She saw a ship, its sails furled, bound motionless in a strange frozen sea.
She saw a snowstorm. She saw Duvall dragging old Eli into the cabin. When the spring awoke, only Duvall came back out, walking heavily with a guilty full look to his face.
She saw a man and boy together, doing things in the dark, their hands hot upon each other’s flesh. She saw the man’s hands closing around the boy’s throat and the boy dead and frozen in the dark. She saw a knife sawing frozen flesh, held and savored in the mouth, in the cabin, in the hold, until the flesh thawed, until it melted, until it came.
And then she turned away and would look no more.
She laid her blanket-coat upon the ground, cradled between two large roots, with her back firmly braced against the tree’s trunk. She would whelp like a bitch wolf in the woods. The tree whispered darkly over her, blood calling to blood, coaxing her as the pains grew closer together.
“You want them?” she grated through gritted teeth. “You want my children?”
She lay back, her legs propped and parted, as if making room for an eager lover, and she waited patiently to give birth.
3
– HURRY –
The word, spoken in Duvall’s voice, hit Lucas like a wave, splashing over his senses, drowning him in its undeniable power.
– HURRY –
The word rocked him, the forest swimming before his eyes, the earth tilted at an unnatural angle, the sky spinning.
– HURRY –
He shook his head gently and gingerly probed the wet juicy edge of his bones. He tasted blood even before he realized his fingers were in his mouth. He blinked, gritting at the sharp effort and slowly stood.
– HURRY –
4
Another.
Lord, there were so many of them. When she saw the needle she should have counted. She should have known. She gritted her teeth and moaned.
Another.
When the last finally crawled or pushed its way out, she breathed a bit easier, but the birthing had taken so much of her strength. She was afraid she would be too weak for the even greater task ahead. She stared hopelessly upwards at the tree, looming overhead, branches shaking in easy laughter.
“You want them, don’t you?” Her eyes narrowed into hate-filled slits.
“Well you shall have them.”
5
– HURRY –
Lucas fell heavily halfway to the tree almost dropping the torch he carried for illumination. It was his foot’s fault this time for no root dared bar his path. The pain rolled over him in a heavy scarlet rush and beneath the red he felt a slow moving blackness and he almost passed out.
– GET UP –
The voice of the tree brooked no argument. Lucas struggled to his feet. Something was wrong. He could feel something desperately wrong; something that the tree could not change or alter.
– HURRY –
6
She bound them to her with the blanket. It was easy. They were so small. And in a way they were already bound to her. She hadn’t yet cut the cords. The axe was harder. She couldn’t carry it and climb as well.
In her teeth, perhaps?
She tried to hold the axe in her mouth but it was too heavy. She slipped the handle down a hole in the side of her dress. The fabric was worn thin. She hoped it would be strong enough for the little time she needed.
Touching the tree was hardest of all. That surprised her after all she’d been through. This deep revulsion she felt for the simple act of placing her hand upon it. For a moment she was certain that she could not go through with this.
“Hurry.”
It was Jezebel, standing, hovering, high above the tree, her arms open and waiting and calling to her.
“Hurry.”
Tamsen touched the tree as hesitantly eager as a virgin on her wedding night. The tree twisted gently as if it swayed in the wind only there was no wind.
The tree twisted and it knew fear.
Tamsen snarled in fierce triumph, clawed at the bark like a wild cat and she began to climb.
7
– HURRY –
Lucas stumbled. He staggered. He wouldn’t let himself fall again. He didn’t think he could rise if he let himself drop. The branches beneath his feet turned to splinters of bone sharded and broken beneath his faltering footsteps.
– HURRY –
The forest was a hungry black void, an empty swallow gulping him downwards and he slipped into its ravening gullet like a raw egg. The torch glimmered above him, trailing out behind his footsteps like a strand of fiery rope.
He saw her now although he was too far away to truly see. He saw her in some strange sort of fashion, glimpsed in the darkness of his imagination. He saw what she was doing, what she had in mind, what she planned.
– HURRY –
He leaned and fell into a broken run.
8
The tree twisted and heaved and fought her for every inch she gained but it seemed to her that its strength was muted. Some other strength moved within her. Jezebel and perhaps even Delta, the three moving together, the three in one that could not be beaten.
