Chapter 12 - Uglywood
Time bloomed…
“Rowing’s so taxing. It’s prickled all my fingers, like poor pencil form,” said Mr. Grey.
“Use your back and legs,” suggested Tom.
As he helped Tom pull their wooden boat ashore, Mr. Grey thought the advice came a little late.
“Tom, I find this perplexing.”
“It takes the load off your arms. You push with your legs, and lean with your back.”
“Not about the form. Why are you following me? I’m not ungrateful,” Mr. Grey added hastily. “But there’s Honeydew. She’s alone at the moment. She might need guarding.”
“There’s little danger, it’s a ticker repair shop. Hers is the kid’s role.”
“But Gourd and Snow are still there. What if they attack?”
“Here in the country, you’re in the thicker danger.”
“I do appreciate it.”
Mr. Grey huffed a few huge breaths through his nose while pulling on the rope. Tom waved his free hand in abstract thanks. With the other he too heaved towards the treeline.
After a moment Mr. Grey said, “We’re often apart, Honeydew and me. I wish we worked together.”
Tom said nothing.
That day saw the eastern horizon speeding the sun to a Meteorball Tournament. In the undergrowth ahead of Mr. Grey, thickets of Panelplants turned their jade flowers through a swift arc as they followed the bustling solar disk to dusk.
“The sun’s getting low,” said Mr. Grey usefully. Tom grunted.
Together they pushed shoeprints into the wet sand of the shore, as they tugged on blistersome handfuls of rope. They closed the gap between themselves and the treeline. The golden orb above carried on its gameday scramble through the sky. It gave only a scanty few moments of light, making the day short. As Mr. Grey and Tom reached the woods’ edge, the swift-moving shadows cast by the three-pronged poetrees rotated around the trunks. The dark silhouettes passed over the Mr. Grey and Tom like stop-motion. Tom lifted a hand to shade his eyes - out of form rather than necessity - and peered at the wood. Mr. Grey did the same.
Mr. grey felt that whoever named this island forest ‘Uglywood’ had been unkind. True, the underbrush held enough dense shadows for a fairy tale. Maybe one could even call those shadows ‘uncanny’, when they moved in fast-forward through the diurnal cycle. There were, however, no gnarled roots blanketing the forest floor. Just regular roots, and grass that could use a trim, and patches of dirt. The trunks wore what looked like normal bark. Mr. Grey thought it would take an imaginative person to see malicious, malformed faces in any of the trees. There were no disembodied sets of eyes peering from nearby bushes, or owls hooting and shooting from their roosts, or giant cobwebs. There were no webs at all; not even the harmless little kind seen in grass after a morning dew. It seemed an ordinary wood. Not at all ‘ugly’ to Mr. Grey.
From the beach behind Mr. Grey heard the crash of the wine waves. He felt the lake’s cold mist on his neck. He turned to Tom. “So where is the Lord’s castle?” asked Mr. Grey.
Tom took Mr. Grey by the shoulder. They backpedaled into the soft sand until they stood free of the trees’ shifting shadow. Then Tom pointed above the forest line.
In the distance, sticking out on the slopes of a mountain hairy with the same forest, a boxy shape jutted from the canopy. Only the upper stories and sloped roofs could be seen in the waning day. The rest squatted behind the trees and the mountain’s jagged crags. The height, the forest, and the speeding sun made the distance hard for Mr. Grey to guess.
They walked back to the trees. “I don’t suppose there’s a road?” asked Mr. Grey. Tom shook his head and handed Mr. Grey a strand of rope. Mr. Grey tangled it through the prongs of a nearby poetree. He examined the forest floor. The short grass and sparse brush looked soft and inviting. “It seems like easy walking. Any Sourbeak nests?” Tom shrugged and glanced away into the woods.
Mr. Grey noticed Tom’s unusual reticence. “When will we reach the lord’s home?” he asked in a plain voice, but while looking pointedly at Tom.
Tom passed Mr. Grey another strand of rope without meeting eyes. “The woods make it hard to judge,” he said. Mr. Grey continued to stare. Tom turned his steel eyes skyward, to the fading sun. “We’ll need to make camp.”
“I suppose it’ll be cold?”
“I’ll make a fire.”
“Can Honeydew produce heat? Those house walls are thin. Fuel might be pricey. Will her treasure be enough? ”
Tom chuckled. “She’s warmer than us,” he said. “The night is colder, reaching Pygmy-Footed-Snake.”
Tom turned silent again. Mr. Grey asked, “What’s Pygmy like, Tom?”
Tom shuffled another lead of the webrope between his hands, then shoved it into Mr. Grey’s. Mr. Grey thought they had the boat well-fastened. He was on the verge of pointing this out, and Tom was on the verge of speaking, when the big man’s stomach grumbled. Looking oddly relieved, Tom said, “The gut interjects. We’ve made our vessel secure. Now for flames and food.”
