Page 16 of The Folklore of Forever (Moonville #2)

Sixteen

In 1925, a circus train crashed in Moonville. The conductor claimed to have seen a bear on the tracks, which derailed the train; many animals escaped. All were eventually reported recovered, but sporadic sightings of zoo animals continued into the next century.

Local Legends and Superstitions, Tempest Family Grimoire

I wish my niece good night, feigning that I need to adjust the buckles of my boots so that I can linger behind. Luna loads up all of her lanterns except one, which I’ve absconded with, and piles them into the red wagon she pulled Ash around the neighborhood in when she was a baby. Then, once I’m alone, I face the empty clearing.

It’s smaller when I’m the only one here, somehow. And dauntingly quiet. I circle the ring of mushrooms in measured steps, around and around, eyeing it sidelong.

Quick, before I can stop myself, I leap inside.

A moment passes.

When nothing fantastical happens, I choose triumph. There is no reason to feel disappointed, because I had zero expectations of unusual results. “Ha! Nothing.”

“Trying to run away to Fairyland?” a voice inquires.

I jerk out of the fairy ring, smashing a mushroom. Bad luck, bad luck, a fairy’s going to coat the soles of your feet with molten gold as punishment. When I was small, Dottie told me a story about fairies doing such things, and it was so enjoyably ghastly that I never forgot.

Morgan slips one hand into his pocket, the other gripping the handle of his violin case. He watches me from a short distance, his gaze wandering from the smashed mushroom to the lantern I’m holding aloft, two of its glass panels blue, two of them green. Its shine paints him beautifully inhuman, like what you’d see looking back at you from beneath the surface of the sea in a fairy tale.

Heart thundering, I tell him, “It isn’t nice to sneak up on people.”

“Did you have a plan for if it worked?”

“Who’s to say it didn’t? Maybe I traveled there and back before you could blink. Maybe I’ve been there for the last hundred years.”

One corner of his mouth edges into a knowing smile. “I like when I catch you acting oddly. Makes you less formidable.”

“I’m not formidable,” I shoot back, offended. Then I frown. “Wait. Yes, I am. Extremely formidable. So…go on home, then. Leave me to my formidability in peace.” I don’t mind that I’m not a gregarious person, but one of the downfalls of being this way is that I’ve got no charm, no oil for the hinges of conversational doors to make them open and close smoothly. I am trying to conduct private business out here, and Morgan is impeding that activity, so my only path forward is to tell him to get lost. “Goodbye.”

“Why do you want me to leave?” He makes no move to do so, scanning our surroundings. “You got other plans?”

“I thought I heard someone back here earlier,” I reply, “who wasn’t in our party. I wanted to look for them.”

Morgan’s eyebrows knit ever so slightly before rising, his eyes a touch wider. “By yourself?”

Instant regret. There’s no getting rid of him now.

“I’ll be fine.”

“You heard some one or some thing ? Maybe you heard the coralote?”

“The coralote cannot exist. There’s nothing like it in any wildlife book, and believe me, I’ve looked through plenty of them.” I head out of the trees, over the red bridge. Back to Vallis Boulevard with its sleeping houses and lamps firing orange off the windshields of parked cars. Aside from an elderly woman rolling by on her bicycle, frozen pizza from an open-late gas station propped in her basket, nobody is afoot.

“Just because it hasn’t been found by others doesn’t mean you didn’t find it,” Morgan says simply. “What if it’s a paranimal? What if it’s magic?”

The word burns across the night, lighting me up with a warm, wonderful feeling— magic!

I

AG

CM

—before I wrestle it into submission.

I’ve pigeonholed myself, you see. By sticking to certain opinions for so long, they’ve baked into people’s perceptions of me. I’ll never be able to shed it.

Zelda Tempest: never stays in a relationship for long. She falls from man to man and eats their love like candy. Doesn’t believe in the supernatural.

If my sisters find out I’m entertaining even a whisper that magic might be real—not because they’ve been telling me so for years but because magic is maybe happening to me —they are going to be disgusted. I can already hear Too late, we’re not accepting you into our witchhood because you’ve been so rude about it and I don’t believe you. Now, how does that feel?

“It can’t be real,” I say helplessly.

“Come on. You want to believe, don’t you? I can tell.”

I squint. “How?”

He bumps the toe of his shoe against mine. “Your boots have pictures of zombies coming out of coffins. You’ve got a Werewolf of London poster on your wall.”

