The Forest Without a Moon

Chapter 7

She stayed on her knees for several trembling seconds, her forehead bowed toward the soil, waiting for the spinning sickness in her skull to steady. Her ears rang with a relentless, high-frequency hiss—a vibration so pervasive and continuous that it felt less like a sound in the air and more like an iron needle vibrating behind her eardrums. When she finally forced herself to draw a breath, the air burned. It tasted flat, metallic, and utterly stripped of vitality, carrying the sharp sting of scorched copper and calcified dust. There was no dampness of the mountain valley, no chimney smoke, no scent of sleeping cattle or pine sap. The atmosphere was completely sterile, as if the air had been gathered into an alembic, boiled to dryness, and poured back out as cold, motionless vapor.

Slowly, Nella lifted her head, bracing herself for whatever nightmare lived beyond the cliff face. Her eyes took several seconds to adjust, squinting against a harsh, shadowless brightness that seemed to emanate from nowhere and everywhere at once. There was no ceiling of weeping ash boughs, no black precipice of granite, and no night sky. Above her stretched an unbroken, horizon-spanning expanse of pale, curdled white static. It did not possess the soft depth of winter snow clouds or the luminous curve of the moonlit heavens; it was a flat, vibrating skin of dead luminescence, trembling with microscopic tremors of gray and ivory that flickered like embers smothered under a sheet of ice. The light it shed down upon the landscape was unrelenting and clinical. It produced no hard edges and cast no dark shadows, washing the entire world in an eerie, bleached monochrome that flattened distances and rendered the horizon impossible to gauge.

Nella scrambled to her feet, her boots slipping in the powdery soil. She reached instinctively into the folds of her apron, her fingers closing around the cold horn handle of her skinning knife, pulling the blade free until its notched iron edge caught the sour white glare. The landscape before her was an endless, calcified garden of petrified wood. Pale ash trunks—identical in their twisted, weeping shapes to the trees of Somber Hollow, yet stripped bare of every leaf, twig, and shred of living moss—stood frozen in the chalk meadow. Their bark was not brown or wet with rain, but smooth, bone-white, and deeply scored with petrified fissures that looked like old scars on marble. The branches overhead did not sway, for there was no wind to stir them; they arched outward like splayed, skeletal fingers, locking together in an endless, motionless vault of bleached stone.

Her chest heaved, the cold hollow beneath her sternum aching with sudden, vicious intensity as she remembered the children. Finnian had slipped through the mist only seconds before her, with Brielle Foster and the silent column of Somber Hollow’s youth pressing hard behind him. Nella had expected to find a slaughterhouse or a pit—a jagged crevasse where sleepwalking children tumbled to their deaths, or a dark clearing surrounded by the ravenous mountain wolves the elders spoke of in hushed, curfew-bound warnings. She gripped the knife until the horn dug into her callused palm, her gaze darting between the pale trunks, scanning the white ground for crimson spatters, torn linen, or the thrashing limbs of terrified victims.

Instead, carried through the stillness on the back of the electrical hiss, came a sound that drove the blood entirely from Nella's face. It was not a scream. It was not the muffled, wet choke of a child being dragged beneath the roots, nor the terrified weeping of little Brielle calling for her mother. It was a sharp, rhythmic burst of breathless, unrestrained laughter. It rose in clear, musical arcs, accompanied by the rapid, syncopated patter of small feet kicking through the chalk dust. The laughter was joined by another voice—a boy’s bright shout—and then a chorus of high-pitched squeals that echoed off the petrified trunks like bells struck in an empty cathedral.

Nella froze, her mind struggling to reconcile the impossible auditory impression with the dread that had propelled her through the rock. The sound was not muffled by fear, nor was it the hollow, sleep-drugged murmuring of the missing hour. It was the vibrant, chaotic din of a village green at noon during the midsummer fair. Clutching her knife close to her ribs, she crept forward, using the wide, fossilized trunk of an ash tree for cover. The fine white dust muted her heavy steps, but the brittle ground crackled faintly beneath her boots, sending tiny plumes of powder curling into the dead air around her ankles. She leaned her shoulder against the petrified wood; it felt unyielding and freezing, devoid of the damp elasticity of living bark, as cold and hard as a headstone dug from deep winter permafrost.

