December's Thorn

by Phillip DePoy

  He managed to smile, his eyes still closed. “She— she told you not to leave the house.”

  “She did.” I only took an instant more to reflect.

  Dr. Nelson looked at me. “That’s important,” she said. “There’s always another way out.”

  I was amazed at her ability to keep up with analysis even in such a situation, but I couldn’t think about that then.

  “We’ll have to ask her how she did that,” Skid said.

  The sirens were obviously closer, and may have come to a standstill, ostensibly in my yard. I turned to Issie.

  “So, are you coming with me up to my house so that we can all talk?” I asked.

  She glanced toward the cave’s entrance and began to shiver. “No.”

  “Look,” Dr. Nelson told Issie reasonably, “you really need to sleep in a nice bed and clean up and calm down. I’m a doctor. I know these things.”

  “I’m not going back to that hospital again,” Issie gasped. “David can tell you all about that. I can’t go back to a place like that. I’m the reason he got in there, to help me get out. You have to understand that.”

  “I don’t understand at all,” I began, “but if you’ll just come up to my house, you can explain it to me.”

  “No,” Issie said, slowly backing away from me. “They won’t listen. They’ll just take me. That’s what David says. They’ll just take me and him away. Away from you, Fever. Fever. That’s a funny name for you.”

  She took a few more steps away from Dr. Nelson and me. Then, almost as if she were able to vanish from sight, she turned, an odd pirouette, and dashed suddenly into the shadows at the back of the cave. I took one step toward her when a barrage of men and guns and flashlights and shouting assaulted me as the entire canvas that covered the cave’s entrance collapsed inward and perhaps a dozen state troopers stormed in.

  Everyone was shouting, pointing guns, telling me and Dr. Nelson to get on the floor, to freeze, to put our hands up, to put our hands behind our heads, not to move.

  I stood very still, blinking in the harsh light of their torches.

  Finally Melissa Mathews tore through the phalanx of burly men and stood in front of me.

  “This is Dr. Devilin, you morons! He’s the one that’s just saved the sheriff, can’t you’uns see that? Can’t you’uns see the sheriff lying here on this cot?” And she jabbed the air with her index finger in the direction of the semiconscious Skidmore.

  Skidmore mumbled, “I’m okay. I’m all right. Put those goddamned guns away. The bad guys are gone.”

  Melissa twisted herself in the direction of the now-silent state workers. “Morons,” she repeated.

  Then she jumped a little to the left and somehow appeared at Skidmore’s cot. He was up on one elbow, blinking like me.

  “Any chance you’uns can quit pointing those flashlights into my eyes? I’ve had a rough night.”

  Slowly the torches were lowered.

  Someone said, “You okay, Skid?”

  I tried to imagine what the scene must have looked like to them. Cots and barrels and crates everywhere, a blood-soaked sheriff, two strange academics, and a roaring fire pit.

  “The alleged perpetrators,” Skidmore managed to say, sitting up, “are a dwarf and a very pale thin woman dressed in black.” Then he inclined his head in the direction of Dr. Nelson and me. “These two people saved my life. Now. If you want to chase off into the caves and see can you catch the man that did this to me, it’s back that way.”

  Melissa pointed toward the back of the cave.

  “Where’s them ambulance men?” Melissa said harshly. “Get them in here now!”

  There was a general bustle, and two men in hospital jackets stepped forward. They went immediately to Skid, began talking to him softly, dabbing something on his broken skin, and readying an emergency litter, ostensibly something to carry him up the hill and into the ambulance—though I imagined that Skid would object to that.

  “Which one of you is Dr. Nelson?” one of the state troopers asked.

  Dr. Nelson raised her hand but remained mute, for some reason.

  “I’m Dr. Devilin,” I felt compelled to say.

  “Hey, Dev,” another state trooper said. “You might not remember me, but I worked on that case up here when them two girls got killed by that train? In that nice orange Volkswagen? That was back— five years ago, I reckon.”

