The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  I stepped over the frame and into the mirror-tunnel.

  _______

  I moved from the close, damp air of the church cellar to an arid and odorless place. My shoe crunched on the grit of sand, echoing into the tunnel with a flat, metallic crackle. As soon as my head entered the space beyond the mirror’s frame, my ears popped. The air pressure had changed. A cold breeze washed over me, sending a chill across my skin that made the hair on my legs and arms stand up.

  I looked back at Sawyer, who was watching me in silent fascination, his eyes wide pools of liquid fear and awe. I shrugged without speaking. My new friend put one foot over the mirror’s frame as well, exploring the floor, and then thrust himself into the unknown with me. I saw him roll his jaw to compensate for the ear-pop like I’d done.

  “Gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” he said, hugging himself protectively against the dry, bracing air.

  I turned and began leading us into the dark depths. It occurred to me that the grit under our shoes wasn’t sand, but on closer inspection it turned out to be some sort of fine silt, or perhaps cornmeal. When I knelt to examine it, I realized that there was a deep, continuous rumble emanating from the stonework floor. Once I’d noticed it, I couldn’t deny it, and now I could even feel it through the soles of my feet. The faint, deep vibrations even seemed to permeate the very air.

  As I looked up, I noticed that the ceiling was wooden.

  “Do you feel that?” asked Sawyer.

  I nodded.

  “Sounds like machinery.”

  I stood and kept walking. The farther down the tunnel we went, the louder and deeper the rumbling got, until the floor trembled so hard my feet began to itch. I put my palm against the wall, knocking loose tendrils of fine silt that smelled strangely of tortilla chips as they sifted toward the floor.

  I looked down and saw thin drifts of the white dust piled against the walls, and it hit me that I was looking at cornmeal. My suspicions were confirmed when we emerged into a larger space where a millstone, a great stone wheel the size of an automobile, was slowly grinding in an endless circle on a round stone slab.

  We had come out of the storage area of a millhouse. We stood there for a moment, trying to piece together the reality of what we were seeing. A bucket on a rope dangled through a nearby hole in the ceiling. Bags were piled in the corner, chewed open by vermin. Grains were all over the floor under them.

  I examined the screen of my cellphone and saw that I had no signal whatsoever. I glanced at Sawyer. “Where on Earth are we?”

  “I have no idea,” he said, and pointed into the darkness with the camera. On the viewfinder screen of his GoPro, I could see the angular, faint green skeleton of a ladder. I went directly to it, seeking it out with my cellphone’s glow, and climbed upward into a smaller room, where a log the size of a tree-trunk was turning in place, running the millstone downstairs.

  I could hear the distinct creaking of a windmill’s vanes somewhere overhead. I did not recall seeing a giant fan turning over Walker Memorial Church.

  Weak blue light filtered through the slats of a wooden door. I opened it and stepped out into a narrow alleyway, surrounded by more tall sandstone buildings, whose archer windows stared lifelessly down at me with dark holes where eyes used to be. Gauzy white curtains billowed from those sockets, fluttering in the breeze.

  I felt as if I were standing in some replica of an Italian village built by Egyptians. Directly overhead, a black, unmoving river of stars filled the narrow canyon framed by jagged, damaged roofs.

  I was speechless with horror and confusion, and judging by the expression on Sawyer’s face, tinted green by his camera screen, he was as well. He was slowly, fearfully, rotating in place, pointing the GoPro in a wide arc across the alley.

  A loud BANG! startled both of us as the door of the millhouse blew shut.

  I jumped. Sawyer swore out loud, ducking, looking up and down the alley as if we’d been shot at. I tugged at his sweater. “Come on, let’s get out of here. This place is creeping me out.”

  We walked down to an intersection and found a slightly larger corridor. Stoops of three and four stairs led up to doorways hewn roughly into the sides of the alley, flanked by unseeing portholes with rotting shutters that hung unsecured, swinging free.

