A Grave Tree

by Jennifer Ellis

  The forest smelled earthy and fresh, but there were a few moments as they walked when Mark could have sworn he smelled the heavy, sweet scent of the clawed woman’s perfume. Each time he looked around for a plant or a tree, such as a wisteria or lilac (which would be in bloom this time of year) that might be throwing off such a scent, but he saw no comforting purple or white blooms in the forest. Once he thought he saw the glossy green leaves and twisting limbs of a Madrona tree in the distance, but with so much green and mist in the forest, it was difficult to tell.

  “It’s not gobbledygook, Ab. Remember what Ian said about some of us being extuits, intuits, and pattern finders, and that I’m probably an extuit? When Mark and I were up on the roof, I directed all my thoughts to Russell giving you his phone and then coming outside in response to the ghosts, and he did. If he hadn’t, the plan wouldn’t have worked.”

  The shake of Abbey’s head was forceful and sudden. “Don’t be silly. I asked Russell for his phone, and going outside was not an unreasonable response to seeing the ghosts. There is no evidence whatsoever that your thoughts influenced him in any way.”

  Caleb shrugged. “Suit yourself. I believe it worked.”

  Another whiff of perfume floated past, and Mark could have sworn he felt the graze of fingernails on the back of his neck. He swung around, nearly losing his footing on the slippery root-strewn path, but nobody was there.

  The roar of water had become increasingly discernible over the rain in the last few minutes, and Mark experienced no surprise when they reached the steep edge of a deep canyon—Skull Canyon, as it was called due to a skull-shaped rock formation farther up river. The wild and frothing Moon River thundered over the rocks below. Mark hung back and tried to contain his sudden surge of vertigo, while Caleb went right to the edge and looked over, the wind blowing his matted, wet orange hair.

  Abbey stayed well away from the edge of the canyon with Mark, her freckled features tight and pale. Mark glanced up to their right. The trail followed the very edge of the canyon wall. One misstep and…

  Mark decided he did not want to think about missteps. He would remain well off the path, in the trees.

  They began to slowly pick their way up the trail (with Caleb seemingly content to walk far too close to the edge of the canyon). The spray of water from the river dampened their clothes even further, and Abbey muttered something about this being absolutely crazy. As a result of the last few months of traipsing through forests and tunnels and along roads and causeways with the Sinclairs, Mark was fitter than he had ever been in his life. But he still found his breath coming in jagged puffs as a result of the steepness of the trail and the instability of the footing. He skittered around trees and rocks, staying at least a meter to the right of the path at all times.

  “What did Russell tell you, anyway?” Caleb said. “Anything useful?”

  Abbey stopped to carefully clamber over a tree trunk that had fallen across the path. “He said the Madronas and those of us with witch blood are entangled, and that due to the DNA Phantom Effect and gravity, we can manifest entanglement on a macro level, which I guess, hypothetically would explain the extuit and intuit thing, but I don’t buy it.”

  “Why not?” Caleb said. “Don’t you think it’s possible?”

  Mark slipped on a slick stone and grasped at the narrow trunk of an aspen on the side of the trail while the maw of the river roiled and swirled fifteen meters down. He decided that it would be best if he were grasping a tree trunk at all times and tried to make his way up the path moving from spindly tree to spindly tree.

  “It’s possible,” Abbey said. “Anything’s possible. But it’s not probable.”

  “What about all those thought experiments?” Caleb said.

  “There’s something there, but most people stretch the results of those very limited experiments way out of proportion.”

  “Still,” Caleb persisted. “If there’s something there.”

  Mark tried not to spend too much time watching Caleb, who apparently could glide over the craggy, rooty path like a gazelle while Mark stumbled along like a three-footed rhinoceros. Watching Caleb would make him lose his own footing. Nevertheless, he marveled at how effortlessly Caleb seemed to be moving up the trail.

