I'm gonna be really, really honest: I ain't happy with this fic yet. Like, to the point of hoping it gets very little attention. That sounds self-deprecating, but I am so dead serious. Fr, the only reason I'm putting it on here is because ff has a pretty darn good read aloud feature, and I'm hoping that actually hearing the text will help me improve it. If you are reading this...please, reconsider lol. Genuinely. But thanks for looking in. Have a good day.
Waverly woke up with the echo of laughter in her ears. She groaned and squeezed her eyes shut tight, wondering who could be cackling so meanly, why her head hurt so awfully, and why the ground was wet. Why was she on the ground in the first place? She sat up, clutched her forehead, and blinked in the blaze of sunlight. Sun in her eyes, grass under her hands and legs…. What on earth?
She lifted a hand to shade her eyes, but that wasn't much use. The sun was reflecting white-hot off of a large pond just to her right, bright as a mirror. A pond? Was she at the summer house then? It was certainly hot enough to be summertime, and there was no other explanation for why she was on her back beside a pond in the middle of the woods. Yes, she was at the summer house. How silly of her to forget a thing like that.
However, it certainly didn't explain why she felt so exhausted—it was a bizarrely difficult chore, lifting herself up off the ground—or why she had been lying on the mucky grass in one of her nicest dresses. She loved the outdoors, but never in her fine clothes! There was mud all over her stockings and the skirt of her pretty blue dress. She had better run to the house and change right away before Mother saw the state of—oh, wait….
Goodness, she truly was disoriented. She hadn't forgotten about Mother that way in...how long had it been? Two years? Three? It was perplexingly difficult to recall the specific dates of anything just now, but she felt the sting of bereavement with perfect clarity even so. There had been so many of those heartbreaking moments immediately following Mother's death, when Waverly would think of giving her some news, or telling her something amusing, or simply seeking her out when she was lonely. Sometimes she would wake up from a bad dream and forget, just for a moment, and sit there waiting for her mother to open the door and bring light into the room.
The present moment held an eerie similarity, like a sickly nightmare she couldn't quite dispel. She wanted nothing more than to lie back down in the hopes that this really was just a bad dream, but she was standing in the middle of a forest instead of her bedroom, and she couldn't understand why! This awful headache was making her so dizzy and forgetful. Perhaps she simply drank too much wine the night before. Wine always made her groggy and forgetful when she had more than a few glasses. But it should only have effected her memory of the evening, not the morning, let alone the entire span of time which had brought her to their home in the country.
Waverly felt her heart race with anxiety when she attempted to recall the precise date, or even the year, and found that she could not. Heaven help her, she could scarcely remember the way back to the house as she looked around—or how she had come to be outside in the first place. It was terribly unnerving.
"Martha. Martha, are you there?" She waited only a few moments before calling her maid with a great deal more insistence. "Martha! Where are you? Come here at once. ...Martha!"
The only thing to answer her summons were frogs from the pond, bleating and hooting after each of her cries like the echoes of a morose Greek chorus. She scowled at them angrily—and then her frown grew frightened instead. Goodness, she had never seen such enormous frogs! The size of the hulking amphibians was so improbable, she had to rub her eyes in disbelief before looking again. It changed nothing. The largest among them could have been alligators for all their bulk, and were those horns upon their heads?
Waverly backed away from the menacing hoard of faces peering at her from out of the water, only to step on a smaller frog by accident. It squeaked and hopped off into the pond with a splash. There were answering squeaks and bellows and croaks in an undeniably angry uproar, and then more splashes as the entire platoon of oversized frogs emerged en masse. Frogs as big as flower pots—big as dogs! Big as anything!
She tripped over her own feet and screamed as the swarm fell upon her. Their sticky tongues shot out of their mouths like arrows and lashed at her as if she were a giant fly. They even chased after her when she finally scrambled to her feet and fled. Running from giant frogs with impossibly elastic tongues... It certainly sounded like a nightmare. Perhaps she was still asleep after all…. But no, her skin stung all over from the assault of the evil amphibians, and the feeling was too corporeal to deny for a dream. She rubbed at the places on her face and arms as the spots turned into little red welts. The frogs couldn't have been poisonous, could they? Who would ever have loosed such horrible creatures on her family's property?
She walked. What else was there to be done? Nobody answered her calls, and Waverly was beginning to suspect that she had wandered quite far from the house, perhaps hit her head at some point, whereupon she had developed some sort of amnesia...but that didn't account for the unfamiliarity and seclusion of her surroundings. Even in the most remote part of their wood, it wouldn't have taken her an hour to find some trace of civilization, and even in the dead of winter, it wouldn't have looked like a completely foreign realm. It was summer through-and-through, as it always was when she came here, and yet she was walking through a forest which looked nothing like her own.
Waverly called for her maid, her father, and her brother too. It was odd, but she couldn't quite remember if Bradford had come with them for the season. She couldn't seem to find the path to the house, either. Had their woods always been this expansive? Could the landscape have changed so much? It was only a few years since their last summer here.