A tree branch whipped her cheek as if to refute this.
She spat blood and gritted her teeth.
“Damn you. I will not be beaten.”
It whipped her again upon the other side of her cheek.
Grimly she continued to climb.
9
Lucas lay panting, the taste of filth and dead meat heavy in his throat. Soon he would be dead and this would be all over with. Soon he could sleep, truly sleep, dead and dreamless as a fallen log.
– HURRY –
He stood and began to walk as if trapped in an endless nightmare.
He walked until he could finally see the tree and Tamsen suspended high above the forest floor.
10
Tamsen did not like to touch the tiny twisting carcasses any more than she liked to touch the tree, but it had to be done.
She clung to the tree with her arms and legs wound tight about the rasping bark, binding herself to the trunk with the rope as she cut each birth cord with her axe, feeling her strength bleeding away from inside her.
She knotted each birth cord about the branch, one after another like birds in a row, twisting each cord about their tiny little necks and setting them free.
Free.
They were her children after all and wasn’t freedom the greatest gift a parent could offer? Never mind the black and stiffened bark that passed for her children’s flesh, never mind the bristles that crawled about each twisted spine, never mind their eyes, their tiny little pine cone eyes.
One, two, three. Birds in a row.
It was easy. How simple a job the hangman had, as simple as a housewife hanging laundry and for this he was paid.
Four and five, birds in a row.
One more left. It was slow hard work, the blackened bits of life constantly threatening to slip from her grasp, her life leaking from the severed cords.
You want them?
You shall have them.
Have us all.
She dropped the sixth unintentionally. The slimy, blood-wet flesh and the aching of her fingers betrayed her grasp. It fell a long way down until it broke with the sound of an overripe melon breaking open. She almost laughed, almost cried, as she felt what was left of herself slipping away.
The axe fell from her numbed fingers. It hit the ground far below.
She nearly fainted.
But there was one more task ahead. One more piece of laundry to be hung.
One more bird.
She slid the noose from about her waist. The tree shook and flailed trying to throw her loose. She wouldn’t feel it. It could not touch her. She was a lifetime gone away.
Up and over, Tammy, up and over.
One more bird.
She jumped.
She had been hanging for five long minutes when Lucas finally found her.
Chapter Twenty–Four
“I take it back! I take it back!”
Like a drowning man swallowing what he knows to be his last breath on this earth, Lucas called out for forgiveness in the still voice of a child. Dreams and visions and nightmares danced like mad little gnomes before his eyes. His world turned and he could not stop it.
He saw an old, old woman, bound to a stool, her legs kicking over the depths of an unforgiving river. He saw his shipmates, comrades in cannibalism, bursting into the ship’s hold, damning him both with eye and tongue for his double sin. Doubled, because cursed is he who slays a boy and doubly cursed when the boy was his lover.
He saw his father – a sad shaken man having just received word of Lucas’s second damning shame, taking his final walk into the quiet lake below their manor.
He saw himself, crouching before his arboreal god, staring upwards into its darkened branches.
He saw his wife, dangling from the end of a rope, her legs kicking, caught up beside the still forms of newborn babies strung and hung like pieces of obscenely ripened fruit, while the tree caught at her with its branches, picking her up trying to hold her struggling form clear of the rope’s embrace.
– HURRY –
It would not let her die.
For the woman was needed. The woman was necessary. It could not let her die until a suitable replacement could be summoned to the valley.
Something snapped.
Lucas heard nothing, not the wind, not his wife, not the whickering branches. He saw the axe lying in the dirt. He picked it up and ran, berserk, screaming his anger. The tree easily plucked the axe from his hand. He tried to keep hold of it, hearing his arm snap before feeling the shriek of pain.
As the bough drew back, he smashed at it with his torch in his other fist. Perhaps it was the dryness or the cold or something in the pine resin, or perhaps merely the age of the thing. Whatever the reason, the bough flared up like dried tinder weed and the flame ran like a fury along the length of the bough.
– fire to pure, fire to pure –
Lucas didn’t pause to wonder where the voice came from. He pushed forward with his fiery assault, lashing at branch after branch with his outstretched torch.
