The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree

by S. A. Hunt

  “I’m sorry,” I said, looking up at her. “I don’t know any Tekyrian.”

  “I said, ‘good evening, stranger’,” she said, smiling. Her voice had a sensual rasp that reminded me of cats’ purrs and late-night radio DJs. “Welcome to Leb Cirimmi.”

  “Good evening. And thank you.”

  “My name is Memne. What is yours?”

  “Ross.”

  “Rosh,” she said. “I like that. It is the name of a warrior.”

  “Thanks,” I replied, rubbing my overgrown buzzcut. “I guess.”

  “Why don’t you come up and listen to the music with me, la cyfi?” asked Memne. “I am not so much for the dancing and the singing and the lebci-zuri. The drunken men, thorgeht’m, they are too crazy, they cannot leave me be. I am up here all by myself.”

  As she spoke, she traced the cords of her necklaces with one light finger. She spoke Ainean/English with a faint Tekyrian accent, which sounded eerily like a Russian’s trill of Rs and stringing of Es. Something peculiar occurred to me as I looked up at her, something about the speaking of English, but at the sight of her sweet, fine-featured face, I couldn’t quite get a lock on the feeling.

  I hefted the little leather satchel I’d found in Ed’s cottage. I listened to the jingle of money inside.

  At the top of the stairs, Memne cat-crept over to me on bare feet and smiled up at me. I could see her retinas globing gold through the glassy pupils of her eyes, like the man at the bath-house, as if there was a tiny star hiding in her skull. She took my hand and I was comforted by the warmth. I’m not sure what I expected.

  Her fingertips were warm and soft, yet scaly in a subtle way, like the belly of a snake, and the dark cerulean surface of her arms was covered in a fine, plush peach-fuzz. She looked to me like the Egyptian goddess Bast, bestial and lethally beautiful.

  I wanted to tell her I didn’t have much money, but I didn’t want to offend her by being wrong about what she was. I contented myself with simply standing at the railing with her, listening to the distant bands play their muffled, cacophonous rendition of Latinized zydeco. I could hear the warble of childrens’ whistles and then a shooting scream. A swirling streamer sailed high into the sky, exploding in a burst of light with a cracking BOOM, resolving into a nebula of gold sparks, fading as it fell.

  I leaned against the banister, the Tekyr girl between my arms, her downy, vulpine left ear against my right cheek. She was nearly a foot shorter than myself. Her hair was long and raven-black, cool and down-soft against my face, tumbling down her shoulder-blades. She smelled tropical and floral, like coconuts and tulips.

  An obscure rumbling came from deep within her—she was actually purring through the Tekyr blowholes on her chest. I didn’t know what to say, and I was happy just being within arms’ reach of a woman for the first time in almost two years.

  Her sweet closeness was more than enough for me.

  My heart beat lightly in my chest, a faint stirring inside of me that radiated throughout my body and made me profoundly aware of my physical self. The cool breeze beat against the heat of my face. A sourceless welling of adrenaline told me to move my hand just this much...and caress the velvet of her arm.

  She nuzzled my cheekbone with that exotic nasal ridge she had in place of a nose. I took this as approval, and closed my arms around her slight frame.

  She turned and the nasal ridge brushed against my cheek again, and she caressed my lips with her own. I smelled the citrus tang before I tasted it when she kissed me. Her smooth, sharp tongue was a nimble explorer, and then Memne had leaned back against the wrought-iron bar and she was grinning. Her bottom lip lingered between her teeth, her gaze alternating between my mouth and my eyes.

  I reached into my shirt and took out the simple gold chain that had been hanging around my neck the last three years. It was looped through a gold circle like Frodo bearing the One Ring. I pulled the chain until it broke, shattering into three pieces.

  I hesitated for a moment in consideration and doubt, just long enough to see the gold catch the light, glittering, and then I let the ring slide out of my hand. A hundred memories hung in the air, spilling through my mind, dragging regret, panic, relief behind them like a needle and thread as I watched my old wedding band slip away.

