The Pact - 1. The Pact

The Pact

“Mommy, why are there so many spiders outside the house?”

Meredith Jones yanked the kitchen curtains shut, steeping the room in uneasy twilight. “It’s okay, sweetie. They won’t hurt us.”

Six-year-old Mary wasn’t convinced. “But they’re scary. And they look all funny with their eyes like that.”

“That’s the way spiders look around here,” Meredith answered, trying to keep her voice calm.

“But back in Virginia spiders were real small. And their eyes didn’t shine.”

“This isn’t Virginia,” Meredith snapped. Then she caught herself and continued after a long, shaky breath. “We’re explorers, remember? The land out west is wild, but it’s beautiful, and we get to choose where we live. That’s why Daddy brought us here in the first place. Which of your friends back in Virginia can say that they have an entire forest to themselves?”

“No one,” Mary conceded in a small voice. She twirled a finger around a lock of her long, golden hair.

“You see? Now why don’t you go check on little George. You know he gets fussy when he wakes from a nap.”

“Yes, Mommy,” Mary answered. She stood up from the kitchen table, the hem of her long dress grazing the rough wooden planking that was the floor. She made as if to go, but then glanced nervously at the covered window. She frowned, looking down. “I hate it here.”

Meredith was taken aback. “What did you say?”

“I hate it here!” Mary exploded, her small hands bunched into fists. “I hate being a settler, I hate the forest, I hate that all my friends are back in Virginia, and I miss Daddy!” her outburst became tearful all of a sudden, and Meredith felt a stab of pain in her chest. “I miss Daddy,” Mary said quietly. Slow tears rolled down her dusty cheeks.

Meredith felt like crying as well, but she reminded herself that now she had to be strong for her children. She stepped away from the table, knelt in front of Mary, and hugged her tight. “Daddy is with God now, Mary. You know that. He’s in heaven, watching over us.”

Mary sniffled. “I know. I’m sorry, Mommy.”

“It’s okay. Go check on little George, all right? I have to prepare dinner.”

Mary nodded and walked over to the only other room that made up their modest cabin. Meredith watched her pick up George from his crib and sit down with him next to the fireplace, rocking him back and forth.

The walls around the cabin groaned, as if struggling under some immense weight. Even though she didn’t want to, Meredith found herself looking at the curtains that covered the window, seeing the faint shadows that scurried across them, and the hints of clusters of red, glowing eyes. Meredith shuddered, and reached for her lukewarm cup of tea with shaking hands.

It’s for the best, she tried to tell herself. It’s the only way.

But now that the time was here, now that the devil spiders were cocooning her house in their impregnable, metallic web, all she knew was naked fear.

The Pact is sealed, the insidious thoughts in her memory reminded her. And the Sabbath is tonight.

***

Meredith had been set along the path to her unspeakable pact the day her husband Harry had been murdered.

They weren’t the only ones to have laid claim to the property on the gentle hillside overlooking the forest, but at first it had not been a problem. There was plenty of room for everyone, Harry had used to say, and one only needed to look out the window to see he was right. Very few settlers had come so far West, following the tracks of brave pioneers that had declared the land rich, gentle, and unbelievably beautiful. It was a promise that had convinced Harry to move out into the wilderness to carve out a better future for himself and his children, and Meredith had followed him like a dutiful wife, supporting him every step of the way.

Ironically, it wasn’t the hard trial of the first winter or the dangers of the wilderness that had first threatened their dream of a new life out West, but the people that had settled nearby. Paul Smith, a trapper from the north, had decided that there was gold to be found somewhere on the hillside, judging from a couple of shiny nuggets he had found in the forest stream below. He had originally settled next to the river, and at first he had been a welcome neighbor. He lived with his two brothers there, and the three men had given Harry invaluable aid when he had first erected their cabin. In return, Harry would help them when they went out hunting, and Meredith would sometimes go down to the riverside shack to share the word of the Lord with them.

