Broken Branch (11 page)

What followed seemed unfair and made Trudy want to curse God, so she did. She wouldn't let fear of anything hold her back again.

What followed was a storm unlike any she'd ever seen.

They heard it before they felt it. They felt it before they saw it. By they time they put their eyes on the trees breaking like matchsticks, they were moving back toward their homes, toward the storm shelter, buoyed by the insistent wind, the loud crashing that seemed to well up from the forest like a primal roar.

Trudy lost Ben. She lost everyone and ran as fast as she could, thinking only of Mary and Rodney and getting them to the shelter.

All around her, people screamed, and she was aware of their voices flying through the air like streaks of white sound, and she knew the wind had gotten them, its fingers slipping through the trees and flicking them like ants. She felt a finger on her back too, but she moved left and it caught a tree, splitting it in half. She ran faster, and as she approached the creek, she saw a waterspout had erupted from the flow. It stood up straight like a crystal funnel. She ran past it, feeling the wind lift her, and she slipped. When she landed, her face was in the mud, her hair tangled in a loop around her neck, but she felt okay enough to keep going, or maybe she only pretended she did. Either way, she ran again, and when she made it to the clearing, she saw she'd managed to beat the storm. The clearing was calm; not a leaf in the old oak tree even moved.

She ran inside the house and shouted for Rodney and Mary.

Rodney came out from the room in back. He had tears on his face. “I thought you were dead, Momma.”

She knelt and, when he came to her, she wrapped her arms around him. “No. I'm here. Where's Mary?”

“I think she's playing with Maggie.”

“We need to get her.” She picked him up and started toward the door.

“There's a storm coming, isn't there, Momma?”

“Yes.”

“It's my fault.”

“Why would you say such a thing?”

“Because I feel the demon in me again. I feel the spell happening.” He buried his face in her neck and began to sob. “I'm sorry. I wish I could stop it, Momma. I wish I could.”

“There are some things you just have to fight even when you know you can't stop them, Rodney.” And as soon as she'd said it, the twister reached the clearing. Otto's house was first. It flew away, like it had sprouted invisible wings. One moment it was there, and the next, it jumped into the sky. She watched it as it rose higher and higher. It reached a dark blot in the sky, a churning dark cloud blot, and when it did, it exploded.

Pieces of it began to rain down over the clearing.

She ran for Ben's house to get Mary and Maggie and nearly bumped into Ben.

“The shelter is that way!” he screamed.

“Mary is in your house!”

“Go ahead. I'll bring them both!”

Trudy didn't hesitate. She believed him. Besides, he'd be able to get in more quickly than she would.

She arrived at the shelter just as Earl Talbot climbed in. She was lowering Rodney to the ladder when Franklin pushed them out of the way. He climbed in and Trudy had to catch the door to keep him from closing it.

“Get in,” she said, holding it open. Rodney climbed inside. Trudy turned to see Ben coming across the clearing holding both girls. Behind him was a black twister too wide for the scope of Trudy's eyes to take in. It would destroy everything. She was certain of it.

She tried to hold the door open, to wait for them, but the wind knocked her over, and her body fell into the dark hole with the others.

The hatch blew closed overhead and all that remained was the darkness.

Trudy became aware of a few things. First, no one was speaking. Second, there was a sound, something scratching in the dirt. It was repetitive and seemed to be growing louder. The third thing was the worst. Ben and the two girls hadn't made it. She couldn't be sure because of the darkness, but she feared many people had not made it.

The scratching sound grew more insistent and someone lit a match. Franklin's face appeared behind the flickering glow.

“What's that sound?” he said and slowly moved the match toward it.

Trudy held her breath because she knew exactly what the sound was.

First Rodney's leg came into view. It trembled against the earthen floor and the other one shook even harder.

“God help us,” Franklin said. “God help us all.” He continued to move the match along the length of Rodney's body until he reached his face and everyone saw the spittle at the corners of his mouth, the whites of his rolled eyes.

Franklin dropped the match, and Trudy wasn't sure if it was because he'd been burned by it or because of what he saw. Someone blew it out and they were in the dark again.

“He's okay,” Trudy said. “It's just a spell. It will be over soon.”

“It's not natural,” a voice said. Trudy couldn't tell if it was Earl or Franklin. It didn't matter. Their fear controlled them.

“It is natural. Don't be afraid of what you can't understand,” she said, trying to remain calm, even as her worst nightmare unfolded in front of her.

“It's not natural,” came another voice. Was that Rachel? “It's a demon. It's why the storm is upon us. Can't you see that?”

