The Door in the Forest (15 page)

The breeze subsided. There it was again, distant but unmistakable, a woman’s voice. It was singing!

“Mama!” cried Emily. She set off at a run.

“Wait for us!” Daniel started after her.

Wesley tried to keep up, but he was really tired. The girl was already out of sight and his brother nearly so.

Daniel glanced back. He
had
to catch up with Emily, but there was his brother, struggling. “Hey,” he called, “come on!”

“I’m coming!” He wasn’t coming very fast, though.

“She’s too far ahead! We’ll lose her!”

“You go on.” He was leaning against a tree.

Daniel started back. “Hey, kid,” he said. The brothers sat down at the foot of a juniper. The ground just there was covered with moss, green, soft, and damp. “You okay?”

Wes nodded.

“Just winded?”

No answer.

“Let’s see that backpack,” said Daniel. “Anything left to eat?”

“Sure.” The boy rummaged through and came up with bread, cheese, an apple, and half a brownie. The pine nuts had spilled into the bottom of the pack, among the lint and crumbs. Saving some food for Emily, he put together a sandwich and cut it in half.

The brothers sat cross-legged, not speaking. The wind had died away where they were, but high above them, in the leafy canopy, it was making a racket. Underneath that sound was another, low-pitched and steady—not a human voice this time, but as if the world were humming to itself.

“Strange place,” said Wesley, yawning.

“It is.”

They fell silent, hoping to hear Emily trudging back toward them, but she didn’t appear. There was only the wash of wind, the scuttle of squirrels, and the thousand barely audible sounds of an intense but invisible life.

Wes got comfortable on a cushion of moss and leaves. The scent of violets drifted over him.

“Tell you what,” said Daniel. “Why don’t you rest while I try to find Emily?” He pulled a red bandanna from his pocket and tied it to an overhead branch. “This’ll help me find you.”

His brother answered with a grunt, already half-asleep.

Good old Wes
, thought Daniel.
He’s had a tough day
. He turned and headed in the direction Emily had taken, looking for scuffed leaves and the occasional snapped twig that would tell him where she’d gone.

He thought he heard something—something beyond the noises he was making. Stopping to look around, he saw a tall linden tree some thirty feet distant, its top swaying unnaturally. There was that flash of color again, a patch of red
within the dark green of the foliage. Daniel squinted and for a brief moment saw clearly: a man, small and wiry, wearing an old-fashioned red waistcoat.

“Hey!” Daniel hurried toward him, but the man was gone. “Who are you?”

Nothing.

How can there be somebody on an island no one can get to
?

Well, he would find Emily, at least. But there were no signs to go by, no singing voice to follow. The light, dim to begin with, was growing vaguer as afternoon declined toward evening. The woods were crowded with shadows. He was up to his waist in them. Then up to his neck. He continued on, but with the sun going, and then gone, it was hard to judge his direction. Another ten minutes and he had to admit it: he was lost.

“Wes!” he called out. “Emily!”

He listened hard, but could hear only the whispered confidences of leaves and the occasional snap of a twig as night animals began to stir. Alone in the forest, he felt surrounded, hemmed in. To shake the feeling, he ran on, heedless now of his direction. He tripped over a fallen branch and went sprawling, scraping his forearm where he’d tried to break his fall.

Now that was smart
!

Still on hands and knees, he looked up, and the breath suddenly caught in his throat, for he found himself staring at something not to be believed: a ghostly leopard, milk white, not twenty feet away, sitting in profile like a sphinx under the boughs of a juniper tree. Amazed, he watched as the great cat slowly turned its head to look at him, its eyes clear blue and impersonal as ice.

Daniel hardly breathed, lest the apparition vanish, or worse, pounce and tear him to pieces. He was sure there could be no defense against those bright, in-curving fangs.

Silently the leopard rose to its feet. It walked off a short distance, stopped, and looked back.

Go on! I’m too scrawny for you to eat
!

The animal went a few steps farther, then stopped again, looking back.

What do you want
? Then the answer came.
He wants me to follow him
!

“I don’t think so,” Daniel said aloud.

The animal tilted its head quizzically. Then it turned, walked a few more steps, and looked back.

The boy started to follow, keeping his distance and trying not to make noise in the ankle-deep leaves. The creature trotted ahead and again stopped.

Daniel’s fear was great, but he went on, his heart beating hard.

Evening, meanwhile, had perfected itself into night. Small, nameless creatures scuttled through nearby bushes, and a screech owl let out a scream from the fortress of an oak. Daniel hardly noticed. He was concentrating on the retreating whiteness ahead of him. Always beyond reach, it never disappeared entirely.

Then it did, just as Daniel stumbled free of the underbrush to find himself in a clearing amid tall grasses silvered with moonlight. Nor was moonlight the only illumination. A glimmer of phosphorescent moss lit the grasses from beneath, giving the place an unearthly glow.

Daniel searched the surrounding darkness, but the creature that had led him here was nowhere in sight. Had he seen what he thought he’d seen?

Creatures like that don’t exist
! he told himself.
Not in this part of the world
.

The wind gusted up, turning the grasses into silver-tipped waves. That’s when he heard the humming, low and soft, and realized it was coming from the surrounding trees. In that part of the forest, the trees were tall and thin, like tuning forks, and Daniel guessed the wind blowing through them had created the strange, almost human sound.

