The Glass Casket (25 page)

Rowan shook her head. Tom wasn’t coming. Jude had been lying. There was no way Tom was sneaking out into the forest in the dead of night. Tom was a good boy. Tom was the boy everybody trusted. Moreover, he was her best friend, and he would never hurt her. She knew that. So why had she doubted him? She wanted to cry, thinking about herself reduced to spying, standing out in the snow trying to catch the person she loved most in the world. She fought back her emotions, but they seemed to take root in her legs, weakening them, and before she knew it, she was shaking. She sat on the cold ground and pressed her knees to her chest to still them. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against a tree.

When she heard the door creak, her eyes flew open and she saw Tom shutting it behind him. He looked around, then
headed off into the woods. She pressed a hand to her heart, and then she pulled herself up, trying to be as quiet as she could, and watched as he disappeared between the trees. On tiptoes she started after him. He wore white gloves, the fool, and as he moved, moonlight illuminated the fabric. She stole through the trees as silently as she could as he trudged ahead, seemingly oblivious to her and the rest of his surroundings. There was a weightiness to the way he walked that didn’t seem like him, and at the same time he wore a generally frantic air, fidgeting with his hands and moving his neck in strange, uncomfortable-looking directions. To Rowan, he looked like an alcoholic forced to abstain, his body slowly rebelling against his mind.

Then there was a noise, a crack, and Tom froze. Rowan, not twenty yards behind him, did the same. And then Tom did something so odd, Rowan could barely believe her eyes. He turned suddenly in her direction and pinned himself against a tree, eyes shut tight to the world. In the moonlight, she could see that his face was pale, his features pulled taut with what looked like terror.

And then she heard it. A low rumble and then a sweeping sound, as if something large was moving through the forest, tearing down everything in its path. And yet the forest around her was still, as if the sound was not attached to anything, as if it were no more corporeal than a sigh. But then the noise intensified, as if it was overlaid with another, otherworldly sound like the rasping breath of a thousand dogs. Fear shot through her, laced with a kind of horrific intoxication. Involuntarily, she spun around and
flattened her back against a tree, just as she had seen Tom do. She tried to bite back her scream as the wall of sound approached, but the fear began to tear at her chest. She shut her eyes as the moment of safety slipped away from her, pushing her farther back against the tree, and then it was all around her, but not just where she was. She could hear it yards away, where she knew Tom stood also like a trapped and helpless child. And she could hear it even farther than that, sweeping against the ground, pushing aside the very air that surrounded her, breathing in chattering shrieks like a legion of demons moving in tandem.

In her mind, she spoke to herself as a mother might to a child, telling herself that everything would be okay—that soon it would pass, and life, the world, would go back to normal. But even as she tried to speak these words within the confines of her mind, the noise, the movement, seemed to drown it out, as if the thing, whatever it was, was capable of pushing through the spaces in her brain, her body, her self, moving through her being as easily as it moved through the trees.

There was a crack and a gust of wind as something whipped through the air, and then the noise, the heaviness to the air, vanished, as if it had charged off somewhere very far away.

Rowan stood there another moment, her back pressed against the tree, her eyes still closed. She knew it was gone, but she couldn’t bring herself to move. She realized that her entire body was shaking, as if trying to release itself
from the bondage of her fear. Her breath coming in shuddering spasms, she turned her head to see if Tom was all right.

He was backing away from the tree slowly, staring into the darkness. He closed his eyes a moment as if in prayer and made the sign of the Goddess. Rowan peered out into the woods, trying to see what Tom saw, but found nothing. And then, as if receiving the signal he awaited, Tom turned and sprang in the opposite direction, darting into the trees faster than Rowan had ever seen him move. Pulling herself up, she lurched after him, then launched into a full sprint. She pushed herself as hard as she could go, but she couldn’t keep up with Tom, and she cursed as he disappeared into the trees.

