The Heart of the Thicket

22. The Keeper Of The Thicket

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

THE KEEPER OF THE THICKET

The man in front of me is both human and not. There is an aura of power that ripples around Him unlike anything I have ever felt before and yet, He lounges, holding His head up with the palm of His hand, a lazy smile on His lips.

Across His brow is a wreath of autumn leaves and the last of the dandelions. Laid over His lap is a staff that does not appear carved from wood but grown . At the top are living boughs of a tulip poplar tree. On the branches, yellow flowers form, bloom, wither, die, and start anew over and over before my eyes. It is not so fast to be dizzying to gaze at, but it is quick enough to happen more than once while I am left to stare. On the bottom of the staff are roots that reach toward the earth. I have no doubt that if The Keeper stood and placed the thing on the soil, it would dig deep, grow tall, and remain there forevermore.

Sitting upright, He adjusts the wreath atop His head with a single, spindly finger. His skin is the same color as an acorn and, with each breath He takes, it shifts from new to feeble, unblemished to sagging with age.

“You have made some interesting choices, Odell.” His voice changes as often as the rest of His form. The way it sounds like a host of people—an army—addressing me makes me flinch. “Mothers always put up such a fight. Do you even remember who you fight for?”

I open my lips to speak and no sound comes out. Every thought in my heart turns to why I am here. Someone needs me. The press of that reality is alive and well in my chest and will never fade. There is one somewhere—not in these woods—who I am meant to find. The face, though, the name, the reason, all are lost to me. In my time with Skelt I have grown as lost as Roil, however long that has been. “There is one…”

He leans closer to me, studying me like I am a very small animal kept within a cage and He means to draw me for use in a textbook. His eyes are a new color each time He blinks. Given how often He blinks, He might know I find it disconcerting to stand before someone who contains so many variations within themselves. Sometimes they are blue and human, others they are dark from end to end like that of a deer or a dog. Every variety of beast is contained within Him.

“Yes.” The multitudes within this being smirk, rolling their fingers in curls of hair that change colors and textures just as their eyes do. “There is one. Go on.”

His animal eyes beg me to try my hand at an answer, delighting in the fact that I do not have one. There is one somewhere and I do not know who they are, where they are, or what will become of them now that I am in the heart of The Thicket.There is a home for me, but I cannot reach it.

If I had time and space, I might shut my eyes and work to imagine a face, a name, anything about the child or children I’ve lost to The Thicket, to this God seatedin front of me. As it stands, I cannot pause to meditate on it and, even if I could, I do not think it would do any good.

A wind rushes through the yellow and red leaves by my feet. The dry foliage turning to dust in the autumn breeze shakes with the voice of Roil, who is lost but is also a mother. She is a mother like me and no matter how many eons pass while we await our children, our hope for their return will never fade.

“Anne.”

The Keeper Of The Thicket stands from His stone throne and bellows, “Silence, witch! Your usefulness to me runs thin!”

The force of His command shakes me from my feet, and I land on my bruised knees just as I have so many times before in this place. It is never less frightening to be brought low, but I have nothing to lose in knowing my child one more time. Staring down The Keeper Of The Thicket, I find my voice. “Anne. She is who I fight for. She needs me. We must get home.”

Tears spring to my eyes as the reality of just how true the words are rushes over me like the muddy water of the river Skelt. It floods into my body with the intent to drown. I cannot recall the girl but Roil has given me a name to clutch close to my heart. I remember now how I worried over what to call the child I would bear. I said it a thousand times a day for years and, already, the name of my daughter is slipping from my grasp. I claw onto it like it is the life boat that will save us both from this place. “I will burn The Thicket to the ground for her. For Anne.”

The lips of The Keeper, wrinkled and thinned by age, rise and grow young and plump. “I know it. That is why I want mothers so badly. Their souls and memories are so powerful.” Stretching free of His lounging seat like He has grown bored of rest and must set to some task, He stands from the granite throne. A wry smile like He knows a great deal of things I do not forms on His mouth. His strange eyes twinkle with mischief the way I imagine an elf or a fairy would in a storybook. “Their hope—your hope—will strengthen the hold of The Thicket on this world tenfold.”

The earth moves beneath my feet, rushing me farther away until He is out of sight. The forest changes seasons, the trees change species. Underbrush from a hundred woods on every continent where a tree ever grew tear at my skirts. While I am moved through the world, I feel someone familiar press into my mind like my skull is a crate and we can both fit inside if we really work at it.

Fallow, though in my mind his voice sounds like Henry as I know him to be, shushes me like his being in there is a secret I am meant to keep.