He started across. The thigh-high grasses were flinging about in the wind, and he was struck by the wild beauty of the scene. Then, abruptly, he stopped, fear spiking as he realized how close he’d come to walking straight into an immense spider web, some ten feet across. It was only because of the moonlight that he’d seen it, the myriad strands transmuted into spun silver.

Gradually the panic subsided. There was no sign of the creature that had spun the web, connecting it to trees on either side of the clearing, but it was bound to be nearby. He could only imagine its size.

As a breeze made the web shimmer, something about it caught his eye. He realized there was a pattern within the pattern, and that at the center of the web’s great spiral stood an upright rectangle, several feet tall, outlined not in pale silver but in white gold, or golden white, like moonlight laced with sunlight.

A door
, he thought. He remembered the stories he’d heard from the old farmers when they’d come into his dad’s
grocery store. They’d talked about a mysterious door in the forest that led—well, they didn’t know where it led. How could they? It was just a story they’d heard as children.

Daniel didn’t remember their saying anything about a leopard, much less why it should lead him to this strange place. That was for him to discover.

He dared not think the next thought, but the thought came anyway:
It’s a door. I’m supposed to go through it
.

What, he wondered, if it were a trap? What if the island were evil, as some thought? What if he were being lured to a horrible death? After all, to be caught in a web and … and
eaten
!

In spite of the warmth of the night, he found himself shivering. He wanted fiercely to turn back. And he should. Wesley needed him. His little brother shouldn’t be left alone out there in the forest.

But Daniel knew he was making excuses. What he feared stood right in front of him, trembling.

A door
.

I’m supposed to go through it
.

He could tell himself it was for Emily, to find and rescue her. He could say it was for Bridey Byrdsong, that strangely lovable witch-woman who had so thoroughly disappeared. But the truth, at that final, fateful moment, was that he just
had
to know what was on the other side.

He held out his arm before him, took a deep shuddering breath, and stepped forward.

Wes Crowley dreamed that he was dreaming.

In the rustling darkness, he saw glowing eyes: split yellow eyes, heartless blue eyes, infernal red eyes, coming closer, closer still. But he refused to listen to his fear.
It’s all right
, he told himself.
I’m just dreaming
.

Then Wes Crowley dreamed that he woke up.

He raised his head from the varnished floor in the back corner of the classroom. He didn’t know why he was lying there when his desk was up front, and the teacher, that nice Miss Temple, was calling on him.

“Sorry,” he heard himself say as he hurried past snickering classmates to his seat.

Her hand was on her hip. “Wesley, did you hear a word I said?”

He shook his head. “No, ma’am.”

“I want you to look at the blackboard.”

He did, but nothing was written there.

“What does it say, Wesley? Tell the class.”

This time, six words appeared. “This number,” he read out loud, “is not a number.” He looked at his teacher. “But there
isn’t
any number.”

“That’s why it is not a number.”

“But …”

He could see that Miss Temple, nice as she was, and pretty besides, was getting impatient. “Why won’t you read what it says?”

The other kids were giggling. Their laughter turned into the twittering of birds.

He squinted. The words wouldn’t stay still. “This sentence,” he read, “cannot be read.”

Bird songs filled the air.

“Wesley, pay attention!”

He tried again. “A bird,” he read, concentrating hard, “is not a bird.”

“That’s impossible!”

“The island is not an island.”

“Impossible!”

“A lie is not a lie.”

“Wesley, leave the classroom!”

“But I checked my math!” Close to tears, he stood up. “I checked it!”

He bolted into the hall and outside to the deserted playing field, his eyes blurring. As he ran, he glanced at the darkening sky.
A bird is not a cloud
, he thought distractedly.
A cloud is not a cat
.

He hadn’t watched where he was going and ran right into
a large man, solid as a wall. A soldier, he realized. Then he recognized the bulbous forehead and pox-riddled cheeks of the person grinning down at him.

“The captain’s been looking for you.”

Wes shook his head, denying all, struggling to twist free of the man’s inhuman grip.

“He wants to bury you in a corner of the field.”

“No!”

“He says not to worry. He says your death is not your death.”

Suddenly Wesley’s eyes flew open.

Inches from his face, staring at him with ice blue eyes, was a white leopard.

As soon as his face had touched the web, Daniel had involuntarily shut his eyes, and now that he’d gotten through and was on the other side, he found them hard to open. A sticky mist had sealed the lids, cooled his face, and soaked his clothes.

At least he had gotten through!

Disgusting
, he thought, wiping a wet hand across his face. With his fingers, he pried the lids open.

What he saw amazed him. Instead of darkness, a brightening dawn rose up just ahead, with sunlight turning the grasses tawny and glinting off a dome of some kind, light blue, rising through the distant canopy.

He turned and looked behind him. There lay night, darker by contrast than before, and the web he’d just stepped through. He saw the ragged tear he’d made, and behind it the black outline of trees. He watched, transfixed, as a shadow encroached on the web’s upper corner. Slowly it crept downward toward the torn section. It was the spider,
monstrous, its numerous legs stepping delicately from strand to glistening strand, like hairy fingers plucking the strings of a harp.