It wasn’t my house or my barn back then. They belonged to a man I’d never met named Ariel Walkrip.
I grew up in southern California during the post-Brady Bunch Era. Los Angeles was still a demi-paradise, but starting to show a hipper urban edge. My family had lived there since the dawn of motion pictures, just a few hundred yards from where Charlie Chaplin built his studios on a then orange grove-lined Santa Monica Boulevard. When grown, the adults in my family habitually chose from two different professions, real estate or movies. I chose movies, as a writer, or rather a never-could-get-past-the-struggling-part writer. By the time the big earthquake came along in the early 1990s, demolishing my house on top of me, I was having daily work-related panic attacks and fought nightly with my coke-addicted agent boyfriend—who wouldn’t represent my screenplays because he didn’t want to look like he “subscribed to nepotism.”
I left. I took what little remained unbroken from the earthquake, got on the Internet, and hunted up the cheapest place in the U.S. that I thought I could stand, where I could afford to sit and write the Great American Novel.
Did I know that New York wasn’t buying Great American Novels anymore? No. Two years later, an eviction notice thumbtacked to my door and urgently needing someplace even cheaper to live, I saw Ariel Walkrip’s ad in the local throwaway.
Cute 1 br./1 ba. with privacy on 80 ac. farm. $175 per month, utilities included, in exchange for light caretaking duties. 555-2419.
$175 a month! How far I’d fallen. I remembered paying more than that for a cut and color in L.A.
Walkrip’s farm was just outside an invisible Flying Brigadoon-like town called Cherry Lick. In the summer, the town mysteriously vanished into rampant overgrowth from the forest, houses fenced in by rats nests of honeysuckle vines suspended from the trees, cut-off by hillsides of weed-laced cornfields. At the end of October, the foliage died and voila, the town reappeared.
I drove out to Walkrip’s place the 8th of July, zipping by downtown Cherry Lick without realizing it, turned off where instructed and plummeted down a driveway so steep it should have had its own runaway truck ramp. At the bottom was the typical West Virginia pre-mobile home era abode, a one-and-a-half story farmhouse on homemade stone footings, recently reclad in rubbery vinyl siding. Instead of the traditional white, Walkrip had gone with cardboard brown. Various outbuildings were strewn about, a chicken coop made out of the back-end of retired U-Haul truck, a series of out houses built one on top of another like successive civilizations in an archeological dig, storage sheds, and a barn with an empty corral attached. No cute 1 br./1 ba. guest houses in sight.
I called out the owner’s name. Several times. Knocked on his doors, front and back, thinking he might be elderly and hard of hearing. I peered in the windows. No one. This left the barn as the only other logical choice.
I turned and walked hesitantly toward the rotting locust-wood structure. On the way I passed a disturbing kitchen garden. Though compulsively tidy and laid out like something on the best of HGTV, each of the mature vegetables in the garden had been. . . abused. Every cucumber, pumpkin, and squash had one or more strings tied tightly about their girths. They reminded me of a half-feral calico cat I’d once rescued. When it was still a kitten, some sicko had placed an industrial-strength rubber band around its midsection and then abandoned it to the wilds. The kitten grew into a cat, and as it did the rubber band restricted and distorted its growth. It probably could have survived this way indefinitely, but when it became pregnant the result was horrifying. Walkrip’s vegetables had received the same treatment.
I halted next to that garden and immediately knew I wasn’t going to rent anything from this man. As soon as I found him, I’d let him know I wasn’t interested.
Ariel Walkrip hung from a noose at the rear of the barn. He looked exactly how I’d pictured him during our phone conversation, an old farmer no different than a hundred other farmers out here, worn out body in jeans, plaid shirt, and a John Deer cap. His eyes were nearly closed, his face bloated and purple, the fingertips on his arthritic hands pendulous and dark as well, like baby eggplant. His feet had swollen so badly with accumulated blood that his tightly tied shoes couldn’t contain the flesh. It spilled over the constrictions, reminding me of the abnormally grown vegetables outside.
