by Lee, Frazer
At this, Tom stopped and turned to face her.
“It wasn’t Greyson. It was… I was followed. A man, I’ve seen him before—he…”
Tom faltered. Fragments of his nightmares were spilling over into his waking life. After his ordeal among the Christmas trees he was beginning to feel he could no longer discern dream from waking reality. He was finding it difficult to think straight.
“A man? What did he look like?”
“Tall, with a long, dark coat…”
“Did you see his face at all?”
“He wore a hood…he…”
Tom was beginning to feel sheepish. Perhaps he had imagined the whole thing after all. Maybe the tall, dark, axman was a conjuration triggered by his recurring nightmare. It had alarmed him to find himself trapped in the needle pit of Christmas trees. The ordeal may have unlocked latent memories. Why then could he still feel the kiss of the axe blade on his neck? He absentmindedly pressed his fingers to his neck, finding swelling there. A weal had blossomed across his throat—but whether it was from his attacker’s blade, or from the sharp branches, he could not tell for sure.
“And you say you’ve seen him before—where?”
Holly was talking to him like a counselor might talk to a suicidal caller over the phone.
Snap out of it, he thought, what must she think of you?
He pictured the figure standing at the tree line, only this time the man was looking straight up at his hotel window; seeking him out.
“Through my window, at The Firs.”
She smiled; a beaming smile that flushed her face.
That’s it, that’s it; she thinks I’m nutty as a fruitcake.
“Cosmo,” she said.
“What?”
“Not what—who. You just crossed paths with Cosmo. He’s our resident local vagrant, spends most of his time out here in the woods. He’s ventured into the village a couple of times, on Feast Days. Followed his nose, people say. Few starving men could resist the smell of a MacGregor spit roast; those with their bellies filled already have trouble enough. Oh but he’s harmless enough, if you keep your distance.”
“And if you don’t?”
“You found that out first hand.” Holly chuckled. “Ah, he’s like a house spider that one. Folks are afraid of him up close, but really he’s more scared than they are. And like a house spider, once he’s made his presence known he soon slinks off back to the shadows.”
Into the shadows, where he belongs, thought Tom.
“If he’s so harmless, why did he attack me like that?”
“Maybe he saw you as a threat, I don’t know.”
“I’m not the threat here… I was only looking for Joe.”
“Tell him that, did you?”
Tom fell quiet.
He hadn’t really attempted to face the stranger and he knew it. He had bolted like a startled horse no sooner than he’d laid eyes on him. Tom could hardly blame the vagrant for being suspicious of him, given the circumstances.
“You said he spends most of his time in the woods?”
“That’s right.”
“What on earth does he do in here?”
“Come on, let’s walk back. You need to get those cuts seen to. I’ll clean you up.” Holly smiled, her face beaming like the sun as she led Tom deeper into the trees.
Tom followed Holly as she led the way along a narrow path through the woods. In places, the path was no more than a shallow furrow in the ground and Tom had to keep his eyes fixed on where he was treading to avoid falling over.
The trees were crowded together in this part of the forest bordering the farmland and that, coupled with the already cloud-clogged sky, meant they had been traveling in near darkness for much of their walk. If it were not for the occasional caw of a crow in the distance, it could have been eight in the evening rather than the middle of the afternoon. Tom reached for his smart phone to check the time. It was gone from his pocket. He stopped and searched all his pockets, though he knew in his heart that he’d lost the damn thing, probably in his tumble down the slope into Christmas Land.
Up ahead, Holly became aware on instinct that Tom was no longer walking with her. She stopped and turned, looking at him with a bemused expression on her face.
“Okay?”
“Lost my damn phone is all. Shit.”
“Want to go back and look for it?”
For a moment, he was tempted. He’d been putting off calling Julia again, but now his phone was gone he felt more than ever that he should do. And there was no way on God’s green earth he would be heading back into the slice and dice of the Christmas trees anytime soon; not anytime ever.
