The Haven

Chapter 16

Nathaniel Park covered one side of the hill that Nathaniel the town stood on.

Park was hardly the right word, though. Forest was more accurate. The only part of it the city kept neat and park-like was the south east corner. There, the cropped lawns sprawled around the mansion and historic homestead of the city's founder, a maze of gardens wound through tall hedges, and brick walkways led to stone fountains and backless benches and shady circles and, ultimately, to the end of the neat and park-like corner of Nathaniel Park.

There, the forest began.

Each year, the wilds encroached a little more upon the lawn.

Vine tendrils reached out towards the clipped grass. Little armies of saplings poked their heads up out of the ground. Birds, foxes and rabbits crept out, watching like sentinals over the neatly groomed territory. Inch by inch the forest was recaiming the tamed area.

But the forest was careful, never intruding too far or too quickly. The city landscapers would not notice. The forest was patient. Its reclamation could go on for a hundred years unnoticed, and it could wait. And on the other side of the park, it did not have to wait.

The wild had already reclaimed that land.

There, Elsa stumbled a little on the dirt path.

Here, there were no neatly laid brick paths or trimmed hedges guiding the way. There was just a random tangle of dirt lines in the ground where people – people who didn't like well trimmed hedges and cropped lawns – had walked, and walked, and walked and walked. Branches bent low over the paths, fallen trees blocked them and saplings cropped up in the places where no one had walked for a long time.

And now it was dark.

But this was not the solid canopy of the dense forest in Elsa's dream. Here in Nathaniel Park, the branches reached high up, tangling with each other, but there were patches in the arboreal tapestry. And here, hints of moonlight fell on the path, although the shreds of light did not so much illuminate the path as cast deeper shadows on the obstacles.

Elsa slowed her steps, feeling out each one, step by step by step.

The underbrush thinned as the trees thickened. The moonlight dimmed and the darkness swallowed her feet. Shadows lumbered up out of the dark as her eyes adjusted. She could no longer see the path – it had disappeared altogether.

Deep in the wildness of the park, she stopped.

A fat oak with huge roots arching up over the ground sprawled in the dark just ahead of her. The glove-like leaves reached out from the dark. Elsa felt around, shuffling her feet in the shadows, until she found a dip between two roots. She sat down and settled her back against the trunk. She breathed in the dark air of the forest and nestled herself deeper into the tree.

She needed to be alone.

Her dream looked back at her every time she blinked. The whispering and running trees echoed in her ears and the staring face in the stream stared from the back of her closed her eyes. The tangled branches – her own arms – and the deep and reaching roots – her own feet.... Elsa shook her arms, to remind herself that they could move, that they weren't bark-covered branches fed by xylem and phloem.