  I squinted to see the man. His face seemed familiar, but I didn’t know him.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” he answered back with a decidedly adolescent grin. “Let’s get you and Dr. Nelson out of here and back up to your house. How ’bout that?”

  “Good,” Dr. Nelson responded, and headed toward the crowded cave’s entrance.

  “I’m worried about Skid,” I said to no one in particular.

  “I got it,” Melissa said. “You go on up to the house.”

  I nodded.

  Some of the troopers had begun to head toward the back of the cave, which prompted me to ask Melissa an important question. I stepped over to the cot and leaned over close to her ear.

  “You found another way out of here,” I said softly.

  “Yes,” she told me, distracted by what was going on with Skidmore.

  “How?” I wanted to know.

  “Oh.” She took her eyes off Skid for a second and looked at me. “Well. You feel the draft over by the fire pit, that makes the smoke go out?”

  “Yes.”

  “You feel that on your face and you follow the feel,” she said simply. “Had to lead to the other entrance. Even when the cave splits in three.” She shrugged and returned her attention to the sheriff.

  I straightened back up. “Yes,” I said, more to myself than to her. “But where did it come out?”

  “Down the way from your front door,” she muttered. “Remember when my car ran off the road because I almost hit the boy? The one we thought was a boy?”

  I nodded.

  “Close to there,” she continued. “You want to find it, just look for where my patrol car messed up the dirt road and the side brush.”

  “Right.” I touched her shoulder and headed out of the cave.

  I caught up with Dr. Nelson as we both cleared the cave, out into the colder air.

  “You’re a little more tight-lipped than usual,” I whispered to her.

  “I don’t think you completely heard what Issie said,” she whispered back. “Wait for just a second.”

  We walked upward in silence, and the sound from the cave faded quickly as we ascended the mountain.

  After we were a hundred yards or so from the cave, Dr. Nelson began.

  “Issie said, or at least indicated, that she’d been in the state mental hospital with David. That he’d somehow gotten himself into the hospital to help her, to get her out.”

  “Oh.” I slowed down. “Right. She did say that.”

  “But Skidmore found David’s fingerprints in the whatever database he searched, and not hers.”

  “Yes, but the other prints were only partials.”

  “And lots of people think Issie is dead,” Dr. Nelson went on, squinting.

  “Some people may think she’s dead,” I corrected cautiously.

  “Okay, but the point is,” Dr. Nelson said, “I need to find Issie, find out why she was in the state mental hospital. I’m beginning to have some very weird intuitions.”

  That stopped me. “Intuitions? About what?”

  She stopped too and looked at me. “Can’t put my finger on it. Can’t put it into words. But you feel it, too, I know you do.”

  “I feel a weird intuition about this woman?” I rubbed my face. “I feel something. But mostly it’s— well it is weird. And there is, I would have to say, a modicum of fear involved.”

  “She scares you.”

  “She scares the hell out of me,” I said right away. “Doesn’t she scare you?”

  “No,” Dr. Nelson said, looking down. “No, because I know wh
o she is, or what she is.”

  “You do?” I asked. “What is she?”

  “Well, she’s not a ghost, but she’s not a real person, either. She’s stuck. A little like you. A little like me. That’s why we both have some odd feelings about her—based on the takes-one-to-know-one school of analysis.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I confessed.

  She took a second to consider, and then seemed to give up. “Yeah,” she said, beginning to walk upward toward my house again. “Neither do I.”

  We walked a few more steps in the snow before an eerie cold clapped itself around my head and shoulders.

  “Still,” I said, suddenly feeling the muscles in my thighs complain from all the hill-walking effort, “I can’t escape the sensation that something—something just on the edge of my consciousness, just outside my view—is waiting in the shadows. Waiting for me to put together bits and pieces of something so obvious that I’m missing or not seeing because of a— some kind of blind spot, maybe. Something. It’s right there, in the corner of my eye.”

  She nodded.

