by Lee, Frazer
“For you,” Holly said, covering the phone’s mouthpiece with her hand.
“Huh?” He was miles away, adrift on a golden honeyed ocean. “Did they give a name?”
“A Mr. Mathers.”
Saved by the bell, thought Tom. Goddamn that bell.
Tom sighed. “I’ll take it in my room.”
He hopped down from his barstool and headed for the door, then doubled back to pick up his whisky glass, sipping as he went—Dutch courage.
“How goes the war, Mr. McCrae?”
Over the phone, Tom could hear the unmistakable background noise of Mathers’ favorite terrace café, up on the roof garden of Head Office. It was the executive’s lunch location of choice.
“The war?”
“Reconnaissance, man. How goes it?”
“Ah, good, sir, in part but…not in, um, others.”
“Speak up, man, damned difficult to hear you out here—have you been drinking?”
“Just with my, um, meal,” Tom lied. “To get you up to speed, sir, I haven’t been able to meet with the Greyson clan yet…”
“Clan,” Mathers chuckled. “Very good.”
“Yes, um, the elder statesman has proven quite difficult to pin down, but I am assured this weekend I’ll be able to corner him. At a social function; my source tells me he’s easier when lubricated.”
More laughter erupted like a foghorn down the receiver. “Hence your dinnertime research into the local lubricants no doubt, very good, McCrae.”
A bead of whisky-scented sweat trickled down Tom’s temple. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, wishing he’d brought a cup of coffee up to his room instead of the Dalwhinnie.
“I have your memo in front of me here, Tom, and I see our Lord Lithgoe is on-side, very good. So once you’ve priced this Greyson fellow, we can soldier on, eh? Shaping up nicely, the Board will be pleased. Sharp instincts you have there, using the electricity hub as a base of ops, seeing as we own majority in that little outfit anyway. Good work.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Now, any other potential flies in the ointment we should know about? No alarms, no surprises, my man…”
Tom’s mind raced, as he thought of the cut brake lines, the dreadful scene in the bar with the protesters and the lunatic stalking him in the woods.
“Just a smallish fly in the ointment…”
“Yes?”
“There was a bit of an…incident, involving Dieter and some environmental protesters who seem to have gotten wind of why we’re here.”
There was a pause, and the line crackled from Mathers’ end.
“Go on.”
“He, um…well, there was a bit of a fight, in the bar at the place where we’re staying.”
“A fight? What, you mean like a bar brawl?”
“Exactly that, sir. After which, I really had no other option but to ask Dieter to return to the office.”
“I see. But how are you going to get around, if you dismiss your driver?”
“Well, that’s the other thing, sir—the car, I believe it was sabotaged.” Another crackle on the line. Tom continued. “The brake lines were cut, myself and Dieter escaped unscathed, but still.”
“And you think these protesters had something to do with it?”
“I do, sir. Local police have been informed, for all the good it will do.”
“Ah, backwater cops, is it? Understood.”
The line turned to static again, and Tom could just about discern Mathers issuing instructions to someone else before he returned to the call.
“Okay, McCrae, it seems from your report we have very little, logistically, to worry about. Work on this farmer guy, find his price, I’m sure I don’t have to tell you to keep it reasonable but also to be aware that the Board will swallow it if it’s the only variable putting the deal at risk. More pressing is the matter of the protesters; they can slow things up for us considerably if they get any press attention, which is the area in which these kids tend to excel. So the name of our game now is timing. Tick-tock, McCrae, the fire in which you and I burn and all that jazz. I’ll move things along here, and you find your man and crush him, y’hear?”
“Loud and clear, sir.”
“One more thing from our end, and it’s really nothing to trouble yourself with, Tom—I mean I told them you’re on assignment for as long as it takes and I call the shots on this stuff, but…”
A crackle on the line, like someone had picked up an extension; listening in.
“Are you still there, sir?”
“Still hearing me, McCrae?”
“Yes.”
“Good, where was I? Oh yes, Internal might have a round or two of questions with you about the Monroe business.”
