The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  The traffic slowed to a stop and Noreen and I jogged across the street. When we reached the other side, we passed in front of a deli getting ready for the day’s business, filling the air with the smell of baking bread and roasting meats. The aroma made my stomach knot up in anticipation.

  “By the time the colonists left Ain for the voyage to K-Set, Ain had invented firearms and crude machinery, like clockworks and steam engines. Guns were the deciding factor in the new war against the Wilders; in several years, the colonists had penetrated the mainland of K-Set and built several towns and farms in a free-homestead expansion.

  “It was a war of attrition. Basically, if you could take it and survive on it, it was yours. There were some Aineans, though, that sympathized with the Wilders, and broke away from colonist society to form adversarial groups—some of them actually began to cohabitate with the Bemo-Epneme, even stepping into the more primal lifestyle of the Wilders.”

  “Is this ever going to get to the No-Men?” I asked with a smirk.

  “Be patient, you jerk,” she said. “So, it turned out that the Wilders worship a god called ‘Obelus’, an entity that was responsible for the destruction of the civilization that had ruled over K-Set centuries before The Fiddle and the Fire. They prayed to this god, desperate for salvation from the invaders, and finally, one day, Obelus answered them.

  “At the end of the first book, The Brine and the Bygone, a large expedition of settlers were slaughtered by something at the farthest frontier of Ainean territory. Only two people survived the attack: the boy Pack and a settler named Aarne Hargrave. Pack escaped unhurt to a far-flung sympathist fortress where the second book, The Cape and the Castle, took place.

  “Aarne made it back to their camp three days’ march away, where he died of his injuries, but not before warning the Kingsmen captain there of what devastated them. The captain asked him if the attackers were men, and Aarne’s last words were, ‘No...they are no men.’ It stuck.

  “As for what they are, your dad never really went into much detail about them—he always portrayed them as mysterious lurking giants, never really showing the ‘face behind the mask’. In the second book, Pack gets a good look at a dead No-Man while he’s imprisoned by the Wilder sympathists. He describes a ‘monolithic golem made of some strange metal he couldn’t identify...a heavy, vaguely human figure all draped in the overgrowth of the ruins’.”

  My coffee cup was cold and empty when I saw the spires of Walker Memorial reaching over the trees. The cars on Main Street whooshed past us in an endless multicolored stream of steel and lights as we approached the church.

  I bypassed the building itself and went straight to the parking lot, where I spotted my car right in the place I’d parked it the previous afternoon. I cursed when I saw the white square on the windshield, but it turned out to be nothing more than a promotional pamphlet for an upcoming street festival, turned spongy and sloppy by the condensation on the glass.

  I scooped the wet paper off and unlocked my car, put my rucksack inside. I was going to head into the church to check on the mirror, but Noreen had already climbed into the passenger side of the Topaz and was sitting there, her arms folded, her mouth pursed tight.

  I got in and started the car. We were pulling into traffic when she said, “If he’s not in his room, I’m going to—gonna—I don’t know what I’m gonna do.”

  _______

  I caught myself doing sixty twice on the way across town. The entire path was a forty-five zone—it’s a wonder I never attracted the ire of the local police. I pulled into the parking lot of the Hampton so fast that the ass-end of my car scraped the pavement as we crossed the frontage.

  Noreen was already climbing out as I parked the car and turned it off. I fell out of the door, putting my hand in a rain puddle, and ran to catch up to her. We nearly sprinted through the lobby, where the desk clerk started to ask us about our reservation, and went directly to the elevator.

  Noreen jabbed the up-button a rapid-fire ten or fifteen times. I could hear the cab inside moving, but it simply wasn’t fast enough. She walked away, shoved the door open to the stairwell, and ran up the stairs, throwing her coffee cup into a nearby trash can.

  Two flights of climbing later, and we were beelining down the third floor hallway toward 312. Noreen pounded on the door with one tight fist and waited.

  Silence.

  She beat on it again, faster and harder. “Sawyer! Are you in there?”

