Crik (23 page)

Fidgeting with the blood soaked bandage Bill gave a nod.

‘Best if we carry on this way,’ suggested Jack. ‘I don’t want to turn north just yet. The wolves went that way; we could end up crossing the path of whatever is chasing them. If we keep going west and then turn north we won’t have gone too far from our path.’

‘He’s still scared.’

Jack looked at Bill, and for a moment, he recognised some of Black in his friend’s expression. The way Bill’s jaw had hardened into a firm line, and his studying eyes.

‘There’s nothing we can do to help,’ repeated Jack. ‘As soon as they shake the pursuit you can bring them back to us.’

Bobbing in the air, with only two shadow arms supporting her, Inara said, ‘They are protecting us, just like they have in the past.’

‘The terror Black is feeling is tearing me up inside.’

Swarms of Insects wrapped around their legs as they moved, masking their footfalls in a constant buzzing. The dense hovering cloud swirled above the ground like a flock of starlings.

‘I can’t keep going like this,’ said Bill coming to a halt. Sweat bathed his hot flushed face. ‘The wolves are far enough away. We won’t be found here.’

‘Here,’ said Inara, looking around at hanging gold thread, ‘where’s here?’

The ground, beneath the swarm, sucked at Jack’s feet. Fearing they had stepped into a bog drove him back, where he collided with Bill. His feet came free, but muddy. Something had turned the earth.

‘Something has dug the ground.’ He voiced his findings in a rush.

‘Why?’ asked Bill.

‘Over there,’ said Inara

Jack looked to where she pointed and saw a young tree uprooted and tossed to one side. The roots, pointing toward the grey sky, still held clumps of earth. The trunk, broken in two, yawned widely, giving the wood the look of a screaming animal.

‘So trees do grow here,’ said Bill.

‘Doesn’t look as though they are allowed to grow for long,’ observed Inara. ‘Whoever did this prefers cold metal to living wood. All this gold,’ she reached up touching the precious metal with her fingers, ‘is hard, unyielding. It’s not natural what’s happened here.’

‘Not natural, wow, I thought copper thorns and iron trees as high as towers grew from nuts,’ said Bill. He hit the bark of the fallen tree with his makeshift weapon, chipping the wood.

Yang moved Inara closer to the felled tree. ‘Since leaving the marsh we’ve seen statues come to life, an old man wearing flutes as shoes, and a hedge attack us. None of that should be natural, but it is. We can’t say for sure how the Red Wood became as it is.’

‘Until now,’ said Jack. ‘Whatever killed the tree is probably the same something that is running after the wolves.’

‘Well it’s not these bugs,’ muttered Bill.

‘There’re more of them here than elsewhere in the wood,’ remarked Jack. ‘Perhaps the churned earth attracts them? I don’t care why, I don’t fancy sticking around. Whatever uprooted the tree may come back.’

‘And cut us down,’ finished Bill.

‘Walk around the disturbed ground,’ said Inara, ‘you don’t want to leave footprints behind.’

Glad one of us has some sense, thought Jack.

A sound of metal striking metal rang through the air. It didn’t sound like a hammer strike in a forge, it felt deeper. A second sound soon followed, reverberating in their chests. Yang lowered Inara to the ground; the insects reached her waist. Jack hunched down. Bill, with mouth agape, looked around, his eyes, through his spectacles, appeared huge.

Clenching his teeth Jack grabbed hold of Bill, tugging him to the floor.

Bill cried out in surprise.

The noise of metal upon metal immediately stopped. The insect sounds continued, and Bill’s whispered apology was all Jack heard. Long minutes went by. The Red Wood retained a pregnant silence. Behind him, Inara bit her lip so hard she drew blood.

‘Is it gone?’ asked Bill.

Clang, then a hollow bong, broke the stillness. The party froze, as with horror they heard the hastening approach of the hunter.

Rushing legs snappe
d
through the underbrush, then stopped. A dull thud, like a drum hit with a flat palm, followed. Before the punctuating noise had Jack crane his neck upward, Yang had spread himself over the group, covering them in a thin obscuring layer. Above him, clinging to the tree like a boy at play, was the oddest beast Jack had ever seen. Its skin matched the forest in hue, blending in despite its righteous colour of cobalt blue, rustic red, and worn yellow. An impossibly broad face, peered down. It was a frog, a giant amphibian, complete with webbed feet and hands. Though to Jack it appeared more like a puppet without its string. The whole body, being bipedal and tall, jarred with the head. An artist’s impression, other than what nature intended. Like this entire place, he mused. The sun slipped by a slow moving cloud, affording greater light. Sunlight glinted like coins off the creature. Jack’s heart quickened, it was metal, the same as everything else in the Wold.

Huddled under Yang’s body they remained undetected. From above they must appear as nothing more than part of the shadow of the felled tree. Each held their breath, enduring the swarming insects covering their lower bodies with stiff resolve.

