The Waking Forest Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Alyssa Wees

  Cover art copyright © 2019 by Leo Nickolls

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wees, Alyssa, author.

  Title: The waking forest / Alyssa Wees.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, [2019] | Summary: “When the lives of a girl, who has terrifying visions, and a witch, who grants wishes to children in the woods, collide in the most unexpected of ways, a dark, magical truth threatens to doom them both”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018022935 (print) | LCCN 2018029205 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-525-58118-5 (el) | ISBN 978-0-525-58116-1 (hc)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Magic—Fiction. | Witches—Fiction. | Wishes—Fiction. | Sisters—Fiction. | Foxes—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.W4288 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.W4288 Wak 2019 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780525581185

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1: In the Woods

  Chapter 2: In the Dark

  Chapter 3: In the Woods

  Chapter 4: In the Dark

  Chapter 5: In the Woods

  Chapter 6: In the Dark

  Chapter 7: In the Woods

  Chapter 8: In the Dark

  Chapter 9: In the Woods

  Chapter 10: In the Dark

  Chapter 11: In the Woods

  Chapter 12: In the Dark

  Chapter 13: In the Woods

  Chapter 14: In the Dark

  Chapter 15: In the Woods

  Chapter 16: In the Dark

  Chapter 17: In the Woods

  Chapter 18: In the Dark

  Part Two

  Chapter 19: In the Kingdom

  Chapter 20: In the Kingdom

  Chapter 21: In the Kingdom

  Chapter 22: In the Kingdom

  Chapter 23: In the Kingdom

  Chapter 24: In the Kingdom

  Chapter 25: In the Woods

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Mama, a good witch

  Let’s start with the Witch in the Woods.

  Only children could find her, the Witch, led by foxes faintly glowing in the darkness between sleeping and waking. Together they traveled through dreamland until they came to an archway like an eye half open, big enough only to crawl through.

  Beneath the stars, the moon a bouquet of blue-violet bruises, the Witch lived in a castle with turrets of unnaturally thick tree trunks and broad walls of entwined branches and leaves, the battlements formed by the oversize molars of some unfathomable animal. The crisscrossed bones of the portcullis gleamed in the milky midnight light as the drawbridge of melded cloven hooves lowered over a rushing red river.

  At the end of a winding hallway illuminated by row upon row of skeleton-hand sconces, each holding a steady flame that burned without the aid of wick or wax or wood, the Witch sat in a seat carved from a canine tooth nearly twice her height, situated at the very center of the castle in a wide, round room with no ceiling, the walls stretching up, up, up and curving inward, just slightly. The foxes could see her, every facet and feature, all at once, a full picture. They grinned and curled up beside her bare feet, licking their paws and waiting and watching.

  A single fox with orange fur so dark it was almost red perched on the arm of her throne, watching now as a troop of bright-eyed foxes, trailed by a girl and a boy with their arms intertwined, eagerly approached the inimitable Witch.

  The children could focus only on one small piece of her at a time: lips glossed in silver starlight, onyx eyes lined with gold glitter, curling black hair threaded with pearls. Kneecaps hard as diamonds, just visible beneath the hem of her scarlet dress; thin hands and long fingers, nails short and bitten. Smooth skin stretched taut over the sticks and bulbs of her bones, slick and shining with an eternal, unbreakable fever.

  As the pair came closer, the Witch saw that these were not quite her usual visitors. The girl was not a child. She had seen sixteen summers, or perhaps seventeen, nearly the same number as the Witch herself. The girl had long, light hair, and blue eyes with lashes so fair, they could hardly be seen. She was a spill of sunshine in the shape of a girl, golden and firm, and she walked as if afraid she might fall right through the floor, every step delicate, tentative.

  The boy was even older than the girl and was surely her brother, for though they looked nothing alike, there seemed to be a kind of magnetic trust that kept them tethered side by side. He had an angular face with lips red as wine, hair black as soot, flesh paler than a ghost moon at high noon. There were gashes on the backs of his hands, old ones and new ones, crossing in all directions, shallow ones over deep gouges, scabbed over and reopened.

  The Witch curled her fingers against the arms of her throne, not quite fists—but almost. She scratched the slick ivory surface, the skirl of nail against tooth echoing around the chamber. The red-furred fox at her side lifted its head and growled. She had never growled at any of the children before.

  When the Witch spoke, her voice was cream burnt at the edges, unspooling from her long dark throat like twisted obsidian silk.

  “I am the Witch of Wishes,” she said. “What would you ask of me?”

  The children knew exactly what to ask for, always, and that was why only they could find her. But these two were much older than those little ones, and so not content to merely receive their wish and be on their way.

