Chapter Two #2
“By the way,” called Mrs. Jupiter as they started along the overgrown path toward the edge of the Wood, “it’s a bit late in the season for imitation wintergreen, but if you happen to come across any, would you mind bringing it back?”
“Not a problem, Mrs. J!” called Meredith.
Without so much as a backward glance, he stepped into the darkness of the Midnight Wood, and David, against his better judgment, followed.
—
Although the sky had been bright and clear on the footpath only yards away, inside the Midnight Wood it was dark as night.
That was because it was night.
It was always night in the Midnight Wood.
Time moved differently there; hours could go by inside the Wood while mere moments had passed outside its boundaries, and vice versa.
It was darker even than in the true nighttime, as the moon had not yet risen, though a sprinkling of stars against the black velvet sky illuminated the scene below.
Though it was nearly as bad as David remembered from the very few—and brief—occasions upon which he’d entered the Wood in the past, he had to admit there was a strange kind of beauty to his surroundings.
Hemlocks and balsam firs and white pines towered overhead; the still-bare branches of birches and tulip poplars and black walnuts stretched toward the night sky.
Massive outcroppings of lichen-encrusted rock punctuated the rolling hills.
The place was permeated by the dank, herbaceous scent of loam and poison plants. Eerie birdcalls echoed through the darkness, answered by the shrill and dreadful chirpings of night creatures lower to the ground.
Despite the darkness, Meredith seemed to find his way by effortless instinct, taking circuitous routes to avoid treading on flowering plants. David kept close behind him.
“So,” he couldn’t help asking, “you and Mrs. Jupiter, then?”
“Oh, yeah, last night she took me out into the back garden and—well, I tell you, afterwards I didn’t know which way was up.” Then Meredith took on a furtive look. “Only don’t tell anybody about that. It’s a secret.”
“You’ve just told me,” David pointed out.
“Yeah, but you and me, we tell each other all our secrets.”
“Do we,” said David.
“Nearly,” said Meredith, and fell back to walk alongside David, linking one arm through his.
“You’re clinging again.”
“I’m cold.”
“It’s not my fault you didn’t dress properly.”
“I dress more properly than anyone,” proclaimed Meredith, but released David as the path narrowed, forcing them back into single file as it wound its way through a dense thicket of brambles.
A screech sounded in the nearby treetops, and a shadow swept past unseen with a swish of bat-like wings.
David shuddered. “I can’t imagine how you go walking about in here on your own, or why you’d want to.”
“It’s a good place to meet people,” said Meredith with a shrug. “A while back, for instance, I stumbled upon a group of sycamore dryads up on the hilltop there. And dryads, you know, they’re quite skittish at first, not that one can blame them, but in the end, we had quite a nice time together.”
David had the horrible suspicion this was a euphemism. “You don’t mean to say—?”
“Well, you see,” said Meredith, ducking under a low branch, “they were having a bit of a get-together, and once we got to talking, they invited me to join them, and one thing led to another—”
“You mean to tell me,” said David, having to step well out of his own path to bypass the same branch, “you come skulking around here nights on the off chance you could have your way with a wood nymph?”
#18: He has been consorting with the sycamore dryads in the Midnight Wood.
“Oh, hardly that! Besides, if anything, it was the whole lot of them who had their way with me. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”
“I do not wish to know of your sordid entanglements with the sycamore dryads.”
“All right,” agreed Meredith. “All right. Forget the dryads. There are plenty of other nice people here. Like the Moon Calf and the Night Horse, they have a lovely little cottage together just the other side of that ridge.”
“Do they.”
#19: One can never tell when he’s being serious and when he’s completely making things up.
“They do, they invited me to tea only last week.”
“The Moon Calf,” repeated David skeptically. “Right. And what does he do, exactly?”
“The Moon Calf prefers to be called it, actually. The kids are reclaiming that one these days, you know.” For a moment, a faraway look came over Meredith as he ran his fingers over the needles of a nearby pine bough.
“Although I don’t know that I’d care for it so much myself.
But,” he rushed on brightly, “the two of them are in charge of the moon, of course! The Moon Calf puts it up and then the Night Horse takes it back down again. And the other day—or night, I suppose—” Meredith continued, “I met a Chinese panda down by the waterfall.”
