House of Dead Trees

by Rod Redux

  Shaking his head in amusement, Raj followed Allen outside.

  7

  The day’s heat had turned to chill, Raj noted, as he crossed the threshold of the Forester House. A stout wind was whipping in from the south, making the treetops shift and creak ominously, but the chill outside was infinitely better than the oppressive atmosphere inside. It was good to get away from the house, if even for an instant. He felt a hundred pounds lighter.

  Raj followed Allen across the porch and out into the thigh-high grass, the wind tossing his hair and tickling his bare arms into goosebumps. He stopped before Allen had walked too far and said, “I’ll give you some privacy, Al. I’m just going to sneak around the side of the house for a couple minutes. Shout if you need me.”

  “Enjoy your smoke,” Allen muttered.

  “I plan to,” Raj replied evenly. He retrieved his pack of Djarums from his hip pocket as he skirted around the house.

  Gazing up at the moon, Raj shook out a coffin nail and tossed it between his lips. It was a beautiful night, though it was hard to really enjoy it with the Forester House snarling at his back.

  The moon was a luminous grin in the sky, a pale glowing crescent shedding wan light on the gauzy ribbons of cumulous drifting by. The stars were out and winking, a sprinkle of fairy dust on dark blue velvet.

  He flicked open his lighter and lit his cigarette, cupping his hands around the little orange flame. He blew out a puff of smoke, then inhaled deeply, enjoying the sensation of warm carcinogens swelling his lungs.

  Self-immolation never tasted so good, he mused, stuffing the lighter and pack back in his pants.

  He hoped he wasn’t making a mistake, letting everyone stay here the remainder of the night. They’d investigated plenty of creepy places, but this house was different. This house was the real deal. That’s what made it so damn tempting—both to him and, he was sure, to the rest of the gang.

  He turned and peered up at the dark bulk of the mansion, contemplating not only its menace but also its glamour. The perfection of its ugliness was something to be admired. A killer… but also a seducer.

  Taking another drag on his smoke, Raj whispered, “Well, you have us now. Question is: what are you going to do with us?”

  8

  Allen stalked around the overgrown driveway, cursing under his breath as his bars vanished and reappeared. Five minutes had passed since Sharon attempted to call him. He held his phone in the air, squinting at the display, then contemplated climbing on top of one of the SUVs, wondering what crisis had moved her to call him so late. His wife wasn’t the type of person to dial someone up “just to chat”. If it was good news, she would have waited until morning.

  He finally found a spot where the signal seemed steady. Stomach rolling, he moved the cursor on the LCD screen to “call back” and pressed the send button. He said a little prayer, then put the phone to his ear.

  At first there was just silence, and he was about to check his bars again, but then the phone clicked and he heard the purring sound of the call going through.

  It rang once, twice, three times. Finally, Sharon picked up.

  “Honey?” he said.

  “Allen, is that you?” Their connection was weak and crackly, but he could hear her well enough, and he was instantly unnerved by her voice.

  It wasn’t the quality of their connection that alarmed him, but the quality of her tone. They’d been married long enough for him to identify her moods-- in as little as four words. In fact, he could probably do it in one, but it didn’t matter how quick he could sense her mood. Most married men grew a mood-detecting antenna pretty fast if they wanted to stay married. What he cared about was the strange mixture of reluctance and fear he heard in her tone. She had something she felt she needed to tell him, but she was shy of the pain in the telling of it.

  Like someone who has to rip a bandaid off, knowing it’s going to hurt like hell, he thought.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” he demanded.

  She was silent a beat. “Nothing’s wrong,” she finally said. “I mean… nothing’s happened. I just wanted to talk. Or maybe I should say, we need to talk …” She let the words hang there.

  We need to talk.

  He’d heard that phrase from enough women in his life to know what that really meant. Living with Sharon had made him a master of the art of reading between the lines. His stomach went cold and his balls shriveled. He braced for the blow. “What do you mean?” he asked warily.

