The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (14 page)

“Hang—
WOAH!”
Sawyer shouted; I turned my head again to look at the mirror.

A horned demon grinned at us from the mirror, his eyes burning yellow in the glass.

I snatched my hands away from the mirror’s frame and leapt back with a cry of surprise and terror. The demon immediately faded into the shadows reflected in the mirror; my eyes darted around the cramped room, trying to figure out where it had gone. I pointed at the silvery glass.

“I told you, dude! I
told
you I saw a demon up there in the closet! That was it!”

“Well, I totally believe you
now,”
said Sawyer. He had pressed himself against the stone wall at the back of the space. “What the hell are we even
doing
down here?”

“We came to talk to the preacher, didn’t we?”

“He’s not even
down
here!” cried Sawyer. “This is screwed up! Why did you bring me down here?”

“You thought it was a good idea too!”

“I agreed to come to the church and talk to Atterberry, not
this!”
he said, thrusting an accusatory hand at the mirror. “What the hell were we talking about, chocolate and shit? It’s like I wasn’t even paying attention to what was coming out of my mouth.”

He stormed over to it and grabbed the frame without fear, trying to wrench it to one side to facilitate his escape. It did not move. He ripped and yanked at it again, to no avail. It seemed fixed to the wall around the opening. Then, he seemed to calm, or, from where I was standing, it looked like he had gone catatonic or something. He was just standing there.

I came up behind him and looked over his shoulder, steadying him with a hand on his back. “What’s goin’ on?”

He glanced down at me (as he was several inches taller than myself), and then back up at the mirror.

Then I saw it.

“We don’t have a reflection,” said Sawyer.

I blinked, and swallowed. My mouth tasted like I’d been licking up dust. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I realized that I was gripping my friend’s shirt—I had twisted my fist in it, to be precise—and let go. I felt like a vampire trying to find himself in his gothic looking-glass. “What the hell, man. What kind of mirror is this?”

Sawyer reached out to touch the mirror, but his fingertips never met a surface. He leaned, reaching, and put his hand into the empty space inside the wooden frame. There was no glass at all. We were staring into what had somehow become a doorway, on the threshold of a narrow tunnel filled with a close and placeless darkness.

I picked up my cellphone and shined its meager, sickly glow into the opening; I succeeded in only illuminating a little way inside, making it look for all the world like something I’d seen on a Discovery Channel special once about the opening of an Egyptian pyramid, dim fiber-optic images of a remote-control robot trundling down a dark sandstone shaft. I felt like Howard Carter again.

I could feel an inky coldness seeping from the space beyond, and it was very obviously not the way we’d come; instead of a low-ceilinged burrow carved from the dirt under the nave, we were looking at a taller corridor with brickwork walls and floor, the latter strewn with what appeared to be sand. Debris was littered underfoot at the limit of my light.

I looked back at Sawyer; he had backed away from it all and turned on his camera. “To hell with that,” he said. “I didn’t sign on for this Plan 9, Stephen King, Movie of the Week shit.”

I glanced into the tunnel, and back at him. “It’s not like we have a choice. We can’t stay in this room forever, and we can’t move the mirror out of the way. We have to do this.”

“I wish I’d brought my damn baseball bat.”

I stepped over the frame and into the mirror-tunnel.

_______

I moved from the close, damp air of the church cellar to an arid and odorless place. My shoe crunched on the grit of sand, echoing into the tunnel with a flat, metallic crackle. As soon as my head entered the space beyond the mirror’s frame, my ears popped. The air pressure had changed. A cold breeze washed over me, sending a chill across my skin that made the hair on my legs and arms stand up.

I looked back at Sawyer, who was watching me in silent fascination, his eyes wide pools of liquid fear and awe. I shrugged without speaking. My new friend put one foot over the mirror’s frame as well, exploring the floor, and then thrust himself into the unknown with me. I saw him roll his jaw to compensate for the ear-pop like I’d done.

“Gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” he said, hugging himself protectively against the dry, bracing air.

I turned and began leading us into the dark depths. It occurred to me that the grit under our shoes wasn’t sand, but on closer inspection it turned out to be some sort of fine silt, or perhaps cornmeal. When I knelt to examine it, I realized that there was a deep, continuous rumble emanating from the stonework floor. Once I’d noticed it, I couldn’t deny it, and now I could even feel it through the soles of my feet. The faint, deep vibrations even seemed to permeate the very air.

As I looked up, I noticed that the ceiling was wooden.

“Do you feel that?” asked Sawyer.

I nodded.

“Sounds like machinery.”

I stood and kept walking. The farther down the tunnel we went, the louder and deeper the rumbling got, until the floor trembled so hard my feet began to itch. I put my palm against the wall, knocking loose tendrils of fine silt that smelled strangely of tortilla chips as they sifted toward the floor.

I looked down and saw thin drifts of the white dust piled against the walls, and it hit me that I was looking at cornmeal. My suspicions were confirmed when we emerged into a larger space where a millstone, a great stone wheel the size of an automobile, was slowly grinding in an endless circle on a round stone slab.

We had come out of the storage area of a millhouse. We stood there for a moment, trying to piece together the reality of what we were seeing. A bucket on a rope dangled through a nearby hole in the ceiling. Bags were piled in the corner, chewed open by vermin. Grains were all over the floor under them.

I examined the screen of my cellphone and saw that I had no signal whatsoever. I glanced at Sawyer. “Where on Earth are we?”

“I have no idea,” he said, and pointed into the darkness with the camera. On the viewfinder screen of his GoPro, I could see the angular, faint green skeleton of a ladder. I went directly to it, seeking it out with my cellphone’s glow, and climbed upward into a smaller room, where a log the size of a tree-trunk was turning in place, running the millstone downstairs.

I could hear the distinct creaking of a windmill’s vanes somewhere overhead. I did not recall seeing a giant fan turning over Walker Memorial Church.

Weak blue light filtered through the slats of a wooden door. I opened it and stepped out into a narrow alleyway, surrounded by more tall sandstone buildings, whose archer windows stared lifelessly down at me with dark holes where eyes used to be. Gauzy white curtains billowed from those sockets, fluttering in the breeze.

I felt as if I were standing in some replica of an Italian village built by Egyptians. Directly overhead, a black, unmoving river of stars filled the narrow canyon framed by jagged, damaged roofs.

I was speechless with horror and confusion, and judging by the expression on Sawyer’s face, tinted green by his camera screen, he was as well. He was slowly, fearfully, rotating in place, pointing the GoPro in a wide arc across the alley.

A loud
BANG!
startled both of us as the door of the millhouse blew shut.

I jumped. Sawyer swore out loud, ducking, looking up and down the alley as if we’d been shot at. I tugged at his sweater. “Come on, let’s get out of here. This place is creeping me out.”

We walked down to an intersection and found a slightly larger corridor. Stoops of three and four stairs led up to doorways hewn roughly into the sides of the alley, flanked by unseeing portholes with rotting shutters that hung unsecured, swinging free.

I began to understand that we were in some sort of primitive village. For some reason, our surroundings looked familiar. Most of the windows were mullioned, but the glass was gone out of almost all of them. Out here, too, the stonework pavement was gritty, but outside the millhouse, it was sand. It piled coarse grains against the walls, sifting toward us in low, ghostly movements that contributed to the illusion of walking against the current of a pale river muddy with gold dust.

I gazed up at the windows as we passed them, fearing the sight of some guarded, unwelcoming, half-glimpsed face, and whispered to Sawyer. I took a picture with my cellphone. He was pointing the camera at the windows.

He walked over to one of them and reached upward with the camera, holding it over his head so he could aim it into the narrow hole. It was at least a couple feet taller than him. Satisfied, he came back, pointing it at me, collecting my terrified face in the green netherworld of its nightvision mode.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” I admitted, beginning to panic.

