“Use your knives!” Jamie yelled, no longer concerned about whether the enemy could hear them or not. All of them—except Jamie, ironically—pulled out their knives and began to hack and cut with surprising ease the vines and branches that were entangling them. All except Jamie were now moving, and moving faster than they had ever moved in the forest to this point. They pushed toward the lights that, nevertheless, seemed to be constantly moving away from them while keeping the same distance, as if intending to lead the children. But Jamie, who alone had remembered the knives, was so entangled that he was not able to reach his knife with either hand. “I’m caught! I can’t reach my knife!” Jamie yelled against the noises of the advancing enemy.
The others were by this time far ahead of Jamie, and only Beatríz was able to hear him. “Jamie’s stuck—way back there!” she yelled.
“I’ll double back,” Elli said, “but you two keep going toward the lights.”
“Elli!” Beatríz yelled back. “We don’t even know what the lights are, or even if they’re friendly!”
“They can’t be any worse than what we’re running from!” shouted Elli, as she attempted to backtrack in the direction of Jamie.
Jamie continued to try unsuccessfully to reach his knife. Then, suddenly, before Elli could reach him, the branches and vines were pulling themselves—or being pulled—away from Jamie. When Jamie was finally able to get to his knife, he was already free to move again. “I’m out—I’m coming!” he yelled to the others. In a minute or so he caught up with his three companions who had stopped and were waiting for him.
Elli barked another order. “Okay, let’s keep going—faster, if you can! The creatures will be on us any minute now!” They resumed their push through the heavy growth and seemed, finally, to be getting closer to the lights. The rumbling and hacking behind them, however, was also growing louder and closer. Elli, in the lead once again, noticed the lights had stopped, not more than forty yards ahead. She noticed also, much to her dismay, that they were disappearing, one by one, until there was only a single small light remaining—hovering, barely visible, just ahead of them.
The children could now feel the vibrations from the movement and destructive work of their pursuers. The ground beneath them began to shake from the enemy’s heavy feet, and the children were hearing trees falling and feeling bursts of wind from their crashing to the forest floor.
Finally, when they had nearly reached the light, it moved suddenly away once more, leaving them with hopes quickly dashed. As the enemy forces were gaining on them, Elli noticed the single light move to the right where she spotted, with newfound hope, the other lights. Far from having gone out, they had been hovering in the darkness beside a tall thin beam of light created by some sort of opening that was more than ten feet high and about a foot and a half wide.
The enemy, with lights of their own, at last saw the children, not more than twenty yards ahead of them, and roared with the certainty of impending triumph. Then, to their astonished surprise, the children vanished. When the creatures reached the spot where they had just seen the children, there was only a single large tree standing nearby. The tree, being one of the biggest in the forest, was too big to hack down, even if the children were somehow within it, which seemed all but impossible. The leader of the enemy forces ordered his warriors to halt and be quiet, hoping to hear the children who had somehow been able to elude them. They looked and listened with keen eyes and even better ears, but saw and heard nothing. At that point the leader motioned for a number of his forces to encircle in opposite directions the trunk that was the width of a house, assuming, with an ugly smug smile of accomplishment, that he would shortly discover the children hiding on the other side of the tree. But, again, there was nothing.
In anger, they attacked the trunk with all of their resources, including the “hacking machines,” but the tree was impenetrable and incapable of being taken down, and the thought, finally, that the children would somehow be in the tree struck them as ludicrous. They then began working away at the forest in the direction they had been heading in their pursuit of the children only minutes earlier. They were determined to follow the children as long as it took to capture or kill them, even if it meant clearing the entire forest to do so. Besides, should the small ones reach the other side of the forest, which was highly unlikely, they would be met with nothing more welcoming than those now pursuing them.
Just as the creatures were about to see and pounce on them, all four children had frantically squeezed themselves through the narrow opening in the trunk from which the light was emanating, stumbled to the uneven floor inside the tree, and then heard the sound of a massive wood door slamming shut behind them. They looked back, but saw no one. The door seemed to have closed of its own accord before disappearing entirely by blending perfectly into the rest of the tree.
They looked around, frozen in silent wonder—each where he or she had tumbled to rest on the floor. The light had seemed bright at first against the pitch blackness to which their eyes had been accustomed outside, but as their eyes adjusted, they realized that the light was soft, streaming in all directions from healthy flames in a stone fireplace on the other side of the large circular room in which they were sitting. The mammoth door that had closed behind them, likely not heard by the enemy above their own loud noises, sealed out the darkness and greatly muffled the sounds of the enemy raging and assaulting the tree.
The children remained quiet, examining their surroundings and unconsciously enjoying their first sense of well-being since they had first arrived in Bairnmoor. It became evident that they had landed on the solid wooden floor of a circular room inside a tree, the diameter of which was about forty feet. There were no windows, and the smooth walls of the room curved gently upward into a circle of shadow that obscured the height of the ceiling—if, in fact, there was any ceiling at all. In the room was a large round wooden table with thick and gnarled branches surrounding it, as if they were a circular barrier to anyone or anything actually being able to use the table. There were also similar tree limbs and branches protruding in a number of different places from the continuous wall of the room, as if they were growing inside the tree and weaving themselves together into complex knots. And although the children could not imagine how anyone could sit in them, there were several articles of twisted limbs scattered about the room that vaguely resembled high backed chairs.
There were also two tall wooden cabinets spread apart along the wall, and perhaps five or six stacks of sticks leaning against them, or against each other, as well as some cups and plates on the table containing remnants of recently eaten food.
Now that she could no longer hear any sounds from the enemy outside, Elli ventured a modestly loud “Hello?” She paused just a bit, out of politeness. “Hello? Can anyone hear me?” she now yelled.
“You don’t have to yell so, especially given the acoustics. I can hear you very well, indeed,” a voice somewhere inside the room or beyond the shadow of the ceiling replied.
Elli, Alex, and Jamie looked wide-eyed around the room, straining to see where the voice was coming from, but saw no one or anything else that appeared able to speak. Beatríz said, “I’m sure the voice came from right behind us, near the door that slammed shut.”
“But of course!” the voice said.
Jamie looked back after having looked there already. “All that’s there, Beatríz, is just an old stack of tall sticks.”
“Well, this ‘old stack of tall sticks,’ as you call me, had just pulled you, sir, out of an entanglement a few minutes ago,” the voice said, directing his remarks at Jamie.
“What?”