The Forest of Hands and Teeth

Chapter 36

I wake to the sound of wind rushing through the trees. I'm on my back, water swirling around my toes. The earth feels different. Soggy. Soft. Smooth.

I try to open my eyes but the bright sun blinds me, sending sharp daggers of pain deep into my head. The rest of my body screams in pain as well and I let out a low moan.

For a while I just lie there. Breathing, remembering my dream and allowing the guilt of losing Jed to wash over me. I want to curl in on myself, to tear at my hair. But my body hurts too much and so I let the water tickle my feet, let the sun warm my cheek, let my body stop its throbbing. The air through the trees is calming, soothing, and I almost slip back into nothingness, grateful to forget about the Forest and Jed and hope and the Unconsecrated and my dream.

The sound of someone digging sifts through my head. The sound of a spade breaking through a root, burying itself into the soft earth, being pulled out again.

It's a familiar sound and makes me smile. Harvest season. Time to celebrate the sun and spring. The sound grows closer and its repetition joins the rhythm of the air through the trees like a lullaby.

A shadow falls over my face and I open my eyes just in time to see a man standing over me with a shovel in his hands. He raises the blade above his head.

On instinct I roll to my right. The shovel misses my throat and buries itself in the sand where my neck used to be.

The man stands there slightly off balance, his blade buried very deep in the sand.

I fall back on my heels and as he yanks against the handle I raise my hands. “Wait, wait!” I shout at him, and he stops. His grip loosens and he looks at me with an odd and curious expression.

“You're …” He pauses. “You're not dead,” he finally says.

“I would have been, had you had your way,” I say. I keep my hands up and start to scoot away from him.

Something past his shoulder catches my eye—an Unconsecrated woman with stringy hair is lurching at his back. “Watch out!” I yell. He turns and decapitates her with a practiced stroke. She falls to the ground slowly.

He returns his gaze to me and starts to speak but his words don't penetrate my haze. I'm suddenly dizzy as I take in the world around me. At the expanse of water stretching out forever beside me.

“The ocean,” I whisper. And then the night before breaks fresh into my mind again. “Jed,” I gasp.

I stand, wobble and then start to run down the beach, examining the bodies washed ashore. Most of their heads have been severed, no doubt the handiwork of the man who's calling after me.

“What are you looking for?” he yells.

“My brother!” I shout. “He was with me and now …”

There are hundreds of Unconsecrated littering the beach and I am about to turn one over to see its face when the man catches up with me and pulls me back.

“Whoa there,” he says. “Watch what you're doing. Some of these Mudo are still dangerous.”

He pushes me aside and flips the body with his shovel. I clasp my hands in front of my face, peering around my fingers. But it isn't Jed. We repeat this with all the bodies on the beach. My stomach lurches every time and I pray that I haven't caused my brother's death. The man patiently leads me from body to body, turning them so that I can see and then swiftly cutting their heads as casually as he would dig into the earth.

We look at every body on the beach. We never find Jed.

“There's a lot of shoreline,” the man says finally. “Maybe he washed up somewhere else. It's dangerous to leave this cove but I could take you if you wanted. Or he could still wash up here. Never know, usually after a storm like last night we'll have stuff comin' up for days.”

I walk to the edge of the water and he follows.

“Why do you call them Mudo?” I ask him.

He seems taken aback by my question. Even blushes a little.

“I guess I like it better,” he says, his voice a little mumbled. “It's what the pirates who hunt along the coast call them. It means speechless.” He shrugs. “Seems to fit.”

“Where am I?” I ask, keeping my gaze fixed on the line where the water meets the sky.

“This beach doesn't really have a name. Not since the Return, anyway. “

I dig my toes into the fine sand. Another wave crashes around my ankles, causing my feet to sink into the ground a little. A few cuts on my calves protest as the salty water probes the wounded flesh.

“I have never seen the ocean,” I say. I wonder what Jed would have thought, taking in the expanse of water. If Travis would be proud that I finally made it. That I survived. I collapse onto my knees and the man jumps in alarm.

He turns to squat next to me and together we look out at the way the sun sets the water sparkling.

