Dale Bailey - In the Night Wood

The title jerked Charles fully awake. The library was silent, cool, and all but abandoned at this late hour. A hard snow ticked against the windows, but despite the chill, a thick column of heat climbed through him. Rereading the footnote, he felt time slip. He was a child again, alone in his grandfather’s enormous library with the cries of the dreadful triumvirate of cousins sounding far away beyond the great arched windows. Long-forgotten details from that single feverish reading flooded through him: a full moon looking down through the mists of the Night Wood; the Mere of Souls, black in its midnight glade; a child flying through the whispering trees; the Horned King upon his pale horse.

“Shit,” he whispered, setting aside the book. He stood and made his way across the reading room to a bank of terminals and tapped the title into the catalog. A few minutes later, clutching a call slip in one hand, Charles caught an elevator to an upper floor. Walking the labyrinth of stacks and dragging a single finger in his wake, bump bump bump across the spines of the books, Charles nearly missed it.

He supposed he’d been expecting the same beautiful, leather-bound volume he’d plucked from his grandfather’s shelf. The library’s copy was infinitely more practical, a thin, sturdy book bound in blue boards — or rebound, he surmised when he flipped it open to find the same baroque frontispiece. It was a woodcut, he saw, the lines strong and sure.

Wily faces peered out at him from behind the boles of the ancient, lichen-shrouded trees, their great splayed roots knuckling down into beds of rich, damp soil. As he gazed at them, the faces seemed to shift and draw back into the foliage, only to appear again, peeping out at him from some neighboring bower of wood and leaf. He imagined that he overheard their whispered conversations in the air around him.

He started back toward the elevator, flipping to the first chapter, that opening invocation —

Once upon a time

— ringing in his head. When he turned the corner and collided with someone strolling the other way, Charles had a brief and not unpleasant impression that he’d been enveloped in a feminine cloud, faintly redolent of lavender. Caught off balance, he threw out his arms to catch himself —

“Watch where you’re going!” the girl cried.

— and went over backward. He thumped to the floor, his glasses flying one way, his book the other. He was still scrambling for the former when the cloud of perfume enveloped him once again.

“Steady there,” the girl said. “You okay?”

He blinked at her owlishly. “Yeah, I —” His fingers closed over his glasses. He fumbled with them, and she swam briefly into focus, a small, lean brunette in her mid-twenties, with a prominently boned face and wide-set hazel eyes, bright with amusement — not beautiful, exactly, but … striking , Kit would have called her. Out of his league, anyway, that much was sure. “I guess I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

“I guess not.”

She took his hand and heaved him to his feet, startling him all over again. “Steady,” she said as he snatched at the nearest shelf. He was still trying to get his glasses adjusted — he thought he might have bent the frames — when she reappeared with his book.

“What was it you were so intent on, anyway?”

“Nothing,” he sputtered. “It was — I —”

Waving him into silence, she flipped the book over to see for herself. She laughed out loud. “Small world.”

“What,” Charles said, still fussing with his glasses. “You’ve read it?”

“Once upon a time, long ago.”

“Not many people have read it.”

“Not like I have,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she said, shoving the book at him. “Here. Hold still.” Shaking her head, she reached out and straightened his glasses. Maybe they weren’t bent after all. “Better?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Thanks.”

“You bet.” Reaching out once again — Charles forced himself not to step back — the girl brushed a speck of imaginary dust from his shoulder. “All set?”

“Yeah, I mean — Yeah.”

“Good.”

Smiling, the girl slipped past him into the stacks.

“Wait,” Charles said. “I wanted —”

But she was already gone, leaving a perfect girl-shaped vacuum in the air before him. “Shit,” Charles said, turning to look after her, but the library was cold and empty, a forest of nine-foot shelves branching off as far as the eye could see.

Then, in one of the few courageous acts in his life up to then, he gave chase. He turned the corner of one row of stacks and accelerated. “Hey,” he called. “Wait up.” And when he reached the next intersection — almost at a run — he nearly collided with her again. She was waiting there, leaning against a shelf, arms crossed, a sly smile upon her-face.

“You’re aching for a concussion today, aren’t you?” she said. “You sounded like a herd of wildebeests. I thought you were going to brain yourself.”

“I wanted to ask you something,” he said. “I wanted to know what you meant by ‘small world.’”

“That’s a complicated answer.”

“Let me buy you a cup of coffee.” Once the phrase passed his lips, the room seemed suddenly airless. He was not the kind of man to ask strange women out for coffee. He was, in fact, not the kind of man to ask out women at all — not for lack of interest, but for lack of confidence. Assuming rejection, he found it easier to save everyone the trouble. So when she said —

“Sure. Coffee sounds good.”

— he exhaled an audible sigh of relief.

Her name was Erin, her secret unexpected (to say the least).

Coincidence, Charles called it. Coincidence that he had plucked down that book in his grandfather’s library (she dismissed it all as chance). Coincidence that he had gone on to seek a Ph.D. in English. Coincidence that on a late night in the library with snow slanting out of the black February sky, he should run (literally) into the great-great-exponentially-great-something-or-other of Caedmon Hollow himself, who might have influenced, in subtle ways, Charles’s pathway to this place.

Fate, he thought. The Worm Ouroboros. The snake biting its own tail. He had come full circle. And for a moment Charles glimpsed a vast, secret world, intersecting lines of power running just beyond the limits of human perception — a great story in which they were all of them embedded, moving toward some unimaginable conclusion.

As secrets go, it wasn’t much of one, Erin confided. The branch of the family that had immigrated to America had generations ago fallen out of touch with the family that remained behind in England — there might have been some kind of conflict, a formal break. She didn’t know, or much care. But Caedmon Hollow had remained with them, as a legend if nothing more: an eccentric figure out of the distant past, who’d squandered much of his abbreviated life in drinking and debauchery, squandering as well the talent that had enabled him to eke out but a single volume of fiction.

“Everyone in the family reads it at some time or other. It’s like a ritual,” she said. “It’s not really a story for children, is it? It’s hardly a story at all, more like the ravings of a man half mad from drinking.”

“I suppose it is,” he said, recalling the strangely vivid nightmares his own reading had produced. “But it has a kind of power, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so. I haven’t forgotten it, anyway.”

“Is there more, do you think? Unpublished?”

“Methinks I hear your grad-student heart beat harder,” she said. “On the hunt for a dissertation topic, are we?” And when he blushed — he could feel the heat creeping up his face — she touched his hand, and he flushed still harder. “Teasing,” she said. “You can have my crazy old great-great-whatever. It hardly matters to me.”