What Wood Remembers

The rocking horse had been carved from black walnut in 1847, when the hollow still belonged to the Whitmore family, and it remembered everything.

It remembered the hands of the woodworker who had shaped it—how he'd wept as he sanded its mane smooth, grieving his own daughter lost to fever that winter. Grief had soaked into the grain alongside the linseed oil. Perhaps that was why the horse could see what others could not. Perhaps sorrow had given it eyes.

The boy's name was Caleb, and he had loved the horse fiercely.

Seven years old, copper-haired, with a gap where his front teeth should have been. He would ride for hours in the nursery beneath the sloped ceiling, the runners creaking against the pine floor like old bones singing. He whispered secrets into the horse's carved ear—that he was afraid of the cellar, that his father smelled like something chemical and mean when he came home Fridays, that sometimes at night he heard music from the woods. Thin music, Caleb called it. Like pipes made of finger bones.

The horse could not speak, but it listened. It leaned into the weight of him, this small warm creature full of blood and wanting and the particular magic of childhood that tastes, to those who hunger for it, like honey mixed with starlight.

On the autumn equinox, Caleb did not come to the nursery.

His mother screamed for three days. His father and the men from town searched the woods with dogs and lanterns, calling the boy's name until their voices gave out. The horse waited in the darkness of the room, patient as only carved things can be, watching moonlight crawl across the floor like a pale searching hand.

On the fourth day, they found him.

The thing that came back wore Caleb's skin, but the horse knew immediately.

It walked wrong—too fluid, joints bending with a liquidity that suggested bones were merely a suggestion it was still learning to obey. It smiled at Caleb's mother, and she wept with joy and clutched it to her breast, and the horse watched her hold a hollow thing and call it her son.

The eyes were the same color. The hair, the freckles, the gap-toothed smile. Perfect in every detail that a mother's desperate heart could catalog.

But the horse saw what the woman could not.

It saw the way the thing's shadow fell wrong—too long, too dark, moving sometimes when the body stayed still. It saw how the creature flinched from iron, how it would not cross the threshold where the grandmother had buried a horseshoe decades past until the father, impatient with what he called foolish delays, pried it up and threw it into the yard. It saw how the thing watched Caleb's baby sister in her crib with an attention that was not brotherly, not curious, but hungry—the way a fox watches a henhouse, calculating entry points.

At night, when the parents slept their exhausted, grateful sleep, the creature came to the nursery.

It did not ride the rocking horse. It stood before it, this small wrong thing in a child's cotton nightshirt, and it smiled with too many teeth—more than Caleb had ever possessed, more than any human mouth should hold, needle-thin and translucent as fish bones.

"You see," it said. The voice was Caleb's, but beneath it ran another sound, like wind through a rotted tree. "You see, don't you, old wood? Old grief?"

The horse could not answer. Could only rock, faintly, in the breeze from the window the creature had opened—always open now, even in the coming cold. A door left ajar. An invitation.

"He was delicious," the changeling whispered, stepping closer, running fingers that were slightly too long down the horse's mane. "So full of fear and sweetness. They kept him alive for six days in the court, you know. My queen likes them fresh. Likes to hear them call for their mothers."

The horse felt something it had not felt in all its long years of watching children come and go, grow and leave, live and die in this house in this hollow.

It felt rage.

The mother noticed nothing. She was so grateful, so relieved, that she painted over every wrong note with the bright colors of denial. When the creature refused to eat anything but raw meat and honey, she called it a phase. When the grandmother's cat fled and never returned, she blamed coyotes. When the baby developed a cough that would not clear, that left her pale and listless, she summoned doctors who found nothing, nothing, could explain nothing.

The father noticed.

But he was a man who had been raised to distrust his own perceptions, to go along with the way things should be rather than the way they were.

Only the horse kept vigil.

And at night, when the changeling came to gloat and whisper and run its too-long fingers over the carved wood, the horse began to rock.

Slowly at first. A creak. A groan. The creature would laugh—what could dead wood do? What threat was there in a children's toy?

But the horse had been carved from grief. Had absorbed a century and a half of children's secrets, their fears, their midnight confessions. It had soaked in love and loss until the grain was saturated with something that was not quite magic, but was not quite not.

And it remembered the real Caleb. The weight of him. The warmth. The whispered confession: I'm afraid of the cellar. My daddy scares me sometimes. But I'm brave when I ride you. When I ride you, I'm brave.

On the winter solstice, the longest night, the changeling came to the nursery to take the baby.

The horse saw it lift the infant from her crib, saw the wrong way its arms bent to cradle her, saw its mouth open wider than any mouth should, revealing rows of teeth like a lamprey's spiral.

And the horse moved.

It had never moved before. Not like this—not off the runners, not across the floor, not with the grinding shriek of wood against wood that brought the father running, that made the changeling drop the baby and hiss, its glamour flickering, its true face showing through like bone through rotting skin.

The father saw.

For one moment, illuminated by moonlight and the guttering candle he carried, he saw what lived in his son's body—the hollow thing, the stolen skin, the teeth and the hunger and the ancient malevolent intelligence that had been feeding on his family for months.

The changeling fled through the window it always left open.

The father stood in the nursery, holding his screaming daughter, staring at the rocking horse that had somehow crossed the room and now stood still as any carved thing should.

He never spoke of it. Nailed the window shut that very night and burned rowan in every fireplace and buried iron at every threshold. The mother wept for her son, lost again, lost twice, but the father only looked at the rocking horse with something like gratitude, something like terror.

The horse was old now. The nursery had become a storage room. The house had passed through many hands.

But sometimes, in autumn, when the light went golden and slanted through the dirty window, the horse remembered a copper-haired boy with a gap-toothed smile. Remembered the weight of him, the warmth of him, the secrets he'd whispered into carved ears.

Remembered that somewhere, in a court beneath the hills, a child had screamed for his mother for six days.

The horse could not weep. Could not speak. Could not follow into that darkness and bring the boy home.

But it could remember.

And in the long, patient years of carved things, perhaps that was a kind of vigil.

Perhaps that was enough.