  “Sawyer—?” I called, kicking the door lightly a few times for deep thumps that echoed down the lushly-carpeted corridor.

  Nobody came to the door. Noreen stepped back as if she were going to try to kick it open, and thought better of it. “Goddam it! We need to get a key and get this door open,” she said, obviously starting to panic. There was a wild look in her eye. “We need to get this door open!”

  I jiggled the doorhandle in desperation. It was definitely locked.

  Noreen turned and stormed past me in the opposite direction, and then stopped short. I turned to follow her and paused as well.

  Sawyer was standing at the corridor intersection, clad only in a pair of jeans and socks, his hair wet and spiky. “What’s all the yelling about?” he asked. “I told you I was in 321, you crazy-people.”

  Noreen ran at him and embraced him so hard she almost knocked him down.

  “Woah,” he said with a smile. “Nice to see you too. I thought you left?”

  We followed Sawyer back to his room and I started searching it, shaking out the clothes that were lying around and peeling back the bedsheets. I was looking through his bags when Sawyer interrupted me.

  “Hey there officer, do you have a search warrant for that?”

  I sat back and exhaled. The room was warm and swampy, and from where I was sitting, I could see that the bathroom mirror was foggy. “Where’s your camera?”

  “I dunno,” he replied. “I guess I left it at your dad’s house last night. The hell did we get into? I don’t remember any booze, but it must’ve been something strong. The last thing I remember is going through the stuff in your dad’s bedroom, and then I was waking up in my bed wearing all my clothes.”

  I sighed.

  Sawyer shrugged. “And for some reason, I was covered in flour or cornmeal. Did we get drunk and bake something? I don’t remember muffins. I would definitely have remembered muffins—maybe not bran muffins.”

  “Why didn’t you answer your phone, you asshole?” asked Noreen, shoving him lightly. It was more of a pushing slap.

  He shrugged, and picked up his phone, checking the screen. “Like I told you, I woke up gross. I guess you called me while I was taking a shower.”

  I sighed. “No proof at all. I look like a psycho.”

  “Proof of what?” asked Sawyer, knuckling one eye. “You don’t need proof to look like a psycho.”

  “Proof that we walked through a mirror under the church and into the world in my dad’s books, that’s what!”

  Sawyer’s eyes got as big as silver dollars and he dropped his phone. The battery cover popped off and it slid under the bed. “Are you shitting me?” he asked, getting down on his hands and knees to look for it. “I had a dream about that. Are you telling me I didn’t dream that? That happened for real?”

  “Hell yeah, it happened for real,” I said, squatting next to him.

  He found his phone and put it back together. Once he’d turned it back on, he stared at it for a moment in thought, then looked up at me. “Didn’t you take a picture with your phone?”

  (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.)

  I nodded. “I remember doing that, but my phone is dead,” and blinked. “Why isn’t yours?”

  “I left it in my room when I went with you to Ed’s house.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well,” said Noreen, throwing Sawyer a shirt, “Now that we know Sawyer�
�s non-phone-answering ass is okay, I think we should hie thee to the church and see if that mirror is still there. You two have me crawling with curiosity.”

  A Heart-to-Heart

  I DID NOT EXPECT TO FIND the church locked up tighter than a— “Tighter than a hooker with lockjaw,” said Sawyer, coming around the corner to join us. We had been all around the perimeter of the sprawling church and found no entry whatsoever. Noreen and I both froze mid-step and laughed at him. He came toward us, shrugging it off.

  “Got any more bright ideas, Columbo?”

  Noreen looked up at the castle-like church and let her arms drop to her sides. “You guys really had me going. Were you telling the truth about what happened? Are you playing a prank on me or something?”

  “I wish I could say I was,” I said. “But as far as I can tell, unless both of us are having identical hallucinations, it really happened.”

  I let my hands drop to my sides, consternated.

  “I have to admit, this is getting a little weird,” said Noreen. “I’m not sure what to think anymore.”

