“C’mon!” shouted Nico. He leapt from cover and, following Curtis’s lead, did a little attention-grabbing dance before running toward the distant tree line. Rachel came swiftly behind, running as fast as she could through the thick stratum of ivy that covered everything. Soon, she’d made it beyond the trees and could see the golden fringe of Curtis’s epaulets glinting in the breaking sun.
The giants’ crashing steps sounded loudly behind them as the creatures gave pursuit.
“This way!” shouted Curtis, seeing that Nico and Rachel had followed him. They skittered across the forest floor while a wave of ivy followed them, a flurry of tendrils being sent out with every one of the giants’ footfalls. Finally, Rachel saw Curtis reach a small glade and turn sharply to the left, diving behind a stand of sword ferns. She and Nico followed quickly after, rolling to a stop next to him.
“Heads down!” hissed Curtis, his own cheek kissing the cold scrub of the fern fronds. Rachel did as she was instructed; Nico watched the scene in the meadow play out.
The first giant came clambering past the line of trees and stopped, scanning the landscape for sign of its prey. The clutch of ivy at its large, clubbed feet seemed to pause as well, its waxy leaves swaying about like a many-headed hydra. It seemed momentarily baffled by the humans’ disappearance, standing just on the outskirts of the clearing.
“C’mon,” hissed Curtis. “Just . . . go!”
Rachel shot a curious look at her brother; his attention was fixed on the strange creature.
The giant, then, evidently seemed to make a guess as to which way they’d gone and it began to walk again, taking another lumbering step into the center of the glade. A loud, woody click sounded, and the giant flinched at the noise. No sooner had it done this than the greenery surrounding it seemed to peel back and a vast handwoven net, anchored by an unseen pulley in the trees, whipped up and neatly captured the creature’s legs in its web. The behemoth toppled to the ground with a moan of surprise and anger; the ground tremored at its landfall. The trap gave a noisy complaint, as it was unable to lift the weight of its captive, but the giant seemed fairly ensnared regardless.
Curtis let out a little whoop and pumped his fist against his side, seeing the success of his well-laid trap. He looked at Rachel and Nico, saying, “Not bad, eh?”
The giant writhed in its bonds, letting out angered, rattling groans from its mouthless face. Nico and Rachel looked on with horror. Two more of the giants entered the clearing and, seeing their compatriot caught in the trap, began whipping about angrily, sending vines of ivy from the tips of their long, twiggy fingers.
And that was when Curtis saw her.
The ivy had rustled a little, the dormant ivy that sat in patches about the clearing and issued from the fists of the angry giants, before undulating alive, and the center of the clearing became awash in a kind of turbulent cyclone of writhing greenery, and then the center erupted and out of it grew a pillar of winding vines that, bizarrely, began to take the form of a very human-looking creature. A very human-looking woman.
Even though she was like a sculptor’s replica of an original, the death mask produced by a handy plasterer, Curtis immediately recognized her. It was the same woman who’d taken him in and shown him the Wood in all its glory, when he’d first set foot in this strange place. The woman who’d first put a saber in his hand and given him his own uniform. The first person he’d ever truly known to be evil, and not in the way he’d been accustomed to, growing up in the Outside. She was not some idle felon, not some immoral crook; she was a woman who he’d seen become completely derailed by her own passions. He’d recognized it when he’d come across Prue’s babbling baby brother in a crib surrounded by crows, with her there, complicit in the deed. He remembered her that way, standing amid those black, squawking things, and how her heart outshone even the dark birds in its opaque, bruised blackness.
But what he saw now was green.
Like the giants, her arms were ivy and her legs, splaying out from the ground, were ivy and her lithe torso was ivy. Her face was ivy, but the vines here began cinching closer together until features were constructed and two twin tufts of ivy vines grew from her head and draped down her neck, insinuating themselves together until they became the two braids that the woman had worn in life, so many months ago.
Curtis looked on and saw the writhing body of Alexandra, the Dowager Governess, re-formed from molten ivy.
