The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (9 page)

Sawyer pulled out of the parking lot and started down the road to what I was now thinking of as The Devil’s Den. I noticed that his camera was mounted on the dash, recording our conversation. “That’s the only wheel cover I could find that would fit. The steering wheel was sticky when I bought it and I couldn’t clean it off.”

“Agnes?”

“Yeah. I look at the car and I think, ‘If that car was a person, it’d be a chain-smoking little old lady named Agnes.’”

Sawyer chuckled. “Yeah, I guess I see what you mean.”

I looked down and saw a ball bat in the floor board. “That’s your weapon, then?”

“Yep. I got carjacked once a few years ago, so now I keep it in the car with me. I guess there’s not much room to swing it, maybe, but you ever been poked in the face with a ball bat?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“It hurts.”

We rode on in silence, and then I made an attempt at small talk. I think after the last hour or so, I needed something normal. “So what’re you up to around here? You said earlier that you were visiting with some fans, or friends, while you were in town?”

“You’ll just think it’s silly,” Sawyer said, nodding dismissively.

I said, “I doubt that. I’ve participated in some fairly silly things in my life.”

“We were having a sort of mini-convention for
The Fiddle and the Fire
at the Hampton Inn. We were all getting drunk and acting out scenes from the novels wearing our costumes. It was a lot of fun.”

He took a deep draught of a soda wedged into the console. “Barry managed to do the entire soliloquy from King Fairbairn’s siege in a really...
really
bad Scottish accent. I mean, it was hilarious. You shoulda seen it. We’re talking about making it a yearly thing. We just...come down here for the weekend in costumes and get loaded.”

“Maybe if we survive the night, I might join you. I still have a lot of catching up to do before I can start writing.”

“I’m sure the others would appreciate the chance to thank you for agreeing to finish the book. Have you thought about continuing the series?”

“I don’t know,” I said, truthfully.

“I understand.”

“We’ll see how this goes. The main thing I am concerned with at this point is doing the original series justice.”

“Now, I’ve only been out here once,” Sawyer said, peering through the windshield at the road ahead of us. “And it was during the day. You might have to let me know when we get there.”

“It’s the fourth mailbox after you get on Tollemache Road. The next driveway. Here we are.” The 4-Runner crackled across the gravel as we pulled into the country driveway alongside the Nova. Even in the relative darkness, I could see the divots in the lawn where I’d carved ruts in the grass as I fled in terror.

“Shit,” said my wingman, looking over me out of my window at the destruction. “I’m getting a little nervous now. I’m bowed up like a Halloween cat.”

“You? I’m the one that saw it.”

“You said it looked like a devil or a demon or something?”

“Uhhh...yeah. Like...you remember that movie
Clash of the Titans
?” I asked, making sword-stabbing motions. I’d been thinking of appropriate analogies since I’d called Sawyer earlier, and finally came up with something close enough to what I’d seen. “With Harry Hamlin and the little mechanical golden owl?”

“How could I forget? That’s a seminal piece of film history. Right up there with
Krull,
The Neverending Story,
The Beastmaster,
and
Conan the Barbarian
.”

“Remember the ugly dude with the curly hair and funky skin? Maybe his name was Calephebas or Calibos or something. I think Harry Hamlin cut his head off at some point and carried it around in a bag. Anyway, that’s what I saw in that closet, except it was bald and had pale pink skin.”

Sawyer’s big bright eyes gazed at me, sparkling in the eerie green light from the dashboard. “No offense, Ross, but that’s scary as shit. I think I might be regretting coming out here with you.”

As I got out, Sawyer was digging under the seat and I heard him swear under his breath. He jumped out of the truck and we walked through the damp late-night chill to the front porch, where the front door was standing wide open.

I looked over at Sawyer and saw that he was carrying his baseball bat and the camera. There was no visible light emanating from it, but I could see on the screen that it was in nightvision mode, the viewfinder screen displaying the world in shades of mint green.

The house was still as dark and silent as I’d left it. I started up the stairs to the second floor, beckoning to Sawyer to follow me. He trailed behind, sneaking almost cartoonishly, gripping the bat with a white-knuckled fist as it rested on his shoulder.

I could hear a faucet dripping as we crested the landing and I looked at Sawyer. He was biting his lips in anticipation.

I stepped in and turned the handle as far as it would go, cutting off the leak. As I did, I noticed something odd: the shower curtain was closed again. I used the tip of the knife to pry back the edge of it and peer into the tub, my heart thundering within me.

To my relief, nothing awaited me.

I lingered momentarily in the soft green light of Sawyer’s camera, trying to remember if I’d left the curtain drawn when I’d come through the first time, but I wasn’t willing to stand around in there staring at my spooky reflection in the mirror.

When I came out, Sawyer was standing guard, looking up and down the hallway, the bat at the ready. I tapped him on the shoulder and felt him jerk in surprise. I nodded toward the back bedroom.

He pushed the door open with the end of the baseball bat and I rushed in SWAT-style with my knife, waving my cellphone around. My foot struck something and a loud clatter scared me bad enough to make me shout. Sawyer was beside me in an instant, ready to start swinging. I have to give him credit for that.

“What?! What is it?”