It hadn’t taken many visits for Meredith to loathe visiting that unkempt, smelly shack. Although at first discrete, the three brothers’ lustful gazes whenever they looked at her were impossible to miss, and soon she began making up excuses not to go there, until her visits stopped altogether. To her dismay, though, the Smith brothers would often come up to see Harry and ask him for advice or get him to read and write letters for them. The brothers were obsessed with finding gold, and when their haphazard testing yielded a sizeable nugget on the hillside not far from Meredith’s home, things turned ugly. Paul Smith in particular claimed that, because he had been there first, he had the right to pick whichever plot of land he wanted as his property.

Harry had argued those claims, and even gone so far as to travel all the way to Oakwood, two hundred miles away, to get a document which certified his claim to the land around his cabin. He had returned from that trip, triumphant, and gone to show the brothers the proof of his ownership.

He never returned from that visit.

Meredith had waited, and waited, but when her husband did not come home that night she knew that something was wrong. The next day, Paul Smith had begun to dig a mine shaft not half a mile away from the cabin, and Meredith had known that her husband was dead.

It was late October by then, and Meredith had realized with increasing horror that she and her two children were trapped. The Smith brothers had taken Harry’s horse, and without it she had no hope of reaching Oakwood in the fickle and ruthless autumn weather, not on foot and carrying a baby. The forest around her turned golden and orange and red, but Meredith was blind to its beauty. She began to fear the nights, when she would hear noises right outside the cabin. In the mornings the brothers would come closer every day, looking at her with hungry eyes which made her shiver. She knew it was just a matter of time before they decided to finally kick her door down and –

Praying had been no use, and so five days after she had last seen her husband alive, Meredith decided to risk it all and find help. She abandoned most of their scant, handmade possessions in the cabin, slung little George across her back in a bundle, and walked out of the cabin with Mary right as dawn was breaking, hoping to escape before the brothers realized she was missing.

She knew she had failed before midday had come.

The forest around her and Mary was wild and threatening, shuddering with frigid gusts of merciless wind and intermittent, icy drizzle. George began to cry and wouldn’t stop, and after a while Mary had said that she couldn’t keep on walking. By Meredith’s estimate, they hadn’t even gone three miles - and help was hundreds of miles away.

Defeated, shivering, and afraid, Meredith had decided to turn back. The wilderness around her was more savage than she remembered. As she made her way slowly through the woods, adjusting her pace to Mary’s tired shuffling, she noticed that the trees around her looked older, more gnarled. They grew further spaced apart, but their branches reached down almost to the ground in places, finger-like, entwining with one another like an arthritic mesh that blocked the meager sunlight.

Meredith was confused. She knew the area around the cabin quite well, but she had never seen this ancient section of the forest. She urged Mary to walk faster, keeping whatever she could see of the sun to her left, knowing she would come to the hillside very soon. She walked for hours with her children in tow.

The forest around her never changed.

Afternoon gave way to dusk, and Meredith’s fear turned into panic. She was lost, hopelessly confused in the wilds, and with night coming she could very well freeze to death along with her children. She tried not to cry, but she knew that it was over. She had failed, first as a wife, failing to protect her husband or warn him of danger. Then as a mother, dragging her children out to die in the wild like this. And also as a believer, because in that moment of black hopelessness, the certainty of her faith cracked like ice in spring and she found no solace in the promises of priests.

“Please help me,” she had whispered in the threatening twilight, when Mary had finally given up on walking and announced she couldn’t go anymore. “Anyone, out there. Please help me.”

The red glow had come like the answer of the devil to her twisted prayer, flickering among the tree trunks like strange fairy light. Shocked beyond words, Meredith had watched as it grew stronger, outlining the wicked canopy of trees above, beckoning. It appeared to be a couple hundred yards away, and she knew that she had to go there.

She made Mary wait with little George in the hollow of an ancient tree, and then she went to see who or what was beckoning her to come.

