Maze of Trees: A Dark Fairy Tale Romance Short Story

by Claudia O'Keefe

  Maze of Trees

  Claudia O’Keefe

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Maze of Trees first electronic edition copyright © 2011 by Claudia O’Keefe. All rights reserved. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Copyright © 2005 by Claudia O’Keefe. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Maze of Trees

  If you ever want to see a setting truly fit for a fantasy novel, it’s best to come to West Virginia first. Like the state’s motto, we are very wild here, wild in thought, sometimes wild in appearance, but always wild in landscape.

  You notice it only a few miles after crossing the state line from Virginia into West Virginia. Our mountains aren’t the type that jutted up out of the earth during ancient upheavals. Our lands formed when water and ice dug down into the Earth, carved deeply and harshly through her plateaus to reveal her womb of smooth, solid rock. Rivers surge through nearly every low area, cold and broad and disdainful of man, yet invigorating to the eye, flowing with magic’s clear blood. They call us the Mountain State, but what we really are is the land of secret valleys, of places where most people don’t belong and soon leave, after remarking on their beauty.

  I was one of those people who should have left. Unfortunately, I was in bad shape when I arrived, thinking a nice convalescence in these deceptively gentle hills would be just what I needed. I didn’t need it. I should have run, dumped all my baggage, both real and imagined, and fled by any means possible, jet, train, bus, on a hog wearing a saddle and hackamore, whatever. I should have left, but I didn’t. I became trapped. First by poverty, then by something much stickier, nearly impossible to transcend. Something that called to me with a voice I’d longed to hear my entire life, magic—real magic—the kind that doesn’t care if you believe in it and gives you power whether you want it or not (I did at first), power that will drive you mad if you let it, and I’m afraid that I am. Just a little.

  I was already half nuts by the time I met Landry. He served me my grilled sea bass with melon salsa at a new restaurant up at Frost Knob the last weekend in September. Being what I was, haunting the village at Frost Knob was like dining with the enemy, but I couldn’t help myself. Frost Knob is the closest thing there is to civilization in my part of the Appalachians. It’s the highest ski resort on the East Coast and during the season the place sucks in well-heeled metropolitan types from D.C., New York, and across the south. Though I didn’t ski and almost never talked with anyone on my visits to 4900 feet, I could brush by tourists wearing Ralph Lauren sheepskin jackets or carrying the latest overnight tote by Prada and draw in tantalizing hints of half-way intelligent speech—a clause here, a truncated exchange there, mention of marketing meetings, the latest editorial in The Times, gossip about someone’s botched eye job, or silly, fractious arguments over aborted play dates, what I call miscellaneous city talk. I walked through the resort’s cobbled square, opening my ears like radar. As I passed candle and book stores, restaurants, ski shops and a Starbuck’s, I’d reel in these little snippets of civilization, like a fisherman on a sea so lonely he’s reduced to holding one-sided conversations with the fish flapping and gasping in his net.

  I wanted so badly to return to the world I once inhabited, have friends again, find a life, but I couldn’t. It wouldn’t let me.

  “Would you like the fries, rice pilaf, or Jumpin’ Jack black-eyed peas with that?” Landry asked me as he stood next to my table in the Gearhead Bar & Grill. He was memorizing my order as I gave it to him, rather than write it down. This either spoke well of his memory or poorly of the house count, most likely the latter. Snow hadn’t yet begun falling up here, nor was it cold enough to make the white stuff artificially and keep it on the ground. Still, with this being the height of the resort’s fall foliage season, the place should have been littered with almost as many tourists as dying leaves. It wasn’t. I’d taken care of that.

  Glancing up into Landry’s troubled face, I felt bad about his lack of paying customers.

  “Pilaf,” I said.

  “Alrighty,” he said. “I’ll go put this in and be right back with your cosmo.”

