Chapter 20 Stranger in the Woods
Green stumbled back into reality and fell nose-first into October loam.
He clutched one of Dancer’s tin cups to his belly and it knocked the wind from him as he hit the ground. The cup bent beneath his bulk.
This time, he had chosen to put his cheek on the asphalt as the bus rushed to meet him. He did it with open eyes. The fear of entering the rift still vibrated in his limbs.
Stepping through the hole, Green held firm to two intentions. They lingered on like woodsmoke in his beard.
Close the hole. Let the fawn find home and peace.
Already, his recollection of his time on the outside doorstep faded to static, unable to hold together as a narrative and take root in a real, living brain.
His mind papered over the vanishing memory, tying his present to the moment he carried the outsider from the world. He lay still, feeling the absence of the fawn in his arms like a warm cup of coffee on a cold morning.
He understood that he had made the journey home. That was enough.
Is this home?
The ground was cold, but already he was warmer than a moment before.
He filled his lungs with the scent of the forest floor, pipe tobacco and compost, pine and rain, then he rolled to his back.
There was the sky he’d seen through the Hole in Nothing, a glossy field of too many stars. The night sky Green had known most of his life was a faint twinkle through smoked glass, not this jeweler’s display of vibrant gems.
What has it done to me? Where am I?
He sat up.
Catskill was no longer turning up the contrast on woodland night. Now, it was truly dark.
A sinking realization hit him. He hadn’t worn his pack through the hole. He had no supplies. No food. No fire.
A fragment of poetry fell from the trees and landed in his lap.
Sometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts.
I want to climb some old gray mountain, slowly, taking
the rest of my lifetime to do it…
He rubbed his eyes and combed fingers through his beard, raining leaf litter on his chest. He stuffed Dancer’s now-bent cup into his coat pocket.
Green grappled with an odd, claustrophobic feeling, as if he were a new captain tasked with piloting a body and he found the vessel’s quarters too tight for comfort. He focused on taking slow, deep breaths. The sensation passed.
Automatically, he reached for the acorn. Its absence felt like a missing tooth.
He settled for pulling out his cell.
No service.
He considered turning on the flashlight function, but decided it would be better to let his eyes adjust.
Pocketing his phone, he sensed a warm glow nearby and searched for it.
The mountainside was uniformly dark, but there was a glimmer in his awareness that had no relationship to sight.
Steadying himself, he concentrated on the radiant idea.
He found it within, standing near the place Catskill’s mind had recently occupied.
There was an image of a huge, spreading oak standing tall in a pillar of golden sun.
At the tree’s base, deep within the wood, he could see an acorn ringed in emerald brilliance.
It wasn’t there with him in the dark woods.
It was elsewhere, a beacon on a distant horizon, a recent addition to his internal landscape.
That’s new.
A skitter drew his attention back to the world of tangible things.
A fat squirrel the size of a cat scuffled out of the trees and sat in the nearby dark like a charcoal drawing. A bulge in its cheek distorted the silhouette of its pointed face. Gimlet eyes considered Green.
“Hello,” Green said. “I could use the company.”
The squirrel opened its jaw wide and the bulge rolled into the black O of its mouth, white as a pearl before the dark limbal rings rose up like a sunrise revealing the orb to be an eye. The eye looked very human. It flitted up and down, taking in the prone man.
“Hey, I know you. A cyclops squirrel.”
A mouth opened in the squirrel’s belly and it spoke in a rich rolling baritone.
“Hark ye, groundling, do not bury yourself like a nut here, your hull to be cracked in winter’s jaws, lest the squirrel queen pluck you up and punish your fraud. Look not upon her. See not her whiskers. Perceive not the arching fountain of her tail.”
The taste of ash settled on Green’s tongue.
The taste I remember. The talking is new. Sure. Why not?
He clapped his hands together and chuckled.
The squirrel scurried back a foot.
“I may not have my pack, but I can’t leave you creatures behind. That’s a comfort, I guess.”
Getting to his feet, he stretched stiff limbs, twisted at the waist to crack his back, and smiled down at the squirrel. He didn’t feel like Catskill was translating. He didn’t feel like the squirrel was actually speaking with human language. It didn’t seem to matter.
