Marrow Fen's Arc

Chapter 5 of 11

The dark moss held. Marrow walked it slow, testing each step before shifting weight, and the four came behind in the same loose line. Orin pointed left, then straight, then left again. Ollie called out each turn. The Fen let them through, but the light did not change. Marrow could not tell how long they had been walking. Their calves burned in a way that felt wrong for the distance. Behind them, the small foggy girl was thinner at her edges than she had been an hour ago. The girl in the nightdress stumbled. Marrow caught her arm. She weighed almost nothing. "Keep going," she said, and pulled free. "Rest a minute," Marrow said. "Don't," Ollie said. "If we sit we don't get up." He looked at the smaller boy with the pale glow, the one who mouthed words without sound. The boy nodded once. Orin pointed ahead. The moss ended at a low bank Marrow did not know. No cherry. No birch. A stand of thin trees Marrow could not name, and beyond them a soft grey light that was not the light they had come in under. Marrow crouched and touched the ground past the moss. It held. They stepped off the path a dead boy remembered and onto ground the Fen had let them find. A black cat sat on a stump ten paces in, tail curled around its feet. It watched Marrow the way a cat watches a door. Marrow had not put a cat here. The cat stood, stretched, and walked three paces toward the grey light. It stopped and looked back. Marrow followed. The four came after. The trees thinned. Marrow smelled woodsmoke, then wet stone. Two shapes stood in the grey where the path opened out—tall, long-eared, gaunt as bone, dressed in something that hung like ragged cloth. One held up a hand. Not a threat. A stop. The other pointed past Marrow, back at the four. It made a small motion at the foggy girl and the boy who could not speak, then tapped its own chest and pointed north. Marrow understood. The dead ones went with them. The living one did not. "They're taking them somewhere," Ollie said. He had gone still. "North. To the others." "You know these two?" Marrow said. "No. But I know what they are. They only come for us." He looked at Marrow. "You can't follow. The living can't go where they're going." The girl in the nightdress met Marrow's eyes and said, "Thanks." She said it flat, like a receipt. The foggy girl lifted one hand. The pale boy mouthed something Marrow could not read. Then the four of them turned and walked into the grey after the tall shapes, and Marrow stood on hard ground at the edge of the Fen with a black cat winding around their boots, four names they had not brought home.