by Paula Guran
“Why is it called a tree?” little Bay asked.
“Because we all grew from the same roots. Lots of people draw their family trees starting from their great-grandpas at the top, as if all your ancestors lived and died just so you could be born, you special little cupcake. But that doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. You start with the roots—that’s Herman and Sarah Bailey, when they moved here from Ohio. The rest of us are their twigs. We grew out of them.”
The chart indeed looked like everyone since Herman and Sarah had grown out of their subterranean bones, children sprouting from their parents like spores.
“Does that mean we’re stuck here?”
Aunt Vivian cocked her head. “And just what is wrong with here?”
His parents had met in elementary school; they grew into a big-haired Stairway to Heaven couple with matching letterman jackets. Whippoorwill born and bred, they cooed, as if that was anything to be proud of. They’d disproved their own manifesto by the time Bay was old enough to dial child services. For a while he was the only one who heard the plastic plates ricocheting off the dining room wall, the fuck yous and the just get outs, the station wagon scurrying out of the driveway and jumping the curb. He wondered how to put that shit in the family tree. Attention, the tree is currently on fire. After the divorce severed his parents’ bond, he imagined his own name gliding away as if it had never been rooted to this gnarled monstrosity that began with Herman and Sarah. Yet nothing changed. He stayed tethered to the crown of the Bailey tree: a struggling, captive bird.
His father never liked it when he talked about New York, Vegas, Mexico. He would point a beer can at him and say, “You think you’re better than this town? We’re not good enough for you anymore?”
It seemed easier to say he was sick of “you fucking hillbillies” than to tell the truth. He knew that would get a response, probably a box in the ear for pissing on his surroundings. But what he really wanted to say was You were never good enough for me. You were never good enough for anyone.
Rumor had it that the weirdo living in Roger “Alkie” Malkin’s trailer in Gaslight Village was an escaped convict. Tweaked-out gremlins in neon shirts sometimes snuck peeks through the windows, standing on their tiptoes in the muddy swamp grass that had swallowed most of the trailer’s tires. The weirdo was usually sitting in the dark with a flashlight, watching something terrifying on his phone. The glow on his face was lunar. When he noticed them, he’d growl and scurry to the window and pull the curtains. The rumor adjusted—now he was a scientist from Area 51, on the run from the Feds.
But he was just a man—a boy, really—who had the misfortune of stumbling upon some hidden fold in the world that he couldn’t explain, and knew of no other recourse than retreat. He was just Lark. When Roz knocked on the door of the trailer, distressed because she’d seen feet descend from the silver maple tree in her backyard, he opened the door. And when Bay banged upon the door an hour later, yelling that he knew they were in there, Lark again relented.
“The gang’s back together,” Lark whispered, trembling and huddling on the piss-stained carpet. He looked like death by then—he’d lost so much weight, so much color. But Roz and Bay were red-eyed too. They hadn’t spoken to each other since her confession to KLNW news. He had tried to contact her at first—called twenty-three times and sent seven text messages, including Fuck you you fucking bitch—but, within forty-eight hours, he was the one on KLNW, and Roz was the unstable nut job with the ax to grind. He swore to the town of Whippoorwill that the video was one-hundred-percent authentic. “Only unity saves the damned.”
“I just got fired,” Bay said in the trailer. “My manager says she lost trust in me since my friend Rosslyn went on TV and said we faked the entire Goose Lake video.” Roz was clenching her stomach, refusing to look at him. “So thank you, Rosslyn. Thank you so much.”
“I was desperate!” she shouted. “You don’t know what it’s like! You turn every corner and you wonder—is she gonna be there? Is she watching me? Will anybody else see her? And even after I said sorry, she still didn’t stop!” She knelt down beside Lark and cautiously tugged on the hems of the blanket he wore like a shawl around his head. “Lark, I know you’ve been seeing her too.”
Lark stared blankly at her, and Bay clapped his hands over his head. “You’re unbelievable. It’s not Raggedy Annie, fuckwit, Raggedy Annie isn’t real! Remember? We made her! She’s Jessica!”
“Yeah? And where is your little girlfriend anyway? She’s a part of this mess, she ought to be here too.”
