He rushed forward, and the hidden hand emerged holding an axe. Alice screamed again. In a single, smooth motion, Thorne raised the axe across his body, looped it overhead, and swung it around horizontally. Everything moved so slowly.
Thorne had Reverend Forney’s face.
The blade whistled and struck with a loud pop. The world spun.
The crown of Alice’s head collided with a wall, and then the floor bounced off her forehead and rolled across her cheeks. Her perspective shifted until she had a sideways view of her own headless body kneeling before the altar.
She watched it slump to the floor before her awareness faded to painless, black oblivion.
Sometime much later, the music began.
Chapter 21
It seemed like a good idea at the time: bury Alice’s body and head in the grove, and then plant an apple tree on top. No one would find her.
But Thorne Norwick hadn’t banked on her taking the tree over and haunting it. In life, Alice had possessed certain powers—aberrations of nature, surely—a fact he’d been too proud to admit to himself, even after she attacked him that night in the dining room. But it was the only explanation for what happened subsequently.
Within months, the four-foot-tall sapling tripled in height, its trunk growing as thick around as his thigh. The tree sprouted strangly thorned leaves and a wild mane of branches that twisted and curled into the sky, like no apple tree he’d ever seen. Bulbous apples that looked more like sacks of flesh than fruit inflated and fell off the branches every few days at a grotesquely accelerated growth rate. They created a thick blanket of rot that concealed the ground beneath the tree.
Much of the rest of the plantation’s landscape soon changed as well. Someone sneaked onto the grounds and burnt down the old slave cabins and overseer’s house. And Eliza Tefera departed in the dead of night with her newborn, somehow eluding the considerable tracking skills of Thorne and his retinue of night riders.
He and Mariann discussed the escaped cook one day as they stood at Obie Redger’s grave.
“That negro practiced magic,” she said. “I saw it with my own eyes when her baby was born. I’ll wager she used it to obscure the trail.”
“Perhaps,” Thorne said. He avoided looking at her. He was uncomfortable discussing things he couldn’t control.
Mariann’s stomach had already begun to show with child, promising him the legacy that Alice’s infertility had denied. Feeling himself grow hard, Thorne unconsciously placed a foot on the mound of Obie’s grave and proposed marriage to her. She accepted.
Their son, Brent, was born that January in their bedroom during a rare Georgian snowfall. Immediately afterward, Mariann started having the dreams. Thorne had heard about women sometimes getting depressed following childbirth, so at first he wasn’t concerned when she woke him during the night. She complained that Alice’s ghost called to her from the apple tree.
“Nonsense, woman. Now leave me be, and don’t molest me with your prattlings.”
But night after night, it was the same. Since he was deaf, he didn’t hear Mariann’s constant mutterings, but he felt the vibrations of her pacing. Finally, one night, when she woke him by rising and going downstairs, he followed her.
He found her standing before his grandmother’s mirror in the dining room. She held the sides of her head as she looked at herself.
Thorne shook her by the shoulders. “What is it, woman? Get ahold of yourself.”
Mariann pointed at her reflection. “It wasn’t me. It was her. She was standing in the mirror.”
Thorne looked but saw only themselves. Damn fool woman.
But the hairs still stood up on his neck. He swallowed. In light of Alice’s strange abilities, which he was only now coming to appreciate, he wouldn’t put something like this past her.
Mariann was still crying, so he hit her. “Go back to bed.”
“But Thorne, the mirror!”
“I’ll make sure it doesn’t bother you again.”
The next morning, when he had light enough to see, Thorne moved the stand-up mirror to the rear of the basement chapel and covered it with a tarp. All the while, he cursed and complained to himself about Mariann’s behavior. If she needed comfort, then she should go shove her breast into the baby’s mouth but let him sleep. The pressure of safeguarding the white race, of leading the Klan’s night riders, and of worrying about how to stay solvent was quite enough, thank you, without having to endure the empty-headedness of a former whore.