A deafening sound, as the creature descended, had Jack clench his fist until his knuckles turned white. The armoured wrists, of the first denizen of the Red Wood they had laid eyes upon, sported long jagged spikes. An especially cruel shard of hammered tin sprang from its right elbow, reaching back as far as its cobalt shoulder. Despite the webbing between its fingers, the creature did not grip the trunk, preferring to lay its hand flat to the replicated plant.

Grandpa Poulis’s stories of Myrm attacks came rushing back to hit Jack like a fall through thin ice. Myrms attacked lone travellers, stealing their weapons and possessions. One story in particular came rushing back, causing him to squeeze his eyes shut to dispel it from his mind. Instead, shutting his eyes brought it back in vivid detail.

‘The house where Elisa lived, with her little brother and father, stood apart from the rest of town,’ Grandpa Poulis had said, setting himself down beside a roaring campfire. He appeared as a boy, with his tell-tale mop of grey hair. A pipe, dangling comically from his small lips, also set him apart from the other boys. ‘Her father, being the town’s only blacksmith could do what he wanted. After all, if he didn’t want to fix your horses’ hooves, or your broken wheelbarrow, who would fix it? When he wanted his house a couple of miles up the road in the meadow overlooking the stream, no one argued. And no doubt if he wanted a bridge over that stream, he would’ve got that too,’ Grandpa Poulis remarked, switching his pipe to the other side of his mouth.

‘Elisa was a beautiful girl,’ he continued, ‘but this isn’t one of those tales my boys.’ His eyes gleamed in the firelight. ‘This story doesn’t have some guy turn up to save the day, or any of that other tripe my wife would prefer me to tell. And if she asks,’ he said fixing his gaze onto Bill, ‘you tell her I told you about a princess kissing a frog that turned into a prince. That way I sleep in my bed tonight, not in the kitchen with Wolf.’ Wolf coughed, making the boys laugh. ‘No, this story is a warning.

‘The sound of her father’s hammer was a constant in the meadow. One day he would be making a wheel, or a fence for the town’s church. Being a master of his craft, he would always strive to improve on everything asked of him. If you asked him to make a horseshoe he would do it, and then go to the trouble of trying to improve its design. He changed the horseshoe from an O, to a U.’ His finger traced the patterns in the air. ‘The joining on the church fence would be so precise you would never see its joining.

‘Elisa was only six when they moved into the meadow, but the night she woke to hear her father’s hammer she was fourteen. The ice creeping up her window did not dissuade her from leaving her room. Scared to disturb her brother she snuck past his room and left the house. Warped shadows danced across the wall of the forge, illuminated by the roaring fire within. One of them, she presumed her father, held a hammer. Just like that,’ Grandpa Poulis commented as Yang grew, arching his back to hang over their heads, his hand becoming a hammer which he beat the ground. Jack laughed at his shadow.

‘She counted at least three figures. Standing closest to the anvil was her father, with the other two nearby. Closing her collar, she proceeded closer, but came to a stop when she failed to hear any voices. Being outside the village her father always wanted to hear the latest gossip. If he wasn’t asking about someone, he invariably explained his work. Many times Elisa walked from the forge with a headache, not from the ringing hammer, but her father’s constant questions. So the quiet unsettled her. The shadows also struck her as odd. Unlike her father’s erect shape, the stooped and crooked silhouettes made her uneasy. Stepping around the back of the forge, Elisa looked through a small window and spied the creatures surrounding her father. They wore skins of recently killed animals beneath crude metal armour. Their bare faces struck fear into her heart, freezing her to the spot more than the winter air. Immediately she recognised them as Myrms. The vile creatures had brought heaps of iron, which they had piled in the corner. Her father worked furiously, beating the metal into shape. She stayed there for a long time, watching her father work, as she had done countless times before. As night gave way to dawn, she saw movement in the corner of the forge. Her little brother, bound in rough rope, lay beside the now dwindling supply of metal, and she knew then why her father worked so diligently.’

‘Grandpa, what was the blacksmith making?’ asked Bill.

‘I don’t know,’ Grandpa Poulis admitted, ‘if I were to hazard a guess I’d say they forced him to make weapons. That’s what their kind is normally after.’ Drifting smoke from his pipe, closed one of his eyes, adding weight to what he said. ‘Seeing her brother in trouble broke the spell that had frozen Elisa to the spot and she set off for the town. It took a while for her to reach the town, and longer still for anyone to understand what she was trying to say. Wasted time,’ he whispered with regret, ‘by the time we arrived the Myrms had taken both her father and brother.’

‘You were there?’

‘Aye, I followed a party of hunters. I was a little younger than your parents are now. I’d say it happened about fifty years ago.’

‘The Myrms killed them?’ asked Jack.

Grandpa Poulis emptied his pipe on the round stones ringing the fire. ‘We found no trace of the boy or his father. The pile of metal Elisa mentioned had also vanished; that at least left tracks. Not one hunter who followed those tracks returned. No doubt in my mind, those beasts led our men into an ambush.’ He shook his pipe. ‘I reckon they caught up to the Myrms.’ He sat quiet, glancing at the boys around the fire. ‘Childish fancy, perhaps, no evidence proves me right, but I like to think our hunters got a scalp or two before the end.

