A Grave Tree (30 page)

Caleb was undeterred, as usual. “Maybe it’s a practice thing and you’ll get better at it each time you do it. I could sense you there on the river. I felt like I could almost see you. We have to give it a try. I have no idea how we’re going to get out of here otherwise. Come on, Mark.”

Mark let himself be guided into the center of the pentagram, where he felt faint with stress. The energy that Caleb had talked about was there, pulsing beneath the ground, but he could feel it dissipating, like the slow ebb of a rechargeable battery left too long. What if there was only enough energy to get his head
to
the parallel universe, but not back? The prospect of being both headless and bodiless was too awful to consider.

“Kotelny, Russia is the next largest island,” he said to Caleb. “It was named after a copper kettle. Nobody knows how the kettle got there.”

Would that be the case with his head?

Caleb raised an eyebrow. “That’s great, Mark. Just focus on whatever you need to focus on to send your head somewhere. I’ll be right here holding on to your arm in case I need to pull you back.”

“The others…” Mark wondered if he should fill in names, but he had too much difficulty with that. “Helped, by the river. They sent me energy, I think.”

Caleb nodded. His face and hair were chalky from the dust that had fallen from the ceiling. If Mark knew Caleb better, and could interpret expressions better, he’d almost say that Caleb was afraid.

“Okay. I don’t really know what I’m doing, but I’ll do my best.”

Mark felt the warmth of Caleb’s hand on his arm. Normally this kind of touch would freak him out, but he tried to accept it. He focused on clearing his head and bringing up on the image of Mr. Sinclair and Ms. Beckham that he’d seen in the pentagram the previous day. He imagined himself with them, talking to them, and then he started to collect the energy from the air as he had before. He could feel Sandy’s pull on the energy in the next room, and at first he was afraid there might not be enough for him, but bit by bit he was able to tear some away. It was easier this time, and Mark felt as though he was knitting together a map of energy, a web of interconnecting energy lines that he could at least somewhat bend to his will. He felt a slight faltering glow of energy coming from Caleb, and added it to his own. It was small compared to what Mark generated, and he experienced a tiny gleam of satisfaction. He could do something better than Caleb.

Then his head seemed to be in a long tunnel of nowhere, and he stumbled a little, disoriented. Did his feet actually stumble, he wondered, or did it just feel like his head stumbled? Then his head was in a forest near a river with trees much like the forest outside the dam, except smaller. The river flowed by a few meters away, its waters foaming and swirling. On the ground beneath him was a pentagram formed out of sticks, the strange symbols carved into the dirt. Nestled in the woods by the river was a small cabin with a thin stream of smoke emerging from the chimney.

He edged his way over to the cabin (or rather directed his head over that way, because he supposed a head could not edge). Could he be killed in this new location? Was his head immune from death because it was still attached to his body elsewhere?

He pushed his head through the front door of the cabin. Better to go in the front door, he decided. (If he went through a wall he might end up in a bathroom or a bedroom and catch someone in a state of undress and that would be very uncomfortable. There were lots of subtleties to this head-flying thing.)

The cabin was spare but tidy. An old woman sat on a faded flowered couch, her back bent, her age-spotted face as lined as a relief map in a mountainous area. She lifted her head as he approached, as if she sensed his presence, and her sunken blue eyes ignited faintly.

It was his mother. The shock almost sent Mark reeling back to the dam, back to the room where Caleb stood holding his arm. He could even feel the outline of Caleb’s fingers pressed against his skin. But he refocused and remained where he was. How had she gotten so old? What was she doing here? Tears sprang to his eyes, and a sudden jolt shot through him. What if this was not actually his mother, but rather a parallel universe version of her?

A stack of creamy parchment paper with a pot of ink and an old fountain pen lay before her. She seemed to be searching the air, looking for him, and he drew a bit closer even though he was afraid. Then, quicker than he thought an old lady would be capable of moving, she snatched up the pen, removed the cork from the inkpot, and started to draw.