She arrived to the clearing in the forest surprisingly quickly, almost as if her footsteps were taking her further than she expected, bending space to hasten her arrival. She stopped at a circular crater in the trees, perhaps twice as wide as her own cabin, and when she looked up she saw that the sky overhead appeared strange, the shifting, threatening clouds dipped in the same red glow that came from the pagan symbol branded on the forest floor.

The symbol looked as if made with fire, but there were no flames playing on its glowing surface and there was no heat coming from it as Meredith inspected it fearfully. It resembled a single line twisting and bending in impossible curves, flat yet appearing three-dimensional, closing in on itself like the mythical Ouroboros. With a faint shudder, Meredith realized that she had seen this symbol before, carved in the trunks of some of the oldest trees in the forgotten wilderness she had crossed with her husband to come to this place.

A memory came to her, sharp with the intensity of awakened fear. Last year, in the dead calm of the winter solstice, she had seen someone furtively watching her cabin from the forest below the gentle hillside slope. Harry had gone out to chop wood in the opposite direction, and Meredith had quickly shut the door and bolted it against the unseen stranger. At first, she had thought it was one of the Smith brothers, but then the figure had come out into the open and she had seen it was a native woman.

The woman was old, her skin leathery and sunburnt. She wore what appeared to be a simple buckskin tunic, her feet bare despite the freezing cold, her hair found in a long queue which reached below her waist. She had simply stood there, unmindful of the falling snow, looking up at the cabin, and Meredith had had the distinct impression that she was watched her. Remembering some of the horrifying tales that she had heard from other settlers on her way here, Meredith reached for something that could be used as a weapon in case the native woman attacked her. She rummaged through the kitchen and settled on her biggest knife, but by the time she had rushed back to the window to check, the woman had disappeared.

She had told Harry when he came back, and he had checked, but he said that aside from a strange mark in the snow, there were no footsteps or anything that might indicate that a person had been there. Curious, Meredith had been unable to resist the temptation of going out to see what this strange mark was. Harry was right: there were no footsteps but theirs in the fresh snow, but someone or something had carved a twisting line on the frozen ground itself, as if drawing with a stencil of fire. Meredith had quickly crossed herself and left the scene, praying that a storm would come to erase that obscene pagan mark from the ground below her home. She had managed not to think about it again at all.

Until today.

Meredith looked at the glowing red line etched on the hardpacked forest floor before her and shiver with growing fear. She was almost not surprised when she lifted her eyes and saw the native woman standing on the opposite edge of the clearing, watching her with irises of a shocking, purest white.

A needle of worry sliced through her thoughts.

My children.

“They are safe,” the woman said, her voice rich and sonorous. She walked forward until she was standing in the middle of the clearing, the red luminescence from the ground dancing on her wrinkled, ancient face. “Father Tree looks over them.”

Meredith gasped. She had not spoken her thoughts aloud, yet the woman had answered.

“You… You speak my language?” Meredith managed at last.

The old woman shook her head. “I speak the language of the People. But on this night, all languages are the same. Understanding flows through the forest.”

Fear and mistrust tugged at Meredith’s thoughts, reminding her that the Sabbath was the night when witches held more power, urging her to leave immediately and not look back. But her need was too great.

“Please, please help me,” Meredith said, walking closer to the woman. “I fear for my life, and that of my children. My neighbors –“

“Killed your husband,” the woman finished. “Brother Hawk saw. His body lies half buried in the abandoned mine.”

Meredith clutched the silver crucifix around her neck. She had suspected, had known it was all but certain, but to hear it said aloud…

“Lord Almighty,” Meredith whispered. “What will I do?”

There was a whisper then, a stirring through the branches of the forest, and Meredith realized with a little start that she did not feel the cold of the autumn dusk anymore. The shadows around her lengthened and the red glow on the ground appeared to grow in intensity. Looking around fearfully, Meredith thought she saw hints of glowing eyes among the shadows, shapes big and small hiding just out of sight.