The tree beast roared its pain and threw the axe at him.
Lucas saw his wife, saw her nodding in redemptive assent, kicking high above in the dark, unforgiving sky.
The axe struck his crutch. He felt his prop slither from beneath his arm. The tree snagged hold of him, raised him upwards and shook him as a terrier shakes a rat.
He hit it with the torch, again and again.
Below he felt, then saw, amidst smoke and flame, the smaller roots of the tree-thing begin to tear themselves out of the dirt.
A branch twisted, caught at his mangled right arm and pulled it off. The torch was in his left and the tree would not touch it. The tree whipped at him with his severed arm, trying to knock or shake the brandished torch loose from his grip.
The strung-up babies caught like tallowed lanterns. All those childish hungers and dreams burning in the long, cold night. Lucas fell free, the dead pine needles rising up like a floor of upturned spikes. He fell hard. The needles bit into his flesh. He stood, dragging himself erect. His wooden leg twisted beneath him.
He turned and looked up and saw the devil tree’s larger roots lashing out like so many blind serpents. He saw it raise itself up and out from where it stood. He saw it take one hesitant step.
He began to run.
Over his shoulder, the devil tree took a second thunderous step like a great flaming petrified giant. Lucas’s good foot went from beneath his body, sliding upon the treacherous snow. His wooden leg rooted itself into the dirt. He was trapped like a rabbit in a snare and as he fell and hit the ground he heard a madwoman’s maddened laughter.
He turned over, deliberately propping himself upon his elbow for a better view, and the very last thing he saw was the devil tree, half-falling, half-throwing itself towards him, crashing irrevocably downwards like a great flaming pillar of unholy darkness.
Epilogue
Two Bear would only go so far, and then he just pointed.
Abraham Golightly walked out into the circle of the ashes, his moccasins hushing down into the cinders. He’d never seen ground burned so hard before, like the fire had been riled beyond reason and had howled across the bottom of this valley eating in a great burning rage.
And that’s when he saw it, patiently waiting for him in the heart of the charred ground.
Abraham saw a tree poked out in the dirt. A jack pine, ripped and rooting up from out of the ashes, like it was trying to reach up and tear a chunk out of the heart of the bright blue sky.
Abraham had never seen a more pissed-off looking tree in his life before.
It didn’t surprise him any to find it here. Jack pines needed fire to spread. There was something in the heat of the flame that drew the seeds from out of the jack pine’s cones. It was kind of God’s way of filling up the empty that a wildfire left behind.
Only this tree was a little different. There was something mean hiding deep in the twisted snarl of pine wood.
Something that made Abraham want to turn and run for the ocean.
“I know you,” Abraham said.
It seemed a damn strange thing to be addressing a pine tree like this, but there was something in that wood that Abraham had to listen to. Something that he’d heard in the dark of his heart when he was riding the high ground through a lonely midnight rainstorm. Something he’d heard howling behind him in the heart of a February blizzard. Something he’d heard in the wolf and the owl and the hungry grumble of the great brown bear.
Abraham saw a movement in the ashes, a stirring, soft and gentle.
And that’s when he saw the baby, lying there in the black of the ashes like the soot had laid itself down into some kind of cradle blanket.
He could see bones, charred black and twisted and damn near rendered down into some kind of wood, cluttered about the roots like some weird god-awful mulch.
And then it got worse.
The baby was suckling on a long dirty pine root, drawing the filthy resinous sap from the heart of that burned out root as if it were mother’s milk.
“Judas,” Abraham swore.
He knelt and picked the child up gently, mindful of its strangely prickled skin. The baby had a weirdish sort of stink to it, and some part of his soul wanted to smash the tiny thing’s skull against the trunk of the jack pine.
And then something else in the wind that whispered through the pine needles whispered deep within Abraham’s skull.
He turned back and looked over to Two Bear.
“I believe we’ll camp here in the valley,” Abraham said. “I believe we’ll stay a while.”
Two Bear slowly nodded as if he too was feeling convinced.
“This is a fine place to build ourselves a cabin,” Abraham said.
And the wind blew over the dead ashes, and the tree seemed to sway and dance and dream and the river laughed from somewhere over the distant hills.
Devil Tree Page 19