Chapter Five

Chapter Five

For some reason unbeknown to Set, Chariza ordered him to stand watch. He did sleep much of the previous day in the back of the wagon but that was only because the night before with Old Dunford proved too horrifying to find any rest.

Serrano instructed him to maintain the fire to keep the wolves at bay but he said it wouldn’t do much against night creatures. The thought of night creatures attacking them that far from the frontlines did not appear to bother them much though. Set never heard three people sleep so wildly. It was a like a chorus of snoring and farts coming from the two tents and the back of the wagon. The noise practically drowned out the endless sound of crickets chirping and owls hooting and coyotes howling in the forest all around them.

What have these people been eating, he thought to himself. Serrano skinned a snake for the fire and skewered a couple of rabbits for them to share but as hungry as Set was, he still couldn’t bring himself to eat any of it. He and his brothers never ate anything like that at House Forsyth, not in a million years. Ms. Lawrence and the kitchen staff made sure that it never came to that.

He poked at the fire with a stick. Mikala coughed in the back of the wagon and Serrano let loose a feral testament of flatulence from the tent behind him. BRRRRRRT.

Just then, Set heard what sounded like a child’s laughter coming from the bushes.

“It sounds like they’ve got the bubbles,” one voice whispered.

“Humans are so funny,” whispered another.

Set stood. “Hey, who’s out there?”

Leaves rustled in the bushes.

“He heard us!” said one of the voices.

“Let’s get out of here!” said the other.

The bushes shook and small feet thudded off into the darkness. After a moment of nothing but night crickets chirping their incessant noise and the crackling of the fire, Set plopped back down onto the ground and continued poking at it with his stick. I don’t know if it’s safe for little kids to be running around out here at night, he thought.

The town where they collected Mikala was probably a few hours back up the road by Set’s best estimate. Since leaving the town he saw nothing but forest and moonlight really. Serrano warned him to keep a lookout once they crossed the tree line but he couldn’t imagine what for. The frontlines were days away, maybe even weeks. Still, he couldn’t be sure. Nobody ever talked about the war where he was from because back there, nobody ever went. So, nobody came back to talk about it.

Ms. Lawrence came from somewhere else, he couldn’t remember where. She told him as much but he never remembered places and names. She wasn’t from any of the nearby towns, he knew that much.

She often told him stories at night before he went to sleep. That was probably his favorite thing about her aside from her cooking. She told the best ghost stories. His favorite was one about a human child that turned into a wolf and ate its human family.

The child’s great-great-great-great-grandfather once led a town mob that rounded up a handful of women that the local priest claimed were witches. The priest riled the townspeople with talk of witches stealing life energy from stillborn babies and using it to subjugate some of the local, well-mannered husbands of the town.

The mob tied the women to a series of wooden posts erected in the town square, piled on heaps of wood at their feet, and lit the whole thing on fire. Most of the women died screaming and pleading for their lives, all except for one. One of them did not plead, nor did she scream. She cursed the descendants of the mob’s leader and died laughing.

The men were horrified at the proposition but it only served to justify their behavior. They thanked the priest for his service but the mob’s leader knew the woman’s dying words and consequent laughter amounted to more than the mad rants of a dying and delusional woman. He had an affair with the woman, he confessed as much to the priest.

Together, the man and the priest schemed the entire witch-hunt in order to help the man save face before his wife, his children, and the town. The man also promised to donate a portion of his wealth to keep the church operating well into the future.

His children grew up healthy and strong. They had children and their children had children. The man eventually grew old and died without ever witnessing the fruition of the dying woman’s curse. Only after he passed did one of his descendants transform into a wolf upon the light of a full-moon. It attacked its entire human family in their sleep and ate them for breakfast lunch and dinner over the next few days.

But those were just ghost stories as far as Set could tell. He scanned the surrounding forest. Tall midland pine encircled the clearing just off the main road. According to Serrano, it was a typical site used by travelers but he said it was best if they didn’t stay all night.

