He pressed his eyes together more securely and concentrated harder on his prayers, but his meditations were interrupted again, not by a tingling, but by a real, physical pain that bit into his limbs, a pain that made him gasp even as he opened his eyes and saw thick cords the color of earth grasp his praying hands even more tightly.
They were roots, pushing themselves from the earth like headless and wrinkled snakes. Kraybill gasped and tried to separate his hands, but they were bound together as firmly as if they had been handcuffed. Then, suddenly, the roots holding his hands yanked him forward as those encircling his ankles jerked back, and he fell on his face, his head striking the rough, flat, exposed xylem of the tree stump. His nose broke with the sound of a dry branch snapping, and he moaned from the pain of it.
Kraybill tried to move, tried to roll off the stump, but the intractable roots held him there, helpless, his head on the flat stump as if on a druid's altar. He spat blood from his mouth and began to pray from Hohman's book, his voice pinched and nasal.
"I, Kraybill, conjure thee, sword or knife, as well as all other weapons, by that spear—"
He broke off with a scream as the roots tightened, stretching his body so that he heard the vertebrae pop.
". . . by that . . . spear which pierced Jesus' side, and opened it to the gushing out of blood and . . . and water . . ."
He was, he realized with a rush of panic, losing his concentration, indeed could scarcely remember what came next, as fire seemed to run down the length of his spine.
"God help me . . ." he muttered, trying to remember the spell he had read and recited thousands of times during his long life. ". . . the gushing out of blood and water . . . that he . . . that he keep me from injury as . . . as one of the servants of God."
He heard the cracking sound then, and knew, from the lack of new pain, that it was not his body breaking.
"In the name of the Father . . ."
With an effort, he twisted his head to the side and saw the tree a few yards from the edge of the clearing, a tall oak heavy with leaves, strong and ancient as a monument, its bole thick as a column in the temple of some forgotten, bloodthirsty god.
". . . and the Son . . ."
He saw its leaves tremble in a wind that left the trees around it undisturbed and heard the cracking grow louder, as though it was being wrenched from the earth by a mighty, unseen hand.
And then, just for a moment, Kraybill thought that he was moving, that his God had set him free of the roots and the earth, and that he was being lifted up, up toward the sky, over the tops of the trees . . .
". . . and the Holy Ghost!" he shouted in praise, before he realized that it was not he who was rising but the tree that was descending, falling toward him where he lay bound, a sacrifice to this other god of blood and terror, this false god that today, at least, had won.
In the infinity in which the tree fell, Kraybill felt no regret, only a mixture of sadness that he would not be present for the victory, and joy that in another moment he would be within the arms of his own God, the kind God, the God he had served so long and so truly.
The tree came down, and the thoughts died with the brain of Grover Kraybill. The skull was crushed like an egg, and, like an egg, the semi-liquid parts of the head burst from the sides of the tree in a viscous sheet, dispersing in syrupy drops that hung from the blades of dry grass for a long time. Insects gathered instantly, the ants converging on the fluids that coated the surrounding area, the blowflies buzzing around the body itself, seeking entrance to the exposed tissues, a haven in which to lay their own eggs. And the tiny gnats swarmed.
. . . Murders done on unfrequented roads, crimes that seem to have no motive, and all the dreary mysteries of the world of will. To his chamber of horrors Madame Tussaud's is nothing.
—Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp
And the gnats swarmed on a rural road near Columbus, Ohio, where the man who called himself Gilbert Rodman straightened up from leaning over a corpse he had just created. When he slid the knife into the man, a marketing manager for a farm supply company, he had whispered, "Laura."
He had whispered her name and thought of her, just as he had with the others between Chicago and here, dreaming what it would be like when he was finally next to her. He wanted, he decided, to sleep with Laura after he did it, to sleep for a long time, and wake up with her beside him, and, in the thin light of morning, do it all over again, even though she would no longer be able to feel it. It would not matter, for he would see it. He hoped that he would be able to stay with her for a very long time, the way he had with the turquoise lady. He smiled at the memory and wondered if anyone had found her. If not, she would be quite a sight by now.