“There are no Chinese pandas in these woods,” objected David.
Meredith gave him a withering look. “He was on a tourist visa. Honestly, David.”
David couldn’t quite muster a response to that.
“We had a lovely chat,” Meredith continued, “and I took him down to the brook to meet the Most Weasel, and then we all—”
“What in heaven’s name is a Most Weasel?”
“Why, it’s the opposite of a least weasel, of course.”
That was simply too much for David to accept. “Oh, come on. There’s no such thing!”
Meredith turned to face David, hands on hips. “Well, you just hadn’t better go telling him that. I can’t think how he’d take it. I mean, really,” he said in indignation, “how would you like it if somebody came around insisting you weren’t real?”
They’d reached a stretch of path surrounded on either side by plants with glossy green leaves and ostentatious white blossoms that shimmered in the starlight, and David took the opportunity to change the subject.
“Is this one of the things Mrs. Jupiter wanted?” he asked. “Slattern’s comb, wasn’t it?”
“Nah, this is maiden’s drawers, can’t you tell the difference? But there’s some bloodroot just over there.”
David joined him in uprooting a few of the plants.
Bianca ventured after them, but halted after a few steps at finding the leaves still wet with the morning dew.
She gave one paw a dainty shake to rid it of the offending moisture, then returned to the path to regard them both with a distinctly judgmental air.
“There, I think we’ve got enough, don’t you?” said Meredith. David followed him back to the path in silence, trying to collect his thoughts. Surely there’d been something he’d meant to tell him, something important, but now his mind was awhirl with weasels and dryads and—
David stopped in his tracks, disoriented. “Weren’t those firs in the opposite direction before?” In fact, he was certain the entire grove had rearranged itself in the few moments their attention had been elsewhere.
This didn’t appear to concern Meredith in the least; rather he lit up with excitement and seized David by the hand to pull him along. “Oh, David, come see! This is one of my favorite spots!”
David resigned himself to being dragged through the grove of firs and into the glade beyond.
Running ahead, Bianca tried without success to clamber onto a large flat stone that rose to waist height at the far edge of the clearing, surrounded by flowers still in bud and shaded by a mossy rock overhang.
Some distance away stood a massive black alder ringed by high hawthorn bushes.
Meredith lifted the Chihuahua and set her down on the rock. “There you are, precious, how’s that?”
Crossing the clearing to join them, David gave a little shiver as he passed through the shadow of the alder. No more than a momentary chill in the dark and damp, yet he found himself struck with a sense of foreboding as he gazed up into its branches.
Of course Meredith would like it here.
“I fell into some thornbushes just like that once, you know,” he remarked, breaking into David’s thoughts.
“What, here in the Wood?”
“No, no, this was ages ago. I was trying to hide in a tree,” he added with a rueful laugh.
“I—” David tried to process this, and couldn’t. Meredith was not, by any stretch of the imagination, what one would describe as athletic. “I’m sorry, but you don’t strike me as the tree-climbing sort.”
“Yeah, well, didn’t make it very far, did I?
” Meredith wandered over to the hawthorns and began to toy absently with the jagged edge of one leaf.
“I’d just got past the first branch, and then the next thing I know, I’ve fallen right back down again.
” With a sharp hiss of pain, he jerked his hand away, a tiny trickle of blood staining one fingertip.
David winced in sympathy at the sight of the long, cruel spikes adorning the hawthorn branches, even if the result had been rather a foregone conclusion the moment Meredith was within arm’s reach of them.
Before he could point it out, however, Meredith asked, “You were about to tell me something earlier, weren’t you?”
“Was I?” At this point, David had become so sidetracked that he might as well have forgotten his own name.
Bianca leapt from the rock, and David followed as she and Meredith both started off for the opposite side of the clearing.
“Something to do with Brian? Jealous rage?” prompted Meredith, then leaned down to pluck a plant with a spiky periwinkle blossom. “This is slattern’s comb, by the way.”
David groaned as it all came back to him. “Oh, yes. Jealous rage indeed, with a side of identity crisis. I’m fairly sure you’ve just cost us another roommate.”