His stomach grumbled. Serrano and the others left a portion of rabbit and snake even though he declined to eat it. It lay on the ground on a wooden plate beside the fire. He had never tasted snake or rabbit before. Some of the help at House Forsythe brought things like that with their lunch when they worked the fields. They told Set that snake and rabbit tasted like chicken which made absolutely no sense. Chicken should taste like chicken, snake should taste like snake, and rabbit should taste like rabbit.

His stomach grumbled again. He looked down at the skewers of meat on the wooden plate. Serrano cut the snake into strips like wavy pieces of bacon with sticks through them. He cubed the rabbit. Meat juice oozed on the surface. The scent of basil wafted into his nose. It did smell delicious, almost like chicken. He decided to give in and take a bite.

Both the snake and the rabbit tasted far better than anything he could have imagined. Serrano seasoned both to perfection and he couldn’t help but smile as he chewed. Unbelievable, he thought. I’ve been missing out this whole time. I wonder what else the forest has to offer.

When they entered the woods earlier that night, Set noticed patches of mushrooms growing on the side of the road. They looked just like the kind that Ms. Lawrence used to cut to make soup broth. He’d watch her in the kitchen, standing up on his tippy-toes and later sitting on the counter when he was tall enough to reach it. She would CHOP-CHOP-CHOP away on the cutting board and slice the fat headed mushrooms into thin pieces before dumping them in a large pot on the stove. He considered asking Chariza about them but she was sleeping or meditating again. Mikala was clearly in no state to discuss mushrooms.

Rather than sit around the fire and provide his mind with an opportunity to dwell on the tragedy of his situation, he decided to get up and take a walk down the road. The moonlight was bright enough. He needed to get the exercise after lying around in the back of the wagon the entire day before.

“Keep moving, Young Master,” Bigby would tell him after a hard day. “That is the key, the secret to life if you ask me.”

Set did ask him. He asked him all kinds of things and it seemed like Bigby nearly always had a good answer. They weren’t answers to questions which pertained to math and science, not even so much about literature. But life? Bigby seemed quite versed in the ways of philosophy.

Set stopped at a patch of mushrooms beside the road and knelt down to get a closer look. They had wide, flat heads and no spots. Only poisonous mushroom caps have spots, he thought. He reached down to pick them up.

I should ask Serrano about these, he thought. Maybe he can use them to make soup like Ms. Lawrence did. He picked up a few handfuls along the road and dropped them into his outstretched shirt.

On the way back he thought about Jessenia. He didn’t know that she had been sleeping with his father. He didn’t hate her for it, she wasn’t the one who beat and humiliated him in front of everyone. She actually appeared quite hurt by the ordeal from the looks of it. In spite of everything, he hoped that she was okay.

And his mother, he hoped that she was okay, too. She surely didn’t ask for any of that to happen. What he should have done was mind his own business, leave the adults to their own affairs, so to speak. If only he hadn’t reached so high, maybe he would be at home writing a letter to Sarah Livewell about how he enjoyed the blonde curls of her hair as he sat behind her in class. But that was not to be. He was on the road in an unfamiliar forest at night with a bundle of mushrooms in his shirt.

“Pervert!” a voice hissed up ahead. “Hey, get back here.”

Set looked up to see Chariza waving a hand for him to return to camp.

“Alright, I’m coming. Stop calling me that. My name is, Set.”

“I don’t care what your name is, get over here,” she hissed. “Keep your voice down.”

He shuffled over to Chariza as she stood at the edge of their campsite, seemingly hesitant to step beyond the boundary of firelight.

Serrano dropped the tent poles down to the ground and quickly rolled them into the canvas. He looked calm, his face remained stoic much of the time and still gave no sign one way or another as to what he was feeling. Mikala, on the other hand, looked left and right as she stumbled toward the ground to pack the canteens back onto the wagon. Wide eyed, she repeated, “Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god."

“What’s going on?” he asked Chariza.

“Night creatures,” she replied. “What are you holding in your shirt?”