“Do not be afraid,” the old woman said, and Meredith look back into her mesmerizing white eyes. They were like the snow, she now saw. Bright and pure and impossibly cold. “I was a mother, too, once. I know what awaits you should the three men find you, and I also know that without you, your children will be lost. For these reasons, I have come to offer help.”

Meredith thought she had heard wrong. Then gratitude banished suspicion and reason.

“Oh, thank you! Thank you. May God bless you. If you could take me back to your village, perhaps, or show me the way to Oakwood…”

“I do not have a village, and only during this night can I help.”

“But… How?”

The ghost of a smile played itself on the lined features of the woman. “I can destroy that which threatens you, if you will consent to a Pact.”

Meredith’s spirits sank. The woman was insane. It was the only conclusion Meredith could reach, and she made as if to go.

Her feet would not obey her. She was rooted to the ground.

“I need your answer first,” the strange woman said quietly. “Before that, you cannot go.”

Raw panic coursed through Meredith’s veins, but no matter how hard she tried to move, her body would not respond. The woman was a demon, she realized. Or a witch. The devil had sent her to tempt her in her moment of weakness, and now she was trapped in her net. Helpless.

“Not helpless,” the woman told her, reading her thoughts once more. “Though it is curious that you have thought about a net. I know now who can best help you. I need your answer first, however. Do you accept my help?”

“Will… will it save my children?” Meredith asked, her voice trembling.

“Your life and that of your children will be saved. I swear.”

“Then I accept.”

“I have not yet told you the price for this help. Once the Pact is sealed, it cannot be broken.”

Meredith looked up at the sky. Night was coming already, and with it, deadly cold.

“It does not matter. I accept.”

The ancient woman watched her for a long moment, and then she nodded. “So be it. Sister Spider, come.”

There was a rustling in the branches overhead, and several gold and red leaves floated slowly down to the ground in the wake of a large shape disturbing. Meredith watched, spellbound, as the shadows above the largest tree solidified, acquiring form, becoming slender many-jointed legs, a bulbous abdomen, and a fanged head adorned by a cluster of glowing red eyes.

The spider was as big as a horse, and yet it dropped down to the ground with barely a whisper, its body hanging for a moment on a slender filament of web with a metallic sheen.

As soon as all of its eight legs touched the ground, the spider scurried with breathtaking speed until it was standing next to the ancient woman. The tips of her fangs glistened, and Meredith could not look away from her many eyes. She felt something coming from the spider, a savage sort of awareness, cold like a predator’s gaze.

“Sister Spider, will you help this pale woman overcome the danger that threatens her and her young?”

The spider hissed, and Meredith was horrified to realize that she understood the meaning behind the hideous sound. The spider agreed.

“Pale woman, do you agree to this Pact?”

Meredith wanted to say no. But she knew she had to be strong now, for her children. “I agree.”

“Extend your hand,” the native woman instructed.

Meredith obeyed, reaching out with her right hand, palm up. Quick as lightning, the spider pounced on it, skewering Meredith’s palm with the tip of one of her fangs. Meredith cried out in pain. It felt as if searing acid had been poured on her flesh, but just as the sensation threaten to become unbearable, it stopped. Her hand grew numb even as the giant spider retreated, and Meredith saw how the pinprick on her palm began to glow red.

“The Pact is sealed,” the elderly woman announced. “You may go home now. Do not go out until two days have passed. Then, your enemies will have been destroyed.”

Meredith nodded, watching the big spider seem to melt in the long shadows at the edge of the clearing. The red luminescence on the ground faded until it, too, disappeared entirely. The mark on the forest floor remained as a scorched remnant, though, scarcely visible in the fading light of twilight.

“Until we meet again,” the ancient woman told Meredith. Then there was a gust of wind, and she was gone.

“Mommy?” Meredith heard Mary calling. “Mommy? Where are you?”

“Over here, sweetie,” Meredith said. She hurried back, away from that cursed clearing, and was overjoyed to find both Mary and little George safe in the hollow of the tree where she had left them.

“It’s getting dark, Mommy.”

“I know. Let us go home.”

