The Pond That Wasn't There

Chapter Eight

Rosemary's hair danced like flickering fire as Bailey felt the air cool around them. The forest had grown darker now, the trees rooted closer together, their shroud dense and consuming, and ensnaring. This place was not the same as the one they entered. It was darker, scarier, and altogether a different place entirely, changed from the thing it was before their very eyes, in a single instant.  

            Night was falling too, as they went, the stars pricking the sky between the gaps in the canopy with soft, faint glimmers, their glow distant and phantom and vague.

            Bailey looked upwards, and wondered what was up there. He'd wondered the same thing back home, on the other side of the pond, but he wasn't sure if this was the same sky. Were there other skies, he asked himself. Or was his the only one? Then Bailey felt his skin go cold and prickled with little bumps as he thought of something terrible and disturbing...What if he was looking up at himself, through another dimension of space and time and the pond had broken all laws of physics and everything he knew...

            "Watch yourself, Bailey," he heard Rosemary call from ahead, breaking his train of thought. "The rootsnarl are plenty and terribly hungry down here. They'll snatch your foot and won't let go."

            Bailey didn't want his foot snatched, and his eyes widened and he looked down at the intertwining roots that looked oddly like big dark snakes, entangling overtop each other like great horsehair ropes or the hose back home. They looked still as glass now, but he was worried they would spring to life with a single slip of his foot. He just knew it.

            "What if they get me?" he asked.

            Rosemary giggled. "Then things must be done, and if you're careful you may have to tickle them. The only way to get them off you, really. Might make your hands all slimy and such, but it'll get them off. Don't you worry."

            Bailey didn't want to tickle a rootsnarl, even if it meant he could have his foot back, so he watched the ground as he went, and he suddenly felt very small and very lost. He looked up, remembering the sky, and his fears rushed back into his mind again.  

            It worried him, not knowing where he was. He felt lost, trapped, so far away from the place he'd come to call home, but wasn't really. He felt even farther away from his old home, his real home. It seemed no more than a memory upon his mind, now, and that hurt him so, down to his heart of hearts.

            "Rosemary," he called, trying to keep up. As the forest grew darker and colder and denser, it proved harder to navigate, harder to tell where he was. "Slow down. Please."

            But she didn't seem to hear him, not at first. She was too far ahead, leaving his request unanswered and lonely in the openness of the space.

            She didn't answer, no, not until they passed the very rim of the forest, and stood on the edge of a great dell in the earth, deep and old-looking. The trees about them had disappeared, vanished much like the pond, and with it, the looming threat of the rootsnarl, forgotten as though it had never been there, replaced by a great and open landscape. It stretched far and wide, bathed in fresh, white moonlight, the twilit sky cloaked in the darkest dark, the stars vibrant and lurid amongst the black. There were mountains, tall and ominous and jagged leagues off, capped in snow, and long black clouds that ran across their tors and small little hills that marched before them. Bailey was positive this wasn't England. He was sure of it, a million times sure. But where were they?

            "This is where she's been taken, sure as stone, it is," said Rosemary softly, breathing long, intense breathes. "I can feel her power in the earth, I can. Right through my boots."