by Julia Fine
AS A CHILD, I’d asked my father, “What is death?”
Heaving earthward on a far point of our property, a large tree was threatening the byway. Mr. Abbott had told Peter to cut it down, claiming that it could, at any time, flatten his Trixie, the little terrier soon to suffer a less common fate at my hands. Supported by a last leg of trunk not yet splintered by the force of its leaning, the tree arched long over the spackled path that split our land from Abbott’s, a seldom-weeded trail that made a line—I had been told by Mother Farrow—from Urizon to a burial mound at the northernmost tip of the wood. Peter caught me by the tail of my oversized jacket as I tried to pass under the tree arch, my weight at age four no match for the grip of his fist.
“Why does the tree bend,” I said, “if it’s not making an entrance?”
“Because it’s dead,” said my father.
So I asked Peter the question that all parents must one day prepare to answer, the question that all children will eventually ask: “What is death?”
Peter released his hold on my jacket. He crouched down on the gravel and gestured for me to mimic his action. He lost his balance slightly while wiping the lenses of his glasses, preparing to speak.
“See these thick roots here, all stretching? See how they reach past the road, past the base of this tree? They fought with the roots of another species, and that lucky tree came out the winner.”
With this verbal sleight of hand, Peter had answered the much easier question: why. Why is this tree dead? A different wonder altogether, fascinating in the concrete traceability of its answer, opposing the unknowable what, the impossible where of the question I’d asked. What was death? My father, still living, could not tell me.
What really happened when I fingered a ladybug, fell to my knees upon the grass, or patted poor Trixie? Where was my mother? Where would I go now if I yanked off the bandages plastered to my arms, squeezed the skin at the inside of my elbow, heightening the blood flow?
Was death, as I had long suspected, darkness? I imagined a fathomless, floating nothing. No needles or pills or sweaty men with foul breath leaning over me. Just peace.
A Body Drained of Blood
Kathryn no longer knows what to make of the black-eyed girl risen from her bier, now that she is a sentient, blinking being, rather than a fresh-kept corpse. She is unsettled by the appetite with which the black-eyed girl watches the women, her undisguised hunger. Kathryn has spied the girl kneeling before the old corpse of a roebuck, her fingers tearing into its stiff body, raising the rotted flesh to her lips. The first death in the forest in centuries. Now Kathryn finds herself jumping at the crackle of a pine cone, the echo of a wood thrush, the scrape of a penknife against twigs. Will it be now? Has the black-eyed girl come for her? The wait is torturous.
She tries to focus her attention instead on those traveling the forest, the other breed of unlike body to consider, within and yet still so far from her reach. It feels to Kathryn like centuries since midsummer, although Lucy tells her it was just the other day that the wood opened, that Kathryn had her dalliance with that young man from the town. Kathryn had hoped that the awakening of the girl would mean a difference, that the wood would let her lovers stay longer, enter more often. Kathryn has been disappointed with the black-eyed girl’s slow stalking of the forest creatures, her apparent disdain for Kathryn’s needs. If she can open the wood on a whim, why not use it to all of their advantages?
This is not to say that Kathryn does not respect the black-eyed girl. She does. Hers is a boundless respect born of fear. She tries to work up her courage to ask the girl for favors, to start a simple conversation, but the uncanny darkness of those eyes, the languid movements . . . Each time Kathryn gathers her courage, she imagines the girl hissing at her. She imagines her own body torn open, the black-eyed girl fingering her unbound muscles, tasting her blood.
SHE GOES WITH Lucy to gather a bouquet of bluebell and honeysuckle to lay at the black-eyed girl’s altar. As she stoops to pluck a flower, Kathryn feels someone moving in the other wood beside them, kneeling where she kneels. Mumbling. Praying. A man.
“I can see him,” Kathryn says. Though still shut, the veil has been thinner since its recent midsummer opening, in a way it never has been before. Kathryn hears movement, smells cologne, catches sight of shadowy profiles. “I can feel him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Lucy.
