Curse on the Land

by Faith Hunter

  In the near distance, twisted into a protective ball, was the evil that was Brother Ephraim. There was nowhere to hide, but he was coiled as far from me as he could get, bowed against the boundary that was Soulwood, against the barrier to the land on the other side of the hill, the church compound. Ephraim had been a churchman before I’d fed him to the earth. I didn’t regret killing him. Not at all. Some people just needed killing. But as I studied him, huddled there, as far away as possible, I did wonder, not for the first time, if I had fed him to the land wrongly in some manner. Maybe there was a methodology I had lucked up on the other time I’d fed Welsh gwyllgi to the earth. Or maybe gwyllgi didn’t feed the earth as well as humans, and I had messed up North Carolina too. Or . . . maybe Soulwood was so different from the rest of the Earth that it refused to absorb some foul things. That felt possible. Right, even.

  But I didn’t know. And I was honestly afraid to find out.

  Near Ephraim, something glimmered. I turned my attention to that odd bit of energy, but it was gone as quickly as it had appeared. A moment later it glimmered again. Something that rested within the earth near Brother Ephraim. Something was . . . active. When it sparked, I felt an answering flicker closer to me. Much closer.

  Curious. Whatever it was, it wasn’t right. Something was different in Soulwood. Something the land didn’t recognize as new and altered. Something bad.

  The glimmer came again, and I realized there was a precise interval between appearances, like a pulse, beating back along . . . There! It was beating back along a thin, microscopic strand of something. Not the same kind of something that trailed from the surface triangle to the dancer, to the sleeper, but similar. I had no words for what it was. But something was beating from the wickedness that was Ephraim, into my woods. Directly to the place where Brother Ephraim had been absorbed into the earth. And then that energy pulsed back to his shadow. I studied it. It was nothing like the shadow/light dancer. It was a back-and-forth pulsation along a thin thread of . . . something else unknown.

  Brother Ephraim had been almost dead when I’d accepted him into my land. Eaten and chewed on by a black wereleopard. By Paka. That crime should have brought her a death sentence. Killing a human, biting a human, always was a death sentence. It was a grindylow’s job to mete out justice against were-creatures who broke that cardinal rule. Justice always meant killing were-creatures who bit humans. Always. But Pea had been easy to convince otherwise. Pea the grindylow hadn’t killed her for it. Later we had learned that Ephraim wasn’t human. Pea had known when none of us had.

  And maybe that was important here and now.

  Pea hadn’t been a judge in his death because Brother Ephraim hadn’t been human, and therefore two things: he wasn’t within her jurisdiction, and he wasn’t an acceptable sacrifice to the earth. And perhaps that was also why he was still separate, a discrete energy trapped in Soulwood. Brother Ephraim had been a Welsh gwyllgi, and had also been pure evil as a human. Whatever the cause, he had found a way to keep some part of himself from being absorbed into the earth. On some level, he was still self-aware.

  And now he was doing . . . something. That pulsing back and forth. And he assumed I didn’t see it.

  I pulled my consciousness into me and thought through my options. I stood, pulled socks and boots onto my cold feet, got a flashlight, John’s old machete, and the limb lopper from the porch, and walked into the shadows, to the place where I feared, where I knew, the pulse was converging. Deep into the shadows of the trees.

  Soulwood was composed of trees that had once been standard-sized trees, ordinary twenty-five-year-old trees, the biggest with boles twelves inches or so in diameter. Then I had fed the land the first time, and . . . things had changed. The trees had begun to grow. Now the trunks were big enough that three men holding hands couldn’t stretch around most of them. They were the size of four-hundred-year-old trees. Even older. Because of my magic. My evil.

  As I came around the massive boles, I could hear the trickle of water from the spring that fed the small clay-bottomed pool. Could hear the chitter of squirrels and the call of birds. Could smell the stench of pond water, full of decaying organic matter. I realized that I hadn’t smelled the usual pondish stench at the goose pond. Odd, but not calamitous. On my first visit, I had been excited and possibly missed it. The smell of dead humans had been strong enough to mask it on my second visit.

