December's Thorn

by Phillip DePoy

  “That’s why you think you’re here?” I asked. “To help with that?”

  I glanced at Skidmore. He looked almost as upset as I felt.

  “It’s not exactly what I told Lucinda,” she went on, “or the hospital, or the sheriff, here—but, yes. That’s why I’m here. To pull you out of the doorway because you’re stuck between life and death.”

  I swallowed hard, staring into her eyes. She sounded insane to me, and I knew that Skidmore had already decided she was in worse shape than I.

  The problem was, I agreed with her. I believed every single syllable of what she’d said. And I was terrified.

  8

  In 1927, Joseph Rhine and his wife Louisa came to Duke University with the idea of investigating, in a scholarly way, psychic phenomena. By 1935 these investigations had produced enough evidence to warrant the establishment of the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory. Naturally, this work met with great skepticism in the academic world. In 1965, close to retirement and fearing that colleagues might discontinue his life’s work, Rhine moved his laboratory off campus. He created an organization called the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, which was supported by, among others, the founder of Xerox. In 2002 a new building was constructed expressly to house the Rhine Center and its work. It was built in western Durham, close to the Duke Medical Center.

  My parents had taken me to the old building when I was eleven years old or so. I’d made the mistake of telling my mother that I’d seen an angel. When questioned about it, I did further damage to my credibility with both of my parents by telling them that I saw other people in the house all the time, shadow people. Some were like laundry on a line, waving in a gentle breeze. Some were like the steam from a teakettle. Some were like ordinary people who came into the house, sat down, smiled, and talked with me.

  This had been enough to send my mother into a frenzy of accusations: I was lying, or, alternately, I’d been put up to the whole thing by my father in an effort to drive my mother out of her mind. Both suggestions were ironic, I’d thought at the time, since my mother and the truth rarely existed in the same county at the same time. If anything, it would be my mother who drove my father mad.

  Ultimately it had been my father’s suggestion that I go to a place in North Carolina about which he’d heard, a center where some people took seriously the idea that an eleven-year-old boy might not be crazy if he saw things that other people didn’t see.

  I don’t remember much about my experience at the Center. I was asked a lot of questions, hypnotized, given several tests. I do remember speaking with a woman who was very calm, very reassuring. I remember that she made me feel better, but I don’t remember what she said or did to accomplish that.

  We came back home, my parents and I, without discussing, even for a second, what had happened in North Carolina. They never spoke of it again unless I asked them about it, which I rarely did. And when I saw strange things in my room or the yard or, later, at the university, I absorbed them. I thought of it as nothing more than a phenomenon like any other: there’s a tree, there’s a friend, there’s a transparent Viking.

  Surreal as this often made my world, the world itself more than rose to meet the challenge. Advertising, world events, news coverage—everyday television—all seemed inspired by Fellini or Dali or Hieronymus Bosch more than by any so-called normal human being. Cows painted billboards, banks needed money, and wars were televised live. A little madness seemed an essential quality for survival in a world like that.

  Furthermore, I believed that if people couldn’t see the things I saw, they just weren’t paying attention.

  So, folded into ordinary existence, these so-called paranormal phenomena of my life went along quite happily hand in hand with everything else.

  Most of the time.

  “Fever?”

  Skidmore’s voice snapped me out of my trancelike thoughts and memories, and there I was, in my kitchen, with Dr. Nelson, who feared I was quite disturbed, and Sheriff Needle, who was certain I was out of my mind.

  “Sorry,” I said, “what were we talking about?”

  Dr. Nelson and Skidmore exchanged a glance.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Skidmore mumbled. “Point is: I got to go look for that boy who shot up your house.”

  He stood, scraping his chair on the kitchen floor.

  “I’m going with you,” I said immediately.

  “No you’re not,” he fired back. “You’re staying right here.”

  “Skid, look,” I began, “this kid, he shot into the house to scare Dr. Nelson. I don’t know why, but that’s what his motive seemed to be.”

  I turned to Dr. Nelson.

  “Well,” she said, and shrugged, “he’s right. The kid threatened me, not Dr. Devilin.”

  “So I’m not really at risk from him.” That was my argument, admittedly thin.

  “No,” the sheriff said, shaking his head vehemently, “you’re not going to go out there in those woods to wander around and get shot by some aggravated child!”

  “I have a little something at stake here,” I told him. “I want to prove to everyone that the woman I saw last night is real, and that the aggravated child is her son. It seems obvious to me, and I want to make it obvious to everyone else.”

  “By sloshing through the snow after a boy with a gun,” Skid retorted reasonably. “That’s what you think is best.”

  “I want to find him so that I can ask him about his mother. Yes, Sheriff, that’s what I want to do. And then I want to bring the mother here and get Dr. Nelson to use her voodoo to help that woman, who is significantly more deranged than I am. And then I want almost everyone to go away so that I can have a nice quiet rest until, maybe, spring.”

  A moment of silence ensued before Dr. Nelson said, quietly, “Voodoo?”

  “I can’t just sit here in the house and wait for something to happen to me,” I said very deliberately. “I have to do something. Anything. I can’t just sit here.”

