Arcane II (5 page)

They come back in. The doctor kneels in front of me. The cop stands at the door. I have the sense the cop’s skeptical, but I can’t read him with his mask still on.

“Where were we? Oh yes, the ritual on the beach. It was a summoning, yes?”

“Yes, Doctor,” I say.

“And the children, they were there for sacrifice, yes?”

“I think so, Doc. I mean, Doctor. They were there for the sea. That’s what I was told. They were there for the sea or they belong to the sea. Something like that. Bled to the sea...”

“Son of a bitch,” the cop says.

The doctor stands up. “Careful. I’ve established this link. You don’t want to ruin it. Not till we know precisely what they were summoning and if he has an idea where the ringleaders are hiding.”

The cop mutters something I can’t hear and leaves.

My vision isn’t getting any better. Pretty sure the swelling on my eye’s grown immense. My sinuses ache. With every rough breath I take in that coppery blood smell.

“What did he show you?” I ask the doc.

“Careful,” you say. “They might overhear you.” I can tell that you’re speaking to us both.

The two other men return to the room.

The professor speaks first. “Have you asked him about the symbol?”

“We were about to get to that. Have you brought your rendering of it?”

The professor nods, and kneels down to show me something. “What does the symbol mean?” he asks, holding a sheet of paper with a crude rendition of your sigil on it.

“Can you put the paper in better light? I can’t see too well. I think some asshole punched me in the eye.”

“You still have another eye to hit, shitbird,” the cop tries to push to the forward of the group.

“Can you leave us a moment?” the professor says to the cop.

I can hear the cop muttering from the other room. The professor holds a flashlight in front of the sheet.

“That’s sort of like the symbol I saw at the church,” I say. “I could show you what it’s supposed to look like. If you freed my hands, gave me a pen and something write on.”

“I can’t do that,” the professor says.

“Go on. It’ll be okay,” the doc says. “He’s unarmed, been beaten, and as I’ve ascertained under hypnosis, he doesn’t know much about what the group was really up to.”

The professor pulls a utility knife off of his belt. I feel the binding on my wrists snap. Blood flow gradually returns to my hands. I flex them both to help speed the process.

He hands me the drawing and the back of a notepad to write against. I take care to do it right, the way you showed me, drawing the last circle counterclockwise, and focusing my mind’s eye on your presence. “There, you were missing a circle,” I say, handing the pad back to him.

“And what does this symbolize?” he asks.

“It symbolizes me,” you say.

“It symbolizes him,” the doctor and I say together.

“Shit,” the last coherent word I hear the professor say before he falls to the tile, grasping the sides of his mask and cackling. Still lying on the floor, he pulls his mask off. He takes his knife back off his belt. His hands shake, like some small part of him still resists your will, but he drags the blade across his fingers anyway. He puts his fingers to the tile, drawing your sigil on the floor with his blood. Then the wall. When he runs out of blood he returns the knife to his skin, this time on his palm of his left hand. He plays with the pool of blood in his palm with the fingers from his right hand like a painter putting a brush to a palette, and laughing the whole time. He starts to draw your symbol again, on the wall behind me, when the door flies open.

The cop. “What the hell is going on in here?” he yells.

I hear the professor laughing behind me. “He is with me now. You cannot know the joy. You cannot understand the power.”

“Harry,” the cop says, pulling his sidearm, “put down the knife.”

The doc lunges at the cop. The cop fires two shots into the shrink, and spins back to put two into the professor before he can stick him with that knife.

I watch in horror. Like it’s all in slow motion, but I can’t move to react even though my hands are now free.

The cop pulls his mask off with his free hand. “No need in keeping my identity a secret now. You ain’t going nowhere to identify me.” He trains the gun towards my forehead.

“Don’t you still want to know where the others are? Or what the ceremony was meant to do?”

“No. I know all I need to, shitbird. You either don’t know shit, in which case I should pop you now. Or you do know shit, but we took out your people and you needed more. Figured you’d recruit my people, in which case, I should pop you now.”

I close my eyes, and pray to you once more.