Bay nervously chewed on his fingernail as he stalked around Alkie’s trailer. It was empty save for plastic bags and cigarette butts and half-eaten meals: evidence of a life undone. “Jessica’s gone.”
The other LunaTicks were silent, but Bay slammed his fist into a plastic cabinet and snapped an answer to a question he’d heard only in his head, “I don’t know where! She’s just gone, she hasn’t been to work, her parents haven’t seen her . . . they think she got mad at me and ran off. When they looked in her room all they found were those . . . damn terrariums.” Suddenly exhausted, Bay slid to the carpet and pulled off his black beanie. “They’re all the same too. Just one tiny tree in every one. Looks like a little oak tree.” The tiniest sliver of a bittersweet smile cracked Bay’s face. “Like a tiny Witching Tree.”
“Bay’s right,” Lark mumbled. “It’s not Raggedy Annie. It’s the trees. Here, look at the video again.” He held up his phone and their no-budget home movie began to play. Roz and Bay were so hollowed out by then that they didn’t have the strength to object to watching their little experimental film another, final time. They watched themselves skip stones across Goose Lake, watched the camera find the Witching Tree. They watched themselves act out the script they’d written at Jessica’s house the night before—“Let’s just go, I’m getting cold”—and watched Jessica stand ominous and hooded in front of the Witching Tree. And finally, they watched the branches of the Witching Tree curl, like the fingers of some enormous dryad, toward Jessica.
“Do you see the tree?” Lark whispered, like he was coaching a baby to speak. The leaves of the tree stood on end, fluttering as if swept by a celestial wind, trembling as if awakening. “See it move?”
“I don’t understand,” Roz whined. “It’s the breeze . . . ”
“No, no, no! Listen, I’ve looked this up, and these beings exist across the world, in dozens of civilizations across time . . . there’s Yggdrasil, there’s Ashvattha, there’s Vilçgfa, there’s Kalpavrishka, and now there’s . . . there’s the Witching Tree.” Bay was about to punch Lark in the face, and they all knew it, so he spoke faster. “These trees, they connect . . . all the planes of existence, the world of the living with the world of the dead. The Witching Tree is our Cosmic Tree.”
Those words—Cosmic Tree—hung like smoke circles in Alkie’s musty trailer. Jessica’s terrariums. The trees that grew manic and hungry over their houses. The Witching Tree itself, eternal long-limbed sentinel of Goose Lake. And all roads led to Goose Lake . . .
Bay was the first to break the trance and grapple to his feet. He claimed not to understand what Lark was trying to say. He said he couldn’t waste his time on this bullshit about trees, because what could a tree do to him? All he knew was that Lark and Roz had gone completely batshit, and now none of them were ever getting out of Whippoorwill, and was that what they wanted all along? Did they want to be stuck in this inbred town forever, maybe open a tree nursery if they were so obsessed with greenery?
“ . . . dude, what are you doing to your teeth?”
Bay was picking at one of his bottom canine teeth, digging into the gum, trying to rip it out. “It’s the root!” he shouted through his bloody fingers. “It’s fucking killing me!”
Bay waited until he’d returned home to extract the tooth. He was so distracted by the electric pain that he failed to see that the dead cottonwood outside his mother’s house, the one that had broken his arm as a child, was growi
ng green again. He used a pair of pliers and the bathroom mirror—the pain was nothing compared to the horror of enduring another moment with the tooth’s ruined root in his skull. Yet even as he stared at the ugly disembodied thing lying at the bottom of the sink, he could feel the roots of his other teeth rotting. He didn’t know what had happened to them—his bad teeth, his mother’s teeth—but he could feel their decay spreading into his jaws, his sinuses. The thought of those sick roots growing into his bones—he saw them jutting out of his chin like saber teeth, drilling down in search of soil—made him want to die . . .
They all had to go. By the time his mother came in, he was lying delirious on the tiles, his teeth scattered around him like bloody seeds.
