Molly let go, taking a step back. For a moment, she had felt that unbearable pressure again, the familiar feeling of being watched, and she wondered if what she felt was the focus of those dark pits, the ghost of the rotting man watching her with those empty eyes.
“Andrew Golnik,” Joe said. “It’s got to be.”
He began to kick at one of the two remaining offshoots from the trunk. The wood cracked even more loudly, the split in the trunk running almost to the roots now. Somehow the dead man had grown up out of his grave with the maturing tree. He was a part of it, its rotting core.
“Come on,” Joe said. “If we’re going to find answers, this is where we’ll find them.”
He hauled back his foot to launch another kick. The tree shook without any impact, and Molly saw the branches begin to snap and twist as they reached for Joe. One of the roots tugged itself from the rain-sodden soil and whipped toward her, wrapping around her leg.
The trunk began to seal itself back up, trying to hide the corpse of Andrew Golnik, and as the thick root twined around her, crawling up her body, Molly McHugh started to scream.
Chapter Ten
Joe fought against the branches of the tree as they wrapped, serpentine, around his arms and his neck. The bark scraped his throat, drawing blood, and he choked as a branch cut off his air. Black spots danced across his vision almost immediately. He hadn’t had time to take a deep breath, and now his chest began to burn with the need for air.
He heard the girl screaming, and the sound of her fear stabbed deeply at him.
Planting his feet, he dug his heels into the earth. Thick, gnarled roots wrapped around his legs, but he would not be moved. Red leaves shook and spilled a fresh shower of raindrops down upon him. A haze of fury and determination began to blur his thoughts, and Joe bared his teeth even as the lack of air made his lungs feel like they were collapsing in upon themselves.
The pointed tip of a branch reached for him, wavering in front of his face, searching for the best spot to strike. Joe tore himself sideways just as the branch thrust forward. It would have speared his left eye if he hadn’t moved.
Molly McHugh screamed his name. As he glanced quickly in her direction, he saw something that made his skin crawl with revulsion. The split in the trunk had sealed itself up, but now it reopened, torn wide and glistening with something like sap. Branches and roots twisted around the girl and pushed her toward the maw of the tree.
Inside the tree, the withered, mummified corpse of Andrew Golnik lay revealed, as though it had crawled up from the grave into the trunk of the tree. Frozen in grotesque, grinning death, it did not move, only lay in the peeled interior of the tree, its skin and hair nothing but wisps on the hideous ruin of a man. Rusted metal rings were knotted in the dead man’s beard.
As the black spots on his vision spread, the darkness encroached on his thoughts. Images flitted across his mind of other screaming girls; of gnarled, spindly hands dragging them by their hair into trees and dank crypts and into the dark water beneath bridges. Some of those girls he had saved and others he had lost to the witches. But he would not lose Molly McHugh.
Without breath he could not scream, but he roared inside his own mind. The limbs of the tree pulled at him, trying to drag him closer. Where Molly’s arm had been drawn inside it, he saw that the tree bark had begun to grow around her wrist and to spread up her arm.
Joe gave in, pressing forward, and for just an instant the branches and roots slackened their grip on him. He twisted his right wrist enough to wrap his hand around the branch and then fought again, digging in, and snapped the branch from the tree. Red leaves withered, died, and fell from the splintered branch as he tossed it down, but his right arm was free.
Golnik’s mummy seemed to sneer, the remnants of its lips cracking to dust as they peeled back.
Joe thrashed and fought, and with a crack and a shriek that seemed to sound only inside his own skull, he broke the branch dragging on his left wrist. He reached both hands to his throat and an ancient strength flooded him, a furious power that felt like memory returning, and he ripped the strange branch fingers from his bleeding, abraded throat. Air rushed into his lungs, and he nearly vomited at the putrid, rotting stink that came with his first breath. Death and decay wafted from the hideous gullet of that gaping tree, a fermented, sulfurous odor that made his eyes water and his stomach roil.
