The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  The nave was virtually unchanged from yesterday except for the angle of the sunlight limping in through the stained glass. The room was slightly darker, which in my solitude made it ominous and agoraphobic, especially when I looked up at the Big Brown Brooding Jesus looming over the altar.

  He stared straight ahead with his dead, colorless Roman bust eyes, somehow oblivious and judgemental at the same time.

  In this cavernous chapel, gutted hollow by the guilt and listlessness of a million parishioners, even my carpeted footsteps seemed to echo.

  I went straight to the door in the vestibule. I wasn’t surprised to see that it was locked, which I remedied with the key in my pocket. I stepped inside, and as before, I turned on my cellphone—or, at least, I tried, and remembered that it was dead. I stood there in the shadows for several seconds, confused about how to proceed, feeling like an idiot—worse, a blind idiot.

  When I went back to the nave, I was walking slowly up the center aisle toward the altar, wondering where I could find a candle in the church (and something to light it with), when I heard a deep, eloquent voice from the darkness at the far end of the pews.

  I spun to discover a man sitting in one of them, barely visible in the gloom behind the soft beam of sunlight. His feet were kicked up on the back of the pew in front of him. I squinted into the light to make out his features.

  It was Maxwell Bayard. “Kid, I think we need to talk.”

  Naturally, I was shell-shocked, locked into place by indecision and confusion. I eventually said, “What are you doing here?” which sounded completely stupid as it came out of my big dumb mouth. My face burned with embarrassment and anticipation at being caught trespassing.

  “Come here and sit down with me, amigo,” said my father’s agent. “I had a feeling I might run into you here.”

  I went over to his pew, my legs wooden and loose, and took a seat. My hands were shaking.

  “Atterberry called me yesterday, told me he thought he’d seen you and that Winton kid in here after services,” he said in his nasal, gravelly Kojak voice from the heavens, and paused for emphasis.

  He was smoking a cigarette, and the blue curls of his smoke hung motionless in the air around his head like the rings of Saturn. “Now, to anybody else, that might or might not look shady, but luckily, as it goes, I might know a thing or two about why you might be in here. And why you’re here now. How did you get in here, anyway?”

  “I climbed in through a window in the assistant’s office,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.

  “Damn,” Bayard said, his brow arching, frowning like an old catfish. “Third floor? That must’ve been a hell of a climb. I didn’t even check up there. You’re a tougher man than I thought. Chip off the old brick.”

  I heard a knock on the front door. Sawyer’s faint voice came to us from outside. My new friends wanted in. “They can wait,” said the old man. “What I’ve got to talk to you about, they may not be too inclined to hear.”

  I blinked.

  He seemed to be searching for the right words. “I’m guessing you’re here looking for what your father called ‘the Burrow’—a door to another place. Would I be wrong...or would I be right?”

  I didn’t know what to say—so I told him the truth. “Yes.”

  “Hmm,” he said, nodding. He took a drag off the cigarette, held it, and let the smoke ease out of his mouth and up his nose, then tilted his head back and blew it back out again like an enraged bull from a Looney Tunes short. “What convinced you to come here to begin with?”

  I produced the key to the cellar door. “I found this in one of my dad’s boxes. It opens that door over there.”

  “I’m not even going to question the dots you connected to get from Point Nowhere to Point Church. Your father was prone to similar jumps of logic,” said Bayard. His head lowered again and he regarded me with those heavy-lidded hound dog eyes. “You share a lot with him, you know. You two have a lot in common. Moreso than you think.”

  I put the key back in my pocket and folded my arms, letting my silence urge him to continue.

  “It took about a decade for your father to admit to me his...clandestine trips to this church, after I took him on as a client. It was another several years before he eventually decided to let me in on his secret. Or what I should say he thought was his secret.

  “That there was, in fact, a secret door underneath this building that led to another world that he claimed was real. The world that he’d been writing about for half his life.”