Instinctively, I knew he was dead, but I remembered something from research I’d done for a script involving a CSI team. You have to know what you’re doing when you hang yourself, or else you won’t snap your neck cleanly. Instead you can dangle and dangle until you suffocate instead, an agonizing way to go. I couldn’t live with myself if I ran out of the barn without checking first to make certain Walkrip was really deceased and not simply unconscious and in need of emergency help.
Fighting every step before I took it, my toes dragging through the dust and straw, I approached.
“Hello,” I said. “Mr. Walkrip?”
When he didn’t respond, I dared myself, commanded myself, gingerly reached out and took one of his leather-clad toes between my forefinger and thumb to give his foot a little shake.
I couldn’t see It, but I sensed It come awake at my touch. It had crouched there, inside Walkrip’s body, just waiting for me to come along and rescue It. That power over loneliness. It jumped off the dead man faster than a flea and coated Itself to my skin. I went into agony, my body suddenly unable to breathe as if every inch of it were covered in metallic paint. Rays of silver light stabbed at my peripheral vision and I felt the thing bite into every last nerve ending I had and work its way upstream with its fiber optic heat toward my brain. My body was wracked with minute convulsions. Choking, losing consciousness, I lifted one hand in front of my face and saw my flesh flaring jaggedly like video shot by a war correspondent on the run.
I fell face first toward a dung covered floor.
When I came to, I knew it was morning. Walkrip swung gently overhead in the breeze and I lay on the barn’s rock scrabble flooring. Poised inches from my face was a green grasshopper, holding up a leaf from a pin oak. As I watched, the insect raised the leaf just a little higher over its head, then dropped it in front of me and slowly backed away, long, crooked leg, by long crooked leg.
Frowning, I fumbled for the leaf. The instant I touched it, I knew I was no longer me. The old me couldn’t tell you exactly where to find the tree it had fallen from. The new me could tell you which branch.
Blundering through Walkrip’s unlocked back door in search of a phone to call the authorities, I stepped into a kitchen just as bizarre as the garden outside. Gleaming new Corian countertops hugged the walls, installed above a set of dilapidated particle board cabinets, two with doors hanging by a single hinge. Centered on the nearest countertop was a piece of paper, and beside that a plate of home-baked Toll House cookies covered with cling wrap.
SORRY, read the note, in oversized, shaky handwriting. I BAKED YOU SOME COOKIES.
I knew I couldn’t tell Landry any of this. I’d never told anyone. For one, I had no family left, and my friends back in L.A. had all turned out to be of the fair-weather variety. I’d made acquaintances, but no solid friends in my decade lost in Appalachia. As desperately as I wanted someone to talk to about everything, I didn’t want to send Landry running and screaming back to his mountaintop. I didn’t just want—I needed the connection he offered, like a lifesaving procedure or the human equivalent of a bottle of Zoloft.
“Carly?” He put down his coffee. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. I’m sorry. Just thinking about your question. Why I chose West Virginia.”
“Why did you?”
“It’s disaster free. No earthquakes, no hurricanes, no terrorists, tornadoes, riots, or nuclear power plants to melt down. Sure, we have floods, but if you live on a mountaintop, you’re pretty much safe.”
“Safety, I can understand that,” Landry said quietly, but his eyes didn’t agree with his words. I knew he knew there was more to the story. I watched his eyelids flicker as he studied me, curio
us for the truth. He opened his mouth then closed it, and touched my hand instead, stroking it softly with his finger, as the wheels inside him turned.
“How did you know?” Landry asked me over the phone.
It was the 5th of October and outside the horror that is a West Virginia winter had set in two months early. Winter is dark and choking here. I hate it with a passion so overwhelming I can’t think straight once it arrives. It comes at you like that stranger you dread at a roadside rest stop, the one who will abduct you and lock you in his trunk until you’re dead and he can play with you.
