by Joe Hill
Terry knelt at the door of the furnace with his head bowed, like a man in prayer, a devout penitent in the church of the holy and everlasting chimney. His shoulders rose and fell, rose and fell with respiration.
“Terry,” Ig managed to call out, but Terry did not lift his head and look back at him.
If Terry heard him—Ig wasn’t sure he had—he couldn’t reply. Terry had to save each precious breath for the effort of getting the next lungful of oxygen. If it was anaphylactic shock, then he would need a stick of epinephrine in the next few minutes, or he’d suffocate on the swollen tissues of his own throat.
Glenna’s phone was somewhere in the furnace, not thirty feet away, but Ig didn’t know where Terry had dropped it and didn’t want to drag himself around looking for it while Terry choked. He felt faint and wasn’t sure he could even clear the hatch to the furnace, two and a half feet off the floor. Whereas the tank of gas was just outside.
He knew that starting would be hardest. Just the thought of trying to roll onto his side lit up vast and intricate networks of pain in shoulder and crotch, a hundred fine burning fibers. The more time he gave himself to think, the worse it was going to be. He turned on his side, and it felt as if there were a hooked blade buried in his shoulder being turned back and forth—a continuous impalement. He shouted—he hadn’t known he could shout until he did it—and closed his eyes.
When his head cleared, he reached out with his good arm and grabbed at the concrete and pulled, dragging himself about a foot. And cried out again. He tried to push himself forward with his legs, but he couldn’t feel his feet, couldn’t feel anything below that sharp, persistent ache in his knees. His skirt was wet with his blood. The skirt was probably ruined.
“And it was my favorite,” he whispered, nose squashed against the floor. “I was going to wear it to the dance.” And laughed—a dry, hoarse cackle that he thought sounded particularly crazy.
He pulled himself another foot with the right arm, and the knives sank deep into his left shoulder once more, the pain radiating into his chest. The doorway didn’t seem any closer. He almost laughed again at the amusing futility of it all. He risked a glance at his brother. Terry still knelt before the hatch, but his head drooped so that his forehead was almost touching his knees. From where Ig was, he could no longer see through the hatch into the chimney. Instead he was looking at the half-open iron door and the way the candlelight wavered around it and—
—there was a door up there, with a light wavering around it.
He was so drunk. He had not been this drunk since the night Merrin had been killed, and he wanted to get drunker still. He had pissed on the Virgin Mother. He had pissed on the cross. He had pissed quite copiously upon his own feet and laughed about it. He was tucking himself in to his pants with one hand and tipping his head back to drink straight from the bottle when he saw it above him, cradled in the diseased branches of the old dead tree. It was the underside of a tree house, not fifteen feet off the ground, and he could see the wide rectangle of the trapdoor, delineated by a faint, wavering candlelight that showed around the edges. The words written upon that door were barely visible in the gloom: BLESSED SHALL YOU BE WHEN YOU GO IN.
“Hunh,” Ig said, absentmindedly pushing the cork back in the bottle, then letting the bottle drop from his hand. “There you are. I see you up there.”
The Tree House of the Mind had played a good trick on him—on him and Merrin both—hiding from them out here all these years. It had never been there before, not any of the other times he had come to visit the place where Merrin had been killed. Or perhaps it had always been there and he hadn’t been in the right frame of mind to see it.
Pulling his zipper up with one hand, he swayed and then began to move—
—another foot across the smooth concrete floor. He didn’t want to lift his head to see how far he had gone, was afraid he would be no closer to the door now than he’d been a few minutes ago. He reached out with his right arm and—
—grabbed the lowest branch and began to climb. His foot slipped, and he had to clutch at a bough to keep from falling. He waited out a bad moment of dizziness with his eyes shut, feeling that the tree was about to come uprooted and fall over with him in it. Then he recovered himself and went on, climbing with the drunkard’s thoughtless, liquid grace. Soon enough he found himself on the branch directly below the trapdoor, and he went straight up to throw it open. But there was a weight resting on top of it, and the trap only banged noisily in its frame.