  The old literary agent looked at me sadly and took a little Maglite out of his jacket pocket. “Come with me,” he said, and rose to his feet. I heard something in him crackle as he put his hands on his knees and stood with a soft groan. “Indulge an old man.”

  We headed for the front area. As we walked, he said, “I was afraid—however improbable—that it might come to this. Atterberry’s phone call yesterday confirmed my suspicions.”

  “What suspicions would that be?” I asked, and was answered with silence.

  Bayard opened the cellar door and descended the stairs into the fierce white glow of his flashlight beam. When we got to the bottom, the low ceiling forced him to stoop and crane his neck sideways, his head just missing the rafters. He squinted in his cigarette smoke and stubbed it out on the dirt floor.

  I found it hard to empathize with his discomfort, or really even pay attention, because my eyes were transfixed by the wall of the dirt cellar.

  There was no tunnel.

  Normand flinched as the huge sea-creature plucked Bennard Koila from the gunwales of the lifeboat. The man screeched like a scalded cat; the massive jaws closed over his torso and lifted him high into the air and left him there. He tumbled end over end for a long moment, then fell into the Saoshoma’s open maw as it slammed shut like a gull snapping up a catch.

  Clayton opened fire with his pistols, but the rounds simply bounced off its impenetrable hide. “Die, you poxy bastard! Why won’t you just die?!”

  —The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 4 “The Truth and the Trial”

  Ramma-Lamma-Ding-Dong

  THERE WAS NO WAY INTO the little room where we’d left the mirror the day before. I stared in disbelief. “I don’t know—” began Bayard, and I realized that he was attempting to be tactful. “I don’t know if you might have picked it up from his notes, or what—but your father believed that there was a door down here at the end of a tunnel that linked this world to another one. He claimed that when he was a little boy, he was exploring the building after dark when he was approached by a being that he called a Silen.

  “He said that the Sileni were a race of beings from outside of time, ancient mariners from a place called the ‘Sea of Dreams’, in the ‘void-between-the-worlds’, where concepts and creativity flowed and ebbed like water. An ocean of stories.” He pronounced Sileni as if he were saying Silent-eye.

  I heard Sawyer knocking on the front door again. “The Vur Ukasha,” I said.

  “You’ve done your homework. Yes,” said the agent, and he sat on the cellar stairs.

  The flashlight illuminated his face from below as if he were telling a ghost story by the campfire. He looked as if he were a thousand years old. “Ed came to my house late one night in 1989, looking like he’d been up for days, I think it was March—April, maybe. Looked like shit, to be frank. Sat me down and told me the whole story sitting by my fireplace, nursing a glass of brandy...so it might behoove you to take everything I’m telling you with a grain of salt.

  “According to him, at the beginning of time the Sileni made a deal with God. In exchange for the gift of immortality, they would scatter themselves to the wind, and seek out those worthy of receiving the waters of the Sea of Dreams. They were, in essence, muses,” he said, making air quotes with his fingers.

  “The Muses, in fact. Living tributaries of the Endless Story, the Vur Ukasha, the only ocean that deepens as you drain it, forever carrying away its waters to keep it from disappearing. One of th
em found your father deserving of the water and became his muse. Remember what I said about jumps of logic?”

  “Ayuh,” I said.

  “Your father told me that the Silen could put ideas in your head. Could make you do what he wanted and make you think it was your idea all along.”

  “That makes sense, being a muse. That—” I said, and abruptly cut myself off.

  Bayard’s head tilted, a questioning gesture.

  “I wonder what made him come to you with this,” I said, changing the subject. “This is some pretty crazy stuff.”

  “Crazy is what we thought, too, which is why I contacted your mother and told her that your father was having a breakdown. This was about the time he was trying to get over the sauce. He was—if you’ll excuse me—fucked up beyond mortal limits. The shakes, hallucinations, the works.”

  I became more and more grim as he spoke. “If you’re trying to say I’m having similar delusions, I’ve got a few epiphanies for you. Mainly, there’s the fact that I’m not an alcoholic. The other is that when I found the door yesterday, Sawyer Winton was with me. And third, we had a camera with us.”