  I began to understand that we were in some sort of primitive village. For some reason, our surroundings looked familiar. Most of the windows were mullioned, but the glass was gone out of almost all of them. Out here, too, the stonework pavement was gritty, but outside the millhouse, it was sand. It piled coarse grains against the walls, sifting toward us in low, ghostly movements that contributed to the illusion of walking against the current of a pale river muddy with gold dust.

  I gazed up at the windows as we passed them, fearing the sight of some guarded, unwelcoming, half-glimpsed face, and whispered to Sawyer. I took a picture with my cellphone. He was pointing the camera at the windows.

  He walked over to one of them and reached upward with the camera, holding it over his head so he could aim it into the narrow hole. It was at least a couple feet taller than him. Satisfied, he came back, pointing it at me, collecting my terrified face in the green netherworld of its nightvision mode.

  “I have no idea what’s going on,” I admitted, beginning to panic.

  “Yeah,” said Sawyer. “Me neither.”

  At the end of this watchful, shadowed lane, we emerged into a spacious plaza bleached white by moonlight. A large fountain dominated the center of this somber area, long devoid of water. Sparse clumps of dead wheatgrass reached up out of the sandy cistern with rustling golden skeleton fingers. We were surrounded by a towering council of two and three-story sandstone villas, cleft into a dozen blocks by slender alleys that tapered into darkness at every angle.

  Buffering us from those swarthy cracks were old marketplace stands, draped in tattered canvas in faded shades of a thousand colors. They displayed worthless wares: tiny animal bones picked clean by scavengers, threadbare rugs, dry and withered husks that must once have been fruit, pottery scoured smooth by windblown sand and lying broken on the ground.

  The sky was an unbroken dome of deepest black velvet, strewn with a billion glittering diamonds through which pulsed a constant slow beat of twinkling luminescence. Perching in the western half was a giant bone-white moon three times the size of the one I’d come to know, its pockmarked china face foreign and unknown to me, a stranger dressed in my brother’s clothes. Another, smaller orange moon hung in front of it like a mask. The orbs were either so large or so close that I could see individual craters and valleys on their surfaces.

  I crept closer to one of the stalls, and found a rack of tarnished jewelry. Some of it was scattered across the counter. I let my hand rake softly over it, my fingertips brushing against semiprecious stones I still had trouble believing. I saw no deep blue minerals, none of the gold-flecked lapis lazuli I had become familiar with in the desert the previous year.

  I was surprised, however, when my rumination was interrupted by the shock of cold gunmetal. Lying underneath the necklaces and earrings was an ancient revolver.

  I picked it up and opened the cylinder, relieved to find cartridges in four of the six chambers. “I found a gun,” I told Sawyer, hurrying to show him. When I tilted it so that he could see it, the pistol’s polished flank reflected the moonlight in a flash of cold white that blinded my right eye for a second. The afterimage had a strange shape in it.

  I took a closer look at the nickel-plated surface and saw a tiny coat-of-arms behind the cylinder, below the hammer. “Look at this weird shield on the side of it.”

  Sawyer nodded, panning the camera around. “Keep it ready, man. This place, it’s...there’s something here. Somebody is watching us. We’re not safe. We’re not safe. We’re not alone.”

  I eased back the hammer until it caught, and held it in the three-point stance I remembered from my MP days carrying a nine-millimeter Beretta. It’d been years since I’d had anything to
do with a sidearm, but standing there holding it brought back the feeling as if it had been just yesterday that I was taking my place at the firing line of the M9 range on Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Move your selector switch from safe, and watch...your lane, said the range safety in the back of my mind.

  I sensed movement in the corner of my eye and my head jerked to regard it, but the window I’d noticed, far above the street, was only a black hole. Something else made me turn and point the six gun at an empty doorway.

  An electronic bink told me that Sawyer was doing something with the camera. His face, limned with pale green, gradually fell as he stood there, replaying the video he’d been recording since we brought the mirror to the church. His features flashed from anxious clarity to astonished fear. He rewound the video, then wordlessly turned the camera around and pointed the viewfinder at me.

  On the screen, we were creeping down the alley again. The camera hovered here and there, rising to higher vantage points for a quick peek into the windows looking down on the thin space. The video-Sawyer approached a window and held the camera over his head. The windowsill sank out of sight and the lens was thrust into a blackness that resolved into a blur of green, which focused until I could see the interior of the room beyond.

