The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  I put the car in park and sat there for a moment, trying to calm myself and gather my thoughts. The red STOP octagon to my right wobbled in the wind. The dark forest surrounded me with ominous shadows, shivering limbs that looked like hands out of the corner of my eye. I watched the woods for unnatural movement.

  Maybe it was someone trying to mess with me.

  Who would do that?

  Maybe it was one of the kids that had come to town for my dad’s funeral.

  But how had they gotten into the house?

  They’d waited until I’d unlocked the doors to sneak in.

  How did they know I was coming?

  They didn’t.

  Maybe they were looking for a way in when I got there, and waited until the door was open. Then it hit me that I’d left all the doors unlocked. Dammit!

  I looked into the rearview mirror, then peered over my shoulder. I could see the road behind me and the dead grass around the asphalt, limned in the red of my tail lights. There was no devil chasing down the car, no cloven-hoofed demon pursuing me. I wondered if it were safe to go back to the house.

  To hell with that.

  I pulled up the contact list on my phone again and rang Sawyer Winton. I got his voice mail. “Hey. This is Ross. I need to talk to you. Please call me back.”

  _______

  I was sitting in the parking lot of a gas station drinking a beer when Sawyer called me back. As he picked up, I could hear uproarious laughter in the background. “Hey. What’s up?”

  “Was that you at my father’s house?” I asked, skipping any pretense.

  “Huh?” Sawyer said. “I was up there a couple days ago with Noreen and Judith, helping your mom clean. Is that what you mean?”

  “Helping my mom clean?”

  “Yeah. We’d went to Mrs. Brigham looking for you—to ask you about the petition—but she told us you weren’t in town yet. Then she told us that she had to go, that she had work to do, and when we asked about it, she told us she was going to your dad’s house to clean, so we offered to help.”

  “Oh. Anyway, I was just up there. I went up there to get something. Something...“ I paused to put the next part together in my head. “Something happened. I saw something. I don’t know what it was. I thought it might have been you or maybe one of the others.”

  “Not sure I understand, Chief.”

  “There was...I was out back in the woodshed and saw someone go into the house. I went inside to look and found something hiding in one of the bedroom closets. I don’t know what the hell it was. I thought it might have been one of you in some kind of costume. It scared the hell out of me. I swear on...I swear it looked like a—like a demon.”

  I struggled to illustrate my point, shaking my other fist, pressing the phone to my temple. “Like Satan or something. I ran right out of there and jumped in the car and hauled ass.”

  Sawyer sounded either unimpressed or as if he were talking to a mental patient. “A...demon?”

  “Please don’t patronize me,” I said. “It touched me, nnnngh! It reached out of the closet and grabbed my wrist! It had these—claws, like a goddamned hawk. Black talons. Skin, raw pink, like a nasty sunburn. It had short little horns, and when I saw it, it was looking at me, with these bright yellow eyes, like a cat’s eyes!”

  “Hey, calm down, man,” said the voice on the phone. “Nobody’s talkin’ white jackets just yet, okay? We’re on the same side, here.”

  “I need to know, and I need to know right now. Was that you or somebody you might know, Sawyer? Because if it was, I swear on a stack of Bibles that if it was one of you, I’m going to my motel room right now and I’m going to burn every box of my dad’s notes in there. You will not see—”

  “Woah!” Sawyer interrupted, “Let’s not get crazy here. It wasn’t me, Mr. Brigham.”

  “Don’t call me Mr. Brigham, Sawyer,” I reminded him, my voice exasperated, “We’re almost the same age.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I guess you’re right. Look, Ross. Are you sure you saw what you think you saw? Maybe some kind of animal got into the house and you mistook it for something else. It was dark, I’m sure, and I’ll bet you’ve had a long day. And maybe—maybe your dad’s death is finally hitting you. I know when my grandmother died a couple years ago I didn’t cry at all. I thought something was wrong with me.

  “All I could do was wander around at the funeral making sure my family was okay. I thought I was some kind of robot, but I guess death hits everybody differently. I was screwed up for a couple weeks after that. I thought I actually saw her ghost at one point.”

