đď¸ Chapter 10: The Whispering Wood
The crunch of bone-dust beneath our boots was the only sound as we left the shore. A party of fifteen men, armed with cutlasses and muskets, followed Harker into the lee of the dunes, leaving a small contingent to guard the longboats and the stricken Serpent's Kiss. The air grew still and heavy, the metallic scent stronger here, clinging to the back of the throat.
Before us stood the edge of the Whispering Wood. The trees were not merely pale; they were a stark, polished white, their bark smooth and seamless as if turned on a lathe. Their leaves, a tarnished silver, hung motionless in the dead air. There were no bird calls, no insect hums, no rustle of small creatures in the undergrowth. The silence was a physical presence, so profound it seemed to swallow our footsteps.
"It's like a forest of bones," Red muttered, his earlier bravado gone, replaced by a superstitious dread.
"The chart shows a river," Harker announced, unrolling the parchment. His voice, normally a dominating boom, was hushed, as if he too felt the need to tread lightly in this place. "It flows from the Spine, through the heart of the wood, and feeds the lagoon near the 'X'. We find the river, we follow it."
We pushed into the wood. The moment we passed under the canopy, the light changed, filtering through the silver leaves in a diffuse, grey-green glow that erased all shadows and made depth perception treacherous. The ground was a soft, white mulch that gave way under our feet. And then the whispers began.
At first, it was barely audible, a sibilant hiss that could have been the windâif there had been any wind. It seemed to come from the trees themselves, from the very air. I saw men flinch, their heads whipping around, peering into the uniform, ghostly trunks.
"Just the leaves," Avery said, though his voice lacked conviction.
But the whispers grew, layering over one another. They were not words, not any language I knew, but they carried intentâa sense of ancient, weary malice. They were the sound of the island itself, and it was speaking.
The Professor, walking beside me, had his compass out. He tapped the glass, his brow furrowed. "It's spinning," he whispered to me. "The needle has no north. The very rock of this place defies nature."
We marched for an hour, the oppressive silence and the whispering playing on our nerves. The landscape was monotonous, a repeating pattern of white trunks and silver leaves, with no landmarks to guide us. Harker's confidence began to seem foolish, his chart a meaningless scrap in this living labyrinth.
It was Two-Finger Tim who found it. He stopped, holding up a hand for silence. "Hear that?"
Through the whispers, a new sound emergedâthe faint, musical trickle of water.
"The river!" Harker exclaimed, a fierce grin splitting his face. "This way!"
We pushed through a final stand of the bone-white trees and emerged onto the bank of a stream. But the sight that greeted us stole any sense of triumph. The water was the same milky, opaque white as the sea near the shore. It flowed silently, with an unnatural viscosity, between banks of the same crushed-bone substrate. And it stankâa cloying, sweet-sour odor of rot and minerals that was far stronger here.
Harker knelt, ignoring the smell, and scooped up a handful of the water. It dripped from his fingers like thin paste. "It leads to the prize," he said, as if trying to convince himself.
We began to follow the riverbank upstream. The whispers seemed to grow louder here, more focused, as if the trees were commenting on our progress. The going was tougher, the ground soft and unstable.
We had not gone half a mile when Silent Tom, who was leading the way, suddenly froze. He pointed a trembling finger ahead.
There, half-submerged in the soft bank where the river curved, was a skeleton.
It was not an animal. It was human, or had been once. The bones were stained a dirty grey, and they were articulated, as if the person had simply laid down in the mud and died. But it was the skull that held our gaze. It was canted at an unnatural angle, and from its gaping jaw and the hollows of its eyes, a thick, white root had grown, pulsing faintly as it siphoned the last remnants of its host into the pale bark of the tree it connected to.
The tree itself was different from the others. Its bark was less polished, and its form seemed to vaguely mimic the human shape it had consumed, a frozen scream in ivory.
A cry of pure horror escaped one of the men. Red backed away, raising his musket. "It's a damned place! A feeding ground!"
"Steady!" Harker roared, but the spell was broken. The crew was on the verge of bolting.
It was then that the attack came.
It was not from the trees, nor from any beast. It was from the river itself. A shape, long and pale and impossibly fast, erupted from the milky water. It was an eel, but magnified to a monstrous size, thick as a man's thigh and twice the length of one. Its skin was a translucent white, revealing a pulsing, black network of veins beneath. Its head was a nightmare of needle-teeth and blank, white eyes.
It struck Silent Tom before he could move. The teeth clamped onto his arm, and with a powerful jerk, it dragged him off his feet and into the water. The event was utterly silent. There was no scream, only a splash, a thrashing that churned the white water pink for a moment, and then stillness.
For a heartbeat, everyone stood paralyzed. Then, chaos.
Another eel launched itself onto the bank, its body slithering across the bone-dust with a dry rustle. A musket shot rang out, deafening in the silence. The ball struck the creature, which thrashed violently before sliding back into the water.
"Back! Fall back to the shore!" Captain Avery yelled, his voice cracking with command and fear.
We ran. We crashed through the white undergrowth, no longer caring about stealth, the whispers a mocking chorus to our flight. I ran, my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest, the image of Tom's silent disappearance burned into my mind.
We did not stop until we burst out of the tree line and onto the relative safety of the open, bone-strewn beach, gasping and clutching our weapons. We had been on the island for less than three hours. We had lost a man. And we had learned the first, brutal lesson of the Ivory Isle.
Its wonders were terrible. Its whispers lied. And it was hungry.