at least she will probably not be a monster.
My mind drifts to the mouse that attempted to lure me somewhere on the first morning I awoke in the rift between worlds. Fallow called her a huntress. “Does she hold a role here? You are a digger. There was the huntress the day I arrived.”
“You’ve also met a poacher.” When I cock a brow, Fallow hops toward me and taps his black beak against the button securing a strap on the side of my left boot.
“Oh, the little man made of odds and bobs?” Thinking of him makes the hair on my arms stand upright. He turned into something wicked so quick and I think he stole more than cat teeth and buttons based on how those skeletal women fled. I think he might have had a soul—if an evil one—and I extinguished it in a muddy puddle. Guilt wars with my pride at having managed it. “And Roil?”
He nods his head. “A witch.”
“In truth?” Rather than answering me, Fallow flaps his wings, catching the last of the sunlight, making them shine blue. Then he hops into the mist of The Thicket’s new puzzle piece. At the same moment I join him, the jay he brought with him explodes into a puff of blood, guts, and feathers near the earth, splattering my boots and skirt with gore.
I jump back with a yelp. “What on earth?”
A rat snake slithers from a bush and onto the path by my feet, unbothered by the sudden violence. Shaken from the explosion moments ago, I jump. To my ears, it is only a hiss, but I think Fallow laughs at me. He pauses to eat one of the larger chunks of the bird, swallowing it whole and growing a small lump in the snake’s ropey body. “Ssssome thingssss travel. Ssssome thingssss don’t.”
Fallow slinks ahead while I take in the new jigsaw piece of The Thicket. Aside from him, I see no living thing. Not even a single fly buzzes in this place.
All of the trees are bare here, beyond what I saw from outside the fog, like autumn comes faster to this part of The Thicket than the others. The other spots I have wandered through have been bright with yellow and red leaves. They were on both the trees above and littered the ground beneath my feet. Here, the bare trees are not of a variety I recognize. They have white bark, and the white is carved with black lines in the shape of eyes, creating an eerie audience to my march. Their trunks are bare of branches, save for at the very top where a canopy of black and grey twigs form above us. The leaves on the ground are brown and damp. The mist makes everything smell like rot and something tells me the smell never lifts.
It is still and the land lies dormant, weighing down my steps and making me feel tired in a way I haven’t all day. It isn’t natural, how much I want to curl up on my side and rest despite the winter breeze and eerie silence surrounding us.
As a snake, Fallow moves faster than both the rabbit and the jay. He keeps pausing on the other side of bushes and logs for me to catch up as I must climb over what he can find shortcuts around with ease.
I force myself to remain as quiet as the woods around us, though I wish to ask how much farther we must walk before we come to this witch. He wouldn’t likely have a helpful answer to give me, if he deigned to give one at all. I feel like a small child with how I have pestered Fallow about every minute detail of this place. The standard answer is that we will come to it when the time is right. I can only assume that he and I are both moving toward it. I hope I haven’t made a terrible mistake in allowing Fallow to lead me here.
As I drudge behind the snake, growing sleepy like I’m bespelled, a memory flares to life in my mind. A little girl with dark brown hair like mine, brown eyes that are nothing like my grey ones, and freckles that I can picture clearly in my mind’s eye. I cannot recall why it brings me grief to remember, but I can hear her asking, ‘How far to town?’ incessantly in my ears. It rings like a bell, and I hold the voice close to my heart. It is one I dare not forget, though if I stay trapped in The Thicket much longer, I certainly will.
Like remembering the girl’s voice digs her up from the depths, a familiar one clears its throat behind me. “Mama?”
Whipping around, every memory of Anne floods back into me at once. My little girl blinks at me with wide, beautiful eyes and a smile spreads across her face. The hem of her dress is tattered and she is streaked with dirt like she has been wandering The Thicket looking for me all this time. She appears healthy, though, and happy to see me. “Anne!”
Dropping to my knees, I hold her close and brush her wavy hair, loose and full of twigs and grass, away from her face. “Oh, Anne, you are safe. I am here, baby. I have been working all this time to find my way back to you.”
Pulling away to memorize every detail of her, everything else falls away. My daughter is here. Every inch of her is perfection. The Thicket can keep me all it likes so long as it keeps me with her in my arms.
