Through the Wood of Hell

1. Chapter 1

Daylight broke through the veil as I lay entombed in blankets, waiting for the faraway voices and hissing to die down.

I gave it a while before I went outside. Just to be sure.

Fog wafting off the wood perfumed the air with the wet stench of rot, threading through the bones of my skeletal little village. If the sun shone over Monde’s End, I couldn’t see it. The fogs blotted it out.

Up and down the lane, doors were hesitantly cracking open, fingers edging around doorframes. Slivers of careworn faces, followed by shoulders and torsos wearing varying degrees of tattered cloth as the townspeople ventured out to meet the morning. Each cottage was shabbier than the last.

It’s cheap, living so close to Hell.

Tree branches waved lazily, though the morning was windless.

I squinted through the fog at the boundary, saw nothing and nobody lurking at the outskirts of the wood.

The earthen roads were calm, dull. No bodies.

Across the street, the baker threw open his doors, called a greeting, which I returned before I slipped back inside.

I’m allowed a few undisturbed hours each morning.

Since I’m a hindrance when I try to help with the chickens, I roused the little ones instead, pulling the sealing wax from their ears, helping them dress.

Livvy was a lump beneath her quilts when I made it back to the room we shared.

I took care to be quiet as I slipped into a dress, washed my face.

It spread through my mind like the omnipresent fogs off the wood as I was patting my skin dry.

You ought to comb your hair, It said when I peered into the looking glass, tearing quick fingers through the tangles.

Why bother? Nobody cared what you looked like in the kitchens, so long as you were reasonably clean.

Because it looks a fright.

And yours, I’m sure, is flawless.

It scoffed, claws clacking across the floor of my mind, but offered no further comment as I left the washroom to wake Livvy.

“I’m so tired,” she said, when she could finally form words, tipping her head back as I oiled her tight curls. She hated the fogs for many reasons, but chief among them was they made her hair unmanageable, a static frizz of a halo come early afternoon.

They started a few years ago, the fogs. Nobody has any true explanation as to why.

The creatures in the wood grow restless, some say.

Hell’s tendrils are reaching out to snatch us.

Here at the end of the world, everyone is superstitious.

Shadows cast by the trees were demonic fingers, clawing at the village.

The sighting of any raven foretold certain doom.

Yowling during the harvest moon was from hellfire-breathing big cats that stalked the wood.

Any discourse about the creatures always drew a snort of derision from It.

“At least you don’t look like you’ve broken your nose.

” With clove-colored skin, Livvy’s dark undereye circles were difficult to discern.

Mine could be spotted at a hundred yards, with my skin the color of watered milk.

“Maybe we can buy extra wax the next time we go to Darensdale.” I worked a comb gently through her hair, ends to root, and tied it in a knot at the base of her skull.

“You’ll sleep better with your ears sealed. ”

“What we need is coffee,” she said around a yawn. “I hear it keeps you going for hours.”

But it went without saying coffee was a luxury we’d never be able to afford.

The fogs only thickened as the morning bore on.

They swirled and eddied around Livvy and me as we trudged through town.

The worst of them would burn off as the temperature rose, but for now we were half blind, staggering toward Lord Fletcher’s.

We kept our arms linked so we didn’t lose track of one another.

Villagers had begun venturing outside by now, their voices floating through the mists, disembodied. “No ruckus,” Livvy said, squinting around. “At least there’s that.”

I would have answered, but a body rammed into us. I knew it would happen a few seconds before it did, could hear the shuffle of boots approaching. It’s a common enough early morning occurrence. Visibility is too low.

A pair of hands found my shoulders, steadying me, and William’s face emerged through the fog. “Sorry Des.” He had a tumble of dark curls, a charmingly chipped front tooth. He also had a wife now.

Not a very attractive one, It offered bluntly.

What did that matter? Was it somehow better to be attractive than loved?

I forced my lips to smooth into a smile, dropped my gaze to the dirt. “Everyone make it through the night?”

“Looks that way,” he said, crossing himself.

That always made It snort. I ignored it as Livvy and I bade William goodbye, and she edged me a sideways look as we approached the entrance to Lord Fletcher’s. The moldering manor rose up through the fog, arrow-shaped leaves of ivy running unchecked over every gray inch of it.