  Mark was navigating around a large rock when Caleb stopped suddenly and extended his finger in a point. There in the trees, about five meters away, its twisting, peeling trunk emerging from a thin layer of soil, was a tiny Madrona, only four feet high, its emerald green leaves trying to reach the sky through the heavy canopy.

  As he stared at the tree, a movement in the understory caught Mark’s attention. The sea of bramble and snowberry bushes parted to reveal one of the nasty Egyptian dogs, its teeth bared in a snarl. Mark recoiled in fear, and he was instantly enveloped by the sickening smell of Selena’s perfume.

  She was here. She had come to get them. He turned and saw the dark-haired woman with the long fingernails behind him. Then he felt an acute pain in his head, and the dimly lit forest went very dark.

  *****

  Abbey saw Mark topple inexplicably like a sack of potatoes, landing terrifyingly close to the edge of the canyon, his body splayed in the unorganized and slack manner of the unconscious. She fell to her knees and grasped his leg as if to stay Mark’s fall into the river, while looking wildly about for the cause of his collapse.

  The forest and the trail behind Mark remained empty. She thought she could see a ripple of something, like the ghosts they had seen the day before, move through the underbrush, but she blinked once and it was gone.

  Caleb, meanwhile, had lunged into the trees and grasped a stout stick, which he started waving in front of him like a weapon.

  “We need to pull Mark away from the edge,” he called. “It’s going to try to drive us off the side.”

  Abbey’s stomach fluttered with terror. “What are you talking about? What’s going to try to drive us off the side?”

  “The dog,” Caleb said, his voice low and terrible. “Can’t you see the dog?”

  Abbey searched the trees frantically, but saw nothing but the stoic Madrona reaching its branches to the sky. “I don’t see a dog,” she said. Was Caleb hallucinating?

  “It’s one of their dogs. It’s right in front of us.”

  Abbey licked her dry lips and tugged as hard as she could on Mark’s leg. She couldn’t budge him. “I really can’t see it. Are you sure?”

  Caleb wheeled over to his left, his branch weapon aloft. “There’s the other one. They’re closing in. I’m going to try to draw them away while you pull Mark from the edge. Or do you want to make a run for it, while I pull Mark away?” He glanced over the edge of the jagged precipice at the raging water below them, his freckled face pale and tight. “There’s no way we can jump. There are no good options here.”

  The prospect of either jumping, or running through the woods pursued by one of Selena, Nate, and Damian’s vicious dogs, made Abbey’s knees weak.

  She stared at the rows of slender pine trees around them. The underbrush on the rocky canyon top was sparse; there was no way the dog was hidden from her view. And what had happened to Mark? A small pool of blood had formed beneath his head in the loose soil on the rocks. Had he hit his head on something? No. No low-hanging branches blocked their way. It was like his attacker had come out of nowhere and then vanished—which was impossible.

  Wasn’t it?

  What had Ian’s card said? To know, to will, to dare… to know.

  Caleb swung the stick wildly in all directions.

  “Wait!” she said. “In the quantum world, we create reality by our observation. Particles are in every possible position until we observe them, and then they appear to pick a state. If witchcraft is entanglement on a macro level, maybe it operates by the same principles. Don’t look at the dogs. If you don’t observe them, they can’t be here, and this isn’t happening.”

  Caleb responded in a clipped voice. “I hate to br
eak it to you Abbey, but this is happening.”

  Mark moaned and lifted his hand to his head.

  “Why can only you see them?” she hissed. “Because you believe in this witchcraft mumbo jumbo is why. I don’t, so my brain isn’t collapsing the wave function.” She shook Mark. “Get up. Get up.” She pulled him into a sitting position. His face was distended with terror, and blood snaked down the back of his neck. Clearly, he could see the dogs too.

  “My brain is about to collapse between a set of teeth,” Caleb snapped. “Maybe we can give them some granola bars.” He fumbled with the zipper of his pack, but before he could get it open, he dropped the pack and thrust the stick wildly at nothing, and yet nothing appeared to grab hold of it and thrust Caleb’s arm from side to side. Could “nothing” grab a stick?

