Wildwood Imperium Page 2

  “Match,” said Zita.

  Alice brought out a small box labeled THE HORSE AND HIND PUBLIC HOUSE. Pulling a match from within, she struck it against the side and the thing flickered alight. Zita took it from Alice and held the flame to the now-closed censer.

  A light exploded from the object.

  Kendra shrieked; Alice threw her hand to her face. Only Zita and little Becca remained calm as an eerie illumination blew from the holes in the censer and flooded the ruined house like someone had tripped a floodlight. The smell of sage filled the air, sage and another scent that none of them could properly identify: Perhaps it was the smell of water. Or the smell of air released from an attic room long closed off.

  “Okay,” said Zita calmly. “Everyone join hands around me.”

  The girls did as they were told. Zita stood in the center with the glowing censer, thick tendrils of smoke now pouring from the teardrop-shaped holes in the brass. Taking a deep breath, she began her recitation:

  On the first of May

  Too loo too ray

  Before the dark succumbs to day

  When sparrows cry

  Too loo too rye

  We call the Verdant Empress

  She looked at the small circle of girls surrounding her. Their eyes were tightly shut. The littlest, Becca, furrowed her brow in deep concentration. “Now you all repeat,” said Zita, “after me.”

  And they did:

  We call you

  Verdant Empress

  We call you

  Verdant Empress

  Verdant Empress

  Verdant Empress

  Then Zita spoke alone. “Now count off. I’m going to turn.”

  The girls hummed the count as Zita made slow pirouettes in the center of the circle.

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  Suddenly, the light from the censer was snuffed out, like an extinguished candle flame.

  The ivy rustled at their feet, though no breeze disturbed the air.

  And then, issuing from the ground came the distinct sound of a woman’s low, gravelly moan.

  Kendra screamed and fell backward; Alice grabbed Becca and, in a state of absolute panic, threw her sister over her shoulder and stumbled for the house’s doorway. Within a flash, three of the four girls had made a hasty exit from the house and were sprinting, screaming, through the encircling woods. Only Zita remained, transfixed, the extinguished censer swinging in her hand.

  All was silent. The moaning had ceased; the ivy had stopped writhing. Zita looked down at the mirror at her feet. The glass was fogged.

  Slowly, words began to scrawl across the glass, as if drawn there by a finger.

  GIRL, they read.

  Zita’s breath caught in her throat.

  I AM AWAKE.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Difficult Houseguest

  “Pancakes, pancakes, pancakes,” Prue’s dad announced in a cheerful singsong as he stuck his head around the kitchen door. “Who wants some more pancakes?”

  Prue politely demurred, saying, “None for me, thanks.” She’d already had two. Her mother and baby brother, Mac, didn’t say anything, as if they hadn’t heard a word the pancake chef had said. Instead, they were staring intently at their houseguest, who was taking up most of one side of the dining room table.

  They were staring intently at their houseguest, who was taking up most of one side of the dining room table.

  “I’d go for a few more,” said the guest. “If you insist.”

  Prue’s mother’s eyes went wide, and the color vanished from her face.

  “That’s what I like,” said Prue’s dad, undeterred. “A guy with an appetite.” He disappeared back into the kitchen, whistling some unidentifiable pop song.

  “W-would you like some m-more o-orange juice?” managed Prue’s mother.

  The guest looked at the three empty jugs of juice on the table. He suddenly seemed embarrassed. “Oh, no thanks, Mrs. McKeel,” he said. “I think I’ve probably had enough.”

  Just then, Prue’s dad reappeared from the kitchen and heaped another five pancakes on the guest’s plate, steam hissing from the blueberries in the cooked batter. By Prue’s count, these would bring the guest’s pancake intake up to thirty-seven.

  “Hope you don’t want any more,” said Prue’s dad, smiling, “’cause we’re cleaned out of flour. And milk. And butter.”

  The guest smiled appreciatively at Prue’s dad, saying, “Oh, thanks very much. This’ll do just fine.” He reached across the table for the pitcher of syrup but stopped, daunted by the task of fitting a golden hook, which stood in place of his hand, through the pitcher’s handle.

