running the same way a rabbit does, breaking this way and that in the hope of shaking off what’s behind. But what was behind was everywhere else too, so that was no hope at all.
Of a sudden, a wall rose up in front of me, steep and sheer. It was a green wall, made all out of bramble and ivy and ropeknot. And set in the middle of it, level with the path I was running on, there was a narrow gap like a door that was just open.
A door in the forest was a thing out of story, and in the story there would be an elf or an ogre on the other side, but I did not think twice. I plunged right through, with choker branches slapping and swinging at my heels and twined ropes of bramble ripping at my face and arms.
I tripped on one of them ropes, and went down so hard I rolled over and over in deep grass and tall thistles. I scrambled up again at once, not knowing if I was safe or still pursued, looking on all sides for waked trees that was moving in on me.
But there wasn’t any. And that wall I just run through looked different from this side. There was still ivy and knotweed crawling all over it, but under that vexatious green I seen a line of planed wooden planks, all set tight together, in a right line except for the open place where I had just come through.
It was a fence, and the open place was a gate. A choker branch was moving there, slapping the ground inside the fence like a cat sticking its paw in a mousehole.
My mind all in a daze, I looked around me. There was weeds and saplings and towering brakes of bramble everywhere, but beyond them there was humps and hillocks with strange shapes, all overgrowed. The hillocks was set apart, in rows, with great masses of knotweed in between. Nothing moved or made a sound in all that empty strangeness.
Did you ever see one of them puzzles where someone has drawed a picture and it’s a man’s face or maybe a woman’s? And then they turn the picture upside down and it’s something else, like a dog or a bird? A beard becomes a mane, the lines on a frowning forehead turn into a wing, and other tricks of that nature. My mind done that right then, turning the world upside down to see what had been in front of me all along.
Ludden was not a fair walk up ahead of me. Ludden was this, right here. Them humps and hillocks was houses, half-swallowed up by weeds and young saplings. The forest had come all the way up to the fence and jumped on over it, nor nobody had lifted a hand to interfere.
“Hey!” I shouted. I could not forbear, though it was a foolish and a dangerous thing to do. “Hey, it’s a visitor that’s here, inside your gate. I’m Koli Woodsmith, from Mythen Rood.”
Some birds took flight at the noise I was making, and one or two of them squawked what they thought about that ruckus, but from the villagers I would of looked to find there was never an answer. It was like I stood in a cursed place, not in the real world, for there was nothing I knowed that would make the people of the village stand by while their homes was attacked and whelmed like this.
A bad fright will make you weak oftentimes, but this one time I got some strength from my fear. I pushed my way forward through the weeds, hacking with the knife when I could and tearing with my fingers for the rest.
On all sides of me I seen the houses. That same wave of green had come against all of them, and splashed up the walls, and over the roofs, and in at the doors and windows that was mostly either hanging open or broke in.
I turned all around in a circle, my knees shaking and my mouth all dry. “Hey!” I shouted out. “I’m Koli! I’m Koli from Mythen Rood. Where are you?” I yelled them words again and again, sometimes in my own tongue and sometimes in the Franker language we used to talk to people from villages further off. It made no difference. I still got the same answer, which was none at all.
A wild dog come out of one of the houses and stood