by R. A. Nelson
So much power.
The rented pulpit comes apart in one big, shivery scream of tearing, the sound of the busting wood mixed with the shrieking of the nails wrenching theirselves loose.
Something runs through the crowd fighting around the pontoon boat—the way a horse’s skin will wiggle and crawl— and just like that, all the faces turn, the whole crowd turns to me.
“Little Texas! It’s Little Texas!” some of them start screaming. “Go to him! Go to Little Texas!”
They start at a rush, pushing and shoving and screaming, all barreling down on me now.
“This way! This way!” I say again and again.
I take off running, hurrying fast as I can toward higher ground, away from the dock, but away from the clearing, too. They are all running after me crosswise over the slope, heading in the same direction I am heading.
Toward the old railroad trestle.
Folks in Sunday clothes, big strong men, kids, old women, all tear catty-corner across the hill toward the spot where the big iron beams of the trestle are sunk deep into the hide of the island.
I reach Tee Barlow where he is huddling with Miss Wanda Joy down in the shadows.
“Come on!” I yell, pulling at his arm.
Tee Barlow is muttering, eyes blank as a painted wall.
“‘The fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars—’”
I backhand him across the mouth. He shuts up, his eyes flutter. “Little Texas?”
“Come with me!” I say, this time to Miss Wanda Joy, tugging her away from him. They both start to run at last.
The sound gusts over our heads again, and there is a great, shuddering WHOMP, making the ground shimmy under our feet. One of the pillars has fallen.
Everybody runs hunched over like they’re being showered with hail. The trestle’s just a hundred yards down shore, but the closer we get, the thicker the pricker bushes and vines.
Another loud crash bangs in the clearing. Keep running.
There’s just enough light pouring down from the lamps in the clearing to make out the iron frame of the trestle. In the last few feet the crowd rushes past us, scrambling up the concrete base.
I haul Miss Wanda Joy further up the hill to keep her from getting trampled. People flood onto the trestle, shoulder to shoulder, fighting and screaming at the bottleneck. The old iron strains with the weight, and the timbers moan.
Please, Lord. Please let it hold. Keep them safe.
The trestle starts to shake, jammed with squirming, tangled people. But they’re moving forward, four and five abreast, stumbling, stepping on fingers.
A noise thunders behind us—for a while that’s all I can hear, a huge, roaring anger.
Lucy’s voice sounds in my head from last night when we were making the plan.
“The best thing to do is, you don’t show it fear, Ronald Earl. You’ve got to be arrogant. Haughty, proud. A real spiritual badass. That’s its weakness. Pride in its own power. If it comes, it’ll be pissed off. Don’t try to stop it. You can’t. Not by yourself. Lead them to the trestle. I don’t think it will cross the water. It will be the fastest way off the island.”
Tee Barlow climbs up beside me and Miss Wanda Joy.
“Go with him!” I shout to her. I turn to Tee Barlow. “You’ve got to get her across! Don’t you let go of her one second.”
“But you—Little Texas,” Miss Wanda Joy whimpers, “what about—”
Another blast comes, this time much closer.
“Move.”
I give Tee Barlow a shove in his big tailbone with my foot. He stumbles forward and throws a fat leg up on the trestle’s cement base and turns to give Miss Wanda Joy a hand up.
I watch them clinging to each other, pushing their way into the mob on the first splintery cross tie. For just the smallest little second, I think about going with them. I won’t lie. But she’s depending on me to carry through with our plan. Set those folks on the island free. Send them home.
“You’ve got to draw it as far away from the tree as you can,” Lucy said. “You’ve got to use the people at the service—use them for bait.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You can and you will. It’s the only way.”
The last of the congregation are scrambling over the concrete base now, clambering onto the trestle. I can’t wait around here anymore. Either they will make it or they won’t.
A scream makes me turn and look one last time. Lord. Someone just jumped or fell from the trestle, hitting the lake like a rifle shot. The roaring over our heads changes to a low, sickening growl. My heart clutches with fear.
Dear merciful, heavenly Father, please send your angels to guide, watch over, and protect whoever just fell in. Please help them all, I pray. But I start moving.
I cut uphill, streaking through the woods, fumbling branches away from my eyes. Heading right back toward the destruction in the clearing.
Get the flashlight.
I step out of the woods near where Sugar Tom had his stroke. The fallen column is at my feet in a jumble of plaster and chimbley rubble. I stoop to pick up the flashlight, then jump back into the forest.
Another scream from down below rips through the forest, and the hooting roar comes again. What will happen if that thing gets hold of the trestle and shakes it down before they can all get off?
“Once the people are safe on the other side, across the water, it’s you and me we have to worry about, Ronald Earl. When it figures out where we are, what we’re doing… it will come for us.”
I keep the flashlight off and start up the path leading to the trouble tree.
Have you ever done something you knew was supposed to be right, but nothing about it felt right? The deeper I get into the woods, the more I can feel it. Anger. Hate. Fear.
I have to switch the flashlight on when I’m about a quarter mile in. A branch snaps off in the woods a ways, and I spray the beam around. Nothing.