"Martha!"
Oh, but wait…. Martha hadn't been her maid since Mother's death. Before that, even—not since Waverly was a child. How was it possible to be so wholly disoriented? Her household, the date, even the forest she had known so well, they were all quite confused in her foggy recollection.
Waverly stopped walking and put her hands to her head. She stood like that for a long while, sweating both from the heat and from her own anxiety. She needed desperately to remember….
And she did, at least a little; a very little, all things considered, but the particulars were beginning to return now, slowly.
Mother was dead, and Martha was gone—that much was certain. She remembered the Great War, and she knew that Bradford had been spared from the terrible fighting, but she could not recall how many years had passed since the end of the war, or even what year it had ended. Whether Bradford had yet left home for his own estate, and whether he was here at the summer house—somewhere—she also could not say.
She stood and thought a little longer while birds sang in the trees and insects buzzed in the bushes. There was something just at the edge of her memory, something which made her think of her radio, for some odd reason. Waverly tried to recall the last song she had listened to, straining for the date of publication…. It was something from that new Broadway production last month—oh! And there it was, as sudden as summer lightning: she could remember the year and the day now, a great improvement...although it brought her little comfort.
For it was winter, not summer. Yes, Boston was having a very rainy, very gloomy November, and even at their country home in the South, the weather should have reflected that. It should at least have been cold. It was winter, her mother had been dead for three years, and there was no way this was her family's forest. Where in the world was she, then? And how had she gotten there?
...Goodness. Something truly was wrong, and it wasn't just her head or her memory either. Something sinister had happened. She knew it was so. She could recall no particular reason for the feeling just yet, and yet it chased at her heels until confusion blossomed into panic and sent her into a headlong sprint. She was like an animal fleeing blindly from something it couldn't understand. Something menacing...a shadow and an evil laugh which clutched her without mercy.
Waverly ran until she was sure the woods were finally thinning up, along with much of the air in her lungs, no doubt. The organs were certainly hard-pressed when she met the next monstrosity on this feverish trek.
It wasn't that they appeared out of nowhere; Waverly simply failed to understand what she was seeing until it was too late, and she was too close to do anything but freeze in sheer horror. They were not the black wiry shrubs she had mistaken them for at first glance. They were spiders. Horrible, gargantuan spiders, bigger even than the frogs had been. They sat amongst equally gargantuan webs which had been strung over and between dozens of trees in a thick gray netting. The monstrous arachnids appeared to freeze in the same way she did, but that was little comfort when they were all clearly looking at her. Thousands of dark, beady eyes pinned her like a beetle to a board, and she could have sworn there was intelligent calculation in those hostile stares.
For just a moment, she imagined herself backing away from the silent creatures without any harm done. Instead, the spiders hissed at her—truly hissed, all at once and all together. It was the most hellish sound she had ever heard; Waverly felt her legs nearly give way at the sudden, utterly unholy chorus of demoniacal hissing.
Something did give way as she turned to escape the bone-chilling sight of black legs and black eyes and bulging gray webs. There was a snap from her left foot, and for a moment she believed her ankle was broken. It was only the heel of her shoe, however. She'd never broken a heel before—she didn't know how to run in such a condition, but the spiders were still making that dreadful sound. Were they truly spiders? What sort of spider hissed like a snake? She wouldn't be dawdling long enough to find out, that was for sure and certain!
She limped on a few desperate yards, tore off both her shoes as the spiders stared her down with one thousand eyes, and then bolted with the speed of a street car. She tripped over something and saw her bleeding foot but scarcely felt the pain. She didn't check to see if the spiders had followed her for fear of finding that they had. She ran.
Between fir trees that whipped her face with their needles, and low bushes that tore at her stockings with their twigs, she ran—and then stumbled—and then limped, certain that if she stopped, something terrible would catch up to her. Her only thought was safety, concealment at any cost, and she found it in the form of a perfect tree.
It didn't seem to belong there in that forest, but she scarcely registered the thought. All Waverly saw was shelter and separation from the perilous ground below, tentative as such a separation might be; that, too, was scarcely a thought in her mind. The tree was a lovely sprawling oak of the South, with sheltering branches that ran parallel to the ground, the largest limbs being wide enough for two men to lie side-by-side.
For just a moment, the sight sent her back to pleasant childhood memories of using such trees for pirate ships and castles. Waverly hadn't climbed a tree in years, but the thick branches might as well have been a ladder to her. She scrambled up the giant quick as a cat. When she had climbed as high as she could go, she sat back against the trunk, looked at her bloodied foot and scraped up legs, and began to sob. What had happened to her? Why, why couldn't she remember?
In spite of everything that had happened—or, perhaps, because of it—Waverly managed to find a little sleep. The limb was broad enough to keep her from falling and breaking her neck, and she was apparently tired enough to doze on such a perilous perch. When she awoke, it felt as if no time had passed, but the sun was overhead through the messy green canopy, the heat had grown more stifling, and the birds were a great deal quieter. There was another, far more significant difference in her world now, however, one which had Waverly clutching her knees and panting like a half-drowned dog.