  I still don’t know where it fell.

  She put her tiny three-fingered hands on my now-ungilded chest and guided me backwards through a doorway, where I gladly spent half the money in my satchel. I didn’t think Ed would begrudge me the use of his coin collection in a situation like this.

  For a night, at least, I loved somebody with all my heart again.

  _______

  I got back to my room and slept for four hours, slept like a dead rock at the bottom of a well. I woke up to the sound of knocking at the door and found Sawyer on the other side of it. As soon as he saw my face, he broke into a tremendous grin and walked away.

  I called after him, “Shut up,” and closed the door to take a much-needed bath, still redolent of Memne’s scent. I lay in the hot water, grinning like an idiot and feeling like Captain Kirk.

  Yesterday’s buffet was a banquet compared to today, just a platter of croissants and pancetta sitting on the island in the Rollins’ modest kitchen. Walter had filled a metal thermos with coffee and we were out the door. I was still eating my breakfast as we wound down the foothill into the valley.

  We didn’t have to pay for tickets since we were with the Deon and he was on business. Walter, Noreen, Sawyer and I boarded the train and took our seats. I sat down, put my feet up on the seat across the cabin, and the warming morning breeze knocked me out as easy as a haymaker.

  Sometime later, I jerked awake, my heart slamming. “What the hell was that?”

  “The hell was what?” asked Noreen. They were eating what looked like jam on toast points.

  I looked out the window. The sun was directly overhead. I’d been asleep for at least three hours. “I heard a voice.”

  I shut the window so I could hear better. A rasp in my head,

  (rammatica, my name is hel grammat)

  words whispered into the center of my brain like creme

  (can only talk to you like this a few time)

  injected into a Twinkie. I stood up and walked out of the private cabin, into the hallway, where I leaned against the wall to steady myself as the train rocked from side to side. Noreen came outside and took my arm. Her touch was reassuring. She didn’t ask me about myself like I’d asked after her so much the past week, but I knew from the concern on her face.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Something—somebody’s talking to me. In my head.”

  I leaned against a nearby railing, facing the windows that ran the length of the exterior corridor.

  “Maybe you need more sleep, Ross. Maybe you’re hallucinating. Who knows what it could do to your mind, what we’ve done, what we’ve been through?”

  “I don’t think that’s it.”

  “Just come back in and sit down. Or lie down,” she said, gently tugging my elbow. “You can lie down and put your legs in our lap.”

  It dawned on me that it had gotten considerably darker in the room, very quickly. I put my face against the cold window and looked outside at the clouds. In other circumstances, the dark, billowing anvil in the sky would have simply foretold the coming of rain. However, I knew that it was something else.

  I pointed at the funnel cloud spiralling down from the stormclouds and said, my heart racing, “Something is coming.”

  I pulled Noreen back into the private sitting-room, leaving the door open. Everybody was immediately alarmed by my expression. Walter pulled his hat off and looked at me, his face growing dark. “What is it?”

  “Something is coming,” I said again.

  A panic crawled into my system and began to take me over. I felt a furious listlessness and my eyes cut back and forth, looking for safety. Whatever was outside was serious business, and I didn’t need the voice in my head to tell me so. I c
ould feel the evil emanating from the tornado-sapling worming down from the air when I saw it.

  In the few seconds I’d lingered at the window, watching the cottony blackness whip itself into a funnel, I took a sinister inspiration from the sight of it, felt the malice inside of it like a snake in a stocking.

  It wasn’t natural...it was threaded through with a wrongness that threatened the reality around it like a glitched video game or damaged tape cassette.

  We stepped back into the corridor and surveyed the coming tempest.

  It had reached the ground by now and what filled me with dread was to see that it did not pull dirt into the air and throw it around—instead, the darkness of the tornado seemed to infiltrate and devour the real around it in an ink-blot sort of insidious way, billowing, seeping, eating, taking away.

  It was not an agitator, it was not a destroyer. It was a subtractor.

  “That’s not good,” said Sawyer.

