The Man in the Tree

THE MAN IN THE TREE

Larry put the truck in gear and drove around the curve of the loop.
"What's that?" the giant asked.
"A hopper. Where they load coal, I guess." As they drove under it,
something white flashed toward them, a leaping figure, arms waving. Larry
hit the brakes; the engine died. He had just time to see that the pale
figure was a dummy, a scarecrow with a face, jerking and swinging in
front of the windshield. Then the cab shook to an insane roar; the
figure was gone behind a tumbling stream of darkness that cascaded past
the windshield.
"Oh, God!" said Larry. "We're going to be buried alive . . . "
Berkley books by Damon Knight
THE MAN IN THE TREE
THE WORLD AND THORINN
THE MAN IN THE TREE
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with
the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition/January 1984
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1984 by Damon Knight.
Cover illustration by Carl Lundgren.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,
by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.
For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
200 Madison Avenue, New York. New York 10016.
ISBN: 0-425-06006-3
A BERKLEY BOOK ™ TM 757,375
The name "BERKLEY" and the stylized "B" with design are
trademarks belonging to The Berkley Publishing Group.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
I have taken some liberties with geography in this
novel, but Dog River, Oregon, exists, although it is
no longer called by that name. There really is such a
place as the Lost Forest, and it really is not on most
maps.
I wish to acknowledge my debt to the authors of
two books not mentioned in the text:
Jesus the
Magician
, by Morton Smith (Harper. 1978), and
The
Trial and Death of Jesus
, by Haim Cohn (Harper,
1971).
D.K.
To
AMIT and MAGGIE GOSWAMI
The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye
slew and hanged on a tree.
Acts, 5:30
Now I Joseph was walking, and I walked not. And
I looked up to the air and saw the air in amazement.
And I looked up to the pole of the heaven and saw it
standing still, and the fowls of the heaven without
motion. And I looked upon the earth and saw a dish
set, and workmen lying
by it
, and their hands were in
the dish: and they that were chewing chewed not, and
they that were lifting
the food
lifted it not, and they
that put it to their mouth put it not thereto, but the
faces of all of them were looking upward. And
behold there were sheep being driven, and they went
not forward but stood still; and the shepherd lifted
his hand to smite them with his staff, and his hand
remained up. And I looked upon the stream of the
river and saw the mouths of the kids upon
the water
and they drank not. And of a sudden all things
moved onward in their course.
Book of James, or Protevangelium, XVIII:2
Chapter One
When I was young we were giants' captives.
They stripped us, tortured us with facecloths,
Left us to endure alone
The moonwashed branches on the windows
In the long clock-ticking night.
We voyaged deep under that black ocean
Where Earth eats her daughters in silence,
And always returned. By day we had red-jam smiles,
Breadcrumb fingers, corn hair.
In our pockets were stones, gray string, nails
Scavenged as we went. We knew the secret
Undersides of things, the roofs of tables.
Only insects were smaller than ourselves.
We caught locusts and made them spit tobacco,
Poured dust on pismires, puffed ladybirds away.
We dreamed of being smaller still: built pebble fences,
Roads in dirt, peered with one eye
Under green blades. All Eden was
Our afternoon. It was the time before
They taught us time: before we knew.
--Gene Anderson
Before he was born he remembered the darkness and the light. The darkness
was the color of old blood, and in it there were drifting shapes that
were not stars.
He remembered the doctor's face -- he had plump cheeks and a ragged
black mustache -- and a voice saying: "My gosh, he's a big one, isn't he?"
When he was four, he told his mother some of the things he could remember;
later he heard her saying to his father, "What an imagination Gene has."
But she was thinking, What a strange child.
By the time he learned to walk, he was already too large for infants'
clothing, and his mother had to buy shoes for him at the boys' store. His
father, who was worried about money then, said that he had taken up the
wrong trade; he should have been a cobbler.
The Andersons lived in a small town called Dog River in northern Oregon.
It was the only world Gene knew, and he did not understand then how pure
the air and water were, how blue the sky. From their yard he could see
two snowcapped mountains, Hood and Adams.
From the time Gene was very young he could glimpse the other worlds that
were all around him; in some of these worlds, things were just the same
as they were here, and in some they were different. He was not more than
two when he found out how to reach with his mind into another world and
turn it. He could put a marble on the floor, for instance, and then reach
into another world where the marble was in a slightly different place,
and bring it into this world: then there would be two marbles. He was
four when he first realized that other people could not do this.
One afternoon he was turning somersaults on the lawn with Zelda Owens'
little brother Danny, mesmerized by the stiff grass-blades against his
forehead, the green sun-warmed smell, and the surprising way the world
turned to thump him on the back. Danny was looking for something in
the grass, tearing out big clumps with his fingers. He was crying. Gene
asked him what the matter was, and he said he had lost his nickel.