“So?”

He begins to speak, his cheekbones burning with color, but then stops. Studies me. “Maybe the paranormal isn’t real. But tell me honestly that if it was real, you wouldn’t want to learn every single little thing about it. If there is even the slightest possibility of knowing great big things, you need to find out.” He advances on me with interest as dark as the hollow of a tree. “It would drive you mad, not knowing for sure.”

My skin is hot all over, creeping down my throat, spreading like a rash. “How did you guess that about me?”

“Because you’re like me. Once you’re wondering, you can’t let go. And do you know what?”

“What?”

“I think you should stop worrying about being right, and let yourself explore this even if you might be wrong.”

I analyze his face, sharp lines and soft curves. It looks chiseled from white opal, but I bet if I stroked a finger down his cheek, it’d feel soft as feathers.

Everything feels magnified. The warm breeze stirring, the echoing bark of a dog a couple blocks away, the vivid electric green, yellow, red of the stoplight. Morgan’s hair a black sickle against his cheek like the inverse of moon against night.

“Why do you believe?” I ask.

Morgan looks away, ruminating for a spell. “In a town known for being magical, nothing magical has ever happened to me. Not once.” His pain is like a shock wave. “I need for it to be real,” he says wistfully, “because I want to be able to do the unexplainable, like Luna and Romina, and now Alex.”

(It should be noted that Alex himself has professed that he does not have any new gifts, and that he’s able to locate lost belongings simply because he is “good at everything.”)

Morgan turns back to me, jaw set. “If magic isn’t going to choose me, then I’m going to go find it . And if you, Zelda, can see the supernatural, then I need to be exactly where you are.”

—

Morgan drops his violin off on Wafting Crescent’s porch, and then we continue walking past our houses, down the road. “All right, then. For the sake of…” I twirl a hand, thinking out loud. “Scientific research. How should we proceed?”

That we transforms his expression to one of greed and elation. “We search with intention. How many paranimals have you seen?”

Counting only this past summer, and not the experiences I had while growing up, it would be…“Three.” The glowing winged creatures that flock to lightbulbs when it storms. The coralote. The huggle. I allow the forbidden thought to sneak in.

What if I’m a witch?

I have no right to feel thrilled at the prospect, given that I have been such a staunch denier. I bite my lip. “Can I confess something?”

Morgan just looks at me, pleasantly expectant. Go on.

“I’ve always wanted to believe in magic. I’m not saying I do now, but…”

“But maybe?”

“I’m at whatever step is right before maybe. I’m at almost maybe.” I’m trying to distance myself from it, wanting to believe without letting on to the universe that I want to.

“I won’t say I told you so if we’re wrong, you know,” he says.

Eyes forward on the road, my next lungful is jagged. The earth is beginning to cool, fog rising from the hollows that dip here and there throughout our town, the twists and turns on back roads with sheer drops on either side. Mist floats up to wreath treetops, and it reminds me of the legend of brays, which are the spirits of people who died in these woods. If you get too close to a bray on the anniversary of its death, it’s allowed to take your body as its own, leaving you a captive of the forest forever while they wear your skin and your life.

“You don’t find any of this embarrassing?” I sweep my hair over one shoulder and fiddle with it. “Being a fully grown adult, hunting for ghosts, talking about paranimals. Prophecies, crystal balls, love magic.”

“I don’t know.” He spins once, hands in his suit jacket with his elbows pointed out. “I’d rather be wrong than never wonder at all and miss out on incredible. It’s why I never left Moonville. If I’m ever gonna witness anything special, this is where that would happen.”

“What are you hoping for, exactly?”

“Any sort of magic power. Literally, I would take any . My neighbor growing up, Hank, said there’s a strange kind of goat around here that comes out only when it senses tornadoes. Disappears as soon as the tornadoes are gone, so you’d only catch one if you were out in a storm. Why is it that Hank knows about that? Hank was the most ordinary guy alive. He didn’t even really care that he saw a phenomenon. No curiosity. It isn’t fair that those of us who are looking for this stuff don’t get to discover it.” He makes a hum sound deep in his throat. “I’d love to be able to see ghosts. Or find a waraver.”

“A waraver! It’s been ages since I heard about those.”

“War- ah -vur,” he corrects.

I shake my head firmly. “ Where -a-vur.”

