I turned back towards Prime, who now stood a head taller than everyone else. I hadn’t noticed before, but the fire had changed him, making him larger than Leon’s six-foot frame.
A tiny ring of open space surrounded him as people fought to get away.
Prime’s torso split down the center and his head, shoulders, and arms began to droop backwards as he unfolded like a macabre flower. His insides were a rippling black mass that glistened under the streetlights. The inner surface of his body, now peeled back and facing outwards, was covered entirely in a thick sheet of needle-sharp thorns.
And then I knew why the wooden men were here in force and why Prime was using them to keep the crowd packed in tight. And there wasn’t a goddamned thing I could do about it.
Back in my army days as a sergeant, I could always make myself heard when I needed to. But now, with the strength of my new body, my lungs and vocal cords could produce sound levels that were beyond human.
I cupped my hands around my mouth and bellowed. “Get down!”
The people around me flinched and covered their ears, but the rest of the crowd didn’t react. They heard me, they just weren’t able to focus on what I was saying. At least Anne and Chuck reacted in time, diving off of their table and out of sight.
I yanked my own table up like a shield at the last second, trying to cover as many people as possible.
There was a ripping sound, like tearing silk, and staccato vibrations reached me through the table. I lowered it and saw that the front was peppered with thorns that were buried half an inch into the wood.
A new sound drowned out the panicked screams from the crowd. Anguished shrieks filled the air, an animal keening that erupted from the throats of those stricken by Prime’s thorns. They lay on the ground by the dozens, clutching at themselves and writhing, mouths stretched impossibly wide as the tiny spheres on the end of the thorns began to drain their blood. And their souls.
On cue, the wooden men surged into the crowd from all directions. They broke bones with their hard wooden fists and cut deep into flesh with their jagged fingertips. Nobody got past them.
There was no way I could deal with all of the wooden men. There were easily fifty or more of the grotesque things attacking the crowd. But Prime was here and we had unfinished business. Hunger leapt into my fist as I charged through the thinning crowd towards him.
He was twenty yards away, his chest sealing together into its original shape. He turned to face me with a wide grin, showing a mouthful of thorns.
A wooden man to my right ran at me. Hunger connected with a solid crunch and sent it spinning away. Two more ran at me from either side and one slammed into my back.
I tore one free just as another wrapped itself around my legs. I fell. More of the things piled on top of me, clutching at my arms and legs and digging into me with their misshapen hands.
As I struggled to free myself, Prime simply turned and strolled away. If he had a voice, I’m sure he would have been laughing.
I let go of Hunger so that I could use both hands to tear at the things. I wrenched off a wooden arm and at least one head, but even as I dismembered them, the creatures continued to clutch at me with single-minded determination.
The wooden men kept me distracted for another thirty seconds before leaping off and scuttling away, leaving shattered pieces of themselves behind. They had done their job.
Prime was gone.
26
There are times and places from your life that you will never leave behind. Images past and present blur together into a single unbearable moment. Corpses in the street here and in my past, cobblestone there and asphalt here, with scavengers plucking at them. Ravens and wooden men.
I stood among the dead and dying on the battlefields of my past and in a small town in North Carolina and the space between them was as thin as dreams.
The wooden men harvested the blood filled sacs that sprouted from the husks of Prime’s victims and ran away with them, often carrying three or four in their arms as they loped off into the darkness past the streetlights.
I could hear the futile crack of Anne’s pistol as she fired at the fleeing creatures. Unable to shoot until they were clear of the crowd, she was forced to wait until the things were nearly shrouded in darkness and moving fast. Even so, wood chips flew in the distance and some of the prized sacs were dropped, but none of the wooden men went down.
I caught a couple of stragglers as they attempted to get the last of the sacs, crushing them with Hunger as they tried to escape, but in the end Prime’s forces had managed to get what they came for. Owen had been sacrificed and Prime had gotten away with his spoils. Anne, Chuck, and I may as well not even have been here. He had simply outclassed us.
The firemen were the first to arrive with aid, on foot and carrying their trauma kits like oversized orange plastic luggage. The station was only a block away and most of the firemen were still in the clothes they had worn to the party, leaving just long enough to get help.
They must have started the return trip before Prime had vanished, willingly heading right back into what had been a full-on war zone when they left. That impressed the hell out of me, but it didn’t surprise me. I doubt there was much on this earth that would have been able to frighten those men away.
We helped where we could, lending hands and what little skill we had to offer, but in the end there were few serious injuries. Most were wounds inflicted by the wooden men as they ran into the crowd to harvest the sacs and a few people who were suffering blood loss from being hit with one or two thorns. The majority were either uninjured or shriveled corpses lying in the street.
Ambulances and official vehicles began to arrive in short order, clustering around the site like ants around a dead grasshopper. They appeared at the edges and removed bits of the scene little by little, taking away the injured and the dead, delivering them to the hospital, and returning again.
