Charlotte Salter
Where the Woods End
For everyone who has ever been followed by a monster
KESTREL’S NOTEBOOK. DO NOT TOUCH!!!! Grabbers:
A grabber chooses a victim from the village.
It stalks them for days, or weeks, or even years.
They build a
THEN THEY ATTACK.
Get them where they’re weak, e.g. the heart.
People eaten:
1
THE HUNGRY HOUR
The endless forest was as dark as the back of a wolf’s throat, and it was filled with countless horrors.
Cats with too many eyes. Dogs with teeth as long as knitting needles. Ravenous birds with razor-tipped feathers.
And that was only the beginning. Every night, all of the people who lived in the forest’s only village slammed their doors, pulled the sheets up to their chins, and crossed their fingers that they would survive till morning.
Well. All except one.
Kestrel had been lurking in the branches of a moonlit tree since sundown. It was the Hungry Hour, the time before sunrise when the forest was darkest and most dangerous. Here she was, a ready-made monster meal, completely and utterly alone.
So why had nothing tried to kill her yet?
“Help,” she said unconvincingly.
Kestrel sighed and wriggled her nose to try and get some blood back into it. She was hanging upside down, her knees hooked over a branch, swinging gently like a sock on a wash line. It was part of her research on bats. She wanted to know what was so good about being upside down all the time, but so far it had only made her feel sick.
She’d write it down later—right side up is BETTER—adding another tiny bit of knowledge to everything she knew about the forest. The more she knew, the better she’d be able to work out its secrets.
And the more she knew about its secrets, the sooner she’d be able to escape.
Kestrel touched the hard leather book stuffed under her shirt. It had belonged to her grandma, Granmos. It was crammed full of Granmos’s terrifying descriptions of the most dangerous places in the forest, notes on the monsters that lived there, and some truly unique, stomach-churning recipes. Kestrel had added her own carefully written additions, such as ghosts are scared of cheese and don’t touch those weird yellow frogs ever again, I MEAN IT. She was proud of her notebook.
Then she checked the rest of her arsenal. There was a slingshot up her sleeve. Her favorite weapon, a spoon with a sharpened handle, was wedged in her boot. Lastly, there was reeking pork fat in her pocket and a necklace of tasty chicken bones hanging around her neck, which she had stolen from Mardy Banbury, the evilest hag in the village.
Kestrel wasn’t sure what made someone a hag, but Mardy was probably it. Unless you counted Kestrel’s mum.
She looked toward the village, thinking longingly of the warm gutter where she sometime slept, or the dark, dry burrow she hid in when her mother was in a bad mood. But she couldn’t leave without catching the awful creature that had been running around the village at night, hissing at people through the shutters.
“Look at me, completely and utterly alone like a snack on a stick,” she said loudly. “I hope nothing tries to eat me.”
But the animals knew that Kestrel was undelicious and as stubborn as a badger, and they kept their distance.
Instead, Kestrel was answered by the kind of laughing, creaking silence that only the forest could make. The trees scratched the inky sky like a creature with thousands of long, bony fingers and overgrown nails. The wolf fire, a huge pyre that kept the ravenous beasts away, flickered in the distant village. It helped keep the village safe, but it made the shadows bigger, too.
Kestrel saw something out of the corner of her eye. It was a tiny, fleeting movement, and most people wouldn’t have noticed it, but her eyesight was formidable and she was quicker than a greased fox. In one fluid movement the slingshot was in her hand, fitted with a stone.
“Come out,” she said boldly, tightening her fingers around the stone. Her heart started to thump, but she made herself ignore it. “I’m ready!”
Nothing happened, and she slowly lowered the slingshot. Kestrel cautiously hoped it was because everything near the village was terrified of her. She was scary, but she wasn’t as good at hunting as her grandma, who had taught Kestrel everything she knew. Even her dad was a great hunter. He set incredible traps and hadn’t let a villager get eaten by a wolf in five years. He was so good that the villagers called him the Trapper.
Kestrel secretly thought it was a terrible name, like something you’d call a dog, but she liked hearing it anyway.
Kestrel pulled the notebook from her pocket and pretended to read, so it wouldn’t look like she was lying in wait. She could see every shadow of the forest in her peripheral vision. She turned the book around as her grandma’s scrawled sentence crawled around the corner of the page, turning into a tight spiral and bumping into a recipe for snail cake.
The reeking monster-fat candle inside her storm lantern suddenly guttered. A group of giant moths, which had been hopefully bumping into it, spiraled into the air and disappeared.
They knew that something was wrong.
Kestrel shoved the notebook back under her shirt, hand on spoon, as her heart did a horrible little dance in her chest. She thumped her ribs, shutting it up.
The first thing Granmos taught her was that fear is bad. Being scared is more dangerous than having snakes in your bed or spiders in your tea. It stops you breathing properly, it makes your heart thump so loudly any creature can hear it, and it makes your skin so cold you can’t move. All those things mean it’s easier for you to get caught and eaten.
When she thought of her training, Kestrel felt a familiar queasiness in her stomach. It was the same queasiness she always felt when her grandma called her name, ready for the next session.
But that was all over now.
“Don’t let them know you’re scared,” she muttered, clinging to her grandma’s mantra. “Shut it away and deal with it later.”
Bit by bit, her racing heart slowed. Kestrel glared through the trees. She’d spent ages practicing looking dangerous, and there were lots of small rabbits who were, indeed, completely terrified of her.
There was another crack, closer by this time. Something was in the forest with her, and it wasn’t Finn, the only other person who might be hanging around here in the dead of night. It wasn’t Pippit, either. Pippit was never quieter than an explosion.
Something was watching her. She could feel its eyes drilling into her.
Kestrel gritted her teeth and looked down.