A Grave Tree

by Jennifer Ellis

  Already he felt his strength and the energy that held him here fading. He hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours, he hadn’t eaten properly, and he hadn’t had any time alone at his desk rejuvenating. She held up the piece of parchment and jabbed her pen urgently at it. Mark shook his head, bile roiling in his stomach.

  His mother had already bent her head over another piece of paper. On this one she scratched a circle and then four leaves—oval leaves, just like the leaves of a Madrona—their tips meeting in the middle of the circle and their ends sticking out of the circle, like ears. But Mark’s strength was fading. The last thing he saw was his mother holding up a drawing of a flower, and then he was back in the circular room, standing in the beam of Caleb’s flashlight, breathing heavily.

  He stumbled away from the center of the pentagram, wanting to be away from the small pulse of energy that still emanated from it.

  “What? What did you see?” Caleb said.

  “My mother,” Mark replied.

  *****

  “I think he’s getting closer,” Abbey murmured. She didn’t think. She knew. She’d been carefully measuring Russell’s distance from them. When they first spotted him, he had been at least thirty trees away. Now he was averaging eighteen trees, and sometimes came as close as fifteen trees. She wondered who would be more appetizing, her or Sylvain. Probably her, she concluded. Sylvain was all bone.

  “He might just be giving us an escort. Protecting us,” Sylvain said.

  Abbey looked back into the pale blue eyes of the beast and saw the same wildness that had always unnerved her a bit about Russell.

  Not prey, not prey, not prey, she repeated in her mind. But somehow the word that stuck and glowed electric in her brain was prey. Prey, prey, prey. Her hands tingled with fear. They’d covered a fair bit of ground in the last half hour, but the dam was still so far away.

  “Try to communicate with him,” Sylvain said. “From a distance. See if you can make any contact. Just whatever you do, don’t agitate him.”

  Abbey made a face at Sylvain. Now she would have prey and agitate running on a single track in her brain.

  She didn’t believe in witchcraft. Not one bit. It didn’t make any scientific sense. Entanglement wasn’t possible on a macro level, nor was it possible for people to shift energy around, or communicate with animals in any form other than the pedestrian ways she communicated with Farley: “no”, “good dog,” and “come” (and even that was sketchy at best). She did have to admit that the screens she and Sylvain had made had felt fairly real, and on a deeper hypothetical level she knew it was all possible… It was just so very unlikely. If it was possible, wouldn’t it have been proven long ago? Her mind rejected all of it—although she did seem to be very effectively throwing the word “prey” at Russell the panther.

  If it even was Russell. Maybe it was just a panther. Maybe this was all a bad dream and she had actually gone psychotic and was locked in the psych ward at Coventry General Hospital.

  What would she even say to Russell the panther anyway? Hey, Russell, it’s Abbey, your friend. Don’t eat us. Or if you are going to eat someone, eat Sylvain. He’s older than me and doesn’t hope to invent cool things in the future. I’ll go out on a date with you if you want, provided you turn back into Russell the human, of course. Or perhaps she should just say, Good kitty. Nice kitty. It all seemed too ludicrous.

  She jerked her head back to check on the panther.

  Seven trees away.

  *****

  His mother. She was in the parallel universe. She was old, older than Mark had ever imagined she would be.

  “What did she say? Were you able to talk to her? Were my parents there?” Caleb hit him with question after question.

  Mark shook his head. It seemed the only answer. She hadn’t told him anything, really. Just more hand-drawn riddles that he didn’t understand. And he hadn’t been able to talk to her, and Caleb’s parents hadn’t been there. Did his mother live alone in the little cabin in the parallel universe?

  The whole dam seemed to be vibrating, and a thicker layer of dust filled the room.

  “I went out to check the antechamber,” Caleb said. “Sandy’s gone, but the spillways are open. I have no idea how she got out. I nearly flooded the room and killed myself just opening the door a crack. There’s no way we can go out that way, and I’m not sure how much longer this structure is going to hold. I think Sandy might have damaged it, and it hasn’t been maintained for years and years. We have to get out of here.”

