A Lament of Moonlight (4 page)

However, try as he might Melvin was not able to find the path. Each time he thought he was headed away from the music he found that he was indeed headed right for it. Maybe there was more than one person playing music? But that was absurd! Why would anybody be in the woods playing music let alone several musicians? He realized it was probably a big mistake to have left the path in the first place, now that his fear of the night was giving his mind a better clarity than it had before.

Melvin entertained the notion that maybe there was a hermit that lived in the woods, that could be out tonight playing the music. He shuddered for with all that he had encountered tonight he hated the idea of what it must be like to live each and every night down here
with nothing but thin walls to save you from the darkness
.

No, it most certainly wasn’t made by a lone stranger in the wood, for this music was not anything that a mere human could produce, or at least wasn’t something any lone stranger he had ever met had been able to produce. Melvin was not into believing in things unseen or other beings than humans, so he wasn’t at all sure what this could be.

“It’s an angel!” Exclaimed Ruby but Melvin didn’t think it was an angel at all, and he had the feeling that Ruby also knew that what they were hearing was not an angel. It was then that Melvin realized the sound he was hearing was not something good at all.

He suddenly realized what a strange place the woods actually were. Before he had been able to look at the woods with love and warmth for the time that he spent there, but with the onset of night the woods was an alien world he couldn’t comprehend. He used to think that only wild animals resided here, and when night came the animal kingdom took over. It was something about the daylight that to
ok with it any sense of normalc
y and instead left behind a world that humans didn’t know, a world that was primal and wild, a world that was not ran by any form of
hierarchy he could understand.
It was a world that humans had once been a part of, a world that spoke to the darkest recesses of the mind . . . and terrified it beyond comprehension now for the mind could not understand the compulsion of nature.

They thought Singers Trail at night was dangerous and frightful, but it was nothing compared to the terror that the woods themselves posed. While they had been on the path there had been none of these feelings. They had heard the red eyed creatures behind them, but they had been behind them. Now the beings, whatever they were, were beginning to surround the Bordeau
x’s.

Still the harp played on, and still Melvin, Abigail and Ruby tried to find their way back to the path that had been lost moments before, and might never be found again. They were surrounded by more than the trees and their fear. More than limbs seemed to catch at their hair and the hems of the girls nightgowns. Invisible hands reached out for them, catching at their arms, pulling at them this way and that and constantly there was the movement that seemed to chase them further into the woods and further away from their safe harbor. They were surrounded by the red eyed beings that were coming closer, closing in on them. They were also surrounded by the sound of the harp that played on in mock joy at their demise. No longer was the music lovely and caring but instead it was harsh and cruel as it strummed their failure, played their death marches.

The forest had won.

The darkness had won.

Helvegr,
came the whisper in the air, a whisper and a word so haunting, so deplorable that it fit where they currently found themselves better than anything probably ever could. The word was like an utterance
from the deepest level of the Otherworld
, it was something that was not understood, yet more than just a word, for it was a feeling as well, a feeling so profane they knew it was perverse even if they didn’t know what the word meant.

Still they stumbled on, and though they were being surrounded by the red eyed creatures they were able to move on in whatever direction as if the ring of red eyes were moving with them. They tried spying the light, but for some reason, no matter where they moved in the darkness they could not see it. It seemed for the entire world as if the purple light had been extinguished. Maybe it was something that could only be seen from Singers Trail? But that didn’t make any sense at all, how could something be seen on the road but not inside the woods?

And then with a twang that sounded as though a cord had broken on the harp the music halted and the red eyed creatures scattered.

They had stumbled to a spot they hadn’t even known existed in the woods for it consisted of trees that were not indigenous to their home. They found themselves standing before a ring of foreign trees which shed such darkness that even Melvin cowed before them.

Chapter Four

A silent dead wind shook the limbs of the trees before them, and chilled the Bordeaux’s to the core. The limbs of the trees, somehow dead in the middle of what should have been the growing year, scrapped and clattered together
creating a music all their
own, a music that was both like and unlike the wildly beautiful yet increasingly terrifying music of the harp before.

There was also fog, a fog that had n
ot been there moments before
. The fog, while taking up space in the physical world seemed oddly otherworldly, as if it should not have been in this place and time. It was a consuming thing which sought to devour even as it drifted across the ground aimlessly. Melvin was not entirely sure how he could tell this of the fog, but he knew that it was true.

The fog was evil.

Helvegr
, the word came again, but somehow Melvin was able to ignore it in the presence of such chaos as he currently found himself. His sisters, however, could not ignore the fog or the word and looked uncertainly about them.

His attention was not for the word, the fog, or the wicked trees before them for something was growing in his awareness even before it grew in the world they now looked at, a world that was decidedly not their own. But if it wasn’t their w
orld than why was it here, o
n their family’s property?