Her memory of the previous evening had become dreadfully, inescapably clear.
...Oh, dear Lord, what had she done? It wasn't a dream. That man hadn't been a dream. She was like Clara in the Nutcracker, only her mysterious Drosselmeyer had turned out to be the rat king instead. She could remember his laughter vividly now.
Waverly shuddered and began crying once more. She was in some awful forest with giant frogs and giant spiders, and she was going to miss her birthday party.
She didn't weep for long, though; she was much too angry. That anger pulled Waverly back onto her bruised and bloodied feet—the stockings had torn away from both her ankles, and she was missing the nail from her littlest toe and some skin from the top of her foot—and then down onto the ground again, where she took her only good shoe and thwacked it viciously against the tree trunk until the heel finally broke off. She didn't know how to walk in broken shoes, but she could learn. She didn't know where she was, but she would find out. Perhaps an ordinary heiress would not survive such misfortunes, but she was, after all, a Lamb, and the Lambs did not give way beneath misfortune when it came.
Waverly put on her shoes with scarcely a wince for her wounds and marched off with every ounce of righteous fury she possessed. When she realized it was back in the direction of the spider creatures, she turned around and marched the other way, albeit with just as much dignity as before.
Maxwell. That was what he had called himself, the odious cad—the insidious cur—the treacherous, shadowy charlatan! She remembered his voice better than his face, but that wouldn't stop her from finding that face and putting a sizable dent in it.
Goodness, she hadn't entertained such violent thoughts since she and Bradford had been quite young. She certainly hadn't fought with anyone apart from her brother, and never physically, at that—but that was going to change once she found that lying, loathsome...!
Waverly screamed a little. A few birds flew out of the bush in front of her. She plunged through the shrubbery like it was a fist through Maxwell's face, not a care for the state of her lovely blue dress. She was going to hunt down that villain, hit him, and then have him arrested. And then have her brother hit him, too! ...Of course, Bradford might be terribly upset that she did anything so foolish in the first place, making a deal with a strange man. A man whose voice had appeared over her radio, whose face was more shadow and shape than flesh and blood…. Oh dear.
That stopped her plans, although it didn't stop her feet. What was she going to tell them? That she had accepted a mysterious offer from a man on her radio and then found herself in a forest of monsters? Perhaps she could preserve their faith in her sanity if she manufactured a more believable tale. She decided that a clandestine stroll in the night had ended with her kidnapping, perhaps for some dreadful occultic ritual from which she had escaped, only to find herself lost in the middle of the wilderness. ...But how had she come to the middle of the wilderness in the first place? That bit was still quite bleary in her memory, although she had a distinct impression of shadowy hands grabbing her—hands made of actual shadow, like something from a storybook—and of a gaunt face laughing at her pitilessly. Good Lord, she sounded fit for a sanitarium.
Waverly refined the false story and its details as she continued carefully through the woods, until….
"Oh dear," she whispered as her trek came abruptly to an end. There appeared to be more pressing problems at hand than what she would say to her family. "This is certainly not the summer house…."
The forest had cleared at last, but only to reveal the most enormous cliff. That word seemed too small, however, for the dizzying distance which suddenly lay at her feet. It felt like the view from atop the Woolworth Building. Even the cliffs in Maine weren't this high. It was a sheer drop all the way down to an angry sea, and not a sign of ships or peaceful shoreline to be seen. No smoke or distant islands on the horizon. Nothing but the scream of gulls and the distant roar of waves too far below.
Waverly backed away until she was once again within the safety of the trees. She swallowed against the nauseous feeling which rushed from her stomach to her chest. It wasn't the impossible height of the cliff which had sickened her so, but rather what it signified. Her ignorance was decently average when it came to geography. She knew this couldn't be Boston—perhaps not even New England. She was beginning to wonder if she was on the East Coast at all...or anywhere in the United States, for that matter. Could this be Africa? It might explain the spiders, but wasn't that more of a jungle than a woodland forest? Perhaps some uncharted part of Europe or Russia then? But if that was so, she had no way to account for the journey there—and seemingly all in one night, too.
With an aching head and a chest tight with panic, Waverly turned her back on the daunting precipice and picked a new direction in which to march, doing her best not to think as she went along. She was bound to find a street sign or a helpful policeman at some point. And then perhaps she would see her mistake, that she was still somewhere close to home and she simply knew less about coastal geography than she had previously believed. She crossed her fingers, put Africa—or Europe, or Russia—out of her mind, and walked on through the forest.
She was able to carry her hope of a swift return home all the way until evening, when her expectations were dashed to smithereens. It was the moon that did it. A big, impossibly oversized moon, which looked absolutely nothing like the one she knew. No silhouette of a woman holding her child or the vague impression of an old man with a smile. This moon was as much a stranger to her as every other creature she had met today. Giant spiders, demonic frogs...and a moon that wasn't her own.
