Chapter 1
The third fire was the one that finally got me pulled from school. The first two had been small enough for adults to use words like accident and grief. The third emptied half the building into the parking lot and brought the fire department, which ended everyone’s patience with both explanations.
My father had been dead seven months, and everyone seemed to think that explained me. Maybe it did. I was thirteen, angry most of the time, and tired of adults watching me as though every slammed door and bad decision contained some important clue. Two weeks after the fire, Mom packed our lives into boxes and drove us north to Bellweather, Maine, where I would finish school online while we stayed with the grandmother I barely knew.
Mom called it a fresh start. I called it exile.
Bellweather announced itself with a weather-beaten wooden sign and a population count of 684. Someone had dragged something sharp through the number so many times that the paint beneath it had nearly disappeared. Below it, carved directly into the wood in deep, uneven letters, was a single word: DECLINING.
I twisted in my seat to look back at it as we passed. “Well, that’s welcoming.”
Mom didn’t answer.
The town itself did little to improve the first impression. Old houses with deep porches lined the road, followed by one gas station, a white church, and a narrow brick building Mom informed me was the post office. I was still deciding whether Bellweather technically qualified as a town when we passed a bulletin board outside a small market. Most of it was covered with ordinary small-town clutter: church notices, a lost-dog flyer, firewood for sale, somebody trying to get rid of an old snowblower. But underneath those were photographs. Missing people. The word MISSING appeared over and over. A boy smiling stiffly for a school picture. A freckled girl. Another boy. A teenager. Some of the flyers were new enough that the paper was still bright white. Others had yellowed inside plastic sleeves, their photographs faded and their corners curled. I only caught pieces as we passed, but there were enough faces to make me turn around and stare through the back window.
“What’s with all the missing people?”
Mom glanced briefly toward the board as it disappeared behind us. “I don’t know.”
That answer should have bothered me more than it did. Instead, I sank lower in my seat and looked at what remained of Bellweather. “This is it? It looks dead. It’s six houses and a gas station.”
“There’s a post office.”
“Oh, good. Never mind. Thriving metropolis.”
Mom tightened her hands around the steering wheel and let the comment pass.
Bellweather had been settled by Irish families nearly two hundred years earlier. Our own family had roots there stretching back generations, though I had never visited. Mom and Grandma had been estranged for most of my childhood. Grandma hadn’t approved of Dad and had thought even less of the way they were raising me. Spoiled was a word I remembered from one of their last arguments. Eventually Mom stopped taking Grandma’s calls, Dad stopped pretending to care, and I grew up knowing almost nothing about the woman whose farm we were now going to live on.
The farm sat several miles beyond town at the end of a narrow lane bordered by old stone walls. There was a white farmhouse, a red barn, fenced pastures, a chicken coop, and a vegetable garden. Beyond all of it stood the forest. It rose behind the property in a dense wall of pine, birch, maple, and ancient oak. Even beneath the afternoon sun, the spaces between the trunks looked strangely dim. There was nothing remarkable about a forest in Maine, or at least I didn’t think there was then, yet this one seemed less like scenery than a boundary.
Grandma came around the barn carrying two feed buckets. She was somewhere in her fifties, broad through the shoulders from a lifetime of farm work, with dark hair going iron-gray and muddy boots. She set one bucket inside the barn doorway before crossing the yard to meet us. The hug she gave Mom was brief but genuine. Whatever had passed between the two of them over the years didn’t disappear, but for those few seconds it seemed willing to stand aside. Then Grandma released her and turned her attention to me.
“So you’re Tobias.”
It wasn’t exactly the warm welcome Mom had promised. Before I could decide whether I was expected to answer, Grandma looked me over and remarked that Mom had told her I’d been giving her hell. Mom immediately warned, “Mom,” but Grandma seemed entirely unconcerned. She went back for the bucket she had left beside the barn and handed it to me.
“Second stall on the left. Put that beside the grain bin before you bring your things in.”
I stared at the bucket and then at her. “We just drove nine hours.”
“I expect your arms survived the trip.”
Mom sighed, but Grandma had already picked up the other bucket and started into the barn. I reluctantly followed, muttering to Mom that she could have at least said hello.
Without breaking stride, Grandma called over her shoulder, “Hello, Tobias. Second stall’s still on the left.”
