The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  My cellphone’s glow washed over the unseeing eyes of the house. My father had inherited it from his father, who had inherited it from his father. Corinthian columns supported the roof like a Greek temple, screening the face of the building from the outside world like a mask. Their long, tall shadows capered west and tumbled off the end of the porch as I stepped up onto it and pulled the key from my pocket.

  My face fell when I discovered that it didn’t fit in the deadbolt or the doorknob. I used the key on my keyring to open it (given to me by my mother this morning), and let myself in. To my chagrin, the power bill had been due when my father passed, and so it went unpaid and now the electricity was off.

  I was standing in the foyer, a cavernous front room where a flight of stairs curled along one wall to a balcony overhead.

  I swept the cellphone over the accumulations of an old man’s lifetime as I forayed deeper into the house, walking past an antique grand piano into the living room. The faint smell of habitation came to me, the camphor of cough drops and the dank, sweet yeast of age. There, a sofa with an avocado-green linen slipcover tempted me with its soft embrace.

  I refused and kept moving, past my grandfather’s roll-top desk and the Magnavox boob-tube with foiled rabbit ears. I went into the kitchen, passing between bookshelves crammed with names.

  Simmons, Lumley, Barker, Koontz and King epics and haunters. Ragged decades of National Geographic, appliance manuals. Ludlum, Grisham, and Clancy thrillers. Obscure horror and fantasy from the 70s and 80s. My light passed over the spines of the books and a wistful frisson marched up my spine at the sight of so many recognizable pseudonyms.

  The kitchen was spotless in relation to the rest of the house. The air was pungent with an acrid citrus aroma. My mother must have cleaned it after I’d left. Dry dishes were piled in the drain, silverware gleaming in my searchlight.

  The fridge was empty, the door ajar.

  There was an open padlock on the cellar door, installed years ago to keep me from taking a header down the stairs (as a child, of course). The key didn’t work on it, so I opened the door and made my way down the creaky steps into the damp darkness of the basement.

  The floor was painted with some gray sealant that kept the cellar dry and clean, so there wasn’t much of an odor. I turned this way and that, looking for locks that might perhaps fit the key now resting in my pocket. A chest freezer stood open to my immediate left, devoid of contents, dry and warm.

  I felt a small twinge of guilt at not participating in the clean up, which I would have done, had I gotten to Blackfield soon enough. I continued investigating the cellar, wondering who my mother had gotten to help.

  In a back wall, beyond a minefield of heirlooms, furniture, and dubious appliances, was a padlocked door. I picked my way through the silent forest of chair legs, cheap paintings, space heaters older than the kids working at Jackson’s, and shuffled between a decrepit bookshelf and a very dirty armoire until I stumbled into a small space littered with dead pillbugs and cottony cobwebs.

  The key did not work on the padlock. I sighed in disappointment. What was I even doing? What made me come looking for a lock, anyway? What was I looking for?

  Was it some Great Secret, some hidden inspiration, some foul and lurking deed that my father had hidden away from the world for decades until I came along and dragged it screaming and kicking into the light of day? My deformed twin brother, locked in some dank oubliette behind a bag of Christmas decorations and my father’s teetering collection of funk vinyl and issues of Hustler 1987-1994?

  I sneezed, bracing myself against the door, and noticed that the padlock wasn’t locked, just inserted into the hasp and rusted solid. I twisted it, jerking it this way and that, until it broke in a shower of corroded brown steel. An eldritch breath of cold, wet air seeped through the crack like fog creeping over the ground in some old-timey vampire movie.

  I pulled the door open and shined the cellphone inside.

  A crawlspace full of white mildew, dirt, and rotten material. I could see the underside of the front porch and the retaining wall that ran the exterior length of the platform overhead. I forced the door shut and turned around, and screamed like I’d been goosed.

  I was not prepared for the shock of turning around and finding myself standing face to face with Hugo Award nominee Ed Brigham.