On another morning soon afterward, Mariann gazed at him across the crib of their son. “It was wrong, what we did. We murdered Alice in cold blood, and she wants revenge.”
“Be silent.”
“She’s growing those apples for us, Thorne. She wants us to eat ’em.”
“If you don’t be silent, apples are all you’ll eat today.”
Leaving her in the nursery, Thorne returned to his bedroom.
Moments later, he looked out the back window to see Mariann trudging through the ankle-deep snow toward the apple tree. She hesitated, and then reached with a trembling hand to pluck one of the unseasonable fruits.
“Damn fool woman,” he muttered.
She took two bites and spit out the second. Dropping the apple into the snow, she came back inside. She was crying.
Thorne lay down for some more shuteye, shaking his head but not very concerned. He fell asleep within minutes.
The familiar smell of gunsmoke awakened him. Had someone fired a weapon? Being deaf, he wouldn’t have heard it.
His battle senses bid him to rise from bed. Drawing the short sword that he kept behind the bureau, Thorne moved into the hall and down the stairs. His heart pounded as the smell thickened, but he kept his gait light and breathing shallow.
The odor seemed to come from the nursery. He peeked in.
No men stood in the room. Nothing looked out of place. But Mariann’s feet and the hem of her bell skirt poked out from behind the crib. Thorne went to her.
He cried out.
Mariann held his officer’s pistol. She had used her thumb to pull the trigger so that she could more easily stick the barrel into her eye. Bits of skull and gray matter stuck to the side of the crib.
A drop of blood had landed on the baby’s face, and it was crying.
✽ ✽ ✽
He didn’t sleep for two days, and then only out of sheer exhaustion. The baby’s presence set him on edge until he coerced one of the town midwives into taking on the tiny “boarder” for the indefinite future.
Once asleep, he dreamt of Alice. Wearing her everpresent blue dress, she stood at the shore of a black pond that had replaced the manor house, fishing with a long pole. She smiled at him as she hoisted Mariann’s head from the water.
“This one was an easy catch,” she said, and tossed it onto the ground.
Then before Thorne could react, she whipped the fishing pole back and casted the line straight at him. The hook snagged in his eye.
He awoke in the certain knowledge that Alice’s ghost had murdered his wife. Enraged, he dug out the axe he’d once used against her and donned the hooked crucifix necklace Alice feared.
He would chop down the apple tree and cast her bones into the woods.
✽ ✽ ✽
Entering the grove was like stepping onto a giant bacon griddle. The snow had melted around the apple tree, and static charges caused his toes to curl.
Thorne gripped the axe tighter as he neared the monstrosity. The bed of rotting apples crunched underfoot like animal bones strewn at the mouth of a cave. Was it his imagination, or had the circling ring of pines retreated from the apple tree in recent months?
The tree suddenly vanished.
Alice materialized in place of the tree. Her dress hung, musty and threadbare, on her withered frame, her face sunken and skeletal.
Thorne knew he wasn’t seeing the truth—that Alice had commandeered his vision, for he felt her presence prickling his brain like bugs in his bed�
��so he continued marching forward.
Thorne swung his axe.
Alice’s eyes erupted into electric, blue energy balls. A force froze the axe over his head before it touched her.
“Jesus loves you, my darling,” Thorne grunted. “Let me send you to heaven.”
The electricity that spun in Alice’s sockets vanished. In their place, soft brown eyes stared at him in naked fear.
He swung for her neck. The axe gouged out a wedge of wood and bark.
She shrieked.
Yelling, Thorne swung again.
Her features faded. Open-mouthed with fear, her face distorted with deepening lines. She no longer looked human. She elongated, her skin roughening into tree bark.
Arms rising over her head, they morphed into the bottom of the tree canopy. Her body transformed into the trunk and lower branches, growing as it did so.
As Thorne carved out more wood, hundreds of apples rained from the branches, dropping on and around him. They changed momentarily into miniature Alice heads that shrieked in high-pitched agony that he heard in his mind despite his deafness. When they reverted back into apples, they shrunk like raisins, and then burst open with little expulsions of gas.