  Skidmore was about to say something when Dr. Nelson beat him to it. “You want to define the parameters of your dasein, not the other way around.”

  “Exactly,” I said, and looked at Skidmore.

  He stared. “I don’t know what that means. Not at all. But if I have learned anything over the long course of our friendship, it would be that you’ll do what you want no matter what I say. I can tell you ‘no’ all day long, and it won’t do a bit of good if you’ve already got ‘yes’ in your head.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Okay then,” he said haplessly. “Get your coat on. You stick with me, though. No going off on your own and I mean it.”

  Dr. Nelson scrambled. “I’m not staying here by myself.”

  “Maybe you should just go home,” I suggested, sounding a little colder than I’d meant to.

  “No,” she said, not the least bit offended. “You have to find out what you have to find out, and I need answers to my own questions. So, I stay. Or, I mean, I go into the woods with you.”

  “Ceri,” Skidmore said, “I may not have told you this before, but I only understand about half of what you say. Ever.”

  She smiled. “Me too,” she said.

  I headed for the living room and my coat. “It’s been at least a half an hour since the boy was here,” I said. “We should really get moving.”

  “Even though the footprints are not good for much in the way of forensics,” Skidmore told us, moving toward the front door, “they will give us a fairly obvious path to follow.”

  Dr. Nelson pulled her coat around her and followed Skidmore out the door, and I was close behind. Down the front porch and into the snow, the three of us made our way fairly easily for a while.

  Beyond what might be referred to as my front yard there was a road. Other than that, the woods were more or less what they had been for thousands of years, and they were thick with a rather remarkable variety of larger trees, black walnuts, scarlet oaks, white pines, hickories, ashes, maples. The underbr
ush was nearly impassable with Mountain-laurel, but other shrubs impeded progress: rusty blackhaw, littlehip hawthorn, and Red Buckeye. Beautyberry stood out here and there, mostly purple, against the snow. And the trail of footprints slogged through the worst and most difficult parts of the mountainside, weaving incoherently to and fro. Within twenty minutes, I was winded.

  “These footprints don’t seem to have an aim or pattern,” I said, white ghosts of frozen breath surrounding my face.

  The day was lovely, really. The sun high and white, the sky a thick blue glass through which a crescent moon and, I imagined, several planets could be seen.

  “They’re going in a circle, more or less,” Skidmore panted.

  “There are definitely two sets of prints,” Dr. Nelson said. “Look.”

  We’d come to rest in a small clearing, about five square feet of open space beside an ancient pine. It appeared to be a place where our quarry had also rested for a moment. Two sets of prints were indeed visible: a larger pair of women’s boots and a smaller, child’s shoes.

  I looked around. “You’re right, I think,” I said to Skid. “We are going in a circle. If we keep going this way, we’ll head past my house and down the mountain.”

  “How can you tell?” Dr. Nelson asked, trying to get her bearings.

  “I grew up in these woods. I spent more time here than I did in that house. I’ve stopped in this same place, by this same tree, a hundred times before.”

  “Of course,” she said quickly. “Sorry.”

  I looked at her profile. She was wearing an odd sort of secret smile. The sunlight made her hair seem made of the same snow that was on the tree limbs, and her face was alabaster and roses.

  “Was that part of your examination of my faculties?” I asked her.

  She started to say something, then obviously thought better of it, and settled on, “Yes.”

  “Okay,” Skid said, and launched off into the maze of laurels.

  I followed him; Dr. Nelson followed me.

  In no time we were headed downward. The slope was slight, but the progress was easier. Skid got a little ahead of me, and when I hurried to catch up I heard Dr. Nelson whisper.

  “Fever,” she said.

  I could barely hear her. I turned around. She was holding several strands of black thread that had caught on one of the laurel branches.

  “Didn’t you say that your visitor last night was dressed in black?” she asked me, still whispering.

  I nodded.

  “And the boy was in white today,” she went on, “I saw that.”

  I turned back around to call out to the sheriff, but Dr. Nelson touched my arm.

  “Wait,” she said.

  She pointed to the ground. At first I couldn’t see what she was pointing to, but after a second it was obvious that something was wrong with the pattern of snow just below the laurel branch.

  I knelt. It was impossible for me to be certain, but it appeared as if there was only one set of prints, the boy’s prints, in the snow from that point on. It was as if the woman had simply vanished.

  I looked up.

  “I don’t see two sets of prints from here on,” I said softly.

  “Right,” she agreed.

  “Skidmore!” I called out.

  My voice was much louder than I’d thought it would be. I could hear animals scrambling in trees and several irate crows complained.

  “I wish you hadn’t done that,” Dr. Nelson said, shaking her head.

  “Why?” I asked, getting to my feet.

  Skid appeared through the dense branches a second later.

  “What is it?” I couldn’t tell if he was concerned or irritated.

  “Dr. Nelson discovered something important.” I pointed.

  She held up the branch from which the black threads hung.

  “What is that?” he asked, coming closer.

