In the Night Wood

As secrets go, it wasn’t much of one, Erin confided. The branch of the family that had immigrated to America had generations ago fallen out of touch with the family that remained behind in England — there might have been some kind of conflict, a formal break. She didn’t know, or much care. But Caedmon Hollow had remained with them, as a legend if nothing more: an eccentric figure out of the distant past, who’d squandered much of his abbreviated life in drinking and debauchery, squandering as well the talent that had enabled him to eke out but a single volume of fiction.

“Everyone in the family reads it at some time or other. It’s like a ritual,” she said. “It’s not really a story for children, is it? It’s hardly a story at all, more like the ravings of a man half mad from drinking.”

“I suppose it is,” he said, recalling the strangely vivid nightmares his own reading had produced. “But it has a kind of power, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so. I haven’t forgotten it, anyway.”

“Is there more, do you think? Unpublished?”

“Methinks I hear your grad-student heart beat harder,” she said. “On the hunt for a dissertation topic, are we?” And when he blushed — he could feel the heat creeping up his face — she touched his hand, and he flushed still harder. “Teasing,” she said. “You can have my crazy old great-great-whatever. It hardly matters to me.”

So it began, their introduction to the fuel that love feeds upon: stories.

That night they shared their stories — the beginning of them, anyway, as they understood them then. They started at the surface as the best stories do. So they talked about their graduate studies (their gradual studies, he said, venturing a rare joke). They talked about their crummy apartments and their crummier cars. He talked about the pressure to publish. She talked about the Law Review.

And then, as the best stories do, they deepened.

They talked. She was an orphan, alone in the world. Her parents had died in a car accident three years ago. In a way, Charles was an orphan, too. Kit had hardly been a mother to him, and in his freshman year of college she’d moved to a commune in Nova Scotia. He hadn’t seen her since.

Dreams and aspirations, two cups of coffee, then three. They were both too wired to sleep, so they repaired to her apartment to talk some more. She checked his head to make sure he hadn’t injured himself when they’d collided, his lips brushed hers, and one thing led to another, as these things will.

Everything important that had ever happened to him had happened in libraries, Charles thought, drawing her down to him on the bed. Then he stopped thinking at all. They married six months later.

They lived happily ever after.

I

HOLLOW HOUSE

At midnight, by myriad ways and strange, through trees parted before her to direct her path, Laura crept down to look into the Mere of Souls, whence the Sylph had dispatched her. Of a time you could see things in the water, or so Laura had learned in the Sylph’s Tale, and she went to her knees, enamored of these mysteries. But no matter how she tilted her head or squinted her eyes, she could see nothing but clots of leaves rotting in the depths below.

Then the waters began to boil and the Genii of the Pool thrust his head above the surface. Weedy hair coiled around his face. His eyes were narrow and blue and cold. “What brings you to this place?” he said in tones thick with the thunder of distant waters.

Laura gathered up her courage and spoke, her voice quavering. “I was told in a Story once upon a time,” she said, “that you could see your Fate in the Pool if only you believed hard enough. And I believe very hard.”

“Some things are better left unseen,” the Genii rumbled, “and the Mere of Souls may lie.”

— CAEDMON HOLLOW, IN THE NIGHT WOOD

1

They hadn’t spoken for almost an hour — not since Harrogate, where he’d had some trouble with a roundabout and the solicitor’s car had vanished, eclipsed by traffic — when Charles Hayden caught his first glimpse of the Eorl Wood.

In the days prior to their departure from their home in Ransom, North Carolina, with its attendant griefs and sorrows, Charles had fooled himself into thinking that maybe, just maybe, things would be okay after all — that the quiet stranger who shared his home was the outward face of a new Erin, a sadder, wiser Erin, tempered, but no longer paralyzed, by knowledge of the myriad ways the world could betray you. He had fooled himself into believing that with enough time and effort, with enough patience, he might yet reach the core of warmth inside her. He had supposed that the core of warmth was still there.