Being this afraid is like being squished down into a block of ice-cold cement. I feel the weight of my fear with every step.
I stumble along, heart drumming, into the inky black. I can’t hear the sound anymore—did it get them? Tear the whole trestle down?
Is it coming for me?
I run faster, pushing my way through the oak and hickory saplings. Finally I get to the long bend where the red-tailed fox disappeared. I know Lucy is waiting for me. As I round the long curve, the far end of the flashlight beam suddenly dissolves.
A wind kicks up from off the lake, making the chains and leg irons in the branches clang together. A sound so lonely and dead and forgotten, it makes me want to kneel in the dirt and pull the ground up over me.
“Lucy!”
There’s only the lonesome pieces of iron talking to each other. Where is she?
I smack the flashlight against my leg; the beam flickers and holds. I sweep it around the clearing. There—I see the trouble tree, its muscular roots running all over the ground, trunk cranked in that crazy twist, and I think about our plan again.
“It won’t take long for it to figure out what we’re doing,” Lucy had said. “We’ll need to move swift to set them free. I’ll wait for you by the tree.”
“I’ll be there. I won’t let you down” I told her.
We squeezed each other’s fingers, and she was gone.
But now where is she? What is she going to—
“Jesus.”
It’s a one-word prayer.
What was that?
Something—something just darted across the flashlight beam. Hunched over, low to the ground, running in a funny way, like maybe it’s hurt. Bony-looking. A flash of bluish skin.
I swing the light around. The woods are much closer than they were a second ago. Then—
The flashlight beam licks over something a few yards in front of me. Something blue and kind of see-through and shiny, with wet, glisteny yellow hair.
/> “Where were you?” I say, feeling all the air rush out of me. “It’s down by the trestle—what are we—”
“Hurry,” Lucy says. She comes toward me, and her fingers tighten on my arm like tongs. “Keep going. I’ll tell you when to stop.”
I edge forward, closer and closer to the tree, her almost helping me along. The wind moans through the branches, making the manacles rattle hard overhead. The closer I get to the trouble tree, the more the humped roots shooting out from the bottom almost seem to writhe and quiver.
“There,” Lucy says. “That’s where you need to go to set them free. There.”
She’s pointing at a place where two monstrous roots squirt out from the base of the tree, roots nearly as tall as my chest and big around as drainpipes. I swing the flashlight around. The beam passes through Lucy’s middle.
I can feel her sweet, warm breath on my neck. I boost myself up on the root and swing my legs over, ease myself down. The two giant roots have grown together at one end, making the place between them into a little football-shaped depression with a carpet of leaves and spongy dirt. The skin of the tree feels hard and cold as limestone. Lucy comes closer, peering over at me.
Are we supposed to kill the tree? With what?
“What am I supposed to do now?” I hiss.
Lucy points. The twisting of the tree’s hide has spread open a hole in its middle. Deep enough to see into its insides, like a natural little cave.
“Inside,” Lucy says, eyes glowing. “Look inside.”
I set my feet against one of the roots, trembling, and push myself up toward the opening. The flashlight is crooked on my finger. I haul myself up with my arms and poke the flashlight up, shining it in and—
Nothing.
Only the inside of a very old tree. I can see dark humps of tree flesh colored gray and brown running up the inside of the trunk.
“Reach inside,” Lucy says. “You might have to stretch a little.”
I lean over into the hole, reaching with my fingers. There is something there. Something flat and kind of square, with a cool, pebbly hide. I draw it out of the tree trunk and let out a little gasp.
“Did you find it?” Lucy says.
“It’s Sugar Tom’s Bible,” I say, swiveling around to face her, showing her the black King James Bible with the red gilt edges. “How? How did it get in there? I was just holding it up at the clear—”
“It’s not Sugar Tom’s,” Lucy says.
I climb down from the trunk, heart jumping, and set the old Bible on top of the root. My back is against the tree now. I bring the flashlight around again. She’s standing on the other side of the root.
“You mean it’s … then this belongs to …”
“Pastor Hallmark,” Lucy says in a voice that’s not her voice.
I sit down hard in the little space between the roots. The flashlight slides out of my hand and drops between my legs, shining up under my chin. Lucy comes over and looks down at me.
“Don’t you remember me, Little Texas?”
“Who … who are you?”
She touches herself in the chest. “Don’t you know me? You have always known me.”
I am cold. So cold.
“The book of Mark,” she says. “I’m sure you’re familiar with it. Jesus asks a man full of devils who he is, and the man says—”
“‘My name is Legion,’” I say, “‘for we are many.’”
My eyes bunch up; her face smears like paint dripped in water.
She looks down, not saying anything.
“Don’t forget what happened after that,” I say quietly. “Jesus cast the devils out of that man and slung them into a herd of pigs. They ran over a bluff and killed theirselves.”
“You want to give it a shot?”
“Where is she!”
She smiles and speaks in a different voice. Lucy’s voice.
“But I’m here, Ronald Earl. I’ve always been here.”
I feel my heart plunging. No. No.