“No,” Trudy said. “It's just your fear.” But her words fell flat. Her moment was gone. She held nothing else in reserve to awe or frighten them.

Another match was lit. “Help me get him out, Earl.”

She would fight them. She'd kill them if necessary.

Trudy flung herself at the light, but strong hands held her back.

She screamed and flailed in the darkness, but whoever had her—Earl or Franklin—was too strong, and she watched as the hatch opened above them. She watched as Rodney's writhing body was lifted up and placed on the outside, where she saw that the sky still swirled like a dark current. When the hatch was shut, the hands let her go.

Trudy scrambled to the ladder and began to climb.

She knew it was suicide, but she had no reason to continue living without her children. When she reached the top, she saw that Rodney's convulsions had gotten worse, and so had the storm. The houses were being shattered by the twister, which seemed to have set itself down right in the clearing. It was in no hurry, content instead to just twist and destroy.

She picked up Rodney and struggled toward the only other place she knew—her house and the cellar James had constructed so many years ago, back before being cautious about the weather was a sign of weakness, a sign that you didn't trust God.

As she began to struggle across the clearing, sure that they wouldn't make it, she heard Mary.

She whipped around and saw Mary and Maggie huddled against a fallen oak. A boot stuck out next to the girls and she knew it belonged to Ben. She heard his voice from the other side of the trunk, cajoling the girls to run on to the shelter.

Trudy called out to them too, but her voice was lost in a blast of wind from the twister. It didn't matter. Both girls were moving now, and Trudy felt a surge of relief as she saw them reach for the shelter door together. They beat their fists on the hatch until it opened and they were able to climb inside.

She thought about going back for Ben, but their time was running out. The twister was churning up Ben's house now, and she knew it would take out hers next. She held Rodney tight as he shivered and began to sprint to the small cellar beneath her house.

They lay in the cellar for a long time, and even slept before Trudy stood to try the door. Not surprisingly, it didn't budge. She'd heard the house come apart shortly after they'd climbed down into the darkness, and she knew that something heavy had landed on the only way out. It might have been the stove, but was more likely a tree. Still, there was water pouring in through the cracks, and Trudy drank deeply before she lay back down.

It wasn't until much later—after another long sleep—that she realized part of the wooden door above them was broken. It was a fist-sized hole, not big enough to matter much. It did allow a little light through, enough that Trudy knew it was morning.

She looked at Rodney, who still slept across from her. Somehow they'd survived. When they got out, they'd find Mary and maybe Maggie too. Then they'd leave this place forever. Rodney wasn't right. Not just the spells. She knew he had his father in him, a fear that might drive him to meanness, to hate even, but she thought she could love it out of him, or at least teach him how to keep it at bay.

When he woke, she started by describing the swamp. Even though she'd only just glimpsed it, she'd felt it nestle deep within her, and somehow it became more real than anything else she'd ever experienced.

He listened, but didn't say much.

She told it to him again, hoping it would be like a balm to him, a place where he could find God, and know that vengeance was an idea of man's and not God's.

But there was the gator.

She closed her eyes and tried to go there. She tried to see the gator again. The last time, it had been coming toward her, but when she found the swamp in her mind's eye, it was gone, the swamp water still, the sky a peaceful dusk just before a blazing night of stars.

She decided the gator was like the demon she'd felt when she killed James. Just a name for what we do to each other.

Later as her eyes adjusted to the half-light, she watched Rodney, asleep again in the corner of the cellar. She loved him so much, yet she felt no peace when she looked at him. She was afraid for him, she realized. Deeply afraid.

Her eyes traveled around the cellar until they fell on an old wooden crate. Her old notebooks from years ago were inside. She struggled to her feet, surprised and a little worried by how weak she felt. She made it to the crate and dug inside, pleased to find one of the notebooks with empty pages in the back. In the very bottom of the crate, beneath a dozen or so notebooks, was her old fountain pen. She pulled it out, shaking it hard, licking the tip, and testing it on a blank page. It blotted and then flowed smoothly.

She went back to the cellar hatch and drank some more of the water trickling from the hatch before sitting down and beginning to write.

She wrote until she couldn't keep her eyes open. Rodney didn't make a sound.

The next time she woke, it was because her stomach rolled over and she felt a burning acid coming up her throat. She let it out in the corner and then immediately felt another bout coming.

“Are you okay, Momma?” Rodney said.

She nodded, but she was lying. “Don't drink the water,” she said. “No matter how—” But she couldn't finish the thought because she was vomiting again. All at once, it seemed as if she couldn't do anything else.

