louder—the thunder of the wheels and hooves, the creak of
leather rigging. Now he could hear the driver’s voice: “Hee-yah! Heee-yahhh! HEEEEE-YAHHHH!”
He stood in the road, stood there, his head drumming with
horror. Can’t move, oh dear God oh dear Christ I can’t move Mom Mom Muhhhhhmeeeee—!
He stood in the road and the eye of his imagination saw a
huge black thing like a stagecoach tearing up the road, pulled by black animals that looked more like pumas than horses; he saw black curtains flapping in and out of the coach’s windows; he saw the driver standing on the teeterboard, his hair blown back, his eyes as wild and crazed as those of a psycho with a switchblade.
He saw it coming toward him, never slowing.
He saw it run him down.
That broke the paralysis. He ran to the right, skidding
down the side of the road, catching his foot under one of those gnarled roots, falling, rolling. His back, relatively quiet for the last couple of hours, flared with fresh pain, and Jack drew his lips back with a grimace.
He got to his feet and scurried into the woods, hunched
over.
He slipped first behind one of the black trees, but the touch of the gnarly trunk—it was a bit like the banyans he had seen while on vacation on Hawaii year before last—was oily and unpleasant. Jack moved to the left and behind the trunk of a pine.
The thunder of the coach and its outriders grew steadily
louder. At every second Jack expected the company to flash
by toward All-Hands’ Village. Jack’s fingers squeezed and relaxed on the pine’s gummy back. He bit at his lips.
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Directly ahead was a narrow but perfectly clear sightline
back to the road, a tunnel with sides of leaf and fern and pine needles. And just when Jack had begun to think that Morgan’s party would never arrive, a dozen or more mounted soldiers
passed heading east, riding at a gallop. The one in the lead carried a banner, but Jack could not make out its device . . .
nor was he sure he wanted to. Then the diligence flashed
across Jack’s narrow sightline.
The moment of its passage was brief—no more than a sec-
ond, perhaps less than that—but Jack’s recall of it was total.
The diligence was a gigantic vehicle, surely a dozen feet high.
The trunks and bundles lashed with stout cord to the top
added another three feet. Each horse in the team which pulled it wore a black plume on its head—these plumes were blown
back almost flat in a speed-generated wind. Jack thought later that Morgan must need a new team for every run, because
these looked close to the end of their endurance. Foam and
blood sprayed back from their working mouths in curds; their eyes rolled crazily, showing arcs of white.
As in his imagining—or his vision—black crepe curtains
flew and fluttered through glassless windows. Suddenly a
white face appeared in one of those black oblongs, a white
face framed in strange, twisted carving-work. The sudden appearance of that face was as shocking as the face of a ghost in the ruined window of a haunted house. It was not the face of Morgan Sloat . . . but it was.
And the owner of that face knew that Jack—or some other
danger, just as hated and just as personal—was out there.
Jack saw this in the widening of the eyes and the sudden vicious downtwist of the mouth.
Captain Farren had said He’ll smell you like a rat, and now Jack thought dismally: I’ve been smelled, all right. He knows I’m here, and what happens now? He’ll stop the whole bunch of them, I bet, and send the soldiers into the woods after me.
Another band of soldiers—these protecting Morgan’s dili-
gence from the rear—swept by. Jack waited, his hands frozen to the bark of the pine, sure that Morgan would call a halt. But no halt came; soon the heavy thunder of the diligence and its outriders began to fade.
His eyes. That’s what’s the same. Those dark eyes in that white face. And—
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Our boy? YESSSS!
Something slithered over his foot . . . and up his ankle.
Jack screamed and floundered backward, thinking it must be a snake. But when he looked down he saw that one of those
gray roots had slipped up his foot . . . and now it ringed his calf.
That’s impossible, he thought stupidly. Roots don’t move—
He pulled back sharply, yanking his leg out of the rough
gray manacle the root had formed. There was thin pain in his calf, like the pain of a rope-burn. He raised his eyes and felt sick fear slip into his heart. He thought he knew now why
Morgan had sensed him and gone on anyway; Morgan knew
that walking in this forest was like walking into a jungle
stream infested with piranhas. Why hadn’t Captain Farren
warned him? All Jack could think was that the scarred Cap-
tain must not have known; must never have been this far west.
The grayish roots of those fir-fern hybrids were all moving now—rising, falling, scuttling along the mulchy ground toward him. Ents and Entwives, Jack thought crazily. BAD Ents and Entwives. One particularly thick root, its last six inches dark with earth and damp, rose and wavered in front of him
like a cobra piped up from a fakir’s basket. OUR boy! YESS!
It darted toward him and Jack backed away from it, aware
that the roots had now formed a living screen between him and the safety of the road. He backed into a tree . . . and then lurched away from it, screaming, as its bark began to ripple and twitch against his back—it was like feeling a muscle
which has begun to spasm wildly. Jack looked around and saw one of those black trees with the gnarly trunks. Now the trunk was moving, writhing. Those twisted knots of bark formed
something like a dreadful runnelled face, one eye widely,
blackly open, the other drawn down in a hideous wink. The
tree split open lower down with a grinding, rending sound, and whitish-yellow sap began to drool out. OURS! Oh, yesssss!
Roots like fingers slipped between Jack’s upper arm and
ribcage, as if to tickle.
He tore away, holding on to the last of his rationality with a huge act of will, groping in his jerkin for Speedy’s bottle. He was aware—faintly—of a series of gigantic ripping sounds.
He supposed the trees were tearing themselves right out of the ground. Tolkien had never been like this.
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He got the bottle by the neck and pulled it out. He scrab-
bled at the cap, and then one of those gray roots slid easily around his neck. A moment later it pulled as bitterly tight as a hangman’s noose.
Jack’s breath stopped. The bottle tumbled from his fingers
as he grappled with the thing that was choking him. He man-
aged to work his fingers under the root. It was not cold and stiff but warm and limber and fleshlike. He struggled with it, aware of the choked gargling sound coming from him and the
slick of spittle on his chin.
With a final convulsive effort he tore the root free. It tried to circle his wrist then, and Jack whipped his arm away from it with a cry. He looked down and saw the bottle twisting and bumping away, one of those gray roots coiled about its neck.
Jack leaped for it. Roots grabbed his legs, circled them. He fell heavily to the earth, stretching, reaching, the tips of his fingers digging at the thick black forest soil for an extra inch—
He touched the bottle’s slick green side . . . and seized it.
He pulled as hard as he could, dimly aware that the roots were all over his legs now, crisscrossing like bonds, holding him firmly. He spun the cap off the bottle. Another root floated down, cobweb-light, and tried to snatch the bottle away from him. Jack pushed it away and raised the bottle to his lips. That smell of sickish fruit suddenly seemed everywhere, a living membrane.
Speedy, please let it work!
As more roots slid over his back and around his waist,
turning him helplessly this way and that, Jack drank, cheap wine splattering both of his cheeks. He swallowed, groaning, praying, and it was no good, it wasn’t working, his eyes were still closed but he could feel the roots entangling his arms and legs, could feel
8
the water soaking into his jeans and his shirt, could smell Water? mud and damp, could hear
Jeans? Shirt? the steady croak of frogs and
Jack opened his eyes and saw the orange light of the set-