Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

“There,” said the boy. “Just there.”

The woman looked over her shoulder. The other two Mystics followed his pointing finger.

“What?” asked the woman. “What’s there?”

The boy ignored her question, but instead began moving into the thick of the bushes, clambering over the bowed saplings that stood in his way. The other Mystics went to follow the boy but he moved too quickly; before they could even cross the threshold of bushes, the boy was gone.

The mirror rested against the wall on top of the girl’s dresser. She sat across the room from it, staring at it with her arms crossed. She was sitting upright in bed. Her bedside table light was on; the windows had gone dark. A gaslight flickered into life outside her window and she blinked at it, suddenly aware of the passage of time. How long had she been staring at the mirror? Long enough to have lost track of the hours; she could hear her father in the hall outside her door, shuffling his way toward bed. She could hear the wheeze of a wind gust. She could hear the absence of the songbirds. She could hear the rattle of a single, lonely coal cart.

The mirror, on the dresser, was not speaking. She was thankful for this. But she knew, when the tall grandfather clock in the sitting room chimed midnight, the words would appear on the glass.

It’d been this way for several days. Ever since the séance at the old stone house.

She’d already dismissed the first time she’d seen the letters, the scrawled writing, on the mirror’s surface as being something she’d dreamed up, something her overactive imagination had conjured out of her own desperate need to see the thing happen. It was a hallucination, pure and simple. It appeared that her friends, the ones who had been there that night, had taken a similar course—it was as if the incident hadn’t even occurred. No one spoke about it; in school, when they met before class, the conversation swirled around other topics, normal topics. No one dared broach the bit about the glowing aura, the distinct moan, the woman’s moan, that rose from the ground.

But they hadn’t seen the writing. The fogged-up mirror, the scrawl across the glass in the shape of a thin fingertip. The words: I AM AWAKE.

And that hadn’t been the last of it.

Every midnight, shortly after the chime of the grandfather clock in the sitting room, a strange mist would overtake the simple mirror sitting propped on her dresser, and the glass would become cloudy, as if someone had breathed over it, and the sound would come: the sound of a hand drawing over a wet surface, a sort of gasping scrape; and then the words would appear.

The first time it’d happened in her room, Zita had only seen the word GIRL appear before she’d dashed from her bed in a panic and slammed the mirror down on the top of the dresser. After she’d taken several pacing spins around her room, she was relieved to see, when lifting the heavy glass again, that the word was not there. A single hairline crack had crawled across the top left corner of the mirror, but the writing was definitely gone.

The next night, though, it happened again. Zita was an insomniac, had been since she was a toddler, and the second night after the séance found her trying a new braiding pattern in the mirror very late at night when the grandfather clock in the hallway chimed its chime and her face, lit by the kerosene lamp on the dresser, grew suddenly dim and fogged. To her terror, the writing came again: GIRL.

This time, she was frozen in horror, her fingers still tangled in her braid. The writing continued: BRING came next. Before the specter had a chance to write a third word, Zita had slammed the mirror down flat again and had leapt, shivering, into her bed. She lay tossing in fitful sleep the rest of the night. The morning came cold and a new realization dawned on Zita, the May Queen, and she ate her cereal in silence, reflecting on the change.

That night, she lay in wait for the chime of the grandfather clock, determined to hear out the spirit that haunted her. She had decided that however she might resist this encroachment on her life by the supernatural, it would likely be no use. Better to give in, to not tempt the anger of the spiritual world.

And when the grandfather clock chimed, when midnight struck, she watched with halting breath as the disembodied finger scraped the word in the fog across the glass.

GIRL, it read.

BRING, it continued. But that wasn’t all.

The boy walked through the woods like it was second nature. He spoke to the plants and the trees as he walked, continuing an ongoing conversation with his mind, sorting through a vast snarl of disparate voices for a common thread. He followed the pattern that he saw in the green, a slight change in color and the timbre of the voices. It led him in a wide circle that steadily crept inward, as if affixed to a central point. It soon became clear that he was following a spiral. The voices of the other Mystics disappeared behind him, lost in the shroud of voices and the trees and the ivy and the trilliums, white and blooming.

As he grew closer to the center of the spiral, he felt the voices of the forest begin to soften, to arrive at a decided consensus: A hush overtook the warring voices and suddenly conjoined into a steady, meditative hum. The circle was tighter now, and it was as if he were retracing his own winding steps until he found the center of the spiral, the heart of the thing.

There, in a small womblike tuft of moss, a single green sprout grew. The sapling sported three identical branches; only one, however, bore a leaf.

A new tree was being born.

The boy reached out to touch the single downy leaf of the shoot, and the ground promptly opened up below his feet and he was swallowed by the earth.

The noise was unbearable: The friction of a finger against a windowpane, damp with dew, amplified a thousand times over in Zita’s mind, and she pressed her fingers to her ears in an effort to shut out the sound.

BRING ME, the words read. The noise continued.

BRING ME THREE THINGS

BRING ME THREE THINGS BY THE CHIME OF MIDNIGHT IN TEN DAYS.

Zita rasped with fear: “What? What should I bring?”

There was room only for two more words, scrawled on the bottom of the glass:

EAGLE FEATHER.