She wasn't in Boston anymore. She wasn't anywhere anymore. At least not anywhere she knew. Certainly not Africa—or Europe, or Russia—because there would still be a proper night sky with familiar constellations and the same old moon.
Waverly rested on a large gray rock jutting out of the ground. It was moderately flat on top and quite warm against her bare legs; she'd stripped off her stockings once they had become more like swiss cheese than respectable garments. Now she was running around...somewhere...with bare legs, broken shoes, and not a morsel in her stomach. That's what she got for being juvenile and going on a hunger strike. It wouldn't have convinced her father to come to the party anyway….
"Father must be terribly worried by now," she murmured, and then, "Hmph. Should he even notice I'm gone, that is." She crossed her arms—and not because she was petulant; it was getting rather chilly out, that was all. Her father hated this dress—it barely reached her calf—and had forbidden her from wearing it in his presence ever again. It was the most prominent reaction she had drawn from him in a long time. ...Well, she wasn't going to be in his presence at all if he wasn't going to come to her birthday, now was she? So Waverly had tried on the dress she would wear tomorrow just to spite him, and now she was stuck with its short sleeves and scandalous hemline until she found her way back home. She might have been better off in her nightgown, for all the warmth it provided.
The night was cold but bright, and the rock was uncomfortable but well-warmed from a day of sunlight. Across the clearing, trees formed a forbidding wall of blackness. Waverly wasn't afraid of the dark, but she felt better about being in as open a place as she could be, although perhaps that was counterintuitive. A wiser plan might have been to look for another tree like the one she had climbed and to spend the night safely in its high branches...but the idea of going back into the dark woods made her shudder. When something cold brushed against her chest, she slapped a hand over it in fright, only to realize—her necklace. It was a miracle that it hadn't caught on a branch and broken during her frantic gallop through the forest. She closed her hand around the small locket and felt a little warmer, even as she shivered again from the chill breeze and looming shadows.
Waverly's first thought upon waking was of a broken back, hers hurt that badly; her second thought was of a sun-baked desert, her mouth and throat were so dry. Her stomach took precedence over every other consideration, however. An aching back, a desiccated throat, and not a morsel for breakfast!
"Well," she murmured, her voice sounding odd and cold against the bird-gilded silence, "I suppose that I...ought to find something...if I possibly can." And, remembering that a Lamb never faced adversity with anything less than upmost dignity, she put her chin in the air and marched.
One of the prime delights in her summers with Bradford had been feasting on the wild fruits of field and forest...but her brother wasn't here to help her find berries and fruits and edible plants, and it didn't look as if she would be fishing for her dinner, sadly…. So it was with great surprise that, not late into the morning, she actually found something to eat.
Well, she found carrots. There was water in carrots, wasn't there? She couldn't quite remember, as she had only ever fed raw ones to her rabbits, but her heart leapt at the promise of something even vaguely refreshing; the bright green sprigs in their haphazard little rows seemed to turn the gloomy woods into a wonderland.
Unfortunately, she never received a chance to enjoy the feast, if that word even applied to a potential breakfast of uncooked, dirty vegetables.
Waverly had been so happy to recognize something edible, she scarcely even wondered why the vegetables were arranged in rows such as a farmer might make, nor did she take much notice of the shabby wooden hut just a few yards away. A hovel was hardly anything remarkable, especially to the eyes of a heiress, and she had seen many such structures during her summers down South. ...But then it occurred to her that, in a place such as this, any sort of house was an extraordinary thing, and her heart leapt with hope beyond mere breakfast. Such hopes were not to last, however.
The hut was small, and it had only one window—a genuine window with actual glass, albeit cracked and dirtied—and in the window was a pale, misshapen face. Large black eyes watched her over a deformed nose which was pressed against the pane.
Monster!
Her heart froze into a tight knot, and her breath caught painfully in her chest; her entire body seemed to throb with fear.
The monstrous face remained fixed to the window.
Run? Remain still? She couldn't choose one over the other. Her torso twisted around as if to flee, while her feet remained frozen to the ground.
And still the creature merely blinked at her from its filthy glass window.
Waverly's stomach chimed in with an almost comical burst of need despite the icy fear churning there, and a decision stirred in her mind, hasty and undeniably foolish. She was certain now that the best thing to do was to flee—there would be at least a few seconds' delay as it ran to its door to pursue her...but...but she was absolutely famished! And here was a good deal of food right in front of her….
She hadn't eaten since breakfast the day before, and she had never managed to keep on a hunger strike lasting any longer than two meals. A restless night and a day on the run transformed hunger into foolhardy courage the likes of which she had never known. Waverly dared to hold the creature's eyes as she very slowly stooped down and began to uproot carrots, pulling them up with one hand and bunching them in the other. She didn't look away from the piercing gaze until it suddenly disappeared. The shabby door of the house flew open, and out ran a screaming, two-legged pig. Four legs, rather—two of them carrying the owner very swiftly towards Waverly while the remaining pair flailed angrily in the air.