  The lights from my house came into view then, almost as if it had just appeared. There were also flashing lights from squad cars and the ambulance. The yard was lit in red and blue and the warm buttery white from my windows, and I thought, “What an odd set of decorations I have for Christmas this year.”

  18

  The house was warm, and the coals in the fireplace were cheery. My first thought was that we’d regroup and then head back out right away to find the other entrance to the cave. But that seemed increasingly unlikely as muscle fatigue and the general horror of the scene in the cave sank into our bones. Every time I blinked I felt my hand under Skidmore’s sweaty neck, twisting bailing wire. My thumb and finger were cut deeply and needed tending. Dr. Nelson was unusually quiet. I didn’t even think to offer her more of the apple brandy to drink, to take the edge off. I was suddenly so exhausted that I could barely move. She was shivering again. She sat down on the floor in front of the fire. I drifted upstairs to wash the blood off my hands and put antiseptic on the wounds. I don’t know how much silent time passed before I found myself walking down the stairs again.

  “You’re right,” she said, hearing my shuffling approach, not looking back.

  “About what?” I mumbled, limbs nearly numb.

  “There’s something about this woman that we’re missing. Something just out of reach or sight. Intuition only gets you so far, in my experience. After that, you just have to do the work.”

  “The work?” I asked, collapsing into my chair.

  “Brain work, Mortimer,” she sneered.

  “Now I’m Mortimer?”

  “Something obvious, hidden in plain sight,” she went on, ignoring my objection to the newest of my appellations.

  “Well, yes,” I agreed, only a bit reluctantly, “like the cave entrance. I’ve been over that same stretch of hillside thousands of times. After a while, you can’t see certain things. The obvious becomes invisible.”

  “Right.” She nodded, still staring into the fire. “But the situation is complicated by the fact that even though you obviously knew this woman, you didn’t remember her when she came to your door.”

  “Complicated because something happened to make me suppress the memory, something gave me situational or, I don’t know, specific amnesia. Right?”

  “Um,” she hedged.

  “Right?” I insisted again.

  “The possibility remains that you’ve suffered more brain damage from your coma than was originally thought,” she said bluntly. “It’s entirely likely that you don’t remember, now, lots of things in your past like that.”

  “No it’s not,” I snapped.

  But the thought made me very uncomfortable. What if there were lots of things I would never remember? What if part of my mind was gone? How would I ever know it?

  “Let’s start with what we know now,” Dr. Nelson went on. “What are the basic facts? Her name is Issie Raynerd—a very difficult name.”

  “Difficult?”

  “The sound of it, as Dr. Andrews said, is icky.”

  “I don’t think Andrews used the word icky.”

  “And the last name,” she began. “There’s something wrong with it.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “You know what?”

  “I know,” I told her reluctantly, “that if you pronounce her last name with the accent on the second syllable instead of the first, the way everyone does now—and you make the e an a—you get a trickster figure from French folklore: the fox.”

  She turned to look at me. “You do?”

  “Raynard the fox,” I assured her.

  “You’ve known this all along?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t mention it because it seemed— it seemed too paranoid.”

  “So what does it mean?” Dr. Nelson twisted around to face me, her back to the fire.

  I sat forward, coming to conflicting conclusions.

  “Either it means nothing and I am paranoid,” I concluded calmly, “or this person has deliberately created a name for herself to— to flaunt my own discipline in my face.”

  “Why would she do that?” Dr. Nelson leaned forward, too.

  “Because she’s trying to confuse me and taunt me simultaneously. The way a trickster would.”

  “Again,” Dr. Nelson said, “why?”

  “Two reasons. Two I can think of at the moment. First: it’s her nature. A trickster willfully disobeys or ignores traditionally accepted rules of normal behavior. Sometimes it’s all in fun, sometimes the fun ends in blood.”

  I glanced around the house until I found the spot where Lucinda had hung mistletoe and pointed at it, tacked over the entrance to the kitchen.