I picked up the hatchet I’d kicked and showed it to him, then jabbed the tip of the knife into a fat, yellowed Nora Roberts paperback lying on the dresser, so that it was standing up. I left it there and I pointed at the closet, hefting the axe, preparing to defend myself.

Right there,
I mouthed at Sawyer, my face a ghostly green in the display on his camera, my eyes gleaming with an oblique light like a telescope lens.
That’s where I saw it. Get ready.

The door was still open. I cat-stepped toward it, too aware of the floorboards shifting under my feet, every creak and click amplified to deafening levels, a stage upon which I crept and fretted, sure that at any time, I was about to be disemboweled by some horrific spectre from the dirty, black, root-veined underside of the earth.

I slid the axe-blade between the clothes hanging inside, slowly, and then swept the hatchet back and forth, chuffing out loud in a high voice of fear and certainty.

A frigid thrill erupted at the base of my neck and turned my hands and face into numb cadaver parts, and my hair prickled at the sight of a silhouette crouching in the back of the closet, waving something menacingly at me in the weak glow of my cellphone.

I froze, muttering,
“Aaaa
—aaaah!”

“W—wait a minute,” Sawyer said, leaning over my shoulder to gaze into the abyss that was staring back at me. I thrust my cellphone toward the jackets and shirts and realized that I was looking at a floor-length mirror, leaning against the back wall of the closet.

Sawyer relaxed. “You have got to be kidding me. It’s a mirror. It’s a goddamned mirror. You saw your own reflection in a mirror that was in the back of the closet.”

I whirled on him. “What I saw earlier, that was
no mirror.
Something reached out of there and grabbed me.
Don’t even go there.
I’m not crazy, and I’m not stupid, and I’m no coward. I
saw
what I
saw
and I
felt
what I
felt.
”

“What
I
feel is freaking stupid,” Sawyer said, walking away. He turned off his camera and looked at his watch. “It’s midnight...I’m getting out of here and hitting the hay.”

What I felt right then was the suspicion that someone had been grinding up crazy pills and stirring them into my dinner.

I saw no sense in trying to explain, or excuse, or rationalize any further, so I just gave up and let him leave. I followed him back down to his truck, both of us traipsing through the moonshadows. The fear and trepidation were disspelled by the strange mix of disappointment and relief, oh, great waves of relief coursing through my system, leaving me spent and dull-witted.

We rode back to the gas station in silence, but my mind rocketed through plans on a red-hot wire, powered by the last dregs of adrenaline in my brain. I would be back tomorrow, and I would see in the heartless blaze of day, just what was so special about that mirror.

White Lightning

T
HE AUDITORIUM WAS PACKED WITH
people I’d never met. They’d all shown up to see people that I’d never meet again. I stood on the basketball court floor, my Oxfords just as polished as the boards under my feet, looking up at them, scanning the crowd for someone I might know, hoping someone had come to see me.

I was alone in the thunderous pandemonium of that screaming standing ovation. My green wool uniform made me sweat in the harsh glare of the studio lights overhead, reflected by the gold buttons on my lapels and the medals on my chest. Hundreds of beaming faces regarded me from the stands, none of them familiar, none of them clapping for me.

I closed my eyes. Silence fell in a sequential rush from the back to the front like a late summer shower, until I was an island in an ocean of soundlessness.

When I reopened them, my breath caught in my throat.

The stands were empty, but I was no longer alone. My father stood in front of me, holding a six-shooter at arm’s length, a Colt Single Action Army .45, pointing it at my forehead.

When I didn’t move, he flipped the gun around with a flick of his wrist and offered it to me, saying, “You don’t know where you’re goin’, son, ‘til you can see where you’ve been.”

I looked down at the revolver and the pink, black-taloned hand holding it.

_______

I awoke with a start, and opened my eyes to cold iron light seeping between the hotel room curtains. I felt like I’d been twisted and wrung out by a Greek god. Every joint in my body was radiating heat and my left tricep felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to it. I tried to shake off the grainy-eyed remnants of the melatonin I’d taken to fall asleep.

I’ve never been able to sleep in hotel rooms, for some reason. I don’t know if it’s a mental block, or the highway noise, or the unfamiliarity, or what. As I lay there under my warm blanket reassembling my brain and gearing up for another day, the phone rang.

I picked it up. “Hello?”

“Morning,” said Maxwell Bayard. “I’m going to grab something to eat. You game?”

_______

I slid into the booth across from Bayard and ordered us coffee. The IHOP was packed with people. Luckily, they were all homebodies still recovering from a night’s sleep since it was half past eight and the workaday crew was already on the clock. Everything was relatively quiet except for the clinking of silverware, and the occasional snippet of a mumbled conversation. The P.A. system softly howled George Jones’s “White Lightning”.

My dad’s agent picked up a newspaper from the box outside, took the top section and I took the funnies. The drizzle that had been going on all morning had progressed to a downpour, and sheeted against the safety glass in staccato handfuls, blown by the wind.

Bayard must have caught me watching it with a worried expression on my face, because he picked up another section of the paper and showed me the day’s weather. “It’s not supposed to stay this bad all day. It should taper off around the time we go down for the burial, at least to a mild shower,” said Bayard.

George Jones punctuated it with a “Pbbsshh—
white-uh lightnin!”