Thorne closed his eyes and shook his head. When he looked again, the fallen apple tree lay at his feet.
✽ ✽ ✽
It doesn’t matter how many dead bodies you’ve handled or how much blood you’ve spilled. Digging up a woman’s putrefying corpse, ripping it apart like a Thanksgiving turkey, and flinging it into the woods is enough to unsettle anyone’s stomach. But that’s what whiskey is for.
The next morning, though, drink has consequences. Thorne Norwick experienced them as he stumbled outside, his head pounding and floating, and vomited into the snow. But no matter. He’d gladly take sickness over further confrontations with Alice’s ghost.
Footprints.
Shallow and narrow—perhaps a woman’s—they circled the house in three concentric rings, passing through the apple-laden area where the tree had once stood. Thorne tracked the prints with interest. He noted that whoever it was had paused at the four corners of the compass to stop and face the house, her feet drawn together at attention. His heart thudded as he wondered if it was Alice.
His mood darkened when he found blood smeared beside all his doors and windows. Ancient Hebrews had done this at Passover, as a ward against the angel of death, but Thorne didn’t think this was intended to protect him.
Thorne.
Alice’s voice penetrated the swishing drone of his deafness.
Thorne spun and squinted in the direction where he’d thrown her remains, expecting to see her standing in the trees.
Thorne.
The wench’s voice came from inside his house. He wouldn’t tolerate this. He was the most feared man of northern Georgia, and a mere woman wasn’t going to get the best of him, dead or not.
Running inside, Thorne dashed from room to room, shouting for her to show herself. He stopped in the pantry, breathing hard, and listened in case she spoke again.
Laughter came from the chapel. How he heard it through his deafness mattered not at this point. Bellowing a rebel battle yell, Thorne charged down the stairs and into the room.
He saw no one at first. The shadows between the cracks of light slanting in through the windows spread thickly. He picked up his axe from behind the door.
You think you can defeat me? Alice spoke in his head. You’re senile.
His mind, instead of his ears, heard that her voice came from the corner. There, covered by a tarp, stood the mirror. He remembered now that Alice used to stare at it all day. He pulled the tarp away.
And yelled in shock.
Alice stood inside the mirror’s reflection, as if on the other side of a door. Smiling at him, she looked as young and unblemished as the day she died.
She transformed.
Her skin sank and lined, darkening and sprouting scales of bark. Her body creaked and snapped. The sound of twisting wood.
Her torso elongated, and branches sprang from her body. Sparkling with a humor Thorne didn’t understand, her eyes fell into her head. Also transforming into bark, the dress sank into her wooden skin. Her arms, now branches, gave birth to apples.
The tree groaned as it grew, forming words. A lower branch, heavy with fruit, beckoned him. He felt more of that unfathomable humor, the way she sometimes mocked the religion she feared.
Take, eat. This is my body.
Thorne swung his axe. The mirror creased in a spider-web pattern of cracks before falling from its frame.
✽ ✽ ✽
Roosevelt Parker and his two boys, now senior lieutenants in Thorne’s den of the Ku Klux Klan, stood guard outside the house overnight. Thanking them for their loyal service, as was only gentlemanly, Thorne instructed them to keep a lookout for assassins. The Parkers nodded and smiled, no doubt believing his paranoia was rooted in mental instability brought on by Mariann’s suicide.
As he drifted off to sleep, Thorne felt grim confidence that this all would pass. He would move out of the area if necessary, not in retreat from Alice, of course not, but in recognition of the fact that Norwicktown was no longer a profitable area. If he remained here, he’d soon be forced to sell off tracks of land to carpetbaggers—or worse, negroes—to stay out of debt. Better to sell the whole lot at once to a white man and be done with it rather than suffer its slow, undignified death.
He would be free to explore political prospects in other regions, either with or without the Klan’s help. Bedford Forrest, in fact, had started sending him some rather arch letters, criticizing Thorne’s violent methods in Norwicktown, and it would be pleasant to be free of such critiques.
