“They hate me,” he whispered, and the trees whispered back, but he could not make out the words. Just leaves in the wind, he thought suddenly, not voices at all. He sat up and threw a handful of rotted leaves at the nearest tree trunk, and somewhere he thought someone laughed. The woji. “You’re not real, either,” he said softly. “I made you up. You can’t laugh at me.”
The sound persisted, grew louder, and suddenly he stood up and looked back over his shoulder at a black cloud bank that had been forming all afternoon. Now the trees were crying out warnings to him, and he began to scramble down the slope, not following the boys and Barry, but heading for the old farmhouse.
The house was completely hidden by a thicket of bushes and trees. Like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, he thought, trotting toward it. The wind howled, hurling bits of dirt, twigs, leaves stripped from the trees. He crawled through the bushes and in the shelter the wind seemed very distant. The entire sky was darkening fast, and the wind was dangerous, he knew. Tornado weather, that’s what they called it. There had been a rash of tornados two years ago; they all feared them now.
At the house, he didn’t pause. He opened the coal chute, concealed by a tangle of ivy, and slid down and landed lightly in the black basement. He felt about for his candle and sulfur matches, and then went upstairs, where he watched the weather through a chink in the boarded-up window in the top bedroom. The house was completely boarded up now, doors, windows, the chimney sealed. They had decided it was not good for him to spend time alone in the old building, but they hadn’t known about the coal chute and what they had done actually was to provide him with a sanctuary where no one could follow.
The storm roared through the valley and left as abruptly as it had started. The heavy rain became a spatter, then a drizzle; it stopped and presently the sun was shining again. Mark left the window. There was an oil lantern in the bedroom. He lighted the lamp and looked at his mother’s paintings, as he had done many times in the years since she had taken him camping. She knew, he thought. Always that one person, in the fields, at the doorway, on the river or ocean. Always just one. She knew what it was like. Without warning he started to sob, and threw himself down on the floor and wept until he was weak. Then he slept.
He dreamed the trees took him by the hand and led him to his mother and she held him close and sang and told him stories and they laughed together.
“Is it working?” Bob asked. “Can they be trained to live in the wilderness?”
Mark was in the corner of the room, sitting cross-legged on the floor, forgotten by the doctors. He looked up from the book he was reading and waited for the answer.
“I don’t know,” Barry said. “Not for a lifetime, I don’t think. For short periods, yes. But they’ll never be woodsmen, if that’s what you mean.”
“Should we go ahead with the others next summer? Are they getting enough out of it to make a large-scale attempt?”
Bruce shrugged. “It’s been a training program for us too,” he said. “I know I don’t want to keep going back into those dismal woods. I dread my days more and more.”
“Me too,” Bob said. “That’s why I brought this up now. Is there any real point to it?”
“You’re thinking about the camp-out next week, aren’t you?” Barry asked.
“Yes. I don’t want to go. I know the boys are dreading it. You must be anxious about it.”
Barry nodded. “You and I are too aware of what happened to Ben and Molly. But what’s going to happen to those children when they leave here and have to spend night after night in the woods? If preparation like this can ease it for them, we have to do it.”
Mark returned to his book, but he was not seeing it now. What happened to them? he wondered. Why were they all so afraid? There wasn’t anything in the woods. No animals, nothing to hurt anyone. Maybe they heard the voices and that made them afraid, he thought. But then, if they heard the voices too, the voices had to be real. He felt his pulse racing suddenly. For several years he had believed the voices were only the leaves, that he was only pretending they were really voices. But if the brothers heard them too, that made them real. The brothers and sisters never made up anything. They didn’t know how. He wanted to laugh with joy, but he didn’t make a sound to attract attention. They would want to know what was funny, and he knew he could never tell them.
The camp was a large clearing several miles from the valley. Twenty boys, ten girls, two doctors, and Mark sat about the campfire eating, and Mark remembered that other time he had sat eating popcorn at a campfire. He blinked rapidly and the feeling that came with the memory faded slowly. The clones were uneasy, but not really frightened. Their large number was reassuring, and the babble of their voices drowned out the noises of the woods.
They sang, and one of them asked Mark to tell the woji story, but he shook his head. Barry asked lazily what a woji was, and the clones nudged each other and changed the subject. Barry let it drop. One of those things that all children know and adults never do, he thought. Mark told another story and they sang some more, and then it was time to unroll the blankets and sleep.
Much later Mark sat up, listening. One of the boys was going to the latrine, he decided, and lay down again and was asleep almost instantly.
The boy stumbled and clutched a tree to steady himself. The fire was dim now, no more than embers through the tree trunks. He took several more steps and abruptly the embers vanished. For a moment he hesitated, but his bladder urged him on, and he didn’t yield to the temptation to relieve himself against a tree. Barry had made it clear they had to use the latrine in the interest of health. He knew the ditch was only twenty yards from the camp, only another few steps, but the distance seemed to grow rather than decrease and he had a sudden fear that he was lost.
“If you get lost,” Mark had said, “the first thing to do is sit down and think. Don’t run. Calm down and think.”
But he couldn’t sit down here. He could hear the voices all around him, and the woji laughing at him, and something coming closer and closer. He ran blindly, his hands over his ears trying to blot out the ever louder voices.
Something clutched at him and he felt it ripping his side, felt the blood flowing, and he screamed a high wild shriek that he couldn’t stop.
In the camp his brothers sat up and looked about in terror. Danny!
“What was that?” Barry demanded.
Mark was standing up listening, but now the brothers were calling out, “Danny! Danny!”
“Tell them to shut up,” Mark said. He strained to hear. “Make them stay here,” he ordered, and trotted into the woods toward the latrine. He could hear the boy now, faintly, dashing madly into trees, bushes, stumbling, screaming. Abruptly the sounds stopped.
Mark paused again to listen, but the woods were silent. There was pandemonium behind him in camp and ahead of him nothing.
He didn’t move for several minutes, listening. Danny might have fallen, winded himself. He might be unconscious. There was no way in the dark for Mark to follow him without sounds to lead him. Slowly he turned back to camp. They were all up now, standing in three groups, the two doctors also close to each other.
“I can’t find him in the dark,” Mark said. “We’ll have to wait for morning.” No one moved. “Build up the fire,” he said. “Maybe he’ll see the glow and follow it back.”
One group of brothers started to throw wood on the embers, smothering it. Bob took charge, and presently they had a roaring fire again. Danny’s brothers sat huddled together, all looking pinched and cold and very afraid. They could find him, Mark thought, but they were afraid to go after him in the black woods. One of them began to cry, and almost as if that had been the signal, they were all weeping. Mark turned from them and went again to the edge of the woods to listen.