Later, when she couldn't tell if she was in the cellar or the swamp or maybe she was back in the storm shelter, she heard Rodney's voice.

He spoke of the attacks and the storms. He spoke of God's deep rage at him, at people in general, the way he felt like God wanted him to cleanse the earth. He told her he was sorry that she was dying because he didn't know what he'd do without her.

He asked her where his father was.

“Gone away,” she said in her delirium. “He never loved you none, but I did, Rodney. I swear I always loved you. I love you so much I want you to see the swamp. It's a beautiful place.”

“What happened to Otto?”

“He left too.”

Rodney seemed to take this in. “Is God real?”

But Trudy felt too weak to answer. Or maybe, the truth was, she didn't know the answer. Either way, she felt herself slipping. She felt herself almost there, but not quite, as if her consciousness had been split into two equal parts and she could still hear her son talk, but she could see the swamp and the little cabin with the light burning inside.

“I'm angry, Momma,” he said. “I'm so angry. Hold me, and make me feel better.”

But she couldn't. All she could manage was to push the journal that lay beside her in his direction.
Maybe that'll be enough to make a difference,
she thought. She knew she should have said something, done something, but that time had passed. She'd done the best she could and she knew that in many ways it wasn't enough, that she was leaving her children to a cruel world where most people either ignored the thing greater than them or twisted it into a hard mess of wire and lies good for strangling and holding but not much else.

But she'd found her way to the other side. She could only hope that Rodney would find his.

She was approaching the cabin now, her hand outstretched to the door. She touched it and she stopped being able to think of anything at all, as her mind stretched and finally broke like a tree in the most magnificent wind.

Read on for a special excerpt from the next title by John Mantooth

THE YEAR OF THE STORM

Available June 2013 from Berkley!

DANNY

A
storm is a kind of magic.

I've lived through a lot of them, but none of them were like the ones I experienced when I was fourteen.

Watch the news in the spring. You'll see footage of flooding and devastation and broken homes scattered like wood chips from an almighty Skilsaw, any previous illusion of constancy the houses held shattered in short seconds of earsplitting fury. As I grow older, I watch these scenes on the nightly news a little differently. Of course I still grieve for the people whose homes and lives have been uprooted by the weather, but I also study the pictures and video a little more closely. I look for the way things have been altered, the way one world is gone and another moves in to take its place, and if this isn't a kind of terrible magic, then I don't know what is. After the news, when the lights are off and I lie atop the covers, not even pretending that sleep might eventually transport me away from these nagging thoughts, I marvel at the way scientists can deconstruct a thing, pulling it apart fiber by fiber until the whole of it is unwound and every piece labeled and comprehended. I tell myself that if the right scientist could get hold of my life, if that scientist could put the events of my fourteenth year under a microscope, he'd be able to explain them away. But then the magic would be gone, and
that
would keep me up at night too.

Now, I'm almost thirty, and I make weekly visits to a therapist who insists I call him Dwight instead of Dr. Reynolds. He slaps me on the back at the beginning of every session and hugs me at the end, just before letting his hand linger until I stuff a check in it. Oh, he's not a bad guy, and he seems genuinely fascinated by my story. He likes to explain everything in psychological terms and ask a lot of leading questions. Sometimes I think he's even on to something when he talks about “subconscious mythmaking” and “the profundity of illusion.” But other times—and these are the nights I sleep best—I dismiss his words as easily as the straight-line winds dismiss trees, snapping them like brittle sticks. When I think like this, I remember it all, and if there are pieces of the puzzle that I can't work into place, I ignore them and focus on the pieces that do fit. And these pieces are the people—Pike and Seth and Cliff and even my little sister, Anna. Most of all, I focus on the great things that the brain is capable of and how like a storm it can be, wild and ravaging, erasing landscapes and building new ones in the wink of a eye.

I was fourteen the first time I came in contact with a real storm. It cut a line right down the center of my life, pulling my sister and mother away from me and cleanly dividing that year into a before and after so radically different that I've come to think of fourteen as not only the longest year of my life, but also the most important because it was the last year of childhood and the first year of the rest of my life, a life that would be forever marked as different in subtle and insidious ways from the people around me.

Fourteen was the year my mother and sister disappeared, the year I lost my mind. The year I learned secrets that will stay with me until I am no longer able to think of them.

And fourteen, most of all, was the year of the storm.

