The Forest Without a Moon

Chapter 20

Nella did not slow her pace. She burst through the low iron service arch at the base of the Bell Tower, tumbling out into the biting, freezing midnight air of Somber Hollow. The sudden cold struck her face like a slap of ice-water, clearing the narcotic haze from her throat as she caught her footing against the frozen mud of the lane. Above her, the great iron bells hung silent in the belfry, waiting for the midnight sequence to begin. She had less than two hours before the twelfth chime, and across the lane, behind the fogged and shuttered windows of the Foster house, a six-year-old child was coughing ash into her blankets, waiting for the impossible bell that would summon her into the dark.

The frozen mud of the lane offered no purchase beneath Nella’s boots, slick with black ice and the quiet venom of the mountain frost. She ran with her head down, skirts hitched in one fist and her skinning knife gripped in the other, her breath dragging across her dry windpipe like sheep shears over rough wool. The village was sunken in its chemical stupor, every timber cottage shuttered and blind, breathing out thin plumes of peat smoke that smelled of boiled poppy hulls. There were no watchmen in the lanes; there was no need for watchmen when the Magistrate’s draught had already extinguished every waking thought between the valley cliffs. Slipping through the unlatched rear gate of the Foster cottage, Nella did not bother with courtesy. She moved into the suffocating, chamomile-thick warmth of the kitchen, scooped the limp, quilts-wrapped weight of Brielle Foster from the settle before the mother’s glassy eyes could register the draft, and retreated into the dark. Two cottages down, she found Finnian Hart already standing by his scullery door, his small woolen coat buttoned askew, his dilated pupils catching the meager starlight like wet river pebbles as she caught him by the wrist and hauled him into the cold.

Nella hauled both children into her own cottage, slamming the iron latch into its bracket and kicking the door shut against the creeping valley fog. The silence inside her workshop was brittle, smelling of sheep’s fat from the dying rushlights and the sour tang of damp linen stacked beneath the cutting tables. Dropping Brielle onto the wool-stuffed pallet by the unlit hearth, Nella immediately dragged a heavy pine plank from the timber pile beside her scullery door, wedging it diagonally across the doorframe. She took up her grandfather’s claw hammer and a handful of four-inch iron spikes from her notions drawer, driving the metal into the oak stiles with frantic, deafening blows that shook the stone lintel. Finnian crouched beside the hearth, his small boots pulled tight beneath his knees, watching the hammer rise and fall with an expression of dreadful, ancient lucidity that no eight-year-old child should have possessed.

"You cannot hammer the wind, Nella," Finnian murmured, his voice trembling not with a child’s panic, but with the quiet sorrow of a traveler watching an avalanche descend upon a blocked mountain pass. He reached out with a thumb, absentmindedly tracing a seam in the floorboards where the frost was already beginning to bead into fine, powdery whiskers. "They don't come through the hinges. When the thirteen strikes, the wood doesn't remember how to be hard anymore. The quiet friends get angry if the door is shut when they are starving. If you keep Brielle here, the ground under our feet will simply c***k open and swallow the chairs."

Nella did not lower the hammer; she drove a third spike through the pine brace until the iron squealed against the cured oak, her teeth clenched so violently that the ache radiated deep into her temples. Turning from the door, she seized her heavy birch cutting table—a four-legged beast of seasoned timber she had used for seven years to shear broadcloth—and dragged it with a harsh scrape across the slate floorboards, wedging its thick top flush against the window shutters. She piled heavy bundles of cured wool, her iron pressing stones, and split logs of seasoned hickory on top of the sill until the frame groaned under the dead weight. Brielle lay curled among the quilts, her skin gleaming with that sickening, pearlescent luster in the gray tallow light, her breath coming in tiny, rhythmic clicks like dry locusts dying in a jar. When Nella knelt to tuck the blanket over the child’s shoulders, Brielle’s fingers brushed her wrist; the girl’s knuckles were cold, hard, and vitreous, clinking against Nella’s horn cuff-buttons with the unmistakable ring of unglazed earthenware.

"You are staying here," Nella told them, her voice coming out in a rasping whisper that sounded strange in her own ears, vibrating against the hollow draft behind her breastbone. She moved between the children, checking their boots, tucking wool around their knees, her hands moving with frantic, seamstress-bred precision to mend a tear in reality that needles could never touch. "I will not let them drink you until you are stone. Let the Magistrate come with his purple poison; let the bells strike until the belfry breaks. There is three inches of ash-timber between us and the street, and iron enough to hold back a mountain cart. We stay by the hearth until the false dawn breaks."