‘Elisa never returned to her house, preferring to stay in town. The foundations of the house and forge are still in the meadow, hidden by tall grass.’

‘You said the story was a warning,’ said Jack.

The wizened eyes set in the small face always unsettled Jack when they focused on him, and none more than that night. ‘It’s a warning alright,’ Grandpa Poulis said. ‘Elisa’s dad made the mistake of wanting to live alone. He wanted to build his house away from the town in the meadow. If he had remained in the village, the Myrms wouldn’t have come to him as they did. There’s safety in numbers, and don’t you boys forget it.’

Doubting three, four if you counted Yang, constituted as safety in numbers, kept Jack still, in the hope the thin shadow would hide them until the Myrm left. Inara reached over to grip his hand, which he squeezed in return. They had no chance of fighting the Myrm, and seeing how swift it moved down the metal he knew they had little hope of fleeing from it.

The Myrm landed two yards from Jack. Its long legs looked awkward, as though it had one too many kinks, making the Myrm hunch as it moved toward the root end of the felled tree. The sure motion it possessed above, vanished as it stumbled over the uneven floor. It more snatched at the roots than took hold of them, crunching the dried mud between its fingers. An echo resounded within the head of the frog as the beast sniffed the dry dirt and sneezed. Jack had a maddening urge to say bless you, and literally had to bite down on his tongue to stop himself.

The flies that dogged the company shied away from the Myrm, allowing sections of the ground to become visible amidst the swarm. Hoping the Myrm wouldn’t discover their footprints, added pressure on Jack’s heart. It stood close to the muddy section that had sucked at his shoe. He must have left an imprint; by the time he had pulled his foot out, the mud had risen to his ankle. The insects still obscured the area, another step and they would leave.

The Myrm hit the fallen trunk with an agitated open palm, breaking the bark and splintering the white wood beneath. The group felt the ferocious impact deep in their chests, scaring them with its raw power. Guttural noises, sounding like a pregnant sow, issued from the static alien. Despite its aggression, it continued to move slowly, staying close to the dead wood.

In many ways playing hide and seek with a monster was no different from playing with friends. Dwayne, with his wide eyes, would have already spotted them through Yang. The shadow’s deception would work against most. The twins would no doubt make themselves look gruesome to scare kids from their hiding place. Good practice for the real thing, reflected Jack. Thinking of hiding from the Myrm as a game helped calm his nerves. The secret remained the same, keep still, and do not let those hunting you spook you from hiding. He drew in a steadying breath, knowing sounds often gave people away, and though his legs ached, he ignored the need to flex them.

A more unsettling thought came to him as Yang darkened his image. His life and the lives of those with him depended on his demon. It could at any moment lift the shadow, and with a forked tongue pressed firmly between phantom teeth blow him a raspberry.

The insects dispersed from the ruined ground left by the uprooted tree. Jack saw his footprint, so did his friends. A muddy hole to the side of the larger hole, filled with dirty water.

The Myrm scanned the heights of the Red Wood, arching its neck back to an impossible angle. Its feet continued to move until its toes crested Jack’s footprint; an iron shod toenail made small ripples in the water. Its fingers skittered impulsively over a small disc held in its open palm. Scrapes and abrasions marring the disc’s surface drank in the sunlight. Closing fingers hid the disc.

The beast swung around.

The Myrm’s erratic movement reminded Jack of the game again. When playing he had spun around, hoping to spy kids, who thinking themselves safe, had crept out of hiding to get to the safe house. Only now, there was no safe house, and they would not be creeping out of hiding until the Myrm was long gone.

Despite its agitation, the Myrm remained over the large hole, with the smaller print now at its heel. Satisfied nothing moved behind it the armoured figure returned to its original stance. Bowed head, it clicked its fingers on the tree trunk, muttering odd sounds to itself.

It is brooding. The observation leapfrogged from Jack to Bill and Inara, who watched in mute horror.

The grunts coming from the Myrm were beyond comprehension, and yet the tone conveyed bafflement and a tired resignation. Bronze and zinc cuttings caught the monster’s attention. Mesmerised by the glint, it allowed its shoulders to sag. To those watching, the creature almost looked comedic. Turning from the entrancing light the yellow eyes, seen through eyeholes cut into the frog mask, widened.

It has seen my footprint, Jack’s mind screamed.

The rotting wood hid the Myrm as it bent down. They heard great inhalations of breath as the creature sniffed with an animalistic eagerness. When it rose, it carried a torn piece of clothing in its mailed fist. Though muddy, they recognised the piece of shirt Bill had used to wrap around his weapon.

Ashen faced, Bill moved his hand so that they could all see the naked metal shard resting on his knees. The sharp instrument looked ineffectual now faced with a real adversary.

Excited, the Myrm moved down the tree, using the wood to balance itself. Despite its exhilaration at finding evidence that they had been in the clearing, the Myrm still had no definite idea where to look first. For all the creature knew they could have left the area an hour ago. The creature moved steadily away from them, until it dropped from sight.