Under the Overtree

by James A. Moore

  P.J. Sanderson stepped back, as Jonathan Crowley came closer. He stopped backing up only because the wall stopped him. Crowley leaned into his face, the grin on his face looking like the smile of a shark.

  “How’s this one? Did you know that his precious little brother Todd met a pretty little girl all of fifteen and nailed her, got her pregnant? Or that he took off like a bat out of hell as soon as he heard she was pregnant? Her name back then was Jennifer Gallagher. She had a little boy, she named him Mark. Then she got married to a nice man named Joe and they lived happily ever after.

  “Until whatever you woke up in the woods started making things happen. Things that ensured Mark’s arrival in Summitville. Here’s one last coincidence for you: Mark Howell, son of Jennifer Gallagher and Todd Harris, managed to get his face pulverized by the local shit heads. He managed to get himself hurt on a rock somewhere out in those woods. I’d be willing to bet you money that the rock that cut him was the very same rock you made those little chicken blood sacrifices on. Maybe, just maybe, he even got himself cut on the very same stone that hurt poor little Todd so long ago. I looked at the spell you say your friend read. To work properly, it requires the blood of a virgin. It never specifies how much blood, or even if the blood has to be a particular sex. It just says the blood of a virgin.”

  Crowley pulled back a little, P.J. found he could breathe again.

  “What do you suppose the chances are that Mark was a virgin when he landed on that rock? My guess would be pretty damn good. He only started shaping up after the accident.

  “You’re right Philly. Mark didn’t do shit. He doesn’t deserve to be punished for what’s happened to him. But killing you wouldn’t change a single thing.”

  Crowley smiled again for P.J.’s benefit. Then he turned and walked away from the writer. P.J. started to collapse then, all of his worst suspicions had just been confirmed by this terrible, frightful man. Crowley paused at the door, smile gone again. “You think about that, Philly, the next time you want to ask me what right I have to judge. I’m going to do my best for that boy, because he seems like a good kid. But if I fail, if I end up having to kill him, it’s on your head. Not mine.”

  Crowley left. Sometime later, after the crying jag had run its course, Phillip Sanderson went down to his bookstore’s main room and took all of the rare antique books he’d collected over the years to his bed room. It took the rest of the night and a good portion of the morning, but eventually he managed to burn them all in his bedroom fireplace. One by one, page by page.

  5

  Mark was asleep, Jenny was asleep; Joe had the house entirely to himself. Joe was having difficulty understanding the way his wife had been acting over the last few weeks and as much as he hated himself for it, he was going to find out why. In order to find out why, Joe broke the second cardinal unspoken law of the Howell Residence. He entered one of the other family member’s private domains.

  When they had moved out here from Atlanta, Joe had jokingly suggested that there were enough rooms in the house to let everyone have a room all to themselves as work space. Jenny and Mark had taken the joke seriously and the den as well as two of the extra rooms were suddenly declared off limits by the family almost as soon as they had settled in.

  Joe had broken the first unspoken law, always knock before entering the bathroom, more than once. But he had never broken the second before now.

  Feeling as if he’d committed an actual crime, Joe entered Jenny’s workroom. Surrounding the walls were unfinished canvases and pencil sketches that dated all the way back to when they had first met. There were illustrations from literary magazines, children’s books and even her one “real” book cover, spread in organized disarray, around all of the walls and even resting on the couch where she sometimes napped. On the far wall, where the light was most likely at its best during the day, was Jenny’s drawing table. At present it too was covered with unfinished works, the difference being that these would soon be finished.

  Joe didn’t know what he expected to find in the room, but he started with the drawing table in the hopes that whatever it was, it would be easy to locate. Under the first layer of cute animal sketches he found more of the same. Under the second layer of Bristol board, he found something he had not expected.

  Buried as if by sheer accident, Joe found odd sketches of a wooded area, but they were like no woods he had ever seen before. The trees twisted in a mockery of what nature had intended, as if they were made of unbaked clay and someone had tortured the lifelike duplicates. Figures where hinted at, but never clearly shown, dancing around the malformed Aspen and Oaks. They too had the wrong shape, a slander of what nature had intended. The figures were too small to be human too large to be rodents and yet they stood for the most part on their hind legs.

  The second of the sketches was much like the first, but in this one there was a large stone. Sitting on the edge of the stone was a young man Joe assumed to be Mark, until he studied the face closely. There was something missing from his face, something obvious that Joe couldn’t see. After a moment, it dawned on him; the boy’s scar was gone. Not a large thing to notice, not a vastly important detail, but one that Jenny would certainly have placed if she had been drawing her son.

  There was only one other person Joe had ever seen that looked so much like Mark and that was his father. For just a brief moment, Joe was prepared to tear the picture into shreds in a fit of jealousy. Then he recalled Jenny’s offhand comment that she was considering a children’s book, one that she would write herself. It would only be natural to use her own son and equally natural to leave the scar off of his face. No child wanted to read a book that was realistically drawn with the hero being scarred for life.

