Author's Notes: Bit of a format change, this time. Hope no one minds, and thanks again so much to everyone who's stuck with me so far and taken the time to leave kudos or comments. :)
Chapter 3
Mrs. Wickerbottom never asked if Wes wanted to stay.
Instead, the following morning, she handed him one of the traps they'd made the day before. "Winter will be here soon enough," she told him. "We'd best make sure you have something warmer to wear."
And he nodded, and fixed her with that smile again, so bright and grateful that it hurt a little to look at.
They fell into a routine: breakfast together, then out into the world to divide and conquer, bringing home whatever materials Mrs. Wickerbottom declared were necessary for survival.
Every morning, before they left, Wes smoothed his face paint on by touch.
Mrs. Wickerbottom noted with some incredulity that it always went on smooth and even, the rouge on his cheeks symmetrical. It was something of a triumph, given that he had no mirror.
Wendy was fascinated by the ritual of it – sat beside him to watch, pale eyes round and staring. "Why are you painting your face?" she asked one day, perhaps a week after he'd arrived, with a child's straightforward curiosity.
He seemed to think about it for a little bit – paused after a moment and gave her a smile. He reached out a hand to touch the garland resting atop her wavy blonde hair. It was a lovely thing, brimming with Lilium bulbiferum and their vibrant orange petals.
He lifted his eyebrows – more expressive, now that every line was picked out in white – and waited for her to find the answer.
"It's something flippant, to make you feel better," Wendy guessed at last. "Like the garland?"
Like pausing in the scramble of daily life to pick flowers and weave them into a crown: a small slice of mundanity, in a world where very little was mundane. Mrs. Wickerbottom closed her eyes, and wished that Wendy had not asked.
But Wes only nodded, and daubed his lips with black. Like all the rest, the mark went on perfectly even.
On the day that Wes met Abigail, Wendy returned from gathering with the entire front of her dress drenched.
"Abigail wanted to play with the frogs today," she said, and when Mrs. Wickerbottom glanced up, she found a dozen of said frogs cradled in the girl's skirt, like a makeshift sack. They glistened, still faintly damp, littered with the gashes that had killed them.
Then Abigail drifted in behind her, a small dead girl glowing softly in the gathering twilight, and Mrs. Wickerbottom had never seen anyone move as fast as Wes did then. He went from cross-legged on the ground, where he was patiently smoothing out the edges on a thermal stone, to halfway across the camp in approximately five seconds.
He pointed a shaking finger, panting as though he'd just finished a race.
"That's Wendy's sister, dear," Mrs. Wickerbottom told him. "But she can only stay sometimes, and only for a little while."
He pointed the finger again, more urgently this time.
"Yes," Wendy said, serenely. "She's dead."
In the middle of night, while the other two slept, Mrs. Wickerbottom tended the fire. She'd always been something of an insomniac, and as she aged, it had only gotten worse.
Here, she found that it was to her advantage.
She wove traps and baskets; she strung fishing poles; she listened for the hounds. And, as she always had before coming to this world, she wrote. The paper was papyrus now, sloppy pressed reeds, and the pens were sticks of charcoal, but she filled her nights with words all the same. When the dawn came, she would tuck them away into a chest.
It was habit – her private indulgence. It was not something she would have thought to share.
But one morning, in the hours before sun-up, Wes jerked awake, eyes wide, mouth open in a silent scream. He sat unsteadily, hair damp with sweat, and put one arm out to the side of himself, as far as it would go. He stretched the other in the opposite direction, as though feeling for something she could not see – but when he didn't find it, the tension went out of him, and he heaved a shaking breath.
It was only then that he seemed to notice she was awake, hunched over her manuscript.
He offered up a pallid smile, a small wave. Then he nodded toward her – held one hand out flat, like a tablet, and used the other to hold an imaginary pen.
"A bit of nonsense," she told him, and went to stuff the pages away again.
But he waved one hand, palm out, to the side. It was a gesture that she knew by now: don't.
"What," said Mrs. Wickerbottom, "I ought to keep going?"
This time the extended hand was palm up, and he pointed at himself with a hopeful little smile.
She regarded him for a long time. Finally, she said: "It's frightfully boring. Don't say I didn't warn you."
Over the next few nights, he read the whole manuscript, all fifty-seven pages of it so far. Mrs. Wickerbottom wasn't entirely sure how she felt about that.
"Now," said Mrs. Wickerbottom, ducking under a low tree branch. "Be careful up ahead. We'll have to skirt around them, but that should be safe enough, as long as we don't wake them up."
"Yes, ma'am," said Wendy.
"Keep Abigail close to you, too," Mrs. Wickerbottom told her. "Let's not have any repeats of that incident in the swamp, young lady."
Wendy glanced up at her sister, expression unreadable. "Please behave, Abigail."
