Goldeline by Jimmy Cajoleas (i read books txt) 📕

woods I know. These are not my safe places. Soon we’re deep enough into the woods that I can’t see the road anymore. We’re coming close to lost.

EIGHT

I keep the knife to Tommy’s throat. He blubbers, he cries, but he doesn’t fight me. It’s like he knows this is his part.

“Please let me go,” he says quietly.

“I can’t. They’ll kill me.”

“I know,” he says. “Will you let me go when we’re safe?”

“Yes, Tommy. I won’t keep you out in the woods with me forever.”

But the second I say that my heart clenches up and I realize I don’t want him to leave. I push the knife closer to his throat, as if to keep him from running away from me right now.

“You’re hurting me,” he says.

“Sorry,” I say, and ease off a little. I push the knife into his back just hard enough for him to feel it but soft enough not to cut him. Just a little poke to keep some fear in him, to let him know that if he tries to run I got this waiting for him.

We walk until it’s a fight to keep my legs moving. It’s raining and I’m lost and I’m tired and I don’t know how much farther I can go. Tommy’s dragging. He kept stumbling into the knife so I don’t hold it against him anymore, I don’t want him to trip and hurt himself on it. For a while I keep the knife out, walking behind him, barking at him to pick up the pace. Then I just lead and he still follows me. He’s as cold and wet and scared as I am. Sometimes I think I hear the Preacher or some of the Townie men behind us, but then it could be thunder, it could be a deer, it could be nothing at all.

Soon we hit a trail. This is a good sign, I just know it. Because Gruff told me something else about this forest too, a little fact I’m hoping the Preacher doesn’t pick up on. Moon Haven lies just on the other side of these woods. At least, it does in all the stories Gruff told me. He said to take the long road around them, sure, that to cut through these woods was about the worst idea anybody could think of. But we don’t have any other choice. Besides, I’d walk through just about anything to get back to Gruff. I just hope I listened right, that I got it all straight in my head. I hope I’m not leading me and Tommy into something even more horrible.

It rains hard now, the tree leaves dumping their water on us. I’m praying to Momma to save us, I’m praying for bread and not a stone, a fish and not a snake. My hair is wet in my face, Tommy’s momma’s dress is heavy and too big, sagging off me, leaving my shoulders naked to the cold. The hem is blackened by mud. My bare feet bleed.

Suddenly the path vanishes and I slip and fall face-first right at the mouth of a gorge, a deep one, dark and open like a gnarl-toothed smile. The knife goes sailing down and disappears. I begin to slip forward, my arms dangling into the black, my stomach sliding over the edge. I am going to fall. I’m going to fall and die forever.

Hands grasp my foot. I’m dragged backward, away from the hole, until my hands touch mud and wet leaves and I’m safe. I turn around and it’s Tommy, still holding me by my foot. He sits down, shaking.

“I thought you were gonna die,” he says.

We huddle close when we walk now. Tommy doesn’t try to leave, even though I don’t have a knife anymore. We walk until we see a hill, just a mound like a pimple sticking up from the earth, steep and sudden, and from the top of it smoke rises. Stuck in the middle of the hill is a door a little taller than me with a big metal bolt on it.

“We shouldn’t go in here,” I say. “We should keep going.”

“Where to?” says Tommy. “We’re lost. There might not be anywhere else.”

He’s shivering. I’m scared he’ll get sick. Sometimes people would bring their sick kids to Momma and she would fix them with her magic. She was good at it, she could fix things way better than the doctor in town and everybody knew it. Sometimes, though, when they were shaking and shivering, there wasn’t anything anyone could do but cry while they died. I don’t ever want Tommy to die.

But then in the distance I see torches, hear the sounds of men in the forest. It’s the Preacher. He braved the bad woods, same as I did, and now he’s come for me. There’s nowhere to run to. The lights are on all sides of us. My stomach tightens up and I can hear his voice in my ears, Come to me, Goldeline, come to me, until he’s everywhere and all around me.

“What’s wrong?” says Tommy.

“Don’t you hear him?” I say. “Can’t you see the torches?”

Tommy just stares at me like I’m going crazy. But I can hear the Preacher coming. I can feel him like a spider crawling across my neck. My eyes see spots and I’m breathing faster and faster and I’m scared, I’m so scared I might pass out, and then he’ll find me for sure and I can’t take it, I can’t let him have me.

I run to the door and bang on it.

“Please,” I call, “please let me in.”

I bang the door harder, I hit it again and again. I beat the door with my fists and I kick and punch it and my fingers are bleeding and I scream and Momma please Momma please let me in.

The door swings open and I fall in on my face. Leaning not a foot over me is a short man, grizzled and crack-toothed, wearing a stained white shirt