Chapter Nine
I stare between the trees, my eyes struggling to make shapes form in the sudden blackness.
It’s like the moment that you wake from a nightmare and suddenly, everything in your room seems strange and alien.
You stare at the unknown monstrous form of your coat on the back of your door and dare it to move, frozen in fear, until you lurch awake and realize it’s all in your head.
I stand, hearing my own rapid breath, waiting to wake up, for the trees to become trees again, but they don’t.
A slithering shape made of darkest night is following us, just on the farthest edge of my vision, and I can hear a snuffling, horribly intimate wet munching.
“It’s eating the cheese,” Bastian whispers.
“Holy crap, it’s real,” I whisper, my voice coming out much more panicky than I expected, but I’m equally as surprised when Bastian, in a similar tone, whispers back.
“It fucking is!”
I realize that, for all his talk, a part of him didn’t expect it to be here, and having a real-life magical creature within ten paces of us is a complete shift in reality.
“What do we do now?” I say, hoping to god he actually has a plan, and cursing myself for not doing some bloody preparation. Ninety-five percent, I chide myself. It’s the five percent that’ll kill you.
“We make a deal.” Bastian holds his cheese out but I also see him getting his penknife out of his pocket.
“How?” The slithering shape is crawling closer.
I can’t see hands or eyes or limbs; I can only sense its malevolence and the overwhelming feeling that I should be running very fast in the other direction.
I feel like I’m confronting a bear or a puma.
I know literally nothing about how to survive this encounter and am instantly furious with myself.
What kind of numpty walks into this situation willingly with someone they barely know? The answer is obvious. It’s me.
“Stand very still,” Bastian whispers. “Unwrap a Babybel and hold it flat in your hand so it can smell it, like you’re feeding a horse.”
“But it’s not a horse!” My whisper is getting hysterical as the liquid sound of a vast, wet mouth chewing gets closer and closer.
“Do not panic,” Bastian hisses. “Do not panic.”
I hold the Babybel flat on my outstretched palm like a small moon.
I’m doing this for Elizabeth, I tell myself.
It’s all for Elizabeth. The chewing sound stops.
I listen to a heavy, rattling breath and imagine a wheezing animal with sharp teeth.
I do not want it to get any closer to my fingers.
I tell myself to not panic and to stand still but I realize I can’t do anything else. My knees have locked. I’m stuck.
“Show yourself to us,” Bastian says in a commanding voice. There is a low hiss in response and the darkness slithers back a few paces. I can’t help exhaling with heavy relief when its shadows retreat from my boots. “We have offerings.”
Bastian breaks off a piece of his cheese and throws it toward the shadow. There is a horrible snap and I imagine a great jaw closing, a thousand pointy teeth wetly masticating. Then suddenly, it speaks. Its voice is uncanny and sets every hair on my body on end.
“You smell of human flesh and cow, surrender both to my claws now.” It sounds like a sick child. A high, young voice that’s somehow phlegmatic, full of gravel and damp. I swallow down the disgust in my throat, the overwhelming feeling that I want to turn away and never hear it speak again.
“It speaks in rhyme?” I manage to squeak out.
“Yes, all boggarts rhyme, give it the cheese.”
I shakily throw the Babybel toward the shadows, a ridiculous parody of throwing treats for a dog. There is a flash of something silver, maybe eyes or maybe teeth, and I stumble back from it, my heart thundering. Then it laughs, a nasty high-pitched giggle so lonely and sharp that it hurts my ears.
“You feed me but I smell your fear, what prompts such cowards to draw this near?”
“We want your name,” Bastian says.
The laughing stops. In a gust of wind, the shadow snaps close, close enough that a pair of ghoulish white eyes stare unblinking at us.
We both gasp and I don’t mean to, but my hand clasps around Bastian’s clenched fist. I have no idea what a boggart should look like but this is probably going to give me nightmares for the rest of my life.
“Then name me, child, face your fear, and you will always have me near,” it whispers. We both take a slow step backward and Bastian unclenches his hand, gripping mine. His palm is sweaty.
“We have come to bargain.” Bastian’s voice is shockingly level. “We want your name.”
“Come to bargain with what, little child?” the boggart croons toward Bastian. Their faces are horribly close; I can see saliva dripping onto Bastian’s shoes. He leans his head back but seems determined not to move his feet. “I see your fear in your eyes and smile.”
Bastian’s breath hitches and I realize that he’s gone mute with terror. Out of nowhere, I’m speaking instead.
“Hey, don’t talk to him like that, you’re not eating him,” I blurt out. It was the wrong thing to do. Now those bulbous white eyes are focused on me.
“What of you, then, little skin changer?” it whispers. “I’ve eaten children but none stranger.”
With trembling fingers, I throw another Babybel a few paces back.
The boggart lurches away, hastily devouring the cheese with those slick, wet sounds.
Bastian has my hand in a vise grip. I’m not even sure he’s breathing properly; he looks scared silent, his eyes wide and still.
Oh, shit, I think. This is a deer-in-headlights moment.
I have no idea what to do so, of course, I keep babbling.
“Do you spend all your time thinking up rhymes?” I improvise, shoving my fear right down inside me, just like I did when the police took me to the station after Elizabeth’s death. “You think you’d be better at it. You know poetry has evolved beyond rhyming couplets.”
“Your fire is nothing compared to my ire, I shall light your skin up like a pyre.”
The boggart twists its head a sickening 180 degrees with a crunch. I taste a surge of bile in the back of my throat. Do not fucking panic, I tell myself angrily.
“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes,” I say shakily. “See? I can do it, too. Tell us your bloody name!”
This senseless antagonism, this infuriating back talk, it’s been there my entire life.
