“I’m not the bad guy, Iz,” John said softly.
Those weird whispering voices were swirling through the trees again, making my ears hurt. “Guys…”
There was a sound off to my right. A branch breaking. A face peeked out from behind a tree. It was the girl I’d seen on the way in. She didn’t look very old, maybe seven or eight. Her hair was wet, but her skirts and blouse were caked in grime and mud, like she’d been swimming in a filthy lake. She called out to us in a foreign language.
“Sorry,” I said. “We don’t speak…”
She opened her hand to show us the bread crumbs there.
“Holy…” Quickly I glanced behind us. No crumbs. She’d obviously been following us from the beginning. Suddenly I felt disoriented and unsure of the way back. Just then she hitched up her skirts and started running into the forest. Without thinking I ran after her. “Don’t let her get away!” I yelled.
She dodged under low-lying branches that smacked me in the face and sprinted easily around every obstacle. She knew the way and had the advantage, but we still managed to keep her in our sights. Deep down I knew we were headed farther into the forest. We reached a part where the fog was even thicker, and the trees were dead and gray, like they’d survived a fire and never grown back. The ground was no longer cushioned by leaves and vegetation. It was stony and scarred, scabbed.
“Don’t lose her!” I yelled to the others.
“This fog is intense!” Baz yelled back. “I couldn’t find my own ass in this soup.”
“You can’t find your own ass most days,” Isabel shot back. She was keeping pace with me.
The fog thinned slightly. The girl stood beside a wide, deep lake surrounded by more of those dead trees. It was weird because everywhere else the forest was lush and colorful. But this spot was barren. Like nothing had ever grown here. Like nothing ever would. It was colder too—more like October than August. About ten feet out the rounded tops of polished stones showed just under the water.
The little girl looked out at the lake and then moved on to a cave. She whistled, and soon more kids stepped out. I counted them—five, six, ten. They were pale and half-starved looking, all in peasant-style clothing wet with algae and dirt, like they’d been out here for a while. One, a boy of about sixteen maybe, walked over to us. I didn’t know whether to run or stay put. Hadn’t the villagers told us not to come to the forest? What if these kids were feral? What if they were killers? Instinctively we closed ranks, hands at the ready in case we needed to fight our way out.
“Hey,” I said, forcing a calm into my words I didn’t even remotely feel. “We’re just out for a walk, okay? We don’t mean any harm.” To the others I whispered, “Start walking backward.”
“Can’t,” Isabel squeaked. “Look.”
The way back was cut off by a pack of about ten more creepy kids.
“We just want to go back to the village,” I said.
John pulled out his wallet. “Hey, you guys want money? I got money.”
“John, shut up, man,” Baz said.
The kids closed in, surrounding us, cutting off any hope of escape. They smelled earthy and damp, like they were part of the forest. While we watched, they gobbled down the bread crumbs. The little girl who’d led us here offered me a bottle of dark liquid.
“A bea,” she said. I’d heard that at the tavern. It meant drink. “Vin.” I knew that too: wine.
“Dude, don’t drink that shit. It could be anything,” Baz cautioned.
I shook my head, and three of the older kids grabbed Baz and dragged him toward the lake. Before any of us could do anything, they shoved his face under the water. His long arms thrashed and tried to grab for anything he could, but there were more of them and a mob always beats one—even if that one is six foot four with the strength of a Death Metal drummer, which Baz was. We tried to run for him, but they surrounded us, holding us back.
“Okay! I’ll a bea the vin!” I shouted, reaching for the bottle.
They let Baz up. “Holy f**k!” he managed between coughing fits.
I knew it had been a bad idea to come into the forest. My grandmother used to say you should listen to your instincts. The morning the men came to tear her family from their home in California, she’d woken up at four in the morning with the urge to run. Instead she’d tried to calm herself by arranging her dolls around a teacup, like everything was fine. “That is what we do,” she said to me as we waited for the bus. “We try to kill the voice inside that says the truth, because the fear of the truth is greater than any other fear.”