  Old Goats and Indian Chiefs

  I JERKED BACKWARDS, SWEARING AND falling against the door, sliding onto the concrete floor in surprise. I pointed my cellphone at the silhouette in front of me, and discovered I’d scared myself with a cardboard cutout. It was an old promotional stand-up from my father’s last big book tour, covered in a fine layer of dust and paled from sun.

  The man in the picture was smiling wanly, holding up a thick hardback copy of the fourth novel. His hair wasn’t entirely gray yet, and he was a good thirty pounds lighter. He still looked like a particularly weatherbeaten Kevin Flynn.

  “Ya dirty son of a bitch,” I said, getting to my feet.

  I slid between the bookshelf and armoire, and hiked back to the stairway, where I brushed the dust off my clothes and thumped back up the stairs like a tired sasquatch. I came back out into the kitchen and looked around, half-expecting to get jumped in the dark.

  Nobody was waiting for me, so I opened the back door, trying the key on the deadbolt and doorknob on the way out to the back yard.

  Outside, a chill wind told me that winter was coming, and it brought with it the soft, innocent trill of crickets and the susurrant cackle of a deep brook down the hill to my left. There, a waterwheel mill three times older than myself lurked at the limits of my light, a squat building made of river shale and redbrick.

  I could see from here that there was no door in the doorway to be locked. I played the cellphone glow across the Wilderness, and saw a woodshed standing at the treeline to my right.

  There was a spotty old padlock on it, and the key didn’t work, so I tried my keyring. It turned out to be the last one on the ring. When I got the door open I pointed the light inside and saw a work table with a modest array of tools lying on it and a C-clamp gripping the corner of a sliding closet door panel. Dried wood glue oozed out of a crack where the clamp was pinching it.

  To my left, a canvas tarp covered some large and lumpy object the size of a sofa.

  I pulled off the fabric and uncovered a 2002 Indian Chief Roadmaster with an aqua top and cream belly, leather seats and saddlebags.

  I swore under my breath and sat on the machine, my shoes crunching on the oil-spotted refrigerator carton underneath it. It was a work of art. I remembered something my mother had told me about my dad buying a bike several years ago, but I had no idea it was this fantastic. He had kept it in mint condition—probably came out here every day to tinker on it and clean it.

  I was ambushed by a longing for the old man. Just to see him again. To talk to him again. What was I thinking?

  “You only have one dad,” I said, holding the handlebars. “Sorry I didn’t come see you, you old goat.”

  I looked down at the gas gauge, feeling like the lowest of the low. “Why didn’t you come see me?” I asked the motorcycle, buttoning the top button on my thermal shirt. “Why didn’t you call? Did you not want me around? What gives?”

  The sound of a twig snapping outside made my heart jump.

  I froze, my ears straining to catch the furtive movement of a stranger. My eyes leapt from tool to tool until I looked down to my right and saw a woodaxe leaning against a stack of firewood that lined the wall. Too heavy.

  Lying next to it was a hatchet. I grabbed it and got up off the motorcycle, creeping toward the door.

  I got there just in time to look up at the house and see the back door swing shut. I resisted the urge to sprint across the yard and still made it to the back door in record time. I threw it open and stepped inside, but I couldn’t bring myself to run through the kitchen and up to the second floor.

  “Hello?” I called, yelling into the suffocating s
ilence.

  No answer. “Is anybody here?”

  Same as before. I tightened my grip on the hatchet, but made a detour to the kitchen sink, where I pulled a carving knife out of the dish drain and stuck it in one of the pockets of my cargo pants with the handle sticking out. My heart was pounding and all I could hear was my anxious breathing and the soft ripping sound of my shoes on the linoleum floor.

  I went into the living room, leaping through the doorway like a TV show cop and turning back and forth as I landed. The shadows reeled in dizzying swoops as I aimed the cellphone’s light around.

  No one lay in wait for me. I continued on to the foyer.

  The piano was unoccupied. As I moved past it, I very much knew that as I did so, it was going to reverberate with a deep, dissonant THUNNNNNG!, but luckily, I was proven wrong. Even so, I stared at it until I was halfway up the staircase curving along the wall to the landing overhead.

