This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2010, 2011 by Carrie Ryan
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in slightly different form in the collection Kiss Me Deadly: 13 Tales of Paranormal Love by Running Press Teens, an imprint of Running Press Book Publishers, Philadelphia, in 2010.
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v3.1
It’s because the paths are forbidden that Tabitha always finds her way to them. Despite the Sisters’ warnings about what lies beyond the village fences, she’s tired of being trapped. Tired of being told what to do all the time. Tired of hearing that the village is all there is of life.
She wants something more. Needs something more.
The fences exist, the Sisters tell her, to keep the dead at bay. Tabitha wonders whether they might also serve to keep the living docile and trapped. Lately she has begun to understand the claustrophobia of an unexplored life, and the only time she breathes easy is when she thinks about what might lie outside her tiny existence.
The first time she opens the gate it’s on a dare with herself, to see if she’s truly strong enough to follow through on her awakening desires. She touched the gate once, as part of a bet when she was seven. To win she kept her fingers wrapped around the thin coil of metal for ten seconds, watching the dead shuffle toward her with vacant hunger.
As she counted off seven … eight … nine … one of them reached out to her, ran his thumb over her knuckles, trying to pry her grip from the barrier.
She made it to ten, won the bet and had nightmares for a month. Until recently, the fence and path have been nothing but off-limits stretches of treacherous, forgotten land unfolding from the village proper. There is no such thing as life beyond the fences, Tabitha has been told her entire life.
Except that now she’s not sure she can accept this edict.
As she approaches the gate, she’d like to believe that she isn’t terrified. That she isn’t hesitant. That the dead along the fence don’t frighten her, with their broken fingers reaching, always reaching, and their moans calling for her.
It’s the sound of them that gets to her—the way it invades every part of her life. She hears them in her sleep, in her daydreams, during chores and services. She hears them when she’s praying to God.
And on the path there’s no escaping the Unconsecrated. They stumble along the fences on either side of her, pushing and pulling the rusted metal. She’s never known need like that in her life. Doesn’t understand it.
Yet she recognizes it as more intense than anything she feels now, anything she has ever felt, and she begins to realize she wants to feel it as well.
Tabitha knows there are rules and that rules are meant to be followed. Every morning she attends the services at the chapel and every evening she recites her prayers. She respects her parents, cares for her younger siblings and completes chores without complaint. Well, without too much complaint.
During the winter months she does as she’s asked and smiles demurely to the eligible young men her age, wanting one to choose her for a wife.
But they never do.
Tabitha’s okay with this, though. Because it isn’t the young men who call to her at night. It’s the Forest. It’s the whisper of the trees that there’s something else, outside the fences. That there’s still a world that’s bigger than any she could ever comprehend and all she has to do is find the strength to go after it.
At night she tosses and turns in her bed, listening to the Forest. Wanting it. Needing it until her cheeks burn red and tears run from her eyes. And in the morning she slows her steps as she passes by the gate on an errand. She promises herself that tomorrow she will sneak through it. Tomorrow she will taste the world beyond.
The first time she actually crosses out of the village and onto the path she pauses and waits for the siren to wail. The sound of the gate hinges screaming as she pried them open still sits too heavy in the air, and there’s a moment of absolute terror as she realizes that she has taken an irretrievable step and broken a rule inviting unimaginable consequences.
But she doesn’t turn back. Instead she takes one step forward and then another, until she is fully through the gate. She waits, moving only to breathe, and when no one comes after her, she experiences an elation unlike any she has ever contemplated.
This is true freedom, she thinks, feeling the draw of liberation. This is what it means to believe in yourself and reach for what you most desire.
She stays on the path for only a moment, the Unconsecrated coming near to press against the fences on either side. She stares down the path to where it disappears into the Forest and she wonders what lies on the other side of the forbidden horizon.
Tabitha knows enough to slip back through the gate quickly, though, and seals it shut as flakes of rust scatter from the abandoned metal latch. The feeling of those few moments, of being bare to the world beyond, vibrates through her, a new energy that ebbs too fast so that she immediately craves it again.
After that day she crosses through the gate again and again. She’s timed the Guardian patrol just right so that she knows when to slip away, when to sprint down the path. And the lightness of freedom is unlike anything she’s ever known. It consumes her.
Sometimes she tells herself she won’t ever go home. Yet she always does. Because she’s a good girl, and there are still some rules she’s not ready to break. But she’s not so “good” that her skin doesn’t start to feel tight and itch, as if her body’s shrinking and the only thing that will release the compression of it is to escape to the path.
So she does, pushing farther and farther into the Forest. She learns to ignore the Unconsecrated, who follow her every step; learns to listen instead to the way the wind tickles its way through leaves overhead, and to the chirps and whirs of birds.
The sun feels brighter and the shade cooler in the Forest, and she starts to wonder why it’s off-limits. She likes that she doesn’t have to think about what’s next when she’s on the path: it’s just one step and then another, and the fences keep her moving straight ahead.
One day, she walks far enough to find a second gate and she stands for a long time staring at it, wondering if she should go through or if it’s a sign that she’s wandered too far.
She sets her hand on the metal latch, feeling a pattern of rusty prickles beneath her fingers. She still hasn’t decided what to do when a voice calls out to her. “You’re here,” it says.
Startled, she runs her gaze through the Forest and down the path and finds a pair of eyes looking back at her. A young man approaches the gate from the other side.
Not expecting anyone else to be on the path, especially a stranger, she needs a moment to find her voice. “I am,” she responds as quickly as she can, because to show her confusion and shock would make her appear weak. Tabitha never likes to appear weak. “Are you expecting me?” she asks, suddenly not sure whether she’s awake or asleep.
She notices that the young man has his sleeves rolled up and his forearms are exposed. She’s seen forearms before, of course, but there’s something different about his. Something so informal and intimate about the sloppiness of the sleeves pushed to his elbows, as if it’s an invitation to push a finger underneath the fabric and tempt the sensitive skin there.