"Mine!" it squealed at her in a rough voice. "Mine!" The monster charged, arms still flailing.
Waverly didn't even scream. She dropped the carrots and ran from the bipedal abomination like a coward. The shrieks of the pig creature were drowned out by her heartbeat in her ears and the crash of shrubbery against her legs. Hunger was forgotten for a time as she ran through the forest, no dignity, no breakfast.
She kept on until her knees gave out beneath her, and she didn't attempt to rise again. One arm over her eyes, one hand clutching her locket, she sobbed her heart out on the filthy forest floor like an infant. Lying on top of tree roots and crying over carrots was not survival. Bradford would be disappointed with her, but Bradford hadn't almost died at the hands of a breakfast food with feet. ...Lord, what she wouldn't have given for a plate of hot bacon…. She would never go on another hunger strike for as long as she lived!
Even worse than the hunger, however, was the thirst. Had she been offered a glass of the sweetest, most florid wine, she would have traded it for just a mouthful of water, never mind whether it came from a dirty faucet or a babbling brook. During their summer encampment, Bradford had often boiled water from the river; now she would happily have taken it brown with mud. Any kind of water at all would be a Godsend, even if it had fish in it. She walked for hours without finding anything of the sort, but she did, eventually, find something to eat.
Waverly reached the edge of the seemingly endless pine forest just as the sun was setting behind it, and at the shrubby border of that forest, she found berry bushes. She didn't know what kind of berries they were or if they were poisonous, but that didn't give her even a moment of pause.
She wasn't full by the time she had eaten every morsel she could find, though she picked and ate all the way from dusk to night. The berries were shiny in the light of the moon—she could see now that it had been missing more than a sliver last night, and it wasn't quite full tonight either—and she plucked the nearly luminous little spheres off of each bush until her fingers were cold and no more berries could be found. That's when she finally started wondering if death by poison berry really would be preferable to starvation, and how the wind could be so much colder than the night before, and what that odd, rhythmic noise in the distance could possibly be.
It sounded like a window shutter hitting against the side of a house, and when Waverly pictured the monster pig in its hut, she almost turned tail then and there. But perhaps there would be more carrots, and perhaps the monstrous pig wouldn't hear her over the sound of its loose, decrepit shutters knocking in the wind.
The moon was rising to her left, far across the grassy plains, and the forest was all on her right. There was no shade in which she could conceal herself fully without reentering the woods. She felt rather exposed as she approached the house, but her stomach gave her courage. A long finger of trees branched off from the woods a ways in front of her, thinner than the rest of the forest. That was where the knocking was coming from, and that meant she would at least have a chance of losing any potential attackers by running through that thin finger of trees and back into the dark forest, loath as she was to do so. It was better than attempting to escape through the wide open field on her left. No, she would duck into the forest and lose any pursuing pigs in its shadows, if she must. She needn't go very deep to escape the likes of such a dimwitted-looking creature, surely. She would brave anything, even getting lost in the woods, if she could only find a single carrot to eat.
Having a plan didn't make Waverly feel any happier as she neared the perpendicular offshoot of forest and the source of the steady tok, tok, tok. Hunger steeled her resolve, though, and she moved carefully, but without hesitation. Surely a human being could see better in the dark than a pig; she would no doubt spot the house and any vegetables long before anyone ever saw her in return, and perhaps the occupants would be inside—and away from the window this time.
She stayed just within the treeline as she approached. The knocking sound was loud, and the cold wind blew noisily through the trees. The forest was quite dark, too. Perfect for potential escape. The pig creatures would never see her coming, let alone hear her, and any food she found would be hers.
...Reduced to a thief. Bradford would be very disappointed.
Waverly came to the spit of forest that crossed her path, keeping a sharp eye out for any figures or houses. There was movement all around her from the wind, and it made her anxious. Moonlight fell between the younger trees and offered her only meager cover there. She tried to walk in their bushy shadows, timing her steps to the knocking—the rhythm was far too measured and invariable to be a shutter, she realized, but it was too late to turn back now. She'd gone a whole day without food, practically at death's door.
When she tripped and fell, she wasn't quick enough to stop herself from crying out in surprise. The knocking stopped. Waverly pressed one hand over her mouth and the other over her bleeding knee. She had tripped on a stump. They were everywhere, she noticed now. She also noticed, at that moment, something like a person coming towards her through the trees.
He had an axe, a black beard, and a tall, definitely human shape. That was all she had time to appraise before she was on her feet and running.
Suddenly the shadows of the dark woods and the possible pig monsters and giant spiders lurking there seemed much less threatening. Who would have believed that a human being could be more frightening than actual monsters? Waverly had never seen such an unruly looking character in all her life, and she had immediately known that he would kill her with that axe if she didn't run. A rather gruesome piece in one of her magazines had detailed the primitive, cannibalistic tendencies of men with horrible whiskers who lived all alone in the countryside. When he shouted at her to stop, it only helped her to run faster—into the forest, as far as she could go. She would run forever if it meant getting away from the grizzled, savage wildman.