“In those trees? Forget it. Doubt we’d find it in there, anyhow.”
There was something strangely liberating about leaving the device behind in the depths of the plantation. Perhaps fate had dealt him a helping hand.
“Suit yourself.” Holly seemed to catch the anxiety in his expression. “Feels like losing a limb though, doesn’t it?”
She didn’t miss a trick that one. Tom just nodded, and they walked on.
After a few twists and turns in the path, signs of human intervention began to appear. Branches and bracken, woven together to form makeshift fencing, cropped up here and there, keeping saplings a healthy growing distance from their towering forbears. The Greysons must have spent more than a few seasons performing the methodical, hard work of coppicing out there in the thick of the forest. By systematically cutting back and reorganizing the landscape, they had inadvertently created a hollow in the forest; a circular clearing through which he and Holly now passed. As they broke the trees, so too did the cloud cover, revealing the sun’s rays for just a few seconds. And for those brief moments, Tom felt the warmth of the sky beaming down on him like a smile from above. The wind whispered through the trees, kicking up that delicious earthy scent of pine and damp soil. It was like a tonic, and he breathed his fill of it, the air spurring him on with a spring in his step that belayed his physical injuries.
They left the clearing and reentered the forest on the other side. Here, the path all but disappeared and even Holly, so sure of foot thus far, had to slow her pace to navigate the tangle of roots and tree trunks before them. Tom watched her footfalls, emulating her progress as well as his city-dweller’s feet would allow. He slowly drew nearer to her, risking guilty glances at her feline form as they walked on. Then, they neared two colossal trees, their trunks five times thicker in diameter than any of those they had seen so far. Holly slowed to a crawling pace, rolling her shoulders back as she looked up reverently at the trees’ branches above. She had a look of serene beauty, of peace, on her face. It was as though she were gazing up at the painted dome of some fabulous cathedral, not merely the canopy of some trees. As they passed between the trees, Tom saw there was something truly special about them. Holly stepped over the giant roots of one and as she did so, Tom noticed the largest root was joined to that of the neighboring tree.
“They’re joined at the root,” he said. “I’ve never seen that before.”
“Aye, it’s a rare thing.”
Holly stopped, standing still on the other side of the root system and facing Tom.
“Local folk call them the Jack Tree and the Jill Tree.” She reached out and touched—or rather stroked—one tree then the other, like they were sacred objects.
“Jack and Jill went up the hill…” Tom recited.
She giggled; a warm, infectious sound. Her red hair was a fire burning beneath the shadows of the tall trees.
“Aye, that’s the kids’ version. But us grownups also call them the Cunt Tree and the Cock Tree…”
Her eyes twinkled with mischief, her mouth making a meal of the words as she said them.
Tom felt shocked by her candor, and utterly aroused by the sound of her voice speaking the words. He cleared his throat, painfully aware of how his awkwardness was amplified out there in the woods.
Holly didn’t seem to notice. She ha
d both hands on the trunk of the female tree, caressing its lithe body, looking up into its branches as she spoke.
“It’s Sow-when this weekend. Every year, local people have come here to worship and give thanks to these trees.”
Sow-when. The word was alien to Tom, exotic, and yet at the same time strangely familiar.
Holly caught his bemused expression. “You might know it as Samhain. What you Americans call Halloween? Same thing. In the Celtic tongue it is Sow-when, the end of one year and the beginning of another; the cycle of the seasons, of life itself. A feast day, a night for celebration—and a time to give worship.”
“To worship…trees?”
“That’s right. Does it seem so strange to you, Tom?”
“Well yeah…it does, to be honest.”
“Are you a religious man?”
“No, no I’m not.”
“But you’ve been to church during your lifetime?”
“Sure, when I was a kid…they took me to…”
His voice trailed off. He didn’t feel comfortable talking about the orphanage, never had; never would.
