When the Forest Calls

Victoria stood on the back porch of her new farmhouse with a glass of prosecco going warm in her hand, and she could not stop smiling. Could you blame her? Fifty-four years old, thirty of them spent elbow-deep in other people's dogs, and now here she was on eleven acres at the edge of an old forest, hosting the best open house she had ever thrown.

The barn glowed. She had spent two weekends stringing fairy lights through the renovated rafters, and lanterns hung from shepherd's hooks all across the yard, and everything smelled like cedar and grilled sausage. Omar from the clinic was holding court by the drink table, telling some story with his whole body. A half dozen guests wandered the property with drinks, admiring the fence line, the garden beds, the big dark wall of trees beyond it all.

Dominic found her there on the porch and slipped an arm around her waist. He was fifty-five, retired from landscape architecture, and still the best-looking man at any party he attended, in her completely unbiased opinion.

"Well? Told you the lights would sell it," he said.

"They did not need selling, Dom. They bought themselves!" She laughed and leaned into him. Two years they had been together now, ever since a mutual friend dragged them both to a rescue volunteer mixer and they spent the whole evening arguing about whether goats could be trained. They could, it should be noted. Victoria had been right.

"Penny for them," Dominic said, when her face must have gone soft.

"Just thinking I'm a lucky woman. Retired, in love, and owner of the prettiest farm in the county. What's left to want?"

"A rain barrel. You said you wanted a rain barrel."

"I married well anyway," she said, and he snorted, because they were not married, not yet, though there was a small velvet box in the barn office that she was absolutely not supposed to know about.

It was around then that Mariah appeared at her elbow. Mariah was the neighbor from two parcels over, twenty-seven, an ecologist on a research grant, and a lovely girl who had brought a casserole to the door the week Victoria moved in and stayed to help her shingle the garden shed. Tonight, though, she was not smiling.

"Can I steal you for a minute?" Mariah asked quietly.

"Of course, honey. Everything okay?"

Mariah led her out past the lanterns, to where the yard ended and the tree line began, and stopped a respectful ten feet short of the woods. She looked back at the party, then at the trees, then at Victoria.

"You bought eleven acres," Mariah said. "But your deed doesn't say what the deed doesn't cover."

"That sounds ominous!"

"It's meant to. Look, I moved out here two years ago and the first thing my grant advisor told me wasn't about soil samples. He told me the forest behind your place is older than any survey. Older than the county. The people who settled this valley had a name for it and it wasn't a nice one."

"A name? Like Bigfoot? Mariah, are we doing Bigfoot at my party?"

"No!" Mariah's voice dropped further. "Like something that lives there. Something that's always lived there. My advisor's grandmother grew up four miles east, and she used to say the woods don't want your cattle and they don't want your apples. They want your good days. They feed on joy, celebration, big happy gatherings. And every so often, when there's a lot of it in one place, they come out and take what they want."

Victoria glanced back at her lanterns, her fairy lights, her barn full of laughing people. "Take what they want," she repeated. "Take what, exactly? People?"

"Nobody's ever proved anything," Mariah said. "But there are gaps. Gaps in the records. People who went into those woods and came out different, or didn't come out at all. I'm telling you because you're my neighbor and because this is literally the biggest, happiest party this valley has had in years, and I'd know if I were the woods, that's the one I'd crash."

Victoria patted her hand, because what else could a hostess do? "Thank you for the warning, sweetie. I'll keep one eye on the tree line. Now go get a drink, you've barely touched your glass."

Mariah did not go get a drink. She stayed at the fence with her arms crossed, watching the woods, which Victoria decided was just a scientist thing.

* * *

The pet emergency was, in the end, a blessing and a disaster in the same little furry package.

Mrs. Halloway from the grange had brought her terrier, Moose, and Moose got into a plate of dark chocolate truffles sometime around nine. Omar spotted the dog shaking by the fire pit and hollered for Victoria, and of course she went, she was a veterinarian her whole life before tonight and a dog in trouble outranks a party every time. Induced vomiting, hydrogen peroxide, the works, right there in the mudroom with Omar holding the flashlight and Mrs. Halloway crying gratefully into her sleeve. Moose would be fine. He would also be very sorry in the morning.

