Two Girls Missing in the Woods
Listen. It is night in Ashwrath, and it has always been night in Ashwrath, or so it seems to a man reading by one candle in a locked room beneath a chapel while the village breathes above him unknowing. The dead are in their churchyard. The dying are in their beds. The living are doing what the living do in a plague year, which is mostly trying to remember what they were like before they were afraid.
John Pike:My name is John Pike. I am the priest of Ashwrath, which means I am the man who stands between this village and god and tries to make them understand one another. And I will tell you plainly that in the 1348, I am not certain either of them is listening. I still wear the cloth. I still say the offices.
John Pike:I do it here in my vestry with the door bolted and a book on my desk that is not scripture and was never meant to be. A book that came to me sealed in a case of dark iron with a date pressed onto its side as I have read 40 times now and cannot account for. The digits are clear. The date is not possible, and I will leave it at that. The book calls itself the Chronicle of Ashwrath, seven volumes in the iron case, three of which I can read freely.
John Pike:The others resist me in various ways. The first volume knows this village, the way a man knows his own hand. Every line, every mark, every place where the skin has worn thin, it knows my parishioners better than my confessional does. It knows what they said, what they meant, what they swallowed back down and carried home again. It shames me.
John Pike:I read it anyway. It changes. I must say this. The chronicle changes. The same passage read on different nights gives me different words.
John Pike:Pages that were blank when I closed it are full when I open it. In a close dark hand, I am beginning to know the way you know a stranger who keeps appearing in the same street. I do not know if it is showing me the past, present, or what is still to come. I have stopped being certain. These are three different things.
John Pike:I read this because the village is dying, and someone must witness it. I am that someone. It is the only thing I have left that I am sure of. It is the 10/14/1348, and Ashwrath is holding its market because to stop would be to say the word nobody is saying. They come to the stalls on the cold morning.
John Pike:These people I have baptized and buried and shrivel and fed with the body of Christ, and they stand a little further apart than they used to. And they hold vinegar rags at their belts like small damp prayers, and they buy and sell and pretend that buying and selling still means what it meant before the sickness came and showed them what things are actually worth. Mistress Fowler is at the wall stall, which is to say, she is at the center of everything, which is to say, she is exactly where she always is. A good woman in the ways that cost nothing and a sharp one in the ways that matter. She saw the Marsh Girls this morning going to the tree line.
John Pike:Agnes in her mother's green shawl, Ruth with the basket. Both of them walking with the quick serious purpose of children who have been given a task and mean to finish it. Mistress Fowler watched them go. She notes everything, mistress Fowler. She files it all away in that busy, generous, pitiless mind of hers.
John Pike:She did not call after them. There was no reason to call after them. They had been to the tree line a 100 times. Agnes Marsh is 11 years old, dark eyed and her father's daughter, which means she does not stop when she has started. I baptized her in this chapel on a Tuesday in February, and she screamed the place down and looked at me afterwards as though it had been my fault.
John Pike:She knows the near wood, the way she knows her own yard. Every hollow, every dead fall, every path the deer have worn between the beaches, she is not a reckless girl. She is not a foolish one. Ruth is nine, which is old enough to know that something is wrong with this autumn and young enough to still ask why. She asked me once why God made wasps.
John Pike:I said they were a mystery of creation. She said she thought they were probably a mistake. I have turned that conversation over in my mind more times than I have turned most of my sermons. They went to the tree line before the market bell. They did not come back.
John Pike:The wood at the edge of Ashwrath has no name. This is not an accident. The village stopped naming it so long ago that no one living remembers the name it had, which is its own kind of name, the name of the thing you have agreed collectively and without ever discussing it, not to say aloud. Children are told not to go past the first beaches. They are not told why.
John Pike:They understand anyway. It lives in the way a mother's hand tightens on a child's shoulder when the path curves towards a certain place, in the way a conversation finds somewhere else to be. The chronicle says the wood is old, older than the village, older than the church, which was built on ground that was already holy for reasons no bishop has satisfactorily explained and several have preferred not to ask about. The roots of its oldest trees reach further than the roots should reach. Where they go, the soil goes dark, goes cold.
John Pike:Each thing the chronicle says about the wood is possible. Each thing is simply slightly more than you were expecting. A crow sat on the fence post at the field's edge for three mornings before the fourteenth. Three mornings. The Chronical records this in a margin in a second hand, smaller than the main text, darker ink, not the hand that wrote the rest of the passage.
John Pike:And I have come to understand that this second hand annotates the chronicle with things the main hand considers beneath its attention. It notices. It anticipates. I do not know whose hand it is. When I try to read it for too long, I become aware that my candle has burnt lower than it should have.
John Pike:Joseph Veil is the constable of Ashwrath, and the chronicle loves him in its precise unsentimental way, which is to say it describes him as though every detail matters and withholds its opinion of whether they do. A man of middle years careful, where another man might be suspicious, who has learned over twenty years in this work the distance between those two qualities is where the truth usually lives. He has buried four of his parish this month already. He has stood at each grave with his hat in his hands and said nothing because Vale believes that silence at a graveside is more honest than the words, and he has enough honesty for it to cost him something. He organized the search when the news reached him.