The sun glows off the blond hair covering his arms. His fingers look long and tan, curled slightly as he stops on the other side of the gate. “Not especially, but I’m glad you’re here,” he says. She looks up from his arms to his face.
He’s smiling at her, eyes slightly crinkled because the sun is at her back.
“I think …” She tilts her head and ponders for a moment because she doesn’t like to be rash with her words. “I think I am too.” She grins at him.
She learns that his name is Patrick and that he comes from another village in the Forest.
“I didn’t know there were other villages in the Forest,” she says, but she has to struggle not to let him see what this knowledge does to her, how it makes her blood pump furiously through her body. Growing up, she was told that they are all that was left. That her village is home to the only survivors of the Return.
She was told it is her sole and sacred duty to continue the path of humanity.
“Quite a few of the villages are gone,” Patrick explains. “But there are enough left that we’ll survive.”
Neither of them opens the gate between them, and as Tabitha walks home in the late afternoon, her thoughts run wild with the newly learned reality of her world. It’s as if she’s spent her life kneeling on the ground, staring at a rock, and suddenly she’s standing, staring at a field full of stones.
She wonders what it would be like to fly. To see the entire world at once. She runs through the Forest, arms out, with fingers almost—but not quite—brushing the metal links of the old fences. She realizes that the world might be hers to know after all.
They have agreed to meet at the same gate on the second afternoon after the full moon each month. Tabitha spends the between days lost in dreams. Her mother starts to scold her for burning dinner. Her younger brother skins his knee one day when she’s not paying attention. She barely remembers the words to the prayers she’s asked to recite at services.
But she’s alive. And she wants to grab everyone around her and scream that there’s a world that’s more important than any of these daily toils. Yet she doesn’t say a word because she fears that they will lock the gates. Lock her from the path, and from Patrick.
The next two times they meet, neither opens the gate. They stay on their respective sides and tell stories. She rolls onto her back on the path and stares up through the canopy of leaves and watches how the sun caresses each one as Patrick tells her about his dreams.
Sometimes she closes her eyes and wonders what it would be like to walk through the gate and run away with him. And sometimes she imagines bringing him home with her and claiming him as hers.
At the end of their third meeting, he laces his fingers through the links of the gate and she laces her fingers through his and they sit that way for an afternoon, feeling each other’s pulse fighting.
He brings her a gift at their next meeting: a worn book with pages as soft as feathers. She opens the gate to take it from him. She’s astonished at how small it is, how compact. The only books she’s ever seen are copies of the Scripture in her village, thick heavy tomes with paper like onionskin.
“It’s my sister’s favorite,” he tells her. “I thought you might like it too.”
She reads the little book three times before their next meeting, trying to understand what it means. It’s about a house and a woman and her husband, who, she discovers, may have drowned his first wife. It’s lush and dangerous and makes her body pound and pulse.
“Why would a man be so cruel to his wives?” she asks Patrick after the next full moon.
He looks at her with his head tilted. “It’s just a story,” he says. “It’s made up—fiction.”
She nods but she’s frowning because she still doesn’t understand what that means, and he pulls her into his arms to ease her worries.
In the winter she tells him about Brethlaw, the celebration of life and marriage at her village. He opens the gate and she walks through it and now they tangle together under blankets, surrounded by snow that floats through the air and melts against their skin.
He traces his finger down her spine, weaving between her bones. “Would you leave your world for me?” he asks.
“I might,” she tells him. She wonders how the world ever fell apart with this much love in it.
Tabitha’s parents are unhappy with her. She’s not focusing, they tell her. They remind her that if she doesn’t find a husband soon she may be left with no option but to join the Sisterhood, like her friends Ruth and Ami. And while this might have been an effective threat in the past, she just bites back smiles because she knows there is no man or god for her other than Patrick.
Patrick’s not at their meeting spot. It’s the first time he hasn’t shown, and Tabitha wraps her arms around her body and paces little circles in the freezing rain. She walks through the gate and sprints down the path, wondering if he’s hurt or lost, but there’s no sign of him.
She goes home confused and empty. Where before she felt too big for her skin when she walked around her village, now she feels too small. Her body doesn’t work the way it should—she’s clumsy, tripping when she walks. Nothing is right anymore.
The next month she checks the moon, making sure she knows exactly when it’s at its fullest. She’s so anxious to go to Patrick two days later that she’s not as careful as she should be. One of the Guardians sees her placing her hand on the gate to the path.
He takes her to the Cathedral and the Sisters whisper in a tight little knot while her parents stand to the side, white-faced and silent. No one will marry her now, they know. She’s a dreamer, and dreamers need to be broken to the will of the Sisterhood.
Her parents don’t object when the Sisters proclaim Tabitha one of them. She puts on the black tunic and combs her hair from her face into a tight bun. She stands with Ruth and Ami, and listens to the enumeration of her duties. She bows her head and recites the prayers, but that is not where her mind and heart are. They’re on the path, waiting.
Tabitha spends the next month planning her escape. Soon she can’t sleep anymore and she’s memorized every detail of her room. She’s tired of the stone walls, the stone floor, the tiny window looking over the graveyard, beyond which the dead roam the fences. She thinks she might understand a little now why they moan. She thinks she might understand the pain of such intense desire. It brings tears to her eyes that never seem to go away.
She starts to wander through the Cathedral in the darkness of the too-early morning hours. She counts the windows, she counts the benches and cushions and even the stones in the floor. Anything to stop thinking about pregnant moons and Patrick and the feel of him trailing a hot finger down her spine.
She’s tracing her own finger along a crooked crack in the Sanctuary wall, remembering the feel of his skin against hers, when the crack dips behind a curtain and she follows it. There’s a door there, and she doesn’t hesitate before pushing it open to reveal a long hallway. She wanders down it to another door, this one thick and banded with metal.