And as if those weren’t enough reasons to leave, Norwicktown was finally changing its name. Harkening back to the Name Riot of 1813 and the pronouncement that the community would not bear the name of a dishonorable man, the town council had passed a resolution renaming Norwicktown to Toombs, in honor of the folk hero Robert Toombs. Perhaps ordering the Klan to tar and feather the council members last month had been a mistake. Well, it had been their fault. The council should have never passed that resolution in symbolic support of the new U.S. president, Ulysses S. Grant.
A sweet, nauseating smell roused him from sleep.
He couldn’t move. The army blanket on top of him felt as heavy as rock.
Thorne rolled his eyes in their sockets, noting the candlelight reflected on the ceiling, until a woman leaned over him.
It was Eliza Tefera, the runaway cook.
She looked dirty and cold, her face slackened from lack of sleep. But within her bloodshot eyes, he saw murder. When she spoke, Thorne read her lips:
“I took out yo’ men with the Knowing. Dey’s asleep on the ground, and goin’ wake up in an hour.”
He tried to speak, but his paralysis extended even to his lips. Eliza responded by tracing a symbol in the air, and his jaw promptly unlocked.
“You’ll never get out of here alive,” Thorne managed.
She laughed. “Oh, I do believe the massa’s mistaken’, yes indeedy. But iffen I don’t, then I’se be thankful to be with my Jonah that much sooner. My son’s in good hands back home and would still grow up strong without me.” Her face hardened. “But I do believe the massa’s goin’ beat me to the grave in any case.”
When Thorne opened his mouth to speak, Eliza shoved in a rotten apple. His mouth rebelled from the sweet taste of decay, and he tried to spit out the wad of slime that broke off against his teeth. Eliza clamped a hand over his throat and spoke a word he didn’t understand, making him swallow.
The room disappeared, and Thorne found himself in the place of his nightmare. He stood near the black pond where Alice had fished out Mariann’s head.
Alice stood before him on the shore, neither woman nor tree. Her skin consisted of wood. Her arms, as small tree branches, hung laden with fruit.
“Eliza is my friend, as was her husband you murdered.�
�� She walked forward and drew him into a prickly embrace. “Love has its say in the end.”
Her wooden arms grew as she spoke, forming a structure behind him that he didn’t see at first. Suddenly, small branches encircled his wrists like ropes and pulled his arms out to either side. The branches lashed him to the crisscrossing trunks that Alice’s arms had become.
He screamed. Alice was tying him to a cross.
Still facing him, Alice drew close and hugged him, filling his nostrils with the smell of wood and death. Thin branches reached out from her body and speared his hands and feet—crucifying him. He convulsed in agony although he knew this was all just a dream.
Grinning, Alice kissed him and forced his mouth open with a wooden tongue. Thickening into another branch, it skewered through the back of his head and pinned him to the vertical beam.
The last thing Thorne heard was Alice’s laughter.
✽ ✽ ✽
Back in the bedroom, Eliza Tefera nodded when she saw the light fade from Thorne Norwick’s eyes. She pulled the rotten apple out of his mouth and left it on his chest. And then she departed the Norwick plantation forever.
✽ ✽ ✽
The dreamscape faded to black, and Alice felt the presences of Thorne and Eliza recede, moving to their respective destinations.
She herself was rising to the place she had visited after her death in the chapel—the place she’d immediately rejected and retreated from because she’d been intent on revenge.
But there was no denying her fate now.
Her final judgement was at hand. If there was to be a penalty for Momma’s theft of the angel’s wings and for her own resistance to Jesus Christ’s apparent will, then now was the time for her sentence to be carried out.
It started with music, the same music she’d heard before. What was that? Voices? Stringed instruments? Maybe harps. The thought made her laugh. Then she was surprised she could even hear herself laugh. The black void brightened. She became aware of having a body—a normal body, with two arms and two legs.
Cursed by Christ Page 23