  Mark cast around the room for anything that he could do that would be helpful. Digby skittered about making chittering noises. Mark wondered why the rat stayed. Perhaps the other parts of the dam had already caved in or were flooded. Perhaps they were really and truly trapped. His eyes fell on Ms. Beckham’s handbag.

  The flower. His mother had drawn the flower.

  “The bag,” he managed to croak. “My mother said to look in the bag.”

  Caleb was on the handbag in seconds and lifted the bottom to expel the contents. They tumbled onto the floor with the flash and clank of metal. Mark enumerated the items quickly. A set of old-fashioned keys, an odd-looking gun (which seemed out of character for Ms. Beckham), a black box in the shape of a cube (just a little bit bigger than a Rubik’s Cube, although Mark doubted that was what was in the box), some frightening-looking instruments (which had a vague resemblance to old dental tools), and the cable with metal bits on the end that Mark had stuffed into the bag earlier.

  Caleb snatched up the Y-shaped cable. “It looks like a booster cable,” he said. “Why would my mother be carrying a booster cable?” He stared at the cable, then at the pentagram. “Unless… if we can channel energy, maybe the cable can boost our energy somehow.”

  Caleb swung his head to examine Mark in a way that he didn’t like.

  Mark thought of the man strapped to the platforms with the cable. He started to back away. “No,” he said. “No way.”

  “Maybe we could boost the signal enough to transport ourselves to the parallel universe.”

  Mark just shook his head, emphatically, definitively.

  Undeterred, Caleb picked up the gun and turned it over in his hands. “Weird. It looks metal, but it’s too light to be a firearm. There’s a switch here. It says EM and AM.” He pointed it at the wall, and before Mark could scream, he pulled the trigger. Nothing appeared to come from the gun, but a small explosion lit up the side of the room where Caleb had fired.

  Startled, Digby leapt off Mark’s shoulder and scooted under one of the stones. Caleb cocked his head, flipped the switch on the gun, and fired again. This time nothing happened, which caused Caleb to scowl and give his angry rooster look. He stuffed the gun in his pocket and walked over to where the rat had disappeared, feeling under the rock with his fingers.

  “There’s an opening. I can feel a draft. There has to be another room or a passageway. Maybe there’s a secret door.”

  Or it’s just a crack, Mark thought dismally. He sat down, withdrew his satchel from his backpack, and started sketching out the drawings that his mother had done for him. Caleb retrieved the old-fashioned keys from floor and started trying to fit each of them into every conceivable nook and cranny in the wall above the spot where Digby had disappeared.

  Having apparently had no luck, Caleb stowed the keys in his pocket and returned his attention to the booster cable, which he laid out on the floor, extending all three lengths of the insulated wire. It was very long. Digby popped back into the room carrying something small and round. He delivered it to Caleb, who flipped it over and over in his hands.

  “It’s the piece that holds your snorkel to your mask,” he said. “I wonder if that’s how people get in and out of here when the reservoir is full, and the outlet valves and spillways are open. With scuba gear.”

  Mark felt his heart accelerate uncomfortably. Even the prospect of the parallel universe seemed more inviting and less dangerous than sc
uba diving.

  Caleb turned one of the ends of the jumper cable over in his hands, then thrust it in Mark’s direction. “This one looks like a plug, like we need to put it into something.”

  Mark forced himself to examine the end of the cable. It was a circle, and within it, four leaves met in the middle, forming little ears that jutted out of the circle. It was just like the one his mother had drawn.

  Of course it was.

  With a sigh of resignation, he held up the paper on which he had just sketched the very same symbol. He wondered what cascade of dangerous actions he was instigating.

  Caleb did a jig of delight. “Maybe that’s what I’m looking for!” He renewed his search of the walls. Mark rose and halfheartedly started helping Caleb, seriously hoping their escape would not involve scuba gear.