It’s dark and she has no candle and it’s late, and Tabitha spends a long while staring at that door before she turns around and goes back to bed. The moans of the Unconsecrated whisper her into the deepest sleep she’s felt for ages.
The next night she doesn’t even change into her sleeping gown, but instead waits in her black tunic for the Cathedral to fall silent. She takes the candle and flint from beside her bed and goes straight to the curtain in the Sanctuary, her heart pounding so hard that her fingers shake from the force.
She sneaks down the hallway, her footsteps disturbing a thin layer of dust, and this time she doesn’t pause but goes immediately through the metal-banded door. It leads to a set of stairs, and she descends, the air growing dank and thick enough that the light from her candle barely penetrates it.
She’s in a basement and it smells like dirt, tastes like the wet rot of fall. Rows of wooden racks march through the large room, some cradling old grimy bottles but most just barely withstanding entropy. There are no other doors and no windows, no escape from the heady mustiness.
Along one wall hangs a curtain but Tabitha already knows this trick. She pulls it aside and finds another door, but this one is locked. She tries every way she knows, but she can’t open the door. Eventually she gives up and goes back to bed, but this time she cannot sleep.
Soon, to Tabitha, the locked door behind the curtain in the basement becomes like the gate blocking the path. She knows she must go through it. And as with the gate, she makes her plan carefully.
She offers to take on the chores assigned to Ruth and Ami, cleaning rooms and scrubbing walls and floors, using them as an excuse to rifle through drawers and cabinets. She finds dozens of keys and she tries them all but none work.
The next time the moon is full she thinks about abandoning Patrick in the Forest. It’s been months since she’s seen him, and she’s angry and hurt and broken. Sometimes she’ll pull his book out from under a loose stone in the wall of her room and she’ll flip through the pages, wondering if all men are so cruel; if love is like a spring bud that blossoms and bursts in a bright hot color and then wilts and dies, never to return.
Two days later, she spends the afternoon torn. She finds herself sneaking away and walking toward the gate and then turning back. She doesn’t know what’s right. She doesn’t want to give up the hope of Patrick but she’s not sure she’s ready to deal with the pain of him either.
It frustrates her that he occupies so much of her mind. Even when she tries to think of other things during the day, he invades her dreams at night and she wakes up sweaty and alone. The second night after the full moon is no exception. She crawls from her bed and carries her candle to the gate and walks the path through the Forest to their meeting spot.
The light from the tiny flame of the candle barely reaches past the fences bordering the path, and it throws cruel shadows across the Unconsecrated who follow her. Their eyes seem more hollow than during the day, their cheeks sharper, their teeth and tongues black maws.
Moans surround her, peel away her flesh until she feels bare and raw. The Unconsecrated bang against the fence, claw for her so hard their fingers snap and bones protrude, gleaming and sharp. She can’t rush because the candle will go out and so she’s forced to walk slowly, unable to outrun the death on either side of her.
The gate is as it always is: impassive and sturdy. As she expected, the path on the other side is empty. She stands in the darkness and tries to decide what to do next. Go back? Go forward? Curl up on the path and let time take its toll?
Her shoulders fall, her fingers go limp and the candle drops. Just before the flame sputters out against the damp earth, she catches sight of something lying on the ground on the other side of the gate. In the middle of the path is a small basket covered by a scrap of material.
The moon is fat but waning, and she doesn’t bother relighting the candle before opening the gate and crossing through it. She pulls back the fabric to find a spray of wilted flowers, their petals black in the darkness. Nestled amid the limp leaves rests a piece of paper, and it takes her three strikes of the flint until her candle’s bright enough to read the words.
“My Tabby,” she whispers aloud to the dead around her. “My family has grown sick and my father is on the verge of death. I couldn’t bear to leave my mother and sister so soon. Forgive my absences. Please forgive me. I have missed you and I promise that nothing will keep me from you after the hare moon. I hope that you remain mine, as I remain yours. Always, my love, Patrick.”
She presses the words to her lips, hoping for a taste of his skin on the paper. She holds her hand against her chest, wanting to rip out her heart and leave it in this basket among the wilted flowers for him. Because she now understands that it belongs to him and always will.
Tabitha keeps the note on her person at all times, tucked into the binding for her breasts, next to her heart. She doesn’t care that the sweat of the day blurs his words; she needs them against her. She needs to remember the feel of him.
She continues her search for the key in a feverish daze. She finds herself staring off into space in the middle of mundane tasks, and she’s late for services more than once. As punishment she’s tasked with spending nights alone praying in the Sanctuary for the Midnight Office and Matins.
Her eyes begin to look a bit hollow, the bones in her cheeks a little sharper and her jaw more defined. There are confusing moments when she thinks she almost feels the comforting heat of God in her deepest prayers, and she stumbles to her bed muddled and hazy.
She’s so lost in her thoughts one afternoon that she doesn’t realize at first what it means when she comes across a large key while dusting the shelves and stacking papers on the desk in the oldest Sister’s chambers.
She holds the key in her hands, feeling its weight. Something warms in her chest, loosens along the small of her back. She slips the key next to Patrick’s letter in the binding around her breasts and spends the rest of the day itching for the time to pray.
She’s standing in the middle of the Cathedral, staring at the altar and trying to decide if she believes in prayer, when a little girl comes and stands next to her. The girl’s name is Anne, and Tabitha recognizes her as a friend of her little brother’s.
Anne stands next to Tabitha quietly for a moment, and then she shyly looks up at her. “Are you praying?” she asks.
Tabitha thinks about this for a moment and answers, “I don’t know.”
The girl looks puzzled. “Why don’t you know?”
“Because I don’t know what to believe in right now,” she answers.
The little girl takes a short breath and then shoves her slightly damp hand into Tabitha’s, squeezing her fingers. “I know what to believe,” she says. “My mother told me and her mother told her.”