A single gunshot, louder than the cop’s gun. I hear a body hit the floor.

“You can open you eyes now,” I hear you and the journalist say together.

The cop’s sprawled on the floor, blood and brains oozing from his head.

The journalist takes her hand off her shotgun and extends it to help me up. Your presence is there, the glint in her eye. “You ready?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s go. We’ll meet up with the others at the beach. He awaits his sacrifice.”

Tree Hugger

Gef Fox

The tree was a monster. A gigantic monument on the edge of a modest forest. But if anyone had any inclination that Derrick Polk was trying to save the giant northern red oak from being cut down because he was in tune with nature, they didn’t know him very well. He had one reason for sticking his neck out for an overgrown stack of lumber: Pamela Patterson.

The way Derrick figured, milking his sports injury would only last so long before the novelty wore off with the girls and they lost interest. He’d gotten as much sympathy and as many phone numbers as he was going to get thanks to his left knee. The oohs and aahs had consoled him when he lost his spot as star forward with the Middleton High School hockey team, but it was late April now, and his senior year was winding down. He felt he needed to go out as the scene-stealer one more time.

“What do you even see in Pam Patchouli anyway?” Derrick’s best friend TJ asked. “I mean, besides the rack.”

“Don’t call her that,” Derrick said. He looked over at TJ and shrugged. “I dunno, man. We just... hit it off, you know? We have good chemistry.”

“Who gives a fuck about chemistry? Physics is the only thing that matters when it comes to chicks—specifically friction.” TJ proceeded with one of his trademark hand gestures.

“That reminds me, how’s your mom doing?” Derrick asked, straight-faced, though a devilish smile cracked across his face when TJ’s smile vanished.

“Do you
want
my help getting up there? ’Cause I can leave if you want.”

“Sorry, sorry. Alright, here I go.”

They stood at the base of the enormous red oak with their heads craned upward. The sun hadn’t quite broken over the tree tops yet, so the surrounding forest shrouded them under its great shadow, though the shadow cast out by the oak over the marsh ahead of them was monstrous. The tree had to be a hundred feet tall, easy, dwarfing every tree for miles around.

It was situated about a half-mile behind Derrick’s house, at the end of a small brook that bled into a marsh. The land on which it stood didn’t belong to his family, though. It belonged to their elderly neighbor, Roscoe Finch, a retired cop who owned hundreds of acres around the county. The old fart was always barking at people to stay off his property, only letting the woodcutters access on occasion when they purchased timber rights.

The Red Giant, as Derrick and TJ had come to call it during the construction of the loft, was slated to be cut down tomorrow, which was precisely the reason why Derrick was about to perch himself in that loft about twenty-five feet up. He intended to hold a tree-sitting protest in order to save it—well, for as long as it would take to impress Pam, anyway.

Being Friday, he figured he could seal the deal by Monday, maybe sooner if that Finch called his cop buddies to come pull him down. That would be even sweeter if he could get hauled away in handcuffs with Pam watching.

Derrick and TJ propped a ladder against the tree, the top of which rested close to the lowest lying branches. They’d snuck the ladder and the rest of the supplies back through the woods plenty of times over the last couple of days, so Derrick had become fairly comfortable with the climbing aspect of things.

“How’s the knee?” TJ asked as he held the ladder for Derrick.

“Fine. But that rope ladder will take some getting used to.”

Since the aluminum ladder wouldn’t be around for Derrick during his sit-in, they’d taken a rope ladder from a playground and nailed it to the edge of the loft, so he could sneak down for a bathroom break or whatever, rather than use some unsanitary method up in the tree. Being a half-mile from the nearest house, he didn’t expect an audience. Getting word out in town was TJ’s job.

He stepped carefully on each rung of the ladder, but it still rattled under his weight. If Roscoe found out about Derrick’s stunt before everyone else, then there would be no telling the hell he’d catch. At the top of the ladder, he gingerly hoisted himself onto the lowest branch and grabbed onto one of the support lines they’d rigged underneath the loft on the next branch up. It was basically a glorified collection of planks, with no walls or roof.

