“But don’t you wonder about where they might be being sent to?” Thomas asks, in an attempt to keep the conversation reasonable. Because I’m about ready to give her the finger. Or stick my tongue out.
“The athame sends them where they need to be,” she replies.
“Who told you that? The Order?”
Jestine and I lock eyes. She’s going to look away first. Even if my eyeballs have to completely dry out.
“Wait a minute,” Carmel says. “Back on point, are you saying that nobody knows where we’re going?” She looks around; our blank faces serve as confirmation. “And we’re supposed to leave the groomed and maintained trail to go through unmarked forest?”
“There is a mark,” Jestine says calmly.
“What, like a flag or something? Unless there’s a string of them leading through the trees, I’m not comforted.” She looks at me. “You saw out your window this morning. These trees go on for miles. And we don’t even have a compass. People die this way.”
She’s right. People die this way. More frequently than we like to think about. But Gideon knows we’re coming. If we don’t show up on schedule, he’ll send someone looking for us. And besides, in my gut I don’t believe that we can get lost. Looking at Jestine, I don’t think she believes we can either. But how do I explain that to Carmel?
“Thomas, you ever in the Boy Scouts?” I ask, and he squints at me. Of course he wasn’t. “Listen, if you want, you can just follow the path back to the inn.”
Thomas tenses at the suggestion, but Carmel crosses her arms over her chest. “I’m not going anywhere,” she says stubbornly. “I just thought it was worth mentioning that this is stupid and we’re probably going to die.”
“Noted,” I say, and Jestine smiles. The smile puts me at ease. She doesn’t hold grudges; you can disagree with her and not become an enemy. I’ve wanted to strangle her for half the time I’ve known her, but I like that.
“We should go soon,” she says. “So we don’t lose the light.”
* * *
After another hour and who knows how many more miles, Jestine starts to slow. Every once in a while she stops and looks around the woods in all directions. She thinks we’ve gone far enough. Now she’s getting nervous that the marker won’t be there. When she pulls up at the crest of a small hill, we all take our backpacks off and sit down while she stares. Despite good shoes and being in relatively good shape, we’re all tired. Carmel is rubbing the backs of her knees while Thomas rubs his shoulder. They’re both slightly pale, and clammy.
“There it is,” Jestine says, in a tone that implies she always knew it would be. She turns back to us, triumphant, a wicked gleam in her eyes. Down the path in the trees lining the trail I see it: a black ribbon, tied around a trunk, fifteen feet off the ground.
“We leave the trail there,” she tells us. “And on the other side is the Order. Gideon said it would only be two hours through the woods. Just a few more miles.”
“We can do that,” I say to Thomas and Carmel, and they stand up, looking at the ribbon and trying to overcome their trepidation.
“Maybe the forest floor will be softer at least,” Thomas says.
Jestine smiles. “That’s right. Come on.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“It’s old-growth forest,” Jestine says, after the scenery changes gradually from meadow and pine to deciduous trees and fallen trunks overrun with moss.
“It’s beautiful,” says Carmel, and she’s right. Trees stretch tall over our heads, and our feet whisper through a blanket of low ferns and moss. Everything in sight is green or gray. Where the soil peeks through, it’s black as pitch. Light filters down through the leaves, bouncing and refracting off their smooth surfaces, painting everything crisp and completely clear. The only sounds come from us, obscene interlopers crunching through with scratchy canvas backpacks and blundering feet.
“Look,” says Thomas. “There’s a sign.”
I glance up. A black, wooden sign has been tacked to one of the trunks. Written in white paint is the phrase:
The world has many beautiful places.
“Sort of weird,” he says, and we shrug.
“It seems humble. Like they know this forest is beautiful, but not the most beautiful,” comments Carmel. Jestine smiles at this, but as we pass the sign, something starts to itch in the back of my brain. Images start flipping through my memory, disconnected, made-up images of things I’ve never actually seen, like pictures in a book.