“What’s that?” Tabitha asks.
The little girl scrunches her face. “You won’t get me in trouble for saying?”
Tabitha shakes her head.
The little girl motions for Tabitha to bend down and she obliges, getting on her knees so that she’s face to face with the child. The girl leans forward, her dark hair falling against Tabitha’s cheeks. “My mother says there’s a world outside the fences. She told me about the ocean, and when I get older, I’m going to find it. If you want, you can go with me.”
The little girl pulls back, her eyes shining and her little body almost trembling with energy. Tabitha thinks about telling her that it’s true, that there’s something greater beyond their gate. That she’s touched the very edge of it. But when she opens her mouth nothing comes out.
Tabitha starts the Midnight Office early and races through the words, baldly reciting them hot and fast without thought to their meaning or significance. After the last Amen she slips from the pews past the altar and toward the secret door.
She’s just pulling back the curtain when she hears the whisper of feet over stones. “I thought we would keep you company tonight,” Ruth says, carrying a candle into the Sanctuary, a yawning Ami at her heels. They pause when they see Tabitha and the hidden door.
Tabitha’s heart beats fast and wild. There’s a certain thrill, she realizes, in getting caught. “I finished early,” she says.
Her two friends drift closer. “What’s that?” Ruth asks.
Ami tugs on her sleeve. “It’s not our place to know if they haven’t told us,” she says. The whites of her eyes almost glow in the darkness.
“Where does it go?” Ruth asks Tabitha.
Tabitha grasps the key tightly in her hand, its dull teeth digging into her palm. “I don’t know,” she says.
“Ruth?” Ami’s whine is tinged with anxiety. She glances over her shoulder, as if expecting someone to come upon them at any moment.
“You’re going to explore it?” Ruth asks. Tabitha recognizes the hint of a thrill in her voice. Knows that Ruth is like her—that she craves the knowing.
Tabitha raises her chin. “I am.”
“Ruth …” Ami is now close to panic, scrabbling at her friend’s arm. Ruth looks from Ami to Tabitha, and Tabitha knows the moment she makes up her mind, because her shoulders droop a little. She places a hand over Ami’s.
“We’ll pray for you,” Ruth says to Tabitha. Ami sags with relief. “And we’ll make sure no one asks about your absence.”
Tabitha nods. “Thank you,” she says, thankful to be left alone but more grateful to know that her friends will be looking out for her.
Ruth tugs Ami toward the rail and together they kneel. Alone, Tabitha slips through the door, and before the curtain falls back into place, she sees Ami’s head bowed low and Ruth’s glittering eyes following Tabitha’s movements with both lust and resignation.
The basement is the same as before: dark and damp. She slides back the curtain and pulls out the key. The lock on the door doesn’t even protest, just slips to the right, and the door cracks open, revealing a long low tunnel.
There’s a flutter in her chest like the first time she opened the secret gate between her and Patrick. On a small table just past the door she finds a stash of old candles, but she ignores them, cupping her hand around the flame on the taper she brought with her and pushing into the darkness.
She can tell she’s underground: the walls are slick with moss and sweating with moisture, the floor is a hard-packed dirt. Her steps are slow and hesitant not because she’s afraid, which she is a little, but because, until recently, with her forays into the Forest, it is so rare for there to be something new in her life, rare for her to have a feeling she’s never experienced or a thought she’s never shared, and she still isn’t used to such a novelty. She always assumed she knew this village and this life and everything about them, and now she’s found something new and she wants to make it last.
Down the low tunnel she finds a series of doors, most of them with locks that her key won’t budge. But one door opens easily after she twists away metal bars that hold it closed in the stone wall. In the room beyond, the glow of her candle illuminates a low bed piled with mildewed blankets, and a rotted mat on the floor.
Against the far wall sits a rickety table with a thick book resting on top. She knows even in the dimness that the book is a copy of the Scripture, and she’s about to return to the hallway and her explorations when something about it calls to her.
She wonders if this is what it was like for the prophets she’s learned so much about, this pull toward some offering of a truth. She places a hand on the book, thick dust sliding smoothly under her fingers.
With a reverence she’s never before felt, she opens the cover. The printed text is as she expects. What she doesn’t expect is the cramped handwriting covering the margins. She sets down her candle and leans closer to the page, reading the first line: In the beginning, we did not know the extent of it.
She immediately recognizes the writing for what it is: a history of the village, beginning with the Return. She carries the book to the bed and begins to read. When her candle burns too low, she gets another from the table by the door.
Time ceases to exist for Tabitha in that room. All that matters is the words, the memories. The horrifying facts of her world. Stories she has never heard, about the brutality of the pre-Return existence, about the sacrifices those who came before her made to keep her village safe.
It feels as though the words crawl from the page and eat their way under her skin, infecting her with a fever that causes her head to pound and her blood to burn.
She begins to understand the precariousness of their existence. The delicate balance of knowledge and ignorance, of what to pass down to the general populace of the village and what to keep locked up safe in the Cathedral.
And she learns the reason the paths are forbidden. She reads about the bandits who attacked the village in the early years. About the men who would leave and never return, who would alert the outside world to the village’s existence, who would incite a fresh wave of refugees that overwhelmed the village’s resources.
There were times when the Infected from other villages would try to invade. There was a year when her village almost perished because a small child wandered from the Forest and turned Unconsecrated in the middle of the night, sparking infection that raged.
In a desperate act, those who’d come before her closed off the paths. Sent word that their village was infected and broken, would never survive. They started to tell the next generation that they were all that was left. They killed any who dared to tip this delicate balance.
They did it out of love. Out of loyalty. Out of a desire to continue the existence of humanity in the service of God. They did it with a passion born of conviction.
This, Tabitha realizes, is what she inherited. This is what she jeopardizes every time she steps into the Forest.
