Strangewood (14 page)

For precisely the same reasons that she wanted him gone from
the hospital the day before, she needed to see him now.

She climbed out of the Honda, and when she slammed the door,
Joe stood up from the bench on her front porch. His face was etched with
concern and self doubt, but he said nothing as he waited for her to approach.

Emily strode quickly toward the steps.

"I'm sorry, Em," Joe said hurriedly. "But
when I called the office, Lorena said you were coming home to wash up, and I
just had to . . ."

Nearly launching herself up the steps, Emily wrapped her
arms around Joe as tightly as she could. That was it. No kiss. It didn't even
occur to her. Just the weight of him was enough to give her what she had to
have at that moment, the reassurance of her own self. Emily Randall had never
been a woman who defined herself by the presence of a man, but in this case,
having anyone who cared so passionately about her and just her was an absolute
necessity.

"I'm glad you're here," she said weakly.

Together, they went inside.

"I don't have any more classes today," Joe told
her. "I thought I'd go for a ride, and then I called the office and . . .
here I am. I was afraid you'd be angry."

Though she was dying for a shower, Emily sat Joe down and
tried her best to explain her feelings, the maelstrom of emotion she'd gone
through in the past forty-eight hours.

"What it comes down to," she said in the end,
"is that I need you. I really do, Joe. But right now, selfish as it
sounds, I need you on my terms. Is that awful?"

This last she asked hopefully, her hazel eyes turned up to
him.

"Not at all," he replied gently, and then he
kissed her, softly, deeply, for a long time.

Finally, Emily stood, tossed back her unwashed hair, and
said, "I feel so gross, I've got to take a shower. Alone."

They both smiled.

"If you have the time, please stay. It's easier for me
to be here when I'm not by myself. I shouldn't be long," Emily said.

"I’m not going anywhere," Joe promised.

He was as good as his word. When she emerged from her room,
hair damp from the shower, and began to put on her makeup, Joe was sitting in
the living room watching
The Gossip Show
on the E! Channel. When she had
gotten everything she needed together, and her hair was dry, Emily went back
out the door with Joe, kissed him good-bye, and watched him ride away on his
bike, powerful legs rippling with muscle.

Sliding into the Honda, she left the ghost house behind. All
the while she was in the house, she hadn't so much as glanced at the door to
Nathan's room.

 * * * * *

Strange smells filled the air. His eyes felt sticky. Sticky
and tight. There were voices. Or maybe just the wind in the trees.

Cradled against the gummy chest of the Peanut Butter
General, Nathan slept fitfully as they made their way along the Winding Way. He
briefly woke, not quite aware, his eyes fluttering, then blinking, then opening
wide for just a moment before he drifted off again. He'd seen, in that moment,
the clearing in front of Grumbler's darkened cottage and the lake beyond,
orange starlight glimmering on the water's surface.

He knew that meant they were passing the Scratchy Path on
the other side. But it didn't occur to Nathan to wonder what might happen if he
turned up the Scratchy Path, traipsed carefully through the brambles to where
The Boy's house was supposed to stand. Before he could even begin to consider
where The Boy himself might be, Nathan had fallen back to sleep.

It was twenty minutes or more of sticky jostling and the
distant howl of the Orange Pealers before a low, viscous voice whispered in his
ear.

"Wake now, boy," the voice said. "For I may
need to fight and then won't be able to carry you."

As he was being lowered to the ground, Nathan rubbed sleep
from his eyes. It was weird to him to have to wake up when it was still dark
out, and he was unsteady on his feet for a minute as he got his bearings. Strangely,
there was no peanut butter on him anywhere, neither on his clothes nor on his
skin, except where the General had soothed the ragged wounds left on Nathan's
back by Bob Longtooth. It was as if he could control it, and why not? It was
part of him, after all.

Nathan looked up at the Peanut Butter General and wondered
if there was anyone inside, or if he was made up all of peanut butter.

