Dreamwood (15 page)

But the next moment she forgot all about Pete. Shadows slunk among the trees. She heard the sound of animal breath, of growls.

“Something out there?” She searched the woods in fear.

Pete heard it, too.

Yellow eyes gleamed at her through the underbrush straight ahead. They belonged to something big and dark, with teeth.

She couldn't look away, grabbed blindly at the vine. It loosened just enough for her to get free. There was a low growl from one side, and an answer on the other. Three beasts crept forward, emerging from the shadows.

Wolves.

Saarthen wolves, which meant they were the size of oxen. Their jaws dripped with slaver, teeth like razors.

“Run!” Pete cried.

He waited precious seconds until she was level with him, then the two of them went tearing through the woods, leaping and crashing, running blindly.

But they weren't fast enough.

The wolves were gaining on them. In a second Lucy would feel the rip and gash of their teeth. She could see a shaggy black blur racing alongside her.
I'll never be able to outrun it.

“This way,” Pete yelled.

Ahead was a dense knot of trees where the kodoks grew close together, their branches drooping low and intertwined almost like a lattice. If they could get there in time they might be able to climb out of reach.

“Come on.” Pete was just ahead, waiting for her.

Her lungs aching, Lucy put on one final burst and caught up to Pete. He lifted her about the waist and boosted her up so she could grab a branch just above her head. Then he leapt up, climbing easily. Lucy struggled to get higher into the tree.

The wolves gathered below them. They seemed to grin as they watched Pete and Lucy retreat.

She was still not high enough for safety. And the wolves were big enough to make the jump. Why didn't they?

“Why are you stopping?” Pete hissed. He was several feet above her in the branches. Tree sap and dirt streaked his arms, his throat shone with sweat.

But Lucy stared down into the wolves' yellow eyes, suddenly sure of herself. “They're not going to hurt us.”

Without even a parting snarl the pack shifted and ran off.

“What was that about?” Pete asked, climbing down to her level. He stared after the wolves in confusion. “Are they really giving up that easy?”

Lucy had fled in panic, but she had no illusions about her running speed. “They could have caught us anytime they wanted. But they didn't.” She felt for the knife on her belt. If she'd cut that vine, however . . .

Pete closed his eyes as if this was too much to take in. “So they were playing with us?” He rubbed his forehead, leaving behind dirty smudges on his skin.

Lucy's breathing slowly came back to normal. It felt safe and strangely nest-like up in the tree branches. She watched Pete with his eyes closed, his head thrown back. When he opened his eyes, she was looking straight at him. She saw him realize that. Blood surged into her cheeks—she hadn't meant to stare—and she began to climb down.

“There's a clearing on the other side,” she said, fussing with the tree sap on her hands. “We might want to stay here for the night.”

The ring of trees, their branches tightly woven, formed a circle.

Pete started to climb down after her.

It had been a strange day, and something made her feel it was about to get stranger yet.

Lucy stepped into the circle, surrounded by mournful kodoks. The last rays of afternoon sun came through the treetops, raking the grove with light and shadow.

A fallen log lay about ten feet away. Just visible under a coating of kodok needles was something that didn't belong. Something blue.

Her heart beat fast. With a small cry she ran forward.

It was a man's blue flannel shirt. Next to it lay a tin cup. And beside it was . . .

“A notebook.” She held it with trembling hands. “My father's notebook. He was here!”

L
ucy sat cross-legged on the ground, paging through her father's journal. His handwriting was small and secretive—he always said his wealth was in his ideas. They were locked up safely in his crabbed script. A few scraps of paper fell out as she studied the pages: newspaper clippings, pages torn from books.

Trees several territories over in Montana were dying from a disease that sounded suspiciously like Rust.

She found a printed page with many Latin words on it: “The dreamwood, which we shall call by its scientific name
Hypnogagous atrox
, is the largest flesh-eating plant in the world.”

There was a note from her father: “It is my belief that, when feeding, it introduces a narcotic into the victim's bloodstream, producing the vivid dreams that give the tree its name.”

Another scribbled note: “Saarthe's lost settlement . . . The key lies in uncovering the past . . . used to harvest dreamwood.”

She put the journal with its patchwork of scraps back down and rubbed her eyes. She felt exhausted after their long day—which really had begun in the wee hours of the morning with Obwe's boat. Their trip across the bay already seemed as if it had happened in the distant past.

“Lucy, take a look at this,” Pete said. While she'd been reading he had been wandering nervously around the clearing. Now he stood in the middle, an unmistakably queasy expression on his face. He waved her over, then bent down, examining something on the ground—though whatever was there made him cover his nose.