As she closes the book, Sister Tabitha understands that she has to decide what she will stand for: her own desire for love or devotion to her village and the people within it.
Tabitha has just stepped back into the Sanctuary, weak and trembling, her face pale, when the oldest Sister comes upon her. “You’re late for the Midnight Office,” she scolds. “Your face is streaked with dirt and your hair is uncombed. This is no way to come before God.”
In the past Tabitha would have seethed inside at being treated like a child, but tonight she merely nods and walks stiffly to her room. She has been in the tunnel chamber for almost an entire day, and her eyes burn, dry and painful.
She washes her face and plaits her hair and returns to the Sanctuary half asleep for the midnight prayers. It’s hard not to weave on her knees, not to rest her head against the altar railing and slip from the world.
Ruth and Ami join her. Ami keeps her head bowed, her fingers laced so tight that her knuckles blaze white, but Ruth looks Tabitha straight in the eye. “We covered for you,” she says.
Tabitha nods. “Thank you.”
“What did you find?” Ruth asks. Ami closes her eyes tightly, mumbling prayers as if trying to drown out everything around her.
Tabitha thinks of the Scripture with the journal written in the margins. She thinks of the burden of her knowledge and wonders what it would be like to share it. To seek counsel.
She thinks of telling Patrick. Of lying in the spring grass with his fingers tangled in her hair.
“A basement,” Tabitha says truthfully. “Old dusty bottles and broken shelves.” She turns her attention to the altar and the cross, though she still feels Ruth’s heavy gaze.
“That’s it?” Ruth sounds disappointed, deflated.
Tabitha nods and joins in Ami’s mumbling prayers, reciting the words without thinking or hearing or feeling them. In her mind she’s begging God to tell her what to do, what choice to make.
Tabitha sneaks back to the room underground whenever she can, each time with a growing sense of dread and apprehension rather than excitement and joy. She sits on the old bed surrounded with the taste of mildew and she stares at the book lying on its rickety table.
There hasn’t been an entry recorded in it for seven years. Since the last-oldest Sister passed on in her sleep. Tabitha wonders if the Sister simply forgot to mention the book to her successor or if its loss was more purposeful. If maybe the Sister meant for the village to forget its past and start anew.
Tabitha understands that this determination rests in her hands now. She’s suddenly become the keeper of her village, and she must decide whether to accept the mantle.
One day Tabitha ventures down the long dark hallway past the rows of locked doors, past the tiny room with its bed and book and rot. She stops at the end of the tunnel farthest from the Cathedral basement and sits on a narrow set of steps carved into the earth.
Above her, set flush with the ceiling, is another locked door. Another taunting gate. She’s tired of all the secrets, tired of them chasing her in her dreams. She pulls useless keys from her pockets and shoves them into the lock, but none of them will turn.
She trembles with the rage of it and storms back to the basement, ripping apart one of the old empty shelves until she has a pile of dry splintered wood cradled in her arms. For good measure, she swipes a few candles from the table just inside the door and piles it all haphazardly under the lock on the door at the other end of the tunnel.
She strikes her flint, letting sparks fly until everything begins to smoke darkly. Eventually the wood catches and the flames lick the old wood around the lock on the door. She stumbles back down the tunnel seeking fresh air and watches the blaze, her eyes burning and her lungs protesting while heat sears her face.
She’s never been one for patience, and when she thinks the fire’s done enough damage, and when she starts to fear that the smoke might be drifting too far down the tunnel, she wraps one of the moldy blankets around her arms and scatters the charcoaled wood, stomping it out with her feet.
Not even caring that the steps are burning hot and that stray embers sear her skin, she kicks the lock until it breaks free.
Fresh air rushes in through the opening, bathing her face with its pure sunlight. It’s like an epiphany, this rising from the ashes and into an outside world.
She climbs out and crouches in a tiny clearing, nothing but fresh clover spread around her, white flowers dotting it. An old fence circles her, woven through with blooming vines that make Tabitha feel like she’s stepped into another world.
A frayed rope tied to a gate trails across the ground, and she realizes that with one tug she could open the gate and escape into the unbounded Forest. For now she leaves it be and pulls herself out into the grass, feeling the caress of the soft earth against her burned face and fingers.
For a few moments, nothing exists in her world except her breath and blood and pounding heart and the belief that she’s been reborn here for something important: something greater than herself.
The hare moon is pregnant in the sky. Tabitha watches it from her little clearing in the woods. She doesn’t care that the dead have sensed her and wandered from the Forest to trace their fingers along the old links of the fence. She sits cross-legged, old pilfered tools that she’s used to repair the door to the tunnel scattered around her.
She has two days to decide what to do about Patrick. The words about duty from the journal rattle around in her head, but her body remembers the feel of his fingers wandering down her spine.
She prays to God but He’s silent. She searches for guidance but the Forest only moans.
Two days later her hands tremble so badly she has to replait her hair several times before it will lie flat along her back. Her face is scrubbed clean, her tunic freshly washed, and she pretends to gather wildflowers from the cemetery while she waits for the Guardian patrols to rotate off so that she can sneak through the gate and down the path.
It’s an achingly beautiful spring day, one whose soft air whispers into Tabitha’s ears about love, and she smiles as she listens. It’s been too many months since she’s seen Patrick, and as she makes her way to him her body almost vibrates with excitement and anticipation.
In her arms she carries the basket he left for her, this time with fresh flowers hiding a change of clothes underneath. Pressed against her breast is his letter.
If he asks her to leave her world for him, she will say yes.
She practices saying it as she walks: “Yes, yes, yes, yes!” But when she arrives at the gate he’s not there and she has a moment of uncertainty. She sets the basket on the ground and then picks it up again. She runs her hands over her tunic, smoothing nonexistent wrinkles. She holds her breath and blows it out and tugs on her braid and paces.