Several Orange Pealers came screaming up the path behind
them, gnashing their teeth as they rushed to take up positions on either side
of Nathan, eyes darting around, looking into the darkness of the wood for any
sign of attack. Nathan bit his lip. He was still afraid of the Pealers, but
they seemed much more interested in protecting him than in using those gleaming
needle teeth and their tiny spears on him.

Nathan glanced around. The dark wood was thick on either
side of the Winding Way, but there were no fruit trees here, burned or
otherwise. He didn't know what kind of trees they were, but they looked good
for climbing. Or they would have been, were it not for the nasty looking
pricker bushes that lined the left side of the path. Though there was no breeze
at all, the wicked-looking branches swayed back and forth, and Nathan knew
without a doubt that he didn't want to go anywhere near those bushes.

Then he recalled passing Grumbler's cottage, and what that
meant. He felt a brief urge to turn back, but he was only five and a half years
old — that half having become so very important to him — and he
didn't want to go alone. In some strange way, the Peanut Butter General was the
only grown-up around.

Eyes darting around nervously, Nathan reached up
unconsciously to hold the Peanut Butter General's hand. The bees still kept
away from Nathan, and that was good. The General seemed surprised when Nathan's
fingers touched his own, but after a moment, he gripped the boy's hand firmly,
and they began to walk along the Winding Way together.

"Why are you going to have to fight?" Nathan asked
suddenly, though he'd actually been running the General's statement through his
head ever since he'd been put down. "Are they . . . are they coming
back?"

They had reached a point where the Winding Way became a
small hill, an incline up which they now walked briskly. Nathan had to hurry to
keep up with the long stride of the General. Somehow, the Orange Pealers seemed
comfortable with the pace, which for them was almost an out and out run. Nathan
smelled oranges again, and of course the smell of the General.

"Strangewood smells like breakfast," he announced,
happy the thought had occurred to him.

But the Peanut Butter General had not forgotten his
question. "The only way I can think of to keep you safe is to take you to
my home," he explained. "The journey is long, and there are many
dangers along the way: those who would try to prevent us from reaching our
destination."

"Why?" Nathan asked, eyes wide with his lack of
understanding. Longtooth and Cragskull wanted to hurt him, but he didn't know
why anyone else would try to attack, especially a . . . well, a monster, like
the Peanut Butter General.

The General stopped in the path. They'd reached a point just
below the crest of the hill, and the path was all hard-packed dirt and stones
and twigs there. When the General crouched by Nathan with a hand on his
shoulder, the boy heard his knees pop just like an old man's and he stared hard
at the General's knee for a second. Bones in there, he thought.

When he looked at the General's face again, Nathan studied
him intently. There
was
someone in there. Somehow. More than just peanut
butter.

"Son," the General said, "there have always
been bad things in the wood. Bad people and places. Danger. But since your
father stopped coming here, it's only gotten worse. It isn't safe now. You know
the stories, the way things would always work out for the best. That's over,
now. It's savage here. Do you know that word? It's wild, son, and there's only
one person in the world who can do anything about that."

Nathan bit his lip. "My Dad?" he asked.

The General smiled slightly, kindly, and nodded. Then he
stood again and took Nathan firmly by the hand, and together they walked up the
crest of the hill, Orange Pealers spread ten feet on either side of them,
covering the entirety of the broad path out to where the trees shot up from the
earth. Their bumpy flesh glowed oddly under the light from stars whose color
matched their own.

At the top of the hill, Nathan looked down. The path fell
away at a steep angle and then leveled out. It began to curve then, but gently,
and ran another fifty yards as the wood thinned a bit. Then there was the
Up-River, flowing into the heart of Strangewood off to the right. Though it
wound all around Strangewood, almost in an embrace, it changed considerably
over the course of that route. Here, the Up-River had carved itself a canyon
thirty or forty feet deep over the years. The Winding Way led right up to the
edge of the river and continued fifty-seven feet away, on the other side.

Spanning the rushing water was a wooden structure
twelve-feet wide that looked as though it had been patched together over the
course of several decades by a blind carpenter.

"The Rickety Bridge," Nathan whispered.