He felt his sister’s breath at his neck; he felt Nico’s nervous, clutching hand at his shoulder. He wondered, then, if their horror at seeing this specter seemingly rise from the ether was as horrific to them as it was to him; they did not know the heart of this thing. Curtis had reckoned it immediately.
“No,” he breathed quietly. “It can’t be.”
“What?” asked Rachel. “What is it?”
“Looks like a she,” said Nico.
“We have to get out of here,” replied Curtis in a whisper. In the clearing, this new, plantlike Alexandra had completed her transformation and was now standing and inspecting the damage wrought by Curtis’s trap. She casually circled the collapsed net while the giant within had ceased his protestations and was lying dormant. The ivy-woman, some ten feet tall, did not so much walk as re-transform herself at every step, the ivy that made up her flesh and bones reconfiguring and re-entwining to give the illusion of walking.
Moving up to the netting, the ivy-made Alexandra reached one of her leafy hands out and touched the forehead of the captured giant, like a mother would the brow of a child or a cowering dog. Just as her fingers made contact with the giant’s head, the ivy form dissipated and the netting collapsed in on itself, suddenly freed of its contents. The leaves and vines that had made up the giant’s form simply fell apart, like a bubble bursting, and returned to the laden earth, to the swelling ivy at the plant-woman’s feet.
Then, to the horror of the three onlookers, the woman raised her arms out and extended her fingers. The ivy below her hands ruptured and split, and suddenly two new forms began to rumble into shape. Before long, the budding shapes of two new ivy giants had been produced and were squirming into life. They started as little pupa, two burping embryos on the forest floor; they bawled and brayed in new life. Then, as the woman continued her conjuration, they found their footing and they sprouted new growth: Their arms and legs lengthened and found strength; a writhing crown of hair jetted from each of their heads. As stunted preadolescents, they were dwarfed by the other two, fully grown ivy giants. Soon, however, their spines straightened and they grew tall and strong, having achieved a kind of developmental adulthood in a matter of moments.
Nico said something, loudly, having finally broken the barriers of his own disbelief. “You have got to be kidding me,” he said. Curtis tried to shush him, but it was too late; the plant-woman, Alexandra, had twisted her neck around and was staring with her baleful, hollow eyes in the direction of their hiding place. Her mouth gawped open; a horrible scream emitted from the dark space it made.
“GO!” shouted Curtis, and he thrust himself up from the ground. He could hear Nico and Rachel scramble behind him; he threw his hand out to his sister, who’d slipped on something in her desperation, and the two of them tore away from the scene in the clearing, not looking back. They didn’t see Nico falter, strangely transfixed by the ivy-woman, but they heard him scream as a flood of ivy, sent by one of the giants’ crushing footfalls, poured toward him.
They both looked around in time to see the man become swallowed in the wave, a wave that engulfed his black-clad, turtlenecked body in a short matter of seconds. His scream dissipated in the air and then he was gone.
“Nico!” yelled Rachel desperately. She hesitated momentarily, wanting to return to the small lump of ivy that remained where the saboteur had stood, but Curtis pulled her away.
“We have to go!” he shouted as the crest of ivy approached them. Rachel turned her attention away from her friend, the funny saboteur who’d become such a canny part of he
r world, and instead watched as the rolling ivy, having swallowed the man whole, galloped toward them. She let go of her brother’s hand and started sprinting through the woods as fast as her legs could carry her.
CHAPTER 27
Deluge!
The trees blew by her like mile markers on a highway; she threaded the obstacle course of the forest, following the practiced path of her brother, who leapt the fallen tree trunks and dodged the shrubbery with an exceptional skill. The sound of the ivy and the thundering steps of the giants only pushed her onward until the noise fell away behind them. She broke through a thicket of blackberry brambles and slid down a muddy embankment; when she looked up, Curtis was nowhere to be seen.
“Rach!” came a hissed voice.