  Sawyer shrugged helplessly. I felt like a fraud—no, worse, I felt like I might actually be losing my marbles after all. I couldn’t deny how crazy it all sounded, and even now I was having trouble reconciling the surreality of the previous night myself. I looked around at the parking lot. We were the only ones that had a car here.

  As I thought about the situation, a sensation of warmth spread across the back of my neck. When I turned back around, the morning sun was breaking through the clouds. I was momentarily blinded by a force of golden light.

  I shielded my eyes against the searing glare and canted my head away—and saw it.

  “Look,” I said, thrusting a finger. “There’s a window open on the third floor. You see it? There, behind that—the—”

  “The buttress?” said Sawyer.

  “—Yes, the buttress. Up there.”

  We assembled at the base of the wall. It was a sheer vertical drop of thirty, maybe forty feet from the window to the ground. The sand-colored bricks used to construct the building were easily as large as any cinder block, if not larger. They seemed to have been mortared so that there was a horizonal gap of an inch or so between layers.

  The face of each block was rough and uneven, presenting ledges and crags here and there along the wall surface.

  I glanced back at the others and wedged a couple of fingers into the gap between the bricks as an experiment. Then I hopped up and put a foot on a thin ledge that protruded just enough to catch the edge of my shoe.

  “Oh, I know you’re not doing what I think you’re doing,” said Sawyer. “Are you seriously going to climb that?”

  “I’ve climbed worse,” I said, hugging the wall and reaching up to another gap.

  I hopped down and rubbed my hands, and took off my jacket, handing it to Noreen. It was a nice one, a recent purchase, made of coffee-colored leather, and had a gray hood sewn into the lining that made it look as if I had on a sweatshirt underneath. “I need some kind of dust. My hands are sweaty and they’re only going to get sweatier.”

  “You’re in luck,” Noreen said, but took two steps in the opposite direction and threw her hands in the air, making a frustrated noise. “Never mind, I don’t have my talcum powder with me because I don’t have my car with me.”

  “Why do you have talcum powder?” I asked.

  Sawyer made a snipping motion at his scalp with his fingers. “She cuts hair back home in Florida.”

  “Oh,” I said, after a beat, and started climbing the wall anyway. We were in an alley deep between two parallel walls, so I wasn’t too concerned with being spotted by police officers that might take offense to me breaking into a church.

  I forced my fingers into a crack and hoisted one foot onto a ledge. A thought occurred to me and I spoke over my shoulder, “Do either of you know how to pick a lock?”

  A beat of silence, and then a simultaneous, “No.”

  “Then onward and upward it is,” I said, and continued climbing.

  I stood, lifting myself onto the bottom-most windowsill. I braced myself inside the windowframe and sat on the flat stone, then pulled my legs up, planting my feet on the narrow platform heel-to-toe Egyptian hieroglyph-style. That gave me a solid base to push off the inside of the window behind me and stand up, crouching like a gargoyle in the window.

  I reached over the arch above me and found a new grip, then kicked my right leg up and found a new place to step, used it to lift myself. I traded hands and reached upward.

  “This is crazy,” reiterated Sawyer below. “What if you fall and get hurt? I’m guessing you probably don’t have insurance.”

  “I figured you would catch me if I fell,” I grunted. I was now just above the bottom window, clinging to the wall, a giant spider in a shirt too thin for the weather.

  “Thou dost assume too much,” he replied.

  I made it to the second floor window and grasped the sill edge with both hands, preparing to pull myself inside like I’d done with the first one. As I began to drag myself upward, my foot slipped and my heart roared in my chest. My face grew hot with the rush of adrenaline as I dangled from the rim of stone. I gasped, scraped my left cheek hard across the rough brick.

  The edge of the sill dug painfully into the tendons of my flexed fingers.

  “Shit,” said Noreen, her voice echoing faintly off the walls around me. “Watch out, I’m not taking you to the hospital. If you fall, you’re fired before you hit the ground.”

