Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest Read Free

Night after night—or so the parents whispered to their children behind the closed iron shutters—Nehi the Mountain Demon comes down from his black castle beyond the ridges and forests and passes among the houses like an evil spirit, searching for signs of life. If he happens to find a stray grasshopper, a solitary firefly blown here from far away by the winter winds, or even a beetle or an ant, he whips open his dark cape and ensnares any living thing inside it, and before sunrise, he flies back to his castle of horrors beyond the most distant forests on the perpetually cloud-shrouded mountaintops.
    That's what the parents whispered to their children, but when the story ended, they assured them in a different voice that those were only fairy tales. Yet none of the villagers ever went out after dark. Because the dark, the parents said, the dark is full of things it is definitely better not to meet.
    Maya, only daughter of Lilia the Widowed Baker, was a stubborn child. She didn't want to hear such rumors and refused to believe in things no one had ever seen. Maya was often cheeky to her mother: she said that all the darkness stories her mother read to her were silly and stupid. Sometimes Maya said, Everyone in this village is a little crazy, Mum, and you're a little crazier than any of them.
    Lilia said, Maybe it's a good thing you feel that way. Maybe there really is an old craziness here in the village. And you'd be better off knowing nothing about it, Maya. Nothing. Because people who don't know can't be thought guilty. And they're not likely to catch it.
    Catch what, Mum?
    Bad things, Maya. Very bad things. Enough. Have you by any chance seen my kerchief anywhere, the brown one? And when will you finally stop scribbling on the oilcloth table cover? I've asked you a thousand times to stop. So stop. Enough. Finished.
    One night, Maya waited patiently under her winter covers until her mother fell asleep. Then she got out of bed and stood at the window without turning on a light. She stood there at the window till morning, wrapped in her winter covers against the cold, and she didn't see anyone walk past outside, didn't hear anything, except once when she thought she heard the sound of Nimi the Owl's sad whoops coming from three streets away. Nimi had become a wandering street child and all the doors of the village were closed to him because of his whoopitis. But then he was silent. In the flawed moonlight that occasionally peeped from between the clouds, Maya saw clearly the clump of black trees across the street behind the ruins of a house.
    And because the night was very long and empty, she waited for the moon to shine briefly through the clouds and counted eight trees there. An hour or two later, when the moon shone through again, she recounted them, and this time there were nine. The next time there was light, she counted again, and there were still exactly nine trees. But in the small hours of the morning when the mountain slopes began to grow pale as the first fingers of dawn touched them, Maya decided to count those trees one last time, and suddenly there were only eight again.
    She got the same result when she counted them the next day, in the light, after she decided to go to the ruins and check it close up: exactly eight trees. To be on the safe side, Maya went from tree to tree, touched each trunk, and counted in a whisper, twice, from one to eight. There was no ninth tree. Had she made a mistake in the middle of the night? Because she was tired? Because it was so dark?
    Maya didn't say a word about the ninth tree, not to her mother, Lilia the Widowed Baker, not to her friends, and not to Emanuella the Teacher. She told only Matti, because Matti had told her about the secret plan he'd been working on in his mind for months. Matti listened to Maya's story about the ninth tree, thought for a while—didn't hurry to answer—and finally said that one night soon, he too would stay awake and wait patiently