Down the gully, Curtis was lying flat by a fallen tree. Rachel threw herself down the ravine, scrabbling along the incline madly, and took cover beside him. Just then, the trees above the gully broke open and five ivy giants came lumbering across the landscape, handily making the small gap with one stride. The little flurries of ivy exploded at their every step. Taking up the rear of the procession was the spectral woman, who paused momentarily at the far side of the embankment. Rachel sat against the fallen tree, her hand cupped over her mouth and her eyes streaming panicked tears. Curtis stared at his sister with his finger to his lips, willing her to fight the instinct to scream.
She stared at him, hard; together, they wished the world away.
Then the crashing footsteps began again and the ivy-woman was gone, leaving a trail of flowing green in her path. Only the sound of that creeping plant could be heard. Rachel let her hand fall from her mouth and said, “We have to go back for Nico!”
Curtis shook his head, cutting away a clutch of vines that had ensnared his knees while they’d crouched in hiding. “You saw what happened. He’s gone, Rach.”
Just then, a scream sounded, distantly, from some hollow of the forest. The two Mehlberg siblings recognized the sound immediately; they’d both heard that very scream as it changed from wailing infant to petulant tween in the privacy of their own home. It was, without a doubt, their sister Elsie.
“The fort!” cried Curtis, and they both leapt up, fighting back the snaking ivy, and ran in the direction of Deerskull Dragonfighter. The closer they got, the thicker the ivy grew; soon, they were wading through a knee-deep morass of the clinging stuff, their movements reduced to a slow-motion slog. They wielded their saber blades like machetes, cutting the stuff away as it clung to their pant legs and tangled around their waists. Elsie’s screams persisted; soon, other voices joined in.
“HOLD ON!” shouted Curtis. He felt a jostling weight on his shoulder and looked to see Septimus, having leapt down from a low-hanging branch.
“The ivy!” said the rat. “It’s taking over the fort!”
“We’re trying to get there!” hollered Curtis, but with every step, the painful trudge became more and more difficult. Like the thickest mud, the stuff now clung to Curtis’s boot heels stubbornly, and it required all his reserves of strength to take a single step. It seemed that the ivy left in the wake of the giants’ footsteps continued to ensnare its surroundings in this web, and the world was being covered before Curtis’s very eyes: The low-lying bushes were long gone; the saplings were bent, wilted heaps; the twiggy alders were swallowed whole and the big-leaf maples, already encrusted in moss, had grown a shaggy beard of vines. The tenacious plant was now claiming the farthest territory of the forest: It scaled the highest firs and cedars in its ineluctable conquest for the sky.
He knew the territory well enough; even under its current transformation, Curtis could make out the large cedar tree that anchored the ladder to the fort. The bark of its trunk was completely enshrouded; even now the rigid, wide profile of the tree was being distorted by the ivy as layer upon layer of the plant was painted over it; the ivy clambered over itself to reach the higher boughs, like ants prostrating themselves at the base of some obstacle so its million-strong army could overcome it. He felt the vines making a vigorous assault up his lower back; he felt his steps falter. A vine snapped up and snagged the hilt of his sword, and he felt his arm held fast by the woody plant.
“Septimus!” he shouted. “Get help!”
“Help?” cried the rat, incredulous. “Where am I supposed to get help?”
“I don’t know!” He heard Rachel holler; looking over his shoulder he saw his sister, waist-deep in the ivy mire, as a few vines snagged the strands of her hair and jerked her head backward. The rat, seeing this, jumped from Curtis’s shoulder to a nearby tree and began scurrying up the ivy stalks, his small stature allowing him easy passage over the plant.
Up he went, his nimble legs darting away from any tendril that tried to ensnare them. Within moments, he’d reached the first platform on the tree; it was already completely blanketed. The railings dangled ivy like stalactites. The sounds of the shouting children could still be heard from higher up in the canopy. An ivy vine attacked his front foot; Septimus smacked it back admonishingly.
“Oh no, you don’t,” he sneered.
Looking for help, here in the depths of the woods, seemed like a fairly absurd task. Had he another moment, he would have suggested to Curtis that they were, in fact, the only real going concern when it came to help or assistance in Wildwood, and they seemed to be awfully busy at the moment. But appearances must be kept up, he decided, flying up the ivy-draped stairway to the main hut of the hideout. Here, the entire place had been consumed by the plant; he scrambled over to the gangway that led to the neighboring fir and, looking high into its branches, saw that everyone had congregated on the small shingle of space that was the fort’s lookout station.