  “Here,” said Prue. “Let me help.” She picked up the syrup pitcher and proceeded to pour the thick brown liquid over the guest’s heap of pancakes. “Say when.”

  “When,” said the guest.

  “Your friend sure has an appetite,” said Mrs. McKeel.

  Prue looked at her mom and sighed. “He is a bear, Mom,” she said.

  That much was true: the McKeels’ breakfast guest was a very large brown bear. What’s more, he was a bear with shiny hooks in place of his claws. He could also talk. But the McKeel household had, by this time, become somewhat used to strange phenomena in their lives.

  Only last fall, the youngest of the clan, Mac, barely a year old, had been abducted by a flock of crows (or, as Prue had corrected them: a murder of crows), and their daughter, unbeknownst to her parents, had gone after him, putting not only her own life in very serious danger, but also the life of her schoolmate, Curtis Mehlberg, who’d followed her. And it wasn’t as if the crows had simply deposited the babe in a nest somewhere; rather, they’d brought him to the Impassable Wilderness, a deep, vast stretch of woods that bordered the city of Portland, Oregon. It was a forbidden place—stories were traded about unlucky people becoming lost and walking into the woods, never to return. Apparently, this wasn’t the entire truth: Prue and Curtis had discovered a thriving world inside the boundary of these woods, a world of wise Mystics, savage bandits, warring moles, bird princes, and a Dowager Governess, consumed by living ivy. They’d become inextricably entwined with the events in this land, and now it seemed like the very fate of the place relied on their actions.

  In normal households, a child coming to his or her parents reporting such things would mean immediate psychiatric evaluation, or, if the parent were particularly gullible, a call to the local authorities at the very least. The McKeels, having had their son Mac returned to them, did neither. In fact, it could be argued that they had themselves brought the whole episode down on their unsuspecting children. You see, in order to have children, they’d had to make a deal with a strange woman who’d emerged from the Impassable Wilderness, crossing a bridge that had appeared out of the very mist. So it didn’t strike them as being overly strange, this world inside the forest. They’d mostly just been happy to get their kids back safely.

  After that, things just got weirder; Prue had disappeared some months before on her way to get naan bread from the local Indian take-out joint. They’d both, Lincoln and Anne McKeel, suffered a kind of instinctual shudder of fear when she hadn’t returned, but they both knew, deep down, that there were likely stranger things afoot. Their instincts had been proven right when, later that evening, an egret had landed on their front porch and knocked on their door with his beak. He announced, somewhat nonchalantly, that their daughter had been taken back into the Impassable Wilderness—more specifically, an area of the I.W. that this bird had called Wildwood—for her own safety. Apparently, she was someone of importance in this strange world, and an enemy had dispatched a shape-shifting assassin to end her short, preteen life. It made perfect sense to them at the time, and they immediately set about writing the requisite letters to her middle school, informing them that she had mono and would be missing class for the foreseeable future. They waited patiently for her return, knowing she was in very good hands.

  And now this: Pru
e had arrived at their home some few weeks prior walking with a slight limp, her arm in a makeshift sling and a very large, very English-speaking brown bear in tow. They’d done their best to accommodate the new guest, setting up their giant car camping tent in Prue’s room so that the bear, whose name was Esben, could best achieve his preferred cavelike habitat. They’d made extra trips to the grocery store, procuring economy-size bags of flour and vats of milk to keep up with his ursine appetite. When seen by curious neighbors while making such excursions, the back of their station wagon riding low under the weight of thirty pounds of ground beef, Anne had said that they were stocking up for the end-times. (She’d even gotten used to making a kind of secretive, winking gesture at her husband for the neighbors’ benefit, as if to say, He’s the crazy one. Lincoln, for his part, played it up and peppered his daily exchanges with folks around town with conspiracy theories that he’d literally made up just moments before, e.g., “The Department of Transportation is hoarding avocados for use in avocado-fueled rocket ships that will take only DOT employees to a terraformed resort/theme park on the dark side of the moon, where they will engineer the eradication of Earth’s something-billion people in favor of genetically modified offspring of moon-living DOT employees. I’m not making this up.”) The novelty of the adventure had soon worn off, leading the family to be politely curious about the bear’s departure date. The only concern: He was bound to take their daughter with him.