He took the wallet of Richard Marczak, wiped the blood off the leather, and removed the cash and credit cards. Then he dragged the body into the ditch, placed it within a storm culvert, wiped his hands on the grass, got back into the car, and began to drive east toward Route 161.
He thought he would be safe as far as Zanesville, where he would leave the car and start again on foot. He might have been able to go further, but he wanted to take no chances. If Richard Marczak was expected in the next town, his disappearance might be noted and a search made for his car. Odds were that it wouldn't happen, but Gilbert refused to play the odds. He wanted Laura too badly to take any chances.
Of course he had killed, but he knew how to do that. Killing wasn't taking a chance. Killing was living, and you had to live. You had to keep your hand in. You had to stay in training for the main event. You had to keep your skills honed. For Laura.
The pressure in his bladder grew greater as he neared New Albany, and he stopped on the shoulder of the road, opened the door on the passenger side, sat down, and urinated onto the gravel. He had grown used to touching himself now. It no longer made him shudder, although he had by no means accepted it. But, strangely enough, in a way he treasured it, for it made him think of Laura, made him think of what he must do, held his purpose before him unforgettably.
He slid back into the passenger seat and remembered the paper. Taking it from his shirt pocket, he found the stub of a pencil in the glove compartment and jotted down Robert Marczak's name and the date.
Gilbert pulled out onto the road again and headed east. It looked like it was going to be a beautiful day. He opened the small box that held Richard Marczak's tape cassettes and found a few easy listening, some country/western, and the Beatles' Let It Be. He put in the Beatles tape and cranked up the volume, glad that there wasn't any jazz.
For some reason, Gilbert just didn't like jazz anymore.
And thee, too, with fragrant trencher in hand, over which blue tongues of flame are playing, do I know—most ancient apparition of them all. I remember thy reigning night.
—Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp
Tom Brewer was working in the basement when he heard the knock on his front door. He looked at the carving, sighed, sheared away one last sliver of pine, and set down his tools.
When he went to his door, he found Charlie Lewis standing on the porch looking down Emerson toward the woods to the north. Tom called his name, and Charlie started slightly.
"Tom," he said, "are you busy?"
"Why? What's wrong?"
"Kraybill went out in the woods over an hour ago and he hasn't come back yet."
"The woods? Where?"
"The grove. The grove where Sam Hershey died."
"You let him go alone?"
"He insisted. Said he'd be safe. But now I'm nervous about him, and I damn well don't want to go alone. Can you come along?"
"Sure." Tom dug his keys from his hip pocket, locked his door, and trotted down the steps with Charlie. "Jesus, that was stupid of him to go alone."
"That's what I told him," Charlie said, "but I suppose a warm, personal relationship with the Lord gives one the right to be stupid. At any rate, he seemed confident enough, with his little powwow book stuck in his pocket."
"You believe what he was saying last night?" Tom
asked.
"Thomas, at this point I don't know what to believe. Frankly, his theory makes as much or more sense than anything else I've heard in the past few weeks. You know the old Sherlock Holmes quote—when everything else is ruled out, whatever's left, no matter how goddamned horse's ass it seems, has got to be right."
"I don't think Doyle said 'horse's ass.'
"Well, hell, I got the spirit of the thing anyway."
At the end of Emerson, they turned left and walked up Pine Road past Thoreau until they reached the path that led to the site of the old sawmill. Tom sucked in his cheeks as they walked, trying to create moisture in his mouth. Its dryness, he knew, was due not only to the arid heat of the morning but also to the thought of what they might find when they reached the old grove.
What his imagination had suggested came in a dull second to what they actually found. When Tom saw the body lying across the open space, its head seemingly turned into part of the tree that had fallen on it, he put a hand on Charlie's shoulder. "Stay here, Charlie," he said. "Let me go look."
"No," Charlie said. "I'm . . . all right. Come on."