“Septimus!” shouted one of the children. “What do we do?”
Even though the crow’s nest had been constructed within the highest limbs of the tallest fir tree within miles—the hideout’s location had, in fact, been chosen for this very tree’s particular qualities—the ivy was already snaking its way up the trunk, and its farthest tentacles were just touching the underside of the platform.
“Hold up!” shouted Septimus, rat-galloping across the bridge. “I’m coming!”
He scurried up the fir trunk, circling it as he went so as to avoid the most rapacious vines. When he made the platform, he was surprised to see that he’d beaten the ivy there—though it was fast approaching. On a simple, five-by-five wooden ledge stood six people. The platform had been built just ten feet shy of the very top of the tree, which itself stood some two hundred and fifty feet tall above the ground. The tree was hale and hearty, boasting some half dozen centuries on the earth, but its crown was swaying under the weight of its six (now seven) occupants like a particularly tall man undergoing a fainting spell. They were five children, a rat, and a blind old man, and they stood on the platform with their backs pressed to the tree’s diminished trunk.
“Okay!” said Septimus, finding a postage-stamp-sized spot for himself. “I’m here.”
The people on the platform shared uncertain glances.
“Where’s Curtis?” asked Elsie.
“Down there, fighting ivy,” said Septimus.
“We tried to save Roger,” shouted Martha, pointing out at the nearby trees. “But we couldn’t get to him in time.” Everything was drowning in the ivy wave. The tree that held the weight of their captive’s pen, several yards off, was completely enshrouded.
Septimus gulped. “Let’s just hope it was quick and painless.”
The wind picked up and buffeted the top of the tree like a rubbery antenna; wide-shouldered Harry gave a whimper and pressed his small back closer to the tree’s trunk. The sound of the ivy, a kind of scratchy slither, was everywhere, like snakes moving through rustling leaves. They heard a shout from far below; Septimus reckoned it to be Curtis’s voice. He peered over the edge of the platform and yelled, “Hang on there, Curtis!”
“What do we do?” asked Martha, her hand firmly grasped in Carol’s.
“Get he
lp,” said Septimus. “That’s what Curtis suggested.”
“How do we do that?” This was Elsie.
Septimus chewed on his lower lip for a second before saying, “Shout?”
“That’s sort of what we’ve been doing,” said Ruthie.
Suddenly, a loud crack sounded. Some of the ivy had crept through a break in the platform’s thin, hand-milled planks and had broken away a large chunk right below Oz’s feet. He immediately lost his balance and pinwheeled out into the air.
“Oz!” shouted Ruthie. Just as he tipped off the edge, the girl managed to grasp hold of his hand. It was an impetuous move on Ruthie’s part, one driven by the fierce love and dedication the two shared, but the very real facts of gravity and motion made it so that Ruthie joined Oz in his downward plummet.
Elsie screamed; Martha planted her feet. Harry jolted forward, his hand interlocked with Elsie’s, and swung one thick arm in a quick swoop, snagging Ruthie by her black Chapeaux Noirs–issue pant leg. The momentum of the two children’s fall was stopped, briefly, as the forward motion of the energy was distributed backward through Harry’s arm to Elsie’s hand; from there it was further absorbed by Martha, whose elbow was interlocked around Elsie’s, and finally to Carol, who, instinctively, had thrown his arms around the trunk of the tree while Martha looped her fingers into his hand-spun rope belt.
Septimus, now doubly certain of the very extreme lack of hope in their present circumstances, began running in quick, panicked circles on his small portion of the rickety platform. The ivy continued its steady crawl, unabated, and it began to lap over the edge of the shingle.
They were all screaming various shouts and epithets, a bond of adrenaline running through them. Except for Oz, at the end of the chain, hanging several hundred feet above the ground, who had promptly passed out cold.