Page 6 of Spelunking Through Hell

“No, I don’t.” Her smile faded, replaced by an expression of deep concern. Of all the living people in the world, Cynthia’s the one who’s known me the longest. Huldrafolk live a long, long time. She knew my mother. That’s not something many folks can say anymore. Not even Rose.

“Alice...” she said, and I braced myself, because I knew I wasn’t going to like whatever she said next. Cynthia only remembered I hada name when she wanted to use it like a cudgel to keep me from doing something she’d decided would be stupid. Which, in her defense, my great ideas frequently were. “How sure about this are you? That’s he’s out there for you to find? What, exactly, did Mary say?”

“Mary didn’t say anything,” I said. “We’re not exactly on friendly speaking terms most of the time. Antimony told me when she and her friends were here. After she defeated the crossroads.”

“That was almost three years ago,” said Cynthia.

Dammit. Sometimes moving in more distant dimensions means breaking my tether to Earth time, but it always sucks to hear that I’ve been out of contact with my family for more than a few months. “Doesn’t change the intel.”

“All right. What, exactly, did Antimony say?” asked Cynthia, dog with a bone, not letting the subject go.

I sighed. “She said the crossroads sometimes took people and put them somewhere far away, someplace where they couldn’t get home. It didn’t kill them. That’s what I’ve been banking on this whole time, that when it took them away, it didn’t kill them.”

“It’s been a long time, and whatever it is you’ve been doing to stay young longer than humans are supposed to, he hasn’t had access to that.”

“No, he hasn’t.” I was glad. I’d rather be married to a man fifty years older than I am than see him go through what I’ve willingly done to myself for his sake, what he never would have asked or expected me to do. It’s always easier to set yourself on fire than to allow someone else to burn for you.

But there’s a reason I’ve never discussed my methods with anyone. I try not to think about them except when it’s time to submit to another treatment. Sarah—my adopted granddaughter, the telepath—has brushed up against the edges a few times, and she’s never been willing to ask me to explain. She’s a cuckoo, but I love her anyway, for letting me keep that secret from my family. They would never understand.

“He was already older than you. And time doesn’t always run the same way between dimensions.”

“All true. Are you going to get to a point any time soon, or are we just going to stand here with your tail out, waiting for a tourist to come along and take a picture?”

“What are you going to do if he’s already dead from the things humans just die from, and not from anything the crossroads did?” She looked at me gravely. “Are you really sure you want to know?”

“Honestly, that’s all I’ve ever wanted. This whole time. Do I want him back? Yeah, but I’m not even sure he’ll have me. I’m not the sweet little wife he left behind anymore.”

Cynthia snorted with the effort of holding back her laughter. “Alice, if you think you were ever a ‘sweet little wife,’ I should drag you back inside and make you sleep off the concussion you’re clearly suffering from.”

“Sleep doesn’t cure a concussion,” I objected.

“Whatever. You are only and entirely what you were designed to be by nature, nurture, and the forest, which I can see you stealing glances at. Go run wild in the trees for a while and then get back to your fool’s errand. But remember that no one’s promising you a happy ending.”

“I wouldn’t dream of asking for one. Thanks, Cyn.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I blew her a kiss and ran for the tree line. The trees couldn’t move, couldn’t reach out to meet me, but it still felt like they were welcoming me home. The same way it always did, and always had, and always would, for as long as we were both alive.

On paper, there’s nothing special about the woods around Buckley Township. They’re a fairly standard Michigan forest type, various hardwoods with a spattering of aspens and hickories. Thanks to the proximity of the lake, the ground trends swampy in places, but never commits all the way into becoming wetland; our swamp is more mud putting on airs than anything really literal.

It’s relatively geographically isolated, which is part of why my family settled there in the first place; my grandfather used to say the township was built in the hand of the forest, and he wasn’t wrong. And thanks to three generations of Healys working to protect and preserve the land in all its diverse glories, the woods around Buckley have a higher population of the various North American cryptids that used to be endemic to all similar ecosystems than just about anywhere else. These days, most places, you could camp for a week and never see a single tailypo or hear a single fricken call. Not in Buckley, though.

In Buckley, we’ve managed to keep it all, and the woods are grateful. Or at least that’s how they’ve always felt to me. When huldrafolk like Cynthia reach the end of their lives, they either turn to stone or trees, groves of white aspen with interconnected roots. Cynthia’s mother, who was the one to actually build the Red Angel, had becometrees before I was born, and she grew nearby. Cynthia still spent time with her, still talked to her and kept her up to date on the world, and while most trees aren’t related to the huldra, if Cynthia’s mother could be a thinking organism and a grove of trees at the same time, who was to say the same wasn’t true of the wood?

It loved me like I loved it. I knew that. I had always known it. And as I stepped into the shadows below their branches, my feet following a path I had worn through the brush over the course of decades, I smiled. I only ever felt at peace in the trees. I kept the house where Thomas and I spent our time together for the sake of those trees. It had some pretty bad memories to balance the pretty good ones. It also had close proximity to my trees.

My mother died in the forest. So did my grandmother. It knew them both to the end of their lives, and part of them lingers there still, even if their ghosts have long since gone to wherever it is that ghosts go when they don’t have reason to hang around. Much like Cynthia going to visit her mother, going to the woods is a way to visit mine.

Frickens chirped in the branches above me, so comfortable with my familiar presence that they didn’t stop their constant communications with each other. The tiny, feathered frogs used to be everywhere in the world, and now most of them are extinct, lost forever, because humans were careless. Well, I won’t let them be careless with my forest. I’ve never managed to save anything else I loved without hurting it in the process, but I can protect the woods.

They never liked Thomas, not the way they’ve always liked me. He used to mutter about it when I’d come home from hunting with blood in my hair and a peryton in the back of the truck, how if he’d been able to come with me, he would have been tripped up by every tree root and stuck his foot in every hole until I was forced to help him back to the safety of civilization. Not that he was a poor woodsman, or that he was wrong about the woods around Buckley: he could handle himself in almost any environment that wasn’t actively out to get him.

The only times I could remember the trees being kind to him, he’d been trying to help me after I got in over my head with one problem or another. Bears, both alive and reanimated by body-stealing slime molds, were not nearly as affectionate toward me as the trees. Neither were dire boars, or any of the other predatory dangers that sometimes had to be confronted to prevent them from eating the locals. Part of keeping humans from being careless involves keeping the local wildlife from giving them a reason. On those occasions, the woods hadbeen more than willing to let Thomas in and help him find me before I could suffer something he couldn’t help me survive.

According to my grandmother, and to Mary, the woods were the same way with my mother. They loved her. They couldn’t save her, though—whatever happened, it had happened too quickly for something as slow and deliberate as the trees—and she had lain in state among them until morning, when her body was found. To be honest, I was surprised they’d been willing to let her go. But the memory of my mother was enough to teach me the one lesson she never learned: just because something loves you, that doesn’t mean you can stop being careful when you’re alone with it. The best-trained dog can bite. The most devoted forest can hide a striking snake.

The most loving husband can go when the crossroads call without looking back or kissing you goodbye.

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