Devil Tree Read online

  DEVIL TREE

  By Steve Vernon

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 by Steve Vernon

  Cover Design and copy-editing by David Dodd

  Part of Cover image supplied by http://ashensorrow.deviantart.com/

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  To my love Belinda

  I read this book to you while we still courting

  chapter by chapter

  sitting beside you in that hospital ward

  Love’s roots are planted deep

  Prologue

  Some journeys were like rivers. You dropped your canoe into the current and hung on hard while the go just took you. Some were like oceans – deep, wide and hard to figure. Those journeys were the ones you navigated by skill and dead reckoning.

  And if you reckoned wrong you’d most likely wind up dead.

  Abraham Golightly had hanged a man once. The truth was, the man had needed hanging more badly than most, but on some nights he saw those feet kicking at death, tree-high and a long way down.

  Abraham had traveled through deep wide country for the last two weeks, riding up alongside of the Greensnake River, breaking ground for an impending invasion of immigrants. He’d trapped and scouted these parts for most of his life. He thought he’d seen everything there was to see.

  Not hardly.

  Not yet.

  “What’s up ahead, Abraham?” Wilson asked.

  Wilson was a greenhorn who had his hand poked snugly in several pairs of deep-pocketed green-lined breeches. Bluntly put, the man had money. He knew many friends – fat sleek European bankers who dreamed in dollar signs and strong black ink.

  Wilson had hired Abraham Golightly to scout a route along the Greensnake. Wilson had a dream. He wanted to run a trade route straight through, funneling the where-with-alls that travelers would need to survive and shipping out the meat and fish and the green that run through this land.

  Wilson’s plan struck Abraham as a damn fool scheme but Wilson had those infernal deep pockets and didn’t hurt to draw from that well.

  We all get thirsty in our own kind of style.

  “Yonder,” Abraham said. “What’s up ahead is Yonder Country. Places you ain’t seen or been. That’s all I can tell you. This country grows awful thick, awful fast. No map that’s ever been scribbled can hope to keep up.”

  Wilson fixed Abraham with a scowl and a glare like a burning glass. Deep pockets or not, old Wilson didn’t grow much of a sense of humor.

  “Come on,” Abraham barked. “Keep up.”

  Abraham Golightly had decided some time back that Wilson was nothing more than an ambitious flatlander. Ambition got a person only so far out here, but common sense traveled a whole lot further.

  Two Bear and Rabbit Eye were up ahead, scouting the territory while Abraham and Wilson followed behind, riding with the remuda of packhorses. Two Bear and Rabbit Eye were damn fine scouts. They knew the territory better than either white man. If there were trouble up ahead, those two would find it out and fire it up.

  Abraham had been feeling a keening yearnfulness pulling at his heart like an arrowhead of geese flying south for the winter. He didn’t know how to put it into words. He heard something calling to him, just up ahead.

  Abraham had felt the same sort of feeling six years back when a pack of Crow hankered after his pony and everything it carried – him included. It came down to shoot or sink and Abraham shot dead straight.

  Only this was a different kind of feeling.

  “I feel an itch,” he told Wilson. “Only I don’t know how to scratch it.”

  “Are you expecting trouble?”

  “I’m looking for it,” he answered. “So far I see nary a sign but this rabbity jumped-up feeling just won’t leave me be.”

  The scouts, Two Bear and Rabbit Eye rode up. Two Bear was a grinner. He usually had a joke of some sort but there was nothing funny in the look he threw. Rabbit Eye was the quiet one, a deep kind of thinker, and he looked worse.

  “Trouble ahead, Golightly,” Two Bear signed. “You come. You see.”

  Rabbit Eye still didn’t say a word.

  Abraham went on up over the hill, following a trail that broke through the dirt like some kind of running snake, all twisty and elusive. He rode up from the river to the top of a ridge and looked down into a deep serving bowl of a valley.