The dead catch up with her and rake at the fences, which does nothing to calm her agitation. She grabs a stick from the ground and pokes at them, trying to force them away, but of course, they don’t notice or care or move. Not when she flays their skin. Not when she destroys their eyes with a sharp jab, despising the idea that they’re somehow looking at her and judging her.
She’s about to scream in frustration, so she closes her eyes and inhales deeply, trying to find a way to calm the mortified burning of her skin. She’s standing just like that, strong and tall in the middle of the path with her fists clenched, when Patrick finds her.
“Tabitha,” he says, his voice sounding smaller than she remembers.
She smiles, of course she smiles, the world suddenly tilting into place. When she turns to him he’s different and the same all at once. The blurred bits of her memory sharpen into focus: his eyes are a deeper green, his lips fuller; his skin that much more lush and warm.
“Patrick!” she cries out, racing to him.
It isn’t until he fumbles with the gate that she sees he’s not alone, and her steps falter. She cocks her head, looking at the little boy grasping Patrick’s fingers.
“Patrick?” she asks. She’s thrown off by his absences, by his being late. By the child.
Patrick looks between the two of them. He pulls the boy in front of him and grasps his shoulders. “My brother,” Patrick says. She can tell he’s trying not to sound hesitant.
“I …” She doesn’t know how to finish.
“I need your help, Tabby,” Patrick says, and she hears the misery in his voice. He gently moves the boy aside, wraps his arms around her and presses his face into the hollow at her throat. Her hands go to his head, slip into his hair, but her eyes are still on the little boy, who just stands there. Watching.
Patrick’s telling her how he missed her. How he loves her and didn’t know what to do when she wasn’t there before. How so much has gone wrong and his father has died. She nods and tells him she understands and how sorry she is for the loss of his father, but really she’s waiting for him to explain the boy. She feels the muscles in her cheeks straining and twitching, an aching pain beginning to radiate through her mouth.
He tips his head back, his cheeks damp. “I need to ask you something,” he says, and she trembles, waiting for the words he’s whispered to her every night in her dreams—Run away with me.
She’s waiting for him to unlock the world for her.
“My brother’s sick,” he tells her.
She looks at the child, her eyes wide. “Infected?” she breathes before she can stop herself.
Patrick shakes his head adamantly and tugs on her hands, demanding her attention. “Your village, they have medicine. They can fix him.”
She struggles to get away from him but he won’t let go.
“Please, Tabitha, please,” he says. “We don’t know medicine the way your village does.”
She jerks her hands until she’s free and stumbles away.
“I thought you were going to ask me to leave with you,” she says, her forehead crinkled.
“There’s nowhere for me to take you,” he says.
“But you talked about the world. Life outside the Forest.” The bindings around her breasts are pulling too tight, squeezing her so that it’s difficult to breathe. The little boy’s just standing there. Staring at her.
Patrick shakes his head. “I have to make my brother well first. I promised my mother I would take care of him. It was the last thing she asked of me before pushing me out of our village.”
A bright grief begins to wail inside Tabitha. She presses her lips together, doing everything she can to swallow the growing agony. She turns away from Patrick. She wishes she had something to lean against, because she’s not quite sure her legs will support her anymore. But there’s nothing—just fences lined with the dead, waiting for any chance to make her theirs.
“How did your father die?” Her voice is defeated.
Patrick slowly walks toward her, she can feel when he’s just behind her. When he inhales, his chest brushes against her back and she closes her eyes, aching for him to take his finger and run it up her spine.
“He was infected,” he says softly.
She clears her throat. She will not sound weak. “How?” she asks.
“A woman from another village. They checked her over when she arrived, but she’d hidden the bite by cutting off her own finger. They thought it was under control after my father got infected, that they could keep it from spreading farther, but …”
Tabitha winces. “But your brother? And you?” She thinks about the book in the basement, the story of her village scribbled in the cramped margins of the words of God. It’s the way her world has always been.
“He’s not infected, Tabby,” Patrick says. “Nor am I. I promise.”
“The rest of your village?” She clenches her fists tighter and prays to God, Please, just this once, let the answer be what I need it to be. She’s been a loyal believer for so long, all she asks is for this one small token in return.
“Chaos,” he says simply. “My mother shoved my brother into my arms and told me to save him. I ran to you.”
She clenches her teeth to stop from crying out.
She turns to face him. “Do you love me?” she asks.
His expression softens and his lips part. “More than anything,” he says, stroking her cheek with the back of his fingers.
She feels the tears in her eyes. She doesn’t want to give up on the dream of running away with him. She doesn’t want to turn back to her village and its claustrophobic fences and rules.
But Patrick has asked for her help and she loves him. “Then I will help you,” she says.
As planned, Patrick and his brother stay on the path until darkness falls and wraps itself thickly around the village. Tabitha spends the hours kneeling in the Sanctuary. Her lips tremble as she prays, the words hollow in her heart.
When she’s sure no one will see them, Tabitha leads Patrick and his brother into the Cathedral. The boys is wide-eyed, astounded by the warren of hallways and the soaring Sanctuary. She takes them to her room and tells them she must leave them there.
“I have duties,” she says. She doesn’t know why it’s so hard for her to meet Patrick’s eyes. Maybe it’s because he’s sitting on the bed. Her bed where she’s dreamt of him and thought of his fingertips sliding along the back of her calves to her knees.
She shivers and looks down at her hands. If the boy weren’t there … would Patrick touch her like that when she returned?
“We’ll be okay,” Patrick says. His little brother sits next to him on the bed, silent.
“I’ll try to bring food,” she says. Patrick nods. She find it strange for him to be here in the Cathedral, with its sharp stone walls and ceilings, rather than on the path with the fresh air and the leaves and the light and the freedom.
Tabitha walks to Midnight Office, welcoming the silence of thoughts.