Ivy needs little sun. It’s one of the only plants that flourishes here.

“You still miss him, don’t you?” Livvy asked over the groan of the gates opening. “William?”

I shrugged a shoulder, huddled deeper into my cloak. “Can’t miss what you never had.”

“Maybe you could have, had you tried.”

Trying would never have been an option. Often I feel as though I’m already spoken for.

At the very least I am never, ever alone.

William had tried, once, to kiss me. I almost, almost leaned in to meet him halfway, but then I felt that familiar rustling in the dark room of my mind and I’d lurched back with an apologetic stammer and dashed off.

Ages had passed before William was capable of looking at me without a flush of humiliation.

It’s not you, I’d wanted to tell him. I wanted that kiss, but how could I, when—

It would be nice, It said, if you’d stop blaming me for the least little thing.

But I wasn’t blaming It, not entirely. I had accepted my lot back when I was fourteen, and I’d had nearly six years to get used to it.

Mold festered along the inside walls of the manor, warping the usual white of the stones.

Turning it gray. When my mother and I turned up on Lord Fletcher’s doorstep eight years ago, broke and begging, it hadn’t been palatial, and it’s only gotten worse.

Half of it is gutted, nothing more than empty rooms, naked blanched stones with inky veins.

The rest houses the servants and Lord Fletcher himself.

He doesn’t have family anymore, not since something convinced his daughter to open the back door late one night and head off toward the wood.

The hallways were dim, cold with damp, the clammy walls glimmering in the candlelight.

Livvy and I sidestepped buckets of water set out to catch rain.

Our practiced hops around the obstacles were almost like a children’s game.

We dodged networks of lacy cobwebs, flattening ourselves against the walls when someone unexpectedly headed our way.

A puddle of merry orange-yellow light trembled across the flagged floors, growing bigger and brighter the nearer we got to the kitchens. The room was alive with voices and the clatter of pots when Livvy and I made it inside.

“No disturbances in the night?” Mary was asking Lord Fletcher over the dough she kneaded, a heat haze shimmering around her sweaty face.

His profile looked grim, but that was nothing new. “None reported,” he said over the rim of his teacup. And when Mary flicked us a disinterested glance, he tossed a look over his shoulder and added, “Oh, hello girls.”

We murmured our greetings and took up our usual posts, Livvy at the sink and me beside Mary, who wordlessly passed me a lump of dough.

“The fogs worsen every day.” Mary’s voice was careful, void of emotion. “Hard to believe it won’t affect the harvest.”

Lord Fletcher heaved a weary sigh. I’d never known a time when he wasn’t exhausted.

The lord of our village was perhaps forty but looked ten years older, his hair a gleam of gray at his temples, thinning into wispy white.

His flesh drooped like sallow puddled wax.

It was somehow comforting that even the richest of us weren’t immune.

He placed his teacup in the sink, made a good attempt at a smile. “The farmers aren’t optimistic, but the stores should hold for a while.”

Mary’s gaze dropped down to her work. “I’ll send up breakfast shortly.”

“See that the leftovers find their way to the children.” Lord Fletcher caught my eye on his way out of the kitchen. “You’ll take care of that?”

“Of course,” I called back, but he was already gone.

The village is a perpetual wash of gray.

Clammy gray stone, gray dirt streets, gray faces, clothes which start life as different colors but wind up gray soon enough.

I can’t remember the last time I saw anyone who looked well-rested.

At night, when things start calling from the wood and the fogs are thickest, you can’t even see out a window.

Nobody is allowed out after dark. We hang crucifixes at every window and every entry point of our cottages, just in case.

Small children are made to seal their ears with wax.

They’re more suggestible, vulnerable. Adults stuff scraps of linen in their ears if they run out of wax and try to ignore whatever filters through, white-knuckling it through dawn.

You’re wondering why we don’t all just move.

Nothing bars us in this village, but who among us has the coin to leave?

Lord Fletcher can hardly afford to patch the cracks in his crumbling manor.

He and Father Hull hadn’t collected tithes in years.

The wood borders Hell and is thought to be dense, though nobody who’s set foot in it has ever made it back out.

It stretches from the back of Monde’s End to an abandoned holdfast a near two-week journey away, hemming in the borders of humanity.

In daylight it’s as any other wood would be. Only by night does it come alive.