•   •   •

D
espite dealing with the presumed deaths of my mother and sister, at fourteen I still believed that magic and God were the same thing, or if they weren't, that they were wound so tightly together and threaded through the spaces of our lives as to become a length of double-braided rope whose ends had not yet begun to fray.

My father was forty-one when I was fourteen, and like me, he was knocked back by the storm. But unlike me, his world then was a rigid place. Neither magic nor God existed for him except in books and memories. Storms were storms, and any transformation that came from them was incidental, swept away in a flood of adult problems.

Before my mother and sister vanished, we weren't a perfect family, but we were complete, a strong knot of individual strings, each wrapped over the other. If one string pulled too tight while another string fought to breathe more, how was that different from any other family? The point was that we were a knot, and then we came unwound. At fourteen, I was foolish enough to think I could tie the knot back, and we'd go on like always.

After it happened, Dad felt every kind of emotion—rage, hate, resentment, despair. But mostly, I think he was jealous. Jealous of a world that took his happiness, that swallowed it without leaving a scrap, and then went back to the same quiet, sleeping place it had always been.

But ten months into my fourteenth year, the world shifted in its slumber.

•   •   •

M
idnight, and a man I had never seen before stood outside our front door, a cigarette nub burning between his knuckles, his long white hair wild in the wind. Beside him on our front stoop was an oxygen tank he'd lugged up the steps. I watched from my bed, leaning over to peer out my upstairs window as he flicked his cigarette to the ground and stepped on it, extinguishing it against the concrete. He faced our front door, lifted a hand to knock, but faltered. Instead, he turned back to his oxygen tank, taking up the clear tubing and placing it inside his nostrils. He was still. I looked out over the yard and saw the immense oak trees swaying in the wind, saw the highway—empty and lonesome—and beyond that the great silver fields of cotton, rippling in the moonlight. On the horizon, a massive thunderhead gathered and advanced steadily toward the house.

I should have been asleep. Sleep came in fits those days, a dream of my mother's face always a few breaths away. Across the hall, Dad was snoring, and I wondered if he still dreamed about them too.

Shrugging off the covers, I stood and made my way down the steps, the same ones my sister, Anna, used to count each time she went up or down. There were twelve. Dad and I both knew that the same way we knew Anna's closet was her sanctuary from the world, the same way we knew that when a bad storm came, bad like the one that was rolling in now, Anna had no sanctuary except within herself. She was autistic and only four years old when she disappeared. She'd be five now, and though her doctors said it wasn't possible, I still wondered if she had gotten any better. It was a foolish hope, but I was fourteen and believed things that no rational person should. Things like my mother and sister were still alive.

Downstairs, I waited on the other side of the door. Would he knock? Or did he mean to simply stand outside our home, a strange presence that touched our lives without invading them? Maybe he stood outside every night while we slept. Maybe he was one of the moonshiners Dad had told me about, who lived beyond the margins of society, setting up stills in the deepest parts of the woods and living hand to mouth on what they could catch with a fishing pole or shoot with a rifle. Or he might have come from some faraway place, riding the rails like a lost hobo arriving at our house by pure chance or by some more sinister motivation. Or maybe he was the man responsible for taking those two girls back in the sixties, whose sad spirits seemed to linger and haunt these woods like fireflies in the darkest hollows of the night. Maybe he was the man who took Mom and Anna too, and now he'd come back for the rest of us. And maybe, just maybe, I'd go with him willingly.

Dropping to my knees, I moved across the den until I was under the front windows. Carefully, I lifted my head, pushing aside the curtains so that I could see out one of the lower panes. He was still standing there, illuminated by the moon, his hair glowing vivid white. Somewhere behind him, across the highway, lightning struck the cotton fields, followed by a sharp crack of thunder. The man did not jump or start or even seem to notice. He only stood at our door, filling his lungs with oxygen.

I let the curtain fall back in place, and I lay down on the floor. I'd been hearing the stories about these woods since I was a kid. Most of them were the generic campfire variety, the same urban legends reshuffled and personalized for different times, different settings, but one story was more than that. One story had the ring of authenticity. It was unique to these woods, and unlike the tales of hook hands and insane asylum escapees, it never seemed to fade away. Two girls, Tina and Rachel, lost in the woods behind our house. I grew up knowing their names just like I knew anything else. They were a part of the landscape, a part of the place where I lived. It didn't matter if I'd never seen them or heard them speak or even gotten the whole story straight about their disappearances. I felt their presences intimately, and their loss settled on the woods like a heavy fog. When I walked through the darkest parts behind my house near dusk, sometimes I thought I saw them in the gloom, floating, transparent, made from spiders' webs and dying streaks of light mingled with shadow. Their sad visages slithering round tree trunks and drifting past blooming moonvines. I shuddered, thinking that the man responsible for these disappearances might be standing in my front yard.

