by Joe Sharp
“Don’t touch the soil.”
Jess was losing her patience. “Yeah, you said that.”
The woman pointed her finger at Jess’ hands. “You cannot touch the soil with your skin or it will know.”
“Who will know what?” asked Jess, feeling herself being drawn into this woman’s dementia.
The woman suddenly gripped a handkerchief against her mouth as violent hacking spasms began to ravage her body. She clung to the fence, until it seemed that the purging had reached into the bottom of her soul. After a time, when the retching had ceased, she wiped her lips and slipped the cloth back into the pocket of her cape. Jess wondered what she might see in that handkerchief.
“What are you looking for here in Willow Tree?” asked the old woman, and Jess felt the quiver of deja vu run up her spine. It couldn’t be.
“What have you got?” she replied, the way she had answered before.
The woman reached into the other pouch of her cape and withdrew a folded slip of paper. She held it out to Jess with a trembling hand. Jess took it from her and started to unfold it. The woman placed her knobby hand on Jess’.
“After I have gone,” she said hoarsely. She took one of Jess’ hands in hers and turned it over. “Do you have gloves?”
“No, it isn’t that cold,” replied Jess puzzled.
The woman let out an exasperated sigh. Slowly, almost regretfully, she started to slip the gloves from her own hands.
“No,” argued Jess, “I can’t take your gloves.”
The woman ignored her protest and finished removing both gloves. She shoved them into Jess’s hands and then jerked her hands away. For an instant, Jess imagined she had seen … scales? It must have been a trick of the dim moonlight. She stood holding the long black gloves in one hand and the folded paper in the other. She had made out like a bandit tonight.
The woman slipped her hands into her cape pockets and confronted Jess.
“You must wear these and you must tuck your pants into your boots. The soil cannot touch you. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“I understand the words, but you still haven’t told me why.”
The old woman’s eyes lingered over the cemetery. She was almost entirely in silhouette. Had the clouds been thinner that night, Jess might have seen the woman’s face. “The answers, as always, are in the soil.”
The woman turned and shuffled down the grassy patch running along the cemetery fence. Jess opened her mouth to offer her a ride, but the words did not come out. Maybe because she couldn’t spare the time, or perhaps because she already knew the answer. When the woman got to the corner where the two fences came together, she was a dot on the horizon. Then, she turned the corner, and all Jess had left were the two gloves and a piece of paper to convince her that any of this had really happened.
Jess set to the task of insulating herself from the dangerous dirt. She knew she should have felt silly doing it, but whose idea was it to come to the cemetery in the first place? After she had finished stuffing her pants into her boots and her tiny hands into the long gloves, she glanced out over the cemetery again, and then went up and over the tall spiky fence. She landed in the soft loam like her feet were on feather pillows. Jess reached between the thin iron bars and pulled the ladder back through to her side. She tucked it down along the fence, and then wondered what to do next. She started to take the sightseeing tour of Weeping Gardens when she remembered that she had just been given instructions.
The folded paper crumpled open and Jess strained to see what was written there. She was going to need help. Turning her back to the cemetery, she took out her phone and opened the flashlight app. White light flooded the iron bars in front of her and she crouched down and bent her body over the paper. What she saw was out of a children’s movie.
On the paper was drawn a treasure map, complete with compass points and a rendering of a giant tree and a big ‘X’ next to the tombstone where the treasure could be found. It told how many steps from the tree to take and how many inches down into the soft ground to dig. It was Christmas morning and Halloween night all rolled up into one.
But, Jess wasn’t celebrating. She was staring at a short note scrawled in the bottom corner of the paper. It might have been added later, she couldn’t be sure. But, something told her that the cartographer of this map and the author of this scrawl were one in the same. Fate had come full circle.
This is the real deal.
a fan
Colonel Davis, October 12th
Davis held the syringe gingerly between a thumb and forefinger and tried to contemplate the long, dark tunnel leading down into oblivion.
He could not see it without a magnifying glass, but he knew that it was there. How something as slender as a human hair could have a perfect hole running through it was more than he could wrap his nineteenth century brain around, but that did not stop him from piercing the stopper of the small glass vial and drawing clear liquid into its narrow plastic cylinder.
It seemed like only yesterday when he would inject them with morphine by ramming a needle as big as a plumber’s pipe into their arms. Now it was ketamine, and they barely felt the prick before they drifted away in a euphoric haze. After all, there was no need to be barbaric about this.
The years had marched on and so had the technology. Davis had to scramble to keep up. He had been born in the days of the industrial, he had lived through the age of the analog, and now he was swimming in the deep of the digital.
Most of the time, it felt like he was just treading water.
Eunice was wrong; he had not adjusted effortlessly. It had been a struggle ever since he had stepped out of the soil. He would often retreat to the familiar feel of an axe handle in his hands as he chopped logs for a fire, or the aroma of tobacco smoke wafting from a clay pipe in order to feel comfortable in his own skin. These were the few touchstones he was allowed these days.
