The Forest Without a Moon

Chapter 2

Clang.

Nella leaned over him, her heart skipping into an uneasy, erratic tempo. She took his broad face between her hands, shaking his cheeks with firm pressure. "Rowan! Wake up. The twelfth bell hasn't finished. You cannot be found here by the watch."

He did not stir. His mouth hung slightly slack, his eyelids completely closed, untwitching, as if the nerves behind them had been severed cleanly from the waking world. As Nella leaned closer, her nose wrinkled at the sharp, cloying scent rising from his open mouth. It was not the hearty smell of cabbage, nor the sour tang of fermented elderberry; it was a sickly-sweet, medicinal vapor that coated the back of her throat like oil—the distinct, lingering odor of ghost-poppy resin, smelling faintly of crushed bitter almonds and hot copper.

Clang.

The eighth. Then the ninth.

Nella stepped back from the unconscious carpenter, staring at his slack features with a growing sense of dread that coiled tight around her ribs. Every adult in Somber Hollow drank the evening draught at the setting of the sun—an ancient custom, they said, an herbal brew prepared by Sebastian Whitlock at the dispensary to ward off the night-vapors that pooled beneath the ash canopy. She had always refused it, pouring her share into the roots of the dead briar hedge beside her rain barrel, repulsed by the oily sheen that floated upon the liquid's surface. Rowan had laughed at her caution only yesterday, claiming the draught gave a man the only untroubled sleep to be had in a valley where the sun never truly shone. Now, he lay upon her settle like a felled ox, utterly dead to the world, his consciousness cleanly snuffed out before the curfew had even completed its count.

Clang.

The tenth.

Clang.

The eleventh. The vibrations seemed to thicken the very air inside the cottage, turning the atmosphere into something dense and gelatinous, muffling the crackle of the fir logs on the hearth until the fire burned in absolute, uncanny silence.

Clang.

The twelfth chime rang out, its massive, sonorous roar expanding through the narrow streets of the Hollow, bouncing from the damp stone walls of the cliffs, and slowly, inevitably dying away.

Then came the silence.

It was not the natural quiet of a sleeping village, where dogs barked in the distant kennels or eaves creaked in the wind. It was a suffocating, total vacuum. The hearth-clock on the corner shelf stopped its tick mid-swing, the brass disk frozen at an angle of fifteen degrees. Rowan’s heavy snores ceased to produce sound, though his chest continued to rise and fall in slow, mechanical intervals. The wind howling against the eaves vanished instantly, cut off as if a massive, padded hand had clamped down over the entire valley. In that profound, unnatural void, Nella stood alone in the center of her workroom, her hands clutched against her apron, her breath caught in her throat.

Then, the world shattered from the inside.

It did not come through the air. There was no iron clang from the central bell tower, no acoustic reverberation to strike the ear drums. The shockwave struck directly through her teeth.

It was an impossible, silent impact—a thirteenth bell that resonated purely through calcium, bone, and stone. The vibration drove straight up through the soles of her shoes, vibrating her shins, jarring her jaw so violently that her molars clicked together with a sharp, sickening c***k. But worst of all was the chamber behind her sternum. The drafty, hollow space in her chest—that lifelong, cold absence—caught the frequency like an empty glass bell struck with an iron hammer. It did not merely vibrate; it sang. A pure, harmonic, arctic frequency tore through her ribcage, so intense and freezing that she cried out, though no sound escaped her throat into the deadened air of the room.

The small casement window groaned, the lead caming twisting as the glass flexed inward under the pressure of the impossible hour.

Nella stumbled toward the wall, bracing her hip against the sill to keep from collapsing as the silent resonance slowly ebbed from her marrow. She caught the edge of the coarse burlap curtain with trembling fingers and pulled it aside, peering out through the frost-ferned glass into the narrow lane of Somber Hollow.

Outside, the darkness was absolute. The weeping ash trees, whose intertwined branches formed a dense, weeping vault that completely hid the stars and the moon from the valley, hung like black shrouds over the lane. The single pitch lantern hanging from the corner of the blacksmith’s forge opposite had ceased to flicker; its yellow flame stood perfectly still, a frozen teardrop of light that cast no moving shadows across the rime-covered cobblestones.

Then, across the street, the iron latch of the Hart cottage lifted with a dull, muffled click.

Nella pressed her forehead against the freezing glass, her breath clouding the pane until she frantically wiped it clear with the cuff of her sleeve.