Lucy walked over to see what he was looking at. This turned out to be a small patch of boggy ground covered with flabby-looking mushrooms the color of cooked liver. They were ugly, but unremarkable. She bent down to examine them and wrinkled her nose in disgust. There was a rotten, sinister feeling to the place, as if a terrible crime had been committed here and instead of disappearing with time, it had sunk in—spread through the ground and gotten stronger with age.

“What did you want me to see?” she asked.

“These, of course.” Pete pointed to the mushrooms. “Did you ever smell such a stink?”

Lucy sniffed the air. They did give off an unpleasant smell, but she didn't think that warranted taking her away from her father's journal. Except, of course, boys often assigned an outsize importance to disgusting things.

“They're bad,” she agreed. She stood up, wanting to get back to her reading.

Pete put his hands on his lower back and stretched. “Let's go. I'd like to get some fresh air, sleep someplace that feels, um, healthier.”

Lucy didn't think this was a good idea. “We should stay here tonight,” she told Pete. “What if my father comes back for his things?”

The expression on Pete's face was almost pitying. “You know, by the looks of it, that stuff has been here awhile.”

But Lucy didn't want to listen. Her father was absentminded, always leaving scraps of notes about. He might come looking for them. She wrapped her father's shirt around her shoulders, settled against the back of a broad kodok trunk, and picked up her father's notebook again.

Pete gave a loud sigh, in which she could detect boredom, impatience, and a desire to rile her up.

“What?” she asked.

He smiled. “I've just never seen anyone look at a book that way, like you're going to make it give up its secrets . . . or else.”

“Oh,” she said. For some reason the thought that he was noticing the way she read a book made her cheeks color. “I just . . . thought I should read these journal entries. Maybe I can, um, learn something.”

Pete shrugged as if learning were a novel idea but one he was prepared to entertain. He settled down next to her. “Okay then. Let's get to it.”

“Okay.” She nodded back at him, but now it was hard to focus on the journal.

“Well,” said Pete, sitting close to her. “Anything?”

She squinched her nose, not wanting to admit she couldn't concentrate. “I'm looking.”

“Sounds good.” Pete stretched his arms out and yawned.

She flipped through the diary and read a few bits here and there before deciding she would read from back to front. The last page was the easiest: It had only one line.

He killed them all.

Lucy felt her stomach take an uneasy dip. Beside her Pete had closed his eyes.

The sun had gone down, and with the twilight the sinister feeling of being watched returned. The moon was rising over the treetops. As the shadows entered the grove, Lucy kept glancing to the circle of trees. A few times she thought she'd seen
faces
in their trunks. She shook her head. It wouldn't help if she started seeing things.

She turned to Pete, but he'd already fallen asleep. His breath came lightly, rhythmically.

Lucy turned back to her father's journal. There was now barely enough light to read. She squinted to make out the words. “I believe that, like a spider that keeps its prey fresh by drugging its unfortunate victim, so, too, the dreamwood keeps its food in a state of suspended animation . . .”

Part of her wanted to put the diary down. The words reminded her too much of the pictures in the terrible
Codex Saarthensis.
But a horrified fascination compelled her to keep reading.

“According to legend . . . human food . . . months to digest . . .”

She swallowed on a dry mouth. Her chest was tight, as if she could not get enough air.

Beside her, Pete's breath grew shallow, his eyelids flickered with dream.

“Even if I survive his challenges, the forest turns deadly at night . . .”

Against her back she imagined—no, she felt—the tree trunk shift ever so slightly.

She didn't want to read any more. The diary fell to the ground.

I'm hungry,
said a cold voice.

She jumped.

“Who said that?”

There was no one around except Pete. But she'd heard a voice as clearly as if it had been spoken by someone just over her shoulder.

“What?” A bleary-eyed Pete woke up; he was looking at her strangely. A tickle of panic ran up her spine.

The angles of his face were etched in the moonlight. Something about the light chilled her. The moon was dangerous, but she couldn't remember why.

Slowly, she got up and walked a few paces into the clearing where the moonlight was stronger. She held out her hand in front of her, watching the mottled shadows paint bruises on her skin. The sight was mesmerizing. It made her dizzy.

“Lucy?” Pete's voice was tight and thin. “Look at the trees.”

She raised her eyes to the trees that ringed them. In the stark moonlight she could see each tree had a face on its trunk: a twisted, evil, ancient face. She stared at the tree across the circle from her. The eyes—two fathomless holes—were overhung with a bristly ridge of bark. A crooked limb was a long and witchy nose. But worst of all was the mouth: open, ravenous, with stringy tendrils of moss strung across it like teeth.

And then she felt it, the vast
hunger
that surrounded them. The tree she'd been sitting under seemed to yawn open; its trunk was a dark mouth. The devil's face leered out at her. They'd been too foolish to see it before. The grasses swayed and twisted like they were all one being, and she saw with horror that each blade was barbed at the tip as if it bore a tiny tooth. In a second they would swoop upon her, biting her with hundreds of sharp teeth until she fell and bled out on the ground.