Meredith at least had the decency to look dismayed. “Brian’s gone?”
“He hasn’t yet, but I think he’s about to.”
“Oh dear.” Meredith straightened up with a handful of flowers, frowning. “Was it about the fan blades?”
“The—what?”
“The fan blades. I only thought—”
“It was not about the fan blades.” David took a deep breath. He did not want to know about the fan blades.
“Shall I speak with him?”
“Best not to just now,” said David. “But did you really have to go and sleep with him, too? How many roommates does this make now?” As soon as the words left his mouth, he realized that he very much did not want to know the answer to this question.
“Technically,” said Meredith, blinking wide blue eyes at him, “we didn’t sleep together, exactly. I only—”
“That’s quite far enough,” interrupted David, though Meredith’s aborted hand gesture had already insinuated far more than he needed to know.
“I didn’t mean to, only he kissed me. People are always going and kissing me,” he said, and managed to make it sound like a complaint. “They should know better, really.”
“Schwarzy,” said David thoughtfully, “I really think I might kill you.”
Meredith only giggled—again—and then, contrite, tried to stop himself, pressing his hands over his mouth, to no avail.
“Do you know,” David went on, “I don’t think he even knows your first name?” That, too, might have been cruel, but he was in no mood for gentleness.
That did the trick, though Meredith looked more shocked than anything. “Oh! But of course he does. He must.”
“Must he? I haven’t heard him say it once.”
“But how?”
“You’re the one asking? I should think it would’ve come up when the two of you—” David grimaced and let the sentence end there. “It’s not as if you help matters. You don’t introduce yourself properly.”
#20: He never introduces himself properly.
David hadn’t learned Meredith’s first name for over a month when he’d moved in. True, perhaps a portion of the blame could be laid at the feet of Mr. Bednarek, who was in the habit of addressing him only by nickname, even when making introductions to new tenants.
And this, he’d say with a sweeping gesture, is our Schwarzy, in much the same way one might say, And this is the kitchen garden.
And Meredith never elaborated, just invariably grinned his foolish grin and gave a wave and said, Yeah. Hi.
“Anyway,” said David, “it doesn’t matter now. The damage is done.”
“But I really did tell him,” said Meredith in distress. “I told him the same way I always do: I’m not in love with you, I’ve got no plans to—”
“Yes, yes, I know,” David interrupted. He’d heard it more times than he could count and was in no mood to do so again now.
Meredith reached out and caught him by the elbow. “I’m sorry, David.”
“I know. I know you are.”
He always was, not that it made things any better.
To David’s surprise, as they came around the next bend in the path, daylight shone through the edge of the Wood quite close by. In just a few moments more, they emerged in Mrs. Jupiter’s back garden next to the henhouse.
Meredith strode up to the open kitchen window and rapped lightly on the sill. “Mrs. J?”
He collected the bloodroot from David, and handed it over along with his own supply of slattern’s comb when Mrs. Jupiter appeared in the window.
“I do appreciate this,” said Mrs. Jupiter, returning Meredith’s overfull shopping basket to him. “The two of you must drop by for tea soon, but for the moment, I had best see to finishing this potion.”
With that, she vanished from view, and David and Meredith started up the hill toward Midnight Cottage.
“I really am sorry about Brian,” said Meredith. “I didn’t mean to make any trouble for you.”
David’s first instinct was to point out that it was much too late for that, but he relented. “Well, never mind. I’ll go and see if I can’t calm him down. You make yourself scarce for a bit.” He doubted Brian would change his mind, but they might at least part ways amicably.
“Here, I’ll take this down to Bednarek.” Meredith took the bag of coffee and handed his basket over to David.
He started away, turned back after a single step, and threw an arm over David’s shoulders as he leaned in to grab a poppy seed roll from the basket, ignoring his aggrieved sigh. “Say goodbye, Bianca.”
Bianca, of course, did no such thing.
“See you in a bit!” Meredith raised his roll in a mock toast and sauntered off with his little dog in tow, leaving David feeling once again as though he’d just weathered a bewildering and infuriatingly good-natured hurricane.