Miles To Go Before I Sleep

Co-written with Joanna M. Lawrie and first published in Shelter of Daylight by Hiraeth Publishing.

Nothing about the forest was remarkable. Leaves changed with seasons, from bright green to warm flame to rain-soaked brown corpses crushed under the hooves of ordinary deer. Earth-scented breezes whispered a gentle melody to the rustling trees, whose murmuring harmonised with the laughter of foxes hunting at night. Rabbits hopped in and out of perfectly-shaped burrows, their fluffy white tails flashing like stars in the grassy expanse of the forest floor. Sunlight shone through bare winter branches, and the full moon illuminated thick patches of picturesque clover.

Rules apply to even the most normal of forests. What walks inside is not to be followed. Who walks alone should not venture into the woods. What lurks in the heart of the forest is not to be known.

Our mothers, our mothers’ mothers, their mothers, and theirs never questioned the rules. If they wondered, they did so privately. Lives lived watching nothing passed in the shade of trees that towered in silence. We stayed on our side of the divide, and the forest stayed on its side.

Until it didn’t.

Hannah raised her voice hesitantly one evening, and asked if anyone else had seen the stag at the edge of the forest.

“Its eyes…” She frowned, searching in vain for words to complete her sentence.

Soon after, the foxes strayed beyond their borders. Shadows of teeth and tails flitted past our windows. We watched them prowling the edges of our gardens and slinking down the dark alleys between houses, and wondered if they were foxes after all. We turned away, certain they were. We turned back, just to check once more.

No one spoke of it at first. Wide-eyed, terrified glances were exchanged, but no words. An unsaid fear that acknowledgement would summon whatever it was that haunted our town stewed in the simmering air between us.

Moss crept into the cracks of our corridors and cabinets. Glowing eyes stared at us from the darkness, reflecting the light of a moon that was not there. The wind howled our names over our shoulders and laughed at us when we turned around to see who had spoken. Our gardens were filled with half-eaten plants, leaves bearing bite marks left by teeth tiny and sharp. Vegetables grew hollow, disintegrating into dust as we pulled them from the stinking, mildewing soil.

Bones began to show through our skin. We wore thin. Huddled together by the meagre fire in the town’s inn, we told each other and ourselves it was for warmth. In a weak, hoarse voice, Hannah spoke one night.

“This is my fault.”

No one responded. Creaking, cracking boards and the howling of wolves pierced the space where words might have been.

Rigid and un-blinking, Hannah sat at a table in the corner. White-knuckled hands gripped around a tankard that had been empty for hours. She had not looked up as she spoke. She showed no sign of expecting a reply, but had there been one, we did not think she would have noticed.

She continued.

“It wants me.”

Looking back on it now, I wonder that we were so easily misled. So desperate were we for a solution that when one presented itself, we asked no questions. We embraced it with open, eager arms. We did not stop to wonder why the forest would consider one person so particularly extraordinary. We did not acknowledge the ridiculous notion that a whole town should be accosted for the sake of one person.

Hannah rose from her seat and walked out the door on shaking legs. She did not look back, and we did not gaze after her.

We hoped the forest would be satisfied.

It wasn’t.

Hannah was only the first to disappear. After her, we waited uneasily for the nightmares to cease, for the eyes in the dark to stop glowing, for the food in our gardens to grow. Every flicker of movement, every shadow in the corner of our eyes became a clue. We scrutinised our hallucinations and scoured the events of our days for omens, for help, for warnings.

Those who spoke about what they saw disappeared, but so did those who saw and kept silent. Some grew bold in their despair, insisting that the truth should be told regardless of consequences. I wondered if they still felt that way when the forest came for them, but of course, they could not tell me.

Gradually, we forgot what was normal and what had changed. We forgot what life was like before, what a hare was meant to look like, how tall the crops were supposed to grow. We forgot to fear the forest. The longer it crept into the cracks of our homes and our lives, the less we remembered of the time that we had each respected the boundaries of the other, of why we kept the bargain.