Grover Kraybill's body was visible through the light cloud of insects that surrounded it. He was lying on his stomach, what was left of his head on the stump beneath the fallen tree. His arms, unbound, lay limply at his sides, and the toes of his feet pointed outward. The blue-stemmed pipe jutted from one hip pocket, the powwow book from the other. The book's worn, leather cover was splashed with blood that had dried to the color of old rust.
"Sweet Jesus," Charlie whispered, then turned around, rested his hands on his knees, and vomited onto the ground. Tom's throat leapt in sympathetic peristalsis, but he swallowed hard and looked away.
"We'd better go back," he said when the sound of Charlie's retching had stopped. "Get the police. Again."
Charlie spat several times, then took a handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped his nose. "What . . ." He paused and cleared his throat. "What the hell did it?"
"A tree fell," Tom said.
Charlie snorted, and looked down at the body. "Some goddamned coincidence. You think . . ." He paused for a moment. "Look at his hands . . . the wrists."
Tom did and saw red marks there. "Rope burns?"
"Something held him down," Charlie said, then whipped up his head and looked around the clearing, staring into where the trees grew thick. "Something . . ."
Trying not to look at the upper part of the body or at the fluids drying on the grass, Tom knelt by Kraybill's legs. "There's dirt here. Around his pants legs. And what . . ." He narrowed his eyes and looked closely at the earth. "The ground's been disturbed here. There are holes, almost like a cane or a stick was poking in . . ."
He examined the small indentations which the dirt had partially filled again. Because of the dryness of the soil, he could see miniature jigsaw puzzle slabs of caked earth that reminded him of photographs he had seen of parched plains crossed with a spider web of cracks. But the corners of the tiny slabs were pointing upward toward the centers of the holes, and as he realized what that signified, he drew his hand back and jumped to his feet as though a snake had just leapt from one of the holes.
"What's wrong?" Charlie asked, ready to flee at a moment's notice.
"Holy shit," Tom whispered. "Roots."
"What?"
"The roots. Son of a bitch, I don't believe this. Look, Charlie—don't get near it but just look. Those holes there, see them? They weren't made by a stick. They came up from beneath. Roots held him down. They held him down so that goddamned tree could fall on his head."
Charlie looked, then stepped back cautiously. "Let's get out of here. Let's go get the police."
Tom had no better suggestion, so they dogtrotted back up the path to Tom's cottage and called Bret Walters in Chalmers. He wasn't happy to get the call.
"Aw, hell," he moaned into the phone. "All right, Tom, I'll be out just as soon as I call the staters." Tom heard him sigh deeply. "Aw, hell."
Tom and Charlie walked back to the clearing but stopped on its perimeter, neither one anxious to get too near the body or what might still be lurking beside or beneath it.
"He was right," Tom said quietly as they stood together, waiting for the police to arrive.
"He?"
"Kraybill. About it being the wood. The trees, God knows what else."
"Tom . . ." Charlie shook his head. "I just . . . I'm sorry, I thought I could believe it, that's why I contacted Kraybill in the first place. But Jesus, moving trees, it sounds like something in The Wizard of Oz—westeal their apples and they get pissed off."
Tom looked sharply at Charlie. "Why did Kraybill come here?"
"I . . . I asked him to."
"I don't mean Dreamthorp, I mean here, the grove. What did he think he was going to find?"
Charlie sighed, as though to show that it was all too absurd to take seriously, but the gesture was unconvincing. "I told him about the carving—the piece of quartz Sam Hershey found. It put a burr up his . . ." Charlie stopped, glanced at the corpse across the clearing, and began again. "It seemed to strike a chord. I kidded him about Indian curses, but the next thing I knew he was on his way here, and then he didn't come back."
Charlie shrugged and looked across the clearing again. When he looked back, Tom saw tears in his eyes, a thing that surprised him even more than Grover Kraybill's inexplicable death.
