The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (good books for 8th graders .TXT) 📗

“Could it change so much that I never came here? Or never even knew Cooper? Or Fox?”

“It could. But what does that matter? It is all what it is. It is all dammas.”

“It matters to me,” Maggie told him firmly. “I want the life I have, not another.”

“Those of your kind who would say that are rare indeed; that’s why you interest me.” Then he advised, “When you find Cooper, say little and listen much. Small changes are only ripples in Time—it is only the big ones you need fear.”

She nodded. “I’ll be careful.”

Crow cupped his hands, and she saw water in them. He let the water pour down to the earth. When it touched the ground, it burst into flame. The flames died out, leaving reddish-brown dust. Crow dribbled more water from the palm of one hand, and stirred the dust into a thin paint. He dipped one finger into it, and beckoned for Maggie to step closer.

He painted spiral lines on her cheeks and intricate knotwork patterns around each slim wrist. He unbuttoned her shirt, and painted more lines on her belly, and in the hollow between her breasts. He took off her boots, and painted jags of lightning on the soles of her feet. He untied a string of small bells from his ankle, and wound it around one of hers.

He said, “You must hold on tightly to the image of the place and the time where you wish to go. The spiral keeps turning; the motion will pull you into other directions. Don’t let it, or you may not be able to return. Stay clear. Stay focused. Don’t let your fear distract you. Think about Cooper in that house you know so well.”

“And when I want to return?” she asked.

“Then you must think of the mountain, and of me. I’ll hear the bells. I’ll know where you are.” He untied a white feather from a braid in his hair, and knotted it into Maggie’s. Then he held her wrist lightly, and led her to the edge of the cliff, where the path was waiting.

The midday air seemed to shimmer around her. The clouds looked almost solid underfoot. She said, “Why wasn’t Anna able to walk it? She knew so much. She had worked so hard.”

“She couldn’t take this next step,” he told her. “Anna lived a protected life. In her parents’ house. In Cooper’s house. And then in the house of her Christian God. This is a solitary path. She wished to walk it. She could not.”

“I’m not sure that I can either,” said Maggie, looking down at the valley far below. And yet she’d had a lifetime’s practice of stepping out into the great unknown. She thought of the day that she’d left West Virginia. She thought of the day she’d left Nigel.

Crow said, “Cooper did it. He walked the path. And you are no less than Cooper.”

She met his eyes. “Thank you for saying that.”

“Don’t thank me,” Crow growled back at her.

Maggie took a breath. She looked straight ahead. And she stepped into the sky.

The clouds held firm under her feet. The sky grew dark around her. Absurdly, the images from old Roadrunner cartoons were running through her head: Coyotes spinning in the air; coyotes hurtling to the ground. Don’t look down, she told herself. Don’t think about that now. She thought about Cooper; she pictured his house; she pictured the man from the photographs stepping through a freshly painted blue door and onto the wooden porch. Around her the sky darkened into black; the spiral was a pathway of stars underfoot. It moved. It carried her, spun her into motion. She herself was dammas, that-which-moves. She heard a low humming, a soft, steady whisper, chanting in the language of the stars.

She thought about Cooper. She could see the house, a glimmer of light through the mesquite trees … but the stars spun her past it. She couldn’t get back. There was somewhere else that they wanted to go, pulling her to an image even more integral to the core of her being than Cooper’s.

She felt mud underfoot. The stars hung overhead. The night was cold, with a winter’s bite. Rain was sleeting down, drenching her unbuttoned shirt, gleaming on the black surface of a road. Where was she? The smell of the place was familiar. It made something ache deep inside of her bones. Then she saw the car come. A white Oldsmobile. She knew that car, and what it would look like the next morning when they dredged it from the silted riverbed. She watched it skid, flip over onto its roof, slice sideways through the thin guardrail to the steep bank of the river beyond, the faces of her parents both looking so pale, so small, so very young…

“No,” she whispered, staring at them. Time stopped. Collapsed. It was not dammas, this emptiness, this horrible stillness, frozen between one moment and the next. She pushed against it. Time moved, and its grinding motion pulled Maggie back to the path, her heart pounding, the blood roaring in her ears, spinning her away from that terrible place as she reached for something solid to hang onto.

It was the railing of a stairway. The stairwell was dark; the bulb was busted overhead. She knew this smell too: cigarette smoke, turpentine, rain on the London streets outside. She climbed steel stairs to a warehouse landing and stood before a familiar red door, her heart swelling with a thousand memories she’d thought she’d long forgotten. The door was plastered with postcards, smudges of color, a painter’s fingerprints.

In her hand was a key, and with it she opened the door. Inside, the huge half-empty loft was covered with dust. She looked slowly around the room at industrial windows, Tat’s bright monoprints, her own old desk, their jerry-rigged kitchen. Two women sat in some battered chairs, Tat, and herself, so young, so young, looking up at her in surprise. She started to speak—the spiral pulled, and