That was Grandma. She wasn’t cruel. She simply had little patience for dramatics. There were animals to feed, fences to mend, vegetables to pull, and wood to stack, and she considered all of them perfectly reasonable work for a thirteen-year-old. She didn’t ask me how I felt or treat my temper as something delicate. If I was angry, I could be angry while carrying feed. If I was miserable, I could be miserable while cleaning a stall. By the end of the first week, I had learned two things about my grandmother: she could outwork me without trying, and arguing with her accomplished absolutely nothing.
I also learned her rules. Muddy boots stayed beside the door. Gates were left exactly as you found them. Animals ate before you did. And I did not cross the stone wall into the forest after sundown.
Grandma mentioned that last one while sorting potatoes at the kitchen table. She said it with the same practical tone she used when reminding me to latch the chicken coop, which made me look up from my laptop. When I asked why, she kept working. Bellweather’s oldest families had rules about those woods, she explained, and I would follow them whether I believed them or not. I wasn’t to follow music when I couldn’t see who was playing it. I wasn’t to answer laughter from an empty place. If I found a path I didn’t remember seeing before, I left it alone. I accepted no food from strangers I met beyond the wall, and I made no promises there.
“You know that sounds insane, right?”
“Probably.”
“But you believe it?”
Grandma cut a black spot from a potato. “I believe people have lived beside those woods a lot longer than you have. My grandmother called them the Good People. Her mother called them the Fair Folk. Neither woman thought they were particularly good or fair.”
I realized what she meant and laughed. “Fairies?”
Grandma finally looked up. “Call them whatever you like in town. Don’t call them that near the woods.”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t know what’s listening.”
The amusement disappeared from my face. Grandma returned to her potatoes and, before the conversation ended, gave me one last warning. If I ever turned around in those woods and discovered that the path behind me had disappeared, I was not to run. Panic made people stupid, she told me, and the forest was a bad place to become stupid.
At thirteen, I was old enough to know that forests didn’t steal paths, that laughter required someone to make it, and that whatever Grandma believed lived beyond that stone wall belonged with witches, ghosts, and the things children imagined beneath their beds.
Maybe I should have listened.
But that realization came later. At the time, I only thought Grandma was strange.
About four and a half weeks passed before I met Nell.
By then I had settled into the kind of routine I’d sworn I would hate. Online school in the mornings. Farm work whenever Grandma decided sitting in front of a laptop had made me useless. Dinner with Mom and Grandma. Long stretches of nothing in between. I knew the farm well enough to find my way around without being told, but Bellweather still didn’t feel like home. If anything, four and a half weeks there had only made the isolation worse.
Then one evening I found a girl sitting on the stone wall behind the pasture as though she had been waiting for me.
She looked about my age, with blond hair held neatly away from her face by a white headband. Her dress was white too, with a narrow gold ribbon around the waist, the sort of outfit I associated with old photographs or Easter Sunday rather than sitting beside a muddy Maine pasture. The strange part was that she didn’t frighten me. Not then. She simply looked as though she belonged somewhere else.
Nell already knew my name. That bothered me until I remembered Bellweather had fewer than seven hundred people and strangers in town had already known who Grandma was before I mentioned her. Nell told me she lived beyond the woods, and I assumed there must be another road or another cluster of houses somewhere beyond the trees. I didn’t question it much. More importantly, she was the first person I’d met since arriving who didn’t know me as the boy whose father had died or the kid who’d been pulled from school.
So I kept meeting her. Sometimes Nell sat on the wall. Sometimes I found her beside the creek. I never actually saw her arrive, although it took me a while to notice that. She was simply there when I came looking. Mostly I talked and Nell listened. I complained about Bellweather, schoolwork, the farm, and Grandma’s apparent belief that child labor laws didn’t extend past her property line. Eventually I talked about Dad. Nell never gave me the look adults gave me when he came up. She never offered some useless line about grief or healing. She simply listened, sometimes so completely that I became aware of how little she moved. There were other things I might have questioned if I hadn’t been lonely. Nell never seemed bothered by cold. She didn’t swat at insects. Animals sometimes noticed her before I did. But lonely people can explain away a lot when somebody makes them feel less lonely.
The mosquito was the first thing I couldn’t explain away.
