Nightmares of Weirdwood--A William Shivering Tale, page 6
“We’s been smirching the wide pocket-worlds for curifiers for our maladies ever since,” Rustmouth continued. “When you require resources to tender crackled stone, flailing lungs, and disintagreetin’ chompers, you’ll resort to just about anythink. Me and the lady-likes gotta keep hustling, rust-le up enough loot to buy fissure-cal therapy for the Astonishment, dentishry for me, and more mercury for my Silvey.” He gave Wally a pathetic smile. “Tain’t a breezy life, but at least we have each other.”
Wally’s thoughts returned to the Veil. With stronger border protections, dangerous Fae substances wouldn’t have been able to find their way into the Real. The Wardens could have saved the Order’s lives.
“Aaaaaand set,” Audrey said, finishing the loops at either end of the thread. “Say ‘ahh,’” she told Rustmouth, “and don’t squirmify.” She snorted. “Wouldja hear that? I’m catchin’ your way of speakin’!”
Rustmouth grinned and cranked open his bear-trap teeth, which stretched with strands of orange spit. Wally feared for Audrey’s paws as she reached inside to delicately tie the string around his back molar. She tied the opposite end to the armory’s door handle.
“There,” Audrey said. “Wally?”
Wally blinked. “You want me to slam it?”
“No,” Audrey said. “I want you to run!”
She seized his wrist and yanked him down the hall toward the staircase.
Rustmouth grunted in surprise. “Shilvuh Tung!” he mumbled, trying to untie the string from his tooth with one hand and holding out the flask with the other.
“Cover your ears!” Wally shouted.
Audrey pinched hers shut while Wally stuffed his fingers in his, hoping to make it outside before Silver Tongue could guzzle her mercury.
Rustmouth’s raging became muffled behind them, and Wally’s legs remained under his control as they ran up the zigzag stairs and onto the roof, slamming shut the door behind them. Wally found some loose shingles and, using a trick he’d learned as a thief, wedged them beneath the door to keep it from opening.
But there was only silence on the other side. No approaching footsteps. Wally pressed his ear to the door.
“Ah, let ’em fly,” Rustmouth said. “The little birdy said our victoreal was assuretainty, and he ain’t once mispronounsticated yet.”
“Good,” Silver Tongue said with a sniff. “Didn’t wanna waste my last sip on those snivelers anyway.”
“Come on,” Wally whispered to Audrey.
They hurried to the roof’s edge and located a sturdy branch near enough to grab on to.
Audrey rested a paw on his shoulder. “You sure you wanna do this?”
He took her paw and squeezed. “Not at all.”
They leapt and grabbed hold of the branch, and then he and the ferret slowly descended into the haunted wood, away from Graham’s control.
5
THE IN BETWEENS
Rrrrrripppppppp!
“Hello? Wardens? Wally? Anyone? Eek! Ha ha. Sorry. You scared me! Woof, you’re ugly, aren’t ya? And naked. Okay, byyyyyeeee!”
Whooooosssshhhhhhhhhhhh
Infect! Mesmerize! Control!
“Hey! Spores! What’d I say about talk like that?”
Rrrrrripppppppp!
“How ’bout here? Anyone? Nope. Nothing. Yeeshk. Really nothing. Brrrr. Come on, spores. We gotta find Wally so we can help him fix this. Hey! Big blue eyeball! I found another erased pocket-world. I also tore two more Rifts. Sorry ’bout that.”
Rrrrriiiiiiippppppppppp!
“Hiya! Any talking animals live around here? Augh! Rude! No need to chuck spears at my face! I’m going, I’m going! I like your beards though!”
Whooooosssshhhhhhhhhhhh
Infect! Mesmerize! Control!
“Spores! Behave yourselves!”
6
THE DAPPLEWOOD HORROR
Boom Boom Boom!
“Arthur! Arthur, wake up!”
Arthur sat up in bed. Someone was knocking on Audrey’s front door again.
“Get to the edge of town! Now!”
The voice fell into place. Cadence.
Before Arthur could throw off the covers, he heard the drummer run down the lane. He rubbed his face, trying to get his eyes to focus. He hadn’t slept a wink, worried about what was happening in the DappleWood forest. Worried about the dead thing in Audrey’s fireplace. Worried about what he and Amelia had done.