  “Maybe you’re right about my emotions, or whatever, but I know what I saw. I know what reached out of the closet and grabbed me.”

  “I believe you, just don’t hurt me.”

  I snorted at that one. “So I guess we’re both in agreement that I’m crazy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Okay. Look. Uhhh—all right, so I need you to do me a favor.”

  “Anything, man.”

  “I ran off and left all the doors unlocked. If I’m going back to that house to rectify that, I need backup. I need a wingman.”

  “Whatever you saw really scared you, didn’t it? Are you serious?”

  “As a heart attack. Sawyer, I was holding an axe and I had a knife in my pocket when I opened that closet door. I’m sitting at the Kangaroo down the road, and I have no idea where the axe is, and I’m sitting here drinking a beer. I hate beer.”

  “I like beer. Beer is good. Especially craft beer. There’s this place near where my brother lives that has peanut butter beer. Ain’t that righteous?”

  “Totally tubular. Can you come out here or not?”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll be down there in a minute. The convenience store down the road from your dad’s house, right?”

  “Yep. And bring a weapon if you have one.”

  _______

  The glass bottle banged into the inside of the dumpster as I trashed it, Sawyer’s headlights washing across me like surf-crash. He was driving a red 1988 Toyota 4-Runner with the hardtop shell off, and it was meticulously clean. As he got close, he turned down the heavy metal he’d been listening to at rocket-engine volume.

  “We’ll take the Yota,” he said as I got in. “It’s got a little more power if we need to make a quick getaway. That Ford you’re driving looks a little...depressed. And that leopard-print furry steering wheel. Woof.”

  “Hey, don’t talk about Agnes like that,” I said, glancing at my boxy, cream-colored Mercury Topaz.

  Sawyer pulled out of the parking lot and started down the road to what I was now thinking of as The Devil’s Den. I noticed that his camera was mounted on the dash, recording our conversation. “That’s the only wheel cover I could find that would fit. The steering wheel was sticky when I bought it and I couldn’t clean it off.”

  “Agnes?”

  “Yeah. I look at the car and I think, ‘If that car was a person, it’d be a chain-smoking little old lady named Agnes.’”

  Sawyer chuckled. “Yeah, I guess I see what you mean.”

  I looked down and saw a ball bat in the floor board. “That’s your weapon, then?”

  “Yep. I got carjacked once a few years ago, so now I keep it in the car with me. I guess there’s not much room to swing it, maybe, but you ever been poked in the face with a ball bat?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “It hurts.”

  We rode on in silence, and then I made an attempt at small talk. I think after the last hour or so, I needed something normal. “So what’re you up to around here? You said earlier that you were visiting with some fans, or friends, while you were in town?”

  “You’ll just think it’s silly,” Sawyer said, nodding dismissively.

  I said, “I doubt that. I’ve participated in some fairly silly things in my life.”

  “We were having a sort of mini-convention for The Fiddle and the Fire at the Hampton Inn. We were all getting drunk and acting out s
cenes from the novels wearing our costumes. It was a lot of fun.”

  He took a deep draught of a soda wedged into the console. “Barry managed to do the entire soliloquy from King Fairbairn’s siege in a really...really bad Scottish accent. I mean, it was hilarious. You shoulda seen it. We’re talking about making it a yearly thing. We just...come down here for the weekend in costumes and get loaded.”

  “Maybe if we survive the night, I might join you. I still have a lot of catching up to do before I can start writing.”

  “I’m sure the others would appreciate the chance to thank you for agreeing to finish the book. Have you thought about continuing the series?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, truthfully.

  “I understand.”

  “We’ll see how this goes. The main thing I am concerned with at this point is doing the original series justice.”

  “Now, I’ve only been out here once,” Sawyer said, peering through the windshield at the road ahead of us. “And it was during the day. You might have to let me know when we get there.”