“I know this place,” I say softly, at the exact moment that Thomas points and says, “There’s another one.”
This time the sign reads:
Consider the love of your family.
“That’s a little random,” says Carmel.
“It’s not random at all, if you know where we are,” I say, and all three of them eye me tensely. I don’t know what Gideon was thinking, sending us here. When I see him at the Order, I might just wring his neck. I breathe in deep, and listen; a stark lot of nothing hits my ears. No birdsongs, no scurrying of chipmunk or squirrel legs. Not even the sound of wind. The breeze is choked off by the density of the trees. Beneath the layer of clear air, my nose barely detects it, mixed in with the loam and decay of vegetation. The place is laced with death. It’s someplace that I’ve only heard about from charlatans like Daisy Bristol, a place that’s been relegated to a campfire story.
It’s the Suicide Forest. I’m walking through the fucking Suicide Forest with two witches, and a knife that flashes to the dead like a damn lighthouse.
“Suicide Forest?” Thomas squeaks. “What do you mean ‘suicide forest’?” Which of course triggers an outburst of similarly alarmed questions from Carmel, and even a few from Jestine.
“I mean just what it sounds like,” I reply, staring dismally at the useless painted sign that does virtually nothing to change people’s minds. “This is where people come to die. Or, more accurately, this is where people come to kill themselves. They come from all over the place. To OD, or slit their wrists, or hang.”
“That’s terrible,” Carmel says. She hugs herself and moves closer to Thomas, who sidles closer to her too, looking green enough to match the moss. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty much.”
“Well, it’s horrible. And all they have here is these lame signs? There should be … patrols or … help, or something.”
“I imagine there are patrols,” Jestine says. “Only they’re mainly for collecting bodies, not for preventing the suicides.”
“What do you mean, you imagine?” I ask. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know what we were walking into. If I knew about this halfway around the world, you had to know about it in your own backyard.”
“Well, of course I’ve heard of it,” she says. “From girls at school and the like. I never thought it existed really. It was like the story of the babysitter who answers the phone and the calls have been coming from inside the house. It’s like the boogeyman.”
Thomas shakes his head, but there’s no reason to not believe her. The Suicide Forest isn’t something the police would want publicized. More people would just come to kill themselves.
“I don’t want to cross it,” Carmel declares. “It just … doesn’t feel right. We have to go around.”
“There is no way around,” Jestine says. But of course there has to be. The Suicide Forest can’t be bordered by nothingness. “We have to cross. If we don’t, we might get lost, and you were right when you said there were miles and miles of forest to die in. I don’t fancy winding up one more body in the woods.”
The phrase hits home for Thomas and Carmel, and their eyes flicker to the ground and trees around them. I’m going to be the deciding vote. If I want to try to find a way around, Jestine will come with us. Maybe I should. But I won’t. Because that ghost back at the inn wasn’t the test that the Order had planned. This is. And we’ve come this far.
“Just stay together,” I say, and the hope on Carmel’s face vanishes. “
It probably won’t be anything worse than a few dead bodies. Just keep on your toes.”
We switch formation to me in the front and Jestine in the back, with Thomas and Carmel in the middle. As we pass by the second sign, I can’t help but feel like we’re walking into a black hole. But that’s a feeling I should probably get used to.
* * *
Ten tense minutes pass before we catch our first glimpse. Carmel gasps, but it’s just a pile of scattered bones, a rib cage and most of an arm, taken over by moss.
“It’s okay,” Thomas whispers while I keep an eye on it to make sure it isn’t going to reassemble.
“It’s not,” Carmel whispers back. “It’s worse. I don’t know why it’s worse, but it is.”
She’s right. The beauty of the forest has been stripped. There’s nothing here but misery and silence. It seems impossible that anyone would want to spend their last moments here, and I wonder whether the woods lure them in with false breezes and sunlight, wearing a mask of peace, the whole damned system of roots and hanging branches preying on people like a spider.
“We’ll be through before long,” Jestine says. “It can’t be much more than a mile now. Just keep heading northeast.”
