Ceremonies

by T E. D Klein

  Ceremonies

  T E.D Klein

  Ceremonies

  T. E. D. Klein

  Prologue: Christmas

  The forest was ablaze.

  From horizon to horizon stretched a wall of smoke and flame, staining the night sky red and blotting out the stars. Vegetation shriveled and was instantly consumed; great trees toppled shrieking toward the earth, dying gods before an angry gale, and the sound of their destruction was like the roaring of a thousand winds.

  For seven days the fire raged, unimpeded and unquenchable. No one was there to stop it; no one had seen it start, save the scattered tribes of Mengos and Unamis who had fled in terror from their homes. Among them there were some who said that, on the evening of the blaze, they'd seen a star fall from the sky and crash amid the woods. Others claimed that lightning was the cause, or a queer red liquid bubbling from the ground.

  Perhaps none of them were right.

  Let it, therefore, rest at this: the events recorded here began as one day they would end In mystery.

  At last the flames were dampened by a night of steady rain. The morning sun rose upon a kingdom of ashes, a desolate grey land without a tree left standing or a trace of life-save, at its very center, the charred and blistered body of an ancient cottonwood, the tallest object for miles around.

  The tree was dead. But crouched amid its branches, hidden by a web of smoke still rising from the earth, something lived: something older far than humankind, and darker than some vast and sunless cavern on a world beyond the farthest depths of space. Something that breathed, schemed, felt itself dying and, dying, lived on.

  It was outside nature, and alone. It had no name. High above the smoking ground it waited, black against the blackness of the tree. Fire had ravaged its body; a limb had been devoured by the flames. Where once a head had been, and something rather like a face, was now a crumbling mass the form and color of charcoal. Still it clung implacably to life, as to the branch round which its claws were fixed. Survival was a thing of calculation; there was something it must do before it died. Now was not the time, but it was patient. It closed its one remaining eye and settled down to wait. Its time would come.

  The planet spun; moons waxed and waned; vegetation returned, groping hungrily up through the ashes. The scarred place on the planet's surface was lost beneath a canopy of green, and once again the trees rose straight and tall to catch the sunlight.

  Only in a small grove near the center was a difference to be seen. There the foliage was not so thick, and the trees themselves had grown back shorter, coarser, curiously stunted, like the life forms at the summit of a mountain. Others had taken on odd shapes, with trunks split into a hundred branching arms, or twisted, or swollen obscenely like the bodies of drowned animals. When a wind swept westward from off the sea, turning the roof of the forest into an ocean of waving leaves, no such movement stirred the shadowy confines of the grove.

  The very earth there was changed. By night it seemed to glow as if a fire still raged beneath. At intervals thin wisps of steam would drift up from the ground, curling past the roots and leafless boughs, obscuring both the treetops and the sky.

  The Indians seldom ventured near that part of the forest, and even avoided speaking of it after a woman gathering firewood described the thing she'd seen there, squatting in a dead tree in the middle of the grove.

  For the thing, no word existed. But they found one for the grove in which it chose to wait.

  Maquineanok, they called it. The Place of Burning.

  A year passed. And another. And then five thousand more. The stars had shifted slowly in their courses. The sky looked different now.

  So did the planet's face. The Indians were dead, and the forest land had dwindled to a third its size. Settlers had dotted it with homesteads; engineers had crisscrossed it with roads; farmers had cleared off a patchwork of fields for pasturing and corn. Villages had sprouted, townships spread; somewhere a city was being laid out that would spell destruction for another million trees.

  Here and there some remnants of the former age survived: hidden knots of wilderness where man had never walked, and where the great trees still struggled as before, unchallenged and unseen. Such places, though, were few, and disappearing fast; soon, within the compass of a century, the forest and its secrets would belong to man alone.

  Where the ancient woods were deepest, in the region that the Indians had called Maquineanok, five thousand years of quietude had already been breached. Months ago the grove had rung to the distant echoes of a hammer; now, at any moment, human footsteps might penetrate the silence and the gloom.

  Still it waited.

  The boy was not yet lost, but he was puzzled. He had wandered into this part of the forest by mistake, trying out the new snowshoes he'd received that morning, and suddenly he'd found himself unable to proceed, his left shoe mired in two inches of mud. Elsewhere the forest floor was blanketed in white, but here the earth showed through in great bare patches, and the grey December sky was reflected in puddles of melted snow.

  Stepping back in search of firmer ground, he brushed a pale strand of hair from his eyes and tucked it beneath the hand-knit woolen cap. All afternoon he'd had a steady wind behind him, but now it had stopped; until this moment he had hardly been aware of it. Running a tongue over his chapped lips, he looked around him, ears straining for a sound. His own breathing seemed unnaturally loud in the winter silence.

  There was something different about these woods. He saw it now. It was more than just the lack of snow. The trees were smaller here, and queerly formed; a ring of leafless branches, sharp as claws, reached yearningly toward his face, while many of the trunks and limbs were twisted into grotesque shapes, images from half-remembered dreams.

  Pulling off a fur-lined mitten with his teeth, he stooped to unfasten the rawhide bindings of the snowshoes. It was growing late, and he was beginning to get hungry. At home there'd be warm eggnog waiting, and johnnycake made of cornmeal, and, in the huge cast-iron stove, a bowl of Christmas pudding. The older girls would be helping his mother in the kitchen; the others would be singing hymns, the younger children joining in as best they could. His two little sisters would be playing on the rug beside the chimney corner…

  Around him the dark woods seemed to press closer, as if to cut off his escape.

  He paused to wipe the dirt from his leggings and to retighten the laces. Standing, he slipped his boots from the muddy snowshoes and took a step backward, nearly tripping over the exposed roots of an old cottonwood. He reached out blindly, to steady himself With a cry he yanked away his hand. The tree had felt warm to the touch, like a living creature. Yet a glance assured him that it was merely dead wood: blasted by lightning, from the look of it, or scorched as from a recent fire.

  Hurriedly he picked up the snowshoes and stowed them on his shoulder. With the cottonwood behind him he began to walk due eastward, the direction pointed by the lengthening shadows. He was just emerging from the grove, still uncertain of his way, when, prompted by some obscure impulse, he stopped, looked back, and saw it – the monstrous black thing staring at him from the tree.

  He threw down the snowshoes and ran.

  He ran all the way home – almost.

  Just before he reached it, the boy slowed to a halt. Turning, he began to retrace his steps.

  He believed he was going back for the snowshoes. He believed he would stay only long enough to retrieve them from where they had fallen, before dashing home to the safety of his family.

  He was wrong. Across the miles of snow and ice, through the bleak December woods, a call had come.

  He had been summoned.

  The boy told no one of what he had seen. The next day he returned again, drawn back to the secret place to gaze aghast and
wonder-struck at what lived there. Once again the thing rolled up its cold, unblinking eye to stare at him. And nothing moved, and not a word was spoken, and nothing broke the silence of those woods.

  The next day was the same.

  So was the next. And the next. And the one that followed.

  On the seventh day, it killed him.

  Afterward, it gave him back his life – but twisted now. Corrupted. Irrevocably altered. The boy fell prostrate to the mud and worshiped it.

  He came to it each night throughout the spring and summer, to gaze and chant and sacrifice.

  The last time that he came to it, it spoke to him.

  It opened its fleshless black jaws and, just before it died, it told him, in great detail, exactly what it wanted him to do.

  Book One: Portents

  It has long been my conviction that, were an absolute and unremitting Evil to find embodiment in human form, it would manifest itself not as some hideous ogre or black-caped apparition with glowing eyes, but rather as an ordinary-looking mortal of harmless, even kindly mien – a middle-aged matron, perhaps, or a schoolboy… or a little old man.

  Nicholas Keize, Beneath the Moss

  May First

  The city lies throbbing in the sunlight. From its heart a thin black thread of smoke coils lazily toward the sky. April is almost thirteen hours dead; already the world has changed.

  In a park above the Hudson the Old One waits, blinking his mild eyes at the sun. Insects plunge and dart around the refuse by the water's edge and buzz amid the grass beside the bench. But for their hum, the lap of oily waters, and the swish of passing cars, the park is still, the air hushed and expectant.

  A cry from overhead breaks the silence: three long, tremulous notes…

  And then the bird is gone. Leaves rustle softly, one branch at a time. The Old One sits forward and holds his breath. Soon it will happen.

  A sudden breeze sweeps up from the river; blood-red blossoms scatter at bis feet. The pages of an old newspaper shift and curl, revealing smudged bootprints, a naked leg, a jagged slash.

  Above him trees hiss urgently in the wind. With a flash of green the leaves lift together and point toward the city. All the grass leans one way.

  In the distance the coil of smoke whips back and forth, then twists in upon itself. Silently its black tip sways against the sky, splitting into a serpent's tongue.

  The Old One licks his lips. It is beginning.

  All the way from New York, as the bus sped through the grassy haze of the Lincoln Tunnel humming with Sunday-morning traffic, past the condos and diners and car lots that lined the highway, Jeremy Freirs had been thinking about the farm.

  The ad had been enticingly vague: nothing but a three-by-five recipe card with a row of bright green vegetables printed along one side. It had been tacked to the bulletin board just above the table where he usually sat at the Voorhis Foundation Library on West Twenty-Third Street, as it left there for him alone. The handwriting had been neat and somehow girlish-looking: SUMMER RENTAL

  Private guest house on N.J. farm.

  Fully electrified. Quiet surroundings.

  $90/week inc. meals. R.F.D. I, Box 63, Gilead.

  At that price, if he could manage to sublet his apartment – a fourth-floor walk-up on Bank Street – he would actually make himself some money on the summer. And it seemed to him that 'quiet surroundings' were exactly what he needed right now. It would probably mean a couple of months of celibacy, of course, but that wasn't much different from what he'd been going through this spring. It also meant he'd be able to forget the fact that he'd be turning thirty; there'd be no need to suffer through the celebration his friends were so keen on having, the lavish dinner at someplace expensive, followed by booze and slaps on the back. Well, he would just have to celebrate out there on the farm, away from civilization, like Thoreau. Probably be good for him, concentrate his mind on more important things. There was also his thesis to think about, The Something Something Something of the Gothic Imagination; he would figure it out eventually. Focus on the Participant Observer, maybe, or The Interplay of Setting and Character. Or, even more promising, Setting as Character… He was sure it would come to him; these things usually did. Meanwhile he'd be reading up on the subject – the primary sources, Le Fanu, Lewis, and the rest – making notes for a course he'd be teaching next fall and, who could tell, perhaps for years to come. To spend a summer among books: it was an appealing prospect.

  So was the notion of escaping from the city this year: from the three flights of echoing stairs that, even after twice that many summers, left him panting and sweaty by the time he'd reached the top; from his claustrophobic little bedroom, the secondhand air conditioner churning endlessly in the window, blocking the view of the street; and, maybe most important of all, escape from the inevitable memories of a certain Laura Rubinstein who had shared that bedroom with him for so much of last summer and whose moving out at the end of it had been responsible for, among other things, the abandonment of a planned trip to England, the loss of a lucrative teaching assignment at Queensborough Community College (because of Freirs' erratic attendance and, as the department head had noted, 'insufficient classroom preparation'), and the habit of stuffing himself with food as he sat up reading late into the night, alone in his apartment, resulting in a gain of twenty pounds by winter's end and the drastic alteration of Freirs' wardrobe.

  He still missed Laura. For a while he'd actually believed she'd be his second wife, the one who'd prove that, whatever mistakes he had made in the past, this time around he'd get it right. There'd been a couple of other women since her, but no one he'd really cared about. Three weeks ago, on the day of Laura's marriage to an old boyfriend with a family house in Sag Harbor and tenure at NYU, Freirs had written to the box number in Gilead, asking for more information and suggesting today, the first of May, for a possible visit. He had already discovered that the town was too small for most maps of the state (except for one highly detailed Geological Survey map he'd found at Voorhis), but Hunterdon County Transport operated a twice-a-day bus service from the Port Authority which, upon request, made a detour to the town.

  The reply had come less than a week later. It was written in the same girlish hand on lined yellow paper obviously drawn from a legal pad. Three photographs had also been enclosed.

  Dear Mr Freirs,

  My husband and I were pleased to get your letter, and we'll be happy to have you come out on May Day and see our place. The Sunday bus arrives in Gilead shortly after two and will let you off across the street from the Co-operative. That will be closed when you arrive, but there's a bench on the porch where you can wait, and my husband will be by in the truck to pick you up as soon as services are over. You shouldn't have to wait long, and we'll see that you get back to town in time for the return bus.

  The guest house is one of our outbuildings. It is newly renovated and electrified and, though you can't see it in the photograph, we will be putting new screens on all the windows. The left half of the building is used as a storeroom, but you should find the right half more than ample for your needs. There is a brand new bed, a wardrobe, a set of shelves, and a spare table you can use as a writing desk. (Your work sounds very interesting! At one time my husband and I considered teaching as a career.)

  We are not fancy people, but I can promise you three square meals a day, well prepared, just as we ourselves eat. Our farm is not yet a fully working one (we purchased it only in November), but by this summer we expect to be eating our own produce. We are lifelong members of the Brethren of the Redeemer, a religious order with adherents all over the world, though most of its membership is concentrated here in Gilead, with other settlements in

  Pennsylvania and New York. Both my husband and I have attended college outside the community. We welcome the interest of those outside the faith and do not impose our beliefs on anyone.

  We have no telephone, so if you cannot come to see us on May Day, please let us know in writing as soon as
possible. If we don't hear from you, we'll assume you're coming, and Sarr will be there to pick you up – but I see I'm repeating myself! So in closing, I look forward to meeting you and hearing about life in New York.

  Sincerely,

  (Mrs) Deborah Poroth

  P.S. Jeremiah is our prophet, and so your name strikes me as a very good omen!

  Freirs had read the letter, with the rest of his mail, on the subway up to Columbia. He'd found something charming about the woman's tone; it was like getting a message from a pen pal in another country, complete with three exotic snapshots. Yet as he'd scrutinized the photos, tilting them forward and back in the subway's glare, he'd felt a faint twinge of nervousness.

  The pictures were in color; but for that, they would not have been out of place in some long-forgotten album of the past. The first showed a dirt road bordered by woods, with pale winter sunlight slanting through pine boughs and the leafless branches of an oak. In a clearing on the left stood a small white clapboard house with an open porch in front, nearly level with the road, and a line of thornbushes making twisted shapes against one side. The porch was bare save for two narrow wooden chairs, one of them empty, the other occupied by a woman in a long black dress, her dark hair tied back in a knot, her face masked by shadows. On her lap rested something small and yellow, with a second at her feet; squinting at the photo, Freirs saw that they were kittens. The woman was sitting straight in the chair, staring directly ahead. The whole scene seemed touched with the stillness and silence of a Hopper painting.

  Behind the house lay a tiny fenced-in garden, though neither flowers nor vegetables were in evidence. The picture looked as if it had been taken on a winter afternoon; Freirs hoped to find the place a good deal greener now. He could see, beyond the trees, an open field broken only by clumps of weed and sporadic knots of bramble. At its edge stood further pine and oak, rising in a dense forest.