That thought put him in mind of Caedmon Hollow and his own strange fantasy wrested from this same hostile terrain all those years ago — more than a century and a half now; Caedmon Hollow might almost have known the Brontës — and Charles felt a surge of excitement at the prospect of Hollow House awaiting them. In that moment of anticipation, he could almost forget Erin’s brooding silence, the trouble with Syrah Nagle, and — and the rest of it. He could almost forget it all.
Ahead, Merrow turned into a still more narrow road. It ran downhill between retaining walls of stacked stone for maybe half a mile. Then the road broadened, the walls drew away, and they were in civilization again, or what passed for it out here, anyway.
Suddenly they were in Yarrow. The village was old and steep, crowded into a rift between the hills. Merchants hugged the high street — a newsagent with a white cat drowsing in the front window; a pub, its lot crowded with the noon rush; a hardware store; and a florist (Petal Pushers, Charles noted with a humorless snort). At the far end of town before a crumbling stone house, Charles saw a sign reading Yarrow Historical Society. He made a mental note to come back and have a look at the place. They weren’t likely to have anything useful, but you could never say for sure.
He glanced at Erin, but if the change in scenery had made any impression on her, it didn’t show. Merrow made two quick turns, each road more narrow than the last. If they met an oncoming car, they would have to pull over to let it pass. Charles had the fleeting thought that in leaving Yarrow they had passed through the last outpost of the modern world.
The terrain here was sharper, more unwelcoming, the hills rising steeply on either side. The road wound through rugged outcroppings of stone and patches of wiry brush. Charles cracked the window and let the slipstream flow in, freighted with the scent of heather and flowers just coming into bloom, and cooler than it would have been back home.
Except this was home now, wasn’t it? Home and a fresh start. He glanced at Erin. She seemed to have dozed off. She’d tilted her head against the back of the seat and closed her eyes, and for a single heartbreaking moment, as the midmorning sunlight etched silver the line of her profile, she looked like the girl he had married nearly a decade ago. Then the car dipped into shadow, and the sorrow around her eyes and in the set of her lips sprang into relief.
Charles frowned and looked away, the thought echoing inside his head: a fresh start. God knows they needed it. Drumming his fingers on the wheel, he studied the road, ascending a sharp hill. The solicitor’s car hung at the crest a moment, then plunged out of sight. Yew trees clustered against the sky, their tips just visible above the ridgeline.
Anticipation flickered in him once again.
Beside him, Erin opened her eyes. “We there?” she murmured.
And then they topped the ridge. The valley bottomed out endlessly before them, and suddenly the Eorl Wood was there, bigger than Charles had expected, and more forbidding. The trees began halfway down the slope, like the wall of an ancient fortress, a palisade of enormous alder and elm and gnarled oak. The wood spread as far as the eye could see — lime, olive, jade, a thousand shades of green, fading here and there into glossy emerald patches of darkness.
When Charles saw it, his first thought was that he understood, really understood, the environment that had shaped the nightscape of Caedmon Hollow’s mystifying book. His second thought, coming fast on the heels of the first, was that the wood was collectively alive, a single vast organism spilling out across the valley in wild profusion, bigger than the eye could comprehend, improbably, impossibly bigger, that it was sentient, watchful, and that somehow —
— how? —
— it had been awaiting them.
“Jesus,” Erin whispered, and it was all Charles could do — the impulse took an active effort of will to resist — not to step hard on the brake and wrench the car back toward Yarrow.
Too late to turn back now.
Momentum seized them, the gray road blurring as the car gathered speed. At the base of the decline, Merrow signaled left and disappeared into the trees. If Charles hadn’t seen it happen, he would have missed the turnoff entirely.
He almost missed it anyway. He braked hard — the road ended in a turnaround maybe two dozen yards past the entrance — the force of the deceleration pressing him into the upholstery. He swung the car around and squared up to the entrance.
It gaped under the trees, a tunnel hewn into the flesh of the wood itself, flanked by stone columns shrouded in vines. Engraved words, eroded almost flush with the stone, were visible on the pillar to the right: Hollow House, and below that, 1848. There had been a gate there once, but no more.
A taillight flashed deep in all that emerald gloaming. Charles reached out for Erin’s hand. “We’re here.”
“So we are.” She gave him a forced smile in return, but her fingers remained dead in his grasp.
Charles sighed. He turned on the headlights, touched the gas, and nosed the car between the columns. The wood took them. When the sound of their engine died away under the trees, no evidence of their passage remained.
They might never have come that way at all.
An oppression of trees drew up around the car, and a doomed sense of claustrophobia seized Erin Hayden. For a moment it was all too much — the dark closing down upon them and the tires whispering their incessant tidings of arrival on macadam crumbling with time and carpeted with dead leaves.
Most of all it was the ancient oaks pressing close to the road, like old men, lichen-bearded and a little deaf, stooping close to listen. She imagined them straightening up as the car slipped by, leaning their hoary heads together to pass the news, a stir of leaf and branch rippling ever outward before them.
There was something disturbing about the idea, something watchful and abiding about the gloom under the trees. It was too much, too close.
She glanced at Charles, his face masked in streamers of light and shadow. He looked tired, haggard with something more than jet lag. She almost reached out to him, maybe would have, but an overhanging branch slapped at the windshield, startling her, and she turned away instead.
That was when she saw the child: a little girl clad in a simple white dress, maybe kindergarten age —
— Lissa’s age —
— or maybe a year older. She stood on the leaf-scattered shoulder of the road, staring toward them, so close she might have reached out and touched the car as it sped past.
“Charles?”
“Hmm?”
“Did you —” She broke off. She did not want to say it. It had been nothing, a trick of the eye, a flash of sunlight through the forest canopy or a patch of fog breathing up from the damp soil. We see what we want to see, her therapist had told her. As if that helped.
“Did I what?” Charles said.
“Nothing,” she said.
She was tired of seeing things.
For months after the funeral, back home in Ransom, she’d caught glimpses of Lissa everywhere, through a scrim of raindrops on the windshield as she wheeled by the kids at the bus stop or in the baleful fluorescent glare of the grocery store, just turning the far corner of an aisle. Something familiar in the set of the mouth or the flash of shoulder-length hair.
Then she’d blink and see that Lissa wasn’t there after all. The girl at the bus stop would shift the angle of her gaze and her face would