“You alright?”

Derrick looked down and saw his friend staring back up at him, and for a moment a feeling of vertigo set in. Jesus, this was no place to fall from.

“Yeah, I’m good.”

“Good luck, man. I hope she’s worth it.”

TJ took down the ladder, gave a final salute to Derrick, and skulked his way back towards Derrick’s place before continuing to school. Somewhere along the way, he would call the paper and get the word out on Derrick’s stunt, since they couldn’t get so much as a single bar on their phones around the Red Giant.

Derrick removed his backpack and settled down atop the platform, leaning his back against the stem of the oak, and admired his surroundings. From where he sat, he had a view over the marsh and the small brook that snaked its way through the long grass and cat-o’-nine-tails. It was kind of a shame he’d never ventured into the woods more often as a kid; he would have loved to build a tree house in the Red Giant. Better late than never, he thought.

The mosquitoes weren’t much of a nuisance, thankfully, but the warm air brought them out of hiding. After a few minutes, he rummaged through his backpack for a water bottle and an apple. Besides his backpack, he had a small duffel bag with his provisions snuck up the afternoon before. He knew he had cut it close by starting his sit-in twenty-four hours before the tree was set to be cut down, but he really didn’t see the point in doing it any longer than necessary.

He relaxed, eating his snack, and noticed something—or rather, the absence of something. The woods were quiet in a way he hadn’t expected. No birds, no squirrels, no sounds of life beyond his own breathing and the mosquitoes lazily looking for places to land on his skin. He listened, held his breath, and waited. The place was just far enough outside of town that he could remember seeing deer in his backyard every once in a while, so the idea that there was no wildlife within earshot of him seemed damned odd.

CRACK.

The sound came from below, a singular sound like a gunshot from directly underneath him. Derrick flinched. The apple fell from his hand and bounced off the edge of the platform, disappearing over the side. He scrambled across and looked down to see it hit the mossy earth and rest against one of the red oak’s roots.

He looked about at the ground below, but saw nothing moving to indicate what caused the noise. As he marveled at how high he was, he noticed the root next to the fallen apple move. He first passed it off as a trick of the daylight peaking through the thick of the neighboring trees, then he saw it very clearly move, like a boa constrictor winding methodically through the grass.

“No way.” It had been almost three weeks since the last time he’d smoked up, and even then only a few tokes to take the edge off.

The tree swayed, and he was thrown off balance, shoulder-first into a wall of rough bark. He realized he wasn’t high, but he
was
screaming.

Derrick threw himself face down on the platform and gripped its edges. The tree rocked and twisted for a few seconds or so, and as quickly as it had started, it stopped. Derrick lay flat, eyes bugged out, and drew in quick, hoarse breaths, unsure of what the hell just happened. Reasonably sure the tree wasn’t about to take off at a run, he pulled his face up to the edge of the platform and looked down. The tree was motionless, including the roots, but there was something off. He spun around on his belly and peered over the opposite edge and looked down. There, at the base of tree, he saw a small slash of black soil as wide as the tree itself—like the thing had moved away from the marsh.

Did it crawl?
he thought.
Tree don’t crawl, you idiot. Had to be an earthquake or something.

He stayed still and waited for one minute, then two. Nothing happened. He spun round on his belly again, grabbed his backpack and snatched his cell phone from the side pocket. No power.

As he stared at his phone, trying to summon it to life and a bar to appear through sheer will alone, he heard a
plunk
atop the boards next to him. He looked and his breath hitched when he saw his apple, slightly bruised and muddied from its fall and whatever journey it had taken to make it back up, jostling to a rest next to his right leg.

“The hell with this.”

In seconds he had the rope ladder unraveling its way down. It stopped a good six feet up from the ground, but that wouldn’t be a problem for him. He was three rungs down, cell phone in his back pocket and all too ready to abandon everything else, when a voice froze him.

“Hey, Derrick!” TJ hollered from below.

Derrick looked down to see his friend emerge from the woods in a hurry.