She might have rejoiced at meeting another human being in the middle of this nightmare, if only because it would prove that she wasn't completely alone. Waverly had been wishing for just such a thing. It hadn't occurred to her that she might meet a murderer of all people, someone who would leap out of the woods with a long black beard like a pirate and an axe for chopping her to bits. Would her misfortunes never end?
This time, Waverly's legs didn't give out; she ran and ran until it was too dark to see anymore, and she only stopped after tripping and falling yet again. She should have been far enough from the wildman to warrant a bit of rest, but there was none to be found. She lay motionless on the ground not in exhaustion, but in the awful certainty that there was something in the woods with her. It was an obvious sort of fact, of course—even a normal forest sans giant spiders and upright pigs would have been teeming with life—but this…. It felt wrong.
She scrambled to her feet and tried to press on in spite of the sudden soul-deep chill. If she had been a dog, the fur over her shoulders would have been standing on end. She walked and then waited, walked and then waited, her eyes digging into the darkness but seeing nothing. There was, however, most definitely something. Something lurking just on the edge of her hearing, in the margins of her sight. Something that stopped when she stopped, and held still when she held her breath. Waverly didn't know how she knew it, but she did. She was being followed.
A mystery in the dark, or a murderer out in the open? Starvation, or death by poisonous berries? Why was she suddenly having to make such ludicrously dire decisions? How could this happen to her—to an heiress , a Lamb, an undeniably respectable woman such as herself? It simply wasn't fair!
She crouched on the ground in a meager patch of moonlight and began to cry again. That appeared to be her sole utility, producing salt water. Bradford would have been ashamed. He would have had a fire going and their supper roasting over the flames. She would have given anything for a nice fire….
With icy fingers, she dried her face and resumed her steady march to...anywhere. Steady too was the feeling of being followed by something dark, as if the shadows themselves were trailing at her heels. It was a relief every time a breath of moonlight broke through the canopy—like sunlight bursting through the clouds on a cold day. It seemed to clear her head a bit more each time she stood in the light, and very soon, hope pushed up through despair.
Tomorrow she would build a fire. Tomorrow she would make her brother proud and put all those unburdened summer days to good use. For now, though, she was going to sit against this dead tree, wrapped in the large swath of moonlight it let fall, and pray for morning to come quickly.
In spite of darkness and coldness and whatever creature was crawling around in the shadows...morning did come, and Waverly was awake to see it. She had been shivering too hard to sleep, both from the nearly winterish cold and from…. She didn't know what to call it. She didn't even want to think about it. All night long, something had been moving out in the darkness, and the later the hour grew, the bolder it had become. Even when morning came in earnest with vague light through the trees, it still felt as if she was being followed.
She would look back every so often, double blink when something moved just at the edge of her vision, and shake her head at the phantom sounds she simply must have been imagining. Hallucination was a symptom of hunger, wasn't it? Or perhaps it was a sign of the dreadful thirst which was steadily beginning to dominate her thoughts.
Waverly was surprised when the forest began to thin once again. The grass was thicker and the trees grew farther apart. There were stumps here, too...and she would have left the place simply for fear of it being somewhere the Axe Man would haunt...if it weren't for the fact that there were carrots everywhere! Their feathery leaves stood tall, proudly volunteering to be her meal. And—goodness, not just carrots, either; there were violets and wild onions and dandelions which seemed to glow in the buttery sunshine. They grew in clumps beside trees where the ground was moist and the grass was thickest.
"I wish I was a cow," she whispered, "who could eat such lovely green grass."
Waverly stood still for a minute and stared in wonder at the cornucopia of growing things. She wanted to shout, to sing. The grove was so beautiful after so much darkness, and there was so much to eat, she thought that she might cry again. But she was done with weeping. It was time to act more like her brother, for a change, a true Lamb, and less like the helpless heiress she had sadly been proving herself thus far.
The summer after she and Bradford stopped fighting and became friends instead, her parents allowed him to take her on his usual "excursion." That was what Mother always called it. Father just called it cabin fever or foolishness. Bradford was in the Scouts, and for a few weeks every summer, he went camping with his troop. He would continue to camp by himself for a month or so after that, usually for the duration of their time at the summer house, or for as long as Father would allow. Instead of living in "a civilized manner befitting a young gentleman and a Lamb," as Father said, he would go off into their woods and live on his own.
When she was nine and Bradford was twelve, in efforts to make up after nearly two years of nothing but bickering, Bradford invited her to come along. Waverly had a talent for getting her way with Father even before Mother had died, so there was no more "Bradford Lamb, you will sleep like a gentleman's son, or you will be sleeping at Wilbraham and Monson in the autumn." In gratitude for saving him from their father's annual threat of boarding school, Bradford took her on each of his excursions for the next three summers after that, until he again grew too old to be friends with her anymore.
She missed those summers dearly…. She missed having a mother and a true friend and her father's laughter. The gold locket hung cool against her chest, and she clutched it with a sniffle.