Last night over dinner at the hotel, this pleasant illusion had crumbled around Charles. And over breakfast this morning with the solicitor — her name was Merrow, Ann Merrow — Erin had been pensive and morose. During the chaos at the roundabout, as Charles had whizzed around the circle in futility for the second time, Erin had roused herself long enough to point at one of the branching exits.

“I think it’s that one,” she’d said, and Charles had whipped the car across three lanes of traffic. He caught a flash of the sign mounted high above. Ripon and North Yorks, it read. Then a lorry blew by with an aggrieved blast of the horn, and he’d yanked his attention back to the road. There had been a time when a stunt like that would have elicited an impassioned orgy of outrage from Erin. Now, however, she barely blinked. Charles supposed she’d just as soon the truck had crushed the car like an aluminum can. If you got right down to it, he supposed he wouldn’t have much minded it himself.

Ahead, traffic cleared and the solicitor’s dusty blue Saab came into view. “Sorry,” Charles said, but Erin hadn’t replied. The last vestiges of Harrogate fell away in the rearview mirror and the alien Yorkshire terrain drew up around them, a rugged patchwork of hand-stacked stone walls, rolling pasturage, and narrow-windowed eighteenth-century farmhouses, the forbidding line of the moors looming always up behind them like the shoulders of sleeping giants, blanketed with earth.

It was a bleak prospect even on this clear April morning, and Charles found himself thinking of the Brontë children, tubercular and strange, more than halfway mired in fantasies wrested by sheer force of desperation from this unrelenting landscape, the remote Haworth parsonage and the churchyard before it, overcrowded with the dead. The present seemed to lie lightly on the land here, as though the narrow span of gray road, where the solicitor’s car hove momentarily into view at the crest of each new ridge, might simply melt away like a dusting of fresh snow, unveiling the bones of an older, sterner world.

That thought put him in mind of Caedmon Hollow and his own strange fantasy wrested from this same hostile terrain all those years ago — more than a century and a half now; Caedmon Hollow might almost have known the Brontës — and Charles felt a surge of excitement at the prospect of Hollow House awaiting them. In that moment of anticipation, he could almost forget Erin’s brooding silence, the trouble with Syrah Nagle, and — and the rest of it. He could almost forget it all.

Ahead, Merrow turned into a still more narrow road. It ran downhill between retaining walls of stacked stone for maybe half a mile. Then the road broadened, the walls drew away, and they were in civilization again, or what passed for it out here, anyway.

Suddenly they were in Yarrow. The village was old and steep, crowded into a rift between the hills. Merchants hugged the high street — a newsagent with a white cat drowsing in the front window; a pub, its lot crowded with the noon rush; a hardware store; and a florist (Petal Pushers, Charles noted with a humorless snort). At the far end of town before a crumbling stone house, Charles saw a sign reading Yarrow Historical Society. He made a mental note to come back and have a look at the place. They weren’t likely to have anything useful, but you could never say for sure.

He glanced at Erin, but if the change in scenery had made any impression on her, it didn’t show. Merrow made two quick turns, each road more narrow than the last. If they met an oncoming car, they would have to pull over to let it pass. Charles had the fleeting thought that in leaving Yarrow they had passed through the last outpost of the modern world.

The terrain here was sharper, more unwelcoming, the hills rising steeply on either side. The road wound through rugged outcroppings of stone and patches of wiry brush. Charles cracked the window and let the slipstream flow in, freighted with the scent of heather and flowers just coming into bloom, and cooler than it would have been back home.

Except this was home now, wasn’t it? Home and a fresh start. He glanced at Erin. She seemed to have dozed off. She’d tilted her head against the back of the seat and closed her eyes, and for a single heartbreaking moment, as the midmorning sunlight etched silver the line of her profile, she looked like the girl he had married nearly a decade ago. Then the car dipped into shadow, and the sorrow around her eyes and in the set of her lips sprang into relief.

Charles frowned and looked away, the thought echoing inside his head: a fresh start. God knows they needed it. Drumming his fingers on the wheel, he studied the road, ascending a sharp hill. The solicitor’s car hung at the crest a moment, then plunged out of sight. Yew trees clustered against the sky, their tips just visible above the ridgeline.

Anticipation flickered in him once again.