  “It’s the fourth mailbox after you get on Tollemache Road. The next driveway. Here we are.” The 4-Runner crackled across the gravel as we pulled into the country driveway alongside the Nova. Even in the relative darkness, I could see the divots in the lawn where I’d carved ruts in the grass as I fled in terror.

  “Shit,” said my wingman, looking over me out of my window at the destruction. “I’m getting a little nervous now. I’m bowed up like a Halloween cat.”

  “You? I’m the one that saw it.”

  “You said it looked like a devil or a demon or something?”

  “Uhhh...yeah. Like...you remember that movie Clash of the Titans?” I asked, making sword-stabbing motions. I’d been thinking of appropriate analogies since I’d called Sawyer earlier, and finally came up with something close enough to what I’d seen. “With Harry Hamlin and the little mechanical golden owl?”

  “How could I forget? That’s a seminal piece of film history. Right up there with Krull, The Neverending Story, The Beastmaster, and Conan the Barbarian.”

  “Remember the ugly dude with the curly hair and funky skin? Maybe his name was Calephebas or Calibos or something. I think Harry Hamlin cut his head off at some point and carried it around in a bag. Anyway, that’s what I saw in that closet, except it was bald and had pale pink skin.”

  Sawyer’s big bright eyes gazed at me, sparkling in the eerie green light from the dashboard. “No offense, Ross, but that’s scary as shit. I think I might be regretting coming out here with you.”

  As I got out, Sawyer was digging under the seat and I heard him swear under his breath. He jumped out of the truck and we walked through the damp late-night chill to the front porch, where the front door was standing wide open.

  I looked over at Sawyer and saw that he was carrying his baseball bat and the camera. There was no visible light emanating from it, but I could see on the screen that it was in nightvision mode, the viewfinder screen displaying the world in shades of mint green.

  The house was still as dark and silent as I’d left it. I started up the stairs to the second floor, beckoning to Sawyer to follow me. He trailed behind, sneaking almost cartoonishly, gripping the bat with a white-knuckled fist as it rested on his shoulder.

  I could hear a faucet dripping as we crested the landing and I looked at Sawyer. He was biting his lips in anticipation.

  I stepped in and turned the handle as far as it would go, cutting off the leak. As I did, I noticed something odd: the shower curtain was closed again. I used the tip of the knife to pry back the edge of it and peer into the tub, my heart thundering within me.

  To my relief, nothing awaited me.

  I lingered momentarily in the soft green light of Sawyer’s camera, trying to remember if I’d left the curtain drawn when I’d come through the first time, but I wasn’t willing to stand around in there staring at my spooky reflection in the mirror.

  When I came out, Sawyer was standing guard, looking up and down the hallway, the bat at the ready. I tapped him on the shoulder and felt him jerk in surprise. I nodded toward the back bedroom.

  He pushed the door open with the end of the baseball bat and I rushed in SWAT-style with my knife, waving my cellphone around. My foot struck something and a loud clatter scared me bad enough to make me shout. Sawyer was beside me in an instant, ready to start swinging. I have to give him credit for that.

  “What?! What is it?”

  I picked up the hatchet I’d kicked and showed it to him, then jabbed the tip of the knife into a fat, yellowed Nora Roberts paperback lying on the dresser, so that it was standing up. I left it there and I pointed at the closet, hefting the axe, preparing to defend myself.

  Right there, I mouthed at Sawyer, my face a ghostly green in the display on his camera, my eyes gleaming with an oblique light like a telescope lens. That’s where I saw it. Get ready.

  The door was still open. I cat-stepped toward it, too aware of the floorboards shifting under my feet, every creak and click amplified to deafening levels, a stage upon which I crept and fretted, sure that at any time, I was about to be disemboweled by some horrific spectre from the dirty, black, root-veined underside of the earth.

  I slid the axe-blade between the clothes hanging inside, slowly, and then swept the hatchet back and forth, chuffing out loud in a high voice of fear and certainty.

  A frigid thrill erupted at the base of my neck and turned my hands and face into numb cadaver parts, and my hair prickled at the sight of a silhouette crouching in the back of the closet, waving something menacingly at me in the weak glow of my cellphone.