We began to fight back. Some ventured into the forest as brave heroes, valiantly raising their swords and promising to defeat whatever monster lurked within. Some went as sceptics, eager to prove that there was nothing to be afraid of, that we had grown paranoid and delusional.

I went to the forest, too. I was neither a hero nor a doubter, but a student. Whatever was there — or if, indeed, nothing was there — I wanted to know. Even before the change, I had been curious. I never cared for secrets of any kind, and as the forest’s were the ones most forbidden, they were the ones I most craved.

But what I found remained a mystery, even to me. I remembered following a hare — his ears, perhaps too small, perhaps too wide, perhaps just right — into the trees, winding my way through the maze after him. I remembered waking in the morning dew, lying in the dirt at the foot of the trees that marked the forest’s border. Between those events, I remembered nothing.

I was the only one to have returned from the forest. The rest of the town did not believe that I remembered nothing, and treated me with hostile suspicion at best and outright hatred at worst. That I should have come back when those they loved were taken, and without even having learned anything of use, was an unforgivable crime.

Years passed and nothing changed but me. Disappearances continued; many of the children my age did not reach adulthood, as I did. I never ceased to wonder, to wish for answers, to yearn for truth.

The forest called to me still, in the dead air between breezes, in the plaintive songs of mourning doves. I knew it would come for me again; everyone who saw something, even if they said nothing, was claimed, whether it took days, weeks, or years. Before it did, I wanted to know why.

My investigation began with Hannah. Of course, her family would not speak to me. I observed what was left of her presence, watching the shapes people made around the hole left by her absence. It was as though I was putting together a puzzle, but one made of blank space — a blank space I could barely see, like stars which are clear in peripheral vision but disappear, elusive, when looked at directly.

In the spaces between the stars, a picture began to take shape. Crumpled letters in paper grown limp and soft from re-reading, sent from a town far away, from a person whose name I’d never heard. Sketches hidden beneath pillows and in the corners of drawers, dreams of plans that would never come to pass. Hannah wished for a life outside these borders. In the faraway eyes of her family members, I saw, beneath the sorrow and grief, something akin to relief. As if the forest’s abduction was a kindness that saved them from the embarrassment of her nascent rebellion.

Oddities from the forest were not the first things those who disappeared had seen differently. What I found as I searched the wreckage of their lives was curiosity, hope, and defiance. I found wardrobes full of bright, colourful clothes belonging to neighbours I’d never seen in anything but homespun brown. I found true names, chosen by those who bore them in secret, for people who had only ever been introduced to me by names that were not theirs. I found love like mine, beyond the bounds of our society’s acceptance or approval.

In many ways, my investigation raised more questions than it answered, but it only fueled my need to know more. Pulling at the common thread I had found sent the whole fabric of my understanding unravelling and left me hungry to weave it again. Those the forest chose were different: people who saw the grey between black and white, who danced to tunes unheard by unwilling ears. I, too, was different, but even to them. After all, I had come back.

The others in the town called me naive and foolish, and worse things behind my back, I had no doubt. I was begged and pleaded and commanded to stop investigating, to stop poking my nose in things they did not wish to be found. I suspected that I reminded them more and more of those they had lost — my kindred spirits who searched for more in their lives, who were told ‘no’ so many times it lost meaning.

We could not help what we saw. We could not help seeing the beauty of the life our village denied us, any more than we could help seeing the strange deer at the edge of the woods. We could not shut our eyes and will it away. The truth was that the forest had not changed. The forest had always been strange, wild, toothy and clawed. It was simply that some of us had stopped wishing to see a world that wasn’t there, and instead chose to see the world that was.

Truth frightened the others. It frightened people who wished the world’s borders to be small, containable, and controllable. The rules had existed for longer than anyone remembered, and they had been followed dutifully all that time. It had brought our village peace, but suddenly I was no longer sure that peace was what we wanted. Peace brought no adventure, no novelty, no new knowledge, no tests of strength.