***

Meredith looked at the flickering candlelight on the kitchen table and tried to convince herself to start making dinner. From outside, though, she heard the soft scurrying of spider legs around her home and she was afraid.

That night she did not sleep, and she kept the fireplace lit at every moment just in case one of the hellish animals tried to crawl in through the chimney. They had not bothered her, though, and had it not been for the brief glimpses of glowing eyes through the cracks of the shuttered windows, she could have almost believed she wasn’t surrounded by the creatures.

When dawn came, it brought the smell of smoke with it.

“Is something burning, Mommy?” Mary asked right after waking up.

“No, sweetie.”

“Then why does it smell like smoke?”

“I don’t know.”

“I need to go pee-pee. Can I go out?”

“No!” Meredith shouted. Mary gasped in fear. “I’m sorry. We’re not going out today. We are camping inside the cabin.”

“Like it’s wintertime?”

“Exactly. You like wintertime, don’t you?”

“Yes! Can we read stories?”

Meredith looked at her shuttered windows, thinking she could see the faint glow of dancing flames outside her house. “Yes. We can read stories.”

Meredith had tried to read with a loud and clear voice, but she hadn’t been able to drown out the sound of things burning outside, the faint but persistent stench of smoke, and once the abominable cries of something that could only be a man dying in purest agony. George began to cry and wouldn’t stop, and Mary was visibly afraid, although she didn’t say anything. Meredith emulated her young daughter. Maybe if they pretended that nothing was happening outside, it wouldn’t reach them.

She took out the Bible after they ran out of stories in Mary’s children’s book, but although Meredith tried to find solace in the holy word, she could only concentrate on the faint scratching and crackling that could be heard outside her home. It was dark inside, like in the deepest winter days, and only the flickering flames in the fireplace illuminated the space. It was hard to measure the passage of time with nothing to guide her, but Meredith guessed that night had fallen when her exhaustion got the better of her and she laid down to rest beside her children.

The second day was even more horrible than the last because of its silence. Nothing moved outside the cabin, and nothing could be heard, but Meredith remembered that the old woman had said not to leave the house for two days, and so they remained sequestered inside despite Mary’s protests.

Meredith had almost let her guard down when the pounding at their door made both her and Mary scream.

There was no mistaking it this time. It was the ragged, panic-laced voice of Paul Smith.

“Mrs. Jones! For the love of God, open! They’re coming – NO!”

There was a sound like something heavy being lifted from the ground, a sickening crunch and an inhuman deathrattle. Almost immediately, the pounding at the door resumed. When there was no answer, Paul must have decided to throw himself at the door, because the entire cabin shook. Meredith gathered her children to her, a kitchen knife in her hand, but surprisingly the door held.

“Open! Please!”

Something landed on the roof of the house just then, something large enough to make it tremble. Paul’s mad knocking ceased immediately.

“It’s here,” he whimpered. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

There was a loud thud on the ground, a panicky yell and the sudden crush of something heavy hitting the cabin wall. Meredith could not block out the sound of running footsteps, away from her home, or the strange skittering that followed them. A few seconds later, a gurgled, horrible scream was the last she heard of Paul Smith.

Mary clung to her, crying softly, all through the night. Meredith prayed every minute of it, not daring to fall asleep, wishing for the nightmarish wait to be over, for the second day to pass so she could leave her home. In the crawling dark hours, it seemed the morning would never come. Her fears chased themselves in circles and became bigger, more terrible versions of themselves. She repented from every sin she had ever committed, and the nagging terror of realizing she had made a deal with the devil’s envoy whispered terrible things to her fevered mind in the dark.

Morning came, however. Birdsong reached Meredith’s ears. It took her a long time to muster up the courage to take down the boards blocking her doorway. When she had finally done it, she stood for a long time with her hand on the door. Mary and George were sleeping peacefully still.

Meredith took a long, deep breath, and stepped outside.