  “Was he?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re positive.”

  My hesitation spoke volumes. “Yes.”

  “And the camera? Where is that?”

  “We’re not sure. I think it’s at my dad’s house, maybe. But I know we took it to the other world.”

  “To the other world? Listen to yourself, kid,” Bayard said, his New York accent thickening. He was actually starting to talk out of the side of his mouth. The more he talked about the door, the more he began to resemble a skinny Rodney Dangerfield.

  “Look, maybe this is something hereditary, some psychological thing that gets passed down on the paternal side, I don’t know. But what I do know is that whatever it was, it was suckin the life out of your father year by year, bottle by bottle. And now that I see you might be sufferin from this delusion too, I can’t let you push yourself down the same road he went down.”

  He paused and locked eyes with me. “I want you to forget finishing Ed’s last book.”

  “What?” I amazed myself by being appalled at the idea.

  “You heard me. I want you to drop it. I’m not going to stand by and watch you obsess over it like he did. I thought—well, I hoped—that a sober pair of eyes on this fat fucken thing would make a difference, but apparently it doesn’t. I’m cutting you off. I don’t want you in the same boat with him, on the bottom of the fucken lake—forget it!”

  I loomed over him, and replied, “You were the one that talked me into taking the project on—” and he startled me by jumping—jack-knifing, nearly—up off the cellar steps and getting in my face, fists clenched, shaking a finger at my nose.

  He was so close I could smell his hand and the sleeve of his wet tweed jacket, a curious combination of pipe tobacco and petrichor, and I could see my reflection in the reading glasses hanging on the collar of his sweater.

  The sight of such an older man becoming so animated out of anger was a fundamental surprise, and it startled the hell out of me. “I don’t think you understand who you’re talking to, Ross!” he bellowed. “I’m the man that handles this goddamned property, and you’ll back off of it!”

  I recoiled at Bayard’s sudden rage, speechless. He seemed to regain his bearings, evidently having taken himself aback as well. He tugged the lapels of his jacket, standing straighter, a vague look of impropriety passing across his thick features. He smoothed out his hoary salt-and-pepper beard, his thick, rubbery lips making an O.

  “I’m sorry I lost my temper there,” and then he added, staring at the floor, “Your father did not die of a heart attack, Ross. He was murdered. Nobody knows who did it.”

  He tugged back the sleeve of his jacket, looking at his Bulova wristwatch, and ran his hand over his balding pate. Before I could assemble a response, he turned and went back upstairs. I followed him at a distance, unable to find my voice.

  When he opened the front door, I could see a confused Sawyer and Noreen on the other side of it, dappled in pale sunlight.

  As he walked out, the literary agent turned to speak.

  “I have a plane to catch,” he said, his steely eyes softening with concern, and he jabbed the brim of his tartan trilby at me. “Stay away from this. Your father paid the price. That was a check your ass can’t cash, and I’m not going to let you.”

  I took the vague threat at face value. He disappeared and my friends poured into the church with alarm on their faces. “What the hell was that about?” they asked, in unison.

  “I’ll tell you about it later,” I managed to say, brushing past them and marching out the door.

  _______

  We drove back to the Hampton so Noreen could renew her room, but when we got there, Sawyer came to his senses and offered her the bed in his room. I must have looked shaken, because neither of them spoke to me on the road.

  “A little confident in yourself, aren’t you?” Noreen asked Sawyer, depositing her suitcase in front of the closet.

  “I’ll be on the couch.”

  I took the opportunity to use the bathroom in Sawyer’s suite and compose myself. I looked at my reflection in the mirror, wincing in the bright lights and horrifying myself with the crow’s-feet on my face. My shaved head was beginning to grow out, no longer rough to the touch, and I needed a shave.