My hunger to know what was in the forest grew stronger as I searched for answers. Perhaps the loss wasn’t a tragedy at all; perhaps those who disappeared went to a better world, a free world. Would it be such a hardship to leave behind a village that wanted us to be quiet and keep our heads down and hope nothing happened all our lives?

I shared my findings with Rowan, breathlessly racing through all the possibilities my imagination could conjure.

Their face was coloured with fright and concern. “My love, you’ve forgotten. These are our friends, our neighbours disappearing. It isn’t a game.”

I smiled, charmed as always by their thoughtful nature. “No, but it might not be a bad thing.”

Used to my contrariness, they shook their head fondly, and kissed my forehead as they set bowls of stew in front of us both.

When I had first returned from the forest, Rowan was a beacon of light in the dark new world I inhabited seemingly alone. Of all the people in our village, they were the only one who remained a friend. Others scowled as we walked with our arms linked, and muttered curses below their breath as we kissed in the rain. At night when shadows stretched like gnarled fingers from the forest, Rowan banished them with love strong as sunlight.

There were never any strangers in the village; we had known each other all our lives. What was friendship before the forest took me became true love afterwards. I wondered, sometimes, if they were the gift the forest gave me — if what had awakened within me was an acknowledgement of what had been there all along. Before, I had seen them walk alongside me to the market, or pass me on their way home. Now, each step they took seemed to me to be part of an elegant dance, set to music I had never heard before.

It was not done, of course, to live as we did. In our village, love was between men and women, and we, as neither, were forbidden it. Rules of companionship, rules of exploration, rules of restriction: our village was made of rules, and we were not alone in breaking them. Though, as the forest took more and more of our number, perhaps we soon would be.

My excitement over my discovery made me bold. I saw the forest in new light — not something to be feared, but an opportunity, a possibility. In the early morning mist, still silence covered the world like a blanket. Absence filled the air, the hollow echo resounding like the low thrum of blood in my ears. No birds sang, no dishes clinked, no footsteps thudded dully on the soft ground. Dew soaked the hems of my trousers as I walked towards the edge of the woods.

I stood there, waiting for a sign. Wordlessly, I willed it to recognise my understanding, to see that I had learned what it sent me back to the village to learn. I wished for a welcome, for the chorus of rustling leaves to announce my return, for the deer and foxes to escort me inside, for the tangled undergrowth to wrap me in robes of vines.

When the forest did not reach for me, I reached first. Placing my hands on the rough, flaking bark, I listened to the sound of my shallow breath as I waited. A creaking groan cracked the quiet stillness of the morning. I gazed up at the canopy’s unmoving leaves, dizzy as blood drained from my head.

A voice soft and slow as summer rain came from within the tree, speaking without voice directly through my hands and into my head. The unintelligible words flowed together; I could not decipher one any more than I could pluck one drop of water from a running stream. The language was not one I understood, but felt like one I perhaps knew a long time ago. Straining at the bounds of time and flesh, I plumbed the depths of myself to find the part that comprehended the words that washed over me.

Rowan’s eyes glazed over as I breathlessly recounted the encounter that evening. Laughing, I nudged their shoulder. “Stunned into silence?”

Their glassy gaze did not shift from a spot in the corner. I turned to see what it was, and saw nothing. “Rowan? Are you alright?”

Blinking, they shook their head as movement returned to their face. “I’m so sorry,” they said. “I’m just seeing things in the shadows.” They took my hands in their cold ones and smiled. “Please, tell me again.”

The next morning, they were gone.

I woke slowly, smiling in the syrupy morning haze as I reached toward Rowan’s pillow, only to find it flat, as though it had never known the touch of their head — as though they had never been there. I frowned, wondering if perhaps I had overslept and they had already risen. But the clock said only five to seven, and there were none of the familiar sounds: no clear voice singing off-key in the kitchen, no rumbling fire in the hearth.