"Why don't you make it come back?" Gene asked. Danny did not seem to
understand; he kept on beating the lawn with his hands, pulling up grass
and dirt. Gene gave him a nickel to make him stop crying, and then Danny
said it was his nickel and that Gene had stolen it, and ran into the
house to tell his mother.
Later that day, on Zelda's porch, Zelda and Petie Everett were playing
"Can you do this?" Zelda could wriggle her ears and cross her eyes;
Petie could make a noise like a cork by putting his finger into his
mouth and pulling it out again, and he could bend his thumb back until
it touched his arm. Gene could not do any of these things, but he said,
"Can you do this?"
A beetle was crawling across the warped yellow boards of the porch. Gene
knelt and put his finger in front of it to make it change direction. Then
he reached into the shadows and found the place where it could just as
easily have gone the other way. Gene turned it there, and then there
were two beetles. He turned the beetle again, and now there were three,
crawling away from each other as fast as they could.
Zelda and Petie were crouching beside him. Petie said, "Aw, that ain't
nothing. You had them in your hand."
They argued about this, and Gene lost because he was outnumbered. When
he left, Zelda and Petie were shouting, "Liar, liar, your pants on fire!"
One day when Gene was five, after a hard morning rain, he was sailing
walnut boats in the gutter. When he tired of this, he brought a bucket
full of dirt from the garden and made dams. The mud washed away, but he
built the dams up again with twigs and straw, and sent his boats down
the stream to watch them tip over the dams and spin in the whirlpools.
A boy he didn't know came down the street carrying a long stick. Before
Gene realized what he was doing, he had broken one of the dams. "Don't
do that," Gene said, but already the boy was breaking another one.
Gene got up and rushed at him; he was the taller, although the other boy
was two years older. The boy jabbed him with his stick and danced away;
Gene could not get near enough to hit him. The boy broke the last of
the dams and then hit him with the stick again; Gene was crying with
anger and pain. At that moment he felt with his mind where the nerves
and muscles of the other boy's arm were; he reached in and turned them
in a way he had never done before. The stick fell. Gene picked it up
and began to beat the other boy, who ran away crying.
That evening the boy's father brought him to Gene's house with his
right arm in a sling; he said the boy's arm was paralyzed because Gene
had hit him on the shoulder. He was very angry, and shouted at Gene's
father. Gene denied everything, but he was frightened, and he reached in
again to make the boy's arm well. When the father saw him moving his arm,
his face changed, and he took the boy away.
Gene's parents were nearly the same height, but his father was squarely
built, dark and muscular, whereas his mother was small-boned and had
thick auburn hair, now turning gray. Her skin was very pale and fine,
and she had bright blue eyes. Gene was their only child. She told him,
weeping, about her two stillborn daughters, and he used to imagine that
he would meet them in heaven. His birth had been so difficult, she told
him, that she could never have another baby. He felt guilty about this,
and resolved to make it up to her by being a good son, but he forgot
this whenever he was angry with her.
Gene's father was a carpenter; he had a shop in the garage where Gene
often sat and watched him work. Gene loved the aromatic smells of cut
pine, glue and shellac, and he liked to watch the clean white shavings
curl out under the plane. When he was still very young his father began
letting him help with small tasks, carrying boards from the stack,
measuring, clamping pieces together to be glued. He let Gene use the
hand-saw and play at nailing boards together. One day when he was busy,
he said, "Cut this piece eighteen and seven-eighths inches for me, Gene,
can you do that?" Feeling proud and honored, the boy measured the board
and sawed it, but when he brought it to his father, it was too short;
he had made a mistake in the measurement. "Well, that's ruined," his
father said, and threw the piece down.
Gene's eyes filled with tears. "I can fix it," he said.
"No, you can't." His father went to the other side of the room for
another board.
Gene picked up the rejected piece and laid it on the worktable beside
the frame his father was making. He reached into the shadows to a place
where he had cut it correctly; it jumped a little and was longer. "Look,
Dad," he said, "it's all right."
At first Gene's father would not come; when Gene insisted, he looked
at the board impatiently, then stared at it, picked it up, and finally
measured it with his steel rule. He knew it was the same board because
of the two knots near one end. There was something in his mind that he
would not let himself think.
"It's all right, isn't it?" Gene asked. He was afraid, and didn't
know why.
"Yes, it is," Gene's father said slowly. He rubbed his eyes with his
hands. "I must be getting tired. Gene, you go on out and play."
From these things he learned that his power was somehow dangerous and
shameful, and he kept it a secret. For a long time he did not even use
it when he was alone, unless he had lost some toy and wanted to bring
it back. Once or twice it happened by itself, and that disturbed him.
He often daydreamed that he was a magical changeling, a prince given
away in infancy, and that someday his real father would come to take him
away to his kingdom, or perhaps would touch Gene on the forehead while
he was asleep, conferring on him some power greater than he could imagine.
In the first grade he was a foot taller than any of the other children.
