Dreamwood (22 page)

“Darn right.”

She pulled her knees up to her chest and leaned against the tree trunk. “What are we going to do?” It was nearly dawn—she could see the shaggy rhododendrons they'd slept near—but she didn't think daylight would help them much. They'd still be lost . . . on Devil's Thumb . . . with almost no food.

To her surprise, Pete grinned. It was light enough to see his freckles, sprinkled across his boyish face. He looked almost
happy.

“Did I say something funny?”

He gave her a sidelong glance that—despite everything that had happened—made her tingle with excitement. “You just asked me what we should do. That's the first time.”

Lucy tugged her hair, which she knew was a wild tangle. “I'm sure I've done it before.”

“I don't think so.” Pete stood up and held out his hand. “But it just so happens I have an idea.”

Y
our vitometer was shaking a lot, wasn't it?” Pete asked her. He readjusted the bandanna around his neck, examined the moss around some kodok roots, and looked discerningly at the sky. Lucy recognized these signs of direction-finding without much optimism.

“Like a pudding,” Lucy said. As the day dawned the mist turned a pink mother-of-pearl. She and Pete were surrounded by its rosy glow. But Lucy was not in the mood to appreciate it. They packed up their things and Pete broke off two painfully small pieces of dried meat from the jerky stub he'd found. Lucy tried to eat hers slowly, but that had been very hard to do. Now she stood beside Pete, determined to be strong.

Pete found a stick he could use to make drawings on the ground. He made a line for the river and some waves for the ocean. His technique could be called
impressionistic
at best, and although Lucy yearned to take the stick herself, she did not. “So we must be close. And we were heading west the whole day yesterday.”

“Southwest.” Even low as she was, Lucy felt it was important to be precise.

“All right. Southwest.” They stood under a kodok near a clump of huckleberry. “And you saw his map.”

“It's not as if it had ‘location of the last dreamwood' helpfully marked on it.”

“No, I realize that.” Pete scratched his chin. “Well. The old-timers say dreamwood grows in clearings—like the tree circles we've found. Now, I was looking at that map, too.”

He hunkered down, cleared away some kodok needles and continued to sketch in the soft earth.

“So if the stars on the map are the devil tree groves . . . This one here, I think that's where Jank . . . um, died. And there were two more. I think here and here.”

Lucy bent down beside him. She realized how lucky she was to have him here; when she thought of how she'd very nearly told him to stay home, she couldn't believe it.

“So should we head for one of those?” she asked, gesturing at the two remaining stars.

Pete's face had the look of fierce concentration she'd seen on him the day they'd first met, when he'd been whittling. “I don't think so, and here's why. The big guy—His-sey-ak—Niwa said he's different from the other trees. Every other dreamwood is chopped down, right? So what else was on the map?”

Lucy closed her eyes and tried to remember. She'd depended so much on her vitometer she hadn't paid that much attention to the map. “There were some squiggles like houses or walls and beyond that . . .” She opened her eyes. Pete was looking at her expectantly.

“Beyond that there was this thing that looked like a big black spider, right?” He finished for her.

Lucy nodded. “I thought it was an ink blotch.” An ink blotch with legs.

“That's what I thought at first. But now I'm not so sure. Whoever made that map drew trees as stars, so why not another tree as a spider? We are kind of like flies in His-sey-ak's web.”

Lucy licked her lips nervously. She remembered Niwa saying,
How do you call things that eat meat?
She cleared her throat. “It was near the tip.”

“Right,” Pete said. He gave her his hand and pulled her up. “So that's where we'll head.”

She held on to his hand a second longer. “Pete,” she began without knowing exactly what she was going to say. “If it weren't for you . . . I don't know what we'd do now.”

She'd surprised him. And now he gave her a bashful smile. “Oh. Well. I'm not doing anything much . . . just keeping us going.”

But his cheeks flushed beneath his freckles, and he whistled happily for a few moments—for a short time apparently forgetting where they were and whose woods they were traveling through.

