Will bush's Arc

Chapter 2 of 26

The mist closed over Will's head like water. The pale woman's hand held his shoulder, and the Fen tilted sideways, dragging him with her between the trunks. He could still hear the collie barking behind them, farther each second. He could still see, for one blink, the red shoes his sister wore, mud-caked, planted in the grass. Then the trees thickened and the shoes were gone. She walked fast. Her feet did not touch the ground. Will's did, and did not. He stumbled through wet leaves that made no sound under him. He tried to pull his shoulder free. Her fingers were cold iron. He tried to speak and found his voice thin, the way his hand had been thin at the edge of the pass. "Where," he said. "Where are you taking me." "Up," she said. "To the peak. You will be still there. You will not be seen again." Will understood then. The peak was where sound went to die. If she got him there, Kate could stand under him and shout his name for a year and hear nothing back. He would lose the pass, the cherry tree, the dog, the shoes, all of it. He looked around for anything to catch on. The Fen shifted. A shape moved between two far trunks, tall, long-eared, wrong. The hidden creature from the woods. It watched them pass and did not step out. Above the trees a dark bird cut across the grey sky, quick and low, then gone. He thought of his sister at the kitchen table cutting triangles. He thought of the collie's bark, sharp and bright. Sound had reached her. Sound was the thing this woman feared. He had no voice worth hearing. But he had weight. He had, for one more minute, a body she was holding. Will let his knees drop. He threw himself sideways into a low branch and hooked his arm around it. The branch cracked. The noise was small and real. The pale woman's head snapped toward it. Her grip loosened for half a breath. Will tore his shoulder out from under her hand, tearing something in himself too, a cold ripping under the skin. He fell backward down a slope of wet leaves. He rolled. He heard her call his name once, quiet and certain, and the call did not follow him down. He stopped against a root at the bottom. He was alone. He did not know this part of the Fen. He could not see the pass, the cherry tree, or his sister. His left arm hung wrong at the shoulder, pale and blurred at the edge where her hand had been. But he was not on the peak. He was still down here, where sound worked, where a living eye might, one day, find him again. He stood up and started walking back the way water runs.