  He went to sweep the cube and other instruments into a smaller pile with his foot (to get them out of the way); the cube was remarkably heavy. As he pushed it aside, he noticed that some of the smaller metal objects on the floor shifted slightly, as if they were being dragged behind it. Apparently the cube was magnetized. He bent and picked it up and was about to say something about it when Caleb’s voice rang across the room. “Found it!”

  Mark turned to see Caleb already pressing one end of the booster cable, the base of the Y, into the wall. Mark braced for some surge of energy or collapse of the dam, but nothing happened. Caleb then collected the two arms of the Y and thrust one at Mark. “Quick. I think we’re the source of energy for the other ends. This cable has two inputs, one output. Press the input end against your heart. It’s the biggest source of electromagnetic radiation in your body.” Caleb pulled open his shirt and pressed his end of the cable against his chest.

  Mark stood with his mouth agape. The man on the platforms had had a cable pressed to his heart, too.

  “Mark, just do it,” Caleb ordered. “Trust me. I’m channeling my inner physicist. Abbey’s not the only person who knows things. Besides, we’ve got nothing to lose. Just do whatever it was you did before when you flattened those guys outside.”

  With the wire pressed against his heart, and his dirty face and dust-covered red hair standing aloft, Caleb looked rather more like a mechanic crossed with a mad scientist than a physicist. Mark was almost tempted to laugh (but he didn’t, as a rule, laugh very often).

  Mark briefly considered the things that he had to lose, and when he came up wanting, he opened his shirt, wished that Abbey were with them, and prepared to be electrocuted.

  *****

  Smell was the sense most strongly linked to memory, due to the fact that the olfactory bulb was directly linked to the brain’s limbic system. Researchers now suspected that quantum mechanics were at play in scent memory, whereby the olfactory molecules in the nose recognized the vibrations of smell particles.

  Russell had not been responding to any of Abbey’s thoughts informing him that they were in fact friends, that he was really a human, and that she would go out on a date with him, although she was not sure what she expected in response. An answering set of thoughts, like text messaging for witches?

  But surely he could smell her. Surely he recognized and remembered her smell.

  Engrossed in her attempts to communicate with Russell, she hadn’t realized that she’d fallen farther behind Sylvain than she had intended. She was in fact now closer to Russell than to Sylvain.

  The dam was still at least twenty minutes away. If Russell intended to eat them, he still had plenty of opportunity, and yet he hadn’t done so yet, even though he had followed them for several hours. Maybe cats just liked to spend a long time stalking their prey.

  There was that word again: prey. It echoed in her mind like a beacon. Prey, prey, prey. She tried to convert it to pray, pray, pray, to appeal to some sort of religion or belief system she’d never had. Science had always been her religion, but right now any sort of god would come in handy. She wondered if there were any gods associated with this whole witching thing. It seemed almost absurd to be giving this witchcraft the status of “thing,” as if she actually believed in it, as if it had been proven. And yet she’d just somehow created a screen out of thin air with Sylvain—twice.

  But for some reason, “pray” made her think less of gods and more of Sylvain as a praying mantis, and the secret name he used sometimes. Why did he go by Mantis? Mantis meant prophet, and Sylvain had referenced Matthew 7:15 when they first met. Beware of false prophets in sheep’s clothing. What had he meant? Had he been referring to Dr. Ford, as they had assumed, or someone else?

  She looked back at Russell. He was closer now, close enough to leap and set upon her with his claws and teeth. If she was going to reach out to him as Sylvain suggested, now was the time.

  This emotional connection stuff wasn’t her skill set. It was Caleb’s. She was Inquisitive Abbey, not Emotionally Attuned Abbey. If any of them was likely to have a talent in the area of communicating with animals, it would be Caleb. And where was Caleb now? Leading men into battle against some unknown force. She felt a well of anger against Sylvain. She wanted him to do something, to be an adult, to protect her.