Brielle did not answer; her eyelids fluttered, half-open, displaying milky, unseeing whites that mirrored the static sky of the Orchard, while from her pale lips escaped a faint, dry cough that speckled the wool quilt with a fine spray of gray chalk. Finnian reached out, his small, warm hand catching Nella’s thumb and gripping it with desperate strength. His knuckles were gray with petrified dust, yet the blood pulsed beneath his skin with an urgent, human heat that Nella’s own fingertips desperately lacked. Outside, across the frozen expanse of the village square, the first stroke of the midnight curfew sounded. It was a heavy, bronze toll that set the copper kettles humming on their iron hooks, rolling down from the high bell tower to wash over the quiet rooftops like cold well water. One chime. Then the second, vibrating through the granite walls of the cottage, dragging the mortal world toward the edge of the shelf.

Nella crouched on the floor between the two children, her iron-shod timber bar clutched across her lap, her muscles coiled so tight they trembled with exhaustion. She counted the strikes under her breath, watching the tallow flame flicker in the draft that had begun to rise from the floorboards: six, seven, eight, each stroke heavier than the last, settling upon the valley like sod thrown onto a pine coffin. At the eleventh chime, the tallow candle guttered and died, leaving the workshop plunged into an oily, pitch-black dark broken only by the thin fissures of frost-light seeping through the shutter seams. The twelfth chime rang out, lingering on the dead air for an eternity, its low hum decaying into the stone until the silence of the hollow was absolute, suffocating, and unnatural. Nella held her breath, her eyes burning as she strained to hear the familiar night wind howling off the sheer mountain cliffs.

There was no wind. Then, from the center of the earth rather than the belfry above, the thirteenth chime struck. It was not a sound that could be caught by human ears; it was a physical dislocation, a seismic wrench that sheared through the mortar between the cottage’s foundation stones and vibrated upward through the soles of Nella’s boots directly into her jaw. Nella’s mouth filled with the bitter taste of crushed slate and dry chalk. The iron nails she had driven into the pine barricade did not tear free from the wood; instead, the wood around them suddenly turned brittle and fibrous, crumbling into gray shavings that drifted downward like dead skin. The window frame buckled without a splintering c***k, the pine sill bowing inward as if it had sat rotting in a damp ditch for forty years, the weight of the pressing stones collapsing into the floorboards with a muffled, pulpy thud.

From the mortared joints between the stone walls, the mist began to bleed. It did not drift like mountain fog; it poured through the cracks in dense, heavy rivulets that pooled across the slate floor like spilt milk, glowing with an internal, colorless luminance that cast no shadows. Finnian let out a ragged, whimpering gasp, scrambling backward until his spine struck the cold stones of the chimney breast, dragging Brielle’s limp feet with him into the hearth-recess. Nella surged to her feet, lifting the heavy iron bar with both hands, her breath coming in ragged, whistling heaves as the temperature inside the cottage dropped below freezing in the space of a single heartbeat. Frost bloomed in exquisite, petrified ferns across the legs of her cutting table, and the pool of water in her tin washbasin cracked down the center with a sound like a pistol shot.

The mist rose from the floorboards, gathering into three tall, slender columns that brushed the whitewashed ceiling beams. The vapor did not disperse; it condensed, thickening into the smooth, featureless porcelain forms of the Animi. The central entity—the tall, slender creature whose arms were long enough to touch its knees—bent its head slightly to clear the low timbers of the cottage roof. Its skin was the color of calcified bone, unmarred by eyes, nostrils, or lips, its surface possessing that strange, satin-smooth glaze that Nella had seen in the ancient, unburied pottery dug from the cliff caves. Behind it, two more entities emerged from the granite walls, their porcelain limbs moving without a sound, their long fingers trailing through the air like willow wands stirring stagnant water. They did not reach for Finnian. They did not look toward Brielle, whose shallow breathing had settled into a faint, rhythmic whistle in the corner.

"Get back!" Nella screamed, lunging forward and swinging the iron bar with all the strength in her shoulders, aiming straight for the central creature’s slender neck. "Get out of my house! You will not have them! You will not take another hour from this valley!"