“Monroe’s…business in Douglass?”
“No, my man, not that. They just have a few loose ends to tie up on Monroe’s untimely departure from the physical plane, so to speak. And as you were the last to see the man alive…as I said, nothing to worry about.”
“Okay, sir, whatever questions they have I’ll be glad to answer them, although I already said pretty much everything I could say in my statement to the police.”
“I’m sure you did, McCrae. Very diligent, very thorough. Sure you’ll do a good job.”
“Thank you, sir.” Tom didn’t much like the way Mathers had thrown him this slight curveball about Internal sniffing around for an interview after the effect. But he had nothing to hide, after all. He had neglected to mention the man’s last words during his brief chat with the cops at the office. He’s waiting… If the confused ravings of a dying man were of use to Internal, then he’d share, of course—they could knock themselves out trying to find a deeper meaning in Monroe’s words.
“What’s that, McCrae?”
“Nothing, sir.” Tom wasn’t aware that he’d said anything aloud. It had been a long day. “Will there be anything else?”
“Put Dieter on the line, there’s a good fellow. I want to hear what in the hell he has to say for himself.”
“Another smallish fly, I’m afraid,” Tom said.
“Oh?”
Tom took a deep breath and prepared himself to tell Mathers the part about Dieter’s disappearing act. He took a slug of the honey malt; better than coffee after all.
A further ten-minute grilling, during which Tom’s ear had started burning, and his call with Mathers was over. His superior had arrived at the same conclusion as Officer Travis; Dieter had no doubt slunk off somewhere to sleep off the effects of his ill-advised drinkathon and subsequent bare-knuckle fight. He had instructed Tom to have Dieter call the office as soon as he surfaced—the mysterious H.R. Department would step in and take care of the matter from there on in. Mathers had also arranged to have a new cell phone couriered to Tom at The Firs so he could be reached on the ground.
So much for my being off the grid, Tom thought as he lay back on his bed, still fully clothed. Still, it wasn’t a bad thing for him to be contactable; he hadn’t received a call back from Julia, nor did he expect one anytime soon, but at least with a replacement cell he could send her the token text message. In his heart of hearts, he wondered about his motivations for doing so, uncertain about whether he was genuinely concerned about Julia’s wellbeing, or merely interested in pissing Ellie off. Bit of both, he chuckled inwardly. Setting the whisky glass down on the nightstand he rolled over onto his side and, curled up in a fetal position, descended into sleep.
Outside, the wind whispered through the trees and frost began to form on the windowpane. The first kiss of winter.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Tom awoke to the sound of a sharp rapping. Head still muggy from the whiskies, he blinked away the fug from his eyes and sat up. It was still dark—the middle of the night. Stumbling from his bed, he stubbed his toe as he approached the door and, cursing, opened it.
No one there. He must have been dreaming.
He heard raised voices from down the hall. Holly and MacGregor were i
n the throes of an argument. Something smashed and Holly cried out. Had the old man hit her? Tom could not quite tell. Despite what had happened between them in the woods, or perhaps because of it, Tom decided it was not appropriate for him to get involved in a scene between husband and wife. Perhaps the old fellow had overhead their candid exchange at the bar earlier. Much as he gravely disapproved of MacGregor striking Holly, and he must have done the way she was now sobbing like a castigated child, Tom forced himself to retreat back into his room to mind his own business.
Then, he heard the same sharp rapping again. Impossibly, it was coming from the window behind him, but he was on the second floor. He stood in the doorway, eyeing the closed curtains with dread, and his every instinct told him to just leave the room, to head out into the hallway and raise the alarm.
More rapping ensued. He hissed through his teeth, and closed the door again. Crossing to the window, with fear rising in his belly, he tore back the curtains.
No one there.
Of course, anyone tapping on the glass up at that altitude would have to be a pretty accomplished free climber in order to do so. Tom rubbed his eyes, wondering what hellish time of the morning it was, when he caught a glimpse of something at the tree line beyond the windowpane.
