Chapter 30
My rubber boots feel clunky as we move through the woods.
The rain has stopped but the ground is still damp.
At one point, I trip on a tree root and stagger forward, catching myself on a sapling, just before falling.
Behind me, I can hear Topher making his way over roots and stone, emitting occasional grumbles.
“Almost there,” I huff, trying to sound encouraging.
“Okay,” he calls. “Remember I only have forty-five minutes before I have to leave.”
“I know!” I call back. “Really, we are almost there.” I think.
My eyes flick to my watch, to the little flashing dot we are slowly but surely making our way toward.
But shouldn’t we be there already? I pause, feeling light-headed.
Worried, suddenly, that I’m going to have a vision right here in front of my husband.
I don’t think that would help anything. Topher’s a man of science.
He doesn’t operate in a world of visions and oracles.
He operates in a world of evidence. So that’s what I’m going to give him.
I’m beginning to worry that I’ve made a mistake when I see them. Sad, gray shapes take form in the mist. We’ve made it to the gravestones.
“There they are!” I call, pointing triumphantly.
Topher comes up beside me, sweat beading on his hairline.
He takes in the three headstones standing, one lying on its face, being slowly consumed by the forest. And farther back, in their sad, distant row, the four unmarked graves.
I step toward them, breath bated, and I feel, like I did the first time, the sensation of the forest moving around me.
Not the animals. But the trees themselves. Like they are breathing.
My eyes jump to Topher. Are you feeling this too?
But he’s just standing still, looking at the graves.
I pull a piece of paper and pen from my pocket, and write down the names from the three standing graves.
Lavinia Brown. Amias Smith. Hester Proctor.
Who are you? I crouch down by the grave that lies flat on its face.
“Can you help me?”
Topher kneels down next to me, and together we try to lift the stone.
“Damn,” he curses. “I can’t really get a good grip and it’s basically grown into the earth.”
We try again, and I feel a nail crack against the stone. I let go and fall back onto my bottom.
“I don’t think it’s coming up,” Topher says, helping me stand. “We really need a shovel or something to get leverage.”
I nod, but bite my lip, frustrated.
“So?” I ask, not wanting to look him in the eye. “What do you think?”
Topher is silent and when I finally do raise my eyes to meet his, I know immediately that I’ve failed.
He doesn’t feel what I feel here. And seeing the graves hasn’t convinced him of anything.
I don’t know why I thought it would. Maybe part of me thought he didn’t believe me that they existed.
But if he saw them, felt the woods around them, surely he’d see that there’s a history to Wildwood that no one knows about.
Surely he’d see there’s something otherworldly in these woods.
“It’s creepy. I agree, Elinor. These gravestones are creepy.
” He laughs, not exactly in a patronizing way, but maybe in a humanizing way.
“I don’t particularly like owning a graveyard.
That’s not exactly what I had in mind when we came up here.
But I don’t think this means Wildwood is haunted.
I think it just means that something sad happened here, a long time ago. ”
“So why do I feel things here?”
“In the woods?” Topher looks confused, turns his head back and forth, as though hoping he’d see something concrete. An actual monster creeping toward us, perhaps.
“Yes,” I whisper. “I feel the woods. They are alive.”
“Of course they are alive,” my husband says softly.
“That’s not what I mean.”
Tears leak down my face, so I walk farther back toward the unmarked graves, wiping my cheek angrily.
I almost want something to happen, now, so Topher can see it.
Come and get me, I want to shout. But nothing happens.
The stones sit, dark and unmoving. In front of them, I can see the ground is soft and covered in mushrooms. Thin white ones, flat, brown rubbery ones.
A patch that looks like coral. The rain has created the perfect damp habitat.
“You are an empathetic person, Elinor. You’ve always been. I think these graves are just making you sad. Wistful.”
Wistful. I give a bitter laugh. I’m not wistful. The woods aren’t making me wistful. That word feels far too gentle. No, these woods are angry. They are hungry. There’s a wrong that needs to be righted. I feel this with a certainty I’ve never known before.
I don’t know why I do it, but I reach out a tentative hand and touch the first of the unmarked graves.
I am half expecting lightning to strike, or for grappling arms to reach up through the earth to pull me down.
But instead, I feel that same aching sadness that I felt in my last dream flow through my veins.
The feeling doesn’t make me recoil; instead, it draws my other hand to the stone as well.
I’m feeling the stone as though I were feeling a pregnant woman’s belly.
A strange realization washes over me. I initially thought that whoever lay here did something unthinkable.
But perhaps I had it wrong. Perhaps something unthinkable was done to them.
I don’t look back at Topher, though I can feel him watching as I gather some small rocks and stack them one on top of the other, making a little cairn. As I work, I notice a black bird in my periphery, watching with its head cocked. Almost like it’s assessing me.
I see you, I telepath, not wanting to say the words out loud, in front of my husband who does not see what I see. Does not feel what I feel. Does not know what I know.
As I walk away, I send a message to the stones. You are not forgotten. And I swear I hear them whisper back. Find us.