Page 9 of The Folklore of Forever (Moonville #2)

Nine

The trails out here can move on you, leading even the seasoned local astray. To appease the forest gods and keep your path, drop aragonite or fruit of the black gum tree as you go.

Local Legends and Superstitions, Tempest Family Grimoire

Sleep comes in fits, and I rise out of bed much earlier than normal the following morning. I sneak downstairs, hiding when I hear voices, then wait until Luna and Romina are preoccupied in the storeroom before I tiptoe out the front door, undiscovered.

Then I drive to Wiley Palmer Road.

It isn’t that I think I’ll see again whatever it is that I thought I saw. With the threat of police, Morgan driving backward, heated emotions, and the general spookiness that accompanies a night of ghost hunting—real or not—my epinephrine-soaked brain simply conjured an extraordinary vision. However, I am a woman of study. If there is something strange out there, I certainly need to know what that is.

Already, the animal’s begun to smear: I can no longer remember the length of its fur or the texture of the antlers. And while yes, I am certain I hallucinated at least most of it (I likely saw a coyote), returning to the scene where it happened might refresh my memory.

I park my car in a gravelly patch off the side of the road, lock the doors, and set out. I’m in silver tights and a long black dress, which isn’t ideal for July temperatures, but I’m not about to go traipsing through a poison ivy meadow without protection. My hair swishes in a long braid to keep it out of my face. I’m wearing so much SPF that if the sun stares directly at me, it’s going to get a migraine. From somewhere deep inside, I hear an excited child’s voice. Yes! Finally! But I remind her that this isn’t like those times. I didn’t bring a notebook. No backpack. No lunch. I’m not venturing inside the forest.

The road is barren. No animals in sight.

I walk it anyway, gaze averted from the woods as if I don’t want it to know I’m thinking about it, which I am, of course. I never did stop thinking about these woods. Spending all day in them, morning till dinnertime, trudging home only because my parents would notice at some point that I was gone at all, surely. As long as there was a body in my chair at the dinner table, they wouldn’t give much thought to how I spent my time. I didn’t have it the same as Luna, who they crushed with responsibilities from a young age, or carefree Romina, who acted out to intentionally draw attention to herself. I grew up invisible.

When I reach the turnoff for the Davilla house, its decomposing roof visible in the distance, I turn back to scan again. Of course I’m not going to come upon the animal simply waiting for me.

My gaze travels the switchgrass where I watched it— imagined I watched it—disappear.

Wiping sweaty hands onto my dress, I roll in a gentle breath and take a step forward. The ground rises up to greet me—that’s what it feels like, anyway—and wind blows through the grass to lean in my direction, nudging me toward brambles, a dark, cool land beyond with an opening just wide enough to admit one person. The gap is, in fact, shaped precisely like my figure: short torso, wide hips, thick legs.

As if inviting me in.

The trees are achingly familiar. I believe they’re American hornbeam, but I always called them grandfather trees, because the bark of their trunks has a smooth, whittled appearance, and whittling struck me as a grandfatherly pursuit.

“The clock,” says a fragile, whispering voice, just on the other side of the wall of trees.

I leap back, startled. “Hello?”

No response. I stand utterly still for what feels like ages, waiting and listening.

I could venture forth, find out who’s in there, but unfortunately it isn’t safe, as a woman, to wander alone in the woods. I’m furious that I have to think this way—I should be able to roam wherever I want, day or night, regardless of what I’m wearing or who I’m with or not with. I shouldn’t have to worry about human predators. But the sad reality is that I must.

My lips press together, deeply buried longing reaching out to sensitize my skin, running me all over with an electric charge as I stand at the edge of who I used to be. I imagine all of the Zeldas I’ve been, the Zelda who happily stole away into this forest, the Zelda who walked out of it for good, not knowing it would be the last time.

The forest feels like home, but also like hurt. Long ago, I’d treated the woods as I would a friend and their feelings, but really it wasn’t a friend at all; it kept me from making real ones.

I close my eyes as the breeze slips over my face, branches swaying overhead, remembering.

When I was young, I told myself stories. Stories have always been my haven and escape. When I was a teenager and had to live with parents who were constantly fighting, Luna had Grandma and magic to comfort her, and Romina had her boyfriend, but I did not have anyone, because I wasn’t anybody’s favorite person. This is not me feeling sorry for myself, it is only the truth. I had characters. Some of them I made up, others I found in books. At times, they felt more like family to me than my real one.

I felt so very alone, and that’s the only way I can explain the creatures I invented.

As any child with a vivid imagination would be wont to believe, my creatures regarded me as special. They trusted me, would eat food offered from my hand, would run with me. I’d never seen anything like them in books—and I checked out scores of books about animals from the library—so I came up with new names for them. I didn’t share any of this with my family, because I worried they would take them away from me somehow, but I did tell a little girl.

When I was eleven years old, I proudly brought one of my creature friends, one I’d developed a bond with, and fed and cared for every day, to a girl at school named Danielle. I was a shy loner, and while I was happy with my animal friends, I wanted children to like me, too.

The creature was small enough to carry in the palm of my hand, with bushy, pale gray fur, about the size of a pygmy marmoset. Its eyes were wide apart, big and orange, pupils shaped like rings. It had three pupils in each eye, set in concentric circles. This happened in June, so we didn’t have school, and a lot of kids liked to hang out at Coe’s Park. The boys played baseball while the girls sat under the bleachers, talking.