"It will be all right," the Peanut Butter General
said, and started down, still holding Nathan's hand as the boy stumbled to keep
up with him and the Pealers scrambled madly alongside.

"It will be all right," the General repeated.

But Nathan knew what lived under the Rickety Bridge.

He wanted to go home.

The river rushed up a gentle slope, ignoring gravity
completely. It burbled along, quite content, speaking the language of water. The
Peanut Butter General stood at the edge of the Rickety Bridge and listened to
all the sounds of Strangewood around him. A light breeze stirred in the leaves
on the path, whirling up into a little dust devil that seemed to sway toward
him, whisper a warning, and then skitter off down the path, moving away from
the Bridge as quickly as it was able.

The Rickety Bridge creaked as the wind pushed lightly yet
persistently against it. The General listened carefully to the sounds of the
forest and the river and the bridge, but he could not concentrate over the
other sounds that insinuated themselves into his head.

"Hush, now," he said sternly, lips nearly sticking
together with the first word. He ran his tongue over his lips to clear the webs
of peanut butter away.

The Orange Pealers obeyed instantly. Though it was part of
their nature to scream at all times, almost like bats with their squeaking
sonar, the Pealers fell silent. They had dropped back behind the General and
surrounded the boy, Nathan, whom the General had told them must be protected at
all costs.

Still, there was a cacophony of noise surrounding him that
the General would not tolerate.

It was the bees.

"Away!" he commanded, and held out his arm to
point toward the trees.

Instantly, as though he had torn a garment away from his
skin, the bees fled the body of the Peanut Butter General. Several buzzed from
his throat, into and then out of his mouth. They moved as one, a swarm of angry
yellow and raging black.

The Peanut Butter General waited until he could no longer
hear them, until all that reached his ears were the language of the river and
the whisper of the wind. He felt a ripple at his side, an ebb and flow in the
thickness of the peanut butter at his hip. His fingers seemed to flex of their
own accord, and then he reached out to grip the peanut butter covered hilt of
the long, deadly edged sword that was part of his dress uniform.

It required a great deal of strength to draw the sticky
blade from its scabbard.

"Sir?" the boy said behind him. "General?"

The Peanut Butter General turned silently and brought a
finger to his lips, shushing the boy. Nathan's eyes were wide with helpless
terror. With a gesture to indicate to the boy that he should stay with the
Pealers, no matter what, the General turned and took his first step out onto
the Rickety Bridge.

The creak was tremendous, the wail of unoiled hinges
magnified a hundredfold. The General held his sword out in front of him. There
were boards missing or rotted all across the bridge, and despite its width and
substantial structure, the way it swayed made it feel dangerously flimsy
beneath his feet. The General kept his legs spread wide for balance as he made
his way across. He could hear the scritch-scratch of the tiny feet of the
Orange Pealers on the wood behind him and felt the realignment of weight with
each step Nathan took to follow him.

Without the trees, the orange stars lit the night around
them. The black water of the Up-river ran on either side of the bridge, rushed
quickly over rocks and around jags in its deep canyon walls, and where the
rough water gave up foamy white, it too was tainted orange by the light. To the
west, the canyon fell away and the river followed more than a mile before it
turned north and collapsed entirely into a water rise, where millions of
gallons of the Foamy Sea flowed up the side of a cliff to get to the riverbed
in the first place.

In all his years in Strangewood, the Peanut Butter General
had never been to the Foamy Sea. He thought briefly that if he survived all of
this — if Strangewood survived it — he would like to get a glimpse
of that churning water.

To the east, the Up-River flowed, well, up. The incline
became greater and greater as it wound steeply into the Bald Mountains toward
the high peaks and the fortress of the Jackal Lantern.

The General took several steps across the bridge, carefully,
staying alert. There was no sign of trouble from either side, or from beneath. Only
thirty-five feet to the other side now, where the Winding Way picked up once
more and the wood began to thin out some. And after that, less than two miles
to the forest stronghold that the Peanut Butter General had been secretly
building for the past six years — ever since Thomas Randall published the
first book about
Strangewood
. A good soldier was always prepared for the
worst.