Tonight she’s slow with her prayers. Ami and Ruth kneel beside her, their heads bowed, but she sees them glance at her and then at each other. She knows they sense that something is wrong, but she keeps her fingers twined tight and her lips moving in praise of God and doesn’t allow her friends the chance to interrupt.
When she goes back to her room there’s a promise of morning in the air, the sweetness of grass and dew. She slips open the door and Patrick is asleep under her blankets.
The hare moon is still in the sky somewhere, allowing her to see his face. She stands for a bit, the moans of the Unconsecrated threading through the fences as she stares. He sleeps with his lips parted, one hand thrown out to the side as if waiting for her to slip her fingers into his.
It’s as though he cares for nothing. Has no fears.
Tabitha knows she herself sleeps curled around herself in a small ball, protecting herself from the world.
He opens his eyes, sees her.
She inhales at the intensity of his gaze. Something inside her flutters, warms, spreads. He doesn’t say anything as he slips from underneath the covers, the thin sheet trailing over his chest and down across his hips.
He’s wearing nothing. She swallows.
Her voice is a panicked squeak. “Your brother—”
“Is in the room next door. It looked vacant—dusty. Never used.”
She nods her head. No one’s stayed in that room as long as she’s been here. He comes closer. She swallows again. She’s still not looking directly at him and he raises a finger.
He starts at her thumb, trailing his touch around her wrist, up the inside of her arm and across her elbow. Along her upper arm, so that his knuckles brush against her bound breasts.
She’s not sure what breathing is anymore. What heat is.
His fingertips dance over her collarbone, slip just lightly under the hem of her tunic, over her chest. His skin is sleep-warm, his eyelids heavy.
“My Tabby,” he says, lowering his face to where her neck meets her shoulder. Every part of her is alive and waiting for that first touch of lips to skin. When it happens she opens her mouth, her body unable to contain air any longer.
He kisses the line of her jaw and along her cheekbone. Into her ear he murmurs, “My love.”
She stands there, eyes closed, wound up so tight she expects his next touch will cause her to explode and end the world.
She wants to raise her hand and touch him. To wrap her fingers around his muscles and feel them twitch. She wants to make him catch his breath. She wants to make him feel as full of need and desire as she does at this moment.
His lips are just skimming hers. She breathes him into her and he breathes her into him and she wonders if anything can be more intimate than this: this sharing of breath that is life.
He slips a hand behind her neck, into her hair, untangling her bun. His fingertips dig into her scalp and she can feel that he is wound tight, like her. That in the next moment he will pull her mouth to his and they’ll ignite. She’ll crack open and be nothing but pure light energy, her soul bursting into the world to burn with his.
The scream is high-pitched and long, and so unexpected that it takes Tabitha and Patrick too many heartbeats to understand what’s happening.
In the hallway roars a commotion and banging and then the door flies open. “Tabitha!” Ruth comes racing in, blood trailing down her arm. She’s too far into the room before she realizes what she’s barged in on. Before she sees the naked young man with his arms around Tabitha.
Ruth pauses, and in that moment, a tiny body struggles out of the darkness at her. It’s Patrick’s brother, his lips dripping blood and his fingers digging into the Sister’s knee as he bites at her calf.
Tabitha screams. Footsteps pound down the hallway, and before she can warn anyone away Ami careens into the room. Patrick’s brother switches targets, pawing at the newcomer.
Ruth stands there sobbing and Ami dissolves into panic just as fast, trying to fling her body to dislodge the Unconsecrated child but managing only to tangle herself in her tunic. To allow him access to her ankle. More footsteps in the hallway. The boy drops Ami and looks straight at Tabitha. He stumbles toward her and Patrick rears back.
Tabitha doesn’t think. She just acts. She snatches the boy by his arm, twisting him to keep his teeth from her. With all of her strength she flings him across the room. He slams into the wall and Patrick shouts.
“Out!” Tabitha screams at everyone. Patrick tries to approach his brother, who lies crumpled on the floor, little mewling moans dribbling from his lips. The boy starts to crawl toward them, his fingernails shredding and snapping against the stone floor as he tries to gain traction.
Tabitha pushes the two infected Sisters from the room and grabs Patrick’s arm, tugging him behind her.
He grips her hand as she slams the door. “I didn’t know,” he says. “I didn’t know,” he says again, as if repeating it over and over again will still the confusion inside.
Tabitha sits in the corner of a cramped room while the rest of the Sisters figure out what to do next. The two infected Sisters are in the infirmary. They’re being given last rites and will be put down soon. “We’ll tell the village it was a bout of food poisoning,” the oldest Sister, their de facto leader, says. Everyone else murmurs in stunned agreement, but Tabitha stays silent.
“Now, about the infected child,” the head Sister says. As if she’s leading some sort of meeting with an agenda.
Patrick’s brother is still in Tabitha’s room. She knows he’s made it to the door because she thinks she can hear him scratching against it. Tiny moans float through the hallways. Patrick’s been tied to a bed in another room. Tabitha’s sure they gagged him or else she’d be able to hear him shouting for his brother, screaming that he didn’t know.
She presses her lips together tightly. She’s very aware that everyone around her is struggling not to look at her. She’s trying to figure out what she believes. She’s trying to decide if it matters.
She knows she asked him directly if his brother was infected and he said no. She doesn’t know if he was lying. She closes her eyes, remembering the earnest panic of his expression as she pulled him from her room.
Tabitha thinks about the book in the tunnel room. About how long this village has lasted because it was cut off. How she has endangered that.
Ruth and Ami, her only two friends in the Sisterhood, will be dead soon. Her family could have died as well. Everyone in the village could have become infected.
“Someone will have to take care of the child,” the oldest Sister says.
Tabitha rubs a hand over her face, shifting in her chair. It’s all her fault. Whether Patrick lied to her or not, she was the one to bring the infected child into the village. The little boy is her responsibility. Just as Patrick’s fate belongs to her.