“She’s right,” I say, stepping over a fallen log. “A half hour more and we’ll be out.” Another body pops up in my peripheral vision, something fresher, still clothed and in one piece. It’s hanging against the trunk of the tree. I can just see the side of it, and I keep my eyes trained forward even while I watch for movement, for the broken neck to jerk suddenly in our direction. Nothing. We pass by and it’s just another body. Just a lost soul.
The march goes on, and we try to keep our footsteps quiet while at the same time wanting to run. There are bodies upon bodies in these woods, some in piles and some scattered in separate pieces. Someone in a suit and tie lay down against a fallen log and lies there still, his jaw yawning open and his eye sockets black. I want to reach back and take Carmel’s hand. We should find a way to anchor to each other.
“Tell me again why you’re going through all this,” Jestine says from the back. “Gideon has told me some, and then Thomas told me more. But tell me again. Why all this trouble, for a dead girl?”
“That dead girl saved our lives,” I reply.
“So I hear. But that just means you light a candle and give her a nod every now and then. It doesn’t mean you cross an ocean and walk through the forest of the dead just to find a way to the other side to pull her back out again. She did it on purpose, didn’t she?”
I glance around. There are no bodies visible, for the moment. “Not like these,” I say. “She did what she had to. And she wound up someplace she doesn’t belong.”
“Wherever she is, it is what she has made it,” Jestine says. “You know that, don’t you? You know that where she is, it’s not what most people think of as Heaven or Hell. Just outside. Outside of everything. Outside of rules, and logic, and laws. It has no value, good or bad. Right or wrong.”
I walk faster, even though my legs feel reliable as cooked noodles. “How do you know?” I ask, and she laughs breathlessly.
“I don’t. It’s just what I’ve been taught; what I’ve been told.”
I glance over my shoulder at Thomas, who shrugs.
“Every doctrine has its own theory,” he says. “Maybe they’re all right. Maybe none are. Whatever, I’m no philosopher.”
“Well, what would Morfran say?”
“He’d say we’re all idiots for walking through the Suicide Forest. Are we still going the right way?”
“Yeah,” I say, but as soon as he asks, I’m no longer sure. The light is funny here, and I can’t track the sun. It feels like we’ve been walking a straight line, but a line can curve all the way back on itself if you walk it far enough. And we’ve been walking for a long time.
“So,” Jestine says after a few minutes of tense silence. “You were all friends with this dead girl?”
“Yes,” Carmel says. Her tone is clipped. She’d like Jestine to shut up. Not because she’s offended, but because she’d rather all our attention be on the trees and corpses. But so far, they’re just corpses. Acre after acre of decomposing bodies. It’s unsettling, but not dangerous.
“And maybe more than friends?”
“Do you have an issue with this, Jestine?” Carmel asks.
“No,” Jestine replies. “Not really. It’s just that I wonder what’s the point? Even if you don’t die trying, and you somehow manage to get her back—it’s not as though she and Cas can settle down and raise a family.”
“Can we just shut up and get through the death woods?” I snap, and keep my eyes straight ahead. What are we talking about this for, when there are people hanging from branches like goddamn Christmas tree ornaments? Concentrating on the present moment seems more important than waxing theoretical.
Jestine doesn’t shut up. She keeps on chattering, just not to me. Instead she talks to Thomas, quietly, small talk of Morfran and magic. Maybe she does it to prove that I’m not the boss of her. But I think she’s doing it to mask her growing nervousness. Because we’ve been walking for far too long, and there’s no end in sight. Still, our legs keep moving forward, and the unified thought is that it can’t be much farther. Maybe if we think it hard enough, it’ll turn out to be true.
We have to have gone another half mile before Carmel finally whispers, “We’re not going the right way. We should have been there by now.”