Run,
said a voice in her head.
Run while you still can.

She looked into the darkness beyond the clearing. If she ran she might be able to escape. She could outrun that hunger, leap into the sea, and swim away. That was the only hope. If there had been a cliff in front of her she would have jumped without hesitation.

The fear was overpowering. Like black smoke, it choked off her thoughts, all except one—
don't be food.

“Pete!” she screamed. “Run.”

“I can't!”

A web of branches trapped him. Roots came up from the ground, nosing blindly like worms.

From just behind her a branch reached out. She was going to be trapped, too. She had to save herself.

She started to run, dodging branches, twigs that poked up from the ground like spikes.

What about Pete?
a voice inside her asked.

I don't want to be eaten!
she screamed back.

But it was no use. She faltered to a stop. She couldn't leave him.

It took all her strength of will to turn back to Pete. He seemed to be fighting at shadows.

In the last sane corner of her mind she realized he
was
fighting shadows. Because this was a dream.

A nightmare.

Now she ran, but not from the clearing. She reached her pack, and grasped frantically for the small pocket where she kept the vial Arthur Lyman had given her.

Where were they?
Five drops before moonrise.
The warning rang in her head. Brocius Pile was driven mad. Brains turned to jelly.

She'd been so stupid. The one danger they'd prepared for and she'd completely forgotten about it—she'd been so addled by the journal, the lazy afternoon sunshine, and Pete.

She couldn't find them. She was too panicked. It took everything she had to slow down and search. And then there it was, a small glass bottle.

Her hand was shaking as she measured out five silvery drops onto her tongue. The medicine was so bitter she squeezed her eyes shut.

But it worked at once, whisking through her head like a broom. When she opened her eyes the dream had cleared. The forest wasn't going to eat her.

The real danger was that they would run, leaving their supplies—and each other. Pete staggered to the edge of the circle, clawing his arms in front of him. He was almost past the barrier branches. If he ran she would never catch him. She threw herself around his legs, wrestling him to the ground.

“Pete, hold still.”

“They're squeezing me.” He twisted on the ground. “They're going to crack me open and suck the marrow from my bones.”

He thrashed wildly. She held tight to the vial. If she spilled it while holding on to him they were lost.

“No one's going to crack your bones.” Not if she could help it. But he was so much stronger. She swung a leg over him to hold him down, but he tried to throw her off. She dug in with both her legs.

This only frightened him more. “Aah!” he cried. “Aah!”

At least he opened his mouth.

There was no time to hesitate. She sent five drops in what she hoped was the direction of his tongue. She didn't know if they made it.

And then all at once the scream changed into something recalling a sick cat.

“Blechh.”

Pete's muscles slackened, and he stopped fighting. Lucy went limp with relief. The struggle had been harder than she realized, and she fell back on the ground beside him. A few pinprick stars were just visible through the tree branches.

After a moment, Pete stood up. He peered into the shadows, then put a hand against the kodok bark, reassuring himself it would not come alive.

The grove was still.

“That rat Lyman might at least have put some sugar in it.” Pete rubbed his mouth. “Now I understand why you wouldn't want to dream here. Though that's the first time I ever dreamed when I was awake.”

She shuddered as she thought how close both of them had come to running blindly through the woods.

“Poor Brocius Pile,” she said at last. “No wonder he went mad.” She sat up and put her back against a kodok tree. It felt solid and not at all hungry.

Pete sat down beside her, leaning against the tree trunk.

“He didn't stand a chance,” Pete agreed. “You kept your head, though . . .”

“Only because mine's so thick.” She wasn't pleased with the way she'd almost run; she'd thought she was made of stronger stuff.

He gave her a sidelong glance. “Now you're making jokes. At your own expense, too. I think the forest has gotten to you.”

“I'm actually very good at making jokes,” she said, raising her chin. “My father always said I was the only one in the family who could make him laugh.”

“That's more like it,” Pete said, nodding appreciatively, like someone who'd managed to identify the call of a rare bird. “You sound like yourself now.”

“I'm always myself,” she said, frowning. Pete should know that by now. She picked irritably at some of the kodok bark between them.

“That you are,” he said. He stretched out his legs and bent his head closer to hers. “No one else is like you.”

This was what she wanted to hear—so much so she got flustered. She chanced a quick glance at his profile. Then she allowed herself a longer look. After all, she
had
saved his life.

Lucy Darrington saves the day.
She grinned to herself as she looked out at the trees. The stark faces were still there, but now she saw them as a trick of light and shadow. Nothing to be frightened of.