Standing slowly, I slipped my feet into the warm, woollen slippers Rowan had made for me — “soft, just like you,” they had told me, laughing — and shrugged on my dressing gown.

I resisted the knowledge staring me in the face. Suddenly, my consuming drive for answers fled, and I reached instead for comforting lies.

“Rowan?” I called. “Are you making me breakfast?” I kept my voice light and teasing, hoping for a reply to ease my fears, but none came. My heart pounded loud as a drum in my chest as I turned into each empty room in our home. The small study was my last hope, but as I pushed open the door to see nothing but motes of dust sinking lazily through the morning sunlight, a knot tied itself in my gut.

I refused to believe it. I refused to accept that the forest I had only just recognised for what it was could betray my trust, my conviction. Rowan must have gone for a walk, on such a beautiful morning as this. It was the only thing that made sense.

The speed at which I dressed belied my hopeful thoughts, but I kept the smile on my face lest Rowan come home and find me distraught over nothing. That would never do. And so, I lit the fire. I cooked a hearty breakfast of omelette and bacon for two, and poured freshly-brewed nettle tea into our habitual mugs. I set the table, placing the better of our two forks at the side of their plate as something of an offering, and waited for them to return.

Light elongated the shadows that rotated around the objects on the table as I sat. The smile defiantly plastered on my face became a hopeless grimace, and the food was long cold in front of me. Still they did not return. They had seen something the night before — something the forest showed them, but not me. Had I finally solved the mystery? In understanding the forest, had I convinced it to release its hold on me, only to condemn my beloved in my place?

No, I realised. The forest was not my enemy, and never had been; I knew who was. I stood and walked to the front door, guided and powered by my new certainty. I stepped out into the heat of the afternoon and marched toward the centre of the village. The locals eyed me with their usual distrust — or distaste, or displeasure; by now they were indistinguishable to me — and I stopped in front of one of those who had been the loudest voice against my love of Rowan.

“What did you do?” I asked, in a voice I barely recognized as my own. It trembled and shook, barbed like the vines in the forest. “What did you do?”

He looked at me in surprise, and perhaps something like pity. “I did nothing, child,” he said, and I could hear the condescension in his tone. “Perhaps you should look closer to home if you wish for an answer.”

“You stand there and tell me you did nothing,” I replied. “Perhaps that is true. Perhaps that is the problem, that your inaction led to this. But I know. I know the secrets of the forest, the secrets all those who were taken kept hidden. I know your secrets. One of you—one of you,” I continued, my voice raised at the crowd who had begun to gather, “took them from me, and I will not rest until I have them back!”

The still wind howled in my ears as I felt a hand on my arm. Evelyn, who had always been sympathetic to us, had wrapped her fingers around me and was tugging me away. “I am sorry,” she murmured in my ear. “I am sorry for what you have lost, but you do not wish to make enemies here. You know the truth. No one here has touched Rowan. None of the people here would have done so. We all have our sorrows to bear; we would not add in this way to another’s.”

Looking into her eyes, I could see the haunted shadows there. The forest had taken her twin brother the previous year, and I had not seen her smile since. But I was not to be so easily dealt with, or soothed into a quiet, manageable sorrow.

“Are you suggesting that no one wishes us ill?” I asked her, the laugh that followed coming out almost as a choked scream. “That no one here loathes us both for breaking your precious rules? You must think me a fool if you believe I would swallow these lies.”

Her gaze was sorrowful. “You know what took them,” she whispered. “The only lies here are the ones you tell yourself.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came to me. Choking on my impotent rage, I dashed through the crowd and back toward my home. Our home.

As I burst through the front door, ragged breath scratching my dry throat, I understood. The forest that would not acknowledge me, the forest that hid things from me, the forest that took Rowan from me was evil after all. It took, and it took, and it left us behind to grieve our losses with no answers or explanations. Why, and to what end, we could never know. Perhaps the forest was angry with us, for our pretences and falsehoods and lies, to ourselves and others. Perhaps the forest simply wanted to expand and we, in its path, had to be uprooted. Perhaps there was no reason at all, and the forest was simply having fun with us, like a cat playing with a nest of captured mice.