  I froze, muttering, “Aaaa—aaaah!”

  “W—wait a minute,” Sawyer said, leaning over my shoulder to gaze into the abyss that was staring back at me. I thrust my cellphone toward the jackets and shirts and realized that I was looking at a floor-length mirror, leaning against the back wall of the closet.

  Sawyer relaxed. “You have got to be kidding me. It’s a mirror. It’s a goddamned mirror. You saw your own reflection in a mirror that was in the back of the closet.”

  I whirled on him. “What I saw earlier, that was no mirror. Something reached out of there and grabbed me. Don’t even go there. I’m not crazy, and I’m not stupid, and I’m no coward. I saw what I saw and I felt what I felt.”

  “What I feel is freaking stupid,” Sawyer said, walking away. He turned off his camera and looked at his watch. “It’s midnight...I’m getting out of here and hitting the hay.”

  What I felt right then was the suspicion that someone had been grinding up crazy pills and stirring them into my dinner.

  I saw no sense in trying to explain, or excuse, or rationalize any further, so I just gave up and let him leave. I followed him back down to his truck, both of us traipsing through the moonshadows. The fear and trepidation were disspelled by the strange mix of disappointment and relief, oh, great waves of relief coursing through my system, leaving me spent and dull-witted.

  We rode back to the gas station in silence, but my mind rocketed through plans on a red-hot wire, powered by the last dregs of adrenaline in my brain. I would be back tomorrow, and I would see in the heartless blaze of day, just what was so special about that mirror.

  White Lightning

  THE AUDITORIUM WAS PACKED WITH people I’d never met. They’d all shown up to see people that I’d never meet again. I stood on the basketball court floor, my Oxfords just as polished as the boards under my feet, looking up at them, scanning the crowd for someone I might know, hoping someone had come to see me.

  I was alone in the thunderous pandemonium of that screaming standing ovation. My green wool uniform made me sweat in the harsh glare of the studio lights overhead, reflected by the gold buttons on my lapels and the medals on my chest. Hundreds of beaming faces regarded me from the stands, none of them familiar, none of them clapping for me.

  I closed my eyes. Silence fell in a sequential rush from the back to the front li
ke a late summer shower, until I was an island in an ocean of soundlessness.

  When I reopened them, my breath caught in my throat.

  The stands were empty, but I was no longer alone. My father stood in front of me, holding a six-shooter at arm’s length, a Colt Single Action Army .45, pointing it at my forehead.

  When I didn’t move, he flipped the gun around with a flick of his wrist and offered it to me, saying, “You don’t know where you’re goin’, son, ‘til you can see where you’ve been.”

  I looked down at the revolver and the pink, black-taloned hand holding it.

  _______

  I awoke with a start, and opened my eyes to cold iron light seeping between the hotel room curtains. I felt like I’d been twisted and wrung out by a Greek god. Every joint in my body was radiating heat and my left tricep felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to it. I tried to shake off the grainy-eyed remnants of the melatonin I’d taken to fall asleep.

  I’ve never been able to sleep in hotel rooms, for some reason. I don’t know if it’s a mental block, or the highway noise, or the unfamiliarity, or what. As I lay there under my warm blanket reassembling my brain and gearing up for another day, the phone rang.

  I picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Morning,” said Maxwell Bayard. “I’m going to grab something to eat. You game?”

  _______

  I slid into the booth across from Bayard and ordered us coffee. The IHOP was packed with people. Luckily, they were all homebodies still recovering from a night’s sleep since it was half past eight and the workaday crew was already on the clock. Everything was relatively quiet except for the clinking of silverware, and the occasional snippet of a mumbled conversation. The P.A. system softly howled George Jones’s “White Lightning”.

  My dad’s agent picked up a newspaper from the box outside, took the top section and I took the funnies. The drizzle that had been going on all morning had progressed to a downpour, and sheeted against the safety glass in staccato handfuls, blown by the wind.