  His wife sighed, then said in a rush, “I’m not going to be here when you get back.”

  For figurative blows, that was certainly a haymaker!

  “What do you mean you won’t be there when I get back?” Allen asked. He swayed on his feet. He felt like Mike Tyson had just belted him one, right in the noggin.

  He heard her laugh softly. “I’m not planning to slit my wrists, if that’s what you’re thinking. I mean I’m moving out.”

  She could read him as easily as he could read her. That had actually been his first panicky thought when she said she was going to be gone when he returned—that she was going to gulp down a bottle of prescription pills or drive her car into a tree.

  You stupid lunkhead, he berated himself.

  But she had been so withdrawn recently… so passive, like she couldn’t even be bothered to exist.

  “Where are you planning on going?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Mother’s. Maybe. For a little while.”

  “Are you coming home?” he asked, hating the way he sounded. He sounded like a little boy pleading for his mommy to stay.

  “I don’t know,” Sharon said. “Probably not.”

  “Sharon, that’s crazy!” he blurted.

  “Oh, is it?” his wife retorted, her voice sharp, but then she caught herself. He heard her sigh. “Don’t tell me I’m crazy, Allen. Don’t tell me how I feel. Don’t tell me what I can and cannot do.”

  “I’m sorry! I won’t. I just… I’m kind of confused right now.”

  His hands were trembling. No, his whole body was trembling. He thought of Tish giving him a handie under the table and suddenly his face flushed with guilt. He felt nauseated.

  An oily sweat had broken out across his forehead, despite the night’s chill air. He swiped it with the back of his arm and said, “Listen… I know you haven’t been happy. I haven’t exactly been living it up either. We’ve drifted apart these last couple years. I know it’s probably my fault—“

  “It’s not your fault,” Sharon interrupted.

  “But I promise—“

  “No! No promises!”

  “Then what?” he breathed. His heart was beating hard enough to make the front of his shirt tick. “Are… are you seeing someone else? Is that it?”

  “No. There’s never been anyone else. I’m not that kind of woman.” She was silent for a moment, then whispered, “Please… Just let me go.”

  “Let you go,” he repeated, his voice flat.

  “Yes… I want to be free.”

  “I see.”

  “I don’t want this big empty house, and I don’t want to travel with the Scouts.”

  “And what about me? Do you still want me?”

  Silence.

  Then: “No.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut, but a bit of moisture still seeped from the outer corners of his eyelids. A giant, invisible hand seemed to have grasped him around the torso and was squeezing… crushing his insides. He sucked a breath into lungs that had no space left in them for air.

  “I know I’m a horrible person to call you like this,” she went on, talking like she hadn’t just reached inside his chest and ripped out his heart. “Call you in the middle of the night and tell you I’m leaving. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it face-to-face. I tried. I really did. I was just too scared.”

  “Scared of me?”

  “Scared you’d talk me out of it.”

  “If you’re scared you can be
talked out of it, then there must be a part of you that doesn’t want to leave me,” Allen said.

  “Of course, there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to leave! Just like there’s a part of me that still loves you,” Sharon confessed. “But it’s not enough, Allen. If you make me stay, I’ll grow to hate you for it, and then you’ll hate me. This way is better. This way… maybe we can be friends again. Someday. When it doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  “Sharon, I don’t want to split up,” he choked.

  “I know.”

  He started to speak—started to plead, beg her to stay, to reconsider, they’d get marriage counseling, he’d take a leave of absence from the show—but she cut him off before he could spit any of it out.

  “I’m sorry, Allen. I care for you. I always will, but I just don’t love you anymore.”

  “No—“

  “Don’t rush back home. I’ve already packed my things. I’m leaving as soon as I hang up.”

  “Sharon--!”

  “Good bye, Allen. I’ll be in touch. I’ll call you... after you’ve had some time to cool off.”