Tom grabbed his mallet from the boat, wiped his brow with a sweaty handkerchief, and marched into the forest’s churning shadows. After a tock or two — the exact time was unknowable - Mr. Grey grabbed his briefcase and violin coffin. He followed.
The sun smacked a curvecomet out of the eastern horizon’s stadium. Its invasive flash scattered the settled shadows of Uglywood. For a tock, Mr. Grey and Tom huddled in the spotlit timber, next to a feeble, superfluous campfire.
Then the comet punctured the sky’s canvas. The light vanished. From the soil into which it sank, the dark crawled back. Visibility retreated to a rusty glow, flaking off the newly-valued fire.
Mr. Grey looked across the flame at Tom. He said, “When will we reach the castle, do you imagine?”
Tom snapped a stick and added the pieces to the crumbling teepee of fuel. “Depends on when we set out.”
The flames gnawed in a happy crackle at the crisp wood. With the gaunt trunks lurking at their backs, and the dark boughs cutting off the pinprick starholes above, Mr. Grey felt that the woods had turned spookier by a shade. He still felt they were a far cry from ‘ugly’.
The fire still burned with its blanketing warmth. The heavy press of distant waves against the shore, and the low buzz of Uglywood’s nocturnal critters, created a comfortable sensory lull.
The fire burned lower. Their eyelids tended that way too.
“I’m eager to meet this lord,” Mr. Grey yawned. “Will he sponsor me?”
“Convince him of your talent,” said Tom.
“My play’s still not grand. I still don’t have my ticker.”
“It’s a private show. You’ll only play for the lord, maybe some servants. Just let yourself loose.”
Were letting loose so simple he’d have done so at the first contest, was Mr. Grey’s thought. He let that thought go. The popping fire at his chest and the humming night at his back massaged cares from his heart.
Along with the night’s cool tingle Mr. Grey felt wetness - like the wine misting on the beach - condensing on his neck hairs. He looked for clouds, but the leafy poetrees obscured the sky.
Mr. Grey broke the silence. “Seems like there’ll be rain.”
“I don’t smell the Wind,” said Tom.
“I don’t mean offense; you’re an… expressive chewer. Are you eating now?”
“I ate eons back.” Tom gave a somber sigh.
“Perhaps I imagined it,” said Mr. Grey. He rubbed his hands, neck, and face against his robes. They still felt wet.
As night rolled above unseen, and the fire ate its logs, the moisture remained. Mr. Grey began to feel more of the night chill than the fire’s heat. He glanced at the darkness beside Tom’s sleepy-eyed form. He saw that they had used all their gathered wood.
“I think I’ll find some more fuel,” said Mr. Grey, rising. Tom said nothing. He brooded over his spartan supper.
Mr. Grey walked to the edge of the small clearing lit by their camp. He searched the dingy roots and grass of the forest floor. Away from the fire’s stuffy smoke, the air carried an odd, fruity musk. Mr. Grey felt the odor nipping at his nose. He wished he had some protective cologne. He stretched his left hand for the dark shape of a branch on the ground. But he jerked his arm sharply back, and glanced at his hand. A tiny pattern of rose petals blossomed on his palm. He clutched the cuff of his robe to halt the bleeding. He reached down again, with caution.
Mr. Grey’s hand retrieved a rusty axe-head, half buried in the grass. The axe reminded him old woman’s story, back at the Wine Do. The one about the fisherman who’d needed to retrieve an axe in the woods. Mr. Grey also remembered seeing some tree stumps on their way into the trees. He thought forestry of eons-past was the most likely origin of the flaking piece of iron.
Either way it wasn’t what Mr. Grey needed. He tossed the axe head into the darkness with a lazy underhand.
The axe head made a non-traditional noise when it landed. It didn’t thud softly into the grass, or knock against the barky wood of a poetree. No, the metal gave off a long, low, “Ohhhhhhhhh,” noise from whatever it struck; voicelike.
Mr. Grey assumed familiar slateish stillness. He stared into nothing, blinklessly watching the cavernous grove where the axe-head had gone. Nothing moved; nothing edged on his eyes, or prowled in his ears.
Very slowly, Mr. Grey rotated his head back to Tom. Part of him hoped Tom hadn’t heard the noise. After all, that was usually how situations of this sort went, according to King’s Law.
When Mr. Grey looked back, the fire’s light clearly outlined Tom’s raised brow, and shone in his eyes like charged steel.
Mr. Grey retreated two paces. Tom rose, lifted his mallet, and advanced several. They stood, side-by-side, watching.