Mark watched, transfixed. He should be trying to speak, to ask how to get out of the circular room, but his lips didn’t seem capable of movement or sound.

His mother had drawn a tombstone with a mound of dirt in front of it. Mark recoiled. What was she saying? A panic swept over him. Was he going to die? Was that his grave? She added a bunch of leaves around the grave. Was that to say he was dead in the autumn? Then she drew a big tree with long branches, a big slash across the page (like a minus symbol), and a man with an anchor tattoo on his arm and a big scrubby beard. A pirate? There were pirates here?

Already he felt his strength and the energy that held him here fading. He hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours, he hadn’t eaten properly, and he hadn’t had any time alone at his desk rejuvenating. She held up the piece of parchment and jabbed her pen urgently at it. Mark shook his head, bile roiling in his stomach.

His mother had already bent her head over another piece of paper. On this one she scratched a circle and then four leaves—oval leaves, just like the leaves of a Madrona—their tips meeting in the middle of the circle and their ends sticking out of the circle, like ears. But Mark’s strength was fading. The last thing he saw was his mother holding up a drawing of a flower, and then he was back in the circular room, standing in the beam of Caleb’s flashlight, breathing heavily.

He stumbled away from the center of the pentagram, wanting to be away from the small pulse of energy that still emanated from it.

“What? What did you see?” Caleb said.

“My mother,” Mark replied.

*****

“I think he’s getting closer,” Abbey murmured. She didn’t think. She
knew
. She’d been carefully measuring Russell’s distance from them. When they first spotted him, he had been at least thirty trees away. Now he was averaging eighteen trees, and sometimes came as close as fifteen trees. She wondered who would be more appetizing, her or Sylvain. Probably her, she concluded. Sylvain was all bone.

“He might just be giving us an escort. Protecting us,” Sylvain said.

Abbey looked back into the pale blue eyes of the beast and saw the same wildness that had always unnerved her a bit about Russell.

Not prey, not prey, not prey,
she repeated in her mind. But somehow the word that stuck and glowed electric in her brain was
prey. Prey, prey, prey
. Her hands tingled with fear. They’d covered a fair bit of ground in the last half hour, but the dam was still so far away.

“Try to communicate with him,” Sylvain said. “From a distance. See if you can make any contact. Just whatever you do, don’t agitate him.”

Abbey made a face at Sylvain. Now she would have prey
and
agitate running on a single track in her brain.

She didn’t believe in witchcraft. Not one bit. It didn’t make any scientific sense. Entanglement wasn’t possible on a macro level, nor was it possible for people to shift energy around, or communicate with animals in any form other than the pedestrian ways she communicated with Farley: “no”, “good dog,” and “come” (and even that was sketchy at best). She did have to admit that the screens she and Sylvain had made had felt fairly real, and on a deeper hypothetical level she knew it was all possible… It was just so very unlikely. If it
was
possible, wouldn’t it have been proven long ago? Her mind rejected all of it—although she did seem to be very effectively throwing the word “prey” at Russell the panther.

If it even was Russell. Maybe it was just a panther. Maybe this was all a bad dream and she had actually gone psychotic and was locked in the psych ward at Coventry General Hospital.

What would she even say to Russell the panther anyway?
Hey, Russell, it’s Abbey, your friend. Don’t eat us. Or if you are going to eat someone, eat Sylvain. He’s older than me and doesn’t hope to invent cool things in the future. I’ll go out on a date with you if you want, provided you turn back into Russell the human, of course.
Or perhaps she should just say,
Good kitty. Nice kitty.
It all seemed too ludicrous.

She jerked her head back to check on the panther.

Seven trees away.

*****

His mother. She was in the parallel universe. She was old, older than Mark had ever imagined she would be.

“What did she say? Were you able to talk to her? Were my parents there?” Caleb hit him with question after question.

Mark shook his head. It seemed the only answer. She hadn’t told him anything, really. Just more hand-drawn riddles that he didn’t understand. And he hadn’t been able to talk to her, and Caleb’s parents hadn’t been there. Did his mother live alone in the little cabin in the parallel universe?