When the pieces of the puzzle that make up The Thicket stop moving, I find myself beneath a walnut tree, a little girl of no more than four held aloft in its branches. She is perfectly still, not even blinking. Though I cannot pinpoint why, I know that is wrong. There is a script to this play and, for whatever reason, the little girl has forgotten her lines. She is still like a marble statue, her chest not even rising and falling yet the apples of her cheeks are rosy, her eyes bright. She gazes down at me, unblinking and unseeing, but full of mirth.

The Keeper is nowhere in sight, but I get the feeling that He is watching my every move as I approach the little girl, frozen in time.

The branches she is perched on sing her name like the walnut tree has grown to love her. Anne.

Reaching up, I touch her perfect, soft cheek, pink and warm from the exertion it took to climb the tree and throw the walnuts down upon me. The script wraps and weaves into my crowded mind and I know it. Even when I have not known her or where she was, my bones knew. My soul knew. She is as much a part of me as my beating heart is.

I made her from scratch.

I trip.

She asks if I am alright.

She sees the lights, and the lights are me because I am trapped here in The Thicket. After my time with Skelt, I know I always have been and always will be long after I escape—if I escape. It is fate. Time collides.

Whatever magic has stopped Anne’s part in this play, I cannot find any gratitude for it, even though the words wreak havoc in my nightmares.For her to be paused, her book so far from finished yet the ribbon has been pressed between its pages, is too wrong for me to fully comprehend. There is a home I cannot remember. It is like a word that lives right on the tip of my tongue. So close yet impossible to reach.

Though I know she is frozen in time, I attempt to pull her from the tree the way I would if everything were not so wrong in so many ways. The branches that had sung her name seem apologetic when she cannot be budged. I cannot save her with any force of will, there are no choices I can make. I have failed.

“Oh, Anne.” Tears prick at the back of my eyes. A scream born of deep grief builds in my chest and it feels like the end of the world to think of the girl I made, the child I broke my back to provide for and broke my heart to safekeep… to think of her forever in this hell?—

“Don’t. That is what He is waiting for. Don’t break.”

Fallow. Henry. I know he speaks the truth in the back of my mind, but I cannot know why he seeks to help me now, and I may not be strong enough to remain whole.

He betrayed me to Skelt and tricked me, but he might have a new plan. For the briefest moment, he knew me. It would be too much to hope for him to still remember, I know all too well how quick The Thicket is to steal memories of those we love, but I have never had to trust Fallow to listen to him.

Brushing my fingers through Anne’s dark hair, so like mine, I force the hopelessness away from my heart with the thought of Roil’s golden liquid hope. I must find an endless well of it.

I stamp out my tears and prepare for whatever is to come next.

“Good. I have blind trust.”

The words strike a familiar chord in my mind, but in my near-frantic state, I struggle to recall why now. Whether Henry speaks to my ability to still my racing, bereaved heart or in answer to my newfound devotion to whatever he has planned, if anything, I cannot yet know. Roil is near, too. She spoke Anne’s name first.

Placing all my hope in the hands of Henry and Roil and any plan they may yet cook up, I speak a promise aloud to Anne. “I will see you run again. I will hear you laugh again, my beautiful girl.”

My promise is also made to the home Henry built for us that must still exist just beyond my reach. I must believe the barrier in this space will come crashing down and I will walk out of this mess with my daughter and husband in tow, carrying only nightmares that time will wash away as surely as memories are washed away in The Thicket.

Clinging to hope, I make an oath. “I will get you out of here.”

The Keeper laughs and it is a giggle and a guffaw, a sneer and a cackle, all rolled into one. The cruel and twisted voices of countless souls lost in The Thicket laugh. The cacophony splits my ears, and I am forced to move my hands away from my daughter—frozen in time and place—to hold my pounding head. Like Skelt’s voice in the cavern where it dwelled, The Keeper’s laugh bounces and resounds off the walls of my skull .

“Mother’s souls are boundless in their grief and also their hope. Roil must have told you the power of hope. How tenacious! You will get her home .” He whines the word like a maiden in a storybook might speak of some impossible plan, alighting my body with fury.

“Will none of the monsters in this place face me?” Wheeling around, I find myself once again speaking to thin air. “I would look you in the eyes when I make demands of you, Keeper!”

The same man who had been seated on a throne before appears to stand in front of me now. He is only a little larger than a child, His frame petite like a teen just about to grow into themselves. Even now, His skin, eyes, and hair shift with a breeze I cannot feel. “What would you demand of me, Mother Odell?” He cocks His head, smiling like He is pondering a fond memory. “Is it your daughter back in your arms? That will do you little good. If I brought her back to herself now, it would only frighten her. Little Anne…” He reaches up to cup her cheek and I swat His hand away, which only makes Him giggle again. “She is frozen in such a joyous state, Odell. You wouldn’t want her trapped forever in a goodbye, would you? Mothers are not meant to be so cruel as that.”