“Yeah,” said Sawyer. “Me neither.”

At the end of this watchful, shadowed lane, we emerged into a spacious plaza bleached white by moonlight. A large fountain dominated the center of this somber area, long devoid of water. Sparse clumps of dead wheatgrass reached up out of the sandy cistern with rustling golden skeleton fingers. We were surrounded by a towering council of two and three-story sandstone villas, cleft into a dozen blocks by slender alleys that tapered into darkness at every angle.

Buffering us from those swarthy cracks were old marketplace stands, draped in tattered canvas in faded shades of a thousand colors. They displayed worthless wares: tiny animal bones picked clean by scavengers, threadbare rugs, dry and withered husks that must once have been fruit, pottery scoured smooth by windblown sand and lying broken on the ground.

The sky was an unbroken dome of deepest black velvet, strewn with a billion glittering diamonds through which pulsed a constant slow beat of twinkling luminescence. Perching in the western half was a giant bone-white moon three times the size of the one I’d come to know, its pockmarked china face foreign and unknown to me, a stranger dressed in my brother’s clothes. Another, smaller orange moon hung in front of it like a mask. The orbs were either so large or so close that I could see individual craters and valleys on their surfaces.

I crept closer to one of the stalls, and found a rack of tarnished jewelry. Some of it was scattered across the counter. I let my hand rake softly over it, my fingertips brushing against semiprecious stones I still had trouble believing. I saw no deep blue minerals, none of the gold-flecked lapis lazuli I had become familiar with in the desert the previous year.

I was surprised, however, when my rumination was interrupted by the shock of cold gunmetal. Lying underneath the necklaces and earrings was an ancient revolver.

I picked it up and opened the cylinder, relieved to find cartridges in four of the six chambers. “I found a gun,” I told Sawyer, hurrying to show him. When I tilted it so that he could see it, the pistol’s polished flank reflected the moonlight in a flash of cold white that blinded my right eye for a second. The afterimage had a strange shape in it.

I took a closer look at the nickel-plated surface and saw a tiny coat-of-arms behind the cylinder, below the hammer. “Look at this weird shield on the side of it.”

Sawyer nodded, panning the camera around. “Keep it ready, man. This place, it’s...there’s something here. Somebody is watching us. We’re not safe. We’re not safe. We’re not alone.”

I eased back the hammer until it caught, and held it in the three-point stance I remembered from my MP days carrying a nine-millimeter Beretta. It’d been years since I’d had anything to do with a sidearm, but standing there holding it brought back the feeling as if it had been just yesterday that I was taking my place at the firing line of the M9 range on Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
Move your selector switch from safe, and watch...your lane,
said the range safety in the back of my mind.

I sensed movement in the corner of my eye and my head jerked to regard it, but the window I’d noticed, far above the street, was only a black hole. Something else made me turn and point the six gun at an empty doorway.

An electronic
bink
told me that Sawyer was doing something with the camera. His face, limned with pale green, gradually fell as he stood there, replaying the video he’d been recording since we brought the mirror to the church. His features flashed from anxious clarity to astonished fear. He rewound the video, then wordlessly turned the camera around and pointed the viewfinder at me.

On the screen, we were creeping down the alley again. The camera hovered here and there, rising to higher vantage points for a quick peek into the windows looking down on the thin space. The video-Sawyer approached a window and held the camera over his head. The windowsill sank out of sight and the lens was thrust into a blackness that resolved into a blur of green, which focused until I could see the interior of the room beyond.

Inside was a table, set with bowls, cups, and dishes, ostensibly arrayed with food long since rendered decrepit. A painting hung on the wall, one corner ripped and dog-eared. A dusty bookshelf stood to the left, littered with the detritus of a life of memories: framed photos, figurines. The video was too grainy to make out any meaningful details from the pictures.