Thankfully, Holly continued on her train of thought.
“And what was the cross made of? And the altar?”
Tom didn’t need to say anything, she had read his expression. He was beginning to get the impression she could read any man like a textbook.
“Why wood of course,” Holly said smiling. “So you see, it really isn’t that strange at all.”
“Well, now you put it like that…” Tom cracked a smile too.
“Seems to me, people worship what they need in order to survive. Ages ago, folk out here would rely on the forests to give them their food, their shelter, their firewood to live through the harshest of winters. What do they worship where you come from, Tom?”
“Cell phones and money,” Tom said. “The wrong things, I guess.”
He felt that he meant it. At that moment he was glad to be rid of the dead weight of the smart phone in his pocket, burning a hole in his pants with the heat of its battery, desperate for him to take it out and thumb its screen into life—into usefulness. Without his devotion it was a purposeless thing. To hell with it now, he’d abandoned it in the forest. And the forest would still be there long after the thing had rusted and rotted away to nothing.
He gazed at Holly, the delight on her face as she looked up at the Jill Tree, the freedom in her eyes and the youth in her curves. She was a fresh thing, a flower in her fullest bloom. She reached out her hands to him and he took a sharp breath and stepped across the threshold of joined roots. Holding on to her hands, their fingers interlocked. Her eyes met his as he drew near and they kissed, deeply and fully.
“I’ve loved these trees since I was a little girl,” she whispered, nibbling his neck as he explored her body with his hands. “All little girls in Douglass are brought up here when they come of age. When I bled for the first time and became a woman, my mother led me up here and we buried my first drops in the burrow there.”
She took Tom’s hand in hers and pressed his fingers against the opening of a hollow in the tree trunk. He gripped the edge of the hollow and pushed her back against the tree, dry bark in the palm of one hand, her soft skin in the other. They gasped together and kissed some more, their clothes falling to the dirt of the forest floor. Naked now, their daily selves cast off all around them; they made love against the trunk of the tree. Slicked with sweat, Tom felt the razor-thin wounds from the plantation reopening on the surface of his skin. As he bled anew, Holly wrapped her legs around his waist and he rocked against her, into her. He threw his head back in joy and pain as his seed left him. The light between the leaves and branches gleamed down on him like white pinpricks of starlight.
Spent, he fell into Holly’s wet, wild embrace and, for what felt like the first time in a year, he laughed. Holly laughed with him and, for a few precious minutes, she held him there with her against the tree. Then, slowly, she uncoupled from him and reached down between her legs. She raised her hand so they could both see their combined wetness there. She opened her fingers and their ejaculate glistened between them like the strands of a sticky ectoplasmic web. Then she reached her hand into the Jill Tree’s hollow and smeared their twin fluids there.
“What are you doing?”
“An offering,” she said; her voice slightly hoarse after their coupling.
Hearing it, Tom wanted her all over again.
“An offering? Like your…blood, when you were a teenager, you mean?”
“Aye, that’s right. You learn fast for a city laddie.”
Still naked, she danced between the trees, tracing a line from the Jill Tree’s hollow, down and across the root system, then up the trunk of the Jack Tree to the first of its branches.
“They’re joined, see, so one feeds the other—like you and I just did.”
Tom could no longer hide the fire in his groin. Holly did not seem to mind.
She went on. “If a woman miscarried, she would make an offering to the Jill Tree too. It’s long been believed that by doing so, the fruit of her despair would feed the Jack Tree and make her fertile again.”
“You don’t mean…”
Tom looked at the hollow in the Jill Tree, slicked with the mark of their lovemaking. What she had just described conjured images too dark to contemplate. The fire in his groin subsided, replaced by a queasy sensation, like acid indigestion bubbling away in the pit of his stomach.
