Chapter 8
Chapter 8 — The Other Side of the Door
From Maya's perspective on the other side of the door, she writes desperately in her notebook trying to reach Skylia, knowing each message costs the shadows something of her. She recalls crossing through after finding the bleeding tree, driven by a compulsion that felt like her own curiosity. She learns the shadows can extract and wear memories from those they've taken, and that some of the previous forty-seven taken still exist here, diminished. She discovers that Skylia has driven iron into the root and narrowed the door, which she feels as a constriction in her own chest. The shadows intensify their assault on Hemlock's cabin, and through the narrowed connection, Maya senses Brody arriving with his shotgun. She writes a final urgent warning to Skylia: Brody is not coming to help—he's coming to undo what they did. The chapter ends with Maya feeling the door pulse and the shadows pressing toward the cabin with renewed purpose.
The first thing you should know about the other side is that it has a sky.
I didn't expect that. I expected darkness—a void, a pit, one of those movie versions of hell where everything is black and red and screaming. But no. There's a sky here. It's pale. White like paper that's been left in the sun too long. No sun itself, no source for the light, but light anyway, diffuse and flat and directionless. It sits above the tree line like a lid.
The trees are wrong. They look like hemlocks—the same narrow trunks, the same drooping branches—but the bark is the color of wet ash, and when the wind moves through them, the sound isn't rustling. It's breathing. Long, slow inhales. Like the forest is collecting air for something it hasn't said yet.
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