Molly’s head, right arm, and shoulders had been swallowed by the tree, a pinkish, bloody mucous sap spreading along her clothes as if of its own accord. Bark grew over her in its wake, as if the sap hardened into the skin of the tree. If the girl was still screaming, her terror echoed inside the lower trunk of the tree and he could no longer hear her, but he refused to believe she might be dead.
“Whatever the hell you are, you can’t have her,” he rasped.
As other branches reached down for him, he batted them aside, splintering wood as he finally managed to reach for his gun. The huge pistol had always weighed heavily in his grip, but now it felt featherlight, an extension of his hand. He shoved the big barrel into the gaping maw of the tree and pressed it against the mummy’s chest. The split in the tree began to seal over his wrist and its consuming bark grew instantly along his arm, even as he pulled the trigger.
The boom of the first gunshot was muffled and distant inside the tree, but as he pulled the trigger again and again, the tree began to rot and the split grew wider, the bark crinkling as it withered. Each shot was louder than the last, and as the dying tree peeled open, Joe saw the damage the bullets had done to the corpse of Andrew Golnik. The mummy had been blown apart, its chest a crater of flesh like old papyrus and its yellowed bones shattered into shards like the broken branches of the cursed tree.
Something gleamed inside the dead occultist’s chest cavity.
“Stop!” Molly shouted. “Please, stop!”
She had slipped out of the tree as he killed it, and now she lay on the ground, tears streaming from her eyes. Her hands were clapped to her ears and her face contorted with pain. He noticed that the bark that had grown over the skin of her neck, cheeks, and arms had withered and was flaking off, but that observation distracted him for only a moment from the reason for her cries and tears. It wasn’t fear that made her shout, but pain. Her head had been inside the trunk of the tree when Joe had fired most of his bullets, and the thunder of those gunshots had hurt her badly.
Joe holstered his gun and dropped to his knees beside her.
“Molly,” he said, reaching out to try to take her hands away from her ears.
She jerked away from him, but after a moment she relented. Joe was glad to see there was no blood on her hands or in her ears. He didn’t think her eardrums had been popped.
“You’re going to be okay,” he said.
Molly wiped away her tears and shook her head. “I can’t hear you.”
Joe took her hand and held it tightly. “Can you hear me at all?” he yelled, hating the way his voice carried through the sprawl of the cemetery.
Her breath hitching, she nodded, calming a little. “Some. But really muffled.”
“It’ll come back,” Joe said loudly, trying a smile.
He wasn’t very good at smiling, but Molly nodded again and seemed comforted. She clutched his hand and he helped her to stand. She pressed the heel of one hand against her forehead and he knew she must have a hell of a headache. But a headache and a little temporary hearing loss was a small price to pay for not being absorbed by the evil that had been living inside that tree, and he was sure Molly would agree.
Joe could still feel the taint of the dark magic in that tree. He felt as if it had stained him with its malignance, giving his stomach a sickly twist of nausea, and he longed for a shower. Even a swim in the river would be a relief. He gave the sky a momentary glance, hoping that the heavy, low-hanging clouds would erupt with a fresh downpour instead of the light drizzle that still misted around them.
Molly set about peeling the withered bark-skin off
of her face, hands, and arms, her mouth making a little moue of disgust.
In the deepening gloom of the storm-laden afternoon, Joe heard the whistle of a bird off to his left, from a copse of trees near a row of crumbling family crypts. When he glanced back at Molly, she wore a curious expression. He turned to see what had struck her so oddly and realized she was staring at the desiccated remains of the occultist’s mummy, which were so much a part of the rotting tree’s core that it was impossible to tell where the one ended and the other began.
But it wasn’t Golnik’s cadaver Molly was looking at.
Joe had been so concerned about the girl that he had forgotten the glimpse he’d caught of something glinting inside the mummy’s ruined corpse. Tucked into the bottom of the chest cavity was an object that at first glance resembled nothing so much as an exotic puzzle. Tubes of subtly colored glass—or was it glass?—were knotted together in a strangely organized tangle. It reminded him of a heart.