The prickling moisture stretched over Mr. Grey’s skin like a wetsuit, creeping underneath his robes. The night bugs stretched around the firelit clearing to muffle his ears with their drone. The fruity musk stretched in his lungs until he tasted the cloying tang at the back of his throat. And Nothing stretched lewdly between the poetrees.
Then there were faces.
Faces leaned in from the nothing. Not normal faces, but s t r e t c h e d ones. Stretched lengthwise, and widthwise, and depthwise, and crosswise, and sadwise. Pale faces, and toothy faces, and faces that were all nose. Hollow-cheeked faces and faces with a thousand chins. Wrinkly faces, and faces with baggy eyes, and even the faces of babies. But every face - fat or thin, old or youthful - was stretched.
Mr. Grey and Tom stepped back. The faces came with them. Not on legs, not even floating. The faces carried Nothing around them.
Tom brandished his mallet at the faces. They reacted in no way and continued coming forward. Mr. Grey said, “Now… reallytruly… no need…”
The faces stretched coldly forth. Tom roared a sudden challenge and leapt towards the nearest visage; a middle-aged woman with void eyes, her jowls wider than her ears. He arced the barrel-head of his mallet in an overhead chop. It passed through the face and hit the soil with a wheeze. The jowly woman came on, her face unchanged.
Tom swiped with hefty fury through the air. His mallet swished harmlessly through the faces every time.
Tom retreated. Mr. Grey followed him in measured steps. On a sudden inspiration he quickstepped to his violin coffin. It lay beside the fading campfire, the soft felt trapping warmth inside. He unbuckled the clasp with steady hands. His hands would have trembled; he was unquestionably terrified. Except trembling involved lots of uncontrolled moving, in which Mr. Grey lacked skill. So instead he unbuckled the clasp, withdrew the violin, tightened the bow, and set it to the strings as he turned back to the faces; all with the steadiest of hands.
Mr. Grey tried gentle music. Pots had once told him a story during her lessons. A story how she soothed the savage disposition of a monstrous chimera with a fiddle enchantment, in the mythical days of her youth. Mr. Grey hoped for something similar. He did his best to breathe and play slow.
Mr. Grey might have played to fellow statues for all the reaction his notes evoked. The faces came on unchanged. Mr. Grey lost his calm. Now the faces came to the tune of violin shrieking. He abandoned the music. He held his violin in a mute strangle at his side. Tom’s mallet stopped swinging.
As far as they could, Tom and Mr. Grey retreated. Their spines arced over the icy campfire’s dim cinders. The stretched faces formed a hideous crowd around the tiny bubble of light.
The faces changed; not for better. The many mouths - all too wide or too narrow - opened. They set loose more long “ooooooh” sounds from their throats.
Then Mr. Grey felt himself pulled towards the mouths. Not through any compulsion or macabre fascination. With gravity. He braced his feet - saw Tom do the same - to no avail. They both slid on the wet grass towards the open mouths of the closest faces. The faces retreated, and pulled Tom and Mr. Grey with them. Mr. Grey glanced desperately back. The tiny glowing embers of the campfire dwindled. Mr. Grey and Tom’s resistance made no difference. The pair slid on tensed legs, deeper into the caves made of trunks and boughs and shadow. The faces dragged them into the nothing.
Mr. Grey felt this was very different from the old woman’s story of the Ogurs called Long Faces…
Just as their tiny pile of light was on the verge of vanishing, like the last star before dawn, Mr. Grey heard a voice cry, “Who is that I see?”
The stretched faces vanished.
A new brood of faces issued from the woods. These ones came atop normal, people-bodies, in robes of studded leather. They showed only the usual stretching, brought on by regular applications of Age and Hardship. Most of the people - soldiers, it seemed - looked grim and stoic in the dim camp light: turned down mouth-corners, hands on the hilts of mallets, stances upright, square shoulders.
The new faces also wore a degree of admiration. One of the soldiers stepped forward and lifted Tom’s mallet from where it lay by the campfire. He let out a whistle before holding the handle out delicately to Tom.
Initially, some of the soldiers stared hard at Mr. Grey. It made him uncomfortable. But they turned their faces shyly away when he only looked blankly back. Scared as he yet was, brave as they had been, Mr. Grey did not lose staring contests.
A woman wearing matted fur shoulder pads and a wooden soldier’s cap stepped out from the crowd. She sniffed twice and said, “You smell like liquor.”
“Possibly my fault,” Mr. Grey said after Tom said nothing. “My cologne bottle is dry.”
“You need water baths.”
“We wash routinely…” Mr. Grey noticed that his courteous speech - at odds with his stern facade - relieved the soldiers of the respectful sentiments they’d harbored. They stared at him now without balking.
“The crossing marked you. These Ogurs smelled wine on you.”
“In any event, we wish to offer our thanks.”
“Then offer your thanks,” said the woman without smiling.
