The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (34 page)

As soon as we entered, I knew something was wrong.

No one seemed to be alarmed by the sight of the tornado outside, clearly visible through the large port-side windows. At least two dozen people here sat calmly at their tables, their eating utensils in their hands, gazing straight ahead, their food half-eaten and untouched. I waved my hands in their faces, to no avail.

I slapped one of them and he said, “Mickey, Mickey, two four nine,” and a woman behind me said, “Two four nine twelve ten oh five,” and then the entire car erupted in one single riotous, “HEY MICKEY!”

The surreality of it made me sick with confusion, as if my brain was backwards in my skull.

The two of us surged forward, and I noticed that the rest of our party had joined us. I glanced back and saw them looking at the diners with concern.

The next car was as bizarre as the last, a simple passenger carriage with face-to-face booth seating. The people here were as preoccupied as the others. Walter did not bother trying to rouse them from their stupor and neither did I. We simply kept racing toward the engine.

When we reached the penultimate car, the Deon tried to wrench the door open, but it was shut tight. His eyes were bright and wide.

“It’s locked. It’s locked,” he said as if he couldn’t believe it, and drew one of his enormous, exotic revolvers, using the butt to pistol-whip the glass pane out of the door’s window.

Sawyer and Noreen spilled into the room, staggering with the train’s worsening rocking. The noise of the wind seemed to be falling away, replaced by the clattering-chugging of the train’s engine and the hateful silence of the devouring wind outside. Walter had put his arm through the window-hole, feeling for the handle.

Noreen panted, “What is that out there, Ross? Do you know? You said you heard a voice. Did it tell you? Did it tell you what that is?”

“It said its name was ‘Hel Grammatica’,” I offered.

“The tornado?” asked Sawyer.

“No, the...person that the voice was coming from. His name is Hel. He said...he said that the ‘man is coming’. I don’t know what that is.”

“The door is chained shut,” said the Deon. “There’s a padlock.”

I looked through the window in the forward wall of the car. I could see the conductor standing in front of the steam engine’s coal furnace. He was motionless, facing the rear of the train, swaying with the motion of it, staring at the floor, the bill of his cap obscuring his eyes.

I pounded on the wall, yelling, “Hey! Hey you! Open the door! You’ve got to stop the train! We’re about to—”

The locomotive pierced the veil of seething, roiling black, plunging us into a void of silence. The wall of the tornado raced the length of the train in a sequential rush. Pebbles and dirt clattered against the walls and slowed in mid-air, disintegrating before my eyes.

Even as I watched, the engine itself seemed to shred into individual molecules and helixed fading into the ether, from the back to the front. The last thing I saw before I tore myself away from the window was the conductor’s skin slipping from his musculature like a raincoat, and it chipped itself into atoms, leaving a gruesome Mr. Goodbody standing there grinning maniacally at us without lips or eyelids.

“We gotta go now,” I said and ran at my friends, taking their shirts in my hands as I went.

They turned and pursued me. I took a last look over my shoulder at them and saw that the forward end of the car was unraveling itself like a bad sweater, shattering and fading behind us. Oblivion chased us from car to car, sucking-windmilling-chewing brain-dead passengers into the heart of obscurity.

We finally made it to the caboose, which turned out to be the mail car. Steamer trunks and crates were piled against the walls and along the floor in long, orderly rows. Noreen slammed the rear door open to reveal the sand and brittlebush shooting away from us, the track arrowing into a dark horizon.

A mail clerk was sitting on a trunk playing solitaire.

“What’s going on?” cried the clerk. “You’re not supposed to be in here!”

As he stood up, the forward door of the mail car was sucked out of the frame, and all that was visible through the hole was darkness and wind. The wall began to come apart and vaporize.

The mail clerk abandoned all pretense and shoved Noreen out of the way, leaping through the back door. The dust was beaten out of the man as he ragdolled along the tracks behind the train.

We all traded glances and silently agreed that the mail clerk’s plan was less than optimal.

Walter overturned a steamer trunk, dumping half the envelopes out, and righted it again. He marched over to me, grabbed my vest, and manhandled me over to the trunk, shoving me inside. I clouted the back of my head on the rim of the box and cried out in surprise and pain.

“You are meant for great things,” said the Deon. “I see that now. Someone wants you dead.”

He slammed the lid shut and I felt-heard the hiss of him pushing the trunk toward the back door. “It is your duty to survive.”

The floor fell away as the gunslinger shoved me out into the desert. The trunk hit the track with a teeth-rattling slam and my head bounced off the inside of it, setting off a bottle-rocket in my brain. Luckily, the parcels still inside the box with me buffered me against the worst of the fall.

I found when I stopped rolling that the hasp had fallen shut. I was lying on my back in a trunk I couldn’t open.

All around me, the unbelievable grinding roar of the whirlwind howled outside the box, making sounds of uncanny sentient rage. It was looking for me.

The sound of the train shushing down the rails lessened and then petered away into nothing.

The whirlwind faded until I was bathed in silence.

I hugged my knees and pressed my toes against the lid, then shuffled them toward my face until my feet were flat against the inside, and pushed as hard as I could. The wood crackled and lights sparkled in my eyes in the dark, but the hasp held tight. It opened just wide enough to let a hair-thin crack of daylight through.

Shit.

I tried again, and failed again. I felt something pop in my back, just above my ass, and relaxed.