  “Goddam it--!”

  But she had hung up.

  Allen grunted in frustration. He stabbed the call back button, but he was routed to her voice mail. He marched in a circle, stomping his feet. He squeezed his phone, tempted to snap it in half, crush it into little bitty Chinese components. He cocked his arm and mimed throwing it into the woods, then got himself under control and tried to call her again.

  Voice mail.

  “You crazy bitch! You cunt!” he wanted to scream, but he bit his tongue, his body shaking with pain and rage.

  “You okay, Al?” Raj asked quietly behind him.

  Allen pressed his lips together and tried to stifle his emotions.

  “Is everything all right with Sharon?”

  “Yes,” he said evenly. “Everything’s fine.” He wiped his brow, shoved his phone in his pocket and turned to face his friend.

  He grinned.

  “Just a spat. No big deal.”

  I must look like the Joker, he thought.

  That’s how it felt on his face: like a big unnatural grin. Raj could probably see straight through it.

  Only he couldn’t.

  “Oh. Well, that’s good,” Raj said. “I mean, it’s not good, but I was a little worried. You know what I mean. Ready to go in?”

  Allen nodded.

  As they returned to Forester House, Allen’s thoughts raced. In his head, he was rewriting the conversation he’d just had with his wife, going over their exchange again and again, trying to find some alternate dialogue that might have averted their breakup. Could he have said anything different, something that would have changed Sharon’s mind? Maybe he should have been angrier, more assertive. Begged a little more. Cried.

  For Christ’s sake, we just made love yesterday night!

  No, they hadn’t, he realized, as Raj held the front door open for him. She had blown him the night before. Nothing more. A less intimate act for a woman, he supposed. Less intimate than having some big goon sweating and grunting on top of you, anyway. He’d begged her to have intercourse, but she’d said no.

  So what was that? A goodbye blow?

  In retrospect? Probably.

  As he stepped into the foyer of the house and headed toward the command room-- Raj at his shoulder, chatting away unheard-- Allen’s thoughts turned to Tish.

  Tish wasn’t ambivalent toward him. She didn’t ignore him. She didn’t make him feel like a ghost when he was around her. Tish actually listened to him. Laughed at all his stupid jokes. In fact, she was usually all over him… and almost half Sharon’s age!

  Christ! She’d even given him a handjob right in the middle of supper, the whole gang sitting just a couple feet away! How was that for making her intentions loud and clear?

  It had caught him totally by surprise, of course, and before he could figure out what he ought to do about the hand squirming around in his pants, he was shooting off in her palm like a nervous high school boy. Maybe that made him an asshole, but he wouldn’t have been so confused if Sharon hadn’t been neglecting him these past few months.

  Tish was a wildcat, all right, and he was done playing hard to get. No more Mr. Nice Guy. Sharon had made her bed, and his too, and she’d have no one to blame but herself when she came crawling back to him and found some other gal under the covers with her hubby.

  It’s been years since I had myself some strange, Allen thought.

  As he crossed the foyer, trying to figure out how to get Tish alone, Allen passed in front of some floodlights.

  His shadow slithered across the wall behind him like a strange crabbed beast.

  Interval

  Oy’he

  1

  Day came, but it was like the image of the world one might see glimmering on the surface of a slow moving stream. It looked real, and yet it was an illusion. Tanka knew this because it shivered into countless glinting flecks as soon as he thrust his hand into its depths.

  It is only then, when a man reaches into his own reflection, that he grasps the truth of the world, and thus enlightenment, he thought.

  And what was the truth?

  Simply enough: that the world in which we are born, the world in which we spend our every waking hour… that world is an illusion.

  It is a beautiful fantasy, a bright and shining madness, full of pleasure and pain, appetite and satiation. There is love and hate, the seasons and the heavens and all manner of colorful baubles whose only purpose is to distract from the reality that lies beyond. All of it trickery, and reality waiting just a hair’s breadth away, crouched like a starving predator, ready to devour any hand that might come plunging through.