Someone cried out, softly, from within—a voice he recognized.
“What was that?” Merrin cried.
“Hey,” said someone else, a voice he knew even better: his own. Coming from within the tree house, it was muffled and remote, but even so, Ig recognized it immediately. “Hey, is someone down there?”
For a moment Ig couldn’t move. They were there, on the other side of the trapdoor, Merrin and himself, both of them still young and undamaged and perfectly in love. They were there, and it was not too late to save them from the worst of what was coming for them, and he rose hard and fast and hit the trapdoor again with his shoulders—
—and opened his eyes and looked blearily around. He had winked out for a while, maybe as long as ten minutes. His pulse was slow and heavy. His left shoulder had been hot before. Now it was cold and wet. The cold worried him. Dead bodies got cold. He lifted his head to orient himself and found he was only a yard from the doorway and from the six-foot drop beyond that he’d been trying not to think about. The can was down there, just to the right. All he had to do was get through the door and—
—he could tell them what was going to happen, could warn them. He could tell his younger self to love Merrin better and trust her, to stay close to her, that their time was short, and he hit the trap again and again, but each time the door only rose an inch or so before smashing back down.
“Cut it the fuck out!” shouted the young Ig, inside the tree house.
Ig paused, readying himself for another go at the trapdoor—and then held himself back, recalling when he had been the one on the other side of the door.
He’d been afraid to open the trap, had only worked up his nerve to pull back the hatch when the thing that was waiting outside stopped trying to force its way in. And there had been nothing there. He wasn’t there; or they weren’t.
“Listen,” said the person he’d been, on the other side of that door, “if there’s someone down there…you had your fun. We’re good and scared. We’re coming out now.”
The chair legs thumped and squeaked as they were pushed back, and Ig hit the trapdoor from beneath in the same moment the young Ig threw it open. Ig thought he saw the shadows of the two lovers leaping out and past him for a moment, but it was only a trick of the candlelight within, making the darkness seem briefly alive.
They had forgotten to blow out the candles, and when Ig stuck his head through the open door, he found them still lit, so—
—he stuck his head through the door, and his body tumbled after it. He hit the dirt on his shoulders, and a black electric shock went through his left arm, an explosion, and he felt he might be fragmented from the force of it, blown into pieces. They would find parts of him in the trees. He rolled onto his back, his eyes open and staring.
The world shivered from the force of the impact. Ig’s ears were filled with an atonal hum. When he looked into the night sky, it was like the end of a silent movie: A black circle began to shrink, closing in on itself, erasing the world, leaving him—
—alone in the dark of the tree house.
The candles had melted to misshapen three-inch plugs. Wax ran in thick and glistening columns, almost completely obscuring that crouching devil who squatted on the base of the menorah. The flame light flickered around the room. The mold-spotted easy chair stood to the left of the open trap. The shadows of the china figures wavered against the walls, the two angels of the Lord and the alien. Mary was tipped over on her side, just as he remembered leavin
g her.
Ig cast his gaze about him. It was as if only a few hours had passed since he’d last been in this place, and not years.
“What’s the point?” he asked. At first he thought he was speaking to himself. “Why bring me here if I can’t help them?” Growing angry as he said it. He felt a heat in his chest, a fuming tightness. They were smoky candles, and the room smelled of them.
There had to be a reason, something he was supposed to do, to find. Something they had left behind, maybe. He looked at the end table with the china figures on it and noticed that the little drawer was open a quarter of an inch. He strode to it and pulled it back, thinking there might be something in it, something he could use, something he could learn from. But there was nothing in there except a rectangular box of matches. A black devil leaped on the cover, head thrown back in laughter. The words LUCIFER MATCHES were written across the cover in ornate nineteenth-century script. Ig grabbed them and stared at them, then closed his fist on them, wanting to crush them. He didn’t, though. He stood there holding them, staring down at the little figures—and then his eyes refocused on the parchment beneath them.