“Come now, don’t be so squeamish, Tom. Life, death, rebirth. We’re all one and the same out here in nature, you know. We’re like the roots of the trees, joined together, life and death cycles, with one feeding the other through all eternity…”
She grabbed his hand, pulled her back to him, and for a moment Tom thought she meant to make love to him again. Instead, she thrust his hand into the tree’s dark hole.
“What do you feel in there, Tom?”
For Tom, her question was twofold. In his heart, he felt afraid; fearful of what he might find lurking inside the tree trunk. The axman, waiting to slice him open and pull him in. Instead, he felt something wet, something brittle, beneath his fingertips.
“Embrace her mysteries, Tom, grab a hold of something primal and take a look at it.”
He closed his fingers around the wet, brittle thing and pulled it from the tree.
“Open your eyes. Be free.”
Tom didn’t even realize he had closed them. He opened his eyes and looked down at his hand. There in his palm was a little corn dolly, gone dry from age. Its little body was slicked with something dark red, and still wet.
“What is that stuff?”
“Strawberries.”
Tom thought the word might be a euphemism. He lifted the corn dolly to his nose, both disgusted and intrigued, expecting to smell the copper taint of menstrual blood. Instead, he smelled the rich plasma of rotting fruit.
“I thought…”
“What, Tom? What did you think it was?”
A playful grin danced across Holly’s face as she dipped her finger in the red and sucked at it hungrily.
“May my offering be made of flesh and blood, of hearth and home,” she quoted, from some childhood ritual. “Or straw and berries,” she added, laughing.
Her laughter turned to song as she hummed the familiar tune of a nursery song.
Tom felt on edge and queasy. He thrust the corn dolly back into the hole and pulled away from Holly. He looked down at his red-streaked hand and heard the ghost of a cry. Blinking away cold sweat, an image of Julia screaming, entangled in bloodstained sheets flashed before his eyes. He shuddered and sloped away from Holly, from the trees.
“Hey, where you off to?”
Tom didn’t want to hear any more. The heat of the moment had passed, the stain of his passion drying on the pubic hair around his now-flaccid cock. He felt a shot of guilt, remembering Julia’s stricken expression the day they had lost their baby. She had needed him and he had gone back to work. The mom
ent had been too raw, too primal; and he hadn’t been able to look her in the eye. He had done what he had always done; he’d retreated and lost himself in the surface logic of his working day. Holly’s beliefs had led him down a dark path, and he did not want to go where it was leading him. She believed pain and loss were part of everyday life, that much was certain. Tom could not acknowledge those things as every day, he knew that now. To let them in would shatter his ordered little world, and it was that selfsame world he needed to get back to now, after his moment of madness.
Tom needed to be out of the woods, and away from Holly’s words; her arcane superstitions and tree-hugging mumbo jumbo. He gathered up his clothes and pulled them on as he walked away, wishing for all the world that he hadn’t dropped his damn smart phone.
As he stomped away, Tom recognized the lilting melody of Holly’s song.
“Jack fell down and broke his crown…and Jill came tumbling after.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Cosmo watched the American man leave the spot beneath the sacred trees. He turned his attention back to the alabaster skin of the flame-haired girl who had lain with him, just fifty feet from his dugout. Cosmo was finding it difficult to lie still, watching the girl. Her breasts rose and fell as she stooped down to retrieve her underclothes, tugging them on over her smooth, white skin. He ached to touch her, to bolt from his hidey-hole like an animal and take her right there under the canopy of trees; to show her how a real man was. Not the simpering mess of a man she’d chosen to give her most secret gift to. A surge of guilt cooled his blood; his heart belonged to Elena, and the rest of him with it. The cooling effect continued, transforming his lust into anger and hatred.
Ever since he’d first laid eyes on the American up at the power substation, Cosmo knew they were enemies. Their paths were crossed forever; they could never be on the same trajectory. His military training told him a sworn enemy was an enemy for life; something to be feared and never trusted. And the only way to overcome an enemy was to understand it, to track it and study it and, ultimately, to know it.