  Inside was a table, set with bowls, cups, and dishes, ostensibly arrayed with food long since rendered decrepit. A painting hung on the wall, one corner ripped and dog-eared. A dusty bookshelf stood to the left, littered with the detritus of a life of memories: framed photos, figurines. The video was too grainy to make out any meaningful details from the pictures.

  The camera panned to the right. I immediately noticed something in that corner of the room, on the other side of the table.

  A man-like figure lurked there, hunched over, nearly shapeless, a ghost made of cobwebs.

  As the infrared light of the camcorder’s nightvision illuminated it, the shape slowly turned to look at the camera. It was dressed in the deteriorating remnants of some sort of linen robe. A chill shot through me as it began to creep toward the window before video-Sawyer walked away with the camera.

  I checked the pistol again and slapped the cylinder back into place.

  “I think I might know what that is,” said Sawyer. “And it’s not good.”

  “What is it?” I asked, my eyes canting in his direction. There was a white-faced figure standing behind him.

  I raised the gun and pointed it over his shoulder. Sawyer must have thought I was aiming at him, so he dove out of the way. As soon as he hit the ground, he started scrambling away from the creature.

  It was clad in a gauzy shroud, and had a pale face that resembled a white hockey mask, only with a long nose and crowned with large, triangular ears. I thought of plague masks I’d seen doctors wear in pictures of medieval Britain during the time of the Black Death. It studied us with lifeless, yet intense black eyes. Simple markings had been fingerpainted across its cheeks and brow in some dark ichor.

  “It’s a Wilder,” said Sawyer, getting to his feet and hiding behind me, pointing the camera at the thing. “One of the Bemo-Epneme. You’re not going to believe why, or how, I know that.”

  “What?” I asked, backing away as it came closer.

  My hand, and the gun in it, was beginning to tremble. The “Wilder” continued to move toward us on nimble feet, gliding-floating like a spectre. As it drew near, I could hear the being behind the mask breathing, hissing venomously. Ice crashed through my veins.

  I caught a flicker of movement in my peripheral vision. I looked up and saw that more of them were easing out of the windows of the buildings around us like paper Halloween ghosts. They looked like barn owls, staring at us with those horrible black eye sockets.

  “These creatures,” said Sawyer. “They’re from your father’s books. I have no idea why we’re here looking at them. And that gun ain’t gonna do us any good. There are way too many of them and only two of us. We gotta run.”

  I looked over my shoulder at him.

  Sawyer roared, his voice reverberating in the hollow plaza, “Run! OR DIE!”

  A Wilder Shade of Pale

  I FIRED A SHOT INTO THE FACE of the Wilder coming toward me, but he sidestepped it in a deft, casual way, as if he were simply making room for a passer-by. He didn’t even flinch or cry out, he just kept moving toward me, soundless, a murder-minded shark. My heart thundered in my chest as Sawyer pointed to our nine-o-clock and hissed, “That way!”

  I glanced there and found a break in the incoming phalanx of ghosts.

  We fled, cutting through a stall arrayed with a display of rotten clothes that flagged in the wind. Ripping through the shrouds, we found ourselves in a black space that funneled into an alleyway.

  We took that and ran.

  I held out the cellphone and the pistol at arm’s length, aiming them both from side to side. Sinewy, bestial claws rose out of windows as we passed them, long, corded arms that pulled white-faced spectres from inside the hulks looming over us. They spilled into the night air in our wake.

  “This way,” said Sawyer, cutting right.

  I assumed we could make it back to the millhouse this way, but a sheer brick wall blocked us. It turned out to be a hook in the path and we ran to the left, bursting out into a small sitting area where two stone benches faced a collapsed merchant stall.

  One of our adversaries was crouching on the pile of garbage, and as we passed it, it reached into the folds of its cloak and drew a dagger, leaping at me. I put a deafening bullet in it at about seven inches.

  It dropped at my feet, but was immediately up again, slashing at me with a ferocious blade.