We were sitting beside the creek one evening when I noticed one feeding from the inside of Nell’s forearm. Its body had swollen dark with her blood. I pointed it out, but Nell only glanced down and told me it was almost finished. I thought that was weird, but before I could say much about it, another mosquito landed on my wrist. I slapped it automatically. I didn’t think about it. Who thinks about killing a mosquito? When I lifted my hand, there was a tiny smear of blood on my skin.
Nell stared at it.
“You killed it.”
“It was biting me.”
“It was hungry.”
“So? It’s a mosquito.”
I glanced down for only a second, wiping the smear of blood against my jeans. When I looked back, Nell was standing.
I hadn’t seen her get up.
There had been no shift of her weight, no push of her hands against the ground, no movement at the edge of my vision. One moment she had been sitting beside me, and the next she was simply standing a few feet away. Her arms hung loosely at her sides, her face frighteningly still.
Then the forest changed.
The birds stopped chirping. Not gradually, not one after another. Every bird in the trees seemed to fall silent at once. The insects went quiet with them. Even the creek, which had been chattering over stones beside us all evening, seemed to soften until I could barely hear the water moving. The woods had been full of ordinary evening noise seconds before. Now the silence was so complete that I could hear my own breathing.
Nell raised her eyes to mine. I had seen her quiet. I had seen her strange. I had watched her become so still that I’d wondered whether she was breathing. But I had never seen her angry, and somehow the forest seemed to know she was angry before I fully understood it myself.
“You eat when you’re hungry,” she said. “So do we.”
I gave an uncomfortable laugh, but it sounded wrong in the silence. “Yeah, but I’m a person.”
Something changed behind Nell’s eyes. She didn’t shout. She didn’t have to. “You humans are always like this. You take what you want. You kill what bothers you. You destroy us, and then you act like we were never supposed to be here at all.”
I stared at her. The silent birds frightened me. The quiet creek frightened me. The fact that I had never seen her stand frightened me. But what finally made something cold open inside my stomach was two words.
You humans.
Nell hadn’t said we.
I got up and backed away. She didn’t follow me. She only stood beside the silenced creek watching while I retreated, and the forest remained unnaturally still around her. I walked quickly at first because I didn’t want her to know how badly she had frightened me. Then something moved through the brush behind me and I ran.
I looked back once. Nell was still standing beside the creek, watching me. I ran harder. When I looked back again, she was gone. Not walking away. Not disappearing between the trees. There had been nowhere for her to go in the few seconds since I had last looked.
She was simply gone.
Four weeks passed before I saw Nell again.
For the first several days, I was relieved. I avoided the stone wall. I found reasons to stay close to the barn when my chores took me outside. If I heard something moving near the tree line, I refused to look. But fear is difficult to keep sharp when nothing happens. A week passed, then another. Nothing followed me home. Nothing waited beside the creek. Nell didn’t appear on the wall, and the forest went back to sounding like a forest.
By the third week, fear had begun turning into something I hated admitting even to myself. I missed her. I remembered the mosquito and the silence that had fallen over the creek, but I also remembered having someone who listened when I talked about Dad. Bellweather was still Bellweather. I was still alone. I started wondering whether Grandma’s stories had gotten into my head, whether Nell had only been angry and I had frightened myself into making the rest worse than it was.
By the fourth week, I was looking for her again.
That was when Nell returned.
She stood beyond the stone wall at dusk, looking exactly as she always had. White dress, gold ribbon, blond hair beneath the white headband. She didn’t wave or apologize. She looked at me for a long moment, turned, and walked into the forest.
I followed her.
The first part of the forest was familiar. I had gone beyond the wall during daylight before, though never very far. Nell moved quickly, slipping between the trees without checking whether I followed, and soon the pasture disappeared behind us. I tried calling to her, asking where she was taking me, but she never stopped. She only laughed somewhere ahead of me, light and playful, as though this were some game and I was supposed to chase her. Every time I thought I was catching up, the flash of her white dress slipped behind another trunk.
“Nell, wait!”
Her laughter came back through the trees.
She kept going.
The deeper we went, the less moonlight reached the ground. Branches intertwined overhead and roots crossed the earth in thick knots. I called her name again, louder this time, but Nell still didn’t answer. I caught another glimpse of white farther ahead and hurried after it. Somewhere to my right, another laugh answered hers.
That one wasn’t Nell.
It sounded like a child laughing where I could see no child at all. Grandma’s warning returned immediately, and for once I followed it. I didn’t answer. I kept after the fading white of Nell’s dress instead.