The day after Bay was committed to Teller Psychiatric, Roz drove alone to Jessica Grauner’s house in the half-light. She went because only unity saves the damned, though she’d hated Jessica when she’d tagged along on the LunaTicks’ vandalism operations and petty larceny sprees. Where one goes, the others must follow, and she neither wanted to follow Bay to Teller Psychiatric nor knew how to follow Lark into his rabbit hole. And she had the squirmy feeling that Jessica was still hanging around—like Raggedy Annie hung from the Witching Tree?—somewhere on the property.
Roz had been to this house twice—once for a grotesque house party while Jessica’s parents were out of town, and once to prepare for the Goose Lake stunt. On neither occasion had there been a linden tree in the front yard, but now a full-grown specimen had broken through the earth to stand in proud, terrifying splendor before Jessica’s window. Its roots bubbled across the lawn, disrupting her parents’ carefully manicured ornamental ferns. A large, discolored knot peeked out from the linden’s trunk—a malformed branch, right, a sleeping bud? But when Roz got close enough to touch it, she saw that it was a face: Jessica’s face, her eyes clenched shut and her mouth stretched open in an anguished forever-scream. Roz ran her finger down one wooden eye, heard Jessica’s nasal whine—I smell like a dead rat!—and quickly stuffed her hand back in her pocket, running back to her car.
Roz’s mother died during the Great Storm. She died at home, of cancer, while the world raged around them. Electric lines sparked, cars slid off roads, walls fell in, and smaller trees were torn out of the earth, but their older, larger counterparts miraculously survived. It seemed like a condolence card from God: The world is filled with death, but Life endures.
There were strange things said at the funeral. “She’s waiting for you, in heaven.” “We will all meet again, by-and-by.” Roz hated to admit it—because who wouldn’t want to see their mother again?—but when these words floated up on desolate roads at midnight, she was frightened. She wanted to hear that her mother was at peace, in a better place, had moved on—not that she was waiting, lingering, hovering, skeletal hands outstretched to receive her daughter as soon as death delivered her—no. That was ugly.
Her mother loved trees. They were her favorite thing about Whippoorwill. Don’t you love how tall they are, how old they are? These trees are older than all of us. She was a native, so she had grown up with them—climbed them, slept in their nooks, taken their shelter, carved her initials into their skin with the neighbor boy. Roz’s father had agreed to move to Whippoorwill before they got married because it was supposedly a good place to raise a family—what with the safe streets and heritage fairs and seasonal festivals—but when he wanted to move to Lincoln for the sake of a higher salary, her mother had refused on account of the trees. But there are trees everywhere, he said. It’s not the same, she said. These trees are my inheritance. They’re the kids’ inheritance.
She had a special bedtime story about the Witching Tree. It had nothing at all to do with Raggedy Annie. It was about the men and women who first built Whippoorwill, back when America was young. They built the jail and they built the church, they built the courthouse and they built the school. And then they planted the Witching Tree, so after their human bodies died they would stay close to their children, and live forever.
Her father listened in once, and got so upset that her mother never told it again, and Roz never heard it again from anyone else. At middle-school sleepovers—before the other girls decided she was just too weird—they only ever whispered about Raggedy Annie, the abortionist-witch. When she asked about that Witching Tree story they would indignantly snap, “That is the Witching Tree story, dummy!”
But one time in high school when they were all smoking pot in Bay’s basement, Roz tried to retell her mother’s version of the Witching Tree story, what little she could remember of it. It turned out Bay and Lark had heard similar shit from their parents, once or twice. Bay and Lark were, first and last and always, the only people she could count on not to lie to her. Lark said, “It’s a creation myth. And an apocalypse myth, too. The end and the beginning, the beginning and the end.”
Dawn came, and they never spoke of it again. The Witching Tree story—the real one, the one submerged beneath the arsenic-and-old-lace of Raggedy Annie—was only whispered in the ears of Whippoorwill babies, so the truth would soften like sugar cubes right into their unfinished brains. These babies grew up and forgot except when they were sleeping, usually, but sometimes when they looked at the massive, infallible trees of Whippoorwill for too long, that primordial story writhed like a worm and they would shiver, listening to the leaves rustling like ocean waves, wondering who was waiting for them.
Raggedy Annie stood, again, at the end of Roz’s bed. Roz could almost hear her breathing.