Beside him, Erin opened her eyes. “We there?” she murmured.

And then they topped the ridge. The valley bottomed out endlessly before them, and suddenly the Eorl Wood was there, bigger than Charles had expected, and more forbidding. The trees began halfway down the slope, like the wall of an ancient fortress, a palisade of enormous alder and elm and gnarled oak. The wood spread as far as the eye could see — lime, olive, jade, a thousand shades of green, fading here and there into glossy emerald patches of darkness.

When Charles saw it, his first thought was that he understood, really understood, the environment that had shaped the nightscape of Caedmon Hollow’s mystifying book. His second thought, coming fast on the heels of the first, was that the wood was collectively alive, a single vast organism spilling out across the valley in wild profusion, bigger than the eye could comprehend, improbably, impossibly bigger, that it was sentient, watchful, and that somehow —

— how? —

— it had been awaiting them.

“Jesus,” Erin whispered, and it was all Charles could do — the impulse took an active effort of will to resist — not to step hard on the brake and wrench the car back toward Yarrow.

Too late to turn back now.

Momentum seized them, the gray road blurring as the car gathered speed. At the base of the decline, Merrow signaled left and disappeared into the trees. If Charles hadn’t seen it happen, he would have missed the turnoff entirely.

He almost missed it anyway. He braked hard — the road ended in a turnaround maybe two dozen yards past the entrance — the force of the deceleration pressing him into the upholstery. He swung the car around and squared up to the entrance.

It gaped under the trees, a tunnel hewn into the flesh of the wood itself, flanked by stone columns shrouded in vines. Engraved words, eroded almost flush with the stone, were visible on the pillar to the right: Hollow House, and below that, 1848. There had been a gate there once, but no more.

A taillight flashed deep in all that emerald gloaming. Charles reached out for Erin’s hand. “We’re here.”

“So we are.” She gave him a forced smile in return, but her fingers remained dead in his grasp.

Charles sighed. He turned on the headlights, touched the gas, and nosed the car between the columns. The wood took them. When the sound of their engine died away under the trees, no evidence of their passage remained.

They might never have come that way at all.

2

An oppression of trees drew up around the car, and a doomed sense of claustrophobia seized Erin Hayden. For a moment it was all too much — the dark closing down upon them and the tires whispering their incessant tidings of arrival on macadam crumbling with time and carpeted with dead leaves.

Most of all it was the ancient oaks pressing close to the road, like old men, lichen-bearded and a little deaf, stooping close to listen. She imagined them straightening up as the car slipped by, leaning their hoary heads together to pass the news, a stir of leaf and branch rippling ever outward before them.

There was something disturbing about the idea, something watchful and abiding about the gloom under the trees. It was too much, too close.

She glanced at Charles, his face masked in streamers of light and shadow. He looked tired, haggard with something more than jet lag. She almost reached out to him, maybe would have, but an overhanging branch slapped at the windshield, startling her, and she turned away instead.

That was when she saw the child: a little girl clad in a simple white dress, maybe kindergarten age —

— Lissa’s age —

— or maybe a year older. She stood on the leaf-scattered shoulder of the road, staring toward them, so close she might have reached out and touched the car as it sped past.

“Charles?”

“Hmm?”

“Did you —” She broke off. She did not want to say it. It had been nothing, a trick of the eye, a flash of sunlight through the forest canopy or a patch of fog breathing up from the damp soil. We see what we want to see, her therapist had told her. As if that helped.

“Did I what?” Charles said.

“Nothing,” she said.

She was tired of seeing things.

For months after the funeral, back home in Ransom, she’d caught glimpses of Lissa everywhere, through a scrim of raindrops on the windshield as she wheeled by the kids at the bus stop or in the baleful fluorescent glare of the grocery store, just turning the far corner of an aisle. Something familiar in the set of the mouth or the flash of shoulder-length hair.

Then she’d blink and see that Lissa wasn’t there after all. The girl at the bus stop would shift the angle of her gaze and her face would fall into unfamiliar lineaments. Meeting the grocery store specter afresh among the frozen foods, Erin would see that she was younger than she had thought, that she had dark hair and a squared-off jaw, that she looked nothing like Lissa at all.