  “Run, Abbey! The other one is almost on top of you.”

  Abbey rose uncertainly as Caleb’s stick jerked around in the air. He took step after terrifying step back toward the edge of the precipice. Where was she going to go? How did one fight an unseen enemy? And yet even as she thought this, the ripples in the air had started to take the shape of dogs. She was observing, too. Her growing belief that there was something there, fueled by Caleb’s and Mark’s behavior, was collapsing the wave function.

  Her voice shook. “Just close your eyes. Everyone. Please. Try it. Remember what you said about influencing Russell with your thoughts. Do the same with the dogs. They’re not here.” She smelled a whiff of dog, felt breath on her face.

  “If we close our eyes and they are here, we’re dead,” Caleb said through gritted teeth. “Run for the skull—there’s a swimming hole there. People jump off the cliff. Ian—” He lurched back as if struck, and then he whirled, pulling the stick close to his body and releasing it over the edge of the cliff. He teetered, and in a jumble of sneakers, jeans, and red hair, he fell, hurtling off the side of the cliff into the foaming rush of water. His body disappeared, pulled under by the roiling current.

  Abbey screamed.

  Caleb’s brilliant orange hair erupted to the surface, and he flailed his arms and gasped for breath. He managed to stay above water for a few seconds before the current pulled him under again, carrying him relentlessly, rapidly downstream away from her, until he was lost from sight around a bend in the canyon wall.

  Abbey stared. Caleb was gone. He would be killed for sure. A wave of helpless shock threatened to capsize her.

  “They’re not here. They’re not here.” Mark’s voice fractured her horror. He had his eyes pressed tightly closed. “They’re not here.”

  Abbey turned her gaze back to the woods. The ripples of movement had vanished.

  “Mark, where did the dogs go?” Saying the word “dogs” had an instantaneous effect, as if even acknowledging they might have existed was enough. A single arc of undefined movement streaked through the woods in their direction.

  “They are not here,” Mark repeated insistently, his eyes bunches of tight creases.

  Abbey closed her own eyes and prayed.

  *****

  “They’re not here.” Mark said the words over and over, rocking back and forth gently. He was used to this routine, this repetition to comfort himself, to make the ills of the world go away (and those dogs were among the biggest and most alarming ills he had ever seen). The back of his head pounded and stung, and his neck was sticky and warm. He had seen the clawed woman right behind him. She had struck him with a rock. But even as he thought this, he felt the movement of someone, or something, else near him again (so he desperately unthought it).

  One of the dogs had plummeted into the river with Caleb. He had seen this before he snapped his eyes shut, following Abbey’s orders. But the other one, and the clawed woman, could be anywhere around him. “They are not here,” he announced even more vehemently.

  “Mark.” Abbey’s shaky voice cut through his loop of denial. “We need to crawl away from the edge. Feel with your hands and move in the opposite direction. Then we’re going to stand up. You’re going to stand behind me, put your hands on my shoulders, and follow me. I’m going to feel my way along from tree to tree along the edge of the cliff until we’re as far away from the Madrona as possible. Just don’t open your eyes. Got it?”

  “They are not here,” Mark repeated, then realized that Abbey needed an answer. “I will not open my eyes.” He felt Abbey’s hand touch his arm and tried not to flinch as she pushed him in the direction that he was pretty sure was away from the cliff edge. He crawled, feeling the movement of her body next to his, and then stopped when she grasped his arm.

  “Okay,” she said, guiding his hand to the thin trunk of a tree, which he clutched as if his life depended on it (which it probably did, but he didn’t want to think too much about that). “Now we stand.”

  Mark rose unsteadily to his feet, leaning against the tiny tree for support, his head spinning.

  “Put your hands on my shoulders,” Abbey said. “We’re going to start walking slowly. Just keep your hands on my shoulders and make sure you always feel with your foot to make sure there’s ground beneath you.”