The air was starting to get close, hot, damp. I was running out of oxygen. My head spun free of its axis and twirled for miles in my tiny prison. Then I got an idea. I held the lid up and grabbed an envelope, then stuck it in the crack between the lid and trunk, used it to prod the hasp open.

The lid flew open, flooding the compartment with cool, dusty air. I shot up and took stock of my environment, inviting a spear of agony through my skull.

The tornado and the train were gone, but the sky remained dark and woolen. From here I could see that the track ended in a tangle of iron some quarter of a mile away, bent double and twisted by the force of the devouring black funnel. I climbed out of the trunk and swiveled in every direction, a frantic meerkat in the dust cloud, looking for some evidence that my friends had survived, some obvious clue to their continued existence.

The breeze swept the dust away, revealing an unbroken landscape of flat, scrubby desolation as far as the eye could see. The only thing that remained of Sawyer, Noreen, the Kingsmen, the passengers and the conductor was a short trail of debris and litter strewn across the tracks. Envelopes fluttered in the wind, hats rolled in the sand, scarves whipped and waved at me, beckoning me to them.

I tore one of them off, a silken blue one, and tied it around my neck, and bent to collect a small leather pouch. It was the one I had taken from my father’s cottage in Maplenesse. Inside were the coins, and inside of an inner pocket was a sample of strange dry fungus, mired in some sort of gray matter that looked like Spanish moss. Also, I found a fountain pen and a pair of spectacles.

I looked down at the shield and its crossed revolvers, the spear bisecting the center of the crest, the wolf-face carved into the shield itself, and I was overcome with despair. A barb of wet, dull silver pain lanced my ribs and all the strength went out of my legs. I fell into the dust at the feet of a dozen tall tufts of sagebrush and wept hard.

I pulled it from the rabbit-hole deep in myself where it cowered, I pulled it all out in anger, I scraped the guilt out of me with a trowel of rage, slathered myself with it until I was hollow like a cheap chocolate Easter bunny.

I bellowed into the dust between my knees, inhaling it, panting, and reveled in the breaking of my heart. I deserved this, but Sawyer and Noreen didn’t, Walter didn’t, no one but myself.

(get up)

The voice in my head spoke to me again, his tone urgent.

(eep another day, but right now y)

I held my breath, canting my head like a curious dog, and the powdery desert clung to the tear-tracks on my face. A familiar shadow fell across me from the west, the same aura of pure, crystallized apathy I’d felt from the tornado. I found my legs, got to my feet, and looked into the dying sun.

The unremembered man.

(got to run, get away fr)

The distant silhouette was walking toward me, and I could feel the laser-burn of his gaze even from here. I picked up the pouch and threw the strap of the leather satchel around me, and fled across the desert.

Pack sat on the bench, his lanky ankles in chains, listening to the crowd in the stands upstairs. The boy sitting next to him, also shackled to the pole under the bench, leaned into him and muttered, “I bet you’re glad you hid in that box now, aren’t you? Now you know what they do to stowaways.”

A filthy-faced man came down the stairs into the ready-room and assessed them. He smelled like pickles.

When he came to Pack, he paused to glare down his nose at the boy’s tall, sinewy, raw-boned frame. “You look like a real fighter. What’s your name, boy?”

“Normand. Normand Kaliburn. My da called me Pack.”

“Well, Pack,” said the slaver, “It’s your lucky day. Welcome to Finback Fathoms. You get to take a whack at Cutty for a few rounds. I hope your da been feedin you good.”

—The Fiddle and the Fire, vol 2 “The Cape and the Castle”

Dry Leaves

N
IGHT IN THE LONELY HEART
of the desert is a damp and creeping thing, a thin cold rope that comes out of the east and twists itself around your middle, cutting off your feet and hands from your heart until there is no place you want to be. The surprise, after the anger of the sun, is what makes it so bad. It ambushes you.

The sky was dead and gone, glittering with strange unfeeling constellations, and all I could see of the desert was the faint blue of the warm sand holding the thirsty echo of the giant moon overhead. I knew tomorrow would be a scorcher, so I forced myself to find shelter before the sun rose.

I searched the wilderness behind me, but I could not see my pursuer. I knew he was there because I could still feel his looming emptiness, as if he were an abandoned city in the distance, glowing the underside of the clouds with streetlights that no one ever thought to turn off.
The lights are on, but nobody’s home.

I stumbled through the black hours, following the tracks, the brush clawing at my new trousers. I sang songs that cartwheeled through my subconscious over and over, trying to keep my mind occupied so I wouldn’t think about my friends again.

The lyrics trickled out of my mouth in a fearful whisper, gravelled by my lowest, muttering register. Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison” and “One Piece at a Time”, Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Came Down to Georgia”, Chad Kroeger’s “Hero” (I had memorized “Hero” about the time Sam Raimi’s
Spider-Man
came out, so sue me. It’s technically not Nickelback).

My mind circled back around to my life prior to this and I wondered if I was ever going to get back. Did it matter? I found myself uncaring, unwilling to contemplate it. For that matter, whenever I thought about going back, I managed to let Sawyer and Noreen back into my head, which threatened to break my heart all over.

I cracked again and again, until the tears’ tracks overlaid each other in the dirt on my face, a rainbow of shades of brown.

I stopped walking several times out of despair—sometimes out of rage, planning on stomping back the way I came to confront the Presence—but always, my dread urged me on, my fear greater than my sadness or my anger.