“It's usually not so full of debris,” the man says. “Storms like the one last night will cause a lot of timber to pour out of the river, will churn things up a bit and make the water cloudy. But I've never seen so many Mudo before.”

I like the sound of his voice. Its depth, its tone. It reminds me of Travis, melts into my memory of Travis's voice, of the way the words slipped from his lips.

“I live in the lighthouse up there,” he says, pointing up the hill past the sand to a tall tower painted with slanted black stripes.

“My job after the storms is to come decapitate all the ones that wash up so they can't get into the town.”

I look around me. At all the bodies of the Unconsecrated littering the beach. “So much carnage,” I say.

He shrugs. “The tide will come in and wash them back out again,” he says. “In about six hours you'd never know there was anything here other than sand and surf. The beach will be what it always is. Just a beach.”

“But there will be more of them,” I say. “There are always more.”

He shrugs. “That's just the way life is. Some days you wake up and the beach is clear and you forget about everything that surrounds us. And some days you wake up and it looks like this. That's the nature of the tides.”

He shifts his weight a little. “That doesn't mean it's not worth being here.”

I sway toward the water and dip my fingers in. “Is it safe?” I ask. “Out in the water?”

He shrugs once more. “Safe enough,” he says. “It's an outgoing tide; it won't be pulling up any more Mudo from the ocean.”

I slip into the water. Waves push me and I fight them to go deeper. Until my feet lift from the ground.

The man stands on the beach and watches, the tip of his shovel buried in the sand in front of him, his hands folded over its handle. Waiting for me to return.

I kick my feet and fall back and allow the water to cradle me. I touch my lips with my fingers, licking the tang of salt from them.

For a while I let the water push and pull me, lift me, hold me as I fall. I watch the sky, the clouds, the sun, the birds darting overhead. I wait for peace and happiness but I can only think of Travis and Harry and Cass and Jacob. About how I have lost everything but this place. I try to think about Jed, shame holding me back from remembering how he came after me. How he died saving me. But a part of me also thinks he could be proud that I made it, that I survived. That he knew what he was doing when he stormed into that Forest after me.

I feel the burden of carrying his hope with me.

I raise my head from the water and realize that I have drifted down the beach. I pull myself against the current, let the waves push me to the sand. I walk back down the beach toward the man, my limbs feeling gangly and heavy out of the water. He smiles at me as I approach and I can't help but smile back.

“Do you mind if I ask where you came from?” he says as we watch the waves crash on the shore.

“From the Forest,” I say. “The Forest of Hands and Teeth.”

He looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “I've always wondered if there were folks in there,” he says. “Though I've never heard it called by that name. Apt, though, I guess.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I mean, I grew up here. On the edge of that forest. And everyone always says there ain't nothin' but Mudo past that river, beyond the fences. That's why they took out all those fenced paths that led from the forest to the town when my grandpa was a child. Too many kids thought the path led somewhere special and got into trouble. The bridge is still there, over the top of the falls, but there's a gate at the end and nothing beyond.”

I think of our gate, of how the rain masked the sound of the waterfall until we were right up on it. Of how dark the night was, how impossible it was to see past your own body. How we were so focused on the Unconsecrated and escape. I shudder to think that we were that close. That there had once been a path but that we had fallen off track in the slippery darkness.

“Folks don't like to talk about those things,” he says. He holds a hand over his eyes as he looks out over the water, surveying the world around us.

“Maybe they're right,” I tell him. I think about Cass and Harry and Jacob and how there must be a way to rescue them from the Forest of Hands and Teeth. I think about Argos and the way he dreamed of happier times, feet twitching and tail thumping in the morning, one ear flopped up. I think about Jed and the way he smiled at me the night before. The way his eyes shone as he talked about the possibility of life and a future.

And then I remember Travis pulling me against him and telling me about hope. His voice in my mind is soft, just out of reach like a spent echo. I wonder if these memories are worth holding on to. Are worth the burden. I wonder what purpose they serve.

Already the ocean is washing around the Unconsecrated on the beach, pulling them back into the water, reclaiming them. For a while I stand and watch, until the beach is clear and the man takes my hand and leads me to the lighthouse.