Serafina and the Black Cloak - Robert Beatty Page 0,42
lead to the abandoned village. Maybe the state of the road choked off the town. Or maybe the forest took back the road when the townsfolk disappeared. In any case, if she had any hope of solving the mystery of the Man in the Black Cloak, she needed clues and information. Where did he come from? What was his story? How could she stop him?
Poison ivy had never affected her the way it did other people, but she still climbed carefully through the thicket of vines and thorns. On the other side of the two crossed trees, she came into a boscage of rotting, dead snags, with rocks on the ground as sharp as ax blades. The narrow, overgrown track twisted and turned, and dove down into a rocky ravine, and she couldn’t see what lay beyond.
As she gazed at the darkened passage, a shiver went through her spine. She had no idea where it would lead her, but she started down the path.
Serafina followed the shadowed path for a while, crawling over fallen trees and through nasty thickets, until she came to yet another split.
As she was trying to figure out which direction to go, she heard faint sounds drifting through the branches. The sounds had an eerie, unearthly quality to them. She thought it might be nothing more than the wind blowing through the trees, but when she listened very carefully it almost seemed like there were people calling to one another in the distance and children playing.
With no other clues to guide her, she decided to go toward the sounds and see what she could find. If she passed a house, then perhaps the inhabitants could point her in the right direction.
The path led her around a sharp curve and plummeted into a steep, bracken-choked ravine, then it climbed back out again, making its way among large moss-covered rocks and old trees twisted by wind and age. Desperate for soil, the trees’ roots clung to the rocks like giant hands, their massive fingers plunging into the earth beneath them.
This place is terribly creepy, she thought, but she kept going, determined to keep moving forward.
Unlike normal trees, which grew upward toward the sunlight, these had gnarled, contorted branches, as if they had been twisted by agonizing pain. Many of the trees stood dead and bare, withered by disease or some other killing force. Still more of the trees lay dead on the ground, their trunks crisscrossing one another as if a giant had pushed them over.
As she made her way, a mist rose up from the leaf-covered forest floor, and a fog set in that obscured her view of the terrain around her.
Oh, great. If I can’t see, I’m gonna get lost for sure.…
She turned around to head back toward the last split in the path, but the fog became so thick that even this simple navigation was impossible. She tried to control her fear, but she felt the panic rise up in her. She gulped for air as the mist surrounded her and she lost her sense of place and direction. She began to realize that she’d made a terrible mistake in leaving the main road. Stay calm, she thought. Just think it through.…Find your way home.…
Her foot hit a lump, and she tripped and fell forward onto the ground. Her hands and face touched something wet and slimy buried in the leaves. She gasped when she saw that it was the bloody carcass of a deer or some other large animal. Its body had been eviscerated, its guts ripped out. Its head and hind legs were missing, but from what was left over, it appeared that it had been purposely cached here.
She gagged as she got up onto her feet, wiped her hands on the bark of a slimy tree, and moved on, desperate to find the road.
When she heard voices ahead, she felt a swell of hope. She moved quickly toward them. Maybe they’re travelers, she thought. Perhaps there’s a hunting shack ahead.
But then she stopped in her tracks. They were the same eerie noises she had heard before, but this time they were much closer: hoarse, raucous calling sounds, but with a strange, almost human quality, like some kind of weird children running and playing in the forest. A surge of fear swept through her. Her legs and hands buzzed with agitation. The sounds were above her and all around her now, and still she couldn’t see them.