  I stepped onto the second floor and brandished the hatchet at the corridor leading to my left and right.

  In front of me was a huge framed print of the cover art of the first book in The Fiddle and the Fire series, a picture of a cowboy hat dangling from the top of a weathered fence post somewhere on a grassy prairie. A young boy was visible in the background, a thin, ragged-looking spectre, looking up at the hat.

  “Helloooooo!” I yelled into the reaches of the house.

  I looked over my shoulder at the glass chandelier hanging over the foyer, now eye-level with me, and the massive windows in the face of the house that looked out on the magnolia trees in the front yard, feathered goliaths hissing in the night breeze.

  The wind outside was blowing so hard I could hear the faint chuckling of the teardrop crystals in the chandelier. “Helloooo, who’s in here?” I shouted. “Whoever you are, you better come out, cause I got an axe, and if I find you, I’m gonna fuck you up!”

  The corridor yawned before me, a tunnel of dingy, florid wallpaper and old hardwood, studded with gilded paintings and wall sconces draped with the same teardrops as the chandelier. My eyes began to burn and I remembered to blink.

  A bathroom lay to my right. I checked that first, kicking the door open and jabbing the cellphone inside. I stepped in and felt a chill at the sight of myself standing there, my face underlit by the soft blue luminescence of the cellphone. The shower curtain was closed, but it was still rustling in the wind from the door flying open.

  Steeling myself, I reached out and snatched it open.

  There was nothing inside. I exhaled in relief, and left the shower curtain pulled out of the way to eliminate the blind spot.

  Back outside, there was a meaty bump down the hallway to my right, like someone dropping an orange.

  My head snapped in that direction and my heart roared in my chest. I debated fleeing the house, but the hatchet in my hand drowned out the instinct of self-preservation. Someone is in my dad’s house, I thought, my fingers writhing on the axe’s handle as I prepared myself to swing it.

  A territorial little voice in the back of my mind said that this wouldn’t do, no, it wouldn’t do at all. I kept making my way into the depths of the house and came to the upstairs guest room. I shoved the door open with the end of the hatchet and stepped in with the axe raised high, like some kind of Viking policeman, my upper body on a swivel.

  I looked in the closet, but there was nothing inside but a cluster of hangers hanging on the pole. When I opened the door, they clattered together with a musical jingle. On my hands and knees, I lifted the bedskirt and peered under the box springs.

  No one lay underneath the bed.

  That’s good. I don’t know what I would have done if there was. Probably shit my pants.

  Nothing left but my dad’s bedroom at the end of the hall. The door was open when I got there, just a crack, just enough for me to see a sliver of darkness beyond. I eased it open and my all-revealing light pushed inside.

  Ed’s bedroom was just as cluttered as I expected it to be. It wasn’t filthy, but it could use a definite once-over. As I stood there in the dark, surveying the room, I remembered that this was where they found him.

  He had been lying on the bed, with blue lips. Maxwell Bayard had been the one to find him, he had come to talk to my dad about the plans HBO was cooking up for the book series and discovered the body here in this very room.

  God, I had been such an inconsiderate, selfish son of a bitch, I thought, looking down at the bed. It had been neatly made—probably by my poor mother.

  I noticed that the topmost blanket was the brown goat-hair throw I’d bought in Afghanistan and sent to my dad for Christmas. I’d wondered if he’d even appreciated it. I wondered if it had been on the bed already, or if my mom had put it on when she made it.

  Next to a nasty ashtray full of mashed butts, there were a few books on the nightstand, some of them reference books about firearms or medieval warfare tactics, some of them novels. The windows were covered with blackout curtains that night-shifters put up to help them sleep during the day. A pewter candle-stand was also there, that seemed to be a statue of a voluptuous nude holding up a squat green candle.

  There was a noticeable lack of fantasy collectibles in here. I figured Ed would’ve been the type to fill his house with plates and statuettes and figurines depicting various figures from movies and books. Ceramic wizards and dragons with pewter claws and staves, scrying the future through glass marbles meant to be crystal balls. Leggy painted faeries with child-like faces.