They set off through the forest, hoping they were going in the right direction. Long rolls of fog hung like hammocks between the trees; condensed mist dripped down from the kodok needles, falling every now and then on their heads with a taunting pitter-pat.

Even as the sun moved higher, the light stayed gray and the day cool. The trees opened up, but the fog only grew thicker. Soon Lucy's moccasins and leggings were wet from dew.

And then, ahead of them loomed a dark blocky obstacle, not a forest thing at all.

Lucy's heart pounded. “It's a wall.” She ran forward.

Large round stones had been fitted together, taller than she was. They were crusted over with lichen, and the cracks between the stones were frilled with plants. The ragged mist shrouded it in mystery.

“We've found the lost settlement.” This was not where they'd hoped to go—again the Thumb's mysterious geography had turned them around. But it was a relief from the forest, and it felt strangely reassuring to encounter something made by humans. Lucy grasped the stones, feeling excitement build inside her. There were good handholds; it would be easy to climb.

“Wait a minute . . . what are you doing?” Pete looked at her suspiciously.

“I'm going to explore, of course.” Lucy was already fitting her boots into toeholds between the stones and heaving herself up. “My father's journal said the key was in the past.” It seemed obvious enough they should investigate.

And then she was over wall, jumping down the other side into a field of tall saw-toothed grass.

After a moment, Pete jumped down beside her.

“Look,” she said in amazement. “People really did live here.” Visible over the rippled grass were the dark slants of roofs.

It was just an ordinary field and yet there was a strange atmosphere of menace to the view with its cluster of distant buildings. She'd thought the lost settlement would be a handful of shacks; she was surprised to see large houses—several of them.

“I don't know about this.” Pete stayed by the wall, like a swimmer reluctant to leave for deeper water.

“What's the matter?” Perhaps if she had not spent so much of her life in abandoned spaces she, too, would have wanted to give the lost settlement a wide berth.

“Well . . .” He looked embarrassed. His freckles faded into his blazing cheeks and he scowled, not wanting to say what bothered him. But automatically, his hand went for his protection stone.

Lucy decided he was very handsome when he was nervous.

“We do have the ghost sweeper,” she said. “That will protect us.” She hoped Pete didn't think it was too ridiculous after its last performance.

“You're really not afraid of ghosts?” he blurted out, his pebble-green eyes staring out at the abandoned town. Lucy had the impression it was something he'd wanted to ask for a while—only was too afraid of what it might reveal about him.

“I used to be.” It seemed funny to think she'd once wanted to keep this secret from Pete. “My father used to take me along with him when he went clearing. In one old house a ghost led me down the basement stairs and slammed the door shut. I was trapped there in the dark.”

She did not tell Pete the rest of the story. How the ghost had come for her in the dark; he'd hanged himself in life, and the most frightening detail of his ghost—the thing that gave her shivers even now—was the way his ghostly legs jerked, as if dancing. In her mind, Lucy called him the Hanged Man, and he occupied a special place in her fears.

“But,” she said brightly, figuring it did no good to dredge up details about the encounter, “my father found me, swept the ghost away, and then he decided that if I was going to come with him I should know as much about clearing ghosts as he did.” She told Pete about how her father had taught her to read the signs of ghost presence, how to disrupt them, how to protect herself if she was ever caught alone again with one, and so on.

“He taught you all that?” Pete was looking at her with a curious smile, as if he were waiting for her to see something right in front of her nose. “You know, it seems to me like he was trying to pass on his secrets to you instead of leaving you behind.”

No he wasn't,
she was about to reply. But then, even though she didn't believe Pete's interpretation, she decided it wasn't worth arguing about.

“Maybe,” she said, gazing at the field. She clutched the straps of her pack; in the last few days it had gotten so light—and maybe she had gotten stronger—that she hardly felt it.

They walked across the field through the wet grass. It was a gray and chilly day, but it seemed
especially
gray and chilly in the lost settlement. Lucy did not think much of Denis Saarthe's abilities to choose a location for his town.