No more crying, though. Waverly shook the memories from her head, looked around with her hands on her hips, and went to work.
Building fires, gathering food, it had always been a part of the excursions. Bradford didn't need matches to start a fire—he didn't even need flint—and he had been proud to teach his sister the same art. It wasn't until after his return from university that he began thinking she ought to occupy herself with more ladylike pastimes. However, she had learned quite enough from him during their summers to sustain her now...she hoped.
But hope was not enough to sustain her. Bradford's skillful tutoring was not enough to sustain her. The food which at first seemed so abundant, the nearby stream she had quickly discovered, even the sharp and useful rock she discovered on a dry spot of the river bed...none of it made a difference in the end.
That evening, she was no longer hungry or thirsty—well, she was still hungry, though she had been safely removed from the brink of starvation, at least—but she was cold, because she could not start a fire.
Although she found a serviceable branch, successfully split it as best she could with the wonderful stone, and had little trouble carving a notch in the middle where the embers would go, that was as far as she progressed. Waverly spun a fine, sturdy stick in the mouth of the notch. She had twigs and bracken at hand, and a small pile of tinder waiting to receive the spark when it formed. She spun and spun until her hands were red, but there was no fire that night.
The moon, at least, was now truly full. Waverly wished she were the moon….
The next morning, she woke up hungrier than ever. Foraging in her little not-so-enchanted wood did nothing to change that. She had eaten everything she could find, from carrots to dandelions, and yet she was famished.
There were, fortunately, a number of chestnut trees growing near the brook where she drank and washed her face, amongst...other things. Relieving oneself in the wild was so dreadful—it was difficult to imagine how she had once reveled in that taboo liberty as a child. If she were younger, perhaps she might have been able to climb the trees and reach the spiny treasures. They hung overhead like an army of green and tawny sea urchins, and although the branches bowed under the weight, they were still too high up for her to reach. Luck was with her even in this, however; she discovered an abundance of fallen chestnuts hiding in the tall grass directly below the trees. If only she could have had such luck with her fire as well….
Waverly sat there in the damp weeds with the early afternoon sun warm on her back. She had slept late, but not well. She would have liked to hunker down in this nice soft grass and doze, were there not more work to be done.
She combed through the long, bowed-down green grass in search of chestnuts, making piles and peeling shells. The air was warm and sweet. Insects hummed around her, birds warbled nearby, and the brook trickled gently in the distance. The grass was so long and tangled, it reminded her of how Mother would comb through her hair in the evenings after her bath, the gentle hum of her voice as she sang, the comforting warmth of the fire and the soft nightgown and the towel around Waverly's shoulders….
She pricked her fingers on one of the spiny shells and started out of the daydream. She needed to focus, or the night would catch her off guard...but the grass was like a feather bed compared to the hard ground on which she had slept, and the sun was like an invisible blanket, and she was so terribly drowsy. Reclining for just a moment wouldn't hurt anything. She laid herself down and shut her eyes. It would be only for a minute….
When something brushed against her throat, Waverly jolted upright with a gasp. A horde of bright red squirrels rushed away from her. She looked after them in surprise and then anger when she noticed how diminutive her pile of shelled chestnuts had grown. It hadn't been very large to begin with, but now it was hardly a pile at all! There weren't many left in the grass either, just half-chewed remains and empty, prickly husks. She gathered the few that remained of her unshelled collection, along with any others she could find hiding in the grass, determined to come back with a way to knock down the rest. Perhaps a great big stick would do the trick.
It was only after she had stood up with her skirt hiked higher than her knees and full of chestnuts that Waverly realized...she had no earthly idea how to roast them. They were not fish; she could not stab them with a stick and hold them over a fire. In her home, chestnuts always came out of the kitchen already seasoned and toasted, and with a glass of hot wassail too, and slices of apples and clementines and... Her stomach grumbled, and she grumbled along with it. One way or another, she would roast these, even if she had to hold them over the flames with her own two hands. Tonight she would simply have to make a fire!
But she didn't.
Waverly spun the stick between her hands until blisters formed on her palms. She shrieked when she saw them—she'd never had blisters before—and she shrieked when they opened as she turned the stick without pause. Smoke appeared plenty of times, but always sporadically and without any true embers. It wasn't until her hands bled that she finally stopped. Despite a determination not to cry anymore, she lay on the ground weeping as the night came on, staring at the moonlight that shone on her locket and the diamond at its center.
The moon was not quite full anymore.
When the next day dawned, she was cold, thirsty, famished to the point of fatigue, and, to her surprise, blindingly angry. She jumped up and ran over to the would-be fire, kicking at the pile of kindling and snatching up the wretched spinning stick. Instead of snapping it in half, she sat down and began to turn it harder than ever before. Her hands bled. Her blisters made the stick feel like a red-hot iron. Tears coursed down her cheeks. But she was too angry to give up now.