The boggart is my mother, my father, the twenty tutors I had, the shifting specialist I hated.
Sarcasm will not make you better at what any shifter infant can do, Orlando was what he always said to me.
Maybe he’s right but it will help you distract a boggart.
I look at Bastian desperately, because I know this stalling is only going to get us so far, and luckily, it looks like he is back with me, breathing fast and hard but eyes more focused than before.
“We’ve come to bargain,” Bastian repeats, stepping forward and breaking off more cheese. “We want your name.”
“Then offer me something, small witch, say what you come to bargain with.”
“I have a dog,” Bastian says.
“You are not going to give it René to eat!” I exclaim, jerking on Bastian’s hand, which, for some reason, has ended up holding mine again.
“Obviously not!” Bastian snaps at me. “Just shut up, Lando.”
Somehow, him being annoyed at me feels good, a hint of normality in this otherwise utterly bizarre encounter.
“I have a dog and I’ll walk it here at least once a week,” Bastian goes on. “I’ll bring you an offering to protect the wood. Once a week, an intentional offering for you of whatever you want—”
“I want the curdled milk of goats to soothe the rage inside my throat.”
“You want a weekly offering of goat’s cheese?” I can’t help blurting out as I stare at the hunched shadows. Like everything in life, it gets a little less terrifying the longer I look at it. I still don’t want to take my eyes off it, though.
“Lando, don’t—” Bastian hisses.
“Seriously, it’s the most bougie boggart on the planet.”
Bastian sighs and drops my hand. He raises his knife and, in a quick moment, has pulled it across his palm and sprayed blood down on the mulch of wet leaves.
I jump back, a thickening in my throat. Inside my mind, I see the bathroom, those sharp rosy drops of blood, tiny flowers scattered under my feet.
I swallow copper-tasting saliva. I’m not there, I tell myself sternly.
Stay here, you have to stay here or you might not get out alive.
“I swear on my blood I will bring you goat’s cheese once a week and if I cannot bring it, someone else will bring it in my stead,” Bastian says clearly. “For this offering, will you give me your name?”
The shadows still for a moment, as if whatever hidden horror lives inside is considering its words carefully.
We wait. Panic builds inside me, nudging its way to a slow crescendo that makes me want to scream, to run, to cry but I can do none of those things.
I’m planted to the spot, waiting to see if a magical creature will accept an offering of goat’s cheese.
It’s utterly absurd, it’s practically laughable, except that my throat is locked tight with pure, rigid fear.
For a second, I absently wonder if it will kill us and lick our bones clean, like they do in the stories, and then hate my brain for doing that to me.
“The name is not for you, but for your friend, the one who will need it, in the end,” the boggart whispers. A tingling begins behind my knees. Bastian turns to look at me.
“What does that mean?” I ask. I hate that my voice shakes.
The boggart circles us, creeping over wet leaves, the shadows whipping around us.
The air chills with the rapid movement, suddenly cold enough to see my breath.
There’s a smell, too, the sweet decomposing mulch of dead leaves and mud, like the earth underneath a heavy rock.
Run, a part of me screams, but it’s like that dream when your mouth opens to scream but nothing comes out.
All I can do is stand, desperate and shaking, in the middle of a storm of rotting.
“I speak in riddles, it is my curse; but what was done to you was worse.” Its whispers chase me. I turn my head this way and that, trying to catch hold of those pallid, roving eyes.
“You know nothing about me!” I shout. Bastian’s hand grips my elbow. “Give me your name!”
I turn my head and it’s right in front of me: it’s right in front of me, so close that I can see the tree roots that make up its face, the rotted mushrooms that form its skin, the lank trails of dead leaves that make up its hair.
It’s like a little child, if they had disintegrated into the forest floor, half-alive and slowly moldering.
A red mouth speaks, teeth sharp and gray like pebbles.
All my jokes are gone, every comeback, every witty retort has vanished from my mind.
Quietness descends, like the moment when Elizabeth stopped breathing, nothing but unbearable, ringing silence.
“What dwells beneath your anger.” The boggart’s musty words smell like death and cheese. I try not to choke as it leans close, wet, spoiled leaves catching my face and leaving a slick residue. “My name is this: Elander.”
Light explodes from my every pore and I feel that familiar wrenching, agonizing pull in my bones that precedes a shift.
No, no, I can’t shift, I think, horrified.
Not here, not now! I want to push Bastian back; I want to make sure he’s safe, but I can’t move because it’s coming now.
Shifts are unstoppable. I throw my head back, screaming, and give in to the roaring light and pain inside me. Suddenly, I’m not there anymore.
I’m arm in arm with my sisters, our flags caught in the high breeze, our dresses dusty from the dry ground around the clough, listening to a speaker as he cries aloud the need for the right to organize and the right of free people everywhere.
The sun is high in the sky and bright. There are thousands of us, nearly thirty thousand, many suffragettes and ordinary folk, come to hear about the cause as the speaker’s voice travels over the flat space between the hill and the ravine.
Then suddenly, over the hill comes a shout, a brawling bustle, and like ants over jam they spread.
A surly gang of protesters, screaming their insults to the skies and shouldering women out of the way, not caring whom they knock down, trying to get to the center, to the speaker and the woman beside him.
I know if they reach them, they will be done for.
“Run!” I scream at them.
I see them pushing their way through the crowd, hemmed in on all sides, and I sigh with small relief when I see her scrambling over the hill.
Mrs. Pankhurst’s daughter is safe. Then I link arms with my sisters and turn to face the oncoming tide of fists and kicks, standing between these violent men and the daughter of the mother of the movement.
As the sun beats down, I look up to the high clouds and think that perhaps this is a good cause to die for.