She’d mentioned it to Charles once and he’d flinched as if she’d struck him. After that she’d never brought it up to him again.

Until last night.

Last night, over dinner at the hotel, she’d seen Lissa once again.

One moment Erin had been sitting at the table, jet-lagged and silent, spooning an indifferent soup into her mouth. The next, she’d glanced up, reaching for her water glass, and the girl had been there: Lissa, a slim blonde apparition, standing silent in the dining room door. Erin gasped, and the water went over with a crash.

“Shit,” she’d said, half rising as she reached to right the glass. When she looked up again, the girl —

— Lissa —

— was gone.

“Here, let me get that,” a voice said at her shoulder. The landlady — a kindly heavyset woman, her gray hair pulled back from her round, smiling face — leaned over her, dabbing at the table with a cloth.

“What happened?” Charles was saying, but Erin ignored him.

“That girl,” she said, sinking back into her seat.

The landlady paused, the damp rag in one hand. “Girl?”

“There. She was in the doorway.”

“Did she cause this?” The landlady straightened, abruptly stern. “Sarah,” she called. “Sarah, you come in here right now. Always underfoot, that one,” she added, swiping at the spill, an expanding island of dampness in the linen cloth. “Sarah!”

“Listen —” Charles began, but Erin overrode him.

“It’s not the girl’s fault. Really. She startled me, that’s all. She looked so much like —”

Then the girl was there, eyes downcast, her hands clasped behind her back, and the words —

— my daughter —

— died on Erin’s lips.

The girl, pudgy and thick, with a fringe of dark hair veiling her eyes, looked nothing like Lissa. Nothing at all. Lissa had been airy, ethereal, like some elemental spirit that had settled inexplicably among them. This girl — Sarah — looked sullen and coarse, grossly earthbound.

“Sarah,” the landlady said, “have you been sneaking around again?”

“No, Nanna. I just walked by the door. I didn’t mean anything.”

The landlady gave the spill a final swipe. “That should do.” She snapped the rag at the serving station. “Bring me that jug, child. Quickly now.”

Charles stared at his plate, his mouth set in a thin line, while the girl complied. She moved slowly, cradling a pitcher in her small hands. She studied Erin from under her bangs as she refilled the glass.

The landlady smiled. “I’m very sorry.”

“No need to apologize,” Charles said. “Accidents happen.”

“Ever since her mother passed …” The landlady shook her head. “Can I get you anything else?”

“No,” Charles said. “Thank you.”

“You’ll let me know if you need anything, then.” The landlady turned back to the kitchen, herding the girl before her. Just before the child disappeared, she glared back at the table, and for an instant — the space of a heartbeat — she reminded Erin of Lissa once again. It was like the blink of a camera shutter: Sarah, pudgy and resentful; then Lissa. Lissa glaring back at her, her eyes reproachful and unafraid.

You let me die, those eyes said.

Then the shutter blinked again and Lissa was gone.

“Charles —”

His hands busied themselves with his silverware.

There was something wounded in his silence, something fraught and sorrowful. He looked like a little boy, scowling at his shoes lest a flash of further intimacy send pent-up tears spilling down his cheeks. Erin had wanted to touch him then, too, and in that moment of weakness, a confessional impulse seized her. A fresh start, he’d said. And why not? You didn’t start fresh with lies.

“Charles —”

His knife chattered against the rim of his plate. A dull reflection alighted trembling on the flat of the blade. He stared at the table.

“I saw her, Charles. It was her. I mean … I know …”

Then he did look up, his face pale and cold, his expression set.

“She’s gone, Erin. She’s —” He drew a breath, shook his head, sighed. “She’s … gone.” He stared at her a moment longer. “I’m sorry,” he said. He hesitated as if he wanted to say more, and then, biting his lower lip, he pushed back his chair and left the dining room.

“Madam?” The landlady stood in the kitchen door, wiping her hands on a towel. “Is there something wrong with the meal?”

“No,” Erin said. “The food was fine. Everything’s fine.”