  The flash guiding my way, I stepped high, over a root that was bigger than only a few months past, and into the clearing, setting my eyes on the high branch overhead where the Brother had hung, bleeding out his life. Below that limb, on the ground where I had put my hand to take his dark heart and his life from him, there was a something new. A damp place that smelled of rot. I scanned the entire area with the light.

  Around me, leaves that had fallen in the last two months were piled in drifts, against roots and the trunks of trees and in hollows. Everywhere except in this one place. Here, the ground was slimy with something rotten. Here was a mushed, decomposing mass, reddish in color—the color of blood—and in the center of the mushy puddle was a sapling.

  It wasn’t uncommon for new trees and plants to grow on Soulwood. But this one was unusual.

  The young tree was about seven feet tall with two roots rising above the ground before twisting and growing into a slim stalk of trunk. Two branches divided at about five feet high and reached out to the sides and up, bending midway like elbows. It was strangely humanoid shaped, though there was no head, just a slight rise in the trunk, as if a head might someday grow there. The sapling’s bark, if it had bark, was a smooth layer the color of blood, a slimy scarlet skin that dripped like blood but stank of tannins and rot.

  There were thorns as long as my index finger on the trunk.

  Like the other trees at this time of year, the sapling was leafless, but this tree . . . It looked as if it had never grown leaves. As if it never would. It was ugly and stark, a foul thing that simply felt evil. A wound growing up from the ground, a blight in the earth, a sin on the perfection of Soulwood, an evil trespassing here. A curse on the land.

  I set the flash on a rock and aimed it at the tree. Walked over the mushy dirt, machete in one hand, the lopper in the other, careful to make certain that I didn’t sink into the ground, cautious that it was not quicksand or something worse. I set the long-armed loppers down and took a careful stance, a two-hand grip on the machete. I hacked four strong cuts, putting my full body into the swings, trying to cut through the trunk. I knew how to torque my body into the action of a machete or an ax. I cut my own stove wood year round. I cleaned out my garden. But the wood of the thin trunk was too hard, as if it were crimson ironwood, though the scarlet surface of the wood didn’t resemble the bark of any of the species called that.

  As I whacked, a dozen thorns flew free, but my blade didn’t mar the wood of the trunk, so I took up the lopper and pruned off both of the limbs, feeling my muscles clench and strain to cut through. The wood squeaked as I worked, not an unusual sound—metal on wood—but this sounded almost like a kitten crying, a mewling, piteous whimper. I tossed the limbs to the path, to take back with me. On the cut trunk, a bloody sap pooled. It had a tacky, oily consistency, and even in the poor light I could see it was scarlet as mammal blood, but clear, shiny, and thick as syrup.

  I didn’t know what this meant. I had no idea. But whatever it was, it was bad. Soulwood was wounded. And it was my fault.

  I put my hand on the diseased earth and felt down into the land. The diseased part below my hand was partially encapsulated. As if Soulwood had put a wall around it, the way a human body might sometimes encapsulate an infection, making a cyst around it. But the thing that was Ephraim had found a way to link to this spot, along that tiny line that pulsed with faint power.

  I reached out along it, following it to the curled presence of Ephraim, who withdrew like a wounded cat, angry and spitting. Mad that I had figured o
ut he was up to something. But the thing I followed didn’t end at Ephraim. It wrapped around him, and then continued out on the other side, another line of darkness, down, and . . . into the church compound.

  I knew instantly that Ephraim was attached to the tree on the compound, the one that had healed me and had grown roots inside of me, into me, roots that had changed me and mutated the tree. Roots that I could still feel, like ropey scars on my middle. Roots that might be allowing me to sense the earth with greater clarity. Ephraim had found a way to escape Soulwood, to reach out beyond the land. He was back in the church. And if he had found the tree that had healed me, that had grown roots inside me, then he might have found a way into me. I withdrew quickly. I had to get to the church.

  For the first time in my life, I was afraid of the earth, afraid of a growing, living thing.

  I had been wary before, yes. But not afraid. Not until now.

