Page 56 of The Woodsmoke Women's Book of Spells
I know who he is now after working alongside him this winter, sharing everyday moments and stories from my past. Someone whose mouth and hands and skin I am discovering, whose soul is slowly cleaving to mine. With his absence now, with this fear that he is not quite real, I’m afraid he may be the person I’ve been unconsciously searching for—a soul that matches my own.
In this room, I see pieces of Matthieu now. In the woven blanket tucked over his bed, in the clothes in the dresser. I smell the scent of his skin lingering on the pillows. I pick up little clues of who he is to me, and yet nothing here tells me of his history. No breadcrumb trail planted in my memories runs through here, telling me where he could have gone.
I move back into the lounge and eye the map taking up the far wall. It takes me a moment to register that it’s different now. The crisscrossed lines have grown frantic, and the map is now covered,practically coated, in handwritten notes. I step forward and time slows around me, dripping like honey. He’s searching for something. Searching across the length and breadth of the mountains, each careful handwritten note a question, an answer, a date—
My head swims and the ground tilts under me. There’s a note stuck to the left edge of the map, where there’s no place mark on the map itself. It has yesterday’s date on it—and an answer.
The last trail we were going to explore together.
This must be it.
He’s still searching for clues about Henri’s disappearance.
I breathe out, tremors shivering to my fingertips as I pull the note off and examine the place it was tacked to. My eyes trace the lines, back and forth, feathering out from the cabin like veins.
Matthieu isn’t fine. He isn’t safe, and he isn’t well. If this note was made yesterday, if he set out early and never returned—
He’s missing.
If what I believe is true, he’s somewhere in the mountains. And no one has seen him in two days. And... he’s real. Very real. Not some tale conjured from the frost and the mountains, not some phantom or spirit that disappears with the spring.
This is real.
Stars explode, clouding my vision, and I sink to the floor. I clutch the note in my fist, trying to steady my breathing, even as the panic, the absolute terror, sets in...
“Breathe. Just breathe,” I say to myself, as though it can somehow slow my racing pulse, the quickening of my fear. I fumble for my phone and curse the lack of signal as I register the time. It’s just past ten in the morning. The last time I saw Matthieu was yesterday morning, my mouth still swollen with his kisses as I left to meet Cora at the shop in town.
I assumed... I thought... I swallow, closing my eyes. Iwas the last person to see him or hear from him, and now he’s been missing for nearly thirty hours. Knowing these mountains, knowing the number of people who have gone missing, never to be found again...
“Oh God,” I say into the strangled silence. “Matthieu, where have you gone?”
Chapter 42
Cora
Howard has taken Kep for a walk. Cora offered to go with him, to tread the fields at his side, but he huffed in that impatient way that means he needs space. Time. A lungful of new spring air not perfumed by her words. So she washes up the breakfast things, muttering to herself, taking her time over the caked-on egg yolk on their plates. She’s fastidious, always has been, scrubbing at her life until it’s pink and shiny and just so.
She never really felt the absence of a baby in her life until Carrie. Never wondered too much what that weight would feel like in her arms. Most of her friends were enthusiastically filling their arms and their lives with children, their worlds revolving around playdates and new bikes and family camping trips. Cora never quite understood it, never felt that internal tug from some cord draped around her heart. She knew Howard wanted a big family—a loud, shouty, messy family—to help on the farm and to surround himself with. But as every month passed and it still didn’t happen, she would try not to dwell on it for too long. After Carrie, though, all that changed.
But by then it was too late.
“You’re a silly old woman. A silly,sillyold woman,” she berates herself now, the teaspoons, covered in soap suds, clattering on the drainboard. She can usually pull herself out of this spiral, raise her chin, and get on with things. But this morning... not this morning.
She stares out at the chickens, now gone back to their lazy clucking, and feels a pang of something. Is it remorse, or shame, about those chickens? But she can’t put her finger on it. She’s lost again, lost in a labyrinth of yesterdays, feeling her way through dimly lit tunnels, clutching a spool of unwinding thread.
She’s searching for the moments with Carrie, the times that light up her memories like flares. The first time Carrie chose her instead of Ivy to bandage a skinned knee. The times Carrie cycled over on the weekends and Cora would feed her apple pie and custard, lend her books, show her the latest sepia photograph find, or a trinket from a car boot sale. Anything to lure her back, her magpie findings for a girl who loved glitter. She would tell Carrie the old tales, giving her a glimpse of the book, turning a blind eye whenever she and Jess leafed through the pages. She wondered if this was what it would have been like, to have her own daughter. If this was what she gave up to have the book all to herself. She would do anything on those days to keep her grandniece lingering, to keep Carrie near her, if only for a few minutes more.
Cora is so lost in days gone by, in all those memories of Carrie, that she doesn’t hear it at first. There’s a scratching, yipping sound coming from the front door. She blinks, vaguely aware of a bark, of more scratching, and she dries her hands, muttering as she walks to the door. She pictures Jess, her nails and her wide, pleading eyes. She mutters again as she fumbles with the door handle, readying herself for an onslaught of desperation from Jess or someone else from Woodsmoke. But when she pulls the door open, letting in a gust of sharp air, it’s not Jess at all, or anyone else.
“Kep?” she says, confusion pooling in her gut. She leans down to scratch the dog’s head, feeling the silky warmth of her fur. “But you’re with Howard, you’re not meant to be here... you’re not...”
Cora feels the first stirrings of alarm as Kep stares at her, eyesdoleful and brimming. Cold creeps over her, as though the frost has returned.
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
Cora turns, finds her jacket, and stuffs her mobile phone in her pocket.
“Come along, then,” she says to Kep in false, bright tones as Howard’s dog yips, checking that she’s following. Cora makes her way on stiffened joints into the fields, the mud sucking at her boots as she stumbles after Kep. Twice she has to stop to gulp down air as fire burns in her chest, unease builds in her belly, and sharp twangs knot in her joints. Kep circles back each time, waits for her, waits as she stifles a gasp of pain, then continues to hobble after the dog.