He had no mind to answer the question, no reason to try for within his mind bloomed another terror that he could not explain, could not even really be grasped. The terror was without reason, but instead formed in the pit of his stomach as a sense that something was most certainly wrong with the night in which they found themselves, and the trees at which they looked.

The feeling came to fruition before his very eyes as darkness so complete, so profound that it actually glowed, gathered in the center of the thicket of foreign trees. It formed a globe, spinning and pulsating like an evil heart which dripped black goop on the ground below it, and where the goop fell the ground smoked and shivered as if the trees where being consumed, degraded by the substance.

From out of the shadow of a tree there came a tiny woman carrying a harp. She smiled at them a radiant expression that seemed so out of sorts inside the grove. She was the most beautiful woman any of them had ever seen, though she appeared to stand no higher than their knees. She wore a dress of leaves and grass that didn’t look rudimentary at all, but instead as if it had been fashioned by the most artful of hands. Her long black hair fell in ringlets down her back.
Her green eyes flashed once, a
repulsive emotion within them that brought the Bordeaux’s back to themselves in such a startling fashion that Melvin actual gasped and nearly lost his hold on the still vibrating hammer. She turned from them, and they could see that her back was entirely hollow, as if it were a trough or some kind of receptacle, and in truth it was, for within the recess of her back more darkness gathered, and apparently gave her strength, gave her power. She sat the harp down and raised her hands then, and they were filled with a light that was not light, but an eerie glowing that could not be explained. The glowing seemed to fit within the grove of trees, but was nothing they had ever seen, nothing that their minds wanted to understand.

The darkness took form in response to her glowing hands. It seemed as though the fog grew thicker within the trees as the black orb she communed with settled on the ground and began to take the shape of a human, though just as diminutive as the harpist.

In a silent thundering that shook the ground the darkness stood, and appeared as a withered and frightful old man. He wore a hat and clothing of flesh, though what kind of skin none of them could tell, but with as damnable as this grove was they figured it could very well be the skin of wayward travelers like themselves.

He stood and smiled at them, his hat low over his face obstructing his eyes, but not his hooked nose or perverse smile. From the air fell a stick which he caught with ease despite his withered appearance. He was stooped as one would imagine an old man being, and his skin was wrinkled and spotted with disease. As he stepped forward they instinctively took a step back, but he didn’t need to get close to harm them.

He raised his hands and into the air came a deafening whistle. It rebounded off the trees and made everything that was good about the night shiver in protest. From the darkness within the trees came more movement which sounded like little feet, and the woman they had seen before crooned at the little old man, laying her head on his shoulder
to smile at them
, her teeth like broken glass.

They should not be witnessing this.

There were hundreds of little plunking noises and from out of the darkness of the trees came hundreds of little soldiers, spears and swords held high in anger, in hatred. The little soldiers converged
in the center of the grove. The trees were
like mon
oliths to their tiny forms. The
r
e
they talked to the old man, though Melvin (now backing away from the scene) could not hear what was being said, if there were even words being spoken at all, though their mouths did move.

“I think we should get out of here,” he said and turned back away from the sight.

“But where? W
e don’t know where the path is,” Abigail protested as Melvin’s eyes found yet more horror. Behind them the red eyes had gathered once more, and in the perverse light coming from the grove behind them Melvin could see that the eyes belonged to hundreds and hundreds of thick, black snakes. The snakes seemed to be made out of the same light the old man had just formed from, but they didn’t move toward the humans, instead they stayed where they were, coiling around one another; a pit of rolling snakes.

“I don’t think we can get away over them,” Ruby said casting a glance back at the tiny people in the otherworldly wood beyond the evil fogbank. “Maybe around them?” she asked, though one look this way and that told her that there was no getting around the snakes fast enough before they were trapped yet again.

“If we split up,” Abigail started.

“We are NOT splitting up!” Melvin said fiercely, and the suggestion died on her lips before it was even fully formed. “We face this together.” He yelled as the hammer in his hand throbbed harder and harder shaking his arm to the point that it nearly hurt. “I w
ish this hammer would stop!
”
he swung it out in an arc, hoping to ease his joints.

But just then the snakes seemed to draw back, their hissing like vicious music in the air. “What has gotten them?” Melvin asked, but Ruby was nearly vibrating with the same intensity as the hammer clutched in his hands.

“
I don’t think they like your hammer!” Ruby said. Melvin moved the hammer again
and sure enough the snakes hissed wildly and shuddered back, oddly slithering backward in a fashion that was not at all snake-like.

“Huh,” Melvin said looking back at the foreign grove behind them where the little people gathered.
Melvin started pushing the snakes back with each wave of his hammer but the act seemed to have little e
ffe
ct on the people behind him
, who were talking and glancing at him once and a while.