The last time he’d been in this tree house, when Merrin was alive and the world was good, the words on the parchment had been in Hebrew and he hadn’t had any idea what they said. He’d believed it was Scripture, a scroll from a phylactery. But in the wavering light of the candle flame, the ornate black letters swayed, like living shadows somehow magically pinned to paper, spelling a message in plain, simple English:
THE TREE HOUSE OF THE MIND
TREE OF GOOD & EVIL
1 OLD FOUNDRY ROAD
GIDEON, NH 03880
RULES AND PROVISOS:
TAKE WHAT YOU WANT WHILE YOU’RE HERE
GET WHAT YOU NEED WHEN YOU LEAVE
SAY AMEN ON YOUR WAY OUT THE DOOR
SMOKING IS NOT PROHIBITED
L. MORNINGSTAR, PROPRIETOR
Ig stared, not sure he understood it any better now, even knowing what it said. What he wanted was Merrin, and he was never going to have her again, and, lacking that, he wanted to burn this fucking place to the ground and smoking was not prohibited and before he knew what he was doing, he swept his hand across the table, throwing the lit menorah across the room, crashing over the little figures. The alien tumbled and bounced, rolled off the table. The angel who resembled Terry, and who held a horn to his lips, dropped off the table and into the half-open drawer. The second angel, the one who had stood over Mary, looking aloof and superior, hit the table with a crack. His aloof, superior head rolled off.
Ig turned in a furious circle—
—turned his body in a painful circle and saw the gas can where he had left it, against the stone wall, below and to the right of the doorway. He shoved himself through a clump of high grass, and his hand swatted the can, producing a bonging sound and a watery slosh. He found the handle, tugged on it. It surprised him how heavy the thing was. As if it were full of liquid concrete. Ig felt along the top of the gasoline tank for the box of Lucifer Matches and set them aside.
He lay still for a while, gathering his strength for the last necessary act. The muscles in his right arm were trembling steadily, and he wasn’t sure he could do what he needed to. Finally he decided he was ready to try, and he made an effort to lift the can and upend it over himself.
Gasoline splattered down on him in a reeking, glittering rain. He felt it in his mutilated shoulder, a sudden stinging burst. He screamed, and a mushroom cloud of gray smoke gushed from his lips. His eyes watered. The pain was smothering, caused him to let go of the can and double over. He shivered furiously in his ridiculous blue skirt, a series of tremors that threatened to become a full-blown convulsion. He flailed with his right hand, didn’t know what he was reaching for until he found the box of Lucifer Matches in the dirt.
The August-night sounds of crickets and cars humming past on the highway were very faint. Ig tapped open the box. Matches flew from his shaking hand. He picked out one of the few that remained and dragged it across the strike strip on the side of the box. A white lick of fire rose from its head.
The candles had dropped to the floor and rolled every which way. Most of them were still lit. The gray rubber alien figure had come to rest against one, and a white lick of fire was blackening and liquefying the side of its face. One black eye had already melted away to reveal a hollowness within. Three other candles had wound up against the wall, beneath the window, with its sheer white curtains rippling gently in the August breeze.
Ig grabbed fistfuls of curtains, tore them from the window, and hung them over the burning candles. Fire climbed the cheap nylon, rushing up toward his hands. He threw them onto the chair.
Something popped and crunched underfoot, as if he had stepped on a small lightbulb. He looked down and saw he had put his heel on the figure of the china devil. He had crushed the body, although the head remained intact, wobbling on the planks. The devil grinned maniacally, teeth showing in his goatee.
Ig bent and picked the head up from the floor. He stood in the burning tree house, considering Satan’s urbane, handsome features, the little needles of his horns. Streamers of fire unrolled up the wall, and black smoke gathered beneath the banked ceiling. Flames boiled over the easy chair and end table alike. The little devil seemed to regard him with pleasure, with approval. He appreciated a man who knew how to burn a thing down. But Ig’s work here was done now, and it was time to move on. The world was full of other fires waiting to be lit.