Pacing around the room, I tried to gather my thoughts. Should I go to the forest to get Rowan back? Without understanding, did I have any hope? Did the forest take them because they, like all the others, were an outcast, or did the forest take them as a pointed message to me?

Questions swirled around in my head without hope of answer, and yet there was only one that returned to the forefront time and time again. Why had the forest taken me, and sent me back? What about me was different from the others? Had it changed its mind and decided it didn’t want me? Was I unsuitable, or merely unready? Did it have a plan for me? Did it have a plan for Rowan, or Hannah, or any of the others?

Whatever it had been, the forest had not taken me, in the end. Part of me wanted to make the forest regret that. Part of me just wanted to run. But I knew there was nowhere to go — no hope of being with Rowan again except in the forest.

Night had fallen when I looked out the window. The moon seemed as bright as the sun where it illuminated the trees and ground. The distant stars seemed to hang lower in the sky, calling to me in the silence.

Then, I saw it.

The hare I had followed on my first outing sat at the edge of the forest, looking at me as though it had been waiting for me to notice it. His ears — perhaps too small, perhaps too wide, perhaps just right — twitched. He thumped his hind leg on the ground, and I felt the vibrations of it fill my hollow chest.

I had to follow.

The world behind me forgotten instantly, I stepped forward. The hare sniffed, then turned and hopped into the thicket.

Thin branches snapped beneath my feet as I walked over them, following my companion into the dark woods. The rustle of dried leaves crunching and shifting rose and fell in my ears like the gurgle of small waves hitting the shore. Overhead, the tall, old trees creaked and groaned as they shifted in an imperceptible wind. The smell of freshly-turned dirt, ancient and new all at once, hit me as I followed the hare over the gnarled, twisting roots rising like the limbs of the dead from the earth.

I heard the clack of teeth hitting each other with force. Turning towards the noise, I saw only clouds of smoke. Rays of moonlight fractured the dense fog and flashed celestial sparkles into my eyes. The trees seemed to bend as I approached them, swaying to and fro in rhythm with music I could only faintly hear.

Between the dancing trees, a family of deer with glowing eyes glanced at me before running further ahead. The birds hopping between the branches sang in minor key. Scents of sour milk and rotting flowers overpowered me, and involuntary shivers shook my spine. Cold dew crawled up my legs and the thorned undergrowth scratched at me with clawed hands.

And yet, the deeper into the forest I walked, the more a sense of calm fell upon me. I sensed no evil here, despite the strangeness of the world around me. It felt as though I was coming home after a long journey to a house dusty and overgrown with neglect, and I found myself embracing the darkness as it embraced me in return. I wondered about those who had come this way before, and whether they had felt the same. I wondered about Rowan: if they had known this comfort, this affirming wonder and excitement. I hoped they had, for I knew that wherever the hare was leading me would be a place of beauty beyond imagining — a place I and all those like me were always meant to be.

I understood — truly this time. The forest had taken Rowan as a gesture, to show me that it was finally ready for me. It was not a betrayal, but an invitation, guiding me home.

A door appeared in the large, ancient oak before me. It did not look carved or created; it simply was, surrounded by vines and brambles with a handle of ivy. The animals around me seemed to shift in the corner of my eye into something almost humanoid, though when I looked at them they retained their shapes, the same way the most distant stars can only be seen in one’s periphery. I could hear their welcoming voices telling me to open the door, to step through into a better world where my love was waiting.

I pulled the ivy handle and the door swung open. The light inside burned with fierce intensity as it crawled into every pore in my skin. Laughter surrounded me in tones I could not decipher: mocking or friendly, joyous or fearful, emotions that meant something in a world to which none of us belonged. Earthbound starshine flayed the flesh from my bones as I became one with them, and in my last moment of consciousness, all I could think was how beautiful it finally was to see it.