is impossible to dislike a beautiful wild thing, a rare spirit of nature, just because it is naturally wild. But sometimes, watching her cousin, Ariel could not help but remember something her maternal grandmother had once said. “Some people are cursed in life, darlin’. Watch out for them. When a soul touches you on the inside, so that the whole world goes black but for them, take care. For they can take you to a doom.”
There had been more to this conversation, one of many lectures Granny gave on the potential horrors of life, but Ariel had forgotten the rest now. All she could think about, remembering those words, was what it would be like to be black on the inside, as if a hooked finger had poked through your skin and bone and had touched your heart, leaving a dark spot that grew and grew.
“Do you believe in vampires?” Zenna asked Ariel that one summer afternoon, as the girls sat by the pond in the garden. The day was hot. The air smelled green.
Ariel laughed politely. She always did that when she didn’t have an answer.
“Well, do you?”
“I don’t know … Do you?”
Now it was Zenna’s turn to laugh, and this was a very different sound from Ariel’s. “Do you know,” she said, “people always say ‘you can’t be too careful.’ But the fact is: you can.” She jumped to her feet. “Come on,” she said.
Come where? Down to the greenwood, where the shadows are brown and gold. Down to where the earth breathes so loudly you can hear it with human ears. Step through a barrier from here to there. It’s where otherness comes alive.
Zenna took Ariel to a place deep in the forest. They passed a tumbledown wooden shack covered in ivy. Zenna said the body of the woman who had lived there was still lying on the floor behind the door. No one knew that she had died. She had become mostly ivy. Ariel shuddered and ran on. When she held Zenna’s hand it was as if her feet too barely touched the ground. If they ran fast enough the world became a blur and it was possible to see another world beyond this one—always there, but you can’t see it normally.
Zenna’s destination was a dragonbark grove. The trees there were ancient; they were tall yet they stooped beneath the weight of their own age. Five of these trees were still alive; three dead, lying on the ground and riddled with insect nests. Zenna sat down on the spongy wood of one of the dead trees. There was a dampness to this grove, even though the sun was hot and high summer reigned in the greenwood. It was the breath of the earth, oozing out through mulch and mold. The canopies of the living trees were immense, the wings of dragons. Despite the absence of breeze, the leaves fluttered high overhead as if impulses from the roots shivered through them; impulses to fly.
Zenna swung her legs, leaning back on stiff arms.
“Are they here?” Ariel whispered. She wondered whether this was a game, and whether she was playing it right.
“At this time of day? Are you kidding?” Zenna sighed. “I wonder if they sleep beneath the dead leaves, but of course you’d never find them, even if they did. They would just become part of the soil, or would look like soil anyway. They are not what you think.”
Ariel wasn’t sure what she thought vampires to be. In her mind, all she saw was a flash of red eyes, some fangs glinting, a hiss of silk. “What are they?” she dared to ask.
“Very much creatures of earth,” Zenna replied. “They are not about death, nor come from death. They are the greatest example of life. They live on life itself.”
“Blood …”
“Well yes, everyone knows that.” Zenna stood up.
“Have you actually seen them?” Ariel asked.
Zenna glanced at her cousin over her shoulder. “It is actually very difficult to see them. They are camouflaged. At night they must be clustered on the roofs of houses, standing beneath the trees in gardens, watching and waiting for a place of entry.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Why?” Zenna pulled a scornful face. “They don’t kill people, you know. That’s just made up, because people are scared of what they don’t understand. But if you are bitten, you are never the same again.”
“You become like them?”
Zenna paused. “No. You are never the same again because you don’t become like them.”
“But have you seen them?” Ariel persisted.
Behind Zenna’s