  “Thanks, boss,” I said, my shoe regaining traction on the wall surface. I clambered slowly into the second window and perched again. This time I stopped to rest, and as I turned to regard the church’s back parking lot, I was nearly overcome by the vertigo of height.

  From here, I could see into the residential neighborhood one street removed from Main Street. The narrow mouth of the alley only afforded me a view into the side windows of two houses, but that was enough. I could see a man standing at a kitchen sink washing dishes. At the other house, a teenager bundled in a heavy blanket was curled tightly in a bay window reading a book by the wan light of the cloudy day. She squeezed her nose with the wadded tissue in her free hand.

  I shut my eyes tight and leaned my face against my own window behind me, calming my nerve with the shock of the wind-chilled glass. It was colored a dark bottle-green, which made it easy to see my own pallid expression.

  “I can’t believe this,” I said to myself. “What am I doing?” Do I really want to go back there? Back down into that dirt cellar, maybe even back through that mirror? A faint thrill of terror flared inside me as I considered it.

  Suddenly, I wasn’t sure if I was more afraid of falling, or getting caught breaking into a church, or of going back to that dark pueblo-city of weird ghosts.

  I looked down, which was a mistake, and closed my eyes again.

  “I can see my house from here,” I called down, my voice breaking.

  Sawyer swore long and low. “Be careful. This grass ain’t as springy as it looks.”

  I reached over my head and grabbed the keystone again, and pulled myself up. My mind reeled back to my days as an MP, climbing up and down the obstacle walls on Fort Leonard Wood, and to the several months I spent on Fort Hood the year before I deployed, climbing the false wall at the gym down the street from the Transition Barracks.

  I envisioned my grasping hands and feet on the pods screwed into the faux rock wall outside the basketball court, looking so much like giant wads of chewed bubble gum pressed onto the stone.

  I surprised myself by sweating. It was so cool outside. A trickle of moisture crawled between my backbone and hip. My feet were freezing, my toes like icy monkey paw fingers in my shoes, slick with sweat and chilled. My fingers were raw and felt like the gnarled claws of Death.

  As soon as the topmost windowsill was in reach, I grabbed it and scrambled toward it. I almost lost my balance at the last second, and I felt my center of gravity slide bac
kwards, but I found the lock-handle on the inside of the windowpane and caught myself.

  I could hear the pane’s hinge groan under the strain, but it held until I could lift myself into the window.

  Immensely relieved, I sat on the windowsill as if it were a park bench and exhaled a slow stream of vapor-smoke, feeling for all the world like a dragon gazing out of his aerie.

  “I made it,” I said, and scooted backwards into the third floor of the church.

  I was in some sort of office. Luckily, there was no one in it other than myself. I stood behind a richly-appointed cherrywood desk with a calendar blotter on it, scribbled with various dates and short scripture passages. A clergy office, though which one, I had no idea. I wasn’t even sure if Atterberry was the only clergyman in Walker Memorial, nor was I sure how it all even worked, to be honest.

  The room was spacious, with walls and wainscoting the color of snow, and a dark red carpet. An American flag stood in one corner next to an ancient green filing cabinet. I checked the nameplate sitting on the desk: Pastor’s Assistant Janice Evers.

  The name made me feel even guiltier. I got out of there in a hurry.

  Atterberry’s office was next door, but I didn’t go in, had no reason to. I went straight down the long hallway, past doorways labeled with positions like Music Director, Educational Ministry Assistant, etc. The Berber carpet under my feet muffled my steps as I moved into silence, isolated from the outside world and traffic by so much stone.

  The wallpapered walls were lined with framed reproductions of what were probably historical architectural sketches from the county clerk’s office, as well as landscapes and portraits of previous clergy. They eyed me from under their bristly brows as I walked, rolling my feet to stay silent.

  At the end of the corridor was a creaky old wooden staircase. I went down to the ground floor and came out next to the nave. Instead of going down to open the door for Sawyer and Noreen, I succumbed to the temptation of curiosity and went into the nave to see if the mirror was still in the cellar.