I clutch her close to myself again, but she wriggles free of my embrace and rushes away, breaking my heart as children so often do. Her joy is momentary. She is easily distracted from it.
That is what I tell myself.
“I want to show you what I have found, Mama. I think it will help us. Come.” She waves over her shoulder for me to follow and, in a blur of thoughts I cannot catch, I stumble off the path Fallow has been leading me down and into the woods after Anne.
Anne vanishes into the mist and reappears somewhere new just as my heart begins to pound with terror that she was gone again. Forcing my leaden feet to move faster through the brambles and stones of The Thicket, I charge ahead. “Anne, wait!”
My girl giggles as she darts behind a tree. “Find me, Mama.”
Shaking my head at her cheek and how, at this age, she can play with such ease no matter the circumstances, I make a mad dash for the tree she has hidden behind so I can get her by the wrist and allow her to lead me where she means to go without all this running. I will never let her out of my sight again.
My body comes to a halt so fast I fall onto my hands and knees at the sudden stop. I feel like a bird who has flown into a window.
From my own lips, Fallow commands me, “Odell, stop.”
Against my will, I stand, turn, and march back in the direction that I came from. Away from Anne .
I will my limbs to thrash and fight against whatever is controlling me now, but I am only present in my mind. My body is beyond my reach. To have it ripped from me so easily is the single worst thing that has happened to me in The Thicket, maybe ever. I’m trapped, and he could keep me like this to do whatever he wishes for as long as he would like. He could walk me right into a lake and drown me if he wished.
“That is not your daughter.” The surface of my terror is hardly scratched by his voice. Fallow is using me as his puppet the same way he uses a fireplace or a rat snake. It’s as though I am small and bound inside my skull, only able to see the world through the small window he allows. Panic grips me, both for being controlled by Fallow and for how he is marching me away from Anne.
Fighting with everything I have, I attempt to claw my way back into control of my body to little avail. I manage to lift my own hand and blink before Fallow rips me away from the helm of my ship and throws me back into the dark.
“Stop.” He instructs me with my own voice. “That wasn’t Anne. Do you remember where you left her?”
“It was! I held her. She was there!” My own voice comes very small and faraway. I do not even know if Fallow will be able to hear it. It does not come from my physical lips, of that I am certain. It rings all around my mind.
“There are monsters in these woods, Odell. They can make you see and feel anything they wish. That was not Anne. You were chasing a creature of The Thicket who was wearing a very convincing costume. Nothing more.”
“How did the monster know what Anne looks like? If she is not here, she is?— ”
In the walnut tree with an apparition of me, living out the same scene over and over again. Anything from The Thicket who can move between here and there like Fallow would be able to see her and mimic her. That vision of Anne ran away and that is not like her at all. If it had been Anne, if she had been lost and then found, she never would have left my side. She is my good girl, and she would have been very frightened.
A roar of pain rips free from my chest as I send Fallow back into my head and return to my body. Dropping to my knees, I keen toward the canopy of bare trees. My grief feels too great to contain. She was in my grasp! I felt her warm skin and heard her voice. But it was not true. I have been tricked in the cruelest of ways.
Another scream of frustration soars from my lips and, like a child overwhelmed by the unfairness of the world, I slam my fists against the earth. Clutching my head in my hands, I howl with pain like a fox caught in a mean trap.
Fallow leaves my head and does not reappear anywhere within my sight, allowing me privacy while I face what feels like the end of the world. I cry until I forget what I am crying over. I no longer remember what led me to weeping on the ground, but I cannot quell the flood of tears and I think they must come with good reason.
I have a mother’s soul, or so I have been told. That I cannot recall the child I mourn only heightens my misery.
And the person I want above all others, the one man I know could grant me some comfort right now, he is out of my reach, too. If he were anywhere within earshot of me, he would come.
But Henry is as lost as I am .
Throwing my fists against the ground like I might remind the earth itself of the torture it has wrought upon me, I bellow, “I hate this place!” My voice shatters, sending my scream in all directions.
A woman’s laugh resounds around me in response. “We have that in common, Odell Raleigh.”