Joe took a step nearer to the tree, and the design of the knot seemed to shift, all of its turns and angles changing as though it had reconfigured itself.
“I’ll be damned,” Joe said, reaching for the knot. He plunged his fingers into the rotted corpse and tree and dug the half-buried artifact out, then held it up, studying the way it seemed to defy the eye’s attempts to capture its contours.
“What is it?” Molly asked, speaking loudly, having difficulty hearing even her own words.
Joe smiled at her. “It’s the Pentajulum.”
Her hearing must have been improving, because her face lit up with a grin. Joe didn’t blame her. With this shifting bauble, Church would be able to help her track down Felix Orlov.
“But how did it get … inside him?” Molly asked, rubbing at her temples to ease the ache in her head. “It’s too big for him to have swallowed it.”
The Pentajulum pulsed in his hand. Some of the tubes were ice-cold and others emanated a comforting warmth. It almost felt as if it were a part of him, as if it clung to his skin, merging with his flesh … as if it wanted him to hold it. The knot had no consistent reality; it seemed quite possible that it also had no consistent size. Golnik might not have been able to swallow it, but another theory presented itself.
“The last time Church saw this thing, it was in Golnik’s hand. When Church shot the guy, he fell, and the Pentajulum was nowhere to be found. It had to have been inside already, right then, while he was bleeding out on the floor.”
“I don’t—”
Joe turned to Molly. “It must have somehow dug its way inside of him.”
“That’s disgusting. Wouldn’t Church have noticed a big hole in the guy?”
“Unless his body absorbed it somehow. Nobody knows enough about this thing to say what it can and can’t do,” Joe said. “And I gotta tell you, just hanging on to it gives me the shivers. It feels like it’s … awake. I don’t know how to explain it better than that. I’m getting this weird feeling, like it’s aware of us, and I don’t like that at all. Whatever happened with the tree just now … yeah, it might’ve been Golnik’s magic, some kind of curse he left behind, infesting that tree, possessing it somehow. But I don’t think so. I think it was this. I think it wanted out.”
He held the Pentajulum out for her to get a better look, but when she reluctantly reached out for it, he drew it back before her fingers could brush against it. Joe told himself it was out of concern for the girl, that the knot had a weird malignance he didn’t want to expose her to, but he wondered if maybe there was more to it than that. Did it exert some influence over him? Now that he had it, did he covet it so much that he did not want anyone else to touch it?
Molly gave her head a little toss, but her ears didn’t seem to be bothering her as much. Though Joe imagined they were still ringing.
“So it’s just been waiting here for someone to come along?” she asked.
“Not just waiting,” Joe said. “You saw the way the wood was splitting, the hand reaching up like it was crawling free in slow motion … or being born.”
Molly looked stricken, her face paler than ever. “You think it made the corpse move, like some kind of puppet?”
“We’ll never know,” Joe said, staring at the pulsing knot again.
“Put it away,” Molly said. “Please. I don’t even want to see the thing. Let’s just get it back to Mr. Church, so we can find Felix.”
Joe glanced at the tree. At least half the leaves had fallen and the rest were turning brown, dying on the branch. The tree looked dead, and the withered remains of Andrew Golnik had decayed further. Whatever had animated the tree and the body—Golnik’s dark magic or the Pentajulum—the curse had left them.
“You’re right,” he said. “Let’s—”
“What’s that?” Molly interrupted.
Joe frowned, and then he heard the odd sounds that had caught her attention, an odd shush and flap that made him turn and scan the gravestones and the trees around them. When he spotted the figure lurching from between the family crypts off to his left, he swore under his breath.
“Oh, no. Not again,” Molly said, backing up toward the withered tree.
Black rubber gas masks glistened in the drizzling rain, goggle-eyes opaque, as three of the thuggish killers Molly called the gas-men broke into a run toward them. Joe shouted and moved in front of the girl, drawing his gun.
“Back off right now. You’re not going to get by me.”
They didn’t slow down.
“Joe!” Molly shouted. “There are more!”