  He smelled ashes and age wafting up from the valley’s gut. Old foul ashes. Something dark had burned down in the heart of this valley. Something that ought to stay dead – but hadn’t learned how.

  “Should we go down there?” Wilson asked.

  Abraham Golightly did not want to ride into this valley but Two Bear wouldn’t hear of it.

  “You come,” he signed again. “You see.”

  “Waugh,” Abraham growled in assent and rode on down.

  The sun climbed a notch into the sky and hid itself behind a cloud like it didn’t want to see what the men were up to down in the belly of the uncharted valley. The valley reeked of old growth, pine and fungus and dry rot and death. It stank, like riding into the mouth of an unkempt graveyard.

  In the valley’s heart Abraham saw a ring of ashes at least a couple of furlongs in go-round. His pony reared at the edge of the ashes and refused to enter. Abraham didn’t blame it one bit.

  “You stay here with the horses,” he said to Wilson.

  He looked at Rabbit Eye who was quiet at the best of times but could keep a straight barrel and shoot for center when the going got harder than it ought to be. Abraham could tell by the tight lines around Rabbit Eye’s mouth and the glazed ice-on-granite stare that the Indian might turn and run if they pushed him any further.

  “Rabbit Eye, you stay with Wilson.”

  Abraham looked at Two Bear.

  “We go?” Abraham asked.

  Two Bear nodded. The two men walked on out into the circle of ashes. Abraham didn’t rightly know what he figured on finding but he had the feeling there was something out there waiting. There was something here he needed to see. The sun beat down as hard and steady as a meat maul. Abraham couldn’t hear a bird or a cricket singing.

  There was something about the silence that bothered him.

  The fact was he’d never heard woods so damn quiet as this one.

  The fact was the silence kind of scared him.

  But he walked right on out into the heart of the blackened clearing and that’s where he found the baby.

  The baby and the tree.

  SPRING

  Early settlers considered the Jack Pine to be an evil tree – probably

  Because their crops failed to survive on the poor soil in which this

  Tree sometimes grows.

  Native Trees of Canada by R.C. Hosie

  Copyright Minister of Supply and Services Canada 1979

  The Jack Pine, Pinus banksiana, holds its cones pointing ou
twards

  and they stay closed until gray and lichened and grown into bark, and

  fire is needed to spread the tree.

  The Guide to Trees of Canada and North America by Alan Mitchell

  Copyright Dragon’s World 1987

  “And the dead tree gives no shelter.”

  - T. S. Eliot 1888 - 1965

  Chapter One

  The current was a sneaky one. The flow crept in slow-growing strength, gathering speed until the raft had as much say about where she went as a bit of windblown seed.

  Lucas Sawyer leaned his weight against the shaft of the hickory steerage oar. He felt the wood quiver in his hands as he fought the deep seething drive of the current.

  The fact was, the Greensnake River didn’t care to be taken lightly.

  “Down with all hands,” Lucas muttered, echoing the fear that whispered deep in his skull. He was scared and he knew it. He tried to laugh away his worry. He was being a damn fool and he knew it. The river was hundreds of leagues from the ocean.

  It didn’t matter.

  Old fears ran deep and were long in dying.

  “Push on,” he told himself, leaning hard against the tiller. “Time is a wasting.”

  Lucas was a stick of a man with a great beak of nose pushed front-wise like a ship’s prow. He forearmed his forehead sweat, streaking his own salt and spit across his eyes. It was hot, and him dressing in black didn’t help all that much.

  This is one hell of a spot for a crow-clad ex-preacher to find himself in, he thought to himself.

  He tugged at the ringlet of hemp about his throat – a charm against hanging. The twisted hemp hid a goiter he bore on his neck, about the size and color of a small plum. His doctor warned him that the goiter would be his death but that was a load of old hooraw, horse feathers and hogwash.

  “I’ll wear this rope as a charm against death,” he’d told the doctor.

  “Charms are foolishness,