Bagsy Beetlehorn and the Inferno Conscription (The Bagsy Chronicles 3)

Trees With Arms

The muggle torch flickered on and off, casting weak illumination into the forbidden forest. Was it a trick of Bagsy's mind, or did those branches in the distance look like elongated arms with three fingered hands? It couldn't be, she told herself: the branches stretched out almost as long as some of the trees. No arms were that long.

But, then again, no branches were, either.

Bagsy gulped and ducked down, turning her torch off. 'I think I saw arms.' She couldn't see Mezrielda's face, her eyes were still adjusting from the torch light, but her silence said it all. And then, clearer than when she'd heard it the first time, Bagsy heard the noise that had set her on edge to begin with.

It was a faint, high pitched warbling, like the faintest note on a violin fluttering lightly on the breeze. It creeped up behind her and wrapped it's strange, distorted sound around her, like the whisperings of a ghost through a long, thin tube, mingled with the occasional click or harsh clacking noise.

'Do you hear that?' Mezrielda murmured quietly.

Bagsy nodded, not willing to speak her acknowledgement out loud. Steeling herself, she got back onto her knees and peered over the edge of the boab. Her eyes were adjusted to the darkness again, but the arm-like branches, or branch-like arms, she added fearfully to herself, were beyond her eyes reach. She lifted her torch back up. If something was stalking towards them, then it already knew they were there, and could see them, so there was little downside to turning the thing on and making a quick check. All the same, Bagsy hovered there, unable to act for at least a minute.

With a breath, she clicked the torch on once more. Stammering light shone into the dark and this time, when Bagsy searched for them, she couldn't see the branches that had concerned her the first time she'd looked. Her skin prickled as if someone was drawing their nails across a chalk board, and she turned her torch off, ducking back into the boab. 'The arms are gone.'

'Oh, stars.'

Out of ideas, they sat there, waiting. The same noise sounded again.

Mezrielda let out a sharp breath. 'It's closer.'

Bagsy internally agreed – the noise was partially louder this time, and it had moved, coming more from the right. 'I t-think it's hunting us...' Bagsy stammered, gripping the muggle torch as tightly as Mortem's bindings had bound Winifred and Robin. 'I can't...' Bagsy breathed, her heart racing as quick as a squirrel's. 'I can't take this...' Sniffing, she began to cry, salty tears forming in her eyes.

'We need a plan,' Mezrielda offered lamely, but her voice was shaking. Bagsy could tell she had no plan to speak of. She'd lost her magic, and her wand. Bagsy reckoned this was perhaps the first time in Mezrielda's life she felt out of her element. She'd never seen the blood eyed beast in her first year and, at the end of their second when she'd been captured by the creature, she'd been knocked unconscious almost instantly. Evidently, Mezrielda wasn't in a position to steer them out of this.

Bagsy just kept softly sniffing, trying to keep her crying as quiet as possible. 'What do we do?' she worried around her whimpering. 'Should we run?' There was no response from Mezrielda.

Instead, the boab suddenly, and violently, shifted. Something heavy had pushed down on the other side, and where Bagsy was sitting she was thrown into the air. She hung for a second, torch spiralling away from her hand, before she landed in the leaves, roots and dirt of the forest floor. She let out a cry, scrambling for the torch in a hurried panic. Her hands landed on the cool metal and she turned it on, rolling onto her back and shining it at whatever had just happened.

A creature towered above her, draped in moss and vines and dying plants, with parts of its skin missing where ribs and muscles showed instead. It was almost as tall as the trees and its arms were longer, with multiple joints. One of them was holding something. Bagsy turned her torch upwards and at Mezrielda suspended upside down by her leg, where one of the pointed fingers of the creature's hand had gone through her calf and was poking out the other side. The light revealing just what had caught her, Mezrielda's paled features stretched out in growing dread. Her eyes widened, and her mouth pulled open in a silent cry.