  The third picture revealed the strange creatures at Mark’s feet to be Fairies, laughing gaily and dancing in celebration. Mark’s face was filled with wonder and the woods seemed less threatening than they had in the previous two illustrations. Joe smiled at the subtlety used by Jenny in achieving surprise not for Mark, but for the readers as well.

  Feeling foolish, he set the pictures back down and covered them over with the two layers that had covered them previously. He crept back out of the room and gently closed the door.

  Inside of fifteen minutes, he was asleep next to his wife, content in the knowledge that she was only acting strangely because she was preoccupied with her work. Joe reflected briefly, before falling a-sleep, on just how lucky he was to have Jenny as a wife. She was everything he had ever wanted in a lifelong companion.

  Downstairs in Jenny’s workroom, the final two pictures went unnoticed. Perhaps if Joe had seen them, he would have realized that something really was wrong. In the first, Mark stood next to himself; one Mark had a scarred face, the other did not. Behind the two Mark’s stood two women of different heights and physiques that were only seen as silhouettes in the twisted woods. In the last illustration, the stone in the clearing had somehow grown larger and both Marks were mating with the women, now clearly seen in the clearing’s light. The Scarred Mark was joined with Cassie Monroe, the smooth featured Mark was joined with Jennifer Howell. A very careful study of the stone’s shape might have revealed the profiled face of Joseph Howell screaming. An even closer study would have probably revealed the rest of Joseph Howell’s body, outlined in the stone as it seemed to merge with the stone.

  6

  Tony, Tyler and Lisa all spent the night in the same room at the Clinic. Lisa because she was still under observation, Tony just in case there was something more serious than a broken nose and a few bruised ribs and Tyler because he was too tired for the walk home and his parents were both asleep by now. Tony had long since fallen asleep, the tortures his body had been put through demanded rest. Lisa and Tyler sat on her bed together, holding hands and normally saying nothing at all.

  It was after a particularly long silence that Lisa whispered her desperate question to Tyler. “Tyler? What happened to me?”

  Tyler did his best to feign i
gnorance. “What do you mean? You got hit by a drunk driver.”

  Lisa shook her head, fear adding extra moisture to her eyes. “Don’t be an asshole, Tyler. Car accidents don’t make you pregnant.” She studied his face while he did his best to hide what had happened. “Tyler, I want to know, what happened. I can’t even remember where I was going, but I think I was on my way to see you. Please, tell me?”

  Tyler looked away from her, afraid of seeing her face, afraid of telling her even a part of the truth. She placed her hand on his cheek and gently forced him to look at her. “I can’t tell you, Lisa. I just can’t.” He was only whispering, still he heard his voice break and hated himself for the sign of weakness.

  Lisa did the one thing certain to break his resolve, she started to cry. The tears were silent and he knew that she wasn’t forcing crocodile tears to ensure his cooperation, but the effect was still the same. They held each other tightly for several minutes and then he told her. He left out that the rapist had looked exactly like Mark, he left out all that the rapist had supposedly done to her. And he held her when she cried again, this time he joined her.

  They talked long into the night, in fact they were still talking when the sun rose past the mountain tops surrounding Summitville and into the early morning sky.

  Around eight thirty, Lisa fell asleep. Tyler moved carefully off of the bed so as not to disturb her slumber and sat in the one chair assigned for visitors. He thought long and hard about what they had discussed, her pregnancy. Lisa had decided to get an abortion. The A-word. Tyler agreed with her, but he knew her father would go through the roof when he heard about it. Oh, her mom would understand, but he dad was going to blow a gasket the second the dreaded A-word was mentioned.

  Tyler didn’t care what the bastard thought about it; it wasn’t his body that would be growing a rapist’s unwanted child. He wasn’t the one that would have to go to school wearing maternity dresses. Lisa had developed a reputation as a tease a long time ago and even the best of behavior for her last two years of school wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference in the long run. The assholes in town would still run around saying that she had only gotten what she deserved. It was one thing to keep a rape quiet when school was out and everyone thought she was just in the hospital for a car accident, but it would be quite another to keep the voices down in another couple of weeks. Pregnancies just weren’t meant to hide on someone as hippy as Lisa. Lisa had had more than her share of grief for one lifetime in the last few hours, let alone in the last month: Tyler would be damned before he’d let her flabby-assed bastard of a father force her to carry an unwanted child.

  If he had to, he’d bite the old fart’s nuts off to make his point known.

  7

  The confrontation came a little over two hours later, when Doctor Lewis made the call to Lisa’s mom and told her about the consent forms that would need to be filled out. Lisa’s mom didn’t get along all that well with her husband, that was a fact far and wide in town. But she wasn’t nasty enough not to let her husband in on a decision of that size. The man turned his big ol’ Cadillac around just as soon as he had hung up the cellular phone and he broke every speed limit set in the state of Colorado getting to the clinic.

  Tyler was ready for him when he tried to force his way into Lisa’s room for a screaming match. If the man had looked even remotely rational, Tyler would have left him alone; but the purple color on the man’s face told him that the only reason he was here was to explode all over his wife and his youngest daughter about how immoral the idea of abortion was and to probably call the both of them sluts. No doubt the man was certain his daughter would be condemned to Hell as the result of an abortion, he probably thought that calling her names was a good way of expressing his beliefs and conveying the urgency of the matter as regarded her immortal Soul. Tyler was having none of it.

  Tyler Wilson, a boy known for using the English weapon as a scalpel in an effort to injure as many people as possible that offended him, stopped the man with twenty-one softly spoken and mostly polite words. “If you go in there and threaten Lisa or call her any names at all, Mister Scarrabelli, I’ll kill you. Sir.”

  Anthony Scarrabelli was a very large man, standing just at six feet tall and weighing in somewhere around two hundred and fifty pounds. He had the kind of build that spoke of sports in his youth and too much relaxation later; he was pudgy, but there was a great deal of muscle hidden under the excess flesh. In addition, Anthony Scarrabelli was a man who was used to brow-beating his employees and his family into submission with remarkably little difficulty—He often used bribes to get his way with the family, but only because it was easier. Nobody in their right mind took on Anthony Scarrabelli: one way or another, he always won.

  He took one look at the skinny young man in front of him and stopped cold in his tracks. He looked at the door behind the young man and got ready to move forward. He wouldn’t mind plowing through the little runt if necessary. He looked down at the boy and then at the figure behind the boy and stopped again.

  Anthony knew every face in town, if anyone had lived in Summitville for more than a week, he knew them. The man with the feral smile was no one he had ever seen before. He never said a word, that man with the smile, but his eyes spoke for him just the same. His eyes said that Anthony Scarrabelli really should listen closely to what the boy had just said, because the smiling man would back the words himself, if need be. His eyes said that no amount of money would stop either the boy or the man behind him from coming at him with every means available to stop him.

  The boy’s stance said he meant business, his grim posture made clear that he meant every word he’d said. That was a nasty thought in and of itself. The casual way in which the man behind him leaned against the walls with his hands in his pockets, smiling that unsettling smile, said that the man would do much more than the boy had promised. He wouldn’t just kill Anthony, he’d make Anthony wish to be killed.

  Anthony was drawn back to Tyler’s face as the boy started talking; explaining that he and Lisa had spent the night discussing all of the options and just how much humiliation Lisa would go through. In his own way, the boy made sense. Despite himself, Anthony Scarrabelli calmed down. He listened to what the boy said and in the end he found himself agreeing with him.

  In the long run, it was Tyler’s mouth, that weapon most often used to do harm, that helped Anthony Scarrabelli see a little reason instead of hellfire. When he finally sat down in the waiting room with Tyler, he noticed that the Man with the Feral Grin was gone. He found himself wondering if the man had ever been there at all; Tyler Wilson hadn’t seemed to notice him.

  He and Tyler talked for over an hour, mostly about Lisa and how Tyler felt for her. By the end of the conversation, they had all but become fast friends. Anthony didn’t really like the kid much, but he came to respect him. They went in to visit Lisa together. Anthony drove off for a few minutes beforehand and came back with two bouquets of flowers. He told Tyler that he would expect to be paid back for the roses and even gave Tyler the receipt.

  Tyler agreed and gave the roses to Lisa. Anthony Scarrabelli gave her the carnations. Lisa seemed to love both bouquets equally.

  Later, after her folks had left and Tony had checked out, she cried long and hard, wondering if she had made the right decision. Tyler did his best to console her, hugging when she needed a hug, giving her space when she needed to be left alone.

  If he seemed a little preoccupied, it was because she had waited until her family was gone and they were alone before crying. She never said the words that day, but in his eyes that proved the love he had grown to feel for Lisa was returned.

  8

  While Tyler was finally beginning to grasp the depth of he and Lisa’s mutual affections, his older brother Patrick was having a revelation of his own. Dave Brundvandt meant to kill him.

  Dave had come up to the house a little after noon and had apparently decided that the time for formalities was over. This time, he had brought
a baseball bat along for reasons that Patrick just didn’t want to think about. Dave didn’t bother knocking, he reached for the door handle and stepped inside as if he belonged there. If Patrick had not been stepping out of the shower at the time, he would never have noticed.

  The problem, as Patrick saw it, was that he had to get the hell away from the house and somehow get to the sheriff, without encountering Dave in the process. This presented a number of problems, not the least of which was Patrick’s own lack of clothing at the moment. Patrick slipped from the bathroom into his own room as carefully as he could. He had only the knowledge of which parts of the floor squeaked when stepped upon to aid him in his quest. Safely in his room, Patrick slipped on yesterday’s shorts and pulled his tennis shoes in place after locking the door.

  In the hallway, he heard the rickety squeal of the floorboard outside his room taking extra weight. The doorknob tried to turn at the same time that Patrick was kicking the screen off of his window.

  From behind the locked door, he heard Dave’s mild tones. “Patrick? You in there? Hello?”

  Discretion stopped his tongue from making a snide comment and he slipped through his window, pushing the sliding glass frame in place after him. Patrick had been slipping out of the house for years and took full advantage of the tree that grew in the front yard to make his get away again. This time, however, he was not so lucky as to go unnoticed. Dave Brundvandt came out the window just as he was reaching the lawn below him.