Her lungs were stretched beyond capacity, and the stabbing pain forced her to choke on the cold winter air. Up ahead, she could just make out the white of Tom’s gloves as he seemed to heave himself over something, a fallen tree probably, and, knowing she was about to lose him, she pushed herself even harder, her legs shaking beneath her, and then her foot caught on a tree root, her ankle twisted, and she cried out as the pain shot through her leg, burning. Shifting her weight, she tried to keep herself from putting too much pressure on her ankle. She threw her body in the opposite direction, and suddenly the ground slid out from under her. She was on the side of an embankment, and losing her balance, she slipped in the snow and tumbled down a steep slope. For a second she had the sensation that she
was falling off a cliff, falling a great distance into an abyss that awaited her below, but soon she hit solid ground, her shoulder taking the brunt of her weight.

Again she cried out in pain, and then she heard something like the howl of a monstrous creature and felt movement behind her. She tried to pull herself up, to turn to reach for her dagger, but something was upon her, the warmth of a body, a familiar scent and a hand over her mouth. The body pressed on top of her, crushing her into the snow, the hand silencing her cries. And then she felt lips against her ear.

“Don’t move,” he whispered, and terror swept through her. “It’s coming back. If it knows we’re here, it will kill us.”

Jude’s voice. Jude’s scent. Her body relaxed, and then she heard it again. Over their strained breathing, she heard it coming, sweeping through the forest on thousands of legs crackling like fire. Jude’s arm was around her, his body, she now realized, covering hers in an attempt to shield her, his face pressed into her hair. She could feel the sweetness of his breath sliding down her neck, violently hot at her ear, only to cool by the time it reached her clavicle, and for the first time in her life, she truly believed she was about to die, only to be discovered lying in the snow, frozen solid, the boy she despised most in the world pressed against her. And for some reason, she thought about her mother. She rarely allowed herself the luxury, but now she thought that she smelled her, could remember her smell, and without meaning to, she began crying silent tears that flowed forth, pooling in the snow.

The sound came closer, moving, scrambling, scraping,
until it seemed to sweep through the whole of her body, poisoning it. And then, as quickly as it came, it receded, moving back into the darkness, back into the trees, and slowly Rowan exhaled. She could feel Jude’s breath, coming in quick bursts now, feel his heartbeat racing.

They lay there another moment, their bodies pressed close together, and Rowan realized she was shaking. Then, lifting their heads, they faced each other, and Jude nodded. She pushed herself up to sit, and when he reached out to touch her face, she didn’t recoil. Gently, he brushed the tears from her cheeks, then let his hand linger there a moment before she pulled away.

“Is it gone?” she whispered, and he looked at her with something like hurt.

“How should I know?” he said, the edge returning to his voice, but they both knew the thing, whatever it was, had departed. She could feel it. The air was different now, thinner, normal.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked.

“The same thing you’re doing. Only you fell in a pit and I saved your life, and we lost him, so good one, Ro. Real solid work,” he said, standing up and dusting off his pants.

“You did not save my life,” she said.

“I didn’t?” he laughed, a defensive note to his voice.

“No. You clambered on top of me, and we hid together in a pit. If it had found us, we would have died together.”

“I was trying to protect you,” he said, but she just shook her head and pulled herself up to stand. He did not, she noted, offer his hand.

“Come on,” she said, climbing up the embankment.

“Where are we going?”

“We’re going to keep looking. We’re going to find where he went.”

“Rowan,” he nearly yelled. “What is wrong with you? We’ve lost him. We need to go home.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“You’re hurt.”

“I’m fine,” she said, and started walking in the direction she’d last seen Tom go.

“I’m not going with you,” Jude announced, and she turned to see that he meant it.

“That’s fine. I didn’t invite you. You followed me.”

“I followed Tom.”

“Then go back home, Jude,” she said, waving him off. “I don’t need you.”

“Don’t do this,” Jude said.

“Why not?” she said, more defiant than curious.