But everything wasn’t fine. Nothing was fine. Nothing would ever be fine again. Erin leaned her head against the cool window and focused on the thrum of the tires, the hum of the engine. It would be all right, she told herself. Everything would be all right.

Yet the wood, vast and green and vigilant, still oppressed her.

Gone, Charles had said.

He was right, of course. That was the hell of it. Last night at dinner, she had seen not Lissa but another child, a dark, heavyset child with griefs and burdens of her own. If Erin’s heart had chosen to see something else, it was an illusion, nothing more.

Perhaps she’d gone mad. Sane women did not see dead children cruising the canned fruit aisle when they did their weekly shopping. Sane women did not see ghostly shapes in the shadows underneath the trees.

Charles downshifted, and the engine’s tone deepened. Tidal pressure swelled through her as the car leaned into a curve. A bulwark of ancient, moss-damp stone — ten feet at least, and maybe taller — shot up from the forest floor before them like the fossilized spine of a buried dragon. As the car hurtled toward it, Erin’s heart quickened.

Then the road dipped and a narrow aperture, hardly wider than the car, appeared in the stone. The car shot under an archway. The suffocating omnipresence of the wood, that sense of contained energies churning just beyond the range of perception, retreated. An instant of speeding darkness followed — how thick the wall must be! — and then they surfaced on the other side, into a treeless meadow, sunlight breaking across the windshield.

Charles slowed as the road dropped down into a deep, round bowl carved into the heartwood. He nosed the car up to a second wall — hand-stacked stone, perhaps waist high or a little higher. He killed the engine.

Erin reached for her satchel. “I guess we’re here,” she said.

3

They got out of the car and stood there in silence, transfixed.

About a hundred yards away, Hollow House — three stories of gray, castellated stone — stood at a slight elevation, moated by sculpted grounds, meadow, and walls. Like a stone cast into a pool, Charles thought. Axis mundi, still center of the wheeling world.

“Something else, isn’t it?” Merrow said.

Something else indeed. The photographs had not done justice to the house’s implacable aspect — its grim solidity, its tower and turrets, its dormers and crow-stepped gables.

Merrow said, “The original structure burned in —”

“Eighteen forty-three,” Charles said. “Everything but the library.”

Merrow gave him a perfunctory smile. “You’ve done your research.”

“Charles is all about research,” Erin said, adjusting her bag. “It must be hell to heat.”

Merrow laughed. “It’s been decades since the entire house was in active use. Mr. Hollow — Edward, that is, your immediate predecessor — lived in a thoroughly updated suite of rooms, though ‘suite’ hardly does it justice. It has good proximity to the library — handy for your research, Mr. Hayden. In any case, you’ll find Hollow House quite livable, I should think.” Merrow led them along the perimeter of the wall. “Shall we?”

“Where’s the gate?” Charles asked.

Merrow uttered something that might have been a laugh. “There’s a gate for deliveries at the back. Otherwise the wall is unbroken, one of the house’s eccentricities. I thought you’d prefer the front view — a formal introduction, if you will. Here we go.” She waved at a set of stone risers built into the wall — a stile, Charles thought, summoning the word out of dusty memories of some obscure Victorian novelist — Surtees maybe.

“Let me give you a hand,” Charles said, but Merrow ignored him, flitting up the stairs on her own, so that he found himself gazing at the curve of her rear end, sleek beneath her clinging skirt.

She looked down at him from the crest of the wall. Charles averted his gaze, heat rising in his cheeks. “You’ll want to be careful,” she said. “It’s a bit steep.” Before he could reply, she started down the other side.

Charles followed, the steps slick beneath his feet. He paused atop the wall to reach for Erin’s hand.

“I’ve got it, Charles,” Erin said.

The steps on the other side were broader and overgrown with moss. He’d just reached the bottom and turned back to look at her when Erin’s foot slipped. Charles lunged for her too late. She slid helter-skelter down the stairs, spilling her satchel, and smashed to the earth on one shoulder, breath bursting from her lungs with a plosive grunt.

“Are you all right?” he asked, but she waved him away.