  Lincoln McKeel, de-aproned, joined them at the table, nursing a smoothie and a single fried egg. He smiled at the table while he tucked into his meager meal.

  “Any idea when, you know, you’ll be . . . ,” began Prue’s mom. She trailed off, unsure of her footing, not wishing to be a rude host.

  “What my wife is trying to say, Esben,” took up Lincoln, his mouth full of yolk, “is we were just curious about, you know . . . Well, it does seem that we’re out of flour. And butter. And eggs.”

  “And while we’re perfectly happy to go out and get some more,” interjected Anne, “it would be maybe helpful to know . . . to know . . .”

  Prue couldn’t take it anymore. “We’ll be out of here tomorrow, promise,” she said.

  “We?” her parents said simultaneously.

  “WEEEEEE!” shouted Mac, who swung his fork around his small, lightly furred head like a pike. The half-eaten piece of pancake that had been speared on the tines went flying across the room. “WEEEEE ANNND BEARRRR!”

  “I told you guys the plan,” said Prue, watching the arc of the projectile. “This was always part of the plan.”

  Esben, his mouth full of pancakes, grunted in agreement.

  Prue continued, “As soon as my ankle and my arm got better, we had to get back to the Wood. We’re needed. We can’t waste any more time. We have to find—”

  “The other ‘maker,’ sure,” finished her mother. “Whoever that is. I just thought that, well, maybe Esben could go. Work it out himself. You’ve missed a lot of school, Pruey. I don’t want to see you have to repeat the seventh grade.”

  Prue stared at her mother. A silence filled the space between them. “I don’t care,” she said finally. “I don’t care about seventh grade anymore. I belong in there, in the Wood. They need me.”

  Esben stopped chewing momentarily to grunt his agreement again. “It’s true, Mrs. McKeel,” said the bear. “This is very important. She’s needed.”

  “You’re a talking bear,” pointed out Anne McKeel angrily. “Don’t tell me about parenting.”

  Esben, a hookful of pancake nearly to his jaws, froze.

  “Honey,” said Prue’s dad, reaching across the table to rest his hand on his wife’s, “I think we have to listen to them here. This is bigger than us.”

  Just then, as the quiet descended over the dining room table and each person, even little Mac with his tuft of hair crusty with errant pancake, breathed in the silence like it was a calming gas and the periodic hum of cars on the street in front of the house punctuated their unsaid sentences, Anne McKeel burst into tears. Esben the bear was the first to react, saying “Aww, there now, Mrs. McKeel,” like the kind, embarrassed houseguest he was, witnessing something very private and perhaps very human.

  Was that all that was needed to be said? For a time, the sound of Prue’s mother crying was all there was in the room until she sniffled the tears away and the bear finished his pancakes and everyone cleaned up the table, bringing the dirty dishes to the sink. The spring day unfolded in front of them, and before long the morning’s drama had been forgotten. Anne McKeel swallowed her tears.

  That night, as the rest of the house was sleeping, Prue remained awake, her head reclined against her pillow. The bear snored fitfully in the houselike tent by her bed. When she heard a prolonged pause in the sawing, she ventured, “Esben?”

  “Hmm?” grumbled the bear.

  “Can’t sleep.”

  “Again?”

  “I don’t know how you can. There’s so much to think about.”

  “Try not to.”

  Prue pursed her lips and tried to do what the bear advised. Somehow, trying was making the whole endeavor more unlikely.

  “Esben?” she said, after a while.

  “Hmmm?”

  “What’s he going to think? It’s the one thing that keeps bothering me.”

  A shuffling noise followed: an immense body rolling over in a too-small fleece sleeping bag. “What’s who going to think?”

  “Alexei.”

  “Oh. Not entirely sure.”

  “But the tree has to have, like, thought this through, right?”

  “I suppose it has.” A pause. “Prue?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Try to get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.”