He was mindful of the tiny marks along the side of the syringe. 50 ml. He knew not to introduce more than that into the soil; that much could be absorbed without damage. He placed the cap over the needle and laid the syringe down carefully.
Davis ran the tips of his fingers over the slick, glossy surface of the infirmary’s counter. The feeling was alien to him. This was not marble; it was not glass. It had no substance that he could identify, and the world was covered in it. Machines mixed wood chips and resin and squirted out a cabinet or a table top. Slap on a shiny veneer and no one was the wiser.
The doctor had insisted on the counter tops. She had explained that it would be easier to keep clean and would present a more ‘professional atmosphere’ to her patients. He often thought that the doctor had adapted to this age a bit too easily.
Perhaps the next one would be more inclined to reminisce.
Davis opened one of the artificial cabinets and reached his hand into the back. Out came a tall bottle of tempting liquid. Every Paladin knew that Doctor Crispin kept a bottle of liquor in the infirmary for special occasions, like days when the sun rose in the east and set in the west. Colonel Davis was responsible for his clan, and he turned a blind eye to this minor indiscretion as long as the cardinal rule was observed:
One never went into the soil intoxicated.
There were always a few every decade or so who would slip passed the Paladin with a pint in their breeches, convinced that a little libation would intensify the experience.
Aidan Tibbs had been the first to be ejected from the soil. The moment that first drop of moonshine had seeped down into the ground, Aidan had become a projectile headed out of the cemetery. He might have broken his neck, had the spikes on top of the tall iron fence not broken his fall.
His body had been left impaled for three days as an admonition against the evils of drink.
Seth Hardin was the last to be spewed out of Weeping Gardens for dribbling Southern Comfort down his chin during the joining of the summer solstice. There were only a few dozen gravestones in the cemetery back then, but Set
h’s head had managed to find one on his way down. His brains had leaked out and had been gobbled up by the soil. It was Adele Perkins’ headstone. People never looked at her quite the same from then on. Willow Tree was superstitious like that.
The soil was particular about what it ingested, and it was to the benefit of everyone in Willow Tree not to upset its stomach.
Davis turned the bottle in his rough hands, imagining the smooth burn on the way down, and the spreading warmth in his gut. Then, he tugged up on his sleeve and rubbed a hand along the coarse veins in his wrist. The skin was dry and ashy. The scales would come soon. A few days. He placed the bottle back on the shelf and closed the cabinet.
“Don’t abstain on my account,” croaked a woman’s voice.
Colonel Davis looked around at Doctor Crispin coming out of the shadows and he let the cabinet door click into place. So cat-like for one so close to death, he thought.
“Not my time,” he replied solemnly.
The Doctor gazed at the syringe setting on the counter next to the vial of ketamine.
“Is it my time?” she asked, swaying unsteadily.
Davis took the syringe and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He then returned the vial to its drawer, turned the key and put the key in his waistcoat.
“From the looks of you, I would say any moment now.”
She seemed to take this in stride. “Then, I suppose all your troubles will be over.”
Davis smile sardonically as he moved around to the front of the counter.
“You think too highly of yourself, Miss Crispin. Trouble follows me like the plagues of Egypt.”
Doctor Crispin shuffled into the light and pulled back the hood of her cape.
“And, what plague is this?”
She was nearly unrecognizable at this point. The hard, scaly flesh covering her face was cracked, oozing blood and yellow fluid that dripped down and stained her frilly tan blouse. Her eyes were covered with cataracts, and he was amazed that she had made it to her office. She cradled her hands in front of her, and Davis thought it odd that she was not wearing gloves. He doubted her stiffened fingers could bend easily. Perhaps it was too painful. Out of respect, he averted his gaze.
“This is a plague of your own making.”
“I did not ban myself from the soil!” she snapped, her voice breaking. Trembling, she advanced on Davis. “At first, I assumed it was her! But, then I remembered, she does not command the Paladin, does she?”
Davis met her accusing glare head on. “No, she does not.”
“What gives you the right to decide my fate?”
The Colonel took a threatening step forward.
“My love for this town gives me the right!” he boomed, setting the Doctor back on her heels.
Her eyes grew wide. “Do you think I love this town any less than you?” she rasped.
“I think your love for this town is destructive.”
Davis could tell he had pierced her heart, but he could not feel for her now. It was too late for that. He could see that she was befuddled, either by his words or by the blood poison that must certainly be in her brain by now. Davis inched forward.
“What did you think would happen when your reporter exposed our family, your family as the freaks we would be to them? Did you really believe that you would fit in amongst them? Would they welcome you into their polite society after you happily showed them your arms and your legs?”
Doctor Crispin gazed upon her wretched skin, but Davis doubted she could see anymore. The red behind her milky eyes was a sign that the poison was causing her brain to bleed.
“Your desire to know the truth of the tree will lead to our destruction. You think yourself a scientist, but science has no place in Willow Tree. Science would poke us with needles and probe us with microscopes, and for what? So that this depraved world of seven billion could live forever? Would that be your legacy, Doctor?”