  It was the alrighty that got me. That a man who stood over six feet and waited tables like a Grizzly practicing jeet kune do could use a word like that suggested a self-possession I immediately liked. The alrighty wasn’t canned like the automatic responses you learn to use with the paying public. It was just him.

  He returned with my cosmo, heavy on the cranberry, in a frosted martini glass that could have served half a frat house.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Frost Knob invites you to ski happy,” he said. “When we finally get snow, that is.”

  I concentrated a second or two before answering, “Next week about this time. A rare early blizzard.”

  “Is that the Weather Channel talking, or are you merely prescient?”

  “Maybe it’s just that there big toe I broke a ways back that acts up when the weather’s a changing,” I said, doing my best, tasteless imitation of my hick neighbors over in Cherry Lick. I instantly felt a rush of PC-induced guilt, and smiled apologetically a moment later.

  He assessed me and I studied him. I saw his name, LANDRY, spelled in machine engraved letters on the gold plastic tag pinned to his uniform. I saw the confident way he wore the god awful acrylic ski sweater they’d given him, his expensive haircut only just starting to grow out, nails that were still neatly manicured, teeth and fingers that were free of nicotine stains. I’d served food and drinks off and on most of my life and I knew he wasn’t a waiter, not really.

  “You don’t belong here,” I said.

  After a moment, when he glanced down at the last scraps of city cool I still owned, my 10-year-old Betsy Johnson dress, which no longer fit as well as it should, and the Okio sunglasses lying on the table next to my West Virginia driver’s license, he smiled.

  “Neither do you.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Unfortunately, I do.”

  Finishing lunch and deciding to give Landry my real phone number instead one with an incorrect digit, I drove down the mountain to the base of the resort 1,700 feet below. Just west of a T-intersection joining Frost Knob to the main highway leading back to parts known, I spotted four people climbing out of a Cadillac Escalade. It was parked next to a handcrafted billboard advertising a new 500-unit development that would soon replace the hardwood forest beyond it. LUXURY IN CONCERT WITH NATURE, read the developer’s slogan. This meant they’d leave a few landscape quality trees behind when they clear cut the rest to raise their condos.

  I crossed the intersection and pulled my Tracker into the parking lot in front of the tiny grocery that served the people who stayed in condos already built. I felt It coming over me, into me, using me and me using It. It waited, curled inside me, watching the four as they flipped through their glossy brochures. The saleswoman in the group gestured at a 70-foot sugar maple, its glorious crown torched by leaves just starting to turn, and then to an area on a plat map. Two of the visitors were husband and wife, and the husband tramped up the newly bulldozed ridge behind the sign to capture virgin terrain with his camcorder.

  This was the moment It could use to its best advantage, my magic. I couldn’t help myself, didn�
��t want to help It, but I had become It.

  I took a soft, deep breath, then released my hold on the deep place within which understood and could manipulate both humans and forest effortlessly. I raised my left hand, cupped slightly around the object I created. If you could hold a solar eclipse in the palm of your hand—a black hole the size of a man’s kidney, with a hundred snapping tentacles which sucked light and life toward it with the violence of a rip current—that would describe just one of the things my magic does. Though it wasn’t necessary, since the thing could fly through my windshield without being altered, I rolled down the driver’s side window and flung it gently into the air.

  It shot with laser precision toward the man with the camcorder. None of the four could see it, of course. I sighed, watching the thing go to work on him, hovering beside one ear and then the other, sticking its tentacles into each, wriggling and digging farther and farther inside his head, past ear drums deep into to the part of the brain where mankind’s most primitive reflexes reside. The man stiffened instantly, but didn’t understand the shudder that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Backing out of an ear, the writhing black ball went to work on the man’s eyes next, prying up first one eyelid, then the next, sticking a tentacle underneath and smearing his eyeballs with an oily dark light. To the man, it would feel as if the forest had suddenly grown closer and darker. He would feel its lonely, claustrophobic embrace reaching out to smother him. When the thing stuck more of its tentacles up his nostrils, along the nerves and into his parietal lobes, the man would, to a lesser degree, smell the same type of panic that immobilized a horse in a burning barn.

