“I give you my blood and I ask you-”
“ No! ” Panic.
“To remove Rowena Quill from these woods-”
“ No! No! ” Her voice was sprung tight with terror.
Nicholas felt his head grow hot, then cold. His vision danced.
“Forever.”
“Noooooo!” Rowena Quill’s words became a scream.
Her shriek brought back to Nicholas a memory two decades old. He’d been employed to lay out a brochure for an abattoir in Kent. The manager had given him a courtesy tour, and he’d been shown the killing floor. The sound Quill now made was the exact cry of animal fear the cattle screamed when they rounded the narrow chute and saw ahead the crush and, beyond it, the corpses of their cousins that had gone before. Terror in the face of certain death.
Quill’s eyes were wide and rimmed with white. Her head swiveled as she scanned the trees. She dropped Hannah’s paring knife, let go the girl’s hair. She scrambled to her feet. And ran.
Nicholas watched the little sharp blade fall from his grasp. He put his right hand over the deep cut in his left wrist. I’m going to faint now.
He looked at Hannah. His vision seemed to blacken at the edges, like paper charring. But he could see she lay slumped within the broken cage, her eyes wide and locked on the stream of crimson pulsing from Nicholas’s open wrist. On her throat, a tiny nick, no deeper than a paper cut.
He nodded, relieved.
“Okay,” he whispered, and his vision silvered. His spine seemed to turn to water and he fell down onto the cold sand.
The wind stopped. The trees grew still.
Mr. Close! Nicholas! He could hear Hannah’s shriek, but it sounded dreamlike, a thousand miles distant.
The world looked far away, even the moonlit cage of bone and branches before him seemed small and distant, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope.
Take off your shirt. Bind your wrist.
But there was so much blood…
He struggled to remove his sweater, but weariness crept up inside him like the pleasant, drowning waters of Lethe.
I can’t.
Then roll over, he told himself.
With numb fingers, he lifted his sweater and shirt, pressed his pumping wrist against the skin of his belly, and rolled onto it.
Enough, he thought. Sleep now.
He was too weary even to close his eyes, so he stared out at a world far away and ringed with inviting gloom. The woods were eerily quiet. The circle of trees stood silent, their still leaves as green as frozen seawater in the icy moonlight, black as pitch in shadow. They were hushed. Anticipating. The only movement was the opening and closing of Hannah’s tearstained jaw as she silently cried his name.
Sleep.
Nicholas closed his eyes, wondered what the wetness on his belly was, then nodded as he remembered. He was dying.
Don’t worry. Sleep now.
Cate would be waiting.
He smiled.
But a smell shivered him awake.
It was a scent as old as the world. It was a hundred aromas of a thousand places. It was the tang of pine needles. It was the musk of sex. It was the muscular rot of mushrooms. It was the spice of oak. Meaty and redolent of soil and bark and herb. It was bats and husks and burrows and moss. It was solid and alive-so alive! And it was close.
The vapors invaded Nicholas’s nostrils and his hairs rose on their roots. His eyes were as heavy as manhole covers, but he opened them. Through the dying calm inside him snaked a tremble of fear.
The trees themselves seemed tense, waiting. The moonlight was a hard shell, sharp and ready to be struck and to ring like steel.
A shadow moved.
It poured like oil from between the tall trees, and flowed across the dark, sandy dirt, lengthening into the middle of the ring. The trees seemed to bend toward it, spellbound. A long, long shadow…
Then, a hoof. As large as a bucket and dark as stone, gray-splotched with moss; layered and peeling like ancient horn. Above the hoof: a massive leg. Feathered. Or furred. Or dense with leaves. A dark green-gray cast blue as gunmetal by the glacial moonlight. Muscular and long. Its knee bent backward like a horse’s hind leg’s, but thrice the size, and powerful. Another hoof, another enormous leg. A torso dense as an ape’s, but so much larger, as dark as the shadows between the roots of ancient trees. Arms like a man’s: knotted with ropy muscle but thick as tree trunks, their topsides shimmering with fungal gray fur or leaves or vestigial feathers, their undersides creviced as old bark. A bull neck, corded like worn rock. Shoulders, shifting with a frost of green, wide as boulders. Antlers like oak branches, webbed with vines and moss, and huge. And a face in shadow.
Nicholas stared. I am dreaming. I am dead.
The creature’s head turned to him. Its face was rimmed with skin like leaves, or made of leaves. The jaw was massive and ox-like, dripping with tendrils like curling roots. Great tusks the shape of oak leaves thrust from the corners of its wide, leathery lips. Huge nostrils flared. And eyes as dark as wells of deep, distant water reflected the moonlight; eyes at once human and yet so inhuman-inscrutable as winter sky, hungry as an eagle’s. And old. So old.
It was the face he’d seen in Walpole Park. The face he’d seen carved in wood and stone in Bretherton’s church.
The Green Man.
Nicholas’s body was rigid with electric panic, white terror, delirium. His flesh knew what the creature before him was; it knew at some fundamental, cellular level what it smelled and faced, and would have begun digging through the ground itself to hide were it not locked tight in bright horror.
The Green Man stopped halfway between Nicholas and Hannah. He was taller than the trees. He lifted his head and his nostrils splayed. The air shifted. The trees shimmered with pleasure, opening their moist leaves with dark delight. Then the Green Man’s head turned in the direction that Quill had fled, toward her cottage.
A tiny sound. Hannah moaned softly.
She was staring at the creature.
Nicholas opened his mouth to speak, to try to comfort her, but only a hiss of air escaped his lips.
The Green Man loomed over Hannah, dwarfing her small as a kitten. He shifted his hoofs and snorted a blast of warm air as pungent as the forest floor.
Hannah’s eyes rolled back in her head.
The Green Man stooped and, with no more trouble than a man parting tissue paper, flicked open the bone and branch cage, reached inside, and picked her up.
“Hannah,” whispered Nicholas.
The Green Man turned at the sound. In an instant he loomed over Nicholas, a colossal wave about to crash, bringing his wide, dark face right before Nicholas’s.
Nicholas stared into eyes as large as saucers, without whites: huge dark stones that glittered with intelligence and violence. His scent was overwhelming: erotic and wildly horrible; hunger and rot and age and lust. His green leafy lips parted, showing teeth as large as bricks and hard as ivory, goatish and sharp.
And the Green Man chuckled.
The warm, fetid air from his mouth washed over Nicholas, strong and whipping as a storm wind through ripe autumn brambles.
Nicholas’s eyes lost their focus, and the night world became as black as the center of the earth.
