The Short Way Across

"The inn was all the way on the other side of the forest. Our homes, mine, Blue Tom's, Ned's, Alice's, were all scattered about the hills on the other side, where the fens yawned and the wolves cried. We'd meet by the lonely birch and head by the one road, which curved like a sickle through all that darkness, walled with mossy bark and crumbling, wet stone. Once you got out it was like gasping in the light, and there, down the hill that rose up to meet you, was the inn. We'd drink and we'd joke with the carters and take comfort in something that wasn't our homesteads.

One foolish night when we were all staggering for the wine soaking out of our stomachs, Ned said, hey, wouldn't it be faster if we just went through the forest where it was narrowest and straight through. The road was long and we ached for our beds so we took him up on it. We were too drunk for good decisions. Alice had her flintlock, after all, Ned said. Should anything cause us trouble, of course. It wouldn't, he added. The forest was calm. Dark.

We entered into it by a place where the bush and trees were sparser, and we went on. If we kept on in one direction, we'd be out the other end in no time, and less than the hour it usually took. So we all said to each other as the minutes stacked up, the oaks and the birch and the hedge closed in, and the moonlight turned sharp.

Blue Tom stumbled at one point, falling on hands and feet onto the hard, sharp ground, and he yelped like a dying bird as he shook out all the little stones and spiny sprouts that had but barely half-gouged him. His palms were dotted with little red marks, and he wiped them off on his shirt. It looked far bloodier than it should have, the few times I spared a glance.

We kept on, all of us. Alice's hands twitched for the flintlock at her side any time a noise was a touch loud. An owl's scream. A settling of the underbrush.

Ned led on. The branches tore at us, the ground was hard under our feet, but we all kept on going. The haze was fading from us. No one said that it had been more than an hour. We'd all been taught not to blurt out bad truths.

What I only now realize is that Ned was always ahead of us. I never saw his face until that moment, when we came to the clearing. I had half thought we were out, we were free, but the trees were on all sides.

The ground looked blasted, pockmarked as if spades and gunpowder had been deployed here once. One or two stumps made it clear, this was cleared out land. There hadn't been hide or hair of a logger or a timberman in these parts for who knows how many years, we all knew. Since before our grandparents came here.

You'd think there'd be some comfort in having a clear slice of sky. But it was all overcast, clumped grey that seemed to make it all darker than it was under the canopy.

In the center of the clearing, there was a hole. I could only make out so much, the walls of the hole looked bloody, caked in something red and shiny. Some odd soil, I thought. Ned staggered over to it, and he turned to me. I saw the sheer rapture, on his face.

He said to me, that last thing he ever said to me, "It's a shorter way to go, Sam."

And he lay down in the hole. There was a sound, like a tide of mud rising. And they came for him.

The worms, long and thick and red as sin, tore away from the walls and surged into Ned's skull and neck and chest. They dug his way into him, chewing it down, weaving into his skin and bone.

I started running. I heard the crack of Alice's flintlock, as I ran. I heard the meaty sounds of it thudding into something, again and again. Blue Tom was somewhere behind me. He was praying, I thought, by how his hands were clasped.

We ran on, both of us, until we truly left the forest. It was a long, long way.

I fell to the ground as soon as we hit the open, rolling marshland. I sobbed, exhausted. Blue Tom was standing, hands still clasped. I asked him, half-weeping, if he wouldn't pray for Ned and Alice.

"Praying?" he asked. And he slowly, so slowly, parted his hands, peeling them away from another. Something wet and viscous seemed to stretch between his hands.

"I'm keeping them warm."

In the speckled and pitted nest of his hands were three pinkish grubs.

"They've a long way to go yet."

- From "The Red Fens," account by Sam Werthon, transcribed by representatives of the House of Plague