Wes reached out to tap Mrs. Wickerbottom on the shoulder. He drew a massive X in mid-air, then walked his fingers far, far around it. Then he formed the X again and fixed her with an inquiring look.
"Machines of some sort," she told him. "They're quite nasty, when they're up and moving around. But as long as we're able to –"
He wasn't listening anymore.
He was staring through the branches of the trees, to where the machines were visible. There was a hum of gears in the air, and a faint whir of mechanics. Where the metallic creatures were gathered, the ground was a peculiar shade of purple – mottled, polished stone. In the center of them, the chiseled lines of it standing upon a pedestal, was a statue of the man who had brought them here, his face split with a self-satisfied grin.
Wes had gone stock-still, face frozen with terror.
He shook his head, and he staggered backward a step – then another. His foot caught a root, twisted under him, and he went down, but still he scrambled away, on hands and feet, shaking his head the whole while.
"As long as we don't wake them, it's quite safe," Mrs. Wickerbottom repeated, but he seemed not to hear.
She'd never seen him like this – not that night with the hounds, not when a dead girl had come into their camp.
He lurched back to his feet, seemed to pull himself together. Took Mrs. Wickerbottom's arm in one hand and Wendy's in the other and pulled them away from the machinery and the strange, purple ground. He pulled them past the edge of the forest, to the place where the conifers gave way to open plain. When he finally came to a stop, he rounded on them, near tears.
He pointed one vehement finger back the way they'd come, and he made the X again. Not just with fingers this time, with both arms. He could not have made himself plainer if he'd been able to speak the words aloud: "Don't go there."
Wendy watched him impassively, small face thoughtful. "They're dangerous even when they're sleeping?" she asked.
And Wes nodded: yes, yes, yes.
It rained long and hard, a chill and bitter rain, and the frogs had their revenge.
Wendy returned to camp that evening soaked and bedraggled, without her sister in tow.
"They sent Abigail away again," she told Mrs. Wickerbottom, cradling a water-logged camellia carefully in her palms. It was white now, all the color leeched away.
Mrs. Wickerbottom pushed some of the damp strands of blonde hair behind her ears and handed her an umbrella. "You can call her again in a few days, dear. Now stand by the fire, before you catch your death."
"We all will, eventually," Wendy said, but she went to stand beside the fire all the same, and a few moments later she took the tea that Mrs. Wickerbottom pushed into her hand.
The rain fell and fell, and thunder shook the sky. Lightning set fire to the forest west of their camp, and they watched most of their wood supply burn to the ground.
In the evening, when the sun went down and the rain showed no signs of lessening, Wendy began to cry, a silent stream of tears that dripped down her pale face to mingle with the rest of the water.
Mrs. Wickerbottom made her more tea, and Wes dug into his pocket for something – a balloon, it turned out, long and red. He blew it up, turned it one way and then the other, and then he began to work. His fingers moved, quick and clever, twisting and pulling and tightening. When he was done, he held a camellia, bright red and in full bloom.
He handed it over to Wendy – tapped Abigail's real flower, which was beginning to flush pink already.
She looked from the fake camellia to the real one, and she took the balloon flower with a wan smile. "Yes," she said. "I suppose it won't be much longer now." She wiped at her face with the back of one hand, and her smile warmed a little around the edges. "I'm being silly, aren't I?"
The rain turned to snow, and they did not venture out without earmuffs and heated stones any longer.
The wind blew cruel and harsh; food became scarce. Mrs. Wickerbottom took to padding their meals with whatever scraps were on hand, to make them stretch a little further. God help them all, some days they were shredding twigs to make meatballs more filling.
The longer the winter drew on, the more they subsisted on jerky, and what little weight they'd gained in the relative plenty of fall began to melt away. They ate ice; they put jam on snow and pretended it was a meal. Mrs. Wickerbottom and Wes slipped Wendy extra when it came time to divvy up dinner, careful that she did not notice.
Frostbite loomed as an ugly possibility, and Mrs. Wickerbottom lectured them on the signs, and prevention, and staying close enough to camp that they could return if they began to lose feeling in their extremities. She told them what to do if they noticed the symptoms: heat water in the crockpot, not too hot, and submerge the affected area, then keep it warm.
They spent long hours around the fire, all three of them, and the nights seemed to drag on for days.
At true dark, they pushed the fur rolls together, and Wes and Wendy bundled up beneath a makeshift blanket of rabbit skin, still wearing earmuffs. Mrs. Wickerbottom sat beside them, legs stretched out against the fur, and they piled three glowing thermal stones among them.
While they slept, Mrs. Wickerbottom tended the fire – kept it high and bright and hot.
And for some few hours every night, cosseted away from the chill dark in the comfortable yellow circle of light, they were warm.