“It’s bait.” Henry’s voice echoes in my head and he sounds like himself even though he is not the man I knew, not entirely. His attempt clears the frightening way The Keeper’s chorus calls back time and again the same way a voice carries in a stone church.

Henry’s instructions are clear and concise. I should not rise to the bait this thing dangles before me.

“And the moment we leave this lovely, sunny place in the rift, you will cease to remember Anne. Your digger and Skelt have done well by me. Even that finicky witch. You are right on the precipice of lost, Mother Odell.”

Those are harder words not to rise to. Every instinct in my body wants me to argue.

I would say, ‘No. That is not true. I am not lost. I would never lose Anne.’ I have spoken the words so many times it is laughable. If it were not a horror that I am living, I might cackle just as The Keeper does. I would mimic myself the way women copy the voices of those they dislike while gossiping. ‘I am a mother.’

Absurd and unhelpful as those lies I have told myself are, my motherhood is the truest thing about me. It is the foundation on which I have built myself and it cannot crumble. Roil is proof of how sturdy a foundation a mother’s soul is. It does not even need memory to remain. She grieves every day for the child or children she does not remember. My motherhood would remain, but only as a means of torment.

I wish to turn away from The Keeper and see Anne again. I have wanted nothing so much as I want to pluck Anne from the boughs of this damn walnut tree and carry her home. But I have been warned not to turn my back on the creatures that dwell in The Thicket, and I stand before the most dangerous of them by far.

Helpless. This place and The Keeper of it hold me captive.

Rage, the likes of which I have rarely felt, a gigantic emotion that starts at the center of my chest and spreads outward all over again, is almost more than I can take. I stumble under the weight of it. The Keeper smiles with a mouth that changes teeth from one person to the next. I wonder if the souls inside Him feel as stuck and frightened as I do.

As fast as it started, my anger is extinguished. Henry hushes me from inside my head like he holds a finger to his lips. It is bait. Just as he said. I am smarter than any trout.

At seeing me center myself with a deep breath, The Keeper’s goading smile falls and the world spins beneath my feet again, away from Anne, our home, and my memory of both. Before we arrive back at the clearing where The Keeper’s simple stone throne rests, I have already lost the crisp edges of my goal and the rest of the picture flakes away in my hand like paper that has been burned to ash.

Again, anger over a slight I barely remember fills me from bottom to top and, again, Henry’s voice quells my fire. “Trust me,” he whispers in my mind the same way he would if I were fretting over burning the bread at dinner.

Whether he knows it or not, he is my husband, my Henry, the man I chose for his ability to care for me—for us.It is so obvious now that I know it. He has always been able to assuage my fears and his assurances were never bravado. Henry only ever promised what he could deliver. He never once let me down.

And, despite all the times he has warned me to trust no one and nothing here, he is begging me to trust him now. The Thicket and all I have learned here remains at my disposal. It also remains at his. Perhaps we are both wolves, just as I hoped. Maybe we can get out of this together.

“I have blind trust from you.”

I wish I could recall what that statement is meant to mean to me. It sears into my mind with great purpose, but I can’t catch why .

The Keeper finds His seat and rests His elbows on His knees, peering at me with interest. “You have made interesting choices.”

He has said that twice, like He wants me to ask about it. The first time I brushed it off because none of what has brought me here to stand before The Keeper has felt like a choice. I have been staring down paths that all lead to the same place. Deeper. To the Heart of The Thicket. To The Keeper. All the while, I have been pressed between frightening options with terrible odds. Against my better judgment, I ask, “What has made them interesting?”

The Keeper’s eyes sparkle at how I have given in, and I hope that this was not more bait that I have fallen for hook, line, and sinker.

“Keep him talking.” To push my fear to a safe distance, Henry encourages me from within my own head, and pain like the piercing of a pickaxe to stone crackles through His voice.It is kind of him to whisper, though I think he does so out of fearful habit in the presence of The Keeper, and not to stop my brain from pounding behind my eyes.

“I have caught many mothers in my snare. Most grew distracted in time. They were caught by others along their way to the heart. Their diggers wander still, having failed in their task of safekeeping them until they find me. Only you and one other have met with me since I last woke. It cannot only be for the ability of your digger. You will make an interesting witch.”