  She felt in her hoodie pocket for the outlines of the card that Ian had left for them two nights ago. To know, to will, to dare, to keep silent. Witches were certainly all very good at keeping silent. Maybe she just needed to become better at daring.

  As if hearing her thoughts, Sylvain stopped, turned back, and met her gaze. “I know that to a scientist, this all seems absurd, infuriating even, but sometimes the best you can do is just believe. Believe that there are rational explanations for all these things. There is a science behind it; we just haven’t found it yet. Try to connect with Russell on something that you have in common, something you share.”

  Abbey thought of Russell at the Snowflake Dance—the possessive way that he’d held her and tried to kiss her. She cast these thoughts back to Russell. This reminder that they had been friends, or at least acquaintances, and that he had liked her. If people could truly be entangled—which was absurd—were she and Russell entangled? You are Russell Andrews, she thought, brother of Anna Andrews. You are not a panther—at least not normally, she added. She didn’t want to insult his panther self. We know each other. We’re friends.

  She repeated these thoughts in a loop. Still the panther continued to follow them, its white teeth glittering occasionally in the dark of the forest. She resisted adding her thoughts about entanglement on a macro level being pseudoscience.

  It didn’t seem to be working. She didn’t feel any sort of connection. Russell was so close now that he was almost walking beside her, his giant clawed paws striking the dirt silently in unison with her own. In unison.

  He was matching her footfalls. She slowed her pace slightly, and the panther slowed too. She sped up just a bit, and he sped up too. Was she going crazy for thinking this might be some form of communication? It was probably some form of stalking.

  She stopped abruptly, and the panther stopped and regarded her with those impassive blue eyes.

  “Do you know me?” she said aloud in a tinny sort of voice. Maybe trying to speak in his head was stupid. Maybe he would recognize her voice. The panther let out a huff of sorts, and she backed away. She’d heard a lion at the zoo do this before. It was a warning sound, although at least it was a better-natured one than a snarl or a cry. She wanted to turn her head to see where Sylvain was, but she was afraid to break eye contact with the panther.

  “Sylvain says you can become Russell again. You just have to energetically shift your DNA.”

  Another huff.

  “I’m thinking the stones are using teleportation technology. I still don’t buy the idea of witchcraft. What do you think?” Abbey continued. She was babbling, unthinking almost. She hadn’t really decided how she thought the stones worked, but she needed something that might catch Russell’s attention. Then she cast her mind to all the teleporter fails in the history of movies where bodies arrived i
nside out, aged, split into two, dead, fused with fly DNA, or embedded in ship bulkheads, and decided that maybe witchcraft was actually a more reliable means of transport.

  Russell the panther lowered his back end onto his haunches and regarded her, his eyes gleaming, his tail flipping idly. One twitch of the sleek muscles in his hind legs and she’d be dead.

  A twig snapped in the distance behind Russell, and Abbey heard the sudden whistle of a spear.

  16. Animal Magnetism

  The cool metal pressed against his skin, and Mark could already feel the energy sparking from him into the cable. He nearly dropped the cable in alarm, but he tried to do as Caleb had ordered and gather the energy. He felt… if not electrocuted, at least partially electrified, and he wondered if his hair was standing as on end as Caleb’s was. After a few seconds, (unbelievably) the wall where Digby had disappeared and reappeared cracked open, and a tiny passageway appeared.

  Caleb pumped his fist in the air and wasted no time unplugging the cable, taking Mark’s end, and tossing the cable and everything from the floor back into his mother’s handbag, while Mark looked on, bemused.

  Mark was of the opinion that just because a door opened did not mean one had to proceed through it, but Caleb seemed to be of a differing sentiment and did not even hesitate before exiting the circular room, his flashlight illuminating the dark tunnel ahead. Digby already sat in the narrow stone passageway, his nose twitching.

  Mark still held the black magnet cube. He thrust it into his satchel with his drawings and followed Caleb to the door.