Oh, what had she done? She thought she was sooooo smart. Sooooo brave. Soooo heroic. And now she was just a little mean girl. She wanted so badly to find Wayne Sherman and tell him, I hope I accomplish something as great as The Hedges when I grow up.

“Are…we…close…?”

The voice no longer resembled the voices from the station, from Wayne’s yellow house, from the entrance to the woods.

Margot took a deep breath. She heard something like bones snapping behind her. She felt something like wet fur against the back of her neck.

She didn’t scream.

But she ran.

She ran deep into the blackness of the path and quickly climbed one of the trunks of the brittle trees. It curved up and outward and up again, until she didn’t know if she was climbing up or down. She climbed fast, scraping her little legs on the way, and stopped where the trunk met another from an equally gnarled tree.

Her heartbeat was in her throat.

She could hear the officers approaching. The muffled, atonal voices grew louder and danced with the wind in the woods. She didn’t want to see them, she didn’t want to see them, she didn’t want to—

“Little…girl…?”

They were standing at the foot of the tree.

“Are…we…going…to…have…to…get…you…out…of…that…tree…?”

Margot closed her eyes tight.

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!

She edged farther up the trunk and as she did, she felt something beside her.

Feathers, her mind told her.

She did not scream.

But she opened her eyes to look at it.

The darkness beside her started to move. Margot remained silent as a head turned to face her, an animal, two red dots in all this wet darkness.

She knew what it was.

A Great Owl.

“Here…we…come…” an officer said below.

In the blackness, the eyes of the owl were like candles. Margot followed them and, looking over the trunk, saw the faces that had been following her.

She caught her breath short.

It wasn’t a group of Goblin officers looking up at the tree, not anymore.

Margot covered her eyes but it was too late, and she took with her the huge donkey teeth jutting from gray gums, the eyes four times larger than her own, the balding scalps…

Margot covered her eyes again and shuddered.

“Where…is…she…?”

The words were something like prison bars sliding open to Margot. News that Wayne Sherman would be fine. Relief.

They hadn’t seen her.

They thought they saw something in the tree, she told herself. And the owl made them think it was only an owl.

The officers started to move on. The sound of bones snapping, gibberish, and slobbering clay lips grew faint.