  The twisting oblivion raced toward the track, promising to cut the train off as it went.

  “We need to get off this train,” said Walter, and he pushed through us, moving to the rear of the car. He opened the door and went outside. We followed him.

  There was only room for the two of us on the coupling outside. Beyond the car door, the wind was deafening, but the swirling black maelstrom in front of the train made no noise except for the high-pitched electronic whistle one might hear when a television is turned on in another room. It was the song of nothing, the eulogy of logic.

  Walter looked down at the desert blurring past the platform under our feet.

  “It’s too fast,” he said.

  I agreed. “Yeah, if we jump we’ll break our legs and necks.”

  He shoved past me and back into the car. I followed him again, and we raced into the next room, which was the dining car.

  As soon as we entered, I knew something was wrong.

  No one seemed to be alarmed by the sight of the tornado outside, clearly visible through the large port-side windows. At least two dozen people here sat calmly at their tables, their eating utensils in their hands, gazing straight ahead, their food half-eaten and untouched. I waved my hands in their faces, to no avail.

  I slapped one of them and he said, “Mickey, Mickey, two four nine,” and a woman behind me said, “Two four nine twelve ten oh five,” and then the entire car erupted in one single riotous, “HEY MICKEY!”

  The surreality of it made me sick with confusion, as if my brain was backwards in my skull.

  The two of us surged forward, and I noticed that the rest of our party had joined us. I glanced back and saw them looking at the diners with concern.

  The next car was as bizarre as the last, a simple passenger carriage with face-to-face booth seating. The people here were as preoccupied as the others. Walter did not bother trying to rouse them from their stupor and neither did I. We simply kept racing toward the engine.

  When we reached the penultimate car, the Deon tried to wrench the door open, but it was shut tight. His eyes were bright and wide.

  “It’s locked. It’s locked,” he said as if he couldn’t believe it, and drew one of his enormous, exotic revolvers, using the butt to pistol-whip the glass pane out of the door’s window.

  Sawyer and Noreen spilled into the room, staggering with the train’s worsening rocking. The noise of the wind seemed to be falling away, replaced by the clattering-chugging of the train’s engine and the hateful silence of the devouring wind outside. Walter had put his arm through the window-hole, feeling for the handle.

  Noreen panted, “What is that out there, Ross? Do you know? You said you heard a voice. Did it tell you? Did it tell you what that is?”

  “It said its name was ‘Hel Grammatica’,” I offered.

  “The tornado?” asked Sawyer.

  “No, the...person that the voice was coming from. His name is Hel. He said...he said that the ‘man is coming’. I don’t know what that is.”

  “The door is chained shut,” said the Deon. “There’s a padlock.”

  I looked through the window in the forward wall of the car. I could see the conductor standing in front of the steam engine’s coal furnace. He was motionless, facing the rear of the train, swaying with the motion of it, staring at the floor, the bill of his cap obscuring his eyes.

  I pounded on the wall, yelling, “Hey! Hey you! Open the door! You’ve got to stop the train! We’re about to—”

  The locomotive pierced the veil of seething, roiling black, plunging us into a void of silence. The wall of the tornado raced the length of the train in a sequential rush. Pebbles and dirt clattered against the walls and slowed in mid-air, disintegrating before my eyes.

  Even as I watched, the engine itself seemed to shred into individual molecules and helixed fading into the ether, from the back to the front. The last thing I saw before I tore myself away from the window was the conductor’s skin slipping from his musculature like a raincoat, and it chipped itself into atoms, leaving a gruesome Mr. Goodbody standing there grinning maniacally at us without lips or eyelids.

  “We gotta go now,” I said and ran at my friends, taking their shirts in my hands as I went.

  They turned and pursued me. I took a last look over my shoulder at them and saw that the forward end of the car was unraveling itself like a bad sweater, shattering and fading behind us. Oblivion chased us from car to car, sucking-windmilling-chewing brain-dead passengers into the heart of obscurity.