“Perhaps if you were to ask the girl to bring him inside . . .”
“Contain yourself,” says Lucy. “He’s clearly trying to come in. As if he thinks he’s owed entrance. I know of men like that. He isn’t worth the risk.”
“But she let the other’s father—”
“That was different.”
A rush of air sputters through Kathryn’s lips. “Imagine,” she says, “the wind screaming. Imagine the scrape of his boots. I wonder if it has snowed. I wonder if the snow has melted.”
“Silliness,” says Lucy. “Besides, it is summer, remember?”
Kathryn sighs again, brimming with desire. She turns and leaves Lucy. She thinks of the dark-haired boy with blue eyes, lithe and muscular. The boy she’s seen before, a shadow slipping through Urizon. He’d peered in through a back window, sweating through his white collared shirt, and Kathryn could see the ripple of his biceps, could easily imagine the rest of his lean body underneath.
She pictures him now, and tries to reach for him with her mind, following his scent. When she inhales, an overwhelming new odor arrests her. Bullfrogs sing mating songs, trees shiver in the breeze. Kathryn inhales again and stops, looking down at her clogs, which are grimy with age, but still boast small patches of their original color. They are sinking into new-formed mud, a rich red stew of sticky earth. Kathryn kneels, sinking her hands into foreign soil. When she lifts them, her fingers are stained red with blood.
22
Days piled up like playing cards, with only occasional distinctions to separate one from the next: an unusually hot bowl of gruel, a new regimen of vitamins, a rainstorm against the windows, a heavy, dreamless sleep. I had given up my fantasies of Rafe trying to cure me. Surely by now those intentions would be clear. I had become the model captive, and it had not been enough. I had fooled myself again, working so hard to be what I thought Rafe wanted. I was finished with that now. I had done more than enough pandering. I had only enough energy to blink my eyes, to sigh a bit, submit to Coulton’s bloodletting. But just as I was losing myself, becoming the four walls of my prison, my warden’s tactics took a turn. Coulton came to me one day without needles, without food. He stood by the door, his eyes appraising.
“How much,” I asked him finally, voice hoarse from lack of use, “have you been making off each vial of my blood?” The most rational motivation I had landed on was money.
Coulton chuckled and removed his goggles. I thought of my father, removing his own. Maisie, have you come in with my tea?
“Not nearly enough, my dear accountant,” said Coulton. “If there’s coin to be had, I’ve been kept out of it, though I’m pleased to see you’re interested in profit.” His one dead tooth was shinier than the others, a magnet for saliva, fascinating in its rot. I wondered if my touch might stain it white.
“Serves you right,” I said.
Coulton laughed. He beckoned me closer, as if ready to confide. When I did not succumb, he sighed, and leaned back in the folding chair he’d brought to the room with him. It was blue plastic. It creaked under his weight.
“It’s been a strange few weeks,” Coulton said, straightening his shoulders, “for both of us, I reckon. Not a pleasant task, draining a living body, collecting the amount of blood your boy claims he needs. Not work I’d be a part of if it weren’t for his knowledge of some unsavory activities of my own.”
“Rafe is blackmailing you.”
“And so you likely wonder why it is I’m smiling.” Coulton had not been, but grinned widely now, displaying that awful front tooth. “I’m smiling because our friend here has
gone off on some adventure. Left you all alone with Coulton, and we’re going to have some fun. Just like you, I’m interested in profit. I’m interested in what we two, together, can do to make a profit. Do you follow?”
I did not.
“You see, the other day I came across a mouse you killed some weeks ago. I’d meant to throw it out, but, well, you know how things go. Kicked it into the hallway, forgot it. Anyway, imagine my delight to find the thing had never rotted. No smell. A little stiff, icy corpse, just the same as I’d last seen it.” He waited for me to respond, but I held my face firm. “Now imagine: squirrels and foxes, kittens and dogs, lining the shelves at a place like your Holzmeier’s. Showing none of the signs of decay you’d expect—simply frozen. Like taxidermy without all the mess. No need to pay for someone to skin the beasts, to stuff them. Cut out the middleman, as they say.” Coulton crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, pleased. I hoped he would tip over.
