Page 51 of A Serpent in the Garden

Serich didn’t move. Unseen birds trilled louder, more joyfully, almost as if they could sense Serich’s pain. I arced up on my tiptoes to slide my arms around the back of his neck. The hug he gave me was crushing, full-bodied, and when he pulled away his eyes were wet but determined.

“Let’s go.” He pushed forward through this beautiful veneer. “They can’t show me any worse than that.”

I was surprised It didn’t have a snide comment on Serich’s almost-tears. When he heard the thought, It said, I wouldn’t find amusement in someone’s dead father. I may be burdened with a pair of amateurs but I’m not an irredeemable prick.

Would this place conjure up my mother, parade her before me like the dreamy prelude to a nightmare? I didn’t know if I could bear it. My father had died before I could ever know him but if this place knew my mind it could replicate her face so easily.

It doesn’t matter what it shows you, It said. The jig is up. If your mother were alive, she would tell you to press forward.

If my mother were alive, none of this would have happened. She would never have allowed me to ride so close to the wood.

Behind my eyes, It laughed loudly when the wood began showing its hand. It knows I’m here, but it’s still trying, he said, as a frisky golden kitten rubbed against my leg. It can’t sink into your mind when I’m in it, but it knows animals won’t touch you because of me. Maybe you’ll go for a kitty. Maybe next they’ll send a golden mare your way, ready to carry you gently to your doom.

The kitten tried its best, frolicking about my legs through long grass that felt spun of golden silk. Weaving and pouncing mischievously, its bottlebrush tail aloft, it purred so loudly, so contentedly, that I might have picked it up and cradled it to my chest had It not been there. But eventually it gave me up as a bad job and disappeared into the hollow of a tree.

Serich saw Father Hull, who offered to show him a shortcut out of the wood. He saw a gaggle of giggling girls, beckoning him closer. He saw various villagers of Monde’s End desperate to confess their sins. He saw a strange, sparkling cave which looked suspiciously like the grotto in which we had spent the night.

“There’s a bed in there,” he said, looking off to the side at an illusion I couldn’t see. “Like it knows what we did.”

My face flamed with the fury of the sun, so I pretended to see another kitten dashing toward me for an excuse to stare off in the opposite direction. Did the wood think Serich wanted that to happen again?

Of course he does, It said dryly. You can’t honestly believe he doesn’t.

It won’t, I answered, clipped and succinct.

That good, huh?

Stop.

And It said nothing in response, but I felt a certain wry twitching against the walls of my mind, as if he were smirking.

We stopped to drink, trying to ignore the screams of the alcerin and the lush vista bristling with life all around us. Not far in the gold, velvety distance, I saw a pool of fresh water, simmering like a fever. Well, it wasn’t wrong about that one. I would love a hot bath, and that water was warm or at least looked it, shimmering with a heat haze. How quickly would this section of wood have taken me in, if not for It? I could so easily picture myself dumbstruck by the sheer beauty of it all, blinded by the gold.

You have a suspicious mind, It said. You would have known it was a lie.

I probably only have a suspicious mind because of you.

Well. You’re welcome.

On we pushed, and the wood seemed to sense that we would not be fooled, not even by the trunks of gold and jewels that had begun popping up along the path. The land began to slope downward. The wood wanted us to go this way, the path gradually thinning, funneling us forward down the hill. We could either swim in a lake to the left, its water glasslike in the middle but boiling with white froth at the edges, or fall off the sheer drop of a cliff that had been hewn into the gold earth upon which this place had been sculpted. I chanced a glance over the side. That yawning abyss did not end in a gold meadow but a valley that looked like a black gullet, hungry for bones.

At the bottom of the hill hovered a gold mist, twinkling innocently.

What is that?

I don’t know, It said. I’ve never felt its effects but I’m told it’s different for everyone. Something unpleasant, I’m sure. Your worst memory, if I had to guess. But you have to pass through it to find Hell. There is no workaround.

I glanced over at the lake. A waterfall fed it, burbling like a lullaby. Powdery clouds, gold flames in their bellies from the sun they hid, loomed above it. The sand rimming the water looked like beds of crystal. The water would be inviting, I knew that. What would happen if I gave in and sank beneath the surface?

It would slowly steal your sanity. You would be happy, for a while. I’m sure there’s a sort of happiness in insanity. Eventually you’d lose your mind. Not in an asylum sort of way, but everything that makes you who you are. You’d turn into a husk. It wouldn’t kill you immediately, but one would be better off that way.

I turned my back on the lake, and Serich and I fell into a reluctant canter as we headed down the hill.

Will I even feel whatever effect the mist has, if you’re here?

It won’t show you nothing. The wood would never let you go without a last word.

“It doesn’t know what this will show us,” I said, as Serich and I stopped before the winking mist. It was like a web of gold stars, stretched across the wood. Beyond it stood trees so thick and bowed, they formed a tunnel too dark to see within. “Something awful, certainly. Maybe a bad memory. As long as you know it’s not real you should be fine.”