“Because whatever it is you’re searching for, I have a feeling it’s something that’s best left unseen.”

Rowan looked at Jude standing there in the moonlight, his chin lifted to the sky, and then she turned and headed deeper into the woods, determined to find Tom.

As she darted through the trees, the darkness closing in around her, she feared that Jude was right. She had lost Tom, but still she searched. He was out there somewhere, and she would find him.

The pain in her leg grew, and eventually she stopped. She chose a clearing near an ancient yew tree for her resting
spot. She leaned against the tree’s massive, twisting roots and tried to steady her breath.

That was when she heard it. Tom’s voice somewhere far below the earth. Slowly she backed away from the tree, taking in its full breadth for the first time. She knew this tree. When she was a child, it had frightened her. Tom’s grandmother had called it a fairy tree. She said it was a poison thing, thousands of years old. Erupting from the ground in a gnarled tangle of knots and eyes, it shot up, only to spring forth like a terrible insect in a multitude of twisted twigs and branches. The farther Rowan moved away from it, the more distant Tom’s voice seemed to grow, and the tree itself seemed to whisper to her:

Death … death … death …

And then she heard it again, coming closer, moving through the trees. She was in its path. She could feel it—feel her insides begin to change, altered in the very presence of the beast. Darting to her left, she scrambled up a large rock and lay flat, her cheek pressed against its surface. She could hear it now, approaching fast. She willed herself to keep her head down, not to look, but she found that she couldn’t. It was right below her now. She had to know. She had to see. She poked her head up and opened her eyes. What she saw was so vile, the sight of it made her feel foul, dirty.

It walked upright, clicking along on legs made of splintered bone. It had teeth like great needles and eyes like the blackest of pits. It moved in a jagged way, lurching forward unexpectedly, and then suddenly standing stiller than still, so still, in fact, that Rowan could not tell the beast from the
forest around it. Just when Rowan was certain it had disappeared, it would spring forth again, chattering its monstrous teeth, arms spindly as branches searching before it like spiders closing in on their prey.

The monster paused, rising to its full height, and exhaled, clouds of gray vapor issuing from between its slivered teeth. Guiding its rotten head from left to right, it appeared to be looking for something. And then in a flash, it fell down on all fours like a grossly elongated and skeletal wolf, and with a horrifying noise like the grinding of saw against bone, it pushed off and disappeared deep into the woods.

Rowan’s whole body shook. It was gone. It was gone, she kept telling herself, and she had to get home, get indoors. As she climbed down from the rock, her limbs were like rubber, and she nearly lost her grasp more than once.

When her feet touched the ground, her legs were shaking so badly that they nearly gave way. And then she was running, her ankle no longer a nuisance. It was only when she’d made it home and was safe inside that she really understood that whatever that thing out there in those woods was, it was something much more terrifying than she’d ever considered.

Tom tried to tell himself that his life hadn’t gotten wildly out of control. He tried to tell himself that any man would make the same choices he was making. He tried to tell himself that he was somehow special, that he had been chosen
for his exceptional nature, and that he was therefore uniquely capable of dealing with what was clearly an exceptional situation.

Since their first encounter, he had been spending every night with Fiona, and what nights they were. In the morning, there were always parts he couldn’t remember, parts that seemed to run together, flashes of her red lips, her creamy thighs, the slope of her neck, and words that didn’t match, words from another time. And always his memory of the previous night was disjointed, as if it existed outside of time. At home in his bed, lying in the light, begging the Goddess for sleep that refused to come, his mind would run over it all, and he would see Fiona laughing in the woods, spinning around, then suddenly howling and beautiful, and then he would be totally alone somewhere he didn’t recognize, only to be back with her greeting him in the ghostly moonlight as he arrived, and then laughing while she showed him some new trick she had taught herself since their last meeting. And all the while, inside him, something seemed to be changing, twisting him, sucking the anger out of his cells and pulling it ever closer to the surface so that at any moment, he feared he might snap.