The desks were too small for him; he had to sit sideways with his legs
in the aisle. On the first day, the teacher gave all the children strips
of purple and yellow paper and showed them how to make paper chains,
first a purple link, then a yellow one. Gene liked the yellow ones best,
and made his chain all of yellow. A girl across the aisle showed it to
the teacher and said, "He's doing it wrong."
Later they were coloring in their books; there was a picture of a rabbit;
Gene colored its fur blue, as the teacher had told them, but he made the
insides of its ears yellow instead of pink. When the teacher came by to
look at their work, the same girl said, "Look, he's doing it wrong again.
He can't do anything right, can he?"
The teacher said, "That's all right, Dolores; he can do it that way if
he wants to," but when she was gone the girl stuck out her tongue. Gene
was angry, and turned all her crayons to yellow ones. When she saw them,
she called to the teacher that he had taken her crayons. Gene denied
it, and the teacher brought her other crayons, but as soon as her back
was turned Gene changed them to yellow too. She began to scream, and
the teacher moved Gene all the way across the room. From that day on,
the other children understood that he was a troublemaker. They began
calling him "Big Feet," then just "Feet." They were not brave enough
to attack him, because he was so much bigger, but they threw stones
at him from behind, and when he chased them they scattered, shouting,
"Fee-eet, Fee-eet, can't sit in his sea-eat."
After a few weeks of this he discovered an overgrown corner of the
playground where he could lie hidden, and then he spent every recess
there, pulling sweet grass stems and sucking the nectar. He daydreamed
often of sending himself into another world, but his power was not strong
enough for that: the largest thing he had ever turned from one world into
another was the piece of wood for his father, and afterward he had had
a headache. Even with smaller things, if he used his power too often,
he became weak and dizzy.
After school and on weekends life was better; there was a group of
neighborhood children of mixed ages, none of whom were Gene's classmates,
and they did not mind his being tall. In the winter they went sledding
and had snowball fights, and made snowmen that melted little by little
until they were only slumped mounds in their circles of grass. In
the long summer evenings they played King of the Hill, Red Light and
hide-and-seek. He never forgot the scent of the tall lilacs in the dusk,
and the lonesome sound of "All-ee-all-ee-out's in free."
Long after the other children had left it behind, he was still engrossed
by the world of small things. There were different sorts of grasses that
were good to suck: one kind slipped with a sliding sweetness out of its
sheath, and another would only break. There was a weed growing close
to the ground that bore tiny grayish-green buttons, and these buttons
were also good to eat. He learned to stretch a grass-blade tight between
his thumbs pressed together as if in prayer, and then by blowing into
the hollow between the first and second joints of his thumbs, to make a
shattering squawk. Noises could be made with the bitter milky stems of
dandelions, too, and with the stalks of green onions.
He never had a tricycle, because by the time he was old enough he was
too big. When he was seven his parents gave him a bicycle, and all that
summer he explored the country roads across the river and into the hills.
Often he left his bicycle beside the road and walked up a little way
into the woods. When he sat down with the trees all around him, he
had a curious feeling that they were aware of him as he was of them,
or at least that there was some intelligence watching him. This feeling
disturbed him, and he never stayed long in the woods, but he kept on
going there because he needed solitude.
Even in town, however, there were quiet places where he could be
alone. One of them was the long tree-shaded lawn below the library,
where he sat for hours reading books of fairy tales. The library had a
set of Grimm, with old-fashioned engraved illustrations that were all the
more mysterious because they were so dark and badly printed. He avoided
stories about giants -- they were always monsters, to be outwitted or
killed by the hero -- but he liked stories about the Little People,
their trickiness and magical powers, and he liked the "Brownie" books
of Palmer Cox. The verses were labored and dull, but he never tired of
the illustrations; each one was full of hundreds of tiny figures, all
doing different things, but all together. His daydreams were of secret
caverns under the earth, hidden treasures, and a mysterious fellowship.
Because he was growing so fast, his clothes seldom fitted; either his
wrists and ankles stuck out and his shirts bound him across the chest, or,
if he had new clothes, the sleeves hung over his hands and his pants-legs
had to be rolled up. He used this as an excuse not to go to church with
his parents, but there were other reasons. The first time he went to
Sunday school, the lesson was about David and Goliath, and after that,
for a while, he had a new nickname. The hard pews in church made his
bottom ache, and he did not understand the purpose of all that varnished
wood, the tall organ-pipes, the minister in his pulpit talking on and on,
the bad singing.
When he had a nickel and had spent it, he could always reach into
another world where it was still in his pocket. If he wanted more,
he could multiply the nickel as he had done with the beetle. From the
time he found this out, he always had money for candy or anything else
he wanted, and he sometimes treated other children to a bottle of pop
or a package of gum. Once or twice they asked him for money, saying,
"Come on, you're rich," and he foolishly gave it to them.