"I'm scared, Tom. I am goddamned scared, because I don't know what this is all about. If I did, even if it were something insane, something that everyone else said was impossible, it still wouldn't be as bad. But I just don't know. My logic and common sense won't let me believe in what seems to be the truth." He brushed away his tears with a sleeve. "All my life I've lived by logic. By mathematics and calculations and physics. The closest I've ever come to emotion alone has been jazz, but I've always been partial to it for its structures, for God's sake, for the beautiful way in which even the freest improvisations are constructed. And now I find something happening that completely refutes my life. My life, goddamit." He shook his head savagely.
"Charlie . . ." Tom began but didn't know what more to say.
"I've just got to get away for a while. For a few days. Away from Dreamthorp to someplace where I can just relax and stop being afraid—because I am—and think things through." He looked up at Tom and smiled. "Then I'll come back. I'll always come back to Dreamthorp. The goddamned place owns me, Tom."
Tom smiled and nodded. "I know. Go ahead, get away. We'll talk when you come back. But come back soon. Honest to God, I don't know how much more time this town has."
The police arrived then, and the ceremonies that now seemed to be an everyday part of life in Dreamthorp began—the picture taking, the declaration of death, the searches, the interviews of witnesses, in this case Tom and a thoroughly subdued Charlie Lewis, who went back to his cabin to pack after the questions were asked.
"What do they think, Bret?" Tom asked Walters after the state police and detectives had investigated the scene for an hour.
"Looks like an accident," Walters said.
"An accident," Tom said flatly.
"Yeah," Walters said, not looking at Tom. "That tree was pretty well rotted at the base. Ready to fall."
"Did they see the marks on Kraybill's wrists? The marks on his pants?"
"Yeah, yeah."
"And?"
"And what?"
"Don't get pissy, Bret. And wouldn't that seem to indicate that he was tied up?"
"Maybe, maybe not. He went through a lot of brush to get here, coming along that path. Might've got the dirt on his pants if he fell or something. Maybe he scratched his wrists on the path or fooling around with the rough wood on that stump.
"That's a crock."
"Well, what the fuck have you got?" Bret spat at him. ''Somebody tied him down and pushed a tree over on him, then cut him loose? That'd really make a helluva lot of sense, wouldn't it?"
Tom could feel the blood rushing to hi
s face. "So it's an accident then?"
"Yeah, that's what it looks like."
"Boy, we sure as hell have a lot of accidents around here, don't we, Bret? And the nice things about accidents is that you don't have to solve them."
"What are you getting at, Tom?"
"You figure out what accident killed my father, Bret?"
"Okay, Tom—"
"I never thought I'd see you go belly-up, Bret. What's happening? A little too much pressure?"
Bret Walters jammed his hands into his uniform pants pockets and turned away, back toward the place where several policemen were rolling the fallen tree off Grover Kraybill's head. Tom watched for a moment more, a dozen insults coming to mind, but he bit them back and walked down the path toward Pine Road.
Charlie Lewis's car was gone by the time Tom got back to his cottage, but Laura's Cressida was sitting in front of her place.
"Hi," she said when she saw him through the screen door.
"How long have you been here?" he asked, trying to smile.
"Couple of hours. I had some work I could do at home, so I came back. Why? What's wrong? You look funny."
He came inside and they sat in the living room, where he told her about what had happened to Grover Kraybill. Her face grew pale, even though he left out the details. "That poor man," she said when he had finished.
"The police say it's an accident."
"And you don't think it is?"
"I don't think it is."
She pressed her lips together as though she were reluctant to say it. "I don't think it is either."
Despite the official verdict of accidental death that appeared in the newspapers and on the television news that night, more people left Dreamthorp. There were only thirty cottages occupied on the following weekend, and although the post office, general store, and Ted's Mobil remained open, the other few business establishments had closed their doors, apparently due to lack of business but in truth because their proprietors had temporarily left town.
Tom Brewer had received a phone call from Charlie Lewis on Wednesday night, the same day Grover Kraybill died.
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