John Pike:Seven men, the tree line, the near wood, the hollows Agnes knew. The ground was soft from three days of rain, black, and giving, the kind of ground that holds a print like a wax seal holds a stamp. The girls left no prints. Not at the tree line, not in the mud, not anywhere the seven men went all the long gray afternoon. The chronicle states this as it states everything, flatly, completely, without apology.
John Pike:The girls of 11 and nine in leather soles on soft ground in the rain's aftermath, and the ground remembers nothing of them, as though they passed over it without touching it, as though they were not there to leave a mark at all. Vale found one print that was not his men's. At the woods margin, where the grass gives out a boot sole, man sized, pressed clean and deep into the mud. The pattern in it was a grid of small squares, each the same depth, each corner sharp as cut stone. Vale has read the ground in his professional capacity for twenty years.
John Pike:He has never seen a soul cast this way. He cannot think of the mold that would make it. He drew it in his notebook, the steady careful lines of a man who trusts what he can put on paper. And he closed the notebook and put it in his coat and walked back to his men. He told no one.
John Pike:The second hand in the margin. The sketch survives him. Four words. I have read them 11 times. I do not sleep the way I used to sleep.
John Pike:I must stop. The page has changed since I began reading tonight. The passage about Veil was as I have described it, but below it, where there is nothing last night, there is now a new entry in a third hand, larger than the other two, less careful. Written, it seems, to me in a haste or urgency or something that felt like both. I have not seen this hand before.
John Pike:It concerns a child named Mary Tench. She was not in the Chronicle this morning. She is in it now. I will read what it says. Mary Tench is 10 years old and lives with her mother in the house below the Tanner's Yard, in the particular quiet of a child who has decided that the world is best approached by watching it.
John Pike:Not shy, not absent, watching. I know her mother better than I know her. Her mother is one of my faithful penitents, which means she comes to me with sins that are actually sins rather than the presentable approximation most people bring me. Mary has her mother's eyes and her own counsel, and I've always had the feeling in the few conversations we have managed that she is waiting for me to say something worth responding to. She was with Agnes and Ruth Marsh at the start of the morning.
John Pike:She had gone with them to the tree line, which her mother did not know. She came back alone around midday. Her shoes were gone. In her hands, cupped together like a vessel, she carried dark soil, loamy, cold, nothing like the clay heavy earth of Ashwrath. She walked through the market without speaking.
John Pike:Several people saw her. The Chronical notes in the patient way it records the things people would rather not examine that each person who saw her looked away. Vale spoke with her. The Chronical gives me their exchange not as a transcript, but as knowledge, the way it gives me most things, as though I was there and am only now being allowed to remember it. Mary said she had been with the girls.
John Pike:She said they went further in into the place past the wood. There are buildings there, she told him, very tall, made of glass and iron. No one lives in them yet. Yet, Veil said. She corrected herself.
John Pike:At all. No one lives in them. At all. The soil in her hands was taken by her mother and thrown into the fire. Her mother will come to me tomorrow.
John Pike:She will sit behind the screen in the particular way of a woman who is not bringing me a sin, but a fear. And she will tell me about the soil and the shoes and what her daughter said when she asked where she'd been, which was nothing, which was the look of a child who has seen something she is still deciding how to carry. I will listen. I will say the things a priest says. I will have the chronicle on my desk when I get back to the vestry, and I will open it, and I will read because it is the only thing I know how to do that feels in any way equal to what is happening here.
John Pike:Closing, the October 14 concluded. The Chronicals accounting for this day, market receipts, 7 shillings and 4p, The dispute between mistress Fowler and the tanner over the eastern fence settled in the tanner's favor, which will not sweeten anything between them. Three new cases of the sickness reported before Vespers. The names I will not read because I know them and because reading them would make it more real than I can manage tonight. The Marsh Girls, no further record.
John Pike:I have come to understand that phrase of the Chronicals form of grief. It does not grieve often or easily. When it does, it uses four words and leaves you to do the rest. I close the first volume and sit in the dark of my vestry, above me the chapel, above that the sky, with tonight is cold and clear and full of stars that are under no obligation to know what is happening in Ashwrath and do not. Agnes Marsh is somewhere.
John Pike:Ruth is somewhere. Mary Tench is in her mother's house with no shoes and dark stained hands and a careful silence about what she saw in the place past the wood. The tall glass and iron of it, the nobody living there at all. I look at the iron case, the date on its side that cannot be, the seven volumes, three open and the rest waiting, and the seventh which I will not describe tonight, which I am not ready to describe, which sits in the case like a held breath. I will read again tomorrow.
John Pike:The chronicle will show me what it wishes. I will witness it. It is the only thing I have. God keep Agnes, Marsh, and Ruth, Marsh, who went to the tree line in the cold morning and did not come back. God keep this village.
John Pike:God, keep all of us who are still tonight on the right side of the wood.