  Finally the black ball was finished with him. It floated toward the man’s wife next. By the time it reached her, it was losing energy, moving less vigorously. It stuck a single tentacle into the woman’s ear, and then as if pulled by a vacuum, its entire body was sucked, protesting and fading at the same time, inside her head.

  Man and wife abruptly broke off what they were doing and looked around at the trees and the mountains crowding them in on all sides. Both tensed, their shoulders rigid, the complacent smiles they’d worn moments before gone. The man quit filming and stared worriedly into the shadows beneath the trees. Seconds later, he returned to the Cadillac while the wife distanced herself from the saleswoman, who noticed the change in her client’s behavior, but didn’t know what to make of it. A few polite, yet terse exchanges later, all climbed into the Cadillac. The SUV remained a few minutes more, while the saleswoman struggled to salvage her deal, but it was useless.

  They drove away.

  I sat there in my car for another ten minutes, giving them a solid head start toward the safety of the sales office and human habitation. Then thinking about Landry and his lack of paying business, I raised my left hand. On it was a tiny curl of misty light that moved up and away without my help, tendrils beating at the speed of a hummingbird’s wings. It hurtled down the highway ahead of my Tracker on its way toward the interstate, the most popular route to Frost Knob. Bouncing from tree to tree, the tiny light dispelled the shadows my magic had placed there three weeks before, shadows the naked eye couldn’t see, but were sensed by the unconscious minds of all but the least sensitive.

  I am the Goddess of Lonely Spaces. Please bear in mind that I had to come up with this title by myself, as there’s never been anyone to tell me who I’ve become. I may not be a goddess at all, but merely an oddity.

  To explain what I do, let me tell you about my favorite road in these mountains, Rt. 7. Beginning at the turnoff from U.S. Highway 219 at Millerton, it stretches for 58 miles, most of it through the Monongahela National Forest until it reaches Freedom Forge. Winding and bending, climbing and climbing it traverses the most sublime example of natural beauty in North America. If you’ve driven the snowy mountains and fjords of British Columbia’s Highway 99 from Vancouver to Whistler, with its astonishing drop-offs to the pewter sea thousands of feet below, you may have thought you traveled the road to Valhalla. If you’ve ever been fortunate enough to take the ribbon of asphalt descending out of Los Alamos, New Mexico with the whole of mystic Black Mesa to your northeast and the pink cliffs which become fuchsia at sunset guiding you to a dusty high desert freeway below, you might be tempted to think you’re seeing exactly what the Zuni and Hopi saw thousands of years ago when they first came to the land. Take Route 7 from Millerton to Freedom Forge, however, and you’ll discover a landscape so potent and unmolested its enough to make you weep. Unlike these other roads, you can drive the entire 58 miles and never pass another car, mobile home, gas station, or fast food restaurant. Instead you are immersed in a maze of trees reemerging triumphantly from the decimation of old growth forests during the previous two centuries. Your SUV flies like a private Lear jet through tunnel upon tunnel of green in the summer months, through chutes of molten red and orange leaves in the fall. You pass tiny waterfalls of stacked limestone that spray froth at your windshield and are so numerous and unplanned they appear like volunteer fruit trees springing up from carelessly thrown peach pits. You encounter a glacial bog that exists nowhere else in the U.S. and is lush with wild cranberry and orchids and insect catching plants. In the winter the entire road becomes a black and white photographer’s dream—black trunks, black ground, white snow, and falls frozen into monumental ice sculptures. You drive and twist and turn and marvel that there could still be a place like this in the world and somewhere about mile 23 it hits you.

  Loneliness.