An eerie sound drew his attention to Audrey’s little window where a bare branch scraped the glass. Arthur got up and looked outside. The brief winter had ended, but the seasons seemed to have rolled backward. Autumn swept across the DappleWood. The air stank of rotting apples. The sky was a haunted hue. A crisp wind bent the branches and plucked leaves, as red as blood and as yellow as dead skin, twirling them down the lane toward a dark purple horizon.
Arthur shivered. He yanked on his pants, picked up sleeping BW, snagged a few blank pages from Audrey’s desk just in case, and hurried out of the house toward the edge of town.
Beyond the little homes and cobbled streets, the DappleWood’s fields had grown fallow. Overnight, the grass had yellowed, the fences crumbled, and scarecrows and pumpkins had sprouted up like weeds. Most disturbing, the small wood in the distance had grown to impossible heights—a branchy, expanding darkness that slowly consumed the dark-gray sky. The funnel of faces was gone, but the wood’s shadowed edge seemed to be growing closer to the town, like it was reaching toward it.
Weirdwood’s Wardens and staff had gathered before the Wet Beak, the DappleWood’s pub. As Arthur headed toward them, he passed Mrs. Chicken, who clucked about the sour weather. “My eggs will crack with frost at this rate,” she said, hauling open the trapdoor to her tavern’s underground storage. Arthur caught a glimpse of the chicken’s eggs, keeping warm beneath the soil.
He reached the circle of Wardens, and Ludwig took BW from his arms. The baby giggled as the giant bounced her in his hand, as small as a ball in a catcher’s mitt. Nearby, Pyra loaded up Mr. Squirrel’s pumpkin cart with lumpy burlap sacks and every weaponish tool that could be found in Mr. Mole’s blacksmith tent—a pitchfork, a hoe, a scythe—all to replace the weapons Rustmouth had eaten in the previous battle. High overhead, Willa fluttered with her kites, keeping an eye on the forest’s shadowy border. Only Sekhmet seemed to be missing.
Arthur peered over Cadence’s shoulder and found Amelia and the Wardens were studying one of Ahura’s maps, whose moving ink showed the quaint homes of the little village and the shuddering forest. It wasn’t Arthur’s imagination. The ink was spreading toward the little painted town like a disease.
“It appeared late last night,” Ahura said, pointing to a small tear in the heart of the painted wood.
Inky shapes crawled out of the tear, infesting the forest. The shapes were blurry and indistinct, but no less horrific for that. Arthur tried not to throw up. He had managed to bring the storybook town back from erasure, but now he and Amelia had infected it with some sort of horror story. Arthur tried to catch the acrobat’s eye, but she remained focused on the map.
“What are these?” Amelia asked, pointing to the monster blotches and sounding innocent as anything.
“We don’t know,” Linus said, flipping through a large tome. “Nothing in Weston’s Fae-born catalogue resembles anything like them.”
Ludwig sniffed nearby.
“Whatever they are,” Ahura said, “we need to sew up this Rift before they swarm the town.”
The Wardens gazed toward the trees, whose limbs stretched longer with every passing moment.
“There is some good news,” Ahura said. “Unless Wally and Graham have figured out how to override the Manor’s natural movements, it should flow toward this Rift soon. If we can get past these shapes, we might have a chance at getting the Manor back.”
Arthur felt a tremor of hope.
“We’re not asking the most important question,” Cadence said with metal in his voice. “What opened the Rift?” His eyes traveled around the Wardens’ faces. “Someone in this town has been abusing magic, and we know it wasn’t the DappleWood citizens. I don’t want to go into battle with someone who might have betrayed us.”
Arthur’s throat tensed. What would the Wardens do if they discovered it was he who had transformed the DappleWood? Fortunately, he had a tactic for remaining calm in guilty moments. He moved his eyes from face to face, and wondered, Which of these people abused magic? Was it Linus? Ahura? Amelia? Arthur couldn’t help but notice that the acrobat’s eye also moved from face to face without flinching.
“We don’t have time to worry about that now, Cadence,” Ahura said. “The Manor will leave once it senses another Rift in the Veil, so we’ll have a short window to get inside. We should get moving.”
“Fine,” Cadence said. “But don’t go blaming me when one of our own attacks us.”