  Mark felt for Abbey’s shoulder with his left hand. Her shoulder was surprisingly delicate. Her bones felt like he had imagined the bones of a hummingbird would feel, small, fluttery, and almost yielding. He tried not to hold too tightly. When he had his left hand in place, he reluctantly removed his right hand from the tree and dropped it onto her other shoulder.

  Abbey started inching forward. Mark followed, his feet clumsy and uncertain. He was afraid he would misstep and pull them both to their deaths. He wanted more than anything to be back in the safe confines of one of his rooms, any of his rooms, at the cabin, at the Sinclair residence, or even at his home on Coventry Hill, with his walls of comforting maps of rivers, lakes, and oceans.

  He’d been fascinated by the geography of the Moon River before, its sinewy narrowing as it passed through Skull Canyon before it widened out and started to loop lazily through the orchards of Coventry. He’d always wanted to visit Skull Canyon. Now he just wanted to be back in his room studying his maps.

  The more he thought about it, the more he felt like he actually was in his room in his house, seated at his desk, the crisp edges of his map of Coventry and Granton unfurled. He traced the winding path of the Moon River with his eyes and then looked around the room, gazing at the array of blue maps that covered every inch of his walls. His eyes fell on his captain’s bed and his blue world map bedspread that his mother had special ordered online from eBay.

  The bedspread was rumpled, pulled aside, exposing the blue sheets that lay underneath.

  Someone had been sleeping in Mark’s bed.

  He jerked back to reality again—his stumbling, tentative footfalls, his hands on Abbey’s shoulders, their interminable, blind trek forward, the terrifying thunder of water so close by.

  His head had been flying again. What was happening to him? Had he been dreaming? Had his brain, normally so alert to danger of any sort, really dared to fall asleep on this treacherous cliff? Or had he really been in his room, where someone had been sleeping in his bed?

  He focused on putting one foot in front of the other, staying with Abbey, and quashing his panic.

  But after a bit, he felt his mind reaching out again, imagining himself back in his room, reveling in the safety of the place where he had spent so much of his life. His hands automatically reached out to straighten his bedspread—but his fingers didn’t appear within his line of vision. He tried again, moving them forward to smooth the rumpled bed, but no hands came into view. It was like only his head, or maybe his eyes, were present. But he had heard Ian and the bad man speaking the night before when his head had seemed to be in the other room. So. His eyes and his ears were present. He concentrated. The sound of the rush of the river faded, and was replaced by the ordinary sounds of birdcalls and distant traffic. He tried once more to use his hands, but they remained absent.

  He l
ooked again to the map of Coventry and Granton rolled out on his desk (he had not left it there—he always put his maps away in his map drawer) and realized with an aghast gasp that someone had drawn on his map… with ballpoint pen. The Granton Dam had been circled—twice, no less. Messy, overlapping circles, not drawn with a compass.

  Mark let out a yelp and crashed hard into Abbey’s back.

  “Ow! Mark, be careful. Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

  “My map,” Mark managed to bleat. “Someone has drawn on my map.”

  “What are you talking about?” Abbey’s voice was drawn and thin. “I think you can open your eyes now.”

  Mark flicked his eyes open to the overcast sky, spindly trees, and rocky edge of the canyon. They were far enough away from the brink that Mark could no longer see the water, but he could still hear it. The Madrona had vanished from sight, and as Mark’s eyes became focused, he saw the giant skull-shaped formation for which Skull Canyon had gotten its name, the two hollow and spooky indentations for eyes regarding him dispassionately.

  4. Believe it or Not

  Abbey stared at the sinister-looking skull. It was a massive rock face more than ninety meters tall, with a ledge at the bottom surrounded by foaming water on all sides. She had thought to jump off the edge, to follow Caleb down the canyon. To find him. But she saw now that this would be a fool’s mission.

  To her surprise, Ian emerged from one of the eye sockets of the skull in a brilliant magenta and turquoise shirt and tan pants, his beret hanging at a rather ignominious angle.

  “Oh, you’ve arrived,” he called out. “I’ve found one of the old hideaways. There’s even a boat we can use. Where’s your brother?”