What has the hole done to me?
“Harm me not,” the squirrel said. “I am in service to the hidden queen of be-leafed halls.”
“Uh-huh. I wouldn’t harm you, friend. I’m happy to meet you.”
The squirrel cocked its head.
“Is there a town nearby? Where can I find more humans?”
The squirrel scratched beneath its belly-mouth and looked skyward with all three of its eyes.
“Hmm? A riddle? The mill is nearest.”
“Not a riddle. Just need directions.”
“I see. As you wish. Walk downslope to the river. Shun the ford. Keep the close bank. Follow it north to the mill. Your pace is unknowable, but perhaps you shall reach it before the dawn.”
“Thank you, my friend.”
“I…that is…you are…quite welcome.”
Green nodded, swallowed the bitter taste, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and walked down the dark slope. The world was dim, but the moon and stars made walking possible. The squirrel called after him.
“You shall not see the squirrel queen, yes? You shall forget that I spoke of her?”
Green waved a hand.
“Already forgotten.”
“As well you should,” the squirrel muttered to itself and raced up a nearby tree to disappear among the latticework of branches.
If not for the past few months, the interaction with the squirrel would have felt like a conclusive departure from reality. Now, it seemed strangely natural. And yet, something was off. Green frowned up at the vivid sky and wondered what his mentor would say.
“Data. Go and find out.”
He had no sense of the geography of the area, but “downslope” was an easy enough direction to follow. The mountain felt like the mountain he had walked with Valentina, but the sky told him his journey home was not over yet.
He made an intentional effort to reach toward Catskill in his thoughts and found a profound stillness.
Not quite nothing, but not the connection he’d had ten minutes earlier.
The landscape didn’t seem as dark as before he reached for the wolf.
There was something there, something that waited near the strange, distant oak he could sense, but not reach.
He could tug on that thread once he had seen to his immediate survival.
He walked through uncertain woods and heard the chiming of little metal gears in his mind.
Mr. Reynard sat at a table in the corner of Green’s thoughts, working on a picture of a clockwork osprey clutching a clockwork fish in its minute-hand talons.
He looked content, just sitting by to keep him company.
In the mental image, Green reclined in a hospital bed, watching his friend work.
“Hey, neighbor. Are you a part of this world?” Green asked.
Mr. Reynard winked, but did not answer.
A cloud shadow fell on the window and Green’s imagination was seated on the cot in the cabin.
Valentina entered with toast, smiling her wicked witch smile. Dancer ducked in behind her.
A comforting, monstrous wolf with a great bare skull like a weathered hunk of driftwood sat beside the cot and an oak seedling in an indigo pot decorated the rag moth’s table.
I am alive and I am moving forward.
He found the river as night began to fade from the eastern sky. Soon after, he found the mill. The look of the place, coupled with the antique brilliance of the departing stars, shed new light on the situation. Green’s heart pounded.
I may be in the right where. But this is not the right when.
Summoning courage, he knocked on the door and met a stone-faced couple who visibly muscled aside their suspicions to offer the strangely dressed newcomer kindness.
They had biscuits.
They had coffee.
They had news of the year.
1894.
He did not vomit when they told him, but it was a close thing.
The Crow King’s words came to him.
Forward in your future, but backward in a twin of this world’s past…
What had Valentina told him about the man who traveled back six minutes? No paradoxes. No changing the future. No meeting yourself. A pocket timeline.
He tried to focus on gratitude. He was back in the world. Perhaps it was too much to expect precision on a return trip from outside reality.
I did pretty well, give or take a hundred years.
Seated at the millers’ table, weathering incredulous looks, Green chewed his food mechanically and tried to keep his emotions from his face.
Against all odds, he had managed to survive.
He had gained a home and lost it. He was more absolutely alone than ever before.
Even without the universe’s rejection of paradox, he knew nobody in the nineteenth century.
Nobody?
When breakfast was had and talk turned to harnessing the horses and driving the exhausted stranger to Hickory, Green was biting back on a flood of questions, but one slipped through his teeth.
“Do you know anyone by the name of Valentina Blackwood?”