Unless I’m mistaken, there’s a hole in the world, and it’s in the Prairie Creek Redwoods.
I’m probably mistaken.
I’m probably sitting here in the dirt with a sword and a dagger made from the ball-end of a deer femur for no other reason than stubbornness. Or maybe delusion.
I guess I’m about to find out.
It doesn’t look like a hole in the world. It looks like a gigantic woody tumor growing between two trees, or, more poetically, like the two trees had a knife fight and spilled each other’s guts all over the forest floor. It’s probably the ugliest redwood burl I’ve ever seen, but it’s hardly supernatural.
It didn’t look like a hole in the world fourteen years ago either, not until a monster stepped out of it and wrapped its misty blue wings around my brother.
I use my hand to sweep away the litter of brown redwood needles covering the ground in front of the burl. Now my 150-year-old copy of the very obscure and probably irreplaceable Liminals of the Otherworlds is in danger of staining, so I wipe my fingers on my jeans before turning to the bookmarked page. The instructions are as clear as they were the forty-seventh time I looked at them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. My research has also uncovered up some pretty clear instructions for making love potions and flying ointments. Books of folklore aren’t exactly peer-reviewed.
This isn’t going to work.
I should go back to my car. I should put my stuff back in my pack and follow my mom’s advice to stop being so fucking crazy, Sunday! which is incidentally the only time I can ever remember her using the word “fuck” or any of its inflected forms.
Instead, I hold my bone dagger point-down over the bare patch of earth. My hand is shaking and I have to steady it with my other hand, and now I look like a priest getting ready to cut the heart out of a sacrificial goat.
What if this doesn’t work?
I take a big, yoga-style grounding breath and drive the knife into the soft ground.
The forest remains stubbornly status quo.
I expected a cold fog to descend. A magical voice to whisper in my ear. Golden sparkles to descend from the heavens. Disney movie stuff.
My book didn’t mention a wait time. How long am I supposed to sit here? Fifteen minutes? Twenty? At what point should I start reconsidering my vow to never go to a Renaissance fair so five years of swordplay lessons won’t be for nothing?
A Steller’s jay laughs at me from the treetops. Its opinion seems definitive. They were all right about me. I’m confabulating, developmentally fixated, and prone to dissociative fantasies. A human took Leo. A sword-wielding human wearing a blue hoodie. Not a mist demon.
I stand up and brush the pine needles off my butt. My knees wobble. I need to lean on something, but the closest thing is the burl, and I can’t even make myself look at it. It’s a liar. My book is a liar, too. When I get home, I’m going to light a fire in my bathtub and incinerate it.
I’m not even sure my heart is beating anymore.
I reach for my pack. Somewhere on the other side of the burl, insects break into a strange, tinny song. I tune them out for a couple of self-deprecating seconds before it clicks that the sound isn’t anything like a normal insect sound.
I look up, right into the space where the hole in the world is supposed to be.
Well, fuck me.
The redwood forest is still visible between the trees, but the image warps as if it’s veiled behind a clear sheet of plastic caught up in a stiff wind. The sound I’d mistaken for insects isn’t even a sound. It’s a sensation. A swell of staticky air that raises the hairs on my arms.
I should definitely go back to my car. Perhaps there is a rift between this world and the other one, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I should walk through it.
My vows to myself and to Leo have never seemed quite so pulled-out-of-my-ass. I swore I wouldn’t walk through the rift unprepared. I waited until I could disarm a man with ten years more practice and fifty pounds more brawn than me, but maybe I should have waited until I could defeat someone with fifteen years more practice and seventy-five pounds more brawn.
I don’t really know what’s on the other side.
I’m having these thoughts at the same time as I’m buckling my sword on and shouldering my pack, and none of them are slowing me down.
I step over the burl, and into the other world.
The rift feels dense and prickly all over my skin, like stepping into pajamas lined with Velcro hooks. I’m also blind and my lungs don’t seem to be working. I’m just about ready to panic when the sensations fall away and I find myself standing on the other side.
The other world is a forest. It’s not a redwood forest, but it is a regular forest, with normal-looking trees and a normal-looking understory.
I guess I’m a little surprised by the absence of bone houses, phantom carriages, and rivers that run uphill. I was prepared for weird. I was not prepared for normal.
Almost normal.
It’s silent. Windless. And the full moon is too bright, bathing every tree, rock, and stick with unnatural, silver-blue light.
Behind me, the rift hums with crackly energy, and my chest lurches. What if it snaps shut? What if it’s only a one-way crossing? What if my bone dagger is useless on this side of the hole?
I stick my arm into it, and my arm disappears. This does not turn out to be as comforting as I thought it would be, so I yank it back out and spend some time flexing my fingers to make sure they’re still attached to my hand.
The way home will still be here when I get back. I believe this because the alternative is turning back now and never knowing what happened to my brother, and that’s no alternative at all.
I face the forest.
