The Ghost Tree

by Christina Henry

  Yes, forget this pain. Forget that Mr. Schneider and I opened the door and let Janey out that night and locked it up tight behind her so the monster would get her instead of us.

  “I have some things outside that will help us,” she said.

  They all rose in an obedient line and followed her through the house and out the back door.

  26

  That’s it, Touhy thought as he peeled out of the parking area of the fair. The old bitch was going to talk to him whether she wanted to or not.

  He’d tried calling Jo after he’d seen the morning paper. But she hadn’t picked up the phone and he’d been forced to leave a message on her answering machine.

  She hadn’t picked up the other two times he called, either.

  The bitch (witch) was ignoring him. Well, she wouldn’t be able to ignore him when he was standing on her front porch.

  And if she did he’d break the door down.

  This whole business had gotten completely out of control. Bad enough that girls from out of town had been murdered at the wrong time of the year. Now girls from Smiths Hollow were being left in pieces any old place.

  The fair! The fair, of all places.

  If word got out that a girl was cut up into little pieces at the fair, he would be finished. Nobody was going to come from out of town to spend money in Smiths Hollow if they thought their children would be chopped up into dog meat when they got here.

  And that message on the wall. What did that mean? Did it mean the monster was going to take Lauren diMucci next?

  And there were all those layoffs. What was the point of the girls’ deaths if everyone was going to lose their jobs anyway?

  He barely noticed the streetlights, the pedestrians crossing the road, the other cars. All he knew was that he needed to get to the old house on the hill as soon as possible.

  Before some girl is killed right in the middle of Main Street with half the town and that damned Chicago reporter watching.

  Touhy had seen Riley sniffing around the fair and knew it was impossible to hope that the man wouldn’t discover what had happened there. He should have told Christie to have Riley shown out on some pretense.

  Though Christie seemed a little more awake than usual the last time they talked. Normally if Touhy told him to do something, Christie did it, no questions asked. That was all part of keeping the curse in place and out of sight of the townspeople. But Christie had started asking questions, wondering why they weren’t doing more to find out what happened to the two dead girls.

  It was all unraveling. He could feel it. But instead of relief that his lifetime of servitude to the town and its terrible lottery were over, he only felt panic.

  Panic that the unraveling meant not that the curse was over but that it had grown exponentially worse.

  And the only person he could think of that might be able to make it right was Jo Gehlinger. So she was going to talk to him and help him put it right.

  He slammed on the accelerator as his car climbed the steep hill. The house loomed above him, the lights in the upper story turning the windows into glaring eyes.

  He pulled the car to a stop just short of the mailbox. It didn’t matter if he left it in the street. There were no other houses up here and no other cars.

  Touhy stomped up the porch steps, not caring how much noise he made. He hammered on the door with his fist.

  “I know you’re in there!” he shouted. “You can’t ignore me forever.”

  He heard the lock on the other side of the door unclick and Jo Gehlinger stood there, her long gray hair unbound and her eyes narrowed.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “You know what I want,” he said, pushing his way inside.

  He’d never been in her house, though as a young boy he’d run up onto the porch on a dare with some of his friends. There was a moment of surprise when he realized the place looked perfectly normal. He’d half expected a cauldron or bunches of herbs hanging from the ceiling.

  Maybe she’s not a witch after all, he thought, then shook his head to rid himself of doubt. No, she’s a witch. She’s the only one who ever knew those girls were dying.

  She’s the only one who ever looked at me like she knew what I was doing.

  (But that wasn’t my fault. I had to pick the girls. I had to.)

  “You need to make it right,” Touhy said, turning to face her.

  Jo stood by the door, which was still ajar. “What is it that I need to make right?”

  “Don’t play dumb,” he said, his face flushing with anger. “Don’t stand there so smug and superior and tell me that you don’t know what’s been going on in this town. Girls are dying.”

  “I tried to tell you that many years ago,” she said. “But you didn’t seem to mind so much when they died on schedule. Even pretended you didn’t know what I was talking about.”

  “It’s not supposed to be like this! You know what they did—what your relatives did. It’s only supposed to be one girl, once a year.”

  “And the town will stay prosperous,” Jo said.

  The way she said it made Touhy feel like a bug under her shoe, as if wanting people to have jobs and food on the table was a selfish thing.

  “Yes! And now the town isn’t prospering anymore. Things are going wrong. And another girl died tonight. At the fair.”

  He emphasized the last three words so she would understand how important this was.

  She didn’t move from her place by the open door. It was fairly obvious that she was waiting for him to go away and stop bothering her. Well, he wasn’t going to go away. He wasn’t going anywhere until she agreed to fix it all.

  “Don’t you understand? She was killed at the fair in the middle of summer. Not in the woods. Not in November. The thing out there is just rampaging freely. And,” he said, sudden inspiration occurring, “your granddaughter is next. It left a message for her.”

  “Lauren? It left a message for Lauren?” Jo said, giving him a sharp look.