Then I noticed the path beneath my feet. I didn’t remember seeing it before. I slowed and looked behind me, only to discover there was no path at all. Trees stood there instead, crowded together so densely that I couldn’t understand how I had passed between them.
Maybe I should have listened.
This time the thought came with terror. Every ridiculous thing Grandma had told me at that kitchen table was becoming real, and I was already too far inside the forest to know how to get home.
Nell disappeared between two enormous pines. I called after her and hurried through the gap, emerging into a clearing washed in moonlight.
Nell stood near its center.
But she wasn’t alone.
Something tall and impossibly thin stood beside her. For one confused moment, I thought I was looking at some enormous deer standing upright. Antlers branched from its skull, rising above a long, gaunt head, and its body was covered in dark, ragged fur stretched over a skeletal frame. Its arms hung nearly to its knees, ending in long hands tipped with curved claws. There was something almost majestic about it from a distance, something ancient in the shape of the antlers and the way it stood motionless beside Nell. For a few seconds, with moonlight silvering the edges of its body, I could almost convince myself it was beautiful.
Then the light changed.
A cloud moved away from the moon, and the creature’s face came fully into view.
There were too many eyes.
They opened across its face in places eyes should never have been, small and wet and gleaming, each moving independently until one after another they settled on me. Blood seeped from the bases of its antlers, running in thin dark trails through the fur along its skull and neck. Its mouth stretched too wide across its face, exposing rows of narrow teeth that belonged to no deer and nothing else I knew how to name.
The beauty vanished.
Nell rested one hand against the creature as though there was nothing monstrous about it at all.
I backed away.
Then someone called my name.
I knew the voice.
Dad.
For seven months I had wanted one impossible thing, and suddenly that impossible thing was somewhere among the trees calling for me. Nell, the creature, Grandma’s warnings, all of it disappeared beneath the desperate certainty that Dad was there. I ran toward the voice.
It kept moving. Every time I thought I was close, Dad called again from somewhere farther ahead. Branches scratched my arms and face. Roots caught at my shoes. I stumbled, recovered, and kept going until I noticed the eyes watching from between the trees. At first I mistook them for animals. Then one of the figures stepped close enough for moonlight to touch his face.
I knew him.
I had seen that boy smiling from one of the missing posters on the bulletin board when Mom and I first drove into Bellweather. I could suddenly picture the photograph with horrible clarity. Another child appeared behind a birch, and I recognized her too. Then another emerged, and another after that, until the photographs I had barely noticed through the car window were standing in the forest looking back at me. Some belonged to newer posters. Others wore clothes that made me think of the old, yellowed notices buried beneath them. There were more faces than I remembered seeing on the board, and the realization made my stomach turn. The posters hadn’t shown everyone who had disappeared here. They had shown only the ones somebody still remembered enough to look for.
None of them spoke. They simply moved whenever I moved, closing openings between the trees whenever I tried to change direction. When I went left, pale faces appeared there. When I turned right, others stepped silently into view. They never rushed me. They didn’t need to. They were herding me, and by the time I understood that, panic had already overcome everything Grandma had told me.
I ran.
I no longer knew where Nell was, where the clearing had been, or which direction led home. The forest had swallowed every landmark. Then Dad called again, so close that I nearly collapsed with relief.
“Toby.”
Only Dad called me that.
I crashed through the undergrowth and saw him standing between two enormous trees with his arms open. I didn’t question it. I didn’t care that it was impossible. I ran straight to my father and threw my arms around him.
Something rough tore across my cheek.
I recoiled and found my arms wrapped around a tree. Blood from the scratch on my face streaked the bark beneath my hand. I stared at the place where Dad’s face should have been and saw human features bulging from the trunk instead. A nose distorted the grain. Lips pressed through a seam in the wood. One eye was almost swallowed beneath bark, but the other remained visible.
It moved.
I stumbled backward and saw another face higher on the trunk, then another. Children’s faces had grown into the tree, distorted by wood but unmistakably human, and some of their eyes were still moving.
Something snapped around my ankle.
I hit the ground hard enough to lose my breath. Before I could crawl away, a vine twisted around one wrist and wrenched my arm backward. Another caught the other. Roots coiled around my ankles while branches descended from above and wrapped around my forearms. I screamed and clawed at the earth, digging my fingers into dirt and dead leaves as they dragged me backward. My nails tore against roots I couldn’t hold onto. The forest lifted me from the ground and slammed my back against the trunk.