“No,” Roz mumbled to herself. “She’s not real. Raggedy Annie is not real.” And maybe she wasn’t, but something stood there. Something had turned Bay into a pile of dirt in Teller Psychiatric. Oh, that wasn’t in the official hospital report—the hospital said he somehow escaped, from the restraints and the room and the asylum, and the forest-fresh soil that had replaced him in the cot was—what—a practical joke? The LunaTicks knew all about those, but this was something else, something beyond. Roz closed her eyes, telling herself that once she opened them, it would be morning, and Raggedy Annie would be gone.
When she opened her eyes the figure was leaning over her, twitching. This time it wasn’t her mother beneath the hood. This was the face that looked back at her in the mirror every morning, bleary-eyed and bloodless, sapped of life. It was her. Her doppelganger cocked its head to the side like a bird and stared at her with her own big black eyes—black, then blacker, in the face of the ghost. It was death looking down; she could feel that in her veins, because that wasn’t blood roiling inside her anymore. It was sap. Slow like honey. Death leaned in, and Roz screamed herself awake.
It was midnight. Roz drove to Gaslight Village in a fugue, but Lark wasn’t there. Alkie’s trailer looked like it had been spat out by a tornado—it had been smashed nearly in half by a fallen tree. Branches had broken through the windows and now grew inside the trailer, as if they’d been searching for him. Her first thought was that the trailer had become his coffin, but after she scrambled to reach a broken window, cutting her hands on glass shards, she didn’t see a body in the dark. No soil, either. There was only one place, unhappily, that he would have gone.
She could see the woods around Goose Lake stirring before she even got out of the car. For a second she sat behind the wheel, trying to delay the inevitable, hypnotized by the razor-sharp static that had overcome the radio, until she saw again the figure that she’d been running from since they made the video. Raggedy Annie was standing where the trees parted to make way for a little human path. The hooded ghost turned and disappeared down the trail, and Roz knew this would not end if she did not pursue. Where one goes the others must follow, and Raggedy Annie was one of them. The truth was she always had been. Raggedy Annie and her mother and father and brother and Lark’s parents and Bay’s parents and Jessica and Old Lady Marigold and Roger Malkin and everybody, everybody in this town: they were all in this together.
She willed her legs to move into the rippling chaos. As soon as sh
e stepped foot on the dirt path the air pressure dropped, and her bones felt calcified in pain. She’d been hoping not to return to Goose Lake. She’d been hoping to leave Whippoorwill. She’d been hoping . . . well. Hope was just delusion that hadn’t ripened yet. The forest didn’t smell like pine or cedar or Christmas or anything else they could pack into an air freshener—it smelled like rot. A fleet of dead were howling overhead, and there was nowhere left to go but forward. Just like all roads led to Goose Lake, all of Goose Lake’s dirt paths led to the Witching Tree, the oak to seed and end the world.
The Tree had grown since she last saw it. She felt the urge to kneel under its swaying, groaning shadow. Even as worms crawled out of cavities in its trunk, new twigs and leaves sprouted on its boughs. Lark was a dwarf beneath it, wildly swinging a rusty ax. Every strike was true, but he wasn’t getting anywhere—not only was the oak enormous, but its bone-like bark yielded nothing except for a few brittle chips of wood. She could see this, even though she could not see stars through the foliage. What stars? The Witching Tree was everything in this world.
Lark looked up and tried to smile when he saw her through his sweat. He looked so weak and mortal, a mere weed next to the Witching Tree. “We can make it, Roz! You and me. Just you and me. You just gotta help me. Help me end this thing.”
She shook her head. She could feel the Tree’s roots moving like great pythons beneath the fertile earth. “I don’t think we can, Lark . . . I don’t think we’re getting away.”
Lark frowned and paused his work, catching the blade with his hand. “But if we cut it down, it ends,” he said, and then cried out and dropped the ax. He was squeezing his left palm—he’d nicked it. Or it had nicked him, it was hard to tell. So the blade was sharp after all—just not sharp enough to slay the tower of space-time that was the Tree. He moaned and pressed his right hand into the wound. “Something’s wrong,” his voice warbled, holding out his hand. By the Tree’s light, Roz could barely see it: dark amber where red should have been. It was sap. He was bleeding sap.