He rolled the little head between his fingers for a moment, then returned to the end table. He picked up Mary and kissed her small face, said, “Good-bye, Merrin.” He set her right.
He lifted the angel who had stood before her. His face had been imperious and indifferent, a holier-than-thou, how-dare-you-touch-me face, but the head had snapped off and rolled somewhere. Ig put the devil’s head in its place, thought Mary was better off with someone who looked like he knew how to have a good time.
Smoke caught and burned in Ig’s lungs, stung his eyes. He felt his skin going tight from the heat, three walls of fire. He made his way to the trapdoor, but before stepping through it, he lifted it partway to see what was written on the inside; he remembered very clearly that there was something painted there in whitewash. It said, BLESSED SHALL YOU BE WHEN YOU GO OUT. Ig wanted to laugh but didn’t. Instead he smoothed his hand over the fine grain of the trap and said “Amen,” then eased himself through the hole.
With his feet on the wide branch directly below the trap, he paused for a last look around. The room was the eye at the center of a churning cyclone of flame. Knotholes popped in the heat. The chair roared and hissed. He felt, all in all, happy with himself. Without Merrin the place was just kindling. So was all the world, as far as Ig was concerned.
He shut the trapdoor behind him and started to pick a slow and careful route down. He needed to go home. He needed some rest.
No. What he really needed was to get his hands on the throat of the person who had taken Merrin away from him. What had it said on the parchment in the Tree House of the Mind? That you would get what you needed on your way out? A guy could hope.
He stopped just once, halfway to the ground, to lean against the trunk and rub the palms of his hands into his temples. A dull, dangerous ache was building there, a sensation of pressure, of something with sharp points pushing to get out of his head. Christ. If this was how he felt now, he was going to have one hell of a hangover in the morning.
Ig exhaled—did not notice the pale smoke wafting from his own nostrils—and continued down and out of the tree, while above him heaven burned.
He stared at the burning match in his hand for exactly two seconds—Mississippi one, Mississippi two—and then it sizzled down to his fingers, touched gasoline, and he ignited with a whump and a hiss, exploded like a cherry bomb.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
IG STOOD, A BURNING MAN, devil in a gown of fire. For half a minute, the gasoline flames roiled of
f him, streamed away from his flesh in the wind. Then, as quickly as it had come roaring to life, the blaze began to flutter weakly and sputter out. In a few moments, it was gone entirely, and a black, oily smoke rose from his body in a thick, choking column. Or what would’ve been choking to any man but was, to the demon in the center of it, as sweet as an alpine breeze.
He cast off his robe of smoke, stepped forth from it, entirely naked. The old skin had burned away, and the new skin beneath was a deeper, richer shade of carmine. His left shoulder was still stiff, although the wound had healed to a tormented mass of whitish scar tissue. His head was clear; he felt well, felt as if he had just run a mile and was ready for a swim. The grass around him was black and smoldered. A burning red line was marching across the dry weeds and bunches of grass, moving toward the forest. Ig looked beyond it to the dead cherry tree, pale against its background of evergreens.
He had left the Tree House of the Mind in flames, had burned down heaven, but the cherry still stood undamaged. A wind rose in a hot gust, and the leaves thrashed, and even from here Ig could see there was no tree house up there. It was funny, though—the way the fire seemed to be aimed at it, burning a path through the high grass to its trunk. It was the wind, funneling it straight across the field, pouring fire at the old town woods.
Ig climbed through the foundry doorway. He stepped over his brother’s trumpet.
Terry knelt before the open door of the furnace, head bowed. Ig saw his perfect stillness, the calm look of concentration on his face, and thought his brother looked good even in death. His shirt drawn smoothly across his broad back, cuffs folded carefully past his wrists. Ig lowered himself to his knees beside Terry. Two brothers in the pews. He took his brother’s hand in his and saw that when Terry was eleven, he had stuck gum in Ig’s hair on the school bus.