A very deep part of her mind, one that barely managed words, saidthings beyond. It wasn’t knowledge exactly; it was more instinct, like recognizing the smell of blood or the sound of thunder. Given time, she might have been able to translate the feeling into words, to pin it down in its turn and make it concrete, but the fallwasn’tendless. Sophia couldn’t see land when she looked down, but she felt the end approaching.
The shapes changed. Without looking too closely again—and even Sophia’s curiosity quailed at the prospect—she couldn’t have said how, exactly. It was like they became grayer or greener, more twisted or sharper. The first ones hadn’t felt bad, only impossible to look at. These others…
…she couldn’t say. She didn’t know if she wanted to say. Sophia knew only that their presence was a shudder down her spine and a twist in her gut. She shouldn’t have been able to fear anything more than falling rapidly toward an unknown destination, but looking at them was worse than that.
Ground hit her, rather than the reverse. On one breath she was falling, trying not to look at the shapes around her. With the next, she was flat on her stomach, her face in dirt, jarred and probably bruised. She still breathed, though, and she felt no broken bones, which was a minor miracle.
She pulled herself to her feet. It took surprisingly little time; she almost rose as soon as she thought it. Having ground beneath her feet was a new sensation, and one that should have reassured her more than it did, but this ground felt unpleasant, squashy, and unstable. When Sophia looked around, she didn’t like her surroundings much better than the non-place she’d fallen through, even though they made more sense.
The ground below her was part of a tiny path, no wider than her shoulders and perhaps narrower in places. As far as Sophia could see, it wound forward and back through an immense forest of dark trees. They weren’t the trees around Loch Arach—or not in any place she’d seen. For one thing, they all had leaves. Noticing that, Sophia realized that there was no snow on the ground either, nor did she feel cold.
What was she wearing? Strange that she couldn’t remember that. She looked down to check and, in doing so, glimpsed movement from behind her.
Forgetting about her clothes—a shapeless gray dress, which would have struck her as odd, had she had time to think about it—Sophia spun around. Better to know, always better to know, even though it would likely only be a squirrel or a deer and she’d feel silly.
It was a face.
It was a face made out of shadow, one without eyes. It rested atop a shadow-body like a man’s, save that it was too tall and too thin. There were three of them, and they were coming toward her.
Rationality and civilization asserted themselves for a second, letting Sophia stand her ground and open her mouth, even while she shuddered inwardly at the way the things looked and moved. “Hello?” she tried, holding up a hand. “Can I aid you?”
None of them answered. None of them seemed to take any notice of her, except that she felt their not-eyes focusing on her, and the paths they each took on their stretched, spindly legs would converge on the spot where she stood.
Then rationality failed and civilization surrendered to far older and stranger forces. Sophia spun around, though turning her back on the shadow-things was the hardest thing she’d ever had to do, and bolted down the path, not knowing where it led and in that frantic moment not caring at all.
Whatever they were, they wanted nothing good.
While the shadow-things moved silently, Sophia’s flight wasn’t. The ground squelched with every step, wet and sucking like quicksand, and the smell that rose up from it was not that of earth after rain but stronger and meatier. She became rapidly grateful for the sound of her own panting breath in her ears as a distraction, and grateful as well that she was wearing sturdy boots.
She hadn’t known until that thought that shewaswearing sturdy boots. Her dress came to mind again when she realized that, and the combination nagged at her, like the nature of the forest. Where was she? Where had she been before she’d started falling?
The path narrowed even further. Branches scraped at her arms and pulled her hair, and Sophia began to feel a malice to it, that the trees were deliberately reaching out to wound her. That was irrational; this place didn’t make much sense, and these were not normal trees.
And she cried out in dismay when the path ended at one.
There was no way through. The underbrush was thick on either side, the leaves almost blending together into a solid gray-green mass. Sophia looked back over one shoulder.
The shadow-things were still there, and they were gaining. Even as she paused to look, they darted forward, the movement more like fish than anything that walked on land, or should.
With the strength of panic, she leapt, grabbed a low-hanging branch, and pulled herself up. The wood was slick and half rotten itself. She actually felt her hands sink into it. Slime surrounded her fingers, and the few solid bits of bark that remained scratched her palms.
Sophia looked down. The shadow-things were standing around the base of the tree, near-featureless faces tipped upward to watch her. Neither hunger nor hatred could show themselves on any of those faces. Still Sophia felt them, and she shuddered as the creatures stretched their long arms upward, the tips of tendril-fingers brushing through the air just an inch or two below her branch.
The rotten wood gave way beneath her.
Only a few seconds passed between the initial break and the moment when the branch split, just enough warning for Sophia to lunge frantically, blindly upward. Her hands found a higher, thicker branch and scrabbled for purchase, her fingernails sinking into the damp bark. She dangled there as the branch below her tumbled to the ground, her arms already starting to ache.
One of the shadow-things wrapped a hand around her ankle. Sophia felt the cold of its grip burning through her boot. It pulled with a strength that belied its insubstantial form, and the branch to which she was clinging started to give under the pressure.
“NO!”
She shrieked the word, not in cosmic denial but with all the frustrated willpower she’d ever used on balky horses, disobedient dogs, and troublesome younger brothers:This isenough, and if you keep acting up, you’re going to beso verysorry.
And under her hands, the branch became solid again.
Analysis would have to wait. Sophia kicked out at the shadow-thing, hitting it squarely in the face, and yanked herself upward with all the force that fear and anger could give her. This time she didn’t stop, nor did she look down, but found another branch and kept climbing, calling on dimly remembered skills from her childhood and finding them surprisingly near to hand.
The bark even felt drier now. She pulled herself upward over five feet, then ten, and no hand found her ankle again. When she did let herself glance down, she didn’t see any shadow-things pursuing her. Perhaps they couldn’t climb.