“You mean you want to sell dead animals?”
“Frozen witch’s familiars,” he corrected, “for twice the usual price.” His dead tooth, I noticed suddenly, had a spot of remaining white at its corner, the white paw of an otherwise black cat.
“Let me see Rafe again,” I said. “Let me talk to him.”
Coulton laughed outright. “You think that would make a difference? Besides, as I told you, he’s long gone.”
“It isn’t good if I touch animals. You have to understand. It hurts people more than it helps them, will hurt you . . .” I realized that I was pleading with him, my voice rising, making me seem younger, as desperate as I felt. Coulton cackled. Changing tactics, aware that our time to talk was limited, that soon he would be gone and I’d be sitting here alone, I steadied my voice and continued: “Nobody thinks it’s real. The souvenirs you sell to Holzmeier’s. A joke, it’s all just silly.”
“Oh, no, little one, they’re set in their beliefs. The people know what they want. Who are we to deny them? A special thing, it is, is witchcraft.”
“I’m not a witch,” I said.
“So say they all.”
PERHAPS THIS WAS how I would die: mauled by some wild animal, or starved to death as I barricaded myself behind my cot. I swore that I would not play Coulton’s game, that I would hide from any beast that he brought me, no matter how vicious, no matter how sweet, no matter how much I craved touch after weeks without Marlowe.
Coulton brought his sacrifices into my underground chamber, and from the look of things (his red-rimmed eyes, his claw-scratched hands), the task of collecting them had not been pleasant. The animals cried, scrabbling in their boxes, and Coulton grimaced when he dumped them in with me, seeming almost sorry as he double-locked the door behind him.
My first was an angry dog, a stray, from the look of it, roughly the size of Marlowe. Snarling, maybe rabid, it bared sharp yellow teeth. Saliva gleamed like spiderwebs, slid slowly from its jowls.
“I won’t hurt you,” I whispered, aware as the words left my lips how unlikely they were. I held out my hands, palms open in surrender.
Unfortunately, the animal saw this as a sign of aggression. The dog lunged toward me. For a moment I debated holding to my word, simply sitting and submitting to its bite, but an image of what Coulton might do with my injured body flashed through my mind. I was gripped by a rage as intense as if the damage had already been done.
Our collision was a frenzied burst of action, a firecracker popping and then hissing, sizzling still. I left the encounter with a tooth mark at my shoulder, scratches across my chest, a purplish-yellow bruise budding just beneath the skin. The dog left as a corpse.
I stared at the dead animal. The dog seemed smaller, once stilled, less enemy than comrade, afraid and abused, not so different from myself. Perhaps all it needed was a thorough grooming, some affection, and it would have become a companion comparable to Marlowe. Or perhaps this dog had been content to roam the moorland, to be citizen of crags and grass and sky. Who could know, now, what its life might have held, had it not intertwined with mine?
I forced myself to sit with these thoughts. I had killed, with aim to kill and kill completely. For the first time, I had tried to end a life, and with success. I’d have imagined shame and guilt, a sense of failure, but as I looked on the stilled animal I felt only a full-body numbness. I felt tired, and centuries old.
I THOUGHT OF another story, one every child of Coeurs Crossing knew by heart. I’d heard it first from Mother Farrow, and after had perused our library at Urizon, looking for some mention in a history of our region that might further flesh it out. I’d found several references that could make the tale true, though Peter cautioned me that it was legend, and as such embellished and altered over the years, like an old car whose parts have been slowly replaced until little remains of its initial model.
Once there was a great empire to the south that wanted our country in its fold. (Country being, here, a very loose term for the land and the spattering of native tribes that nursed it. This was centuries ago; before the rise of modern cities, before men sailed across the sea.) As one of the northernmost settlements, the land that would, in time, become our village was spared the greedy empire’s initial rapes and pillages. Those who lived there were left mostly to themselves. Of course, this could not last. Eventually the empire sent its troops to take the land and civilize its people. Some fought, many surrendered, even more were killed.