  Or so it seemed to Tanka, when he awakened to the truth.

  He did not know how long he lay awake, staring at his hand in the shaft of sunlight that penetrated the roof of the old man’s cavern.

  He stared at his hand, fascinated by the web of intricate wrinkles in his flesh, and how the sunlight glinted on all the tiny furrows. He examined his scars, the curling black hairs. The knuckles and nails and freckles and warts. It was a labor to tear his gaze from the sight of it. Truth be told, he didn’t want to avert his eyes. He’d never seen his hand in such a light. In it, he was illuminated.

  There, just below the skin, he mused, was blood and bone and glistening gristle, all unseen but for the shapes they cast upon the surface of his flesh. He need only gash through the superficial layer for all his steamy insides to come gushing out.

  And so it was with the world.

  How could he have believed it was any other way? He had been such a fool.

  No! Not a fool! Merely asleep, dreaming he was awake.

  He had drifted through that dreaming world of illusions all his life, arrogantly believing that his perceptions bore testimony to the truth of its reality, that there was nothing beneath the surface of it save the bedrock of his certainty.

  But when you scratched through the bark of a tree, did you find only more bark, all the way through? When you dug in the earth, was there only more earth beneath that which you had cast to the side?

  Of course not.

  Laughing, Tanka sat upright, looking around the cave for the old man.

  He saw the wizened Onemara sleeping on the other side of the fire, wrapped up in his bedding, only a tuft of white hair showing, the knobby joint of an ancient limb.

  He thought to go to the old man and wake him. Shake him from his slumber and share his revelations with the ancient creature.

  But no, Traweek was an elder of the Onemara. He already knew the truth of the world. Didn’t Tanka’s own brothers call the old man’s tribe the “Dreaming People”? Of course they did, and why was that? Because the Onemara had forsaken his people’s way of thinking. The Onemara were skinwalkers, prophets. Yes, the Dreaming People saw the world as it really was. Or had, before they all died out. Devoured, or so Traweek implied, by one of the predators t
hat lurked beneath the surface of the world.

  That was their misfortune.

  Tanka would not make the same mistake. He had always been a cautious man. He would learn to walk upon the surface of the water, diving beneath only when it suited him, always alert to the ripples caused by any circling predators.

  Like the thing in the treetops.

  Tanka clambered to his feet, his head throbbing. He stumbled to the entrance of the cave, removed the sticks and hides and stones the old man had used to block it, and then he wriggled out into the daylight like a baby being born.

  He squinted at the sun, lips peeled back from his teeth. The burning orb was high in the sky, bright. He had slept later than he expected. He could hear the old man snoring in the cave behind him, the rustle and creak of the forest swaying in the wind. Yet, still there was no birdsong. The world was silent but for the old man and the soughing of the wind through the pines.

  At least, he knew why now.

  The old man cried out in his sleep, a pitiable moan, and Tanka glanced over his shoulder toward the cave.

  It was the old man who’d awakened Tanka from his sleep, from the dreams he’d called his life. More precisely, the root the old man fed him had awakened him. Like the shaman weed his people sometimes smoked, some quality of the root had bent his soul to an odd new angle, forcing him to gaze at the world askance from the inside of his skull. Except the root’s effects seemed longer lived, where the weed his people smoked only made them happy for a little while, then shooed them off to bed like sleepy children, its magic gone by morning’s light.

  He could feel the magical properties of the root still shimmering inside his skull. His thoughts swam like shining silver fish, darting this way and that, bursting apart in glittering clouds before regrouping, fast, but so hard to catch hold of.

  He felt… good. He felt powerful. Perhaps even invincible, like Il’Uuk, the warrior god his people often prayed to. Virile, immortal Il’Uuk, who tirelessly chased his bride—the moon-- across the sky, forever desirous to mate with her in the heavens.