I wish she hadn’t said anything. There’s a light sheen of panic sweat on my forehead. For at least the last five minutes, I’ve been thinking the same thing. We’ve gone way too far. Either Jestine was wrong when she told us the distance, or the Suicide Forest is stretching its dimensions. The pulse in my throat says it’s the latter, that we’ve walked into it and it isn’t letting go. After all, it could be that no one intends to kill themselves here. They just do it after the woods drive them insane.
“Stop,” Carmel says, and grabs the back of my shirt. “We’re going in circles.”
“We aren’t going in circles,” I say. “We might be completely screwed, but I know that much. I’ve been walking in a straight line, and the last time I checked, both of my legs were the same length.”
“Look,” she says. Her arm shoots out over my shoulder, pointing into the trees. Off to our left, a corpse hangs against a trunk, strung up by black nylon rope. It’s wearing a canvas vest and a tattered brown t-shirt. One of its feet is missing.
“We’ve seen it before. It’s the same one. I remember. We’re going around in circles. I don’t know how, but we are.”
“Shit.” She’s right. I remember that one too. But I have no idea how we’ve managed to double back on ourselves.
“That’s not possible,” says Thomas. “We would’ve felt it, if we’d curved around that far.”
“I’m not walking this again.” Carmel shakes her head. Her eyes are wild, ringed with white. “We have to try another way. Another direction.”
“There’s only one way to the Order,” Jestine interjects, and Carmel wheels on her.
“Well, maybe we’re not getting to the Order!” Her voice quiets. “Maybe we were never supposed to.”
“Don’t panic,” is all I can think to say. It’s all that’s important. I don’t understand how these trees are stretching. I don’t understand how I was put so far off track that I’ve wound up back at the beginning. But I do know that if any one of us panics now, that’ll be it. Whoever runs first will let the fear out of everyone else, like a gunshot, and we will run. We’ll be lost and maybe separated before we even know what we’re doing.
“Oh, shit.”
“What?” I ask, looking at Thomas. His eyes are big as eggs behind his glasses. He’s looking off over my shoulder.
I turn around. The corpse is still there, hanging from the tree, the lower jaw half dropping off and the skin sagging. My eyes scan the scenery and nothing moves. The corpse just hangs. Only—I blink a second—it’s big
ger. Except that it isn’t bigger. It’s closer.
“It moved,” Carmel whispers, and grabs on to my sleeve. “It wasn’t there before. It was there.” She points. “It was farther away; I’m sure of it.”
“Maybe not,” says Jestine. “Maybe it’s just your eyes playing tricks on you.” Sure. It’s a reasonable explanation, and one that doesn’t make me want to piss myself and run screaming. We’ve been in this forest for too long, that’s all. Reality is starting to bend.
Something behind us moves, shuffling through the leaves and snapping twigs. We spin on instinct; it’s the first noise the trees have made since we walked into them. Whatever it is it’s not close enough to see. A few of the ferns attached to a large ash seem like they might be wavering, but I can’t tell if they really are, or if my head’s making it up.
“Turn around!”
Thomas’s shout makes my scalp tighten as I spin. The body has moved again. It’s at least three trees closer, and this time it’s hanging toward us. The bleary, decomposing eyes regard us with something that’s almost interest. Behind us, the trees whisper again, but I don’t turn to look. I know what would happen. The next time I turn back, those whitened eyes might be inches from my face.
“Circle up,” I say, my voice as in control as I can manage. Our time is limited. The movement in the trees is all around now, and it isn’t stopping. All of the corpses we passed before are on their way. They must’ve been stalking us the whole time, and I don’t like to think of their heads turning to stare after our backs as we went.
“Keep your eyes open,” I tell them when I feel their shoulders press against mine. “We’ll go as fast as we can, but be careful. Don’t stumble.” On my back left, I feel Carmel bend down and hear her pick up what must be a thick stick off the ground. “The good news is we haven’t gone in a circle. So we’ll be out of here before long.”
“Some fucking good news,” Carmel snaps sarcastically, and despite everything I crack a smile. Whenever she gets scared, she gets so pissed.