Two pinpricks of searing red. Like angry eyes, watching.
He moved closer to the window, peering through the thin layer of seasonal frost that had formed there, gazing at the two vivid red eyes glinting between the dark, hulking tree trunks. A shiver passed down his spine as he peered out into the darkness, his rapid breaths making a little cloud of fog on the inside of the window.
Then, with a crash of lead, wood and glass, the window burst open—outward—and he felt something otherworldly close in around him like a freezing cloak of fear borne on the chill wind. His body felt weightless now, and he was lifted from the ground by an invisible force that held him fast. The shock of cold air as it swirled around his prone body made him gasp, and Tom was uprooted from the spot and dragged, kicking and silent screaming, outside like a newborn from the womb.
Down, down, to the trees.
His feet hit the ground running as he was deposited just beyond the tree line. He was puzzled as to why the forest floor felt so sharp and uncomfortable beneath his feet, then he remembered he had kicked off his shoes and socks before falling asleep on his bed. Barefoot in the forest, he tumbled through impenetrable night. He was in a white-hot fugue of panic, desperate to evade the omnipotent force that had taken him from his room and set him down on the forest floor. Here, he was as vulnerable as an insect in the forest’s night garden; prey to the shadows that had haunted him his entire life. He ran on, his skin becoming gooseflesh beneath his clothes at the mournful call of an owl in the blackness above him. He ran until the breath had all but left his body, and he kept running until he could run no more.
Choking from exertion, Tom careered into a clearing; the noise of his intrusion startling sleeping wildlife in the trees. Dozens of pairs of unseen wings flapped and fluttered as the scared creatures made good their escape from this wheezing, sweating interloper.
Then, Tom realized his mistake.
Instead of running away from the shadow and threat gathering at his heels, he had allowed himself to be steered to this place. His pursuer had rounded on him and was now standing just a few meters away, long black body framed by a halo of rusty moonlight, as he leaned against the huge trunk of an immense tree.
“Show yourself,” Tom demanded.
Even as he uttered the words, he knew their bravado was gossamer thin—he held no dominion here, and had no place issuing demands. But for the sake of his sanity he had to vanquish his fear, and so he took a shivering step forward, toward the shadowy figure. He winced at the sensation of something spiky, perhaps a holly leaf, piercing the underside of his right foot. Swallowing the pain, he took another step, and another, until he was at spitting distance from the tall shadow of the man-thing.
“Jack?” Tom said.
Deep within the frightened six-year-old boy’s heart pounding in his thirty-six-year-old frame, he knew that was the tall man’s name.
The shrill cry of a night bird came as answer, startling him to within an inch of his life. Trying to get his breathing back under control, Tom took another couple of steps forward, and what he saw made a mockery of his sense of perspective.
What he had thought to be the shadow of the man was in fact the shape of a second great tree. The man’s forearm and fingers were in fact the smaller branches sprouting from that second tree; a tree he now recognized. In an instant, he realized where he was standing—in the hallowed grove beneath the Jack and Jill Trees. The cacophony of night rang out all around him, birds, foxes, and creature sounds he didn’t have names for.
He turned around, glancing into the shadows, scared out of his wits. He was all alone in the dark, and yet utterly surrounded by the unknown and unseen. He backed up, imagining eyes everywhere—feeling that same sensation of being watched that he’d felt in the village earlier that day. But out there in the trees the feeling was amplified to such an extent that he felt it like a great weight bearing down on him. By day, the tall trees were things of beauty—age-old sentinels of the forest, homes to the birds that sang cheerily in the autumn sun—but at night, they had become like great columns, begging to crush him where he cowered.
He felt something touch his back, and he started. It was the trunk of the Jill Tree, the same rough, sinewy surface against which he and Holly had made love. Her warm hands were on him now, feeling their way across his chest, popping the buttons on his shirt and warming the surface of his skin.
“How?”
His voiced burned with questions.