We smile at each other. Disagreeing over its pronunciation is as locally famous as the legend itself.

Waravers are formed from whitecaps wherever rapids are found in Raccoon Creek. They survive only by moonlight, collapsing back into water at daybreak, and have a humanlike shape. Some folktales describe the waraver as looking exactly like a small child, but with a sunken nose, lower hairline, and extra joints in the arms and legs; but other stories (particularly in the modern era) have beautified the legend, depicting them as the same height and likeness as adult humans, but supernaturally attractive, with eyes and skin that gleam as if perpetually wet. Their language cannot be understood by humans. When they speak, bubbles pour from their mouths. They have been known to warn fishermen of danger and save drowning children—but are also said to abduct children and drown fishermen. The thing about folklore is that there are two sides to every story, and they nearly always directly contradict each other.

Could there be waravers out there?

I don’t think so. But I have no evidence, so I cannot say for a fact that there are no waravers.

We’ve been walking for about ten minutes without direction. I look around suddenly. “Where are we?”

Morgan’s hand circles my wrist to lift the lantern higher and spill light over the road before us. Some fifteen feet off, the brick street crumbles into wild grass, abandoned midconstruction. The road was originally meant to lead to Kings Station, a nearby town that’s become more inaccessible and insular by the year. Tunnel cave-ins, collapsed bridges, huge splits opening up in the road, with the stench of sewer gas springing from them. Attempts to make contact with Kings Station are cursed.

“Dixon’s Dead End,” we both intone. So named after a man who was hit by a train here.

“But it doesn’t make any sense.” I point behind us. “We were just walking west down Vallis, weren’t we? And Dixon’s Dead End is directly east.”

We look at each other.

“I don’t remember. I was following you,” he says.

“And I was following you.”

It’s like two people with their hands on the planchette of a Ouija board. You don’t know if the other person has been guiding it, or…

If something else is.

Falling Rock Forest has been inching closer to town over the years, eating up all of this area, the abandoned road. Wispy gray clouds skate across half the moon, and the broken moonlight slants across a low tree branch just overhead, illumining a strange creature sitting upon it with its long furry tail wrapped around its body.

“Hello there, little huggle,” I singsong. Morgan looks first at me, I think because he’s never heard me use that tone of voice before, and then upward, following my line of sight.

The creature jumps down. Morgan goes very still, and I kneel, a hand outstretched in offering.

It sniffs my fingers, glass-bright eyes roving nervously, ears twitching.

“That looks like a squirrel,” Morgan says carefully.

I examine the animal. Small enough to carry in my hand, with bushy light brown fur. Large, orange, wide-set eyes, three black rings for pupils, one within another within another.

A slow smile spreads over my face. “It isn’t. This is a huggle.”

And this time, it doesn’t change. Doesn’t morph back into a squirrel. It watches me for a second, then darts toward the trees. Waits right at the edge as if beckoning us to follow.

Morgan and I look at each other. The animation in his face is fascinating to me—he is so easy to read. His expressive features remind me of those digital picture frames that click to a new image every five seconds. Something’s always going on: a feathering of muscles, one type of smile evolving into another, a fluid rise of a sharp black eyebrow, a shocked gasp. All the world’s a stage, and I’m watching him give one long, continuous performance.

“ The clock ,” somebody says.

I stop, grabbing Morgan’s sleeve.

“What?” he asks under his breath, staring at my fingers.

“Did you hear that?”

He shakes his head. I search his eyes as the voice continues: “ Of old and new was always …” He makes no reaction, now absorbed in my face.

I step back, and the voice ceases.

Step forward again. There’s a rush of wind. “ The clock —”

And then back. It ceases. “You don’t hear that?”

Morgan’s forehead pinches. “Hear what?”

I grip my lantern tight, swallowing a hard lump in my throat. Zelda, Zelda. I feel the trees reaching for me. We remember you.

Following the huggle, I walk three paces toward the forest’s edge, and this time, I do not step back when the unseen person begins to speak.

“The clock of old and new was always talking about how she used to be human and had butter-yellow hair. That was before the sorceress stuffed her inside a clock.”

The forest breathes out, branches twisting, the glow of fireflies reminding me of yellow cat’s eyes painted on the wardrobe in Luna’s bedroom. The voice does not say anything else.

I glance at Morgan. “Ready?”

“You have no idea.”

Into the woods we go.