Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

While the beaver spoke, Prue found her attention diverted to the far treetops, imagining the horrible scene as the poor, distraught animal described it. What horrific shape had this disembodied woman taken in order to inspire such fear, to wreak so much ruin? The firs and the cedars, the hemlocks and the maples, all of them sported a writhing new growth of ivy vines, clinging to their topmost boughs and making their crowns sag under their weight. Everywhere she looked, she saw the telltale signs of the innocent, somnolent victims of the ivy’s spread: squat mounds in the cloak of green that lay over the landscape.

“Quickly,” spoke the owl. “To the Blighted Tree.”

“Yes!” shouted Prue, remembering the parasite-infected bandits.

Just then, a loud noise diverted their attention to the mountain of ivy in the center of the meadow, the enshrouded shape of the Pittock Mansion. Some of the ivy had fallen away as one of the brick walls let loose a shower of debris, crashing to the ground; a broken hole was, for a moment, revealed in the building’s facade

before a new surge of ivy crept up and covered it. Prue shrieked to see the destruction.

“It’ll tear down the whole building!” she shouted. She remembered, then, how she’d managed to make the ivy retreat from the sleeping beaver. “Maybe I can stop it!” she said.

“No, Prue,” said the owl. “It is beyond even your powers. The Mansion is lost. Perhaps there will be time to save the Blighted Tree.”

“The Blighted Tree?” asked Prue, nonplussed. “Why would we save that awful thing?”

“The fabric of the Woods is a complex weave of many different energies. All must be preserved. It is too much to discuss presently, when your powers are needed elsewhere.” The owl proffered his back to Prue and Seamus, and they both climbed onboard. “Hold tight,” he said before unfurling his vast wings and leaping into the sky.

Again, they were afforded a harrowing view of the devastation from the owl’s back as he flew. The spread of the ivy was rampant; everywhere they looked they saw what appeared to be houses and buildings being torn apart by the infestation. Whole trees, sky tall and centuries old, were cracking and bending under the weight of the plant that was consuming them. The sounds of their breaking echoed through the misty air. Prue stifled a sob in her chest to see such desolation, to see the entire ancient forest being slowly swallowed by this greedy invader.

Soon, they were flying over the clearing where Prue had been abducted, those few days prior: the Blighted Meadow. There, as on the Mansion’s grounds, the ivy was widespread, covering the entire area like a wriggling sheet. The owl, in midflight, shook his head sorrowfully as he taxied around the center of the clearing, saying, “It’s too late!” in a voice loud enough to cut through the whipping wind.

“What’s too late?” Prue shouted back.

“The Blighted Tree. It’s been consumed.”

Sure enough, as the owl settled down onto the ivy-strewn meadow and Prue and Seamus hopped from his back, they saw that the imposing tree, that ancient tree, which had demanded the attention of the clearing for centuries untold, was now nothing more than a small heap in the center of the meadow. Little lesser heaps dotted a circle around it, and Prue guessed these to be the meditating acolytes, put to sleep by the plant. While the great owl stood, seeming paralyzed by the scene, Prue rushed to the nearest ivy mound and began communing with the hissing plant, calling it away from its purpose.

LET, she thought.

She could make out the following word, issuing to her from the farthest depths of her hearing: WHOOOOOO.

LET GO, she thought. She could feel her energy peeling away, like she was treading heavy water.

She suddenly felt the ivy slacken; she reached out and began to pull its webbing apart to reveal a hooded, masked figure beneath. “Seamus!” she yelled over her shoulder. The bandit came running to her side. “Help me get this stuff off.”

The two of them began yanking aside the figure’s smothering shroud; the ivy yielded to their hands, seemingly under the trance of Prue’s demands. Before long, they had the Caliph partially freed of the vines. Seamus grabbed the figure’s cowl and threw it aside before carefully removing the silver mask, revealing the peacefully sleeping face of the bandit William.

“Willy!” shouted Seamus, his voice breaking with excitement. “Wake up there, lad!”

The bandit’s eyelids fluttered, and he stirred in his sleep. His long yellow mustache twitched a little as he slowly woke. Once again conscious, he stared at Prue and Seamus blankly, as if they were perfect strangers. As if his eyes saw nothing. Just then, a look of fear overcame his face and he began struggling in his bonds, as his hands and legs were still confined by the ivy.

“Willy!” Seamus yelled again. “It’s me, Seamus!”

But there was no shine of recognition in the bandit’s eyes. That was when Prue heard the ticking noise. She reached out her hand and pressed it against Seamus’s chest. “Hold up,” she said. “There’s more to do here.”

Seamus, clearly distraught at his brother-in-arms’s amnesia, stumbled backward while Prue held her palm up to William’s face.

COME, she thought. She cleared her mind. She addressed the ticking noise. She addressed the organism inside William’s skull.

The bandit sputtered, his bloodshot eyes thrown wide. He began to cough, and his hands struggled in their bonds. Prue continued to coax the weird life-form that had nested inside the bandit’s nasal cavity; she cajoled it, rooted it out. It ticked louder, unhappy to be disturbed, while snot gushed from the nose of the bandit, who was by now buckled over in the throes of his dry heaves.

“It’s all right there, laddie,” soothed Seamus, at the bandit’s side. “It’s unpleasant, but you got to just let it out.”

The hacking grew more intense, and Prue felt the parasite relinquish its power and fall under her command. Again, she felt her energy being sapped, and she fell back on her heels as William the bandit pitched forward and his retching came on again, renewed. From his right nostril bloomed the grayish-green stuff, and Seamus shot his hand out and grabbed it. His face contorted into a disgusted grimace as he eased the fungus and its web of connected hyphae, the meshy filaments that branched out from the central glob of the organism, out of his comrade’s nose.

The ticking had grown deafening in Prue’s mind, now that the Spongiform had been released from its host, and she could feel it longing to attach itself to another human. “Destroy it, Seamus,” she managed.

Holding it out like it was a poisonous snake, Seamus backed away from William’s prone, coughing form and tossed it unceremoniously into the ivy. The ticking seemed to ebb in Prue’s mind, though she was suddenly alerted to the sound emanating all around her. She scanned the horizon; identical lumps in the blanket of ivy gave away the location of more Caliphs, more ticking parasites.