“Shhh…”
Her breath at his ear, unmistakably sweet; sweeter than the honeyed malt he could still taste on his tongue through his fear and arousal.
She spun him around and into her. Her body was open wide, and already wet to the touch. Tom fell into her embrace and rocked with her urgent movements, feeling her lithe form undulate with him; a twin tide. Once again, the clothes fell from his body as they fucked, and he gave no resistance as she pulled his arms up and around until he was embracing the tree trunk.
But something was wrong.
First came the smell; rank and bitter like all the spoiled apples from Greyson’s farm fermented across aeons. It was at once sweet, and disgusting, the very essence of putrefaction. Tom gagged, and he willed his manhood to wither inside Holly. But he was still hard as stone, and with his arms pinioned either side of the tree, he could do little but continue rocking and bucking with his mate. It was as though she were reeling him in; his arms held fast by the tree’s branches somehow, the tender spot between his shoulder blades burning in agony as his back was stretched to breaking point.
Then, Holly was gone.
Her breath, just moments ago a lover’s whisper in his ear, became a funeral moan—guttural and terrifying. Tom’s bowels churned at the sound, his arms struggling against his bonds; no longer branches, but the hands of the Jack, holding him prone against the tree.
The rocking motion at his groin had become a rhythmic sucking, pulling him into the maw of what had once been Holly, and which was now something equally warm and wet, but wrong somehow.
Tom grimaced in pain as he tried to move his head in order to look down. He managed to twist his head to the right and, feeling the bark of the tree scrape his cheek, tucked his chin into his breastbone—
And the moment he did so, how he wished he hadn’t.
Unable to control the rhythmic sucking at his groin, he was thrusting into the hole in the Jill Tree’s trunk; the same one from which he had pulled a corn dolly in the calm light of day. In the dark secret of night, the hole had taken on a life of its own. It had opened up like a flower from its bud, a living vulva growing out of the tree trunk. The miasmic maw, into which Tom was being drawn ever more painfully, wore a mossy pudendum of soft pubic hair. The point where t
he mossy surface met the surrounding bark of the extremities of the orifice was indiscernible from human derma. Tom tried to stop thrusting, but each sucking motion grew more violent and powerful than the last. He felt like his back might fold in on itself, breaking him in two, enabling the tree to swallow him whole. His nerve endings screamed and, in spite of himself, he ejaculated into the sticky, insatiable organ at his groin.
Sobbing from pain, fear and exhaustion, Tom finally felt the pulsing motions subside and, slicked with drooling mucous, he fell away from the hellish cavity. Great loops of membranous fluid fell with him, tethering him wetly to the tree. As he fell, something else spilled from the red maw; dozens of tiny forms. They were like corn dolls, but alive somehow; hideous facsimiles of human life. Their heads, limbs and tiny torsos were battered and broken—apparently as a result of his thrusting. It was as though he had been skull-fucking death at the behest of this tree—deity’s impossible sex organ. As they slid, in their collective hundreds now, from their rank womb the little creatures screamed. It was a terrible sound, like a thousand nails scraping against glass. Tom clutched his ears against the din, which was so piercing he felt he might pass out any moment. He clenched his eyes shut and screamed with them. All around, the night creatures joined the insane chorus; a whirlwind of agony—
Tom awoke, thrashing like a tiger in his bedclothes. He tumbled from the bed, still the middle of the night, still in semi-darkness. Rushing to the bathroom, he unclasped his belt with trembling hands, pulled down his pants and underclothes. Expecting to find blood and mucal filth there, he breathed a sigh of relief to find himself clean and dry.
Returning to the bedroom, Tom halted at a sudden tap-tap at the window. With a distinct sense of deja-vu he crossed to the curtains and tore them open. Nothing there. Was he still dreaming? He pinched his already scratched arm, hard enough to make a welt there. He was apparently awake. Feeling a little nauseous, he sloped back to the bed and crashed out. His feet were hurting. Sitting up to investigate, he found they were caked with dirt and leaf litter.