The first snow of every year is like an unwelcome anniversary for me, reminding me that I am trapped with no hope of ever escaping.
“Carly?”
“Farmer’s Almanac,” I said finally, explaining away my foreknowledge of the storm I’d predicted when we met the week before.
“You read the Farmer’s Almanac,” he said. He sounded skeptical.
“No, but everyone else here does and is constantly blabbing about it.”
“Incredible. I figured they used a random number generator to make their predictions,” he said. “Either that or threw groundhogs at dart boards.”
“They probably do,” I agreed.
We talked for more than two hours, until my phone went dead in the middle of one of his jokes. I never did find out how many Pindladoor programmers it takes to screw in a light bulb. Though I sensed he was doing his best to help lift me out of a depression I couldn’t quite mask, I also suspected that he didn’t really enjoy the joke himself, because it touched on a nerve he wished would go numb. He couldn’t know how grateful I was just to hear his voice that bleak afternoon, warming me with his easy-going humor.
As a goddess, my territory is pitifully small. It covers portions of just five tiny counties along the West Virginia state line north of I-64, plus a swath of three border counties in neighboring in Virginia. I haven’t been out of my territory in eight years, ten if you count the two years I lived here before my transformation. I’m tethered here by the magic that runs through me now. I am at its mercy. Profit driven land developers may not be able to invade my territory, but as urgently as I want to go home, I can no longer set foot in their territory either.
I’ve never been able to figure out what exactly defines my boundaries, except that I can’t enter a town with more than a certain number of dwellings, enough to house a population of 3,000 or greater, without experiencing discomfort. 6,500 is the threshold at which I go into extreme distress. I don’t want to think about what would happen if someone forcibly took me beyond my boundaries for longer than a few minutes. I know, more than suspect, that the magic inside me would rebel, and likely slip from my control, damaging many around me before it finally fed on and consumed my life.
Logically my territory makes little sense. Portions of both the Monongahela and Washington National Forests, not to mention many private and forested lands, extend well beyond it. What, if anything, protects those areas? I wonder. Does anything or anyone guard nature’s other remote and hidden lands? I’ve never met another like me. Nor did I receive any postmortem clues from the late Ariel Walkrip. His will stipulated only that his house and property go to the first person to touch his body.
Landry made me feel like a human again that winter. God, how I loved him for being the kind of person he was. He taught me to ski under the stars and begged me to do ridiculous, even embarrassing things, like salsa dance underwater in the resort’s indoor rock grotto pool. He hacked us into their reservation system, where he would appropriate empty condos for us, each complete with balcony hot tubs. We’d make feverish love in the open air and bubbling water, then afterwards lay sated, wrapped in towels on the thick living room carpet. With our faces pressed against floor to ceiling windows, we watched Christmas and New Years Day dawning through swirling snow that flecked the dead brown hills spread below us like spots on a sleeping fawn.
I showed him wonders as well, taking him trekking on showshoes into the deepest wilderness I knew, a place no one, not even research scientists, loggers, or the forest service had been for more than a century. History claims that the last Eastern Woodland Bison was slaughtered in Randolph County in 1825 and that the last gray wolf in West Virginia was hunted down in 1900, also in Randolph. Crouching low on a granite spar overlooking one of my secret valleys, we spied on huffing, foraging buffalo whose shaggy manes tinkled with curtains of ice. Hidden downwind in a ring of birch saplings, we peered between the slender trunks while wolf pups entertained us unaware, roughhousing in fresh powder. Landry didn’t realize my sub-species of buffalo were supposed to be extinct, nor the wolves disappeared from the wild. He assumed the wolves were officially introduced transplants from Canada and the buffalo escapees from a ranch raising gourmet steaks. I didn’t correct him, but I worried that I had violated my own magic in revealing them to him. If it weren’t for my power, I would never have known they were there. Someone before me, possibly pre-dating Ariel’s tenure, had set up a type of invisible fence around them, allowing them just enough territory to roam and remain healthy, but herding them well away from exposure to hunters. I was meant to continue the guardianship. Would Landry tell people about them when he returned to civilization after the season was over?
