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As he moved deeper into the Hedge Maid’s inner sanctuary, several more familiars drifted in through the walls and gathered around to escort him where he needed to go. More likely, they were making certain that he didn’t turn back. Whenever he glanced up at them, they stared at him with the most sickly yellow eyes and he would immediately look away. Each of the seven, when seen up close, was as ugly as death itself.
As they made their way down a broader corridor, there were even more candles placed all along the twig walls, from the curving edge of the floor up the rounded walls higher than he was tall. The hall they were in, lit by the golden glow of all the candles, led them abruptly into a murky room with hardly any candles.
There didn’t look to be room for many candles in the shadowy room. The place was filled instead with jars and containers. Some of the containers were made of tan clay. The jars were far more plentiful and in colors from tan to green to ruby red. In hundreds of places, the woven sticks and twigs had been pulled apart enough so that jars could be stuck into the knitted stick walls.
What was in all the jars, Henrik feared to imagine. From what he could see through the colored glass, most were filled with liquid that was dark and filthy-looking, though a lot of it looked like muddy water. Things floated in the liquid among the dirt and debris. He tried not to look too closely at what those things floating in the jars might be. One jar looked to be filled with human teeth.
But the jars and containers were not what frightened him the most.
It was what was woven into the twig walls themselves, behind the jars, that had tears of terror running down his cheeks.
Woven into the walls were people.
He could also see them in the walls of the corridors going out of the room in various directions. At first, he saw dozens and dozens of people cocooned in the fabric of the stick walls.
The more he looked, though, the more people he could see entrapped farther back within the walls.
Some of the people were desiccated corpses, their mouths gaping open, their eye sockets sunken, the skin of their bare arms and legs leathery and shriveled. Other bloated bodies looked more freshly dead. The gagging stink of death left him hardly able to breathe.
But some of the people woven into the walls were not dead.
They looked to be in a numb stupor, hardly breathing, only slightly aware of anything going on around them. All were naked, but encased as they were by the weaving of thorny twigs and branches around them, it was hard to see much of them.
Henrik could see their eyes roll from time to time, as if trying to make out where they were and what was happening to them. An occasional soft moan escaped a hanging mouth.
When he turned from staring at all the dead and the half-dead people laced into the walls, he came face-to-face with the Hedge Maid.
CHAPTER 52
Jit sat cross-legged in the middle of the room, nested in a thatch of branches, watching him with unblinking, big round eyes that were so dark they looked black.
Her thin hair was only a little more than shoulder length. She wasn’t big. In fact, she was not much bigger than he was. Her simple sack dress showed that she had a rather straight torso. Her body looked more boylike than womanly. The skin on her thin arms looked to have seen little sunlight. It was hard for him to tell how old she was, but, despite her pale, smooth skin, he was certain that she was not at all young.
Her fingernails and hands appeared to be permanently stained, possibly from handling what was in the jars all around her.
He imagined, too, that the dark matter staining her fingernails might be the fluid leaking from the corpses woven into the walls around the room.
But what riveted his gaze, what had his heart pounding, what had his knees weak, was her mouth.
Her thin lips were sewn shut with strips of leather.
The leather thong was stitched right through the flesh of her lips, leaving holes that didn’t look like they had ever entirely healed. The stitches weren’t even. They looked to have been done haphazardly, with little care. The stitched strips of leather crossed to form “X”s over her mouth. There was only enough slack in the leather to allow her to open her mouth into a narrow slit.
Through that slit behind the cross-stitched leather thong, Jit let out an undulating squealing sound that didn’t sound human. It ran goose bumps up Henrik’s arms.
From having been here before, he knew that it was her language, her way of talking. While he didn’t have the slightest idea what the sound meant, he did know that she was directing it at him.
One of the familiars, missing a hand, he noticed, leaned toward him.
“Jit says that she is please
d to see you again, boy.”
Henrik swallowed. He couldn’t bring himself to say he was pleased to see her again as well.
Jit, her head bobbing, let out a low-pitched grating screech, punctuated with a few clicks of her tongue against the top of her mouth.
“Jit wants to know if you brought it,” the familiar said.
Henrik’s mouth felt stuck closed. He couldn’t make himself speak. Fearing what she would do if he didn’t somehow answer, he held out his fisted hands. He didn’t think that, after all this time, he could open them if he tried.
The Hedge Maid let out a soft raspy sound— half pule, half screech.
“Come closer,” the familiar said. “Jit says to come closer so that she may see for herself.”
Somewhere behind, there was a sound that made all the familiars pause and turn to look. The Hedge Maid’s black eyes turned up to focus into the distance behind him. Henrik looked back over his shoulder to see what had caught their attention.
In the distance, there was some kind of disturbance. Something was making its way up the hall that led into the chambers.
Candle flames wavered, their light flickering, and then they went out.
What ever it was brought darkness with it.
As it passed, the candles nearby all around it went dark. When it was beyond them, the extinguished flames slowly returned to life until they were once more fully lit.
It made it seem as if darkness itself were stalking through the tunnel of a hall, coming for them all.
As it came closer, pulling that darkness with it, extinguishing candles all around as it passed, the familiars cowered back behind Jit. Henrik could see the one without a hand trembling slightly.
Jit let out a long, low squeal and a few clicks. Two of the familiars gathered in close about her, leaning in, whispering. They nodded to more clicks and soft, grating sounds from deep in the Hedge Maid’s throat.
