The White Forest Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the earth had stony teeth. These deep holes had been looking to devour her, she said.
    The expression on Father’s face went from confusion to alarm as he realized his wife had lost her sense. Before he could take me to the maids, Mother grabbed my wrist so tightly it hurt.
    “Jane,” she said. “Come close now.” She drew me forward until my face was nearly touching her own. This gesture was as much a surprise as anything, because Mother was known for keeping herself at some remove. In many ways, she was a mystery, rarely showing emotion and never coming close.
    There in the parlor, I could smell the earthiness of her breath as she told me that a part of her remained in the stomach of the stone out in the field of shale. There was a world down there that wasn’t anything like ours, and she was damned for seeing that place.
    I kissed her cold hand and held back tears. I wanted to beg her to stop talking, but she was my mother, and I knew I had to listen. I let myself weep beside her as she repeated over and over again that I must never be swallowed and that there were two worlds. I must be vigilant to ensure I remained in this one. Going to the other world would be the end of me.
    I made no sense of her warning. I knew only that a woman could leave the house her normal self and then return a few hours later a lunatic. The earth must have been a cold king to do a thing like that.
    Mother resumed an expression of clarity shortly before I was ledaway. She looked into my eyes and said, “Has the Lady of Flowers come for me, Jane? Do you see her at the door?”
    I turned toward the parlor door and saw no one. “Who is the Lady of Flowers?” I asked.
    Mother barely had enough strength to answer. “She’s there, blooming in the darkness, silent and waiting—”
    Before I could ask Mother to explain further, the maids hurried me to my room and gave me a sip of laudanum tea to help me sleep. They tucked me into my feather bed, and I dreamed Mother’s body bloomed with mouths that drifted across the surface of her skin, moving to the vasculations of her heart. I found a garden deep inside her, a second Earth, hoary and white, with trees made of tusk and unmoving streams of bleached paper pulp. Moonlike blossoms glowed in the underbrush. All that whiteness terrified me, as it was the color of absence, the color of abandonment. Even in the dream I knew Mother was leaving me, and I sensed there were creatures waiting among the trees, creatures I could not see. I dreamed of the white forest and the invisible creatures night after night, though I was never able to explore that place, only to look, as if it was a picture painted on the walls of my mind.
    •   •   •
    A comet appeared in the sky above Stoke Morrow shortly after my mother’s death, and Father took me into the garden to see it. He said the spray of its tail made it look like an Egyptian eye staring down on us, and he told me bitterly that the Egyptians had been correct about their gods. “Gods are animals, Jane. A jackal, a hawk, a common house cat, and like animals, they hunt and sleep and kill, never conscious of their own cruelty.”
    And in that moment, I was taken again by a vision of the white forest from my dream. I had a sense that the creatures that waited for me behind the trees were animal in nature, and Father’s statements made me wonder if somehow they might also be gods. I continuedto dwell on the image, and though it was clear enough in my mind, I did not know what any of it might mean.
    •   •   •
    It was my grief and my vision of the pale forest that opened me to what Nathan would later call my “talent.” After the death of my mother, I was changed. I no longer cared for girlish things—my glass house filled with velvet moths or my family of Austrian puppets with amber-colored eyes. I didn’t cry when my father loaded our carriage with both his trunks, intending to leave me in the care of the maids as he embarked on a