  None of that was in here. To be honest, it could’ve been the nest of any average middle-aged man, if not for the lack of sports paraphernalia. If anything, it looked like he’d been a research nut.

  His laptop sat on a white TV tray by the bed, a two-legged affair that stood on the floor or collapsed to sit across one’s lap. It was several years old, but immaculately kept. I got down and looked under the bed. There was nothing there except for a few old electronics boxes. I tapped them with the axe. They were empty.

  I stood up, confused. I knew I’d heard something in here earlier. Something had come into the house, through the back door. I just knew it.

  I turned to leave and saw the closet door on the other side of a folded-up card table and a vacuum cleaner. I picked up the vacuum and moved it, slid the table out of the way, and opened the closet door.

  Jackets, sweaters, and other winter clothes hung there, reeking of years and boric acid. Tweed, thermals, leather, the thick cotton of sweatshirts, an aging quilt I remembered seeing on my parents’ bed when I was a kid. I shuffled through them, though at this point I wasn’t sure what I was looking for anymore.

  Was I looking for an intruder, or something else? Was I looking for something that could connect me to my father? I shoved a heavy coat aside and caught a glimpse of a goatish horn, and snarling teeth in a pink face.

  A hand took hold of my wrist, a claw wrapped in leather, with black, hook-like talons.

  Terrifying yellow eyes blazed at me.

  Normand stumbled across the vast Emerald Desert, his mouth a puckered, dry pit full of sticky teeth and a leather tongue. The flaky, glittering dust-sand made an epic chore of breathing. It got into his eyes a dozen times and cut his whites, irritated him beyond belief. After an hour of trying to watch where he was going, he couldn’t take it anymore. He closed his eyes, pulled his hat down over them, and walked blind.

  They had double-crossed him. The sons of bitches. They’d ran with the whole take and left him for the Kingsmen. He still couldn’t believe he’d escaped with nary a scratch. It had been a nasty chase.

  He stepped on a rock the size of his head and stumbled, pitching headfirst down a steep slope of shifting green sand. When he finally rolled to a stop at the bottom, Normand rested for a moment, upside-down and exhausted, his feet pointed up the hill. The first thing he did was check his droplegs to see if his father’s gun was still there.

  —The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 3 “The Rope and the Riddle”

  Crazy Pills
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  HALFWAY DOWN THE STAIRS, I slipped and went head over heels, tumbling the last seven steps and sprawling in a stunned heap on the wood floor. I knew I’d be a wreck in the morning, but at the moment, my adrenaline made me invincible.

  I shoved the front door open and sprinted into the front yard. When I got to the Topaz I ran around to the driver’s side and slid in the wet grass, coming down hard on my left shoulder.

  I’m still amazed that I never fell on the knife.

  I wrenched the door open and crammed myself into the car, cranked it, threw it into Reverse, and did a J-turn in the driveway, spinning out in the mud and flinging gravel all over the Nova and into the trees. I came out of the driveway and into the highway going sideways, and almost lost control of the car.

  I pulled out my cellphone, trying to keep from doing a header into a culvert. I could hear the mud clattering against the car’s undercarriage. I was thumbing through my contacts before I realized I had no idea who to call. Who would believe me? Who would care? Who could do anything about it?

  I was going seventy-eight miles an hour. I took my foot off the accelerator as my heart-rate sank toward normal. What the hell was in that closet? What the hell grabbed me?

  I shook my shirt sleeve down and turned on the dome light with a click to look at my wrist.

  There was nothing on it—no slime, no cuts, no bruises, no burns. I glanced into the back seat, turned the light off, and continued driving.

  The car slowed to an acceptable speed and I could feel my grip on the steering wheel relaxing. It occurred to me that I was no longer carrying the hatchet. Somewhere in the back of my mind I wondered where I’d left it. I found the carving knife in my pocket and tossed it into the passenger seat.

  I came to the end of the road, a T-junction in the middle of nowhere, and slowed to a halt, my headlights illuminating a bright yellow bidirectional sign across the road.