The first house they came on they approached with caution, the way one might a dead animal. It sat there with dark, blank-eyed windows, waiting for them.

“Maybe we should try to go inside,” Lucy said forcing herself closer to it.

Its eaves were thick and the roof steep with weathered wooden shingles like an old European cottage. But the front of the house was painted with a face, like the faces on the Lupine lodges.

“Funny mix of Lupine and settler things,” Pete said, studying it. “Makes you think they lived together, maybe even in the same house.”

Part of the roof was covered with a thick parasitic moss; Lucy had the disturbing impression that the carpet of moss was slowly consuming the house, and might digest it entirely in another hundred years.

Summoning her nerve, Lucy tried the door. But as soon as she put her hand on it, the door slammed shut with a noise like a shot, startling a sinister trio of crows that were watching them from the nearby trees.

The black birds rose into the sky with a noisy clamor, and Lucy's breath caught in her chest. She could have sworn the door had been swinging open just a moment earlier. In fact, it was open a crack right now.

“Maybe it's just stuck.” Pete reached out, and the door snapped closed on his fingers. “Ow!” he cried and scrambled away.

“A poltergeist,” she told Pete, whose eyes were as round as coins. “I should have figured. It's nothing to worry about.”

“Easy for you to say, I just had my fingers pinched.” Pete held the tips of his sore fingers to his mouth.

Lucy pulled him away from the house. “What I mean is, they're not really dangerous. They were never people to begin with, like real ghosts, instead they're . . . bits and scraps of spirit. Nuisances.” She did not add that poltergeists were attracted by the same energies ghosts were. Pete appeared unnerved enough as it was.

Pete looked in alarm at the squat, brooding house. “If that's just a nuisance, what can a real ghost do?”

Lucy knew the answer, of course. “There's electrical pulses all through your body,” she explained. “They help your heart beat, and your brain work. And ghosts have a strange connection to electricity. So a powerful ghost—a dangerous ghost—can disrupt those signals in your body. And when that happens your heart can stop beating or your brain can stop working. People will say someone died of fright, but it's really a ghost messing with the electrical pulses of your heart.”

“Oh,
great.
” Pete looked aghast. “That clears
that
up.”

Usually, Lucy thought information like this was fascinating. But there were times, like now, when she sometimes wondered if it were better not to know so much.

In silent agreement they turned away, and went on, passing more buildings, flimsy and bent like paper left out in the rain. In a short while they found the center of the town. The street was overgrown with weeds and nettles, and on either side collapsing buildings leaned like stalks of rotten vegetables.

Lucy's neck prickled with the sense of being watched. At each building they tried to enter the same thing happened. Shutters came slicing down, narrowly missing their fingers. Doors slammed in their faces. Steps broke like eggshells under their feet. And occasionally Lucy thought she heard footsteps behind them, although each time she whirled around, the street was empty.

“A lot of ghosts here,” Pete remarked with his shoulders up around his ears.

Lucy could feel their presence, but for a place so obviously haunted, something didn't feel right. “Yes,” she said, frowning, “but I think they're just a few poltergeists. I wonder where all the
real
ghosts are.”

“Hopefully far away from here,” Pete said, giving her a look that said he would never be as comfortable with ghosts as she was.

While he went on ahead, Lucy looked in her pack. Her ghost sweeper was still trying to kick its way out of Pete's sock—but with no more urgency than usual. Lucy wrinkled her nose at it. Was it not paying attention? Or was her intuition right, and the ghost town strangely devoid of ghosts?

Pete looked in one window and whistled in appreciation. “Look at this.”

Lucy stood on her tiptoes beside him. Hundreds—maybe thousands—of gold coins were spilled across the floor. She peered through another window and saw furs stacked like bales of hay.

She turned to Pete and saw him looking as puzzled as she was. “Angus said they might have had a bad winter, or gotten sick—but this doesn't look like the kind of place where that would make everyone disappear.”