  “What are you?” breathed the girl, staring squarely at the Witch while her brother beside her smiled, lips pressed together as if he already knew the answer. But the longer he stood there gazing at the Witch’s castle, the more his smile hardened into a grimace. He looked at the snapping foxes and the lopsided stars and the brambly walls, and finally back at the Witch.

  “What is this place?” he asked. “Where are we?”

  The Witch smiled, her maw growing wider, so no one would ever guess how her atoms were held together by an unheard howl. Her world, her castle—it had not wanted to be created. It had been pulled out of her sleeping heart, and it had hurt. The pain had never faded, a perpetual poison with no known antidote. But she could not, would not collapse; her world must go on.

  And even as she grinned, she did not stop scraping her throne, peeling enamel instead of her own skin, the itch inflaming her backward-beating heart.

  “What would you ask of me?” she said again.

  The girl grabbed her wri
nkled skirt and curtsied, a movement quick and clean, her cream-curls bouncing around her shoulders.

  “I wish to stay here with you,” said the girl in a rush. “I want to grant wishes to those who need them most. I want always to live in a dream.”

  The Witch hesitated; no visitor had ever asked something like this of her before. It was the one wish she knew she should not grant—this world was her own, and she must live here alone. For the girl this was only a resting place, a sighing place, its gate open to her once and then never again. To stay would be to sleep, neither dead nor alive, on and on until the end of time.

  No, the Witch decided, she would not grant the girl’s wish.

  But the girl did not have to know that.

  Nestled in the crimson soil of the Witch’s heart bloomed an amaranthine rose with petals of velvety blood and a stem of sturdy bone spotted with thorns of pointed incisors, shivering in time with her pulse. Knowing another would burgeon in its place, she reached inside, tearing through skin and muscle and bone, and plucked a pointed petal, the same as she did for every child who came and told her their wishes. For each petal was the same in size and shape, but their flavors were unique, endless essences for endless wishes: bubble gum for a baby brother, lavender and honey to never go hungry, a cinnamon stick to make a new friend, spiced apple for a pet dragon invisible to all but the wisher, a sour smear of bile for revenge on the schoolyard bully, mint chocolate chip for a sick grandmother to get better.

  But the Witch knew that this particular petal would only dissolve into periwinkle dust that tasted of salt and blood and rust—an empty promise, a placeholder. With callused fingertips, the Witch brushed the girl’s soft palm as she presented the petal. She and the boy both watched as the girl placed it on her tongue and swallowed.

  “Now, come closer, wishful one,” said the Witch when the petal was gone. “What do you offer me in return?”

  The girl checked her pockets, but they were empty. For a moment she looked up at the Witch, panicked, but it was not in coins that the Witch traded favors. What use had she for money? No, the Witch dealt in a different kind of currency: footprints and freckles and blisters about to burst; contusions and scrapes, scratches and slashes and faded bronze scars; warts and welts and wisdom teeth still submerged in pliant pink gums; spider bites and sheets of gooseflesh and drops of hot blood pricked fresh from quivering fingertips; loose eyelashes and curled toenails and even entire shadows. The children gave what they could. And the Witch accepted all of it, dispossessing them of the things they thought they would not miss. She heaped their pain upon her altar in the courtyard of her tooth-and-tree castle, a clean stone slab in a shaded glade. Someday, surely, their amassed agonies would outmatch her own.

  “A lock of your hair will do just fine,” said the Witch, before uttering a short spell and producing a knife out of the air. She gave it to the girl, who paused only a second before taking the glimmering blade and shearing a long strand from the back of her head. The dagger melted away to nothing in the girl’s hand as she passed the curl to the Witch.

  Without moving her head, the Witch turned her eyes sideways to the boy. Above the chamber, clouds like broken bones jutting through flesh scraped their way across the sky. She waited.

  “What do you wish?” he said at last.

  The Witch frowned. That was the third question the boy had asked. No child had ever asked a question. “I am the Witch of Wishes and have everything,” she replied. “I want for nothing.”

  “Do you?” he said, stepping closer to her. “Do you truly have everything?”

  The red-furred fox at her side grumbled again.

  The Witch placed her hands on her knees and said, “I will not ask a third time.”

  “There must be something you want,” the boy insisted. “There must be something missing.”

  But no, but no, the boy was wrong. The castle, the foxes, the altar, the gifts—this was her wish. Everything, all hers. Even the cool diamond rain that now began to fall through the open roof of the castle belonged to her and only her, the clench-jawed, wet-haired Witch of Wishes in the Woods.

  “You have wasted your wish,” she said, stamping her foot and sending a tremor through the ground.