He glanced to the right and saw others running in a crouch, weaving through the headstones and darting from behind trees. Some wore long coats to cover the slick, rubbery clothes that seemed to seal them inside, but others did not. Dark forms surrounded them, some scurrying and others hurtling toward them, and Joe knew he didn’t have enough bullets for all of them. But bullets were just the beginning; his fists were just as deadly.
The trio of gas-men who had hidden amongst the crypts closed in, and he could hear their labored breathing inside those monstrous masks. He thought about the way they had come apart in his hands when he had first rescued Molly, and the malleable flesh of the arm Church had examined in his lab, and he wondered if any of the gas-men were actually men. He supposed he would find out.
“Cocteau’s going to be very disappointed when you’re all dead,” Joe said.
He shot the nearest one through the eye-lens of its mask. Air burst out of it like a balloon, and it collapsed, writhing and seeming to shrink. The other two that had been in the first wave caught bullets in the chest, which perforated their suits, and they staggered and fell a dozen feet from where Joe and Molly made their stand in front of the cursed tree.
Molly screamed his name again. He turned to see that she had snapped off a long, sharp length of branch. As Joe took aim at a gas-man lunging for her, Molly speared him through the neck, the splintered end of the branch puncturing flesh and fabric, and a hiss of air burst out with a squirt of inhumanly dark blood.
Joe shifted his aim and shot the next one, but they were moving in faster than he’d expected, swarming around him and Molly. He didn’t know how many bullets he had left, and he reached out and pushed Molly behind him again. Courageous as she was, he would not risk her getting hurt.
She stumbled and sprawled onto the grass a few feet away.
As he fired again, he saw a scarecrow-thin gas-man whip a gun from inside his long coat and take aim, and he felt a kind of roar in his heart. They had guns. Why the hell had they taken so long to put them to use?
He shot the scarecrow three times and it fell, skidding into the mud in a tangle of sprawled limbs. But then his trigger clicked on an empty chamber even as, one by one, other gas-men began to draw weapons, and he knew it was over.
Molly started to rise.
“Stay down!” Joe shouted, and even as he did, he understood why the gas-men had waited to draw their weapons. Molly had been in the line of fire until he’d shoved her to
the ground. Which meant they wanted her alive but had no such concerns about him.
He grabbed the nearest gas-man, a heavyset thug wearing a filthy fedora with his gas mask, and punched him twice in the head before spinning him around to use as a shield against the gunmen. Bullets punched the air and Joe staggered back as they struck the gas-man in his grasp. One knocked the fedora off of the thug’s head and passed straight through, cutting a groove in Joe’s left cheek. It seared his skin, and he could smell his own blood as he staggered back, trying to hold on to the gas-man in his arms. But the suit had been perforated, and rank, putrid air hissed out. A moment before, the thing in his arms had had the shape and heft of a man, but now it felt as if he held some kind of writhing animal wrapped in the rubbery fabric. Dying, it thrashed against him and slipped from his grasp, leaving him without protection.
The gas-men kept shooting. Joe lunged toward the nearest one, but a bullet struck him in the chest and he staggered back a step. He looked down to see a hole in his rain-soaked shirt, a starburst of blood growing and spreading through the sodden fabric. He found himself staring at his hands, suddenly wondering why they were not earth and stone.
He heard Molly screaming.
A bullet struck his shoulder, turning him halfway around. Another hit his right leg, and he collapsed to his knees in the graveyard mud. Gas-men loomed out of the rain-streaked gloom around him. He could see the trickles and spatters of rainwater on the lenses of their masks. Two of them had Molly by the arms and were dragging her away as she fought them, but she was alive. That was good.
The gas-men circled him. The stormy sky seemed to darken. The blood soaking his clothing felt warm at first, but then a cold as deep as bone gripped him. Guns were raised, slowly and deliberately, the mouths of their barrels as dark and unfathomable as the goggle-lenses of the gas-men. The last shots were strangely muffled, as if somehow distant, and he fell onto his back and bled into the mud.
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