I spotted deputy Ellis once, now in charge and looking dazed as he tried to help the paramedics pull Nell away from Verna’s body. She screamed and beat at them as they wrapped a blanket around her and forced her into the back of an ambulance to be sedated. Anne was close by and trying to reach through Nell’s grief, but I don’t think Nell even knew she was there.
It was hours later before we were checked for injuries and questioned by the sheriff’s department for the second time today. That part of the night was a blur.
We drove back to Henry’s place wrapped in numb silence, just taking comfort in each other’s presence.
When we arrived, Henry watched us come into the kitchen one by one. He nodded and put a bottle of Troy and Sons white corn whiskey on the table. White whiskey is basically moonshine, and Troy and Sons were a local distillery that made some of the best.
He already knew the bare bones of the story from listening to the police band, but he didn’t say anything. Each of us told our version of the story because we had to, not because anyone needed to hear it. Each was both unique and the same, variations on a theme.
I raised a glass with the others, but the whiskey failed to warm me. It slid down my throat like tepid water, the fumes and flavor pointless without that spreading heat.
Henry smacked his lips once and slapped his tumbler down on the table. “Very smart. Waiting for Owen to light a pyre of the forest’s dead limbs, then sacrificing him to that same fire. Encapsulating the symbolism of the oppressor and his defeat all at the same time. Powerful.”
“So now you’re a fan?” asked Chuck, pouring himself another shot.
Henry shrugged. “Good work is good work. Doesn’t matter if I like the creator or the results. It just is.”
“Whatever, man.”
I pushed my glass away. “So what was it for? The ritual, I mean.”
“I have no idea. But just because I don’t know what it was for, that doesn’t mean I don’t have an idea about who it was directed at.”
“What do you mean, who? As in a person?”
; “Not exactly.” He picked up the bottle in his free hand and stood up. “Come with me.”
We all followed him outside into the cold, letting the screen door creak and bang shut behind us. He led our somber procession across the lawn to the tree line at the edge of his property.
Warm air wafted over us in soft caresses between the harder, colder winter gusts. It oozed from between the trees in front of us. Trees that had branches covered in buds and tender young leaves, all as green as springtime.
“Holy shit,” breathed Chuck.
Henry nodded. “Could be. Depends on who you pray to. The ritual woke something primeval, something that’s now bound up in these woods.” He took a sip of whiskey from the bottle. “Maybe even more than just these woods.”
I plucked a tiny, curled leaf from the nearest tree and crushed it between my fingers. It smelled fresh and green. “Woke it for what purpose?”
“Some kind of pact, I would suppose. It’s going to do something or give something to Prime in exchange for some action on Prime’s part. And judging from the way that sacrifice was structured, I’m guessing it’s not going to be anything friendly.”
“You mean,” said Chuck, “like taking revenge on people for cutting down the forest?”
Henry laughed, clear and loud, right from his belly.
Chuck’s cheeks turned red. “What? That’s what you said. Prime made a deal with the woods by killing the guy who started the bonfire. So his end of the pact must be to take revenge for the forest, right?”
Henry shook his head. “Lord, no. The woods don’t have a consciousness or anything resembling one. There may well be a power that lives here, most places have them, but they’re deep under the earth. Prime called it up into the woods, sure, but it would no more be interested in avenging some birch trees than you would be about getting back at someone that cut off a piece of your shirt.”
“Oh.”
Anne clapped Chuck on the shoulder. “It was a great idea, though. Very Disney.”
I opened my hand and let the wind pluck the crushed leaf from my fingers. “So we know that Prime made contact and that something said yes. But we don’t know what the question was.”
“Correct,” said Henry.
“Great.”
We stood together at the edge of the dark woods and smelled verdant spring and sterile winter at the same time. In the distance, lights flickered and moved in the treetops.
27
The lights got brighter, two separate spectral shimmers gliding between the trees. It didn’t take long to see that they were headed in our direction.
As they drifted out of the woods and onto the lawn in front of us, I could see that instead of a single glow they were made up of dozens of vertical cascades, each one a luminous blue-green waterfall of color. New cascades appeared in the direction that they were heading and faded out behind, but the individual streaks themselves didn’t seem to move. They each reminded me of a tiny Aurora Borealis, fluxing ten feet off the ground. Their soft light threw shadows in all directions and painted everything in slowly shifting hues.
They came to a halt halfway between us and the tree line and hovered there, pulsing and swaying.
I spoke in a hush, like you might do if you spotted a deer close by. “Henry?”
Henry pulled his ever-present pad from his back pocket started taking notes. “Wisps. I told you that I had seen lights in these woods before.”
“Are they dangerous?”
He shrugged. “All I have to go by are the stories.”
“What happens in the stories?”
“They appear to travelers at night, usually in the woods or swamps. People follow them off the beaten path and are never heard from again. So, yes. Probably dangerous.”
“And I’m guessing you want me to follow them?”
“Absolutely. Their appearance now can’t be a coincidence.”
“What about the part where the people that follow them are never seen again?”
