The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  “You’ve got my cellphone number?”

  “Yep.”

  She pulled him inside the car by his collar and gave him a long, sensuous kiss. They broke off and Sawyer just looked at her, dazed, still stooped over with his head in the car.

  “We’ll see each other again,” Noreen said, smiling. She turned the engine over, putting on her seatbelt, then put the car in gear and eased away. Sawyer watched her dwindle away to nothing. I just stood there, too, letting the moment linger. Life is a series of moments like this. They are what make us who we are. I’d be a rude friend to take this one away.

  Once the spell had worn off and the girl was gone, he turned to me and sighed, giving me unspoken permission to intrude. “I know, buddy,” I said, and tossed my arm around his shoulders as we walked away, giving him a commiserating pat on the back.

  I treated him to dinner at a mom-and-pop seafood joint down the street from the Hampton. The sky was still a river of nickels, but the rain had ceased for the time being. The water standing on the street turned the headlights of every passing car into long-legged neon spiders that hissed and crashed past the windows.

  I panned Sawyer’s camera away from the pale indigo evening and put it on the table. “So what do you do back home?”

  “I used to think I was going to be a computer programmer, but a career in tech support didn’t quite agree with my sense of patience, so I’m going to film school at Full Sail.”

  “Really? That explains the camera. I wondered what you were up to. I knew it wasn’t just vacation video.”

  “Yeah. I’m making a sort of YouTube documentary about E. R. Brigham, but things are getting a little more...interesting, I guess you could say.”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “I’m thinking of doing something a little more cinematic with it. So what are you doing back home?” asked Sawyer. “I haven’t seen much about you since you enlisted in the Army.”

  “I used my G.I. Bill to go to art school. Right now when I get home I’ll be doing freelance art, and working for a little design shop in Kentucky that does things like T-shirts for ball teams, promotional office equipment for companies, coffee mugs, hats, that kind of thing.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “So you say you’re putting this on YouTube?”

  “Yup. That is okay, right? Shit, I didn’t even think about a privacy waiver. I am such an asshole.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  We ate quietly for a few minutes, and then Sawyer spoke up, leading with a sudden inhale, a hesitation, and then, “So what was it like? I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”

  “It was...different,” I said, talking as I ate. “One of the most incredible experiences of my life. You probably don’t want to get me started. I’ll talk about it for hours.”

  “I don’t have anywhere pressing to be at the minute. What did you do?”

  “Logistics. I picked up quite a bit of Italian while I was there, and even a bit of Dari.”

  I loved explaining what I did. I loved it every time someone asked me. “I may not be as public as my dad was, but in my honest opinion, I accomplished things just as important as his fantasy series. I made sure shipments of food and crop seeds got to the people that needed it, and I made sure that people that got hurt got to medical care. I heard a call to the medevac team one day about a farmer whose head was stepped on by a cow.”

  “Did you—umm—see any ‘action’?” Sawyer seemed ashamed to ask, unsure of what word to use.

  “My camp was attacked several times. Mortars, rockets. I was in the shower one night and heard something explode down by the airfield. It turned out to be a mortar...it left a pretty big hole out there. I was walking back to my chu late another night and saw a mortar hit the local police station. It looked like a Fourth of July bottle rocket in the air.”

  “That’s crazy.” He cracked open a lobster claw. “So now what, Scooby?”

  “I want to get my dad’s laptop and see if it’s got a lock on it.” I said, polishing off my orange roughie. “First order of business beside getting to know the series, is recovering the draft he was working on. I can’t finish what I don’t have.”

  “Fe-fi-fo-fum,” said the strange, gentle voice, echoing throughout the city. The god, or whatever it was, spoke at him from some place Normand could not see from where he lay under the metal carriage. The ground shook rhythmically as the god-giant came up the road, his armored hips and shoulders brushing the buildings around him.

  Pieces of masonry fell, knocked loose by his passing, and shattered on the ground. “You’re not supposed to be here. This is a restricted area. Don’t you know that? Can’t you read the signs, silly-billy?”