She peered around the trunk into a wide, shallow depression in the chalk meadow. There, beneath the glaring dome of static, the missing children of Somber Hollow were running. They had not been bound, caged, or herded into pens. Their glazed, somnambulic trance—the heavy, rhythmic stupor that had marched them out of their beds and through the cobblestone lanes—had completely sloughed away. They were awake, their small bodies fluid and supple as they darted through the groves of stone trees. Little Brielle Foster, whose persistent cough had rattled in her frail chest all through the preceding autumn, was sprinting across the chalk with her bare feet churning up pale clouds, her ragged pinafore billowing behind her like a pale sail. Beside her, the tanner’s twin boys were engaged in a wild, stumbling game of pursuit, ducking beneath fossilized boughs and hurdling exposed, root-like ridges of bone-colored rock with total, unhesitating familiarity.

Yet it was not the children’s unnatural vitality that caused Nella’s heart to hammer against her ribs until she could scarcely draw breath. It was the figures who ran beside them.

Moving among the children were entities that defied every tale Nella had ever heard by the hearth. They stood over seven feet tall, impossibly slender, their silhouettes possessing the fragile, elongated proportions of peeled willow wands. Their skin, visible from the crowns of their hairless heads down to their long, sweeping feet, was neither furred nor scaled; it had the smooth, unblemished, matte texture of unglazed white porcelain. There were no joints that bulged, no tendons that knotted beneath their surfaces, and no clothing draped across their frames. Instead, from their slender shoulders, their clavicles, and the hairless ridges of their skulls, ribbons of soft, luminous mist curled into the air, drifting downward like freezing water vapor before pooling gently about their ankles in slow, undulating currents.

Most horrifying of all were their heads. The smooth porcelain of their throats curved upward into jawlines that were delicate and sharp, terminating in rounded, graceful chins—but above the jaw, there was nothing. No nostrils, no cleft of a mouth, no brow ridges, and no eyes. Their faces were unbroken, seamless oval shields of smooth, pale white, polished to a dull eggshell sheen.

Nella shrank back against the petrified tree, her gorge rising. She prepared herself for the inevitable butchery, raising her skinning knife, ready to scream, to fling herself into the clearing with whatever mortal fury she possessed to pull the children from the monsters’ reach. She braced herself to see those porcelain arms whip outward and tear the little bodies apart, or watch the mist drown them where they stood.

A tall figure stepped directly into the center of the depression, its porcelain form catching the static light from the sky. Eight-year-old Finnian Hart was sprinting toward it, his pale hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, his mouth wide in an ecstatic grin. The creature did not strike. It did not drop into a predatory crouch. With a motion so fluid, gentle, and balletic that it seemed to mock the clumsy laws of gravity, the entity bent at its impossibly narrow waist. It reached out two long, tapered porcelain fingers, moving with exquisite slowness, and lightly tapped Finnian upon the shoulder of his linen smock.

Finnian did not collapse. He did not cry out in agony. He squealed with bright, unvarnished glee, planted his bare feet into the chalk dust, and spun around on his heel. "Tag!" the boy shouted, his voice ringing with pure childhood triumph. He lunged forward and slapped his small, grubby palm flat against the creature’s smooth, seamless knee. "You're it! You're it, Pale-Bough! You have to catch Brielle now, she's slower than the miller's mule!"

The porcelain entity did not speak—it possessed no mouth with which to form syllables—but it did not remain inert. It tilted its smooth, featureless head sharply to the left, a gesture that conveyed an unmistakable, exaggerated pantomime of playful defeat. The soft mist trailing from its neck flared outward in a gentle, swirling plume, and the creature swept backward, gliding across the white earth on long, silent strides, its long arms swaying rhythmically like birch limbs in an unfelt breeze as it feigned pursuit of the shrieking Foster girl. Brielle shrieked with laughter, ducking beneath an arching root, kicking up white chalk as she scrambled away, looking back over her shoulder not with the terror of prey fleeing a predator, but with the breathless mischief of a child dodging an elder sibling in the orchard.

Nella’s grip on the knife slipped slightly, her hand slick with a cold, greasy sweat. Her mind spun in wild, sickening circles, refusing to seat the images into any framework of reality she understood. The children had not been stolen. They were not victims of a butcher's trap. They had stepped bodily across the boundary of the world into this monochrome void, and they had come here to play.

"Finnian!" The name tore from Nella's throat before she could measure the danger, a harsh, jagged rasp that broke through the hiss of the static sky and the musical chime of children’s voices.