In the Night Wood. Dale Bailey

       2

      But for the book, Charles might have forgotten the entire episode. For all Kit ever spoke of it, the whole day might have been an elaborate fantasy inspired by their itinerant existence in a succession of cheap walk-up apartments, sustained by a series of minimum-wage jobs (“Fired again,” she always told him ruefully when one of them headed south) and well-meaning but feckless boyfriends, most of whom exuded a sweet-smelling haze that Charles would many years later come to recognize as the scent of pot.

      But the stolen leather volume had a way of turning up anew with each fresh move — in a box of mateless socks or shoved in among the well-thumbed paperbacks on Kit’s bedroom shelf. Finally, home sick one afternoon in Baltimore — they’d only just moved; he must have been nine or ten at the time — Charles actually read it.

      The story showed up in his dreams for days thereafter, a hallucinatory montage of great trees pressing close upon a woodland path, a terrified child, a horned king, his pale horse steaming at the nostrils in the midnight air. Afterward, Charles could never be quite certain whether to attribute the eidetic quality of these images to the book itself or to the feverish condition he’d been in when he read it. He meant to go back and have another look, but the pressures attendant upon being the new kid at school (he was always the new kid at school, and a bookish, nerdy kid at that) intervened.

      By the time he did try to go back, two or three moves later, the book had evaporated, vanished in one of the more recent relocations. And this time it really was forgotten.

      It might have stayed that way had Charles not enrolled in a seminar in Victorian nonsense literature fifteen years later. He’d been on his own for years by then (sometimes it felt like he’d always been on his own, like he’d spent more time parenting Kit than vice versa), a scholarship kid who did well enough as an undergraduate English major to snag a teaching assistantship at one of the big state Ph.D. mills. There, he divided his time between a derelict apartment in the student ghetto, cramped classrooms, where he held forth on the merits of the thesis statement to bored freshmen only four or five years his junior, and the classes he was taking, where the air was thick with intellectual posturing and professional anxiety. He’d enrolled in the nonsense seminar out of necessity, when the class he’d really wanted — a course in literary theory taught by a fading Ivy League enfant terrible who planed in once a week to teach his classes and then promptly vanished — filled up before he could get in.

      So it happened that Charles — at twenty-five, still scrawny and bespectacled, still a little bit afraid — found himself in the university library one cold February evening, reading up on Edward Lear. He’d just started nodding when his eye chanced upon a footnote referencing an obscure Victorian fantasist by the name of Caedmon Hollow. Now almost entirely forgotten (Charles read), Hollow had written only a single book: In the Night Wood.

      The title jerked Charles fully awake. The library was silent, cool, and all but abandoned at this late hour. A hard snow ticked against the windows, but despite the chill, a thick column of heat climbed through him. Rereading the footnote, he felt time slip. He was a child again, alone in his grandfather’s enormous library with the cries of the dreadful triumvirate of cousins sounding far away beyond the great arched windows. Long-forgotten details from that single feverish reading flooded through him: a full moon looking down through the mists of the Night Wood; the Mere of Souls, black in its midnight glade; a child flying through the whispering trees; the Horned King upon his pale horse.

      “Shit,” he whispered, setting aside the book. He stood and made his way across the reading room to a bank of terminals and tapped the title into the catalog. A few minutes later, clutching a call slip in one hand, Charles caught an elevator to an upper floor. Walking the labyrinth of stacks and dragging a single finger in his wake, bump bump bump across the spines of the books, Charles nearly missed it.

      He supposed he’d been expecting the same beautiful, leather-bound volume he’d plucked from his grandfather’s shelf. The library’s copy was infinitely more practical, a thin, sturdy book bound in blue boards — or rebound, he surmised when he flipped it open to find the same baroque frontispiece. It was a woodcut, he saw, the lines strong and sure.

      Wily faces peered out at him from behind the boles of the ancient, lichen-shrouded trees, their great splayed roots knuckling down into beds of rich, damp soil. As he gazed at them, the faces seemed to shift and draw back into the foliage, only to appear again, peeping out at him from some neighboring bower of wood and leaf. He imagined that he overheard their whispered conversations in the air around him.

      He started back toward the elevator, flipping to the first chapter, that opening invocation —

       Once upon a time

      — ringing in his head. When he turned the corner and collided with someone strolling the other way, Charles had a brief and not unpleasant impression that he’d been enveloped in a feminine cloud, faintly redolent of lavender. Caught off balance, he threw out his arms to catch himself —

      “Watch where you’re going!” the girl cried.

      — and went over backward. He thumped to the floor, his glasses flying one way, his book the other. He was still scrambling for the former when the cloud of perfume enveloped him once again.

      “Steady there,” the girl said. “You okay?”

      He blinked at her owlishly. “Yeah, I —” His fingers closed over his glasses. He fumbled with them, and she swam briefly into focus, a small, lean brunette in her mid-twenties, with a prominently boned face and wide-set hazel eyes, bright with amusement — not beautiful, exactly, but … striking, Kit would have called her. Out of his league, anyway, that much was sure. “I guess I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

      “I guess not.”

      She took his hand and heaved him to his feet, startling him all over again. “Steady,” she said as he snatched at the nearest shelf. He was still trying to get his glasses adjusted — he thought he might have bent the frames — when she reappeared with his book.

      “What was it you were so intent on, anyway?”

      “Nothing,” he sputtered. “It was — I —”

      Waving him into silence, she flipped the book over to see for herself. She laughed out loud. “Small world.”

      “What,” Charles said, still fussing with his glasses. “You’ve read it?”

      “Once upon a time, long ago.”

      “Not many people have read it.”

      “Not like I have,” she said.

      “What do you mean?”

      “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she said, shoving the book at him. “Here. Hold still.” Shaking her head, she reached out and straightened his glasses. Maybe they weren’t bent after all. “Better?”

      “Yeah, I guess so. Thanks.”

      “You bet.” Reaching out once again — Charles forced himself not to step back — the girl brushed a speck of imaginary dust from his shoulder. “All set?”

      “Yeah, I mean — Yeah.”

      “Good.”

      Smiling, the girl slipped past him into the stacks.

      “Wait,” Charles said. “I wanted —”

      But she was already gone, leaving a perfect girl-shaped vacuum in the air before him. “Shit,” Charles said, turning to look after her, but the library was cold and empty, a forest of nine-foot shelves branching off