  With a withering look at her brother, the girl reached a hand out to steady herself on his shoulder. The Witch’s fingernails sparkled like cut crystal in a sudden lunge of lightning anointing the sky as she leaned forward and tapped each child on the temple. Once. Twice. “Wake up.”

  And they were gone.

  Left alone on her throne, the Witch stitched her sternum back together with a needle fashioned from a long, sharp fang, each loop pricking her skin. When she was finished, she bent her bare knees to her chin, pressing her thighs to the red ribbon threaded through the stale skin of her chest. The foxes snorted and shuffled, but the Witch ignored them, closing her eyes and trying to force the boy’s voice, his question, out of her heart and out of her mind.

  But it was stuck fast, sinuous and deep, repeating like a song, like a prayer, like a plea.

  What do you wish?

  What do you wish?

  What do you wish?

  Alternatives to screaming: Hold your breath. Chew the inside of your cheek. Push your face into your pillow. Stuff the hem of your T-shirt far into your mouth. Wrap your arms around your ribs so tightly that you fear your bones will break and your lungs collapse. Pretend you don’t have a mouth or a chest or a throat with which to produce such a sound. Close your eyes and smile.

  Smile, and maybe even laugh, just a little, however much laughter you can manage, even if it’s only a squeak, when all you really want to do is yell and thrash and cry, cry, cry and never ever cease.

  Do whatever you have to, because screaming startles people. Especially people who are your parents. At two o’clock in the morning. And you are eighteen years old. Too old to have your neck wrung by nightmares. Nightmares, which are only in your head and cannot hurt you.

  But.

  My nightmares have never been only in my head.

  * * *

  —

  It’s the scent that rouses me. The air is thick with seething saliva and torn fingernails and burning bile. Standing in the doorway of the attic, I look down and see my own corpse sprawled like a doll on the floor: nothing but bones stuck with flaps and flakes of skin, a rotting skeleton, the wood beneath bloodstained and wet. I know it’s me only because of the hair: still thick and black and shining on what’s left of my scalp.

  I stare for half a second, and then I scream.

  It takes only a few seconds, a few beats of my rattling heart, before my sister Rose comes running out of our bedroom one floor below and races up the stairs.

  “What’s happening?” she cries, reaching for my hand.

  My only response is to scream again, this time with less conviction behind it, a question rather than an exclamation. Two more pairs of footsteps pound through the house, and our parents stumble up behind us. Dad lunges past me and pulls the chain to snap on the light in the stairwell: from black to bright white in a sliver of a second. At once the shimmery grime of sweat and blood and shadow where my body lay seems to sink into the floor like water draining through a sieve.

  “Rhea, what happened?” Dad asks, leaning against the attic wall as my two youngest sisters, Renata and Raisa, come to stand behind Mom a few steps down, their hair stringy and askew. They are used to this, my visions, but still they are there in the doorway, gawking as I make a spectacle of myself for the second time this week.

  “Why are you up here?” Dad prods.

  I take a deep breath, Rose’s hand cold in mine. So cold—corpse cold—it makes me shiver.

  “I was having the dream again,” I say as calmly as I can, and behind me Raisa tips her head back and groans, not wanting to hear about this for the millionth time. “You know—the o
ne with the door at the top of a spiral staircase? I climbed it like I normally do, climbing for what seemed like forever, and when I reached the top—I opened the door.”

  Here I pause, my stomach clenching, because I’ve never actually opened the door in the dream before. Usually I wake up as soon as I touch the handle, startled but not surprised to find myself in the same spot I did tonight, in front of the attic door. Then, after taking a few moments to steady my quivering heart, I hurry back downstairs and into bed. No visions, no screaming, no impromptu family gathering in the narrow stairwell.

  But tonight everything changed.

  “When I opened the door in the dream,” I explain, “I opened the attic door here. And when I looked down, I saw a—um, a body. Dead.”

  I don’t tell them the body was mine. To have grisly visions is one thing, but seeing myself dead is something wholly new and far more frightening. And when I glance at Rose, she shudders as if she knows.

  “You mean you were sleepwalking?” Mom says, her curly black hair flattened on one side of her head. “But that’s odd—you’ve never sleepwalked before.”

  “Oh.” I tug my hand out of Rose’s gentle grip and rub the corner of my eyes so I won’t have to look at Mom or Dad or anyone. “Right, yeah. Weird, isn’t it?”

  My parents know about the recurring dream, but I’ve never said anything about the sleepwalking, which has only started in the last few months. I keep hoping it will stop. It isn’t like I’m stumbling around the house breaking things or hurting myself.

  But it hasn’t stopped, and now I’ve been caught.

  Mom and Dad look at each other, and I can see the worry in their frowns.