  I stood and carried my tools and the lopped branches back to my quilt. I dropped them on the ground several feet away and sat again, worried and discomfited, but still needing to do the readings I had promised Rick. Sundown had darkened the sky from red and purple, a livid bruise on the heavens, to a magenta-streaked black. I wanted to be inside, and soon.

  I calmed myself again, and when I could breathe without a hitch, I let my mind reach out to the pond and its dead humans and dead geese. I didn’t expect to sense so far.

  But I saw the shining shadow/light dancer. After being in contact with Soulwood, I could sense it all better; it was clear now, sharp and easy to discern. The dancer moved in a twisted circle, like . . . like a loosely formed infinity loop. That was what it was called in witch workings. The energies were bright and crisp, a red, blue, yellow, and green ring of light, interspersed with pinpoints of blackness, like the blackness of space, that spun and danced in the earth. I studied it, watching and analyzing. Its shape and course had clarified since the first time I saw it. It was no longer dancing and skipping through the rocks and soil. Now, it followed a specific route, a circle, around an area miles wide, moving fast. Along the circle were these red places in the earth, red as blood, bright as fire. A triangle.

  The infinity loop was following the circle that included the triangle points. If I had ever gambled, I’d have put a month’s salary on the probability that the three hot spots coincided with the pond, the deer, and the triangle of houses in the neighborhood.

  I stretched out my perception of the land, like a hand, long fingers of awareness, reaching.

  Far below the triangle and below the dancing infinity’s circular course was the sleeping presence. The sleeping power. The infinity energy no longer prodded it or tried to stimulate it, but seemed content to circle above it, not touching, no longer poking it like a playful puppy, to wake it, but sending pulses of power through the threads that moved down to it. It reminded me of feeding tubes, feeding the sleeper. Though in concept, it resembled the shadowy pulsing of Brother Ephraim to the two trees, the reality of it was very different.

  I was obscurely glad that the dancer was no longer actively annoying the sleeper. The somnolent presence in the earth disturbed me in ways I had no name for. I withdrew my own awareness, higher in the land, back to the infinity loop.

  In the center of the larger triangle, in the center of the circle that the loop raced along, was another location that drew my attention, but it wasn’t red or bright or energetic. It glimmered, a soft yellow. I had seen it before, when I first looked at the earth after I returned home, but it hadn’t been well defined then, just an amorphous blob of light. Now it glowed like a sun. I studied the yellow glow and I felt its pull, strong and determined, the way the planets in the solar system felt the pull of Sol.

  I thought of T. Laine’s come-hither working. Was this attraction like that? Whatever it was, this was significant. This was . . . I had no idea what it was, but I knew it was important. It might be the single thing that tied the points of the triangle, the circling people, geese, deer, and goldfish, and the outer circle, all together.

  And the woman’s voice. Perhaps that too.

  Altogether, it was a spell, a working. As improbable as it seemed, it was a huge traditional working that covered a massive amount of land, across the surface and down into the earth. Nothing I had learned in Spook School led me to understand what this was or how it had been created. Or why.

  Before any of the things I viewed from a distance might see me, I withdrew.

  I had sent my awareness too far away, and the warmth of Soulwood hadn’t kept up with . . . with whatever it was that I was doing. I was shivering. My stomach was cramping. I needed to eat. Maybe a grilled cheese sandwich on Mama’s homemade bread, for the comfort factor. Or a bowl of potato soup.

  But Rick had wanted me to check in on the sleeping presence in the North Carolina mountains, and I knew I’d never come back out again if I got full and warm. So I put my palms back on the ground and reached out across the Tennessee River Valley, east of Knoxville, high into the peaks of the Appalachian Mountains.

  I felt the presence there, the slumbering consciousness that rested deep. It was far bigger than I remembered, the darkness stretching up and out and high and deep and vast, following the ridges of the earth and the sharp outlines of the broken stone that rose and fell, the spines of the mountains themselves like a coil of massive snakes buried by soil and the life above.