“I’m sure you’ll figure something out. You always do.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I walked a few feet towards the lights and they moved away from me, back towards the woods. They stopped when I stopped. That seemed like a pretty clear indication that they wanted to lead me somewhere, so I obliged.
Anne followed because it would never have occurred to her to stay behind and Chuck fell in beside her. As much as I like to pick on Chuck, he’d always been willing to put his ass on the line for other people, even before we met.
We entered the woods. At first we hurried in an attempt to get closer to the wisps, but they changed speed to maintain a good fifty feet of distance no matter what we did, so pretty soon we just followed them at a comfortable walk.
Deep black shadows leapt from nearby trees and merged with the surrounding darkness as the wisps moved through the woods, always keeping us at the edge of their pool of light. I could understand why a lost traveler would follow them, having a gentle light in front and nothing but darkness at his back.
The trees at the edge of the woods had been budding, but the further in that we went the more advanced the growth became. The trees began to be thick with leaves, as if in the middle of springtime, and there were even knee-high saplings here and there.
Anne unzipped her jacket. “Getting warmer.”
“Yeah,” said Chuck. “And the air’s less dry. It’s like winter doesn’t go any further than Henry’s yard.”
I put my hand on a nearby tree. “It’s more than that. I’m no expert on the local plant-life, but I’ve been out in these woods plenty of times and I don’t recall seeing any trees this size before.”
Anne and Chuck came over to see and the wisps patiently stopped where they were.
The trunk of the tree I was looking at was larger than I could put my arms around. It looked like an oak to me and must have been at least sixty or seventy feet tall. The canopy was so dense that I couldn’t see the night sky through it.
The woods around Henry’s place weren’t all that extensive, maybe a few miles across, and were made up of trees with pretty slender trunks, pines and birch mostly. I would have remembered seeing something as massive as this before. And it wasn’t the only one we’d passed.
Anne knelt down at the base of the tree. “Take a look at this.”
I squatted next to her. Growing in the fork between two massive roots coming off of the trunk were three flowers, all growing out of the same thick stalk. Each flower head was an open-ended bell, like a pitcher plant, but pointing slightly downward. The flower itself was white and inside were slender threads that glowed with a gentle golden light. It was faint, but when cupped between my hands the light filled my palms. They smelled like summer.
Anne gently stroked one of the flowers and then looked up at the massive oak tree. “These woods don’t exactly feel sinister to me, you know? I mean, they smell goosey as hell, but they seem nice. Like an unspoiled nature preserve or something.”
Chuck snorted. “Nature preserve? There’s nothing natural about it. And everything unnatural that I’ve ever seen has tried to kill me. I don’t think being pretty is the same thing as being safe.”
Anne stood up and brushed crumbs of loose soil from her jeans. We resumed following the wisps. I felt a little easier as we walked, since Patrick’s intuition about these kinds of things had always been good, and I suspected that Anne’s would prove to be no less reliable.
The wisps led us for a few more minutes and I noticed that we were actually getting closer to them for the first time. They had stopped.
We approached slowly, weapons in hand, eyes and ears peeled. The woods were hushed and the air had gone as still as a held breath.
The wisps were hanging high overhead in the center of a clearing, illuminating the open space. A log lay on the ground, partially covered by vines and leaves. As we stepped into the clearing, something darted out of the woods and jumped up on the log.
It was a red fox.
; 28
Anne glanced at me in surprise. “Didn’t you say that a fox gave that package to Leon in the cemetery?”
“Yeah.”
“You think it’s the same one?”
“I’m betting it’s the same creature, yes.”
The fox stared at us and wrapped its tail around its haunches, seemingly content. Its eyes shone as though reflecting light that wasn’t there. The world changed.
The sun appeared on the horizon and rocketed into the sky in the space of a few seconds, turning the night into noon, hot and bright. At the same time the trees around us vanished and were replaced by an empty plain as far as the eye could see in all directions. Nothing but hard packed dirt, cracked and dry. Not a single blade of grass grew on it. The fox sat in the same place, but now on the dusty ground since the stump had vanished with the trees.
In front of the fox was a package, wrapped in the now familiar pale leather. The package was square and had a lump on top.
Chuck pointed his pistol at the creature. “What the fuck, man? Where are we?”
I took a deep breath and found that I could still smell the woods and the night air. “I don’t think we’ve gone anywhere. I think it’s just showing us something. What do you think, Anne?”
“I don’t know.” She had her gun leveled at the fox with one hand and the other pressed to her nose. “But I can tell you that this is more intense than anything I’ve ever sensed before. My whole face is going numb.”
On the ground, the package began to unwrap itself. As I expected, inside was a book. On top of the book was dried green lump. It was the package that Piotr received. The lump vanished and the book began to smolder and burn. A beam of white-hot light shot skyward and then the book was gone, reduced to ash. The beacon, summoning the Devourer.
Clouds appeared overhead, spreading rapidly from an inky hole where the beam of light had touched the sky. Within moments rain began to fall, slowly at first, but then quickly building to a raging downpour.
Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) Page 10