“It was you,” I say. “You who tore up the revival tent. You in the hallway that first night. You never went away. It was always you. You killed Pastor Hallmark. You—you hurt Sugar Tom. It was you the whole time. Pretending to be Lucy. And tonight—”
“You’re smarter than you look.”
“You used me,” I say weakly, eyes burning. “Why? Why are you doing this? What do you want?”
The thing puts its hands on the root like it’s fixing to climb over.
“I needed you, Little Texas.”
“I won’t—I won’t do anything for you.”
“But you already have. The service. I needed the service. To bring them all here.”
“But they got away! You didn’t get them. I saw them get away.”
It touches a tongue to its lips. “I was hungry. I didn’t need them. I needed what they could give me.”
“Hungry?”
“I fed off them. Their fear. I can feed off fear. Any fear.” The thing turns and spreads its fingers out against the trunk of the tree, looking up into its branches. “It makes me stronger.”
“What about the slaves? Their spirits?”
It reaches over and strokes the trunk of the trouble tree. “They’re mine. Souls in amber.”
“What do you want with them?”
“They keep me … in being… their hatred, fear, anger. You are what you eat, as they say.”
I pick up the flashlight and rise up slow. Aim the beam at the thing and gasp. I remember a deer laying beside the road once. One of the deer’s eyes was open, and the car lights were shining on it. That’s what its eyes look like now.
Lucy.
“You have to let them go,” I say. “All of them. They belong somewhere else. A better place.”
“But I don’t want to,” the thing says. “I told you. They’re mine. I will keep them.”
I lunge at Pastor Hallmark’s Bible on top of the root, clutch it tight to my chest, eyes shut hard.
“Dear heavenly Father, O Great Redeemer, please send your angels to protect—”
The Bible wrenches itself out of my arms.
Smashes against the trouble tree. Keeps on hitting itself against the tree, harder and harder. I swear I can hear nasty little grunts each time the Bible smacks the tree, till finally it drops into a filthy little pile of mushy paper at my feet.
I hear a hard, ragged breathing coming from the darkness all around me. Anger. Huge, ugly. Anger so thick it’s more solid than the tree.
Pictures start to flood into my head: That rest stop where the kids made fun of my hair. Pictures of me taking hold of one of those kids, the biggest boy, getting my fists in his hair, driving his head straight into a brick wall. Doing it over and over, till his head is splattered into nothing but paste.
Then it’s my parents in the pictures, and I’m taking a claw hammer to their faces. Hitting and hitting and hitting till they don’t have faces anymore.
Kill them. Kill them all. Miss Wanda Joy. Certain Certain. Faye Barlow.
Smash their eyes back into their brains, tear off their skin, burn their bones to ash.
“Get out!” I scream. “Get out of me!”
I slump back against the root behind me. Open my eyes. The thing is still there, looking at me.
“Why?” I say, voice croaking. “Why are you doing this to me?”
It smiles, lips pulled back, showing black, sharp teeth.
“Because I love you.”
A sickening shiver of disgust runs through my whole body.
“You can’t love. You don’t even know what it means.”
The face that was Lucy’s face twists into an animal snarl. “What’s wrong, Ronald Earl? Don’t I look beautiful to you anymore?”
I sink down to my knees, hands hooked together, pleading, starting to weep.
“Please. Please let me go.”
It’s the sound of my own voice that does it—the shame and the quiver in it that tells me just what the thing is doing now.
If it can’t suck me in through hate, it’ll do it through fear and shame and pure loathing.
“No,” I say, unloosing my fists and beating them against the ground. “No. You want me, you aren’t getting me that way. I won’t let you. You’re ugly, you know that? That’s what you are. Dog ugly.”
Lucy stands before me, shining and beautiful again. She plays with her hair, looking at it. “It’s such a little thing, isn’t it? Beauty is all you need, Ronald Earl. Beauty can make you do anything. Even free some slaves. I used it to pull you in. But aren’t you forgetting Second Peter, chapter two, verse nineteen? ‘While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.’”
“That’s not—that’s not what it means. You know that’s not what it means. You can’t use the Word that way!”
The face changes again into a mocking, sickly smile. “But isn’t that what you do, your kind? Twist it whatever way you need it to be? Why, you even get to decide who goes to heaven or hell.”
“I hate you. I hate you.”
“But you said you loved me,” it says, grinning.
So hard to think… I have to remember… I know I felt it. But did I ever say it out loud? Did I ever really tell her? Why is that so important to me now?
I close my eyes, and I can see her … feel myself touching her, looking into her powder blue eyes. I can hear her voice.
She’s real, I tell myself. She has to be real. She has to be. Has to be. Has to be!
I get to my feet, bringing up my fists. “Let. Her. Go.”
“Who, darling?”
“I know she’s real. And I do love her. I do.”
The Lucy thing leans back. “Are you saying you love the dead?”
The beautiful face instantly turns the color of ash, then blacker than ash. Pieces of it start to crumble, flaking away like old paint….
I want to cover my eyes. But that’s just what it’s after. My fear.