“I didn’t mean that…” Mr. Grey breathed through his nose. “Thank you for rescuing us.”
The Long-Faces’ attack had left Tom in a stupor. He jumped at Mr. Grey’s prodding elbow. Mr. Grey sometimes forgot his elbows’ sharpness. Were elbowing a fighting-style, he’d have been set. Tom closed his mouth and, though he’d not heard, nodded along with Mr. Grey.
“So, how’d you find us?” asked Mr. Grey.
“I already said, you smelled,” The captain motioned to a soldier behind Mr. Grey. Mr. Grey wanted to turn, but the captain’s tone held Mr. Grey’s ears, and her pressing eyes held his own. “Explain this meeting,” she went on. “Where did you come from? Why are you on the island?”
Mr. Grey, at once grateful and daunted, told her the Where and Why. He explained how they needed sponsorship from a lord, so Mr. Grey could enter a violin contest (which, of course, he wasn’t guaranteed to win, she understood); and how his first performance, back in Toscamo, had gone poorly; but how he felt this next time would go better, since he’d have his ticker repaired by his companion, a marvelous girl named Honeydew; and how Tom - the fellow at his side - knew the lord of this island, and suggested they seek support from that lord; which was, in brief, the Where and the Why.
Tom said nothing during Mr. Grey’s windy explanation, not even when Mr. Grey mentioned how he knew the local lord. Nor had the captain spoken since brusquely asking their business. “I hope we aren’t intruding?” added Mr. Grey as a chaser.
“You aren’t intruding,” she answered. From behind, Mr. Grey heard rustling. He turned around.
A fresh teepee of kindling stood over the doggedest embers in the campfire. The soldier crouching next to it carefully pushed fingerfuls of dry poetree needles through gaps in the sticks. The fire recovered a healthy flush. It dyed the grass, and the faces, and the bark of the poetrees, in amber. New smoke chased off the last fruity whiff. New heat wiped away the clingy wetness on Mr. Grey’s skin.
The captain told them to sit. Mr. Grey stowed his violin. Tom set his mallet down. The soldiers crowded in. The troop gathered in concentric circles around the rising flames. They pulled canteens of water - or what they pretended was water - and bags of trail candy from their studded leather robes. Tom looked on longingly as the soldier sitting next to him chewed on a rope of seaweed licorice. She noticed his eyes and handed him a dozen skeins. He slurped them like noodles.
Mr. Grey felt less scared, if not relaxed. He held his hands stiffly towards the flame. They dried fast. “We heard an Ogur story,” he said, looking at the captain. “They were different, in the tale version. They were givers of advice. And they didn’t moan.”
The soldiers shared knowing looks and nods. None smiled. “They have the wrong idea, those who dwell in town,” explained the captain. “They want child Ogurs. Kind and exotic Ogurs. Vacation Ogurs.”
“These were surely exotic,” Mr. Grey shudde… felt like shuddering.
“Long Faces are mad. Ogurs dwelling in scrap tools; the rusty axes. Left from lumber days.”
“They looked mad and sad. So is that their origin? Deforestation?”
The captain held her palms closer to the fire. “They just like iron. They have lived for much longer. Eons and eons. When giants forged land - and the wine was yet just grapes - these Ogurs were boys. They made mean faces. The giants made plaster casts. They captured the looks. The looks will remain, till the lakes of wine run dry.”
Mr. Grey’s expression and posture ran stony as ever through the narrative. When Mr. Grey said, “That’s an interesting tale,” he said it with the enthusiasm of a Monday morning shift following a Sunday evening bender. But he reallytruly did find the tale interesting. He wondered if any other Wine Medo stories ran differently based on the region of the teller.
The soldiers conversed among themselves in whispers. The captain dug ruts in Mr. Grey with her eyes. Mr. Grey pretended not to notice. He looked into the flame. If the long faces came back, he wondered if he could make them go away by saying, “Who is that I see,” like the captain had.
One soldier stood and walked to Mr. Grey. “Do you always look like that?” she asked after a moment’s hesitation.
The other soldiers stopped talking. Tom looked around at the expectant faces, and quietly sucked a licorice strand into his stomach.
“This is my usual robe,” answered Mr. Grey, perplexed.
“I mean in the face. Is that expression normal?”
Mr. Grey rubbed his palms on his knees. “I’m not the emotive sort.”
The soldiers whispered again. The captain stood, the others followed. The glow of the campfire underlit serious faces as they looked down on Tom and Mr. Grey.
“Now you must help us,” said the captain.
“With pencil pushing?” he asked. “Or with violin playing?”
“No, with your aspect,” she said. To Mr. Grey’s alarm the soldiers handed him and Tom their belongings. They began breaking camp. They lit torches from the campfire, then made it hiss with water.
The captain said, “Our lord is bewitched.”