A Grave Tree (7 page)

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 looked 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.

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?”

“He’s dead,” Abbey spat. Caleb was gone. Like Farley. Like her parents.

Ian’s eyes went wide. “Don’t say that unless you’re very sure it’s true. Things you say and think have a way of becoming true.”

Abbey gritted her teeth and pushed away all thoughts of Caleb being dead. He was alive. He had to be alive. Her parents were alive, and so was Farley.

“He fell into the water because those dogs of Nate and Damian’s were chasing us by the Madrona. One of them pushed him over the edge, and he was swept away. We need to go after him.”

“Oh dear. How did you and Mark escape?” Ian started scrambling down the rock face via the nose hole and jagged teeth of the skull like a squirrel, his feet and hands digging into unseen crevices and keeping him from slipping into the torrent below.

“I couldn’t see the dogs. I made Mark close his eyes, and we just walked away with our eyes closed. I thought maybe observing them collapsed the wave function. And something hit Mark in the back of the head. He’s bleeding.”

Ian seemed temporarily speechless. Finally he shook his head. “That isn’t good. That isn’t good at all. That means the Guild is helping her. That’s the only way she would have enough power to teleport.”

Abbey approached the edge of the canyon to see him better. He had reached a ledge at the bottom of the skull, and now appeared to be trying to pull something from the skull’s mouth. A small rocky beach lay at the foot of the cliff, beside a back eddy in the raging river with a deep dark blue pool. So this was where people jumped.

“Did you say teleport?” Abbey said. She wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly over the rush of water.

Ian moved two of the large tooth boulders aside. “Yes. Well, teleport in a way. But we’ll have to talk about that later. You’re going to have to help me get this boat out of here. We have to go after Caleb.”

Abbey looked dubiously at the skull and then at Mark. How were the two of them going to climb down the sheer face like Ian just had? There was a steep and rocky trail down to the beach right in front of them that most of the cliff jumpers probably used to return to the top of the canyon, but the trail would put them far below the ledge on which Ian stood, and she couldn’t see any way to access the ledge from the beach.

Mark’s eyes had gone very bulgy and he’d already started to shake his head. Abbey tried to don a convincing smile. “Come on, Mark. Let’s climb down to Ian,” she said brightly, not believing for a second that either of them was going to be able to do so without some sort of rope and pulley system.

Ian had already pulled the bow of a heavy wooden rowboat to the entrance of the mouth. Abbey flicked her eyes to the surging water just beyond the back eddy. They were going to go down a raging river in a rowboat? She rather suspected that life jackets were not in the equation.

She made her way over to the edge of the cliff near the right eye socket. Even getting her toe into the indentation that formed the socket would require her to do some sort of spread-eagled stretch across the sheer cliff face. She felt the surprisingly warm grey slab of stone for a handhold, but encountered only rough weathered rock bereft of helpful crevices.

“Climbing is part skill, part faith,” Ian yelled. “You have to believe the holds are going to be there, and that they’ll keep your body safe against the cliff. Belief is very important, Abbey.”

Abbey bit back something tart about belief being for non-scientists. There
was
scientific evidence regarding the importance of belief after all. Well, there was scientific evidence that there were factors relating to belief that might have some influence over something, but nobody was sure yet.

She glanced at Mark. He stood on the edge of the cliff where she had left him, his arms folded over his chest, shaking his head determinedly.

She had to try to get to Caleb. Caleb would scale this cliff in an instant for her.

She wiped her sweaty palms on her yoga pants and reached her hand and leg out once again, searching for tiny indentations. She closed her eyes, controlled her breathing, and let her fingers and toes guide her.

There. A tiny fissure for her toes. She grasped what seemed like nothing with her fingers, brought her other foot to meet the first one, then found another minor indent and repeated her sideways movement until she managed to wedge her first foot in the eye socket and then draw her entire body to temporary safety.

Standing there, with Ian below her, and the rush of water to her right throwing a rainbow mist into the air, her knees were almost rubbery with relief. There was no going back now. She didn’t even know how she’d gotten here.

At the back of the socket, she thought she could perhaps see the faint outlines of a door. The hideaway that Ian had referred to. She looked back at Mark.

“It’s okay. You can do it,” she said. “If I can do it, you can do it. You should probably start now.”

She inched back out to the edge of the socket and got on her hands and knees, grasping the edge of the socket with her fingers while she stretched her toes below her looking for purchase. Centimeter by painful centimeter, she found her way down to the opening that formed the nose of the skull. Each second wasted meant another second that Caleb could be drowning, or that his battered body lay bleeding to death at the side of the river downstream.

Mark had still not budged from where he stood on the cliff. Were they going to have to leave him behind? Could they guide the rowboat into the back eddy to retrieve Mark from the beach? The powerful rush of water all around the ledge made that look unlikely.

“Mark,” she called severely. “You need to start climbing, or we’re going to have to go without you, and you’re going to have to follow the trail back to the cabin.”

She felt bad threatening this. She should have checked the back of his neck to see how badly he was hurt. And what if the dogs remained roving the woods by the Madrona? She couldn’t just abandon Mark. “Please come down here. You can do it,” she added, edging her way backward out of the nose on her hands and knees.

Mark had dropped into a crouch with his hands wrapped round his shins and continued to shake his head.

Abbey glanced down at Ian, who stood only ten meters below her now, his back bent and arm muscles strained as he heaved on the rowboat. “What are we going to do?” she said. “Can we pick him up on the beach?”

Ian turned his head to the beach and then the foaming water at the foot of the ledge. “I doubt we’d be able to get the boat there. The current is pretty strong. We won’t be able to get to the edge of the river until it flattens out and slows down in the valley.”