  I leaned closer and examined my amber eyes, surprised to find that they weren’t bloodshot. I noticed one silver hair in my fledgling beard and ignored it. The crew was waiting for me when I came out, feeling tired but distinguished. “So what the hell is goin on, Scooby?” asked Sawyer.

  “The tunnel is gone.”

  “What?” asked Noreen. Sawyer simply looked at me as if I’d grown a third arm right in front of them.

  “When I came downstairs, my dad’s agent was sitting in the chapel. He took me down to the cellar and showed me the wall where the tunnel used to be. Then he told me a weird story my dad told him back when my dad was in rehab, a story about Dad’s muse, this thing called a ‘Silen’ that I would imagine gave him the Fiddle and Fire series.”

  I told them what Bayard had told me, their eyes growing larger and larger, and then I dropped the punchline: “He told me my dad was murdered.”

  “Murdered?” they both said in unison, getting up off the couch at the same time. “By who?”

  “Nobody knows. Also, get this: Max wants me off the series. He says I’m going crazy like my dad did.”

  “That’s garbage,” said Sawyer. “I don’t care if it was a dream or if it actually happened, but we saw the same thing, and that’s got to count.”

  I lifted my shirt to show them the scratch on my back. It was long and thin, but it was scabbing over. “I think it actually happened. This is where I got hurt falling through the roof in that other-place. If it didn’t actually happen, then where did this come from?”

  “Maybe you did it at your dad’s house? Maybe—” Noreen said, and interrupted herself.

  Sawyer folded his arms. “You don’t really think we got wasted and made it all up, do you?”

  “I don’t have any idea what to think,” she said, shrugging. “I mean, it does sound pretty far-fetched, right? Seriously. This kind of thing only happens in Hollywood. Real life is not He-Man, or Beastmaster 2.”

  “Tish,” said Sawyer, taking her hand in his and kissing it. “Ti amo! You know what it does to me when you talk cheesy 80’s fantasy movies.”

  “Gomez, not in front of the children.”

  I rolled my eyes and went to the door. “Well, you guys want to get some lunch while we figure out where to go from here?”

  “Sounds like a plan, Stan,” said Sawyer, and we left the room.

  As he closed the door behind us with a soft clunk, I noticed a strange flicker in the corner of my eye, as if I’d poked it with my finger. I rubbed the bridge of my nose and wrung my face with my palms, pressing my cold fingers
against my eyelids to soothe them. We sauntered down the corridor past silent suite doors, our footsteps quieted by the plush berber runner.

  Stepping into the elevator, Sawyer pressed the button for the first floor. “So what are you guys thinking? Mexican?”

  I noticed the black spot again, and winced. I noticed Noreen doing the same thing. She squinted and looked up at the cab light, saying, “Yeah, that sounds fine.”

  “I must be hungrier than I thought I was,” said Sawyer. “I’m getting a headache.”

  I leaned my head back and listened to my stiff neck crackle, relieving a dull pain I hadn’t noticed until he brought it up. “Me too. How much sleep you think we got?”

  “Not enough.”

  The door slid shut and a second later, the elevator cab shifted, and began to move toward the lobby. A soft chime told us we were passing the second floor. My mind wandered as I studied my distorted features in the brushed-steel surface of the elevator wall. I grinned and the horrible, blurry face bared its teeth back at me.

  Suddenly, I had an epiphany. “Sawyer, what if the thing my dad talked about was the guy with the horns?”

  “The Silen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can believe it. You know, that puts yesterday into perspective. When we carried the mirror to the church, and we were talking all kinds of weird shit, ramma-lamma-ding-dong, or whatever. You said it can put ideas in your head, that’s how it became your father’s muse.”

  Noreen made a face, turning to look at us. “What are you talking about?”

  “Yesterday,” I said, as the elevator made that ding noise again. “I told you about it, earlier. When we went to my dad’s house yesterday, me and Sawyer took the mirror and put it in the car. It was like we were sleepwalking.”

  “So you’re saying that devil thing made you open a portal to another world?” she asked. “Do you guys have any idea how messed-up that sounds?”