The smell of smoke out here was much stronger, and she soon saw why. The entire lower slope of the hillside had been burned away as if a savage fire had passed through the region. No fire Meredith had seen had left a perfectly circular mark in its wake, though. The desolation was centered around the spot where the Smith brothers’ shack had used to stand.

Looking back at her own home, Meredith gasped. It was covered entirely in metallic threads of the spiderweb she had seen through the window, but she thanked the Lord that no strange spiders were anywhere to be seen. A strange lump around the side of the house caught her attention, though. Unwilling, yet knowing she had to, she walked closer to investigate.

When she saw the three corpses cocooned in metallic spiderweb, she screamed. Two of them were badly burned, their features unrecognizable. The third one, however, was what remained of Paul Smith. He looked like a grotesque Egyptian mummy, dessicated, most of his body encased in the horrifying web. His face had been frozen in a rictus of terror, and a mark had been branded on his forehead. It was the same looping symbol that Meredith had seen glowing in the forest clearing.

Trembling, Meredith walked away from the horrifying spectacle, trying not to think about the screams she had heard the previous two days. How had the brothers died, exactly? Who or what had done this?

She stepped back into her cabin and shut the door behind her, breathing fast, trying not to panic.

It was only when her eyes adjusted to the dark inside that she realized she wasn’t alone in there.

The ancient woman was sitting on her bed, caressing the golden locks on Mary’s head. Little George had been put in his crib, and it was swaying softly from side to side, moved by an unseen hand.

The woman looked up at Meredith and said something in a strange, musical language. Then she gestured all around her, at Meredith, and extended her hand, palm upwards. Even though the words were alien to her, the ghost of the woman’s meaning floated in Meredith’s thoughts.

Our end of the Pact is complete.

“Why are you here?” Meredith asked, choking back a scream. She knew she should rush forward and protect her children, but somehow she could feel that they were… safe. The old woman would not hurt them. It had been part of the Pact.

You must come with me, now. To fulfill your end.

“Come with you? Where? What about my children?”

They will come with us. And they will be safe. The Forest will protect us until we reach the Elder Tree.

“What will I do there?”

The woman looked away from her, staring with her eyes of snow into the distance, almost as if she could see through the walls of the cabin.

They come like a tide, but even the mightiest river may be swerved if its course is altered at the source.

“I don’t understand.”

The old woman looked back at her, and suddenly there were images flashing through Meredith’s mind, trees being cut down, animals being hunted for their pelts only, their meat left out to rot. Ancient land was taken and forcefully turned into farms, settlements were erected with the husks of dead trees, and the tide of pale people never stopped.

Meredith saw natives fighting with bow and arrow, killed instantly by sticks of thunder. There were massacres. There was fear. And above all else, the land mourned for its lost balance.

Even now, our power wanes, the woman explained. You must come with me and teach us. Show us how to free the land from those who come from beyond the sea.

“But… I’m not a fighter. I cannot help you.”

The Elder Tree will see into your memories. He will turn them into weapons if need be. He might change you, as well. He can make you stronger than a bear, faster than swooping hawk. You will be silent like a hunting owl, and fierce like a cornered she-wolf.

You cannot refuse.

Meredith’s palm began to burn, and she saw that the stab mark from the spider was glowing again, reminding her of her binding promise.

“My children…”

They will be raised among the People. They will be safe.

“What is your name?” Meredith asked at last.

The old woman smiled. I am called Willow.

Meredith took a last look at her cabin. She could not survive alone out in the woods with two young children. Back in Oakwood, the most she could hope for was to become a servant in a rich household, but with no references to her name it would be next to impossible.

She could live in poverty, break the Pact… but then she remembered the unspeakable fate of the Smith brothers, and she knew that this was a promise that could not be broken.

She stepped forward and offered her hand to Willow. The old woman took it in both of hers, and the second Meredith touched her, she felt a surge of warmth and understanding flow through her. She caught the faintest hint of unawareness that bordered on divine communion with everything around her: the trees, the animals, the water and the earth itself.

Will you come with me?

“I will.”