Then the branches began to pull.
My arms were dragged outward in opposite directions while the vines around my ankles pulled my legs apart. Bark ground into my back and reopened the wound on my cheek. The pressure increased until every joint in my body strained against itself. I twisted, kicked and begged, and the forest answered by pulling harder. A vine tightened around my wrist until my hand began to numb. Another crawled higher around my thigh. My left arm was forced upward while the other was dragged sideways, wrenching my torso until pain exploded through my shoulder and something inside the joint shifted with a sickening pop.
I screamed, but the forest didn’t stop. It stretched me farther, and for one horrible moment I was certain it intended to pull me apart. The branches bowed beneath the force they were exerting, tightening whenever I struggled. My shoulder burned with every movement. My hips felt as though they were being pried from their sockets. Thin thorned vines wound around my skin, cutting into me wherever they found purchase, and blood slicked the places where I fought against them. The missing children watched silently from the darkness. Some stood between the trees. Others stared from inside them. I begged them to help me until I was choking on my own screams, but not one of them moved.
Then I saw white moving through the forest.
Nell.
Relief hit me so violently that I sobbed her name. For one desperate second, nothing that had happened mattered. Nell had come back. Whatever she was, whatever she had said beside the creek, she was my friend. She would make them stop. I called for her, begged her to help me while the branches continued stretching my injured shoulder until the pain blurred my vision.
She stepped into the moonlight.
The horned creature followed her.
My hope faltered, but I clung to it anyway. I needed Nell to be the girl who had sat beside the creek listening to me talk about Dad. I needed her to have brought the creature because she could control it, because she could tell it to release me, because there had to be some explanation that ended with me getting out of those woods.
Nell looked at me and smiled.
It wasn’t the small, strange smile I remembered from the wall. There was something knowing and sinister in it now, something that made every moment I had spent with her rearrange itself inside my mind. Then she reached beside her and took the horned creature’s hand. Its long clawed fingers folded around hers.
That was when I finally understood.
Nell had never wandered into those woods. She had never been another lonely child. She had never needed me to find her, and she had never needed a friend. She had listened while I told her everything: how lonely I was, how much I missed Dad, how badly I wanted somebody to understand me. I had mistaken her attention for affection. She had been learning me. She had been waiting for the loneliness to become stronger than the fear.
Nell was one of them. She always had been.
The horned creature released her hand and approached while Nell remained where she was. Up close, it smelled of wet soil and old blood. Its many eyes crawled over me independently, some watching my face while others followed the trembling of my legs or the branches digging into my wrists. It raised one claw and placed the tip against my forehead. I jerked away, but a branch cinched across my throat and drove the back of my skull against the trunk.
The claw entered my skin.
It didn’t slash. It carved.
The point dragged slowly through my forehead, parting skin while the creature traced one line, lifted its claw, then cut another across it. I felt every change in direction. Blood ran hot into my eyebrows and filled the corner of one eye. Another stroke opened my skin above the bridge of my nose. I screamed hard enough that my throat tore raw, but the creature continued drawing its symbol as carefully as if I were nothing more than a piece of wood beneath a knife. Blood slid down my nose and across my lips. I tasted salt and iron when I gasped. The branches stretched my ruined shoulder farther whenever I fought, until I couldn’t tell which pain belonged to the carving and which belonged to the rest of my body.
When the symbol was finished, the creature pushed its claw into the raw center of it.
The tree moved behind me.
I felt the bark separate against my back before I heard it, a wet splitting sound beneath the dry crack of wood. The trunk opened along a vertical seam. What waited inside wasn’t hollow and it wasn’t wood. Pale, slick fibers shifted in a dark cavity that glistened with sap too thin and reddish to look like sap at all. The inside contracted once around nothing, almost like a throat swallowing.
I started screaming before the creature touched me.
It shoved me backward.
The opening received me.
Warm tissue folded over my back and adhered to my skin. Hundreds of fine fibers pressed against me at once, twitching and searching. One found the cut across my shoulder and pushed into it. Another forced itself beneath the skin near my ribs. Then there were too many to separate from one another. They pierced me in clusters, and I felt them sliding deeper, forcing their way between layers of muscle instead of stopping at the surface.
I tried to wrench myself forward.
The tree pulled back.
Something under my skin moved.
