And the Trees Crept In(57)

Then Anne is kicking her in the foot. “Let’s go into the woods for a while!”

She tries not to get cross. Anne is always wanting more. Mother says she has too much spirit for her own good, and Cathy is beginning to see why.

Cathy leans up on her elbows. “We can’t, Anne. It’s getting dark.”

“So? We’ll be quick. Come on! I saw rabbits!”

“Imagine if we could catch one,” Pammy says. “We could have it for supper.”

Anne scrunches up her nose. “Ew.”

“Nobody is going into the woods,” Cath states, getting to her feet. She brushes grass from her dress and reties her bow. “Anyway, we should be going in right about now.”

Anne rolls her eyes and Pammy giggles. “You spoil everything.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Anyway,” Anne says, sniffing and lifting her chin. “I don’t need you to have fun, and I don’t need the woods. The woods can come to me. The protector will make sure of that.”

“I think we’re getting a bit old for the protector game.”

“He’s real,” Anne says. “And maybe you’re getting old. So old you can’t even see him anymore.”

“I see him!” Pammy declares.

“Neither of you sees him. We made him up.”

Catherine hasn’t got time for silly games anymore. Mother told her that she was growing up, and now she can see it is true. She does feel much older than both Anne and Pamela. Well, she is older, but now her age is accompanied by a feeling of superiority. She can see so much more than they can. They are still lost in a game about a make-believe man that they sewed from sackcloth one day in the woods.

I’m growing up, she thinks again, and smiles, closing her eyes and turning away so that her sisters don’t see her pride. She envisions a future of long dresses—the kind Mother wears—dinner parties at the long table at La Baume in the grand hall, and long hours alone with all those books Papa won’t let her touch. One day, it will all be hers, and she will know how to care for it. She has such dreams for La Baume and her life!

“Come on,” she says again. “We have to get inside. Mother will be waiting.”

She turns back to her sisters and finds that they are gone.

She clenches her teeth, watching their tiny figures rushing toward the forest boundary in the fading light.

They are leaving her behind more and more.

Well. She’s moving forward without them.

What babies they are.





I’m somewhere else now.

It’s quite dark in here. I can hardly see. In the corner of the room, a little girl sits bent over something. Her hands dance very well, quick movements, back and forth. She pauses now and then to check her work, and then bends low again over the thing in her hands.

I step closer, expecting the child to look up, but it seems I am a ghost in this place.

“Hello?” I call.

Nothing.

I look around, scanning the room for Gowan, and realize that I’m in La Baume again. The attic. The same room that Cath locked herself in for months and months. The same room where she was eaten alive by roots. As I think Cathy’s name, the child looks up, as though startled by a sound.

“Hello?”

She leans forward into a shaft of moonlight cast through the tiny sole window to her left, and I see that this child is Cath. She looks about twelve years old, or maybe older. Her eyes are pink and swollen, her lips cracked and bloody.

“Cath… Auntie Cath.”

The child frowns for a moment, and then shifts back into the shadows to continue her work.

I inch closer, aware of every step. I’m five feet away when I see what Cath is doing. In her hands: a limp and rather pathetic excuse for a doll. It is made of sacking cloth and strips of black material, long and thin with elongated limbs. It has no eyes, only a gaping mouth that has been roughly stitched closed again.

The sight of it sends a chill down my spine.

And when I realize what Cath is doing, I fall to my knees, dumbstruck.

“There,” little Cath says, her voice breaking. “Now you can give her back.”

Cath puts down her needle and takes up small sewing scissors instead. Carefully, she snips the black twine holding the doll’s mouth shut, and it falls open in a manic grin like the jaw is weighted down with stones.

The lack of eyes disturbs me. Look away.

But then Cath speaks again.

“Anne… can you hear me, Anne?”

Silence.

“Anne, it’s Catherine. It’s Catherine, Anne, can’t you hear me?”

Nothing.

“You took her,” she whispers at the doll now. “You crept up and you took her away.” A pause. “You’re a Creeper Man. An ugly Creeper Man. You were never our protector.”

I swallow.

“Come on, then!” Cath cries suddenly, throwing the doll into the moonlit strip of wood. She stands slowly, like a storm gathering the strength to surge.

“I dare you,” she spits at last. “I dare you to come here.”

The doll doesn’t move, but it seems to me that it is observing the child. Considering her.

“Creeper Man, Creeper Man, I dare you to come. Creeper Man, Creeper Man, you are the one. Creeper Man, Creeper Man, bring me my Anne. Creeper Man, Creeper Man, I curse you, be damned!”