“I was thinking about those wolves,” he said to me one night a couple weeks after we returned from our weekend trip to the backcountry. I lay curled against his furry chest in our ill-gotten hotel room bed. The covers were tossed on the floor and our legs sprawled inelegantly on the king-size mattress. We’d been listening to pine logs pop and sizzle in the fireplace.
“What about them?” I asked, alarm ringing through me.
“Nothing really,” he said. He absently fingered a lock of my hair hanging down into my face. “Just thinking about them.”
He looked down at me then, gently tucking the lock of hair behind my ear. “You’re such a wild child, Carly,” he said.
“Hardly wild and a long time from being a child.”
“You know what I mean. I’m not talking about parties and drugs and pissing in the face of authority. You know what I mean.”
I wanted to sit up and pull away from him, but didn’t dare let him see I was afraid. My heart raced and I was certain he could feel my pulse crashing blindly, thudding hard against his naked skin.
“How did you know where to find the wolves? How not to spook them? We were so close and they didn’t even realize we were there. They should have, shouldn’t they? They have powerful noses.”
“I have a powerful nose, too,” I said.
“I know you do,” he said, momentarily playful. “You found me.”
“And that’s how I found them.”
“Why is it then that I’m a ten times better skier than you, but you’re the one who downhills flawlessly in the dark? You never hit anything, no near misses, no tripping. You’re fearless out there. You even knew exactly when to turn back for home when that squall came up, but let us go just a little further than we should have.”
“I didn’t know. I told you.”
“You told me, but I think you kept us going until it was almost too late because you thought it was exciting.”
“It was exciting, wasn’t it?”
He frowned, searching my eyes for the answer he wanted and not finding it.
“Yes,” he said at last. “I was scared shitless we’d get turned around and lost in the storm, but we didn’t. We made it back.” He paused. “How did you know where to find those wolves, Carly?”
“I’ve lived here a long time.”
“How long?”
“Ten years.”
He thought that over for several seconds, accepting what the answer contained rather than what it didn’t.
“How often do you get back? To the city, I mean?”
“It’s been ten years.”
“What? You haven’t left in a decade?”
“I don’t make enough to go anywhere.”
I rea
lized how lame that sounded the moment it was out of my mouth. If I could afford the occasional meal at his restaurant, I could afford a tank of gas to take me to D.C. or at least as far as Charlottesville.
Rather than question my argument, however, he surprised me by asking, “What would you say if I asked you to come with me when I returned?”
My breath halted in my throat. I was unable to speak as I fought off tears. A truth that isn’t a lie. I need a truth to tell him that isn’t a lie.
“I would love it if I could go back to the city with you,” I told him.
I hadn’t realized that his arms had tensed around me until I gave my half-baked answer. He relaxed then with a sigh.
“Thank you,” he said.
I made certain every moment of that season with Landry was as perfect as it could be. During his days on, business flowed into Frost Knob from all points of the compass and ended up at his restaurant. I didn’t have any power over the tables he got or how much he was tipped, of course, but on the nights he worked the place was packed. On his days off, however, every highway leading to the mountaintop playground took on forbidding, unwelcome shadows and skiers who lingered too close to the treeline felt something watching them, a natural menace they couldn’t explain, but which sent them hurrying to their condos to pack up and head back for the city. I didn’t want it to be a ghost town, that would have been bizarre and upsetting to Landry, but I needed him to myself and didn’t want him called in to wait tables because Gearhead got too busy. I’d also spent too much time in the village and the migraines I suffered at exposure to the development there worsened each time I visited. It was like an allergy on overdrive, like a poison taken in gradually larger doses until a lethal toxicity is nearly reached.
Maze of Trees: A Dark Fairy Tale Romance Short Story Page 2