I looked down and watched a thin root travel beneath the flesh of my forearm. My skin lifted over it in a narrow moving ridge as it worked toward my elbow. Another disappeared deeper into the muscle. Something else curled around the bone with enough pressure that I felt it scrape. Fibers threaded through me wherever they could find space, slipping alongside tendons, squeezing between muscle and bone, branching into thinner strands as they spread.
Then they found my veins.
I knew the instant they did.
A sharp cold sensation shot up my arm, followed by pressure that seemed to come from inside the blood vessels themselves. The fibers followed the branching veins through my body as if my own circulation had become a map. My heart hammered harder from panic.
That only helped them.
Every beat pushed blood toward whatever had entered me. The pale fibers darkened beneath my skin. Red traveled through them and disappeared backward into the trunk.
The tree was drinking me.
Not quickly. Not enough to let me pass out.
Slowly.
Carefully.
It wanted me conscious.
The vines released my right ankle, and for one stupid instant I thought part of me had gotten free. Then the bark beneath my heel softened and opened. My foot sank into it. I kicked, but something inside seized my ankle and pulled. The opening climbed over my shoe, my calf, then my knee. Fibers punched into the meat of my leg and tightened around the bone. I felt them spreading through my calf while the trunk drew the leg deeper.
My body wasn’t being hidden inside the tree.
It was being taken apart and incorporated while I was still using it.
I screamed for Mom. I screamed for Grandma. I screamed Nell’s name even though I knew by then that she would never help me. Finally I called for Dad.
“Toby.”
Dad answered.
His voice came from somewhere inside the trunk.
I sobbed so hard I choked.
My other leg disappeared. The opening climbed over my hips and lower stomach. The wet fibers found me everywhere now. They burrowed beneath my skin and spread through my abdomen. I felt one sliding beneath the muscles of my stomach. Another curled painfully around a rib. Others pulsed against my veins, taking a little with every beat of my heart. My blood moved out of me and into the tree while something thick and warm moved the other direction.
Sap entered me.
I felt it spreading through places that had carried only blood seconds before. My limbs became heavy. My fingers cramped and curled. Beneath my skin, veins that should have been blue began showing thin brown branching lines among them.
Then came the first heartbeat that wasn’t mine.
Thump.
It traveled through the trunk and directly through my spine.
Another answered farther away.
Thump.
Then another.
The Living Trees were beating.
The tree closed over my stomach and chest. Fibers slid between my ribs. One pressed deep enough that I felt it move with my lungs each time I tried to breathe. Another wound around my injured shoulder and pulled the damaged joint backward into the trunk. I felt the bone shift. I felt the fibers tighten around it. Then I felt something that terrified me more than the pain.
My shoulder stopped feeling separate from the tree.
I could feel the bark behind me as if it were skin.
I could feel roots underground.
Cold dirt packed around them. Water moved through the soil. Tiny insects crawled over roots yards away, and I felt their legs as faint scratches against a body that had suddenly become far larger than mine.
Then I felt the others.
Heartbeats.
Human heartbeats.
Small and terrified, buried inside the slower pulse of the forest.
The missing people had never left Bellweather.
The scratched population sign returned to me, along with that ugly word carved beneath the number.
DECLINING.
It hadn’t been a joke.
The people on those posters hadn’t disappeared. The children watching from between the trees weren’t ghosts. The faces buried beneath the bark weren’t corpses.
They were still in here.
Still feeling.
Still aware.
The tree drew my arms backward. The vines loosened only when the flesh beneath them began sinking into the trunk. Wet fibers pushed into my palms and between my fingers. My fingers cramped so violently that I thought the bones would break, then the bark grew over them and I could no longer tell where my hands ended. My blood continued leaving me in slow pulses while the tree’s fluid filled what it took.
My heart beat.
The tree answered.
After a while, I couldn’t tell which one was making the other move.
Bark climbed my throat.
I tried to scream again and felt fibers press around my neck from inside. My voice became a wet rasp. Nell stood beside the horned creature watching me, perfectly calm.
The tree reached my jaw.
The inner fibers pushed beneath the skin of my neck and into my cheeks. I felt them spreading along my jawbone, crawling beneath my face. My tongue tasted blood and something bitter and green. The bark tightened around the sides of my skull while the opening behind me drew the rest of my head inward.
I tried to close my eyes.
I couldn’t.