The air is heavy with the odor of pine and decomposing plant matter. Moss creeps over the splintering bark of a fallen tree that lies like a defeated soldier between two enormous oaks. A warty knot with eyebrows and a yawning mouth stares at me from a tree trunk. For a heartbeat, I think it’s a real face attached to a real monster. I blink hard and it resolves back into inanimate tree bark, but it takes me a few seconds to recover.
I memorize the details. This is my way out. Mine and Leo’s. If I can’t find it again, we’re cooked.
There’s no road and no trail. I don’t have a map. My rescue strategy is based on fairy tales and folklore. Find the lesser fae. Give offerings, not trades. Make no bargains. Don’t say “thank you.”
If I had any sense in me, I’d be terrified. Instead, I’m still buzzing from my entrance. If Liminals of the Otherworlds was right about how to get into this place, there’s a fair chance the folklore is right, too.
The forest litter isn’t dry but in the enveloping quiet I might as well be walking on potato chips. Otherwise, my surroundings remain still. Nothing bolts into the understory at my approach, not even a squirrel. No one peers at me from the slim gap between a fallen tree and a moss-covered boulder. There are no brownies or hobs drawing water from the spring that sprouts from the earth and runs for a few inches into a ropey tangle of roots.
No one who might remember a blue demon passing this way fourteen years ago with a little boy. No one at all.
It occurs to me that this might not be another world. Maybe I just took an odd left turn in the redwood forest.
I skirt a shadow at the base of an enormous, decomposing tree stump. It’s abnormally dark, like all the other shadows. Looking into it is like looking into a well on a moonless night. It’s so black I can’t be sure I’m not about to step into a bottomless, black pool of nothing.
As I circumvent the shadow, it flickers.
I freeze and stare at its edges, then I drag my gaze to the tree stump, expecting to see something living, like a snake or a huge millipede, something that could make a shadow flicker.
The stump is as still and solid as any inanimate object.
A trick of the light. Or maybe a trick of my traitorous brain’s own creation.
I step away and approach a moss-covered boulder. Above me, the moon stares down, dropping light through the forest canopy like globs of the stuff that comes out of a glow stick when you cut it in half and shake it.
I look down at my own shadow, but I don’t have one.
Of course I don’t have one. Direct, overhead light produces shadows that are short, faint, or non-existent.
What the actual fuck.
I fix my eyes on the way-too-black shadow next to the looming boulder. The edges ripple as if the boulder is covered in billowing, gossamer fabric.
Which it isn’t.
Next to me, the shadow of a gnarled oak tree bends and sways as if its branches have been swept up in a sudden wind.
There isn’t any wind.
I raise my eyes. The whole forest is in motion.
Shit.
My knees stop working. My breath comes in squeaky, insufficient bursts.
The shadows break apart and fly into the air, fluttering as if winged, like thousands of spectral moths. They make no sound or disturbance in the air, nothing to suggest that what I’m seeing is corporeal. It’s like watching a black-and-white movie on mute.
For one hopeful second, the moth shadows seem like they’re going to fly away, but of course they don’t. Instead, they coalesce into the space in front of me, fluttering around each other as if conspiring to decide what form of shadowy death they’re going to rain down on me. I stare, slack-jawed and frozen, as the spectral insects swarm, crowding together until they’re no longer a mass of shadowy wings but a figure, half man, half furious gray inferno.
I fumble stupidly for my sword because I guess in my panic I think maybe it’s possible to decapitate a shadow? I don’t know. I do feel very slightly better when the hilt is in my hand and the moonlight is glinting off the steel blade.
Yesterday, a steel sword seemed like a rational choice. Steel is made with iron. Fae don’t like iron. Now I wish I’d also brought a handful of nails so I could throw them at whatever the fuck is standing in front of me right now.
He looks down at me. His eyes are black hole black with rolling thundercloud edges. His skin—if that’s what it is—is slate gray, and he’s covered with surging, undulating black things, phantoms that crawl eagerly over his body as if their intent is to devour him. Some of them look like shadowy facsimiles of living things; others leap and twist, reaching skyward like colorless flames consuming an effigy.
He’s not glowing, exactly, but he seems to have his own light source.
He has something on his head that looks like it might be a crown. It flickers like the darkness on the edge of candlelight, only it is so dark, so black, that it is the embodiment of nothing, like the shadows of a shadow.
I don’t think I’m breathing, but my heart is definitely still beating. It’s the most lively thing in this forest.
“You should not be here.” His voice contradicts the rest of him. It’s deep, but not sinister or otherworldly. It’s clear and articulate. And vaguely European.
“You shouldn’t have my brother.” I raise my sword and stare at him with as much defiance as I can summon, given that I might be about to pee myself.
He huffs like my swordplay instructor when I land an unexpected blow or master a new riposte. Then he flies apart like confetti, the pieces of him scattering into the trees and wisping into the air like smoke.
I half stagger into a tree, brace my fist on my chest, and try to rein in my wild lungs. Every muscle in my body tells me I should run, but I can’t.
I’m in the right place. This isn’t just an empty forest. There are monsters here.