  I let myself stretch further, farther, feeling myself thinning, pulling smaller, more constricted. It was cold here, so far away from Soulwood. But the land was fascinating, with contours and boundaries I hadn’t expected. Where I had thought there was one huge presence beneath the summits, I realized that there were several buried beneath the ridges of the mountains. All sleeping. They stretched north and south, elevating high along the peaks, and deep into the earth. I had no idea what they were. But I wasn’t about to accidentally wake them. I slid silently away, careful not to touch them, not to prod them, even by mishap.

  I wished I had someone to ask about the linked presences, but there was no one.

  I pulled back inside myself and into the night. The sun had fallen. A cold front had swept in. I had been reading the land for a long time. I sucked in a breath of the frigid air, and it hit me like a punch to the solar plexus. I coughed, a long, wet sound, as if my lungs had not worked while I was scanning the earth this time. As if I had stopped breathing. The coughing went on for a long time, aching through my ribs and lungs, and when my chest finally cleared and I caught up on my oxygen deprivation, I realized that the two severed branches I had tossed to the earth near my feet had dug little rootlets into the ground. Far too fast to be normal rootlets.

  I rolled to my knees, feeling brittle as old leather, and picked up the machete. When my hands no longer trembled, I gripped the thin branches and pulled, using the tip of the machete to lift the soil like a shovel, until I had all of the rootlets worked loose. I walked back to my house. Leaving the tools on the back porch, I carried the twigs inside, where the heat slammed into me, despite the thermometer on the wall at the back door, which read fifty-nine. I was hypothermic after reading the land so far away. I’d been sitting in the dropping temps, without enough layers, without enough breath, stretched too far for Soulwood to heat me. I had been foolish.

  With the iron eye-lifter, I opened the burn box of the cookstove. Tossed the scarlet stems onto the burning coals and added a fast-burning winter log, split and splintered, so it would catch instantly and burn hot. The split log caught and so did the hacked-off scarlet stems, the flames licking on the red-slimed bark. There was something erroneous with that, but I was so tired and hungry and worn and empty that nothing came. When the stems were in full flame, I closed the burn-box door.

  It was full night, and I was beyond exhausted.

  I checked the greens, removed the roasted pumpkin from the oven and set it to cool, and put a pat of butter in my sixteen-inch cast-iron skillet.
I stored my skillets on the warming shelf of the Waterford Stanley, and they were therefore warm anytime there was a fire inside. When the butter was melted, I added two pieces of bread and a thick layer of cheddar—once I had cut away the blue mold that had coated it in my absence. I sprinkled half a teaspoon of brown sugar on the cheese and closed the sandwich, setting a smaller, heated skillet on top to hold it down. The smell of butter, bread, and cheese set my mouth to watering, and it was all I could do to wait for the cheese to melt and the bread to toast. I flipped the sandwich, poured yesterday’s coffee into a cup and microwaved it, adding sugar to it too. In minutes, I had me a king’s feast, standing right there at the heated stove.

  When I finally stopped shaking and my fingers were no longer an odd, ashy blue, I pulled a chair and a small table close to the stove, carried over an afghan crocheted by my sister Priss, and wrapped up. I held my toes close to the stove’s warmth as I logged onto the PsyLED intranet for updates, checked e-mails, and wrote my reports. All except the things that were happening along my borders. That was private. Until it wasn’t anymore. I knew I’d have to tell them eventually, but not until I understood it all. And the case was solved. We had dead adults and dead children and that took precedence.

  I sent reports to Rick and e-mails to the unit about what I had discovered reading the land, telling them what I sensed about the triangles made up by the affected sites, and the circle, and the sun glow at the circle’s and the triangle’s centers—which were the same place, GPS-speaking, but could have been any one of four R&D places on my map. I told them what I understood, and what I was totally confused about. I told them that I’d be in tomorrow, but that I needed to go by and see my mama first.

  What I really wanted to do was go see the tree on the church compound, the one that had grown roots inside of me, claiming me, healing me, changing me, even as I claimed and changed it. Something was wrong with the tree and with the blot that was Brother Ephraim. It wasn’t connected with the problems in the land at the triangle and circle. It was its own problem. And I had a dreadful fear that my blood and I had caused it.