By the time Victoria washed her hands and came back out to the yard, nearly an hour had passed. The party was still going. The lanterns were still lit. But Dominic, she noticed, was nowhere in the yard.

She found Omar near the drinks table. "Have you seen Dom?"

"Sure, yeah, he was over by the fence a while ago talking to me about the cedar hedging," Omar said. He was thirty-four, the best vet tech she'd ever employed, and slightly flushed from his second beer. "Then somebody's kid started a ring toss thing and I went over there. When I looked back he was... hmm."

"Hmm what?"

"He was kind of just standing there. Looking at the trees. Then he stepped past the fence line and kind of, I don't know, drifted in? I figured he was checking on something. He did landscaping, right? Guy sees a tree, he's got to go say hi to it."

"Into the woods? At night?"

"He seemed fine. He wasn't staggering or anything, he just walked in like he heard his name called. Victoria, hey, is that bad?"

"That depends," Victoria said, and her voice came out much flatter than she intended, "on whether my boyfriend is a fool or something is fooling him. Which way did he go?"

Omar pointed at a gap in the tree line, a little animal track or old logging cut, swallowed at once in black. Mariah was already jogging across the yard toward them, flashlight in hand, her face grim in a way that made Victoria's stomach drop.

"I saw him go in," Mariah said. "I was going to follow, but I thought I should get you first. Get your coat and a light. Nobody goes in alone, that's the rule out here, and it's the rule for a reason."

* * *

What Dominic found in the woods, he would never fully be able to explain, so it's just as well he doesn't get the chance to try just yet.

He had not meant to go in. He really hadn't. He'd been talking to Omar about cedar hedging, God help him, when the trees seemed to lean toward him, and a curiosity rose up in his chest like a tide. Not fear. Not a compulsion either, he would have said, just the strongest, strangest wondering he'd ever felt, like the woods were a door left ajar and someone inside was waiting. He stepped over the fence line. Then he walked, unhurried, into the dark, and the party noise thinned out behind him in about thirty steps.

The moon was up but the canopy ate it. His own breath was loud. And then, maybe fifty yards in, there was a clearing, small and needle-floored, and someone was standing in it.

Him.

Same clothes. Same gray at the temple, same creased shirt, same easy smile. The figure stood with its hands in its pockets exactly the way Dominic stood with his own hands in his pockets, and when it tilted its head, Dominic's own neck creaked in sympathy. But the eyes were wrong. They were calm the way a well is calm, deep and old and empty of anything human.

"Evening," the thing said, in Dominic's own voice. "Lovely party."

"What in God's name are you?"

"I'm wearing your face because it was the polite thing to do. You wouldn't have listened to anything with a stranger's face, would you? No. Nobody does." It stepped closer, unhurried. "I wanted to give you a gift before you decide anything. A truth."

"Decide what? A truth about what?"

The thing smiled his smile back at him, and it said, gentle as a nurse:

"She never told you what she did out here before you met."

Victoria took the flashlight from Mariah's hand before the younger woman finished her sentence. "Then we go together, and we go now." She grabbed her coat off the fence post, the good wool one Dominic had bought her for her fifty-third birthday, and she did not bother with boots. Sneakers would have to do. "Omar. You're on party duty. Nobody else wanders off, you hear me? Chain the gate if you have to."

"Got it," Omar called back, suddenly sober-looking. "Bring him home."

The three of them, no, the two of them, Mariah corrected herself out loud, because Omar had a party to shepherd, crunched across the frosted grass toward that black gap in the trees. Victoria's heart was doing something complicated in her chest. Fear, yes, but also a strange old recognition, like hearing a song from her twenties in a grocery store.

"Victoria," Mariah said, keeping pace with her, "before we go in, you should know something. My grant advisor, the one I told you about an hour ago? He said this forest is older than any survey. Older than the county. Older than the maps. And he said, and I thought he was being colorful, that it feeds on joy. On celebration. On people at their happiest."

"At their happiest." Victoria stopped at the fence line. "Dominic has never been happier than he was tonight. He kept squeezing my hand every ten minutes like he was afraid the evening would escape."

"Exactly. So let's not waste time standing here being scared, okay? Fear is at least something it doesn't want."

They went in.

The woods at night were nothing like the