Willowcreek; Within The Roots

Part Eight ─ When Angels Cry

The bark reignited her control over body, filling her with an urgency to get away from this tree to get to the dog, wherever he might be hiding.

The moon took over the sky, half covered by dirty grey clouds and dulled the light that Evie so desperately needed to see where she was going. The flickering flashlight just wasn't enough anymore and it instilled the fear that the thing from the pier would show up in front of her, that it would stop her in her tracks. She could sense it breathing down her spine, down the back of her neck, its pungent odor of damp moss and sulfur hovered around her like a bubble of stench. It turned her stomach, made her queasy and dizzy, distracting her as she narrowly missed the outstretched roots of the willow tree that she ran away from.

She didn't know why she'd automatically assumed it would look like Meister. She was beginning to wish that it had, because it was easy to tell that he had once been human. An awful one but still, human nonetheless. That thing was not. No matter how hard rationality pushed that it couldn't have been anything other than a human being, nothing could change her mind.

The Shadowman of Willowcreek Estate had never been human.

Ludo continued to bark, once, twice, three times, and following the noise, Evie found herself at the opening archway of the maze. Ten feet, that's how tall the archway had to be. It was made of some kind of stone, maybe granite? And it gave off a sense of impending doom, looming like the gates to the Underworld, like going through it would lead the girl to Elysium or the Fields of Asphodel. Or worse...the Fields of Punishment.

To either side of it, though slightly shorter but absolutely by no means less daunting, walls of green raced she couldn't even tell how far. The flowers that poked through the green, pretty colors that she thought were out of place, were a small comfort to the girl as she prepared herself for the leap.

Beyond this archway, somewhere deep in this maze was her dog and quite possibly the three headed guard dog of Hades, Cerberus, with an array of other mythical and fantastical creatures from mythology, books and movies. Of course, all of that stuff wasn't real, however, Evie well believed if there was even a slight chance of it, this maze could prove those naysayers wrong.

Herself included.

She'd been warned to keep Ludo out of here, to stay out of here herself, but she'd also been instructed to keep eyes on Ludo all of the time. The dog was in there, which meant she had to go in. She'd have to break the rules. Her uncle's only rules. An immediate heavy guilt bloomed in her chest as she stood there, thinking to herself that Eamon's were the only rules she didn't want to break but there was no getting around the fact that she had to.

After this, Evie knew she'd have so many more restrictions she'd have to adhere to. But only if she wasn't sent home for breaking these two first. Rustling behind her and the stench from before getting stronger forced Evie to take a step beyond the boundary. There was no going back now that she was over the line that distinguished inside the maze from outside of it.

She was officially a rule breaker.

Inside the maze was more daunting than the outside.

Those walls of green that had spanned the perimeter of its structure looked twice as large inside. Her mind made her believe they were growing in height as she walked to the first bend, ignoring the rustling that followed her inside. It is just the wind, it is just the wind, she told herself as she took note of a marker stuck in the hedge wall, trying to ignore the stench that also followed.

The marker provided Evie with some relief, however. She wouldn't be forced to navigate this thing on her own, not like the main character from her favorite movie. There would be wooden markers at each turn, with a pretty number and little flower carved into it. It was comforting to know that as she turned the first corner and found herself staring down a long, dark, hallway of vegetation.