  The gunslinger tipped open his remaining gun and checked the cylinder out of habit. He already knew there were no cartridges left. The god-giant stepped on one of the other carriages, crushing it flat and grinding it into the street. Two of the wheels came off and rolled away; the fuel inside squirted out of the reservoir.

  Normand could smell the fuel’s astringent fumes. He had to find safety, and fast.

  —The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 7 (unfinished) “The Gunslinger and the Giant”

  Run or Die

  THE DAY WAS STILL alive as we pulled into my father’s driveway again. In the cold light filtering down through the gray sky, the house seemed to have lost a great deal of its monstrosity. When we walked into the foyer, it seemed docile, diminished, tamed somehow, like a lion reduced to cowering in the corner of its cage.

  Perhaps it was just the watery daylight sighing in through the white shroud curtains, sucking the mystery out of what had been a legitimately disturbing place at night. Now it was what it had always been: the last vestiges of an old man’s life, a home abandoned of laughter and warmth.

  I stood by the piano, my arms folded; I didn’t realize I was staring into space until Sawyer got my attention. I climbed the stairs, feeling stiff and old, and went into the master bedroom, where I found the Compaq computer quietly gathering dust.

  I eased it closed, and as I was gathering up the power adapter, I looked up and saw my reflection in the closet. The sight startled me, but then I remembered why I was seeing it. I lifted the mirror away from the back of the closet; it was surprisingly heavy. I walked it out and stood there looking down at it.

  The frame was made of some dark, weighty wood—perhaps mahogany or ebony, I’m no wood expert—and was carved with reliefs of strange pictographs or calligraphy I didn’t recognize, unintelligible writing with elaborate swoops and tails that resembled the writing I’d seen on road and shop signs in the Middle East. I counted nineteen of them.

  Attached to the back was a thin metal cable, looped around a pair of fixtures screwed into the frame. It was obviously meant to be hung on the wall.

  “I should’ve figured you’d be in here fooling around with that old thing,” said Sawyer. I glanced at him over my shoulder; he was standing in the doorway, leaning against the wall.

  “It does look pretty old. Where do you think it was hanging?” I asked him, pulling on the wire to show it to him. “There’s a wire on the back of it.”

  “Beats me,” he said.

  I hefted the mirror over my head with a grunt and felt a twinge in my back, and immediately put it back down.

  “What are you doing?” asked Sawyer.

  I stretched. “I want to take the mirror too.”

  “Why on earth would you want this thing?”

  “I just do,” I asked, but I wasn’t entirely sure. I just knew that it belonged in my care, and my conviction grew stronger as I stood there holding the thing. “It’s probably pretty valuable. I should take it with me and keep an eye on it.”

  Sawyer blinked. “I guess that’s a good idea,” he said, his voice taking on a peculiar monotone.

  I looked at him; his eyes seemed flat and listless for a moment, but then the life so common to them returned as I watched.

  Even odder was the
feeling in my head of certainty at what I was doing, at odds with the vague confusion at the smooth ease at which I made the decision to take it. My father would’ve wanted me to have it, I was sure. If I didn’t take it with me, someone could break into the house and take it, and it was obviously a priceless antique.

  I gestured with my head, gripping the mirror with both hands. “Here, help me grab it. We’ll put it in the back of my car.”

  We were hauling it down the stairs by the time I thought about it again. It was heavy. Why did I want the mirror so badly, again? Oh, right. For safekeeping.

  I stopped and propped it up on my knee so I could open the back passenger door of my Topaz and put the mirror in my back seat. When had we carried it out of the house? I honestly couldn’t remember even locking the door.

  “Hey, watch the road,” said Sawyer, touching my arm. The sound of my tires growling across the rumble strip embossed into the roadside forced me to focus on what I was doing, which was driving my car.

  I realized I was about to come to the two-way sign at the end of my dad’s isolated country road and jumped on the brake a little too hard; the tires barked and Sawyer grunted against his seatbelt. “The hell are you doing, man? Did you leave your marbles back at your motel room or something?”