He helped Pyra finish loading the cart while Amelia waved Willa down from the sky, and Ahura put some finishing touches on her map.
“Arthur?” Linus said.
Arthur flinched, believing he’d been found out.
But then Linus pointed behind him, and Arthur saw the DappleWood’s townsfolk gathered at the field’s edge. They wrung their paws and fluffed their feathers, gazing at the wood with fearful eyes.
“The last thing we need is a panicked village,” Linus said. “Could you distract them like you do with your performances?”
Arthur cleared his throat. “Of course.”
He took a moment to compose himself, put on a winning smile, then approached the townsfolk, sweeping behind them to turn their attention away from the unsettling forest.
“Morning, everyone!” he said, as if they were back in the amphitheater. “I know what you’re thinking. Who ordered Halloween in early spring? But fear not, this is a temporary redecorating. Fields must go fallow before they can burst with greenery.”
Arthur didn’t feel convinced by his own words, but he kept his smile as bright as a summer’s day.
A turtle mother pulled her son close and slowly raised her hand. “Are we safe, Arthur?”
“Are you kidding?” Arthur asked. “You’re as safe as…”
His voice trailed off when he spotted Sekhmet walking up to the Wardens. She held something wrapped in a blanket. A bloody blanket. She unraveled it, dumping the corpse of a spined creature on the ground. Arthur’s heart went cold. It was the thing from Audrey’s fireplace.
“Of course we’re safe!” a squirrel scout finished for Arthur. “Arthur’ll take care of that spookity forest! Just like he did Alfred Moore and the Order and the Eraser! Won’t ya, Arthur?”
“Um,” Arthur said, trying to put together what the squirrel had just said. Sekhmet must have done a sweep of everyone’s quarters, searching for evidence of misuse of magic. Why hadn’t he burned that creature’s corpse? He swallowed and ruffled the squirrel’s ears. “You know I will! Heh heh.”
“How will you take care of it?” asked Mr. Mole.
“Yes,” said the lizard librarian. “Can you really put thingsss back to rightsss?”
Arthur didn’t hear her. He had his eye on the Wardens as they questioned Sekhmet, who pointed toward Audrey’s house. One by one, the Wardens turned their heads until they were all frowning at Arthur.
“Arthur!” Linus called. “Could we speak to you a moment?”
Arthur smiled at the townsfolk. “Now, if you would all return to your homes and enjoy the haunted view from your windows, the Wardens and I will have this spookity wood business sorted in no time.”
The critters returned to their respective homes, and Arthur shut his eyes for a moment. At least his adoring fans wouldn’t learn what he’d done to their town.
He headed toward the Wardens, who continued to frown at him, Amelia included. As Arthur approached, Sekhmet drew her sword, igniting it with the lava light of the magma manacles, ready to lock him up. But Linus raised a hand toward his daughter as if telling her to wait.
Arthur kept his pace, not wanting to appear guilty. He tried to think of an excuse, but nothing sounded plausible. He was as good as magma manacled.
A few steps before he reached the Wardens, one of the sacks on the pumpkin cart sat up. The sacking fell away, revealing Breeth. She held something silver.
“Knife!” Arthur shouted.
But Breeth was already leaping off the cart and burying the knife in Linus’s back. Sekhmet screamed. Ahura caught her husband as he fell. Amelia cracked her whip, wrapping it around Breeth and binding her in place.
Arthur stood there, numb, while the Wardens sprang into action. Cadence pulled the knife from Linus’s back while Sekhmet placed pressure on her father’s wound, and Ahura wrapped it with her scarf. Arthur didn’t know what to do. So he listened as Amelia questioned Breeth, who grunted and struggled against the whip.
“Who are you?” Amelia demanded.
Breeth spit at the acrobat’s feet. “Whoddaya think?”
Amelia’s eye went wide. “Rose.”
Of course, Arthur thought. It was so obvious. That’s why Breeth wasn’t funny like Wally always said she was. That’s why she’d been hanging around Mr. Mole’s tent. The ghost of Weirdwood’s blacksmith hadn’t been looking to farm at all. She’d wanted to forge a weapon.
Arthur looked from the bloody knife on the ground to Linus, gasping like a beached fish in the late October light. “Why would you do this?”
Rose only huffed.