“Mushrooms. I found them on the side of the road. I thought Serrano could use them to-”

“Are you an idiot?” Chariza snarled. “You can’t eat those. Throw them out. We’re leaving. Now.”

He dropped the mushrooms and started pushing dirt into the fire with the sole of his bare foot. “What’s the hurry?”

The expression on Chariza's face changed somehow. Her eyes softened and her mouth came unstuck from its constant downturned smirk. Her hands were open rather than balled into fists and he could see from the tips of her fingers that she was shaking. He could see it in her eyes, the uncertainty. A sense of dread crept into him like a contagion, and he stopped pushing dirt with his foot.

“Someone please tell me what is going on,” he said.

Mikala replied in a shaky voice. “Night creatures. I heard them. Serrano heard them, too.”

“I was on watch all night,” Set replied. “I didn’t hear anything. Just a couple of kids playing in the bushes. I don’t know what they were doing way out here though.”

Chariza, Serrano, and Mikala froze. All of them stopped what they were doing.

“What do you mean, you heard children playing in the bushes?” Serrano asked.

“Just what I said. There were some children talking in the bushes over there.” He pointed to a section of bushes at the edge of the clearing. “I tried to talk to them but then they ran away into the woods. I hope they’re alright out there.”

“Those weren’t children,” Serrano said.

“OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD. OH MY GOD,” Mikala kept repeating, louder than before. She started running across the campsite, grabbing the tents and blankets and hurling them into the back of the wagon.

“Serrano, unhitch the horses,” Chariza said. “We are ditching the wagon. We need to ride double out of the forest immediately.”

“Got it,” Serrano said.

“What do you mean they weren’t children? I practically spoke with them myself.”

Chariza looked back at Set, eyes wider now. “You understood them?”

“Of course. They said you were all funny humans and you were bubbly. From the snake and the rabbit, I assume.”

“Stay back,” Chariza said as she stepped slowly away from him. She had one hand out with her palm open, telling him to stay where he was.

“Hey, what are you doing?” he asked before stepping closer.

“I said, stay back!” Chariza hissed. She withdrew a knife from her belt and pointed it at him.

“Chariza,” Serrano called out. “Let’s go, what are you doing?”

“He is one of them,” she said without taking her eyes off of Set. “He spoke to them. He admitted it!”

“That’s absurd,” Serrano said. “Come on, we need to go.”

“OH MY GOD, HE’S ONE OF THEM. HE IS, I CAN SEE IT NOW!” Mikala yelled.

Serrano waved a hand at Mikala, signaling for her to quiet down.

Chariza continued facing Set with the knife pointed at his chest as she movedtoward the horses. Just as she reached them she noticed something behind Set. Her eyes shifted and looked beyond him at something over his shoulder.

Mikala broke into a high-pitched scream and broke for the horses. “OH MY GOD!!”

She pushed Serrano out of her way and tried to jump onto the horse, but her approach targeted the rear rather than the side. She frantically leapt up, missing her mark and driving her knee into its rear-end. She tried to catch herself from falling backward but succeeded only in slapping the horse’s rear with an open palm.

The horse reeled up on its hind legs with Serrano still holding the reigns. “Whoa, whoa now,” he said, trying to guide the horse while staying clear of its hind legs.

Mikala fell onto her back and scrambled to get up but before she could, the horse sprung forward and kicked its hind legs out, striking Mikala directly in the chest.

The horse’s kick launched her body backward and she skidded across the ground behind Set.

He looked at her lifeless body on the ground. Behind her, four figures sprinted up the road toward them. They were larger than humans but he couldn’t make out any details. He could only see a yellow tint in their eyes that glowed in the moonlight.

“Run!” Serrano yelled.

Chariza jumped onto her horse and snapped the reigns. “KYAA!”

Set broke into a dead sprint. Cold forest air and the scent of midland pine filled his lungs as Serrano leaned down from his saddle with an outstretched hand.

Don’t look back, Set thought. Don’t look back.