Free The Door in the Forest by Roderick Townley Page B

won’t you tell me what it
is
?”
    “I have another idea. Why don’t you tell me where Miranda is?”
    His face reverted to casual. “Maybe we can work out a trade. I’ll tell you if you tell me.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “But why not?”
    “Because, Captain, it is none of your business.”
    Sloper’s body tightened. “You’re a reckless woman, Mrs. Byrdsong, and I can see you don’t care about what’s good for you. I wonder if you’d be so reckless about your granddaughter here.”
    Bridey’s nostrils twitched.
    “I have a feeling,” he said, “you’d do just about anything to keep her safe.”
    “Now, Captain.” She attempted a little laugh. “This is all silly. You can see what it is yourself! It’s just a map of the local towns, and there’s Everwood in the middle. See?” She held the back of a kitchen chair for support.
    He scanned the page. “I see that it could be.”
    “It is. It obviously is.”
    “What’s not obvious,” he said, “is why you wouldn’t say that in the first place.”
    “Pure contrariness.”
    “I think there’s more to it. What are all these little signs and symbols? And there are words around the border. Something about a serpent? I can’t make it out.”
    She peered at it. “You’d have to ask my ancestors.”
    “I’m asking you!”
    “I think I’ll let you figure it out yourself.”
    “Don’t mock me, old woman,” he said. “You do not want me for an enemy.”
    “I’m sure, Captain Sloper,” she replied, lifting her head grandly, “I don’t want you any way at all.”
    “Well.” He tucked the document into an inside pocket. “In that case, I bid you good night.”

    It wasn’t the crickets that woke Daniel late that night; it was their sudden stop. He sat up in his sleeping bag.
    “Hello?” he called in a whisper. “Who’s there?”
    Who is
ever
there, when you wake in the darkness, with your heart beating?
    He remembered now that he was not in his room but in the hayloft beside his sleeping brother. They’d been banished to the barn for the duration. That was fine with him. The less he had to do with Sloper and his men, the better.
    That didn’t explain the strangeness. The world seemed the reverse of its familiar, daytime self, like the back of a mirror, showing him not the friendly objects of his daily life, but a dull blankness.
    Something, someone was absent. A mirror had gone dark. A sound had ceased.
    But the crickets. Why had
they
stopped? That suggested a presence, not an absence. A prowler?
    Carefully, so as not to waken Wes, he extricated himself from the sleeping bag and climbed down the ladder from the loft. Moonlight leaked through the old wall boards, throwing stripes of light across the barn floor where Daniel sat lacing his sneakers. A sudden thud from one of the stalls made him jump, but it was just Nate, the Crowleys’ horse, shifting in his sleep.
    The big sliding door gave a groan as Daniel pushed it open a few careful inches. He considered lighting the lantern that hung from a nail, but there was no need, with the bright half-moon in a cloudless sky. Anyway, why alertany intruders who might be out there? Unlikely, he thought, but
something
had silenced the crickets.
    He peered across the stretch of broken ground at his family’s house, its roof gray-silver in the strange light. How quiet was too quiet?
    He stepped out. The moon shone like a spotlight, frosting the tops of trees and throwing their undersides to blackness. Daniel slid into the shadows, becoming a shadow himself.
    Nothing.
    Something in the nothing. He held his breath, the better to hear, but the only sound was his heart bashing away in his chest.
    A sudden scuttle of leaves behind him made the hairs rise on the back of his neck. The next moment, a hand grabbed his shoulder, and he let out a strangled cry.
    “Shh!” hissed a voice.
    His eyes began to adjust. “You!”
    “Who did you think?” whispered Emily.
    The girl, as she emerged more