He cou
ldn’t explain how the hammer seemed to have power
over the being
s of darkness, he just knew it
did and left it at that for he was not very introverted and liked it that way.

“
Elle folk!” the old man
yelled throwing up his hands. “We have intruders in our lime tree grove. Intruders of the human variety!” there was a general hateful and malicious muttering that arose around the group. Occasionally a soldier or two would cast an evil eye over their shoulder at the youths. It appeared that these so called elle folk hated humans. “You know what we do with humans?”

“Kill them!” the shout rose up around the group of tiny soldiers, and Melvin would have laughed if their words weren’t filled with such hate. He was not sure how the little people intended exactly to kill them, what with all the humans holding weapons and being much taller than the soldiers, but he was sure that they had the desire to do so, and often that is all it took.

His only hope was that the hammer would grant them purchase on the wood road once more before the elle folk attacked. They were nearly there, but he was losing hope.

F
inally the tension broke and the elle folk surged forward over the fogbank as if it were a substantial presence and straight toward Melvin.
He turned to watch them come, momentarily forgetting the snakes. His sisters hadn’t forgotten the snakes though, and they kept swiping at them, trying to push them back.

The hammer in his hands throbbed painfully and so violently that it nearly fell out of his hands, and he had to struggle in order to keep hold of it, finally a shock like lightning thrummed up his arms and with a yelp he dropped the hammer.

It was so unreal that Melvin was not sure it happened, and he was sure that he would have talked himself out of believing that it had happened if others had not witnessed it, and if it hadn’t left such proof in the ground as to be incontrovertible. When the hammer struck the ground there was a flash from where the head and the ground touched and Melvin nearly found the need to cover his eyes, but so spell-bound was he by what happened that he could not.

The ground then began to thunder and rumble and all of them found themselves fighting for purchase on the shifting earth. Suddenly with an ear splitting rent the ground gave way before Melvin, and he barely had time to grab the hammer before the earth toppled in on itself, swallowing the elle folk soldiers.

The collapsing ground did not, however, touch the foreign forest before them, but in a puff of fog it dimmed, like it were but a dream drifting away in the fog of wakefulness. The old man seethed with rage within the confines of his lime grove, and the hollow backed harp player screamed so loud that the air itself shivered in fear of her wrath.

The snakes were enraged by the sound, and no longer did the ad
vances of the sisters
halt their attack.

Melvin saw, just before he turned back to help fight off the snake the old man puffed up like a balloon filled with noxious air, and with a yell he bellowed out a noxious green cloud that floated toward them directed by his shaking hands which pointed threateningly at all of them.

“Hurry!” Melvin yelled not wanting to get trapped in that fog, and as he yelled the moon broke free of the thunderheads overhead and illuminated a silver path not far away.

“The trail!” Screamed Abigail and swung her fire poker at a striking snake, the point connecting with its head and splaying blood across the leaf strewn ground. They all saw it, and made their way to the safety of Singers Trail where they could see Luna now furiously battering herself off the invisible barrier in an attempt to get to them.

The going was difficult, and it seemed that wherever they struck at one snake two more filled its spot, hissing and striking. Melvin found that if he could strike at a tangle of them that he was able to kill more than one and often about five snakes with one mighty blow. The hammer did not; however, cause anymore fissures in the earth as he hoped it would.
It had fallen still once more, and the snakes didn’t give it any more heed then they did the sisters.

“We need to hurry!” Melvin yelled as he looked at the looming green cloud behind them gaining every minute and they seemed to be moving very little at all.

Ruby was afraid to strike out at the snakes, but she caused great devastation when she did, often slicing snakes in half. They were finally getting somewhere when Melvin felt something thud into his leg, and when he looked down it was too late, the snake had already struck him another three times before he had smashed it into the ground, and the green cloud was right there behind them, the very edges of it already starting to infiltrate their group.

Thankfully the snakes either didn’t like the fog (which maybe was nothing to be thankful for) or they had finally drove them back far enough for they parted and Melvin pushed his sisters through onto the wooded path as the green cloud swallowed him.

Melvin fell gasping for breath and in pain from the poison rapidly spreading black veins of sickness through his leg. When he gasped though, all he took in was the poisonous miasma which was worse than any snakebite could be.

He fell, half in Singers Trail, half out feeling needle teeth sinking into the skin of his legs for it seemed the snakes where immune to the sickness posed by the green fog. Each of his sisters grabbed a hand and heaved him onto the trail where it was evident the snakes could not go, and the fog rolled wickedly against the barrier that Luna could not get through, for the fog could not penetrate the road either.

“I think that as long as we are on Singers Trail we are safe,” Abigail said, but her mind was not for the path for Melvin was dying in her arms.

Just as he drew another painful breath that stuck in his throat he heard an evil cacophony of caws and wings in the trees surrounding them.