  I apologized, staring out the window at the traffic on Main Street. “Sorry about that, man. I’m a thousand miles away today, I think. Maybe I didn’t eat my Wheaties this morning, huh? I didn’t drink my V8.” Wait, Main Street? The hell am I doing on Main Street?

  The light overhead changed from red to green and I pressed the accelerator, slowly surging forward with the cars to either side of me like a rank of Confederate soldiers charging the line at Gettysburg in slow-motion. The man in the car to my left wheeled gradually into a side street, his station wagon falling away and out of sight. I shook my head, sensing a strange sort of fuzziness I couldn’t quite clear.

  A voice droned, muddy and indistinct. “I think I want to see what ol’ Moses Atterberry is up to,” it said. I strained to make that out, and realized it was my own voice. I glanced up at my face in the rearview mirror; my lips felt numb, like I’d been anesthetized at the dentist’s office. It took effort to make my eyes focus on my reflection.

  “Okay,” said Sawyer. He was staring straight forward.

  “What the heck,” I mentioned, casually. It was a question, but it didn’t sound like one. I elected to forget I said it.

  “Sounds like a good idea to me,” said Sawyer, and he pointed out the window at a passing strip mall. “Maybe after that, we can stop at this place over here and get some frozen yogurt. How does that strike you? Do you like frozen yogurt?”

  “I would love that,” I said. I looked forward to going back to the church, but I wasn’t sure quite why. Then it hit me: perhaps Atterberry had the key I needed. What key? I thought, and reached into my pocket for the key I’d used in the nave. It was still there, soft-edged from years of use. What purpose did it serve? Why did my father have a key...that opened a door...in a church...he had no business being in?

  “I love frozen yogurt,” I slurred. The road slid under the Topaz like a tablecloth being whipped out from under a seven-course meal. “Especially the chocolate kind.”

  “Chocolate is freaking awesome,” said Sawyer.

  “I had a white chocolate mocha gelato once, at the camp where I worked overseas,” I said, flicking my turn signal. “Good shit. Why do I feel like I’m high? Did you slip me something, man? Did you slip in something?”

  “White chocolate mocha gelato,” said Sawyer, staring out the window. “Mocha choco-lato. Gelato vibrato. Mocha choco-lato vibrato gelato. Whatta latta chocka-latta!” he chuckled, and started talking in a bad Italian accent, making gestures with his hands as if he were carrying something huge, or massaging big breasts. “I gotta so mucha chocka-latta, I dunno what to do widdit all-a.”

  I stopped the car and put it in park. We were sitting in the parking lot of Walker Memorial.

  “You gotta eata lotta chocka-locka,” I said, and I giggled, almost dropping the mirror. We were carrying it across the asphalt toward the back door of the church. I propped it on my knee again so I could open the door and I backed inside, slowing down so Sawyer could find his footing on the steps of the stoop outside. “I eata chocka-latta formosa my life-a.”

  “Mamma mia,” Sawyer laughed. “This thing is heavier than a dead preacher.”

  Big Brown Jesus looked down at us with his judgemental, agonized stare. I apologized to the Son of God for Sawyer’s irreverence. “Sorry about this, Jesus,” I said, pronouncing it Hey-zeus. “Just passing through.”

  “Hot soup, make way for Hey-Zeus.”

  “Hey-Zeus is on the loose,” I said, almost stumbling down the cellar stairs. “He’s got the juice in the caboose.” I didn’t remember opening the door in the narthex. I took out my cellphone to light the way, laid it on the mirror, and continued backing down the crooked stairs. The cheap cell slid back and forth like a ball on a billiard table. “The junk in the trunk. I thought we came here to talk to Atterberry.”

  “Nah,” said Sawyer. “We came here to hide the mirror down here in the cellar. Nobody would think to ever find it here. Nobody can steal it here. Down in the dark with the roaches and the spiders and the little man in the moon. Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet, eating her curds and whey, the cow jumped over the spoon.”

  “Good idea,” I told him. We duckwalked down the tunnel into the room underneath the altar. “Now what the hell do we do with it?”

