The Forest of Hands and Teeth Read Online Free PDF

Sisters and Guardians.
    The paths are useless strips of land covered in brambles, bushes and weeds. The gates blocking them have remained shut my entire life.
    No one remembers where the paths go. Some say they are there as escape routes, others say they are there so that we can travel deep into the Forest for wood. We only know that one points to the rising sun and the other to the setting sun. I am sure our ancestors knew where the paths led, but, just like almost everything else about the world before the Return, that knowledge has been lost.
    We are our own memory-keepers and we have failed ourselves. It is like that game we played in school as children. Sitting in a circle, one student whispers a phrase into another student's ear and the phrase is passed around until the last student in the circle repeats what she hears, only to find out it is nothing like what it is supposed to be.
    That is our life now.

I t is late afternoon by the time I climb down from the tower and walk back to the Cathedral. The Sisters have been expecting me.
    “So you have chosen to become one of us?” the eldest, Sister Tabitha, asks me. She stands facing me in front of the altar, flanked by two middle-aged Sisters.
    “I have no other choices,” I tell her, because it is the truth.
    She inhales sharply and I can see her lips tighten into a single line. She turns abruptly and walks through a door hidden behind a curtain near the pulpit. “Follow,” she tells, not asks me, and I do, the other two Sisters trailing be hind us.
    We wind along a hallway deeper into the Cathedral than I have ever been until we reach a large wooden door banded with metal. Sister Tabitha tugs the door open, picks up a candle from a table inside and leads us down a steep winding stone stairway. The air becomes colder, damper, and when we reach the bottom we are in a cavernous room that contains row upon row of empty shelves.
    But we don't stop. We cross the room and pause in a shadowy corner. I tell myself that I have nothing to fear in this strange place. That the Sisterhood has always protected the people of the village. And yet I cannot stop the chill that overtakes my body and seeps into my bones.
    Sister Tabitha pulls aside a curtain, revealing a locked door. She pulls a key from a chain around her neck, opens the door and urges me forward. I follow her down another hallway—this one more like a tunnel, with stone walls and a dirt floor and a ceiling held up by thick wooden beams. More racks line the walls and every now and then I see a dusty bottle cradled in the shelves.
    “Did you know that long, long ago, centuries before the Return, this building used to belong to a plantation? Used to house a winery?” Sister Tabitha asks as we walk, our steps echoing around us. The flame of her candle flickers and she does not bother to wait for an answer because she knows we never learned about this in school.
    “What is now the Forest just outside our village used to be fields of grapes. For as far as the eye can see. Guardians tell us that they still encounter remnants of the vineyard, that they still find grapevines smothering the fences.”
    The tunnel curves to the left a bit. Every now and again we pass a door embedded in the stone. The wood is warped and scarred, with thick bolts driven into the walls. I pause by one, wanting to ask what lies beyond it, but I am thrust forward by the Sisters trailing behind me. I wonder why this history—the vineyard and this tunnel—has been kept a secret and why Sister Tabitha has chosen this moment to tell me.
    “They used to store the wine for fermentation under our Cathedral, but this is not where it was made,” Sister Tabitha continues. We finally reach a dead end and a set of wooden steps forced into the dirt and leading upward, and Sister Tabitha stops, turns toward me. I look behind her at a wooden door set in the ceiling at the top of the stairs.
    “The wine was made elsewhere,” she says, commanding my focus