  “I think they’re threads from the clothing worn by my imaginary visitor from last night,” I told him. “And there’s more.”

  “After this point,” Dr. Nelson said, “there’s only one set of prints. The boy’s.”

  Skid’s head snapped back, he scowled, and then began to examine the snow around us.

  “Damn it,” he muttered, “we walked all over these prints. Hang on. Stay right here.”

  He took off again and vanished down the slope. I imagined he was going to the place where he’d stopped when I’d called out, to see if there were one or two sets of prints.

  I turned to Dr. Nelson. “Why did you say you wished I hadn’t called out?” I asked her.

  “Because it might not just be the sheriff who heard you,” she said. “Anyone could have heard you.”

  I instantly saw her point: if the people we were pursuing had been anywhere on the mountainside, they would have heard my voice. I’d alerted them to our presence.

  “You know,” I told her, “considering that it isn’t exactly your field, you’re doing fairly well at this investigation.”

  She nodded. “I’ll tell you what I believe. I believe that if you can do anything well, anything at all, you can do everything well. If you can make a really good loaf of bread, and you need to repair your car, all you have to do is fix the car the way you’d make the bread. Even if you don’t know a spark plug from a toadstool, you’ll be able to figure it out.”

  I glared. “Now you’re just deliberately goading me,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” She seemed genuinely surprised by my reaction to her comments.

  “You know very well what I mean,” I snapped. “That’s my story. What you just said. That’s what I tell people. It comes from a— it’s a Taoist story about a tea master and a swordsman. They’re traveling together and night comes. The swordsman is tired. A gang of robbers comes at them. The swordsman says, ‘I’m too tired to fight them, you do it.’ And the tea master says, ‘No, I make tea. They have swords.’ And the swordsman says, ‘Take my sword and fight the fight exactly the same way as you would make the tea.’ The tea master understands, takes up the sword, and stands in the road to face the robbers. They see him, know that he’d already won because he’s a master, and take off in the other direction.”

  “Yes.” Her smile was an impossible combination of delicacy and aggression. “That is a good story.”

  “So you admit that you’re— I don’t know what you’re doing,” I stammered, “but stop it.”

  Before she could respond, Skidmore reappeared. “One set of prints. Damn.”

  He was breathing hard, and was now clearly irritated. He came to a halt in front of the laurel branch with the black threads attached.

  He stared at the threads for a moment, then at the ground, then looked all around. But the underbrush was so thick, even in winter, that people could have been standing within fifty feet of us and we wouldn’t have seen them.

  The sheriff sighed very heavily. “If I had a deputy here,” he complained, “one of us would look around these parts and the other one would keep going after the footprints in the snow.”

  “Good,” Dr. Nelson said immediately, “then I propose that you go after the boy with the gun and Fever and I wander around here looking for the phantom woman in black.”

  She and I looked at Skidmore.

  “God Almighty piss damn and piss,” he whispered.

  “I know I’ve mentioned this before,” I told him, smiling, “but your language has gotten a lot worse since you became sheriff. When we were boys, you would never curse.”

  “That’s cursing?” Dr. Nelson asked me, disingenuously. “That’s not cursing. I’ve heard patients…”

  “Fine!” Skidmore growled. “You two look around here. I’ll go down the mountain. Either of you have a watch?”

  Dr. Nelson held up her arm to reveal a very expensive piece of jewelry that looked spectacular and also told time.

  “No matter what,” he insisted, “we meet back at Fever’s house in exactly half an hour from now. Right?”

  “Half a
n hour’s not long enough to—” I began.

  “Half an hour!” he stormed.

  “Right,” Dr. Nelson said immediately.

  With another monstrous sigh, Skidmore was gone.

  9

  For an instant there was silence again. No birds, no wind, not even the sound of my own breathing. That silence, combined with the white snow and the limbs, the occasional evergreen and the chiseled air, all seemed to conspire to give the landscape a floating, dreamlike aspect.

  Then Dr. Nelson turned to me. “Is he always that grouchy?”

  “He didn’t used to be,” I told her, “but I’ve given him a lot to worry about, and being sheriff around here is surprisingly difficult.”

  “Really?” She looked around. “It seems so peaceful.”

  “So does a corpse, if you don’t know what’s eating at it from the inside,” I said, relishing the image just a little too much.

  “Lovely.” She shook her head.

  “So I’m going to start here and make a spiral,” I said, beginning to walk around the laurel tree with the black threads attached.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I’m going to make a spiral,” I repeated. “It’s the most efficient way to proceed in searching for anything from a single point.”

  She only thought about it for a second before she agreed and came to my side.

  I stopped. “What are you doing?”

  “Making a spiral,” she told me.

  “No,” I corrected her. “I’m making a spiral. It’s a one-person enterprise.”

  “Then what am I doing?” she asked without a trace of ire.

  “You’re staying here at the center of the spiral to examine the bush and the threads and the snow more carefully,” I answered, “to see what we’ve missed. You’re the one who spotted the threads. And that was just while you were walking by. Who knows what you might see if you take the time to examine the scene more thoroughly.”