At this point in the story, the history books revered the brave soldiers who crushed one final pocket of resistance. Led, it is said, by a brother and a sister, one of the stronger forest cults would not submit. They used guerrilla tactics and crude weaponry in an attempt to hold back their would-be oppressors. They caused enough of a to-do to be remembered in their conquerors’ books, but could not halt the tide of what those books called progress.
The southern troops were stronger, in number and in weaponry and skill, and they thoroughly routed the rebels. The siblings were captured and taken to their enemy’s camp, rumored to have rested on the spot where Urizon would be built centuries later. The sister was tortured, kept prisoner, used most foully, until she escaped one spring morning right from under the empire’s eyes. The brother was sent south and made to fight. This was a common enough punishment in those times. These were the days when crowds would gather at arenas to watch gladiatorial combat, cheering as men battled to the death. Mother Farrow claimed the brother became a champion fighter, the most ferocious, the most cunning, of thousands. She told me this with pride, smacking her tongue against toothless old gums.
Looking down at the dog, contemplating my own situation, I reasoned myself a sort of gladiator: imprisoned, ripped from my home to be thrown into a slapdash arena with no choice but to fight to the death. There was no reason to feel guilty about what I had done. Did the gladiator wonder what became of the subjects of his triumph? He did not. That brother, I was sure, had killed countless wild animals. He’d killed men. His only thought his own survival, the brief burst of his victory, no matter its price.
MY SPOILS INCREASED. There passed a stream of weeks of orchestrated killings. Days of dodging bites and blows that brought me to exhaustion, a repetition that stripped me of any lingering sympathy toward the animals I killed. And with each death, these beasts renewed me: I absorbed their will to live, their instinct to fight. They reminded me an outside world existed, a world to which I was determined to return.
In my readings as a child, I’d been enamored by the Greco-Roman god Charon, the ferryman who ushered souls across the river that divided the land of the living from that of the dead. I’d seen him as an ancient compatriot, the god in whose image I’d been made. To pay Charon for passage from one harbor to the next, coins were placed upon the eyes of corpses, hidden under their tongues. I saw each animal I met as my own payment to old Charon, who would surely love a life force more than coin, and might ferry me from this living death to the realm of life outside. It was, I knew, when I let myself think back to who I’d been before
my capture, a weak justification for my actions. But in my collusion with death I’d had my first true taste of agency, of power. I’d discovered that I liked it.
There was a moment before the final moment—as each animal looked at me, aware that it was breathing its last breath—that felt like being known for who I truly was. A me that I had always been, but hidden. A fire that I had refused to acknowledge was slowly being stoked, a hunger that I’d long tried to ignore could not be sated.
Toymaker and Child
In his new home, this soaring elder, Peter has much time to reflect. He can sense the tree’s disdain for its visitor: unlike its roots’ fungi, whose fibers suck nutrients but offer protection in return, Peter’s presence offers no advantage. Out, the tree whispers in a tongue not known to man, though Peter feels its fibers fighting against him. A new verse to add to the song of its desire: More light. Taller. Wider. Out. The elder feels each tear in the fabric of its trunk and tries to heal the fissures, pressing Peter tighter, forcing him to contort his body, knocking his glasses, which Helen had rescued from the forest floor, out of his reach.
In a way, Peter thinks, this penitentiary is an honor. He remembers the great wizard Merlin trapped in his own ancient oak tree, and for a moment feels his chest swell with pride. What would his colleagues say, those venerated academics that had doubted the fusion of folklore and science, if they saw him here now? He’d always believed he was destined for greatness, for discovery. Peter had dreamed—
His shoulders sag, unable to continue the pretense. He cannot lie to himself any longer. This is penance.
Above him, around him, the elder dreams of soil. Dreams of glassy, glinting snow. Dreams of its own greatness—taller, wider, more light. It knows nothing of self-sabotage, regret, or restitution.