Amelia gave her whip a jerk, making Rose grunt in pain. “She wants the Veil to fall so she can see her son in the afterlife.”
Arthur scowled. “I know a thing or two about the afterlife now.” He looked Rose right in the eye. “I can promise you you’ll never reach it. Not until the day you die.”
Hurt flashed across Rose’s face. She recovered with a sniff. “Takin’ magic from the Wardens’ll be its own reward.”
The words made Arthur want to retrieve the Manor and take down the Order more than ever.
Near the cart, the staff gently lifted Linus onto a stretcher they had made out of rake handles and butterfly netting. The DappleWood’s doctor had nothing but storybook medicine—thermometers, head bandages, bowls of stew—so it was agreed that Pyra would stay behind and tend to Linus with her potions, made from ingredients found around the town.
Sekhmet and Ahura watched, tears in their eyes, as the staff carried Linus away.
Sekhmet sniffed. “I want to stay with Dad.”
“Me too,” Ahura said, squeezing her daughter close. “But you know he would want us to fight.”
Sekhmet wiped her tears away, and she and her mother loaded the last of the supplies onto the pumpkin cart.
Arthur couldn’t help but think of the times the Black Feathers had left their own injured gang members behind to finish the job. But this was different. Arthur was now squarely on the side of the good guys. The fate of the Veil was at stake.
Cadence stepped up to Amelia, wiping blood from his hands. “Linus will be okay, I think.” He nodded to Rose. “What do we do with her?”
Amelia unwound her whip from the girl’s arms. “Bring her to the Badgers with Badges. Tell them not to let her out of their sight under any circumstances.”
Cadence took Rose by the arm and led her away.
“Tell them to keep her in the greenhouse!” Amelia called after. “Tell them she likes plants!”
She and Arthur watched until the girl was out of sight.
“Why the greenhouse?” Arthur asked.
“A better question, Arthur,” Amelia snapped, pointing her whip handle toward the dead creature, “is why that thing was in your fireplace.”
Arthur coughed in surprise. He’d nearly forgotten he was still on the hook. Why would Amelia bring this up again after the rest of the Wardens had been distracted away from it? Unless … she was setting him up for a plausible excuse.
“I have no idea,” he said, finding it much easier to lie without everyone staring at him. “It wasn’t there when I woke up this morning. Maybe Rose had something to do with it?”
Amelia stared down the lane as if considering. “The blacksmith does possess weapon magic,” she said loud enough so Sekhmet and her mother could hear. “Perhaps she sliced open a small Rift, hoping to return to the Order.” She nodded to the horror’s corpse. “This thing must have escaped whatever pocket-world she opened, and Rose slew it and then stuck it in your fireplace to frame you.”
“That … makes sense,” Arthur said.
Amelia flashed him the subtlest of winks, and Arthur felt relief wash over him. They had gotten away with it. Now if only he could get rid of this guilt.
“It’s good to hear you had nothing to do with that creature,” Amelia said. “You’re our ace in the sleeve if our attempts to get into the Manor fail. Your connection to Wally Cooper, as well as your ability to add to the DappleWood’s story and control certain vermin, might be our only hope.”
Arthur smiled. His magic would help the Wardens on this adventure. And that, more than anything that had happened in the past, was the most important thing. “Just consider me your one-stop Wally and ferret shop.”
“The Manor has arrived!” Ahura said. She held up her map and pointed to a splotch of orange that had appeared deep in the wood, in the knot of a painted, gnarled tree. It glowed with Weirdwood’s light. “Let’s move!”
Arthur stepped up onto the cart and sat on an upside-down apple crate. The cart groaned and leaned as Ludwig climbed in beside him, holding BW. The baby was calm and burbling, but the giant shook like a tree in a hurricane.
“We’ll keep you safe, Ludwig,” Ahura reassured him from the side of the cart.
Ludwig nodded, but his giant cheeks continued to quiver.
Ahura took BW from Ludwig’s giant hands and set her in Arthur’s lap. “Arthur, you’re on babysitting duty. With Lady Weirdwood in her current state, Ludwig is the only one who can open the Manor’s front entrance by communicating with the wood. The rest of us will handle the Order and whatever horrors await us in that forest.” She looked deep into Arthur’s eyes. “Whatever happens, you must get the lady into the Manor.”