It would be so much easier if she knew Patrick lied to her. If she could believe that he knew all along that his brother was infected. But she knows her heart and her heart knows his, and this is how she is sure that Patrick told the truth.
And yet it doesn’t matter that she believes him: belief is irrelevant in the face of fact. He brought the infection. She allowed it to happen.
“I will take care of the infected child,” she says softly. She looks at the other women in the room—really looks at them. At how soft some of them appear. How old and tired. How they devote their lives to God and leave nothing for themselves.
How unlike Tabitha. She who lusted. She who put desire for a different life—for a man, for her dreams—before God. She who almost brought down her village.
“And the older brother?” the head Sister asks. For the first time Tabitha realizes the hesitation in her voice. She realizes how weak this woman is to be in charge of not just the Cathedral, but the fate of the village. She wonders if any of the rest of them know of the journal downstairs, know of the legacy of their survival.
Tabitha thinks about taking Patrick’s hand and leading him down the path and away from the village. Of banishing herself and him together. She smiles, letting the dream roll around in her mind.
“Him I will take care of as well,” Tabitha says.
“About the circumstances in which the older boy was found …,” the head Sister begins, leaving an opening for Tabitha to fill in the blank.
Tabitha stands and squares her shoulders. She keeps her chin level and her voice even as she says, “It is none of your concern.” She sweeps toward the door, black tunic floating around her ankles. She waits for the head Sister to challenge her, to maintain her authority and dress Tabitha down in front of her peers for what she has allowed to happen. But the old woman is silent.
“What will you do?” one of the other Sisters asks, as if this is some sort of democracy where everyone can voice a thought.
Tabitha pauses in the doorway, examining them, meeting their eyes one by one. Establishing her control. “I will do what is necessary,” Sister Tabitha responds.
The boy is small and broken and weak. His mewls are those of a newborn kitten. Tabitha steps into her room and walks toward the window easily avoiding his reach. He starts to pull himself across the floor toward her and she stands and stares at the Unconsecrated outside, past the fences.
So much useless death. Such a waste.
When the boy is closer Tabitha kneels and cups his cheeks in her hands. He tries to squirm, tries to twist and turn so that he can taste her. “May God show mercy on us both,” she whispers before snapping his neck and bashing his small fragile head against the stone floor.
For a while she looks at him. If only Patrick had asked her to go away with him. If only they’d been on the path when the boy turned, he could have infected them both. They could have woken up dead, entwined together forever.
As she unties Patrick’s ropes she avoids his eyes.
But he grabs her and makes her look at him. “I didn’t know he was infected,” he says, his voice hoarse and lips dry. “My mother gave him to me, told me to take him away. I never knew.”
Tabitha nods. “I believe you,” she says. And it’s true.
“I would never lie to you, Tabby. I love you too much.”
She nods again. She understands this as well.
She tells him they put his brother in a special room—a safe place where Patrick can say good-bye. After he does, she tells him, she will lead him back into the Forest and away from the village and together they will find a way to live and love beyond this constricted world.
He doesn’t question her as she pulls him down the stairs into the basement, or when she pulls aside the curtain and unlocks the hidden door. He follows her blindly as she leads him down the dark tunnel. She stops at the stairs climbing from the ground at the far end.
They face each other and Tabitha inhales deeply, the scent of him mingling with the smell of old smoke and rot. She closes her eyes, trying to sear it into her memory. Slowly, she runs a hand up his arm, along his collarbone and around his neck until her fingers dig into his hair.
She thinks about the kiss they almost—but never—shared and she wonders if his lips could have been a part of her, if the two of them could have left this world before his infected brother Returned. If their love had been pure, maybe they’d have been able to stop time.
“I will love you always,” she says, pulling his lips to hers.
Through her kiss she tries to explain everything that words cannot. About love and duty and God and need and choices and memory and history. She wants him to taste her and understand her. In that kiss is everything she was and could be, all that she’s giving up in her life.
She needs to take this part of him with her because it’s the only way she can go back to the life she must live. To her duty to village and God.
When she pulls away she’s crying, and Patrick reaches up to her cheek and catches a tear on his finger. He doesn’t realize she’s saying good-bye to him. “I will love you always,” he says, and she smiles, sad and aching.
She gestures for him to go up the stairs first and he pushes open the door. Without having to look she picks up the rope leading to the gate outside and twines it around her wrist. Before he disappears aboveground she presses her fingers to her lips and then against his spine. She pulls the rope and then he’s gone and she closes and locks the door behind him.
She huddles on the top step and listens to him bang and call for her and then to the sound of the moans. She tears at her clothes and her body, raking her nails against her flesh, hoping to let the agony pulsing inside her escape, but nothing can dull the torment.
Her hand shakes as she dips the pen into ink and holds it above the page. The printed words are impossible to decipher through the tears trembling from her eyes. Her body is wracked with sobs. Still, she writes: There is always a choice. Choice is what makes us human. It is what separates us from the Unconsecrated. But that does not mean that choice cannot turn men into monsters. I have chosen survival over life.
In her life, Tabitha has felt consuming desire only during those too-short moments with Patrick. She watches him along the fences with the others now, watches the way he grabs at the metal links and pleads and begs. She touches the old note from him, tucked against her breast under the cross she wears around her neck.
A part of her likes to believe that he’s different from the others, that he doesn’t moan for anyone but her. That he spends his days and nights trying to return to her.
He is always there for her, always waiting. The most constant companion anyone could pray for. One of these days she will return to him. She will feel that desire again, that need beyond human comprehension, and they will be together forever.
Born and raised in Greenville, South Carolina, Carrie Ryan is a graduate of Williams College and Duke University School of Law. Carrie now lives and writes in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can visit her at carrieryan.com . Read all of the Forest of Hands and Teeth books: The Forest of Hands and Teeth, The Dead-Tossed Waves , and The Dark and Hollow Places .