  “Here, let’s hang it on this nail. It’s got a wire on the back of it.”

  We stood the mirror up and held it vertical in the air with a grunt, dumping my phone off onto the dirt floor. We inched forward in the dim light, and the back of the mirror thumped against the spike driven into the wall over the opening where the tunnel came into the room. We eased it down until the wire was supporting it and let go; now it was hanging neatly across the tunnel opening, and to get back out, we’d have to move the mirror out of the way.

  We backed away to appraise our placement of the thing. Hanging there over our only exit, the mirror’s frame made it look like a doorway. It reflected only darkness.

  “Picture perfect,” I said, stepping forward to readjust it.

  “Why did we just do that?” asked Sawyer.

  I cut my eyes back at him in confusion. “Do what?”

  “Hang—WOAH!” Sawyer shouted; I turned my head again to look at the mirror.

  A horned demon grinned at us from the mirror, his eyes burning yellow in the glass.

  I snatched my hands away from the mirror’s frame and leapt back with a cry of surprise and terror. The demon immediately faded into the shadows reflected in the mirror; my eyes darted around the cramped room, trying to figure out where it had gone. I pointed at the silvery glass.

  “I told you, dude! I told you I saw a demon up there in the closet! That was it!”

  “Well, I totally believe you now,” said Sawyer. He had pressed himself against the stone wall at the back of the space. “What the hell are we even doing down here?”

  “We came to talk to the preacher, didn’t we?”

  “He’s not even down here!” cried Sawyer. “This is screwed up! Why did you bring me down here?”

  “You thought it was a good idea too!”

  “I agreed to come to the church and talk to Atterberry, not this!” he said, thrusting an accusatory hand at the mirror. “What the hell were we talking about, chocolate and shit? It’s like I wasn’t even paying attention to what was coming out of my mouth.”

  He stormed over to it and grabbed the frame without fear, trying to wrench it to one side to facilitate his escape. It did not move. He ripped and yanked at it again, to no avail. It seemed fixed to the wall around the opening. Then, he seemed to calm, or, from where I was standing, it looked like he had gone catatonic or something. He was just standing there.

  I came up behind him and looked o
ver his shoulder, steadying him with a hand on his back. “What’s goin’ on?”

  He glanced down at me (as he was several inches taller than myself), and then back up at the mirror.

  Then I saw it.

  “We don’t have a reflection,” said Sawyer.

  I blinked, and swallowed. My mouth tasted like I’d been licking up dust. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I realized that I was gripping my friend’s shirt—I had twisted my fist in it, to be precise—and let go. I felt like a vampire trying to find himself in his gothic looking-glass. “What the hell, man. What kind of mirror is this?”

  Sawyer reached out to touch the mirror, but his fingertips never met a surface. He leaned, reaching, and put his hand into the empty space inside the wooden frame. There was no glass at all. We were staring into what had somehow become a doorway, on the threshold of a narrow tunnel filled with a close and placeless darkness.

  I picked up my cellphone and shined its meager, sickly glow into the opening; I succeeded in only illuminating a little way inside, making it look for all the world like something I’d seen on a Discovery Channel special once about the opening of an Egyptian pyramid, dim fiber-optic images of a remote-control robot trundling down a dark sandstone shaft. I felt like Howard Carter again.

  I could feel an inky coldness seeping from the space beyond, and it was very obviously not the way we’d come; instead of a low-ceilinged burrow carved from the dirt under the nave, we were looking at a taller corridor with brickwork walls and floor, the latter strewn with what appeared to be sand. Debris was littered underfoot at the limit of my light.

  I looked back at Sawyer; he had backed away from it all and turned on his camera. “To hell with that,” he said. “I didn’t sign on for this Plan 9, Stephen King, Movie of the Week shit.”

  I glanced into the tunnel, and back at him. “It’s not like we have a choice. We can’t stay in this room forever, and we can’t move the mirror out of the way. We have to do this.”

  “I wish I’d brought my damn baseball bat.”