  “Why do we kiss under mistletoe?” I continued, pointing to the healthy sprig over the kitchen entrance.

  Dr. Nelson glanced and then looked at me again. “Don’t know.”

  “Loki, the trickster figure of Norse mythology, was jealous of another god, Baldr, whom everyone loved. Baldr was kind and loving and generous. Loki was cold and cunning and mean. So near the winter solstice, he challenged Thor to an archery match and Thor accepted. Then Loki told Baldr that he wanted to change his ways, and wanted Baldr to help him. Baldr agreed. Loki set the meeting place behind a stack of hay. Then Loki put the archery target on the other side of the haystack and taunted Thor until Thor was angry and shot his arrow with a greater force than usual. The arrow went through the target, through the hay, and into Baldr’s heart. The most beloved of all the gods was instantly killed, by Thor, the son of Odin.”

  “Christ,” Dr. Nelson whispered softly.

  “When Odin, father of the gods, discovered Loki’s ‘trick,’” I went on, “Loki was banished to the underworld for a thousand years. And then Odin laid a curse on the tree from which the fatal arrow had been made, the mistletoe tree. Odin’s curse was that mistletoe would no longer be a tree, but a poisonous parasite on other trees. Thor interceded, however, and told Odin that it wasn’t fitting to completely ignore the great love all the gods bore for Baldr. So Odin added to his curse the invective that whenever human beings stood beneath the mistletoe, they would be compelled to kiss. We kiss under mistletoe in remembrance of a forgotten god whose love was the source of great compassion, and great treachery—like all love.”

  She stared, for a moment, at the mistletoe in the entranceway. “That’s quite a story,” she said.

  “That’s what a trickster is,” I affirmed.

  “You’re afraid of Issie.”

  “Down to my marrow,” I agreed in no uncertain terms. “And while some of my fear is a result of current events, I am slowly being taken over by a much more primal dread. I’m afraid that something big happened to me in Wales. Something big happened to Issie Raynerd. I’m afraid that I can’t remember her, exactly, because something so traumatic happened to one or both of us that I drove her into— well, I mean, Christ, tha
t I drove her into the caves underneath my home! Both figuratively and literally.”

  Dr. Nelson nodded. “Yeah. That’s a big fear all right,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Because it can threaten everything. That’s why you’re itchy when I press you about being a spook magnet. I thought you were just averse to the idea because your mind is closed about the subject, but in fact you may actually be a little too enthusiastic about it. It may be one of your biggest unconscious fears, maybe even a root fear.”

  I glared appropriately. “You’re talking to yourself, I don’t know what you’re saying, and you referred to me as ‘itchy.’ Stop it.”

  She ignored me. “I love that you told me this story about the mistletoe,” she went on, “because it completely reveals— I mean, of all the stories you could have told me about tricksters—coyote, rabbit, the briar patch story—you chose that one, one of the bloodiest, one about love and treachery. Man.”

  I think I blinked. “You know about coyote and rabbit tricksters?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “You were just seeing where I’d go,” I said tersely, “because you’re still examining me.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you knew about the mistletoe,” I continued.

  “No,” she admitted, “that was new to me. Great story. But also great in what it reveals about your current state of mind.”

  “And what it reveals about Issie Raynerd, if I’m correct,” I said pointedly.

  She sighed. “Actually, I believe you might be right. I think there’s something of the trickster mythology at work here. I’m just not certain that it’s Issie.”

  “Who else would it be?”

  “You said there were two reasons she might be doing this,” Dr. Nelson said, clearly not interested in answering my question. “The first, you said, was that it’s just in her nature, her trickster nature. What’s the other one?”

  “Ah, well,” I responded, “the second reason would be that she has a plan, like Loki. She wants to confuse me so that she can get something that she wants. Her trickster nature is, then, a magician’s tool: misdirection. She wants me to think that she’s not real, or out of her mind, or too troubled to deal with. That way I won’t notice when she actually pulls off the trick of the magic trick.”