  And so she tried, listening with amazement as Esben fell instantaneously into deep, clamorous sleep. But the thoughts continued to collide in her head: What would Alexei think of his own resurrection? It was something that had been bothering her, in the recesses of her mind, since she’d been given the message from the Council Tree: that the automaton child prince needed to be revived. Hadn’t the prince himself been responsible for his own death after his mother had re-created him? What sort of offense were they committing by making him live that same inconsideration—his resurrection—all over again? And yet the directive had come from the spiritual heart of the Wood itself, the Council Tree: Peace can only be gained by bringing back the boy prince. Wouldn’t he forgive them this imposition, for the greater good? What was the greater good? What sort of situation would be dispelled by simply bringing a single soul back from the ether?

  The morning sun was brightening her bedroom window long before any sort of solution presented itself; Prue admitted defeat and pulled herself from her blankets, underslept and overwrought.

  She set about packing her bag full of supplies for the trip, the pain in her ankle now nearly vanished and her arm only aching when she pulled it too taut. Esben played with Mac in the living room, letting the two-year-old climb over his furry back and tumble into his lap; he spun twin Frisbees on his golden hooks, a trick perfected during his tenure in the circus, and Mac cooed with appreciative laughter. When Prue appeared at the bottom of the stairs with her packed bag slung over her shoulder, her parents were sitting in their respective chairs in the living room, her father reading a book and her mother attempting to coax a shape out of some new tangle of knitting.

  Esben set Mac down and looked at Prue. “Ready?” he said.

  Prue nodded.

  Anne didn’t look up from her knitting; Lincoln stood and walked to his daughter. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s hit it.”

  Anne remained in her chair, tussling with yarn.

  “Bye, Mom,” said Prue.

  Anne didn’t look up. Prue looked to her dad for guidance, but Lincoln only shrugged. Together they proceeded to wrap a threadbare quilt around Esben’s massive frame and enshroud his head with the giant knitted cap that Anne had made him. The bear, thus disguised, sidled out the
door, and the three of them made their way to the family Subaru, parked out in front of the house.

  They drove in silence, Esben huddled down in the back: An amorphous pile of blankets and yarn, he could easily be mistaken for one family’s Goodwill donation haul. The car speakers burbled a public radio pledge drive.

  “Are we going to get another message-by-egret?” asked Prue’s dad.

  His daughter smiled. “Only good news, promise.”

  “And this assassin—that’s all taken care of?”

  Prue briefly shuddered at the mention of Darla Thennis, the shape-shifting fox. She recalled the ungracious THUNKs that sounded her demise. “Yeah, she’s gone. Though there might be more. We don’t know. So that’s why we’re staying underground till we get to South Wood.”

  “And you’re going to be greeted like a hero, right? That’s what you’ve said.”

  “Yeah, if our hunch is right.”

  “Unless things have changed,” pointed out Esben.

  “There’s that,” said Prue, though she’d not wanted to consider the potentially darker side of their plan. She ran her finger along the car’s window, feeling the sun beat against it. They’d pulled up alongside a sedan at a stoplight, and the toddler in the backseat craned his neck. A light in his eyes suggested he’d seen Esben, and he began frantically hitting the window, trying to point out the anomaly to his parents. The light changed and they’d taken a right turn before the bear had been made by the adults in the car, leaving the toddler, Prue assumed, to an afternoon filled with ignored proclamations.

  They arrived at the junk heap after a time, and Esben ditched his disguise: The place was empty of any other soul that might be thrown by the appearance of a talking bear. He breathed a deep sigh of relief and stretched his thick arms skyward. “No offense,” he said to Lincoln, “but that blanket smelled like cat drool and moldy carpeting.”

  “None taken,” said Lincoln.

  The bear did, however, keep the knit cap on his head. He’d said, when he was given it, that he always had a hard time finding suitably fitting headwear. He nestled it close over his small ears as he walked down toward the shack in the middle of the trash heap, its door hanging on its loose hinges; clearly, whoever was responsible for the upkeep of this tunnel access had been negligent in their maintenance. The shack covered a concrete conduit leading into the belowground. Esben stopped at the entrance and turned to the McKeels, who were still standing by the car.