Page 18 of The Luminaries
Since there is no predicting the location of a nightmare’s arrival, the hunter must keep moving. Otherwise, one could appear exactly where the hunter stands. In such cases, the hunter does not survive the experience.
Winnie doesn’t move. She just continues to search the trap for a button and imagine what it had looked like by the lamp in her bedroom. All while the Compendium pours silently from her mouth.
Some believe the mist is a warning for the natural creatures of the forest to flee, and this is often the first sign a hotspot will soon form outside the forest’s primary boundaries: the flight of local fauna—
A wolf howls.
Winnie jumps. The trap falls from her hand. She doesn’t hear it hit the soil, and she realizes with a fresh surge of cold that the wolf must be near if she can hear it so clearly.
The creature howls again, farther away this time, and the first stripe of hemlock bark wavers before Winnie’s eyes. She can see; the mist is fading; no nightmare has formed directly atop her.
She drops to the forest floor and pats around for the trap. Each second that passes reveals more pine needles and soil. More moss and stone. And cold—the usual forest cold is leaking into her bones again.
Her fingers land on the trap, and when she squints down, she sees the button. It is very red, and she doesn’t know how she missed it before.
Another wolf howl, still farther, and Winnie finds her lungs are loosening. Her confidence is returning, and long-forgotten instincts are prickling to life beneath her skin. It’s as if the mist were paint thinner that just ate away years of grime gobbing up Winnie’s insides.
She has carted countless nightmare corpses to the Mondays. She has drawn and redrawn every nightmare that lives beside Hemlock Falls. She can do this. Oh yes, she can do this.
The cause above all else. Loyalty through and through.
Winnie hefts her backpack into place and adjusts her glasses. Her front teeth click silently. If the wolf… orwerewolf… is the only nightmare that formed nearby, she will need to go deeper into the forest to find her prey. And though she supposes she could just track the werewolf, she isn’tthatconfident. After all, she saw what happened to that halfer, and paint thinner can only remove so much paint.
Fortunately, were-creatures hunt more than just humans. They alsofeast on other nightmares, so if Winnie can follow the wolf from a distance, she can assume it will lead her to different monsters.
As if on cue, the wolf howls again. Northeast, Winnie decides, and she pastes on her vicious hunter smile before setting off after that sound, her thumb beside the trap button and her throwing arm ready.
The wolf howls intermittently, which later Winnie will realize is strange. Normal wolves howl as a way to communicate to their pack, but werewolves are solo creatures. So for whom is this one howling?
Yet as she creeps through the wispy fog, watching for movement and straining to see in the forest dark, she only thinks about which direction the wolf hunts. What creatures he might be after.
Which is why she misses the second sound. It is soft, subtle, and so human it takes her a moment to register what it is: someone is crying. Not a mournful wail or a hiccuping sob, but more like a sniffling. As if someone attempts to stifle tears so no one else will hear.
Winnie stops moving, and instantly the page in the Compendium scrolls across her mind along with the drawing she’d sketched beside it.
Banshees: Known for weeping and wailing, they lure prey to them via the natural human instinct for empathy. From afar, they appear as gnarled, elderly women, but closer examination will reveal their differences: vertical pupils, green skin, and claws that come to needlelike points. Their tears produce a lethal poison that burns to the touch.
The sniffling ping-pongs around Winnie, hiding where the creature might be. She tightens her grip on the trap. Mom always warned about banshees because they’re good at disorienting, and one almost took her down eighteen years ago. Before Dad left, before Winnie was even born.
Mom has a long, jagged scar the entire length of her leg from that encounter, and Winnie always thought it was the coolest feature Francesca Wednesday bore. A stretch of puckered skin to wear proudly. But that’s because Winnie has never considered how much it might have hurt to receive. She has never considered that her motheralmost diedfrom it, and that she wouldn’t exist today if not for Aunt Rachel right there to help her.
I shouldn’t be here.
The thought interrupts the constant flow of the Compendium, and with it comes fresh cold in Winnie’s organs. The winter that doesn’t like to let go.
Winnie can’t believe she was naive enough to walk into the forest alone. Naive enough to think she could follow a werewolf. Naive enough to think she could face the mist—face any nightmare—without backup.
She is not invincible. She is not prepared for this, and Darian and Andrew and Aunt Rachel were all right. Now she is too far from the red stakes to escape. Now, she will die and the Thursday-clan corpse duty will ziplock her body with the same bored detachment Winnie uses.
Banshees,her mind repeats—she can’t stop the Compendium from playing like some macabre song stuck on repeat.Known for weeping and wailing, they lure prey to them via the natural human instinct for empathy.
Winnie squints around her. She is surrounded by evergreens with twiggy lower branches. The sniffling is louder, she thinks, though that might be her growing panic playing tricks on her. Doesn’t matter one way or the other. She needs to think. She needs to act.
From afar, they appear as gnarled, elderly women, but closer examination will reveal their differences: vertical pupils, greenish skin, and claws that come to needlelike points.
Every muscle inside Winnie screams to run. Her bladder wants to release, and she wants to sprint away from here as fast as her legs can move—even as another part of her wants to move toward the tears and ask what’s wrong.
Fortunately, tucked beneath those warring instincts is another footnote. Another piece of the Nightmare Compendium Addendum she was smart enough to read.