The whole dam seemed to be vibrating, and a thicker layer of dust filled the room.

“I went out to check the antechamber,” Caleb said. “Sandy’s gone, but the spillways are open. I have no idea how she got out. I nearly flooded the room and killed myself just opening the door a crack. There’s no way we can go out that way, and I’m not sure how much longer this structure is going to hold. I think Sandy might have damaged it, and it hasn’t been maintained for years and years. We have to get out of here.”

Mark cast around the room for anything that he could do that would be helpful. Digby skittered about making chittering noises. Mark wondered why the rat stayed. Perhaps the other parts of the dam had already caved in or were flooded. Perhaps they were really and truly trapped. His eyes fell on Ms. Beckham’s handbag.

The flower. His mother had drawn the flower.

“The bag,” he managed to croak. “My mother said to look in the bag.”

Caleb was on the handbag in seconds and lifted the bottom to expel the contents. They tumbled onto the floor with the flash and clank of metal. Mark enumerated the items quickly. A set of old-fashioned keys, an odd-looking gun (which seemed out of character for Ms. Beckham), a black box in the shape of a cube (just a little bit bigger than a Rubik’s Cube, although Mark doubted that was what was in the box), some frightening-looking instruments (which had a vague resemblance to old dental tools), and the cable with metal bits on the end that Mark had stuffed into the bag earlier.

Caleb snatched up the Y-shaped cable. “It looks like a booster cable,” he said. “Why would my mother be carrying a booster cable?” He stared at the cable, then at the pentagram. “Unless… if we can channel energy, maybe the cable can boost our energy somehow.”

Caleb swung his head to examine Mark in a way that he didn’t like.

Mark thought of the man strapped to the platforms with the cable. He started to back away. “No,” he said. “No way.”

“Maybe we could boost the signal enough to transport ourselves to the parallel universe.”

Mark just shook his head, emphatically, definitively.

Undeterred, Caleb picked up the gun and turned it over in his hands. “Weird. It looks metal, but it’s too light to be a firearm. There’s a switch here. It says EM and AM.” He pointed it at the wall, and before Mark could scream, he pulled the trigger. Nothing appeared to come from the gun, but a small explosion lit up the side of the room where Caleb had fired.

Startled, Digby leapt off Mark’s shoulder and scooted under one of the stones. Caleb cocked his head, flipped the switch on the gun, and fired again. This time nothing happened, which caused Caleb to scowl and give his angry rooster look. He stuffed the gun in his pocket and walked over to where the rat had disappeared, feeling under the rock with his fingers.

“There’s an opening. I can feel a draft. There has to be another room or a passageway. Maybe there’s a secret door.”

Or it’s just a crack
, Mark thought dismally. He sat down, withdrew his satchel from his backpack, and started sketching out the drawings that his mother had done for him. Caleb retrieved the old-fashioned keys from floor and started trying to fit each of them into every conceivable nook and cranny in the wall above the spot where Digby had disappeared.

Having apparently had no luck, Caleb stowed the keys in his pocket and returned his attention to the booster cable, which he laid out on the floor, extending all three lengths of the insulated wire. It was very long. Digby popped back into the room carrying something small and round. He delivered it to Caleb, who flipped it over and over in his hands.

“It’s the piece that holds your snorkel to your mask,” he said. “I wonder if that’s how people get in and out of here when the reservoir is full, and the outlet valves and spillways are open. With scuba gear.”

Mark felt his heart accelerate uncomfortably. Even the prospect of the parallel universe seemed more inviting and less dangerous than scuba diving.

Caleb turned one of the ends of the jumper cable over in his hands, then thrust it in Mark’s direction. “This one looks like a plug, like we need to put it into something.”

Mark forced himself to examine the end of the cable. It was a circle, and within it, four leaves met in the middle, forming little ears that jutted out of the circle. It was just like the one his mother had drawn.

Of course it was.

With a sigh of resignation, he held up the paper on which he had just sketched the very same symbol. He wondered what cascade of dangerous actions he was instigating.