I told Danielle that I called the creature a huggle , because of the way it hugged my wrist as I walked, and was named Katrina, after Katrina Van Tassel from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow . At which she laughed, and said, “That’s just a squirrel.”

Danielle wouldn’t acknowledge that the animal couldn’t possibly be a squirrel, as their eyes were too different. I yelled at her, she pulled my hair, and we got into a fight. The noise scared Katrina away, off into the road where she got hit by a car.

Later, I fell into my grandma’s arms, tears streaming, crying over what happened to my huggle. She walked with me to Coe’s Park, to the road where Katrina was still lying, and gently said, “That’s a squirrel, sweetie-peetie.”

I looked up at her, stunned, because if this woman, who raised me on legends of impossible things existing in our world, didn’t believe me…

I looked again at Katrina, closer. And she was right. It was only a squirrel.

I never went back into the woods after that, which meant that I stopped having any friends at all, real or imaginary.

My eyes snap back open when I hear a car rumbling up the road. Backward.

Morgan parks next to my station wagon. The way he exits a vehicle is cartoonish: he doesn’t climb out so much as fall out, doing a spin as he regains his balance and then trots smoothly off.

He flings a sulky look my way as he slides on a pair of sunglasses and fishes his camera out of a nylon shoulder bag. Beneath the bag is an oversized collared shirt with a paint splatter design, and vintage pants covered in turquoise faces like pop art. I give him my most disgusted frown, because I’m still angry and embarrassed that he tried to use me so shamelessly, but I’m also relieved. A mysterious stranger’s nearby and they keep going on about a clock, so Morgan is now my unwitting bodyguard. Or human shield. If I run faster than him, then the forest stranger will tackle Morgan instead of me.

He flips the screen to record himself, chin tilting upward so that sunlight grazes his sharp cheekbones, and says in a voice that sounds deeper than usual, “This is where a ghost was spotted last night at approximately ten o’clock p.m.”

“It wasn’t a ghost.”

His eyebrows pull down, but he doesn’t respond to me, continuing: “Subject does not believe in ghosts. Or witches, evidently. Even though subject dresses like Morticia Addams.”

“Would Morticia Addams wear these?” I point to my holographic pink geode earrings.

Morgan turns away. He studies the asphalt through his camera, zooming in as if he expects to find trails of sulfur or ectoplasm. “There are no leaves in the road, despite it being a windy day. Suspicious.”

“Why’re you making your voice sound like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like Patrick Warburton.”

I can tell by the way his jaw slides that he’s gritting his teeth. “Please be quiet, I am in the middle of an investigation.”

Good. I hope I’m ruining it. “You’re looking in the wrong spot.” I jerk my head to the right. “It was over there.”

Morgan rips his sunglasses off, pointing them at me. “So you admit it!”

“I admit that I saw a coyote.”

“A coyote? Then why’d you look so weird?”

“I don’t look weird,” I snap.

“Not like that . I mean weirded out. Your face. It was…” He stops, and I realize I want him to continue, because when he talks about it, it’s like I’m back in that moment, witnessing the impossible.

But he decides to ignore me again, speaking only to himself. “Idea for next podcast topic is never meet your heroes . They turn out to be frauds.”

“How the hell am I a fraud? I’m the only one around here who’s not a fraud!”

“Who says I’m talking about you?” Morgan clips. But then in the same breath: “You wear a witch’s hat in your author photo. It’s on the back cover of all your books. Deceitful behavior for a not-witch.”

“It’s just a hat.”

I walk down the road, exploring a nearby cemetery. I did quite a bit of loitering here when I was a teenager, where it was quiet and I wouldn’t be disturbed. Sitting with my back propped against gravestones so old and weathered that the names on them are unreadable, writing stories in my notebook as fast as my hand could zip across the page. I had thick calluses on my thumb from holding a pencil, handwriting a mess, every other word spelled wrong because I couldn’t slow my pace.

“If all you saw was a coyote, then why’d you come back?”

I turn, watching Morgan step over faded bouquets of larkspur laid over a grave. His sunglasses are on top of his head, cheeks pink from exertion. He looks irritated.

“I wanted to make sure it wasn’t hurt.”

He picks his way over, stopping less than a foot away. I am a rather short person, at five one, and he is a good deal taller than me, but I refuse to tip my head back to look him in the eyes.

So he bends. “You told me you don’t lie.”

“I thought I saw something odd, all right? At first, it did look like a coyote—”

“At first?”

“But there was something stuck to its head. And it—”

“A fence,” he interrupts eagerly. “That’s what you said. But maybe it wasn’t?”

“Listen, I don’t know what I thought I saw. Obviously, my mind was playing tricks.”

“Tell me what you thought you saw, then.”

I keep walking. There are dips in the earth over the oldest graves, indicating caskets long caved in, obelisks so timeworn that they’re smooth as river stones. “Leave me alone, you jerk. You won’t believe me, anyway. I wouldn’t believe me.”

“Zelda.”

A hand covers my wrist, and I stop. Trace the hand up to his shoulder, and then, cautiously, I study his face. He’s nothing but earnest. “I would,” he says.