Chapter Fourteen
This time, it was no darker inside the Wood than outside, though that did little to alleviate David’s sense of foreboding. Starlight illuminated the leaves of the trees, and bell-shaped purple blossoms scattered across the forest floor lit their surroundings with a dim glow.
“You see?” said David after they’d covered a little distance and found nothing amiss. “Everything is quite in order.” As much as anything in the Midnight Wood ever was in order, anyway.
“S’pose so,” Meredith conceded with evident reluctance. Then, brightening up, he went on, “Well, since we’re here, we may as well go and see whether the sweet woodruff is out yet.”
David groaned. “Can’t it wait until morning? It’s the middle of the night.”
“Yeah, and it’ll be the middle of the night then, too, in the Wood,” Meredith pointed out. “Oh, come on, David, we’re already right here.”
For lack of any other option, David resigned himself to trailing after him as they made their way deeper into the Wood. Meredith resumed humming quietly to himself, which soon grew louder and then graduated to full-on singing, the same melancholy tune from a few nights before:
“Ihr goldnes Geschmeide blitzet,
Sie k?mmt ihr goldenes Haar.
Sie k?mmt es—”
“You leave off with that at once,” David admonished. “You’ve no idea what might be in these woods, just waiting to come out and catch itself a stripey little songbird—excuse me, medium-sized.”
“What are you on about? I’m not wearing stripes, eith—” Meredith stopped dead, and David crashed into him.
“What the hell are you—” He, too, broke off as he saw over Meredith’s shoulder precisely what he was looking at.
From the shadow of the towering alder, flanked by hawthorn bushes, there stepped out the figure of a man, or something like one, clad in a hooded cloak of dark crimson. Though his face remained obscured, his hair and beard both flowed long and silver below his hood.
In a rasping whisper, he intoned, “Come here, Meredith.”
Meredith shrank back as the cloaked figure advanced slowly toward them. “David,” he said urgently, tugging at his sleeve.
David was frozen. This was it, the same shadowy figure that had pursued him in the Wood the week before, the one he’d been trying and failing to banish from his memory ever since.
“Come with me,” coaxed the stranger, his voice high and hoarse. “Come, darling child, and see what I can give you.”
“I think I’m all right, actually.” Meredith nudged David, but he could not move, could not tear his gaze away from the darkness beneath the crimson hood—crimson like blood—a darkness broken by the sudden flash of needle-sharp fangs in the moonlight.
“Just think what I can offer,” the figure wheedled. “Flowers and finery the likes of which are beyond your imagination, delicacies to suit the most discerning of appetites, nightly dances in my court, music to soothe you into sleep more peaceful than you’ve ever known!”
“No, thank you,” said Meredith firmly. Though David outweighed him by a fair bit, that didn’t stop Meredith from seizing him by the arm and attempting with surprising strength to drag him from the spot. “David! Move!”
David snapped out of it, turned, and fled with Meredith back in the direction they’d come.
The figure crashed through the brush behind them with a bone-chilling wail, ever closer as they dodged tree roots and jagged rocks and gnarled, grasping branches.
He berated himself with every step. This was not how a sensible, capable man such as himself reacted in the face of danger.
They hadn’t ventured far into the Wood, and already the trees thinned, the end of the forest in sight.
In a new flash of terror, David questioned what exactly constituted the border of the Midnight Wood.
Surely there was some line their pursuer couldn’t cross.
Running water? The cutoff between shadow and daylight, or at least where daylight normally fell?
The last tree at the edge of the Wood? The footpath, at the farthest, and it was now in sight.
Nearly there, just the other side of a few more silvery birches—
“Come back,” howled the pursuing figure in rage.
Meredith stumbled.
Automatically, David threw an arm around his waist and dragged him along with enough force for them both to surge forward between the last few trees.
They practically flew out of the Wood and across the path before both losing their balance and tumbling breathlessly onto the grass in a tangle of limbs beneath the clear moonlit sky.
At Meredith’s muffled sound of protest, David scrambled off him, kneeling on the wet grass and gasping for breath. “What the hell was that?” he demanded. “And how does it know your name?”
Sitting up and brushing himself off, Meredith only shrugged helplessly. “Wish I knew.”