  “Yes, written in the other girl’s blood,” he said. She was interested now, he could tell. No more dismissive stop-wasting-my-time face.

  “What did it say?”

  “‘Only You Lauren,’” he said. “I think that means she’s next.”

  “No,” Jo murmured. “It means it wants to take her away. I’ve been afraid of something like this, ever since her father died.”

  Jo didn’t really seem to be talking to him—rather, she was thinking through something out loud and he just happened to be present. He was wise enough to keep still and silent, because as long as she talked he might learn something. Anything might help save his town before it crumbled into ruin.

  “He was the wrong sacrifice.”

  Touhy went more still than before. He felt that his insides had frozen into place.

  The wrong sacrifice. Everything went wrong when her father died in Lauren’s place.

  Touhy didn’t know how that might have happened, how the father had ended up out in the woods instead of the daughter. But that was definitely when things changed. And it all made complete sense. The monster hadn’t gotten what it wanted and nothing would be set right until it did.

  Jo went on muttering to herself. “And of course it wants what it didn’t get. But more than that—it can feel her power. I’ve felt it myself, these last few days, for all that she wants to pretend she doesn’t have any. If it gets hold of her now . . .”

  She trailed off, looking up. Her expression said she’d forgotten that he stood there.

  “Lauren is like you?” he asked carefully. “A . . . witch?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But don’t ask me to have her come up here and perform a spell to undo the curse. I don’t know how to do that. The first curse was sealed in the blood of a witch. I think that would be very difficult to undo.”

 
“But we don’t need to undo it,” he said. He understood now what had to be done. He should have seen it from the first. “We just need to make it right. Put the spell back on course, as it were.”

  He started toward the door but Jo’s eyes widened and she slammed it shut, putting her body in front of it.

  “You’re not going to feed my Lauren to the beast,” she said, her face fierce.

  “But that’s what has to be done, don’t you see?” he said. His voice was very calm, but his heart was pounding fast and his head felt like it was filling up with blood. “Someone has to set this right. If Lauren had died when she was supposed to, then Smiths Hollow would have gone on as it always has. But she didn’t, and the monster broke free and now it wants Lauren. So if we give it what it wants, then everything will be fixed.”

  “You can’t,” she said, holding up her hands and pushing against his chest. “You don’t know what will happen if it takes her now, when she’s come into her power.”

  Touhy wasn’t really listening to her words. Her hands were small and fragile against his chest. It would be nothing at all to grasp those frail wrists and break them. Why had he been afraid of this woman?

  For he had been afraid, he realized now. Afraid of her knowledge, afraid she would expose him to the town, afraid that if she spoke, the dark magic that bound all of them together would unwind.

  But he didn’t need to be afraid anymore. He knew what he had to do.

  Touhy grabbed her wrists—yes, they were like dry kindling, nothing to it—and bent them back. He heard a terrible popping noise and then her face twisted up into a grimace and she screamed, staggering away from him.

  “No, don’t scream,” he said, scanning the room. “We can’t have the neighbors thinking there’s something wrong. Oh, that’s right. There are no neighbors.”

  She held her strangely flopping wrists to her body, back away from him. “Please,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Please, no. Don’t hurt her.”

  He picked up a sculpture that was perched on an end table—some pagan-looking thing, black and made of metal, that had a pleasant heft in his hand.

  “The first curse was sealed by the blood of a witch,” he said, striding toward her. She was on her knees now, a crumpled and pathetic thing. “You told me so yourself.”

  “Not Lauren, please not Lauren,” she pleaded.

  He raised the sculpture. “It’s not Lauren you should be worried about.”

  27

  Karen flipped on the light in David’s room, her heart hammering. Her first thought was that he’d been hurt, or that someone had managed to get into the house.

  Or maybe that he was trying to get out like Lauren had that night.

  But he was still in bed, even if he wasn’t resting peacefully there.

  He thrashed around in the sheets, arms punching, legs kicking. His head shook from side to side and his face gleamed with sweat. Karen couldn’t tell if he was asleep or awake but now that she was in his room his screams were more coherent.

  “Nana, Nana, Nana!”

  She rushed to his side and tried to untangle the sheets from his little body. He hit her in the eye with one of his flailing arms and she staggered back, covering that eye with her hand.

  I’ve got to get him out of there before he hurts himself. She set to work again, mindful of his hard little fists. The sheet was wound around his body and she finally managed to work him free. She scooped him out of bed and into her arms, holding him tight to her.

  “Shh, shh, it’s all right, it’s only a dream, shh,” she said, rubbing his back while he cried for his grandmother.

  He stopped screaming. His head jerked back and his eyes flew open. For a moment his gaze was far away. Then he seemed to realize where he was and who he was with.

  “Mommy,” he said, his eyes welling up with tears. “Nana’s dead. He killed her.”

  Karen shivered. He sounded so serious.

  “No, honey, it was just a dream. Just a bad dream.”