  “Keep moving!” screamed Sawyer.

  By now, he had abandoned trying to videotape the situation, and was pumping both arms, sprinting at full power, no doubt sending the image on the camera into unintelligible fits.

  Dark, silent ghosts were emerging from every shadow and hole as we ran, curious and lethal.

  We came into a T-junction and cut right. Before we made it to the end of the alley, I looked behind us and caught a glimpse of a dark shape standing motionlessly at the other end, holding something long that looked like a sword.

  I could hear footsteps that were not our own. The shape was chasing us.

  We rounded a corner, Sawyer flailing to keep his balance, and ran into a dead end.

  Without hesitation, he threw one leg up and breach-kicked a door open with a hollow crack—”Eeeyah!”—then disappeared into the dark doorway like a rabbit into a burrow.

  I followed him into a jet-black nothingness, tripping over the threshold, fumbling at Sawyer’s sweater, almost tumbling. The sound of soft, running footfalls came to me from somewhere, and then the sound of a bootsole gritting across a rooftop overhead.

  Someone broke a window, and a loud thump from the ceiling sent a paroxsym of panic through me. I barked my shin on a chair, hit a table with my hip, dishes crashed unseen to the floor.

  I slipped on the pieces and righted myself, brushed against threadbare fabric. A vicious snarl ripped the air right in front of me. I could see Sawyer’s nightvision camera glowing to my left.

  I pushed away from the table, ran my shoulder into a doorway, almost knocking myself down.

  “Here!” I heard him growl. Another startling bang was followed by a flood of moonlight from a rectangle in front of me. A shadow ran through it and I followed it into the night.

  We were in a dead, enclosed garden. Strips of white cloth dangled, tugged by the air, tied to stakes driven into lifeless, plowed rows. The buildings directly around us were low, only one story tall.

  The shadows of the windmill’s arms passed over us at regular intervals. I could hear the canvas flapping with a throaty crump-crump, crump, crump-crump.

  Sawyer ran toward a wooden crate and meant to hurdle up it to grab the eaves, but when he put his foot on it, it disintegrated, swallowed his leg to the knee with a dry crunch.

  I helped him up, panting, struggling to speak, “S
omebody following us.”

  “I know—over there,” Sawyer said, and ran away.

  Another of the ghost-faced figures was coming out of a nearby window, perching nimbly on the sill like a buzzard on a fencepost. When it saw me, it called loudly, its piercing, metallic scream reverberating in the valley of shadows and mudbrick.

  My blood tore through me in fear, frozen rocket fuel in my veins. I could hear my heart hammering in my rib cage, driving spikes into my dry throat.

  I found Sawyer leaning a table against a wall at the back of the garden. He ran up it and lifted himself onto the roof, but when he pushed off he splintered the wood.

  As I attempted to use it as a ramp myself, it broke and sent me sprawling shoulderfirst into the wall below.

  “Shit!” I said, landing on my back. An open hand thrust down at my face as I got up. Sawyer had clipped the camera to his belt and was reaching for me.

  I grasped his palm, put the revolver in my pocket, and he grunted as I began to try to billy-goat up the wall. I looked over my shoulder. One of the masked creatures was no more than a meter from my back, his tattered cloak billowing around him like stormclouds.

  I started to scream, but there was a strange, sibilant shick sound, accompanied by a spray of red across my legs. The Wilder’s head spun free of its torso and twirled into the dust; the rest of it collapsed at my feet and lay still.

  Standing behind it was a slender figure, draped in a dark cranberry-red hooded cloak, a sheer veil concealing his face. A leather crucifix bisected the veil. He flourished the blood from his strange long-handled broadsword and feinted at me.

  I flexed my arm, reaching up, clawing at Sawyer’s shoulder, fighting up onto the roof. Sawyer fell backwards and I on top of him. I rolled to my feet and looked down at the swordsman standing in the garden ruins.

  I could see the lower half of his face in the moonlight. “Kah t’vam!” he spat in some plosive language, the childlike voice of someone not quite yet a man. “Keem a-tra agama-nam!”