Encouraging The Keeper Of The Thicket to speak is made more difficult by how my tongue is thick with fear, and how His voice booms so loud my ears pound. “You said mothers are tenacious. ”

“Oh, the mothers carry hope. They cannot help it. You came the closest to actually reaching your goal, though. Sometimes one gets close to escape, for your guide learns a little more with each passing soul, don’t you, Roil?”

The Keeper’s eyes widen and move across the clearing like I have ceased to exist. A woman hisses with venom somewhere out of sight and The Keeper grins like she has impressed Him. This is all a game of chess, a game I know little of beyond its complexity, and I am a pawn on the board.

His eerie gaze returns to me, His eyes milky with cataracts and age. He blinks and they are like that of a hunting housecat. A shiver runs through my body to be in the gaze of a predator. Inside my mind, Henry shushes me once more, the way he would try to calm our mare, Dolly, when spooked.

“You almost had me worried when you found Roil. She is a thorn in my side. Time, great swaths of it even by my standards, have passed since she wandered into The Thicket. She has grown wily. Even I struggle to catch her.” His cat eyes bounce around the forest above my head like He can still see Roil as she makes her escape.

The Keeper is an easy being to keep talking once He starts. That He is gloating over His victory, though, gives me little peace.

“I would not have sent Skelt. Damn diggers. Still, I was pleased by his interference. I had wondered how much longer you would wander.” His answer makes my heart pound, not just for the reality of my hopeless cause but also for how it feels as though a host of beings shout it at me at once. I sway on my feet, and He clicks His tongue against the roof of His mouth at my efforts to remain upright. Each click a little different as His form shifts. “You will make a powerful soul to strengthen The Thicket. The cries of mothers will draw in more diggers who seek to help, who, in turn, bring more mothers to me. The more mothers get lost, the more their desire to return feeds The Thicket. The stronger The Thicket grows, the farther my rule reaches. You will wail in chorus with the others.”

Gathering all my strength and every shred of the hope He claims to be inherent to mothers alone, I lift my hands from my ears and shout, “I am not staying in The Thicket.” The Keeper’s shifting grin collapses into a scowl. His anger frightens me more than anything else I have faced, but a nameless, faceless someone needs me. “I am going home, and I am not going alone.”

His countenance shifts in a few directions as He sorts out whether He is furious or amused. He lands somewhere between. “It is admirable that you will fight on forever. It is no small wonder you have tricked Fallow to your side. Perhaps it was more Roil’s doing than yours, though. Tell me, witch, did you find some hope to spare for this digger?”

“Far more powerful than hope.” Roil’s voice booms through the trees surrounding our clearing.

More powerful than hope… She must mean the red light she stole from my chest in her piece of The Thicket. Blind trust.

And she’s given it to Fallow and popped him into my head.

The Keeper, appearing almost amused, laughs with his hands on his hips and a haughty swagger. “Mother Odell, you have a powerful soul. So self-assured. So hopeful. So trusting. ” Turning away from me and scanning the canopy overhead, he adds, “We will see what your magics have bought, Roil. It might just work.”

When The Keeper returns his attention to me, he is smiling like he almost hopes it does and he flicks a finger toward my head. “Come out from there, digger Fallow. You have earned your reward. You have proven a worthy enough shepherd .” He purrs the term I gave to Fallow, further proof that nothing in The Thicket happens without The Keeper’s knowledge of it. Fallow is flung from my head, the same specter that he has been, save for the brief moments under the river Skelt, but when he lands on his knees on the damp earth beside me, he is Henry. “It’s a funny thing, fate.”

Henry’s brown eyes rise with recognition from the earth to meet mine, for that was always going to be his gift for shepherding me to slaughter.

The realization dawns on him all over again as if it is the first time. He had permission to take my soul because I gave it to him years ago at our runaway wedding. He did not want to dig my grave because I am the love of his life. Horror is painted on every inch of him. From his place on the ground, he groans.

“No.” He drops his face into his palms just as I start to lose track of who he is and why he is crying. Whoever he is, he is no longer of The Thicket. He belongs somewhere else.

I don’t understand. He looks up at me like he knows me, tears in his eyes, some tracking down his cheeks. I do not know where he came from or why he is here.

The man by my feet reaches out to touch me and his hands go right through me, the same way mine went right through Anne when I reached for her in the walnut tree .

“Anne.” I meet Henry’s eyes. “Henry, you must find Anne. You must take care of her.”

The Keeper grins with fangs like a bear’s that change to the pearls of a child’s smile before my eyes. “Be sure to stay on the paths, Fallow.”

Before Henry can correct The Keeper on the matter of his name, he vanishes from sight. Losing him again, losing what we made together, feels like the end of the world.

But it is not for mothers to weep before the job is done.