She was obviously struggling to form her thoughts. Her foaming lips quivered with incoherent sounds. Her hands fumbled, knotting the fingers together. She stepped toward Davis, but her ankle twisted and she went down, catching herself on the back of a chair. Davis reached out and helped her to sit. Whatever was going to take place would happen here in this wooden seat in her own infirmary. There was a certain … equilibrium at work here, he thought. He stood behind her and laid his hands gently on her frail shoulders.
Doctor Crispin took a deep, ragged breath and forced the words out.
“I … want … understand.” Her words were the sounds of the fluid in her lungs.
“You will,” he assured her.
He turned her head around until the crunch of bone echoed in the room.
Davis could hear the stirring movement of a waltz from the antique phonograph echoing down the halls of Justice Mansion. The council had presented Eunice with the machine on the twenty-five year anniversary of the Willow Tree Festival. It was the one piece of technology that she had managed to master.
He got a familiar knot in the center of his chest. He knew that when he opened the doors she would be dancing … alone. She always danced at the end. She also did not sleep, which was fortuitous. By the time he had finished at the reclamation center, the hour was late and there was much to do before the dawn.
He was not able to ascertain how much the Doctor knew, and therefore, how much Miss Granger knew, and whom she may have told. It seemed that Colonel Davis was destined to make her acquaintance, and it was certain to be an eventful meeting.
The Doctor had been wrong.
The answers were not in their cells. They would not be discovered by drawing their blood or dissecting their brains or blasting their essence into atoms. The notion that the tree knew the secrets of the universe and had somehow infused those secrets into their flesh and bone was, in his estimation, laughable.
The tree was a survivor, nothing more.
Willow Tree had survived because the tree had survived. It could not do otherwise. It was like a virus in that way, hanging its hat on whatever door it entered. The virus had topped the food chain on more worlds than were known. It was ruthless and efficient … and it had found a perfect home in man.
And, like so may other viruses, it would decimate its home before it moved on to another.
Eunice had lit this fuse and, if it went up, it could signal the next step in human evolution.
Darwin would have been so proud.
But, the tree could no more reveal the infinite to mankind than it could heal the sick and the dying or bring peace to a troubled world. What it could bring to the world was an unquenchable craving for more life. And, if they came to believe that the life was in the flesh …
How long before they turned on each other in a vain attempt to harvest a life that was not there? How long would their neighbor’s blood drip from their teeth before they realized that the tree had moved onto the next community, the next country, the next continent? How long before this world was not enough? What then?
Willow Tree would never thrive, for too much time was wasted on getting the life, rather than living the life.
It was not like Davis to wax philosophical. Must be getting close to that time of the month, he thought.
As he lay his hand on the brass handle of the council hall door, Davis paused to consider the Eunice on the other side. He could hear her feet gliding and tapping across the wooden floor in time to the strings and woodwinds. This was not the Eunice who presided over the Willow Tree council, or the Eunice who was taskmaster of the Rusty Gate inn … or the Eunice who had watched stoically as Crystal Ambrose had burned alive with a baby in her arms. This was a Eunice lost in the fields of her youth, listening to music for the first time in her life … before the years … before the tree. It was a Eunice he had never known.
Davis knew that Eunice had gone around him, sending her people to sow the branches in sister cemeteries. He could not be sure how many or where, and he knew that if he did asked her, she would not remember.
It was quite possible that she had not been the one to send them.
There it was, that connection to the tree. He did not pretend to understand it. But each incarnation had inched a little closer to the last. Eunice’s connection to the tree was stronger, but it was also more volatile, and more unpredictable. Yesterday was the only thing that was certain.
Davis pressed lightly on the door latch until it gave way under his thumb. He eased the door open and a sliver of light poked through the crack. In that light was Eunice, twirling and bowing, her skirt lifted in her hand. Her eyes were closed and her free hand directed some long ago concert that she had attended, quite possibly with him.
He pulled the door open until he could pass through, and a short blast of cool air passed through with him. The air stung Eunice on the cheek, and her eyes popped open. When she caught sight of Davis, her face lit up like a child on Christmas morning.
“Darling! I’ve been waiting on you all evening,” she scolded him, offering her hand. “Come, dance with me!”
Her loving invitation was salt in his wounds. It was not Davis she saw with those bright eyes. It was never Davis. But, he would not despoil her joy for the sake of his own fragile ego.
“Apologies, Mada- … my dear.” He closed the door behind him. “It has been a long, difficult day.”
“Then, let your spirit soar!” She beamed her full attention on him and he soaked it up greedily. Eunice glided over to the phonograph and replaced the needle to its outermost groove. The scratchy sounds of Strauss began wafting from the Motorola.
“This is a sprightly rendition I only recently borrowed from my cousin Grady. Do you remember him? He brought the elderberry wine to Cecilia’s wedding only to drink it himself. He had to be delivered home in the back of Jeremiah’s mule cart.” She chuckled at the memory.
Eunice remembered it as if it were only last week, and not the one hundred and fifty years that had truly passed. Davis remembered it not at all, having not met Eunice until long after her cousin’s moldering remains were in the ground.