The door of the Hart cottage creaked open, slowly and deliberately, swinging wide into the freezing night. Out from the black interior stepped eight-year-old Finnian Hart.

The boy wore only a thin, bleached linen night smock that hung straight to his shins, offering no defense against the freezing wind that had frozen the mud into sharp, jagged ruts. His feet were bare, his small, pale soles pressing directly onto the rime-crusted stones. Yet he did not flinch. He did not curl his toes against the bitter ice, nor did he pull his shoulders up against his neck to ward off the cold. His arms hung loosely at his sides, his head held unnaturally erect, tilted slightly upward toward the impenetrable ceiling of ash branches.

Nella watched, paralyzed, as Finnian turned his face toward the light of the frozen lantern. His eyes were wide open, staring straight ahead into the dark, but there was no life in them. The pupils were dilated so completely that the pale hazel of his irises was swallowed whole, leaving only two pools of glassy, unreflective black that caught the yellow light like wet slate. His mouth was closed, set in a placid, terrifyingly neutral line.

There was no hesitation in his stride. He did not possess the clumsy, lumbering gait of a child shaken awake from sleep; his movements were fluid, eerily coordinated, and precise, his bare feet striking the frozen mud with a rhythmic, measured cadence that matched the slow swing of a metronome. He turned westward, down the gradual slope of the lane that led away from the village square, toward the high, black boundary stones that marked the limit of Somber Hollow—the f*******n path leading directly into the weeping ash thickets and the terminal cliffs beyond.

"Finnian," Nella breathed against the glass, the name dying against her lips.

Across the room, Rowan remained sunken into the settle, his face slack, utterly unresponsive to the world around him. Whatever draught Sebastian Whitlock had brewed in the dispensary had done its work with terrible efficiency: the adults of Somber Hollow were locked away in chemical cages, their senses deadened, their minds drowning in black poppy syrup while the thirteenth chime vibrated through the stone foundations of their homes.

A visceral, frantic panic seized Nella’s throat. It was not a reasoned thought, nor a calculated choice of duty; it was a sudden, violent pull that surged through the hollow in her chest—an unbearable, magnetic terror for the small, barefoot boy marching into the freezing dark alone.

She spun away from the window, catching her heavy, coarse wool shawl from the peg beside the door. She did not bother with her boots’ silver buckles; she simply jammed her feet into the stiff, cold leather, threw the shawl over her head, and pulled it tight around her throat. She cast one final, lingering glance at Rowan, who lay motionless beneath the stopped hearth-clock, his breath shallow and slow.

"Stay asleep then," she whispered bitterly into the room's dead air. "Sleep through it all."

She lifted the iron latch of her cottage door. The moment she broke the threshold, the freezing night air hit her like a wet sheet, smelling intensely of damp slate, bitter rot, and the sharp, alkaline sting of fresh frost. The street was so quiet she could hear the tiny, brittle crunch of the ice crystals breaking beneath her boots as she stepped down onto the cobblestones.

Thirty yards ahead, Finnian Hart’s small, white figure was already slipping around the bend of the cliff road. His small, bare footprints were cleanly stamped into the thin layer of rime that coated the dark mud, each print sharp and distinct, leading steadily toward the boundary stones where no villager was ever permitted to walk after dark.

Nella pulled her shawl tight against the bitter, biting draft, her heart thumping against her empty ribs in that strange, muted rhythm that never seemed to warm her, and plunged into the moonless dark after the child.

The waiting had taken the feeling from Nella’s toes long before the false dawn began to bleed its thin, curdled gray across the valley floor. For hours she had crouched behind the rotting timber of an abandoned sheep pen near the lower boundary rocks, her back pressed against the damp, splintered cedar while the valley held its unnatural, suffocating breath. She had lost Finnian Hart’s small, pale silhouette at the tree line hours ago, watched him melt into the gloom of the weeping ash grove as though the shadows themselves had opened a seam to swallow him whole. Terror had kept her rooted to the frozen earth, an agonizing vigil during which no owl hooted, no wind stirred the petrified boughs overhead, and the village hearth-clocks sat paralyzed in their housings. She had half-convinced herself that the boy was gone forever, dispersed into whatever bottomless quiet governed the dark, when the undergrowth at the rim of the woods finally rustled with a dry, papery scrape. Out of the stagnant mist stepped Finnian, walking alone with a slow, mechanical rhythm, his small head tilted toward the dirt.