The night before, all she had eaten was raw chestnuts. They had a terribly bitter taste which left her mouth as sour as an old shoe, but she didn't care about the thirst or the hunger or that she had not cleaned her teeth in days. She didn't care about the birds chirping sweetly above her or the sun shining warm on her back. Her mind was full of a fire she both felt and longed to feel. If she didn't have a big roaring blaze by the time evening fell, why, she would turn this stick into a spear and stab it through her heart. She relished the rebellion of having such ghastly thoughts. She bit her cheeks to distract from the pain in her hands and spun, spun, spun. All to no avail.
How could a little thing like a fire be so impossible? How had Bradford managed to make it appear so effortless? How had she apparently failed so desperately in learning from him?
Half the day was spent in frustration and failure with two snapped spinning sticks, two bleeding hands, and sweat in two tired, itchy eyes. Her body had transformed into a bundle of screaming muscles and stinging skin. The frustration was worse than anything else, though. Just when she was really hitting her stride, she lost it to the pain of newly formed and opened blisters. When she found it again and managed at last to produce an ember, she lost that too. She dropped the ember, blew it out, smothered it, successfully moved it into the tinder and then blew it out…. Failure after failure. The birds grew louder and then softer as the sky turned a vivid purple, but she scarcely noticed the changes and certainly felt no appreciation for them.
All too soon, the night began to encroach in earnest. Waverly had exhausted her anger and was now going at it with sheer mechanical apathy. Her hands felt like pulverized piles of blisters; the muscles in her legs and her back weighed more than beams of iron—they felt quite as stiff, too; and her neck, arms, and shoulders were surely sorer than Atlas beneath the globe. Every joint in her body seemed to crackle when she looked about herself for the first time in hours. She only looked because it was getting so dark. A night wind was stirring, fresh and strong. The birds had stopped singing a good while ago, the sky was the color of dark wine, and the stars were out. They were much brighter tonight.
Her body was molten lead when she stood up. Her legs hurt too badly, and she fell back down. As she rolled onto her back and gazed at the sky, a sense of dread swept through her. Goodness, she hadn't imagined it—the stars were much too bright, no moonlight to make them faint. Why? Was it hiding behind some clouds, or had it not even risen yet? The stars might be her only light….
They were beautiful, strange, and far too big, just like the moon. It would have been a breathtaking sight, if not for the black dread churning in Waverly's stomach. Fear wrapped her in its cold, creeping arms until she could hear nothing but her heart hammering away. The stars seemed to pulse in time with the blood in her ears. She stared up at them until they blurred out of focus and the sound of her heartbeat faded a little, just enough for her to hear the whispers.
She thought it was a bird flying overhead at first, the soft sound of flapping wings. But the sound stretched on, and the more she listened, the more it sounded like the edges of words. Probably just the wind in the grass and the trees; the growing gusts made them toss and writhe like living shadows all around her, until they truly looked alive in the darkness. Her eyes adjusted to the black shapes but found no comfort in what she saw. The shadows moved. The wind whispered. Things crept towards her in the dark—no, she only imagined them to, just as she had imagined something following her through the woods the night or so before. She knew that for sure and certain...and yet her blood ran cold as something which looked decidedly tangible seemed to crawl closer and closer to her, and it seemed to have a pair of eyes blacker than any of the shadows around it. They were eyes. She wasn't imagining it. Eyes like pits which stared into her frozen heart.
And then it disappeared.
Waverly looked up and saw the narrow clouds that raced across the stars, their edges rimmed with silver. The moon had risen enough to reach her through the trees. The beam it cast was feathery but bright as it slanted across her body, slivers of white light like broken glass.
Perhaps moonbeams truly did have some enchantment to them, because, against all odds and much to her own surprise, she managed to make a fire after that. The flames were quite steady by the time the moon had risen much higher. She should have been proud of her cheerful little blaze, but she stared at the moon instead. Its shape was much closer now to the slightly lopsided bulge she had seen on her first night. ...Almost a week beneath that strange moon, and she was still no closer to getting home.
In spite of the sheltering moonlight and the warm, protecting fire, Waverly cried herself to sleep.
If you made it this far, I am...really, genuinely, sincerely surprised. And embarrassed ngl. I don't know what it is about these first two chapters, but I just don't like them, and I don't think it's bc it's all Waverly and no Wilson, although I usually hate when it's just someone's OC for a big huge chunk, before they are endeared unto me. I know I'm right in leaving her alone for these first chapters, bc it (hopefully) makes the readers feel the same kind of loneliness for someone else besides just her, just like she feels. And, you know, shows what she's goes through without me just saying "aaand she had a terrible time and realized how little she could rely on herself, and was really lonely." But still, I just don't like the writing, and that's not bc of the 1900s flowery-ness of it either, bc that shows what she's like too, all hoity-toity, and it tones down the longer she's friends with Wilson, and it's a fun challenge trying to write in that style...but still, ughhh. IDK. I've just been grinding away at it for the past couple of years (while also working on every part of the story except for the part I'm supposed to be grinding away at right here, haha). Hopefully I'll eventually just...make it nice enough. Anyway. God bless you.