The Hidden World by Graham Masterton Page B

and this was far too loud to be a few malevolent flowers.
    She stopped, and listened. She still could hear the river, but only faintly now, and every now and then the soft dropping sound of a fallen hat. More than anything else, she could hear her own blood rushing in her ears,
whoosh, whoosh, whoosh
.
    It’s the roses, she thought. It’s the roses, because they’re mean and they’re spiteful and they know that I can’t run very fast because of my limp. She continued to walk toward the treeline, feeling irritated rather than scared, but then she heard a
crackle-crackle-crackle
and she could sense that something really big was rushing up behind her and she turned, and screamed. A huge jagged shape was running toward her, making a noise like chairs and tables being smashed up with half a dozen axes. She saw four blazing red eyes and two stretched-open mouths, and rows and rows of sharply pointed teeth. The thing let out a deafening roar and it was only because she tripped and fell over sideways that it missed her. All the same, one of its claws caught against the sleeve of her sleep-T and ripped it.
    She found herself on all fours, scrambling across the forest floor, her hands and knees prickled not by pine needles but by thousands of glittering hatpins. With a harsh growl, the thing came running back around the hat-stands, and now Jessica could begin to see what it was: a wolf-like creature, except that it wasn’t made of flesh and blood, but varnished wood, broken into sharp pointed pieces, with splinters instead of fur. It had two faces, one the right way up and the other, immediately below it, upside-down. Four eyes, two muzzles, two mouths crammed with teeth. It was the walnut veneer on her closet, come to life. It had two faces because the door panel had been made from the same section of wood, cut in half and fitted with one half facing up and the matching piece facing down.
    It had always frightened her, especially at night when she was lying in bed, trying to sleep. It seemed to stare at her with all four eyes as if it had only one purpose in life and that was to eat her. But here, in the woods, circling toward her, making that crackling noise with every step, it was so terrifying that she couldn’t stop herself from whimpering.
    She managed to stand up, balancing herself against one of the hat-stands. The wooden wolf lowered its head and growled at her with both of its mouths. It had charged at her wildly before, but now it had obviously realized how weak she was, and how scared, and it walked toward her slowly, one seven-clawed paw in front of the other, as if it were relishing the smell of her fear with each of its four flared nostrils.
    Jessica backed away, reaching out blindly for the hat-stand right behind her. Six or seven hats dropped onto the forest floor – a black silk opera hat, a priest’s biretta, a huge Edwardian confection of black eagle’s feathers; then a sudden tumble of trilbies and a deerstalker. The wooden wolf kept on coming after her, every sinew of its body creaking and squeaking.
    Oh please God don’t let it hurt me, Jessica prayed. If it’s going to kill me, please let it kill me quickly. She knew enough about pain from the time when she was recovering from her parents’ car crash. The kind of pain that the roses had been talking about: the pain that made you feel as if something was eating you alive.
    Now the wooden wolf was only a few paces away. It could have easily sprung at her and knocked her down with one jump, but she could hear it breathing her in, breathing her in. It must have been waiting for this moment for over a year – ever since it had first seen her enter her bedroom and stared at her, mute but hungry, from her closet door.
    She stumbled backward, and the next hat-stand swayed, so that more hats fell down. She took hold of the hat-stand and swung it around so that it toppled over. It fell against another hat-stand, and