I'm not sure how long I lay there before I decided to check again, but when I looked up the second time, rain was hitting the roof in torrents, and the man was gone.

•   •   •

T
he next morning, I woke, back in my bed. I'd fallen asleep beside the window, but I vaguely remembered Dad picking me up in the dark hours of the morning and carrying me upstairs. It was still raining and when I fell into my own bed, in the throes of half sleep, I felt a simple, forgetful peace. It was the kind I used to feel each time my head hit the pillow and Mom leaned over me, saying the prayers I could not yet articulate, the same prayers I later repeated to myself, trying to work them out like jigsaw puzzles.

Summer meant I could sleep all day if I wanted, but I got up anyway, determined not to give in to the stifling depression that hung around our house as heavy and dank as the Alabama heat.

My best friend then was a kid named Cliff, who had a lazy eye and the biggest collection of Marvel comics I had ever seen. Together, we spent our summers chasing phantoms through the woods, imagining ourselves as Iron Man and Captain America, and lately, fantasizing about girls, specifically Rhonda Donovan and Betty Dozier. The double Ds. That was what we called them, and sometimes, in our more nerdy moments, D and D.

Usually, getting up on a summer morning meant going to Cliff's house. There were a million things to do—a trip into town to the comic book store, a day watching movies in his home theater, a jaunt into the deep woods as imaginary superheroes, a clandestine journey out to the honky-tonk on County Road Seven where we'd heard the women got drunk and danced topless.

But that morning was different. Dad came into my room as I was pulling myself from the bed.

“I found you in the den last night,” he said.

“I know.”

“Wonder why.”

Dad did this sort of thing, this almost talking to himself that only served to make me feel like he really didn't want to talk to me at all. Which was true. He didn't want to talk to me. He hadn't wanted to talk to me since Mom and Anna disappeared. He wasn't mean about it. In fact, Dad was about as gentle with me as he'd ever been, but the hardness grew inside him, in his eyes that sometimes slipped out of focus, and in his lips that were always too stiff to smile.

“The storm got to me. That's all.”

He sat down on my bed.

“The sheriff called today,” he said to the floor.

“And?”

He shook his head. “It's been nine months. You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. How could I not know that? “What did he say?”

Dad shook his head and studied the floor.

“What did he say?” I asked again.

“Same old bullshit. The woods are a dead end. The dogs have canvassed every part of it.” He shook his head again, this time with more determination. “Dead ends. That's all we have. Damn dead ends. I told the sheriff—”

He stopped suddenly and looked at me, as if remembering who he was talking to.
Yeah, Dad, it's me. Remember not to tell Danny anything relevant because he's too young to understand.
It was infuriating.

“What?” I said. “What did you tell the sheriff?”

“Nothing important. He's going to do some more interviews with people at her work, extended family, that sort of thing. We've heard it all before.”

“That's good news, though. Right?”

Dad looked up, his eyes skimming past my face, but not focusing until they settled on my closet where the clothes I was quickly outgrowing hung like ghosts, pieces of the past that Mom and Anna had once touched.

“Good news?” he said, almost to himself.

“Yeah, I mean, well, at least we still have some hope.”

He looked at me then, and I saw that he hadn't been taking his pills. Looking back, I can't say I blame him much. The ones Dwight prescribed for me didn't work. Sure, they made sleep easier to come by, but my real issues were too deep for any medicine to touch.

The proof Dad had given up was in his face, his eyes, the way he hadn't shaved today or yesterday. Was he even going to work today? I wondered.

He shook his head. “Hope. That's funny.” He looked at me for a second, expectant, as if daring me to argue with him. When I said nothing, he stood up, swinging his arms together, letting his fist connect with his palm, a gesture he used to do all the time, a gesture that seemed strangely devoid of the happy-go-lucky spirit it was meant to suggest.

“Danny,” he said, speaking my name earnestly like saying it mattered somehow. “Why don't you and me do something fun today? Just the two of us?”

“What about work?” I said.

He shook his head, dismissing it. “I'll call in. I haven't missed a day in the last five months. They won't blink. Are you with me?”

“Sure. Yeah. Sounds good.” I tried to sound bright, happy, but it came out shrill, needlessly high-pitched and awkward. Dad pretended not to notice. It was the one thing we had gotten good at over the last nine months: pretending.