#89: He is not nearly as concerned about this as he ought to be.
“Of course, perhaps it’s nothing to worry about at all,” he went on with a rather forced brightness. “Perhaps he’s a friend of the Mice, and I’ve made an awful ass of myself, and we’ll all have a laugh over it later.”
He looked to David in a plea for confirmation.
When David couldn’t muster any, Meredith went on, words coming rapidly, “Or perhaps that was the Erlking. Did look a bit like him, and I have wondered—now you see, David, this is where you tell me—” Here Meredith dropped into his imitation of David: “Now, Meri, the Erlking isn’t real, and if he were, he’d not be in these woods.
Because you never believe in anything, do you?
And then I say, Course he’s real, the Moon Calf told me so, and I have often thought, I wouldn’t much like to run into him in the dark.
Although I’m not exactly his type, if you know what I mean,” he confided in a low voice.
Then, desperation cracking through, he exclaimed, “Oh, David, please, say something! I can only keep this up on my own for so long, you know.”
David said nothing. He’d only halfway taken in the rush of words and couldn’t tear his eyes away from the distant depths of the Midnight Wood, scrutinizing every shadow for a hint of that ghastly inhuman creature, even though it was the last thing he wanted to set eyes on now or ever again.
Inching closer, Meredith placed a tentative hand on David’s arm. “You all right?”
He was not all right. He was not cut out for this, for living next to the Midnight Wood and encountering such beings, for living with a person who treated such things as run-of-the-mill.
On top of that, he was still furious at himself for his own useless reaction in the Wood.
What was the matter with him, freezing like a frightened child, needing yet again to be rescued by Meredith, of all people?
Meredith shifted to sit next to David and slid an arm around his shoulders. After a brief internal struggle, David leaned to the side to rest his temple against Meredith’s cheek. Just for a moment, until he got his bearings again.
Meredith asked quietly, “Was that what you saw before? When we were in the Wood last week?”
“It was,” David admitted, surprised at the hoarseness of his own voice.
“No wonder you didn’t want to talk about it.”
It had been a mistake to go back into the Midnight Wood, one that David didn’t intend to repeat. At last he forced himself to his feet. “Right, enough of this foolishness. Let’s go home.”
—
Back in his room at Midnight Cottage, David paced. It was late. He ought to go to bed, but he was jittery, his mind racing. Of course his nerves were frayed after coming face-to-face once again with that…thing in the Wood. That would be enough to throw anyone off-balance.
He was not just off-balance but in a state of free fall, desperate for anything to catch hold of.
I want to go home, he thought, and a manic urge to laugh bubbled up inside him, which he quickly suppressed, replacing it with annoyance at himself for entertaining such a nonsensical, childish thought.
He was home, or at least what passed for it, for the time being.
In fact, he was quite irritated by his own foolishness.
He was a grown man, not a child who needed his parents to comfort him for the psychic equivalent of a scraped knee.
Besides which, his father was across an ocean, and his mother—
David cut off that thought as though scything down garden weeds. Dwelling on it would hardly help matters.
He jumped when Meredith appeared in his open doorway, giving the doorframe a perfunctory rap before he stepped inside. “David? Can you help me off with this necklace? The clasp’s a bit broken and I can never work this type anyway.”
“Oh—yes, all right.” David beckoned him inside.
Meredith turned his back, and David took a step nearer.
He reached up and brushed Meredith’s hair aside, shimmering the color of old brass in the lamplight.
That was a mistake. They were standing too close, and David was all too aware of the heat radiating off him, heat and patchouli and the grounding familiarity he desperately needed.
Afterward, David was unable to provide himself with any satisfactory explanation for what he did next.
Perhaps it was the adrenaline once again. Perhaps it was the lateness of the hour, or the lingering effects of the false prophet’s balm.
Perhaps it was Meredith’s quiet shuddery little breath when David’s thumb brushed over the back of his neck.
David angled his head down and kissed him in the same spot, and Meredith simply melted into his arms. The strand of pearls slipped from his fingers and tumbled forgotten to the floor.
When David’s second, open-mouthed kiss turned into a bite, Meredith writhed against him, breathing out, “Oh, fuck, David, please—” His hand came up to cover David’s, currently splayed across his chest, and urged it downward.