  We finally made it to the caboose, which turned out to be the mail car. Steamer trunks and crates were piled against the walls and along the floor in long, orderly rows. Noreen slammed the rear door open to reveal the sand and brittlebush shooting away from us, the track arrowing into a dark horizon.

  A mail clerk was sitting on a trunk playing solitaire.

  “What’s going on?” cried the clerk. “You’re not supposed to be in here!”

  As he stood up, the forward door of the mail car was sucked out of the frame, and all that was visible through the hole was darkness and wind. The wall began to come apart and vaporize.

  The mail clerk abandoned all pretense and shoved Noreen out of the way, leaping through the back door. The dust was beaten out of the man as he ragdolled along the tracks behind the train.

  We all traded glances and silently agreed that the mail clerk’s plan was less than optimal.

  Walter overturned a steamer trunk, dumping half the envelopes out, and righted it again. He marched over to me, grabbed my vest, and manhandled me over to the trunk, shoving me inside. I clouted the back of my head on the rim of the box and cried out in surprise and pain.

  “You are meant for great things,” said the Deon. “I see that now. Someone wants you dead.”

  He slammed the lid shut and I felt-heard the hiss of him pushing the trunk toward the back door. “It is your duty to survive.”

  The floor fell away as the gunslinger shoved me out into the desert. The trunk hit the track with a teeth-rattling slam and my head bounced off the inside of it, setting off a bottle-rocket in my brain. Luckily, the parcels still inside the box with me buffered me against the worst of the fall.

  I found when I stopped rolling that the hasp had fallen shut. I was lying on my back in a trunk I couldn’t open.

  All around me, the unbelievable grinding roar of the whirlwind howled outside the box, making sounds of uncanny sentient rage. It was looking for me.

  The sound of the train shushing down the rails lessened and then petered away into nothing.

  The whirlwind faded until I was bathed in silence.

  I hugged my knees and pressed my toes against the lid, then shuffled them toward my face until my feet were flat against the inside, and pushed as hard as I could. The wood crackled and lights sparkled in my eyes in the dark, but the hasp held tight. It opened just wide enough to let a hair-thin crack of daylight through.

  Shit.

  I tried again, and failed again. I felt something pop in my back, just above my ass,
and relaxed.

  The air was starting to get close, hot, damp. I was running out of oxygen. My head spun free of its axis and twirled for miles in my tiny prison. Then I got an idea. I held the lid up and grabbed an envelope, then stuck it in the crack between the lid and trunk, used it to prod the hasp open.

  The lid flew open, flooding the compartment with cool, dusty air. I shot up and took stock of my environment, inviting a spear of agony through my skull.

  The tornado and the train were gone, but the sky remained dark and woolen. From here I could see that the track ended in a tangle of iron some quarter of a mile away, bent double and twisted by the force of the devouring black funnel. I climbed out of the trunk and swiveled in every direction, a frantic meerkat in the dust cloud, looking for some evidence that my friends had survived, some obvious clue to their continued existence.

  The breeze swept the dust away, revealing an unbroken landscape of flat, scrubby desolation as far as the eye could see. The only thing that remained of Sawyer, Noreen, the Kingsmen, the passengers and the conductor was a short trail of debris and litter strewn across the tracks. Envelopes fluttered in the wind, hats rolled in the sand, scarves whipped and waved at me, beckoning me to them.

  I tore one of them off, a silken blue one, and tied it around my neck, and bent to collect a small leather pouch. It was the one I had taken from my father’s cottage in Maplenesse. Inside were the coins, and inside of an inner pocket was a sample of strange dry fungus, mired in some sort of gray matter that looked like Spanish moss. Also, I found a fountain pen and a pair of spectacles.

  I looked down at the shield and its crossed revolvers, the spear bisecting the center of the crest, the wolf-face carved into the shield itself, and I was overcome with despair. A barb of wet, dull silver pain lanced my ribs and all the strength went out of my legs. I fell into the dust at the feet of a dozen tall tufts of sagebrush and wept hard.