Wood hardened around my cheeks. Thin roots moved beneath the skin beside my mouth. The carved symbol on my forehead disappeared beneath a translucent layer of wet new bark before the surface darkened and hardened around it.
My mouth was swallowed.
My nose followed.
Only my eyes remained exposed.
I could still see Nell.
I could still hear the forest.
I could still feel my heart beating somewhere inside the enormous trunk, except it didn’t feel like only my heart anymore. Blood and sap moved through the same branching channels. Roots had replaced the boundaries of my body. The tree had gone through my skin, through my muscle, around my bones and into my blood until there was no clean place left where Tobias ended and it began.
I wasn’t inside the Living Tree.
I was part of it.
And I was still conscious.
That was the worst thing the forest did to me.
It didn’t kill me.
It kept me.
It was after midnight when Mom finally called the police. By then flashlights were moving through the fields, along the road and into the edge of the forest. Deputies searched while Grandma led people through the places she knew. Mom refused to stay at the farmhouse. She called my name until her throat went raw, stumbling over roots and pushing through branches while Grandma stayed close behind her.
Hours passed before exhaustion forced Mom to stop. She leaned against the trunk of an enormous tree, bent forward and tried to catch her breath. Then something moved beneath her palm.
Thump.
She straightened. For several seconds she stood perfectly still, unsure whether she had imagined it.
Thump.
The vibration came through the bark again.
Mom slowly lifted her flashlight and followed its beam up the trunk. It passed over rough bark and deep grooves before catching something that didn’t belong there.
My face.
Her scream brought Grandma running.
Bark surrounded my cheeks and crossed my forehead. The old symbol remained faintly visible where flesh and wood had grown together, but there was enough of me left that my mother could never have mistaken me for anyone else. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move my head or reach for her.
But my eyes could move.
I found hers.
“Tobias!”
Mom threw herself against the trunk and clawed at the bark surrounding my face. She tore at it until pieces broke beneath her nails, desperate to find some edge she could pull apart, some seam that would give her back her son.
Pain tore through me.
I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t tell her that every piece she ripped from the trunk was part of me now.
Grandma grabbed her from behind and pulled her away. Mom fought her, screaming that I was in there, that they needed an axe, that they could cut me out if somebody would just help her. Grandma looked at my face and understood before Mom did. For the first time since I’d arrived at her farm, my grandmother had nothing practical to do. There was no fence to mend, no animal to tend, no chore that could make a terrible thing manageable. She simply stared into my terrified eyes and tightened her arms around her daughter.
“He’s alive!” Mom screamed.
“I know.”
My tree beat beneath them.
Thump.
Mom stopped fighting.
Another heartbeat answered deeper in the forest, and then another answered that one. Soon the sound surrounded them, passing from tree to tree beyond the reach of their flashlights until the woods seemed to possess a single enormous pulse.
Mom stared into my eyes, and I watched the moment she understood that I was still there. Not a face left behind in a dead tree. Not some grotesque impression of what had happened to me.
Me.
Her son.
Then my eyes began to close.
“Tobias?”
Mom lunged toward me, but there was nothing she could do. My eyelids lowered slowly as fresh bark crept over the edges of my face. It moved across my cheeks, over my mouth and nose, filling every remaining trace of flesh with darkening grain. The last thing I saw was my mother reaching for me.
Then my eyes closed.
The bark rolled over them.
Mom screamed my name and clawed at the trunk again, but there was no longer a boy looking back at her. The wood hardened and settled until my face seemed to be nothing more than an image carved into the tree: the faint shape of closed eyes, a nose, a mouth, the suggestion of a thirteen-year-old boy caught forever in the grain.
No movement.
No blinking.
Nothing.
Mom stood frozen in front of me, staring in horror at what looked like a carving where her son had been only seconds before.
Then the tree beneath her hand pulsed.
Thump.
She stopped breathing.
Thump.
The face in the bark didn’t move.
But the heartbeat continued.
Thump.
Mom’s hand flew to her mouth. Whatever hope had remained on her face collapsed as she understood what the sound meant.
I was still in there.
Grandma came up behind her and wrapped both arms around her daughter. This time Mom didn’t fight. She simply folded against her mother, staring over Grandma’s shoulder at the motionless face carved into the tree while that terrible heartbeat continued beneath the bark.
Grandma held her tightly.
“He’s theirs now.”
The End
