I squeeze my eyes shut and try to sink deeper into the moss, stretching out my arms and imagining they are tree roots. I listen to the stream trickling toward the river, which will take its water to the ocean, where someday it will turn into clouds and come down again as rain.

Everything turns into something else eventually.

I hear a twig snap nearby, and I shoot up.

“Hello?” I call. “Is someone there?”

The glade is deserted. But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m not alone. Or that someone was just here, right before Boomer and I slipped under the barbed wire.

I look around for another minute to assure myself that the forest really is empty. Then I stand to go. It’s only as I brush my palm against the trunk of the sycamore tree, wanting to feel its smooth skin against my own, that I see it.

The journal is not where I left it, deep in the hollow. A corner pokes out, like someone left the book there in a hurry, without taking the time to push it in properly.

A chill rushes over me. Has someone been here, reading my journal?

I pull it out from the hollow and flip through the pages, looking for signs of an intruder, until I come to the end of the chapter I wrote last week. When I flip to the next page, it is filled with words.

Words I didn’t write.

As she grew older, Ivy was allowed to roam the great wood by herself. She delighted in its secret thickets and in weaving between the trees as fast as her feet would carry her.

One winter’s day, Gran sent Ivy into the village to buy a loaf of bread from the baker. As Ivy waited in line, she overheard two children talking in low voices.

“There’s no moon tonight,” said the first, a boy with laughing blue eyes and dirt on his cheek. “You know what that means.”

“The witch will wander the forest,” said the second, a girl with eyes that matched the boy’s, though hers seemed afraid.

“That’s right,” said the boy, “and all those who look upon her are lost, for one glance from her red eyes will turn any man to stone.”

“But what about a child?” asked the girl.

“Not a child,” said the boy. “One look from the witch will put a child under her spell. Then the witch can take her back to her cottage and—”

But just what the witch would do, Ivy did not hear, for at that moment, the children’s mother called them away, and it was Ivy’s turn to order.