At the foot of the stairs, Lucius knelt to look at the things he'd seen scattered on the dirt floor.
He couldn't bring himself to touch them.
Quills.
Only four of them, but they look just like the ones I saw on the back of that creature at the base of the watchtower.
I was so shocked at the time that I imagined they were sprouting from its back. But they couldn't have been. It was wearing a cloak of the bad color. So the quills must have been sewn into the cloak, as a kind of armor.
How could some of them have been shed here?
He realized with a shudder that if there'd been a little more natural light, and he hadn't brought the lamp with him, he might have missed seeing them altogether.
A few more cautious steps brought him to the entrance of what was clearly a tunnel. Rough-hewn, but to all appearances human-made.
It can't be...
The schoolhouse wasn't far from the border. He tried to tell himself the forest creatures must have tunneled in, reaching the cellar either by accident or by design.
But this isn't the main cellar of the schoolhouse, doesn't even have a door leading into it. It's a tiny room that seems to have no purpose other than access to the tunnel!
He went back to take a closer look at the stairs. Ordinary human construction.
The same was true of the trapdoor. And it had no locking mechanism; that seemed to indicate a complete lack of concern about its being breached.
Lucius was so stunned that he had to sit on the steps for a few minutes to compose his thoughts.
One more test, to make sure whose trapdoor this is.
He left the lamp on the stairs while he experimented with door and rug. He quickly ascertained that it was possible to descend through the trapdoor and, while closing it, drop the concealing rug into place. The rug was light enough to permit easy reopening of the door from below.
His palms were sweating; he wiped them on his trousers. Don't jump to conclusions, he told himself. I've just been assuming the tunnel leads into the woods.
But where else could it lead? Especially when there are quills here that could only have come from a garment worn by a forest creature? Or by...
Face it. Face the alternative.
By a villager masquerading as a forest creature.
There was one way to find out. Grimly, he followed the tunnel to its end.
.
.
.
.
.
He emerged from another trapdoor and found himself in the woods. Not far beyond the border, but definitely in the woods. The hour was later than he'd realized: the lights marking the village's perimeter already blazed atop their poles.
Last night I was one of those earnest young lamplighters. He'd insisted on resuming all normal, rotating duties as soon as he was strong enough, despite others' belief that he'd become "special." All that effort put into protecting the village...and now I'm starting to wonder if there's anything to protect it from.
Another rebellious thought surfaced in his mind. I'm a grown man, considered old enough to marry and start a family. How is it I've never asked why my generation is allowed to light the torches, paint the border posts, stand guard in the watchtower--but not to participate in decisionmaking with the elders?
First things first. I need to understand what's going on here.
Thankful that the lamplighters had departed and his own lamp wouldn't attract attention, he took a close look at the trapdoor he'd exited. This one too was human-made. The wood and nails were no different from those he used in his amateur carpentry. And clearly, no attempt had been made to conceal it.
If Noah escaped, it was through this tunnel, directly into the forest.
Is it possible that a forest creature pursued him, he tried to return to the village by the way he'd left, and the monster followed and killed him at the foot of the cellar stairs? Or even that he never escaped at all, and it came through the tunnel and killed him in the Quiet Room?
He pondered those explanations, and rejected them. If there had been carnage at the village end of the tunnel, the cleanup wouldn't have left quills lying about as evidence. One might have been overlooked, but not as many as four.
So what I'll think of as a "creature costume" was, at some point, near those stairs. Perhaps it was normally stored under the floorboards. But nothing of the sort is there now. Which suggests that when Noah escaped, he was...wearing it...
The implication was so horrific that Lucius had to sit down.
At last he got shakily to his feet, and began a slow walk through the woods around the perimeter of the village. The forest itself could be trusted to conceal his small light, at ground level, from the guard in the tower.
Even by lamplight, he found three more tunnel entrances. No attempt had been made to camouflage them.
Near the border or not, these aren't the work of people who genuinely fear intruders.
He guessed the tunnels led to the closest houses--one being the Percys'. And then he sagged against a tree trunk as another realization hit him: Noah might have made his first foray into the woods from his own cellar!