  David shook his head and started to wriggle so that she would put him down. She was so surprised by this that she did just that. David was not a wriggler. He always stayed contented in her arms until she was too tired to hold him.

  “He killed her, Mommy. He did.”

  “Who killed her?”

  “Mayor Touhy. And he wants to kill Lauren, too.”

  Lauren standing at the back door, trying to get out. Lauren with that blank and terrifying face, a lamb walking quietly to the butcher.

  Karen didn’t understand how David knew these things but she thought, finally, that she believed.

  And that meant her mother was dead. Something wrenched inside her. Her mother—her difficult, beautiful mother who’d loved her so much even when they didn’t always agree. Just like Karen loved Lauren so much even when they didn’t get along. Her mother was gone.

  She covered her mouth with her hand. “Mom!”

  David tugged on her. “We have to go now.”

  “Go?” Should they go to her mother’s house?

  “Yes, we have to go now.”

  “Yes, we have to get Lauren,” Karen said, standing up and trying not to panic. The second half of what David said had finally sunk in. The mayor wanted to kill Lauren, too. She couldn’t lose her mother and her daughter in the same night. She’d promised Joe that she would keep Lauren safe.

  David shook his head. “No. Not Lauren. We have to go to the Lopez house now.”

  28

  Lauren and Jake sat side by side on a bench in the police station. They’d been taken in because they needed to give statements, but because Lauren was a minor they didn’t want her to give it without her mother present.

  Chief Christie had tried to call her mom, but she hadn’t picked up the phone. He’d also tried to call Jake’s parents even though he was eighteen. He seemed to think it was the right thing to do even though Jake was technically an adult. But Jake’s parents hadn’t picked up either, so the two of them just sat there waiting.

  Jake had his arm around her shoulders and her head rested on his chest but her eyes were very determinedly open. She did not want to close her eyes again and see Miranda there in the dark.

  That was what David was drawing the other day, she thought dully. You and Jake finding Miranda’s body. You just didn’t see him finish it.

  If she had asked David what he was drawing, could he have told her exactly what it was? She wasn’t sure. It had seemed almost like he was in a trance, like when he told her that Officer Lopez needed her help at the fair. If he’d told her, she could have warned Miranda, told her to stay away from the fair.

  Miranda. I’m so sorry.

  There was a big aching place in her chest where Miranda used to be, the place where they used to build forts out of mud and race their bikes side by side. The place where the phone would ring and Miranda would say, Meet me by the old ghost tree.

  Lauren sat up then, pulling away from Jake.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. His eyelids were at half-mast. He looked like he might fall asleep any second.

  “The ghost tree,” she said. “Whatever it is that did this to Miranda is in the ghost tree.”

  “Like that story you told me,” he said.

  She nodded. “I have to go there.”

  “Are you crazy?” he said, his voice low and urgent. “If the monster in the woods is real—”

  “You know it is,” Lauren said, stung. “Your sister. You told me yourself.”

  His eyes flickered, an emotion she couldn’t read moving there.

  “Yeah, well, the more you think about it the harder it is to believe there could be something like that out in the world,” he said.

  “No person could have done that to Miranda,” Lauren said.

  “A person with an axe, maybe,” he said.

  “Did y
ou see anyone walking around the fair with an axe?”

  “The field is just behind the place where we found her body,” he said. “Anybody could have walked up through there and then disappeared behind the fair without being seen. And the woods are just behind that bit of field.”

  “I can’t believe you,” she said. “You know there’s something wrong here. You know and now you’re trying to pretend it isn’t true.”

  Their argument was pitched in low whispers, both of them silently agreeing that their discussion wasn’t the business of Officers Lopez or Miller or Chief Christie. Those three were on the other side of the room, having a whispered conference of their own.

  “That’s what we do here,” Jake said. “Terrible things happen and we just pretend everything is fine. We forget about them.”

  Lauren shook her head. “I don’t think we can forget about them anymore. Something’s changed.”

  He opened his mouth, ready to argue again, and then closed it. Resignation crossed his face, and something else—pain.

  “I don’t want to remember,” he said. “I don’t want to remember Jenny that way.”

  “I don’t want to remember Miranda that way, either,” she said.

  Her eyes were dry. She would cry later, when she could pour out her grief without an audience. She’d just keep pretending the lump in her throat and the ache in her chest weren’t there.

  “Anyway, I was saying, if there’s something in the woods—okay, there is,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender, “the last place you want to be is the ghost tree. For chrissakes, Lauren—it left you a message.”

  She closed her eyes, and there was Miranda’s head with its wide blank eyes and open mouth and just above it the words written in blood on the side of the tent.

  “I know,” she said.

  “If a monster or a killer or whatever had left me a personal message, I would not go chasing after it into the woods,” Jake said. “I’d leave town immediately.”

  “I don’t think I can,” Lauren said. “I don’t think anybody can. It’s part of the curse. Even if you leave you always have to return.”