  This place is too lonely for you. It’s gorgeous, but you want to see something else, a town, a house, even a strip-mall. You want to see signs that you aren’t totally alone here. To hell with the heavenly mists weaving through the valleys and or the tranquil, splashing Cherry River that dogs the highway like a new age fanatic that won’t leave you alone until you buy one of his idiotic healing energy crystals. You want a god damn McDonalds. 58 miles of peace and quiet now seems like 580. You want out but you can’t make up your mind. Would it be better to turn around and go back? Or should you continue on in hopes that you’ll regain civilization sooner ahead?

  To an extent, Nature performs this protective magic all on its own, as it has for tens of thousands of years, keeping people who would destroy it at bay. In these modern times, however, with mankind wielding the sword of technological superiority, human psychology alone isn’t enough to send men and women with chainsaws and Bobcats rushing from dark glades and isolated valleys, back to the blare and growl of the city, glancing nervously over their shoulders as they flee.

  I have to do it.

  Landry called the next morning, up much earlier than I would expect of someone in his business, since he probably didn’t get off work until close to midnight.

  “Did business pick-up at all after I left?” I asked.

  “God, we were slammed. It was dead the rest of the afternoon and even the first part of dinner. They were even ready to let me go early. Then around seven all gustatory hell broke loose.”

  I calculated the time backwards mentally. It’s a good two hour drive from the Interstate to Frost Knob and the little tuft of light I released at two-thirty would have cleared the darkness along the highway from the freeway to the resort by four. Instead of stopping to cancel their reservations in Lewisburg and turn around, as I’d encouraged them to do for weeks, the first of the hoards would have reached Frost Knob’s check-in desk by six o’clock, and had an hour to get settled before descending on Landry in Gearhead. The timing fit.

  “So what are you doing up at—” I checked the ghastly old plastic teapot clock on my kitchen wall, “—8:47? You must be exhausted.”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I’m thrilled. I’m flush. After paying my first month’s rent I’ve got an amazing wad of cash burning a whole in my pocket. Want to do something?”

  “How big a wad?”

  “Just a sec. Let me count.”

  I waited, but he was quick.

  “$18!” he said.

  “Good thing you
called me,” I told him. “If you’re willing to leave campus, I can show you entire towns around here you could buy for that.”

  “With change leftover for dinner?”

  “And breakfast,” I said.

  I hadn’t meant that to be a double-entendre, but I’m out of practice using the dialect from the land of my birth. Landry’s voice held that mischievous grin I’d loved from the day before, like a bear caught with his nose in a fifty dollar jar of Dean & DeLuca honey, but he opted to be a gentleman and instead pretended my slip had gone clear over his head.

  “So where can we do the most damage with my $18?”

  I took him to a bakery in the middle of nowhere. That isn’t much of a description, really, since everything around here is in the middle of nowhere, but I thought my bear would like the cinnamon sticky buns this place had to offer, baked in a genuine wood-fired oven. He did, devouring a six-pack of gooey rolls before we could finish our first cup of MauaJava.

  “What is this place doing out here?” he asked, incredulous to find a gourmet quality coffee and pastry spot on a vacant two lane road an hour from even the least traveled tourist route.

  I shrugged. “What is anyone doing out here?”

  “What brought you here?” he asked, turning more serious than I liked.

  “Probably the same thing that brought you to Frost Knob.”

  “Bankruptcy, foreclosure, and homelessness after your systems analyst job was outsourced to Pindladoor?” he asked.

  “How’d you guess?” I said, favoring him with a sympathetic smile over his situation.

  He waited patiently for my real explanation.

  “Is there really a place called Pindladoor?” I asked.

  “You’re evading,” he said.

  I nodded, but I wasn’t hiding, at least not from myself. I turned my reasons for being here over in my head everyday, every hour, every few minutes, with the frequency the average man has thoughts of sex. I hated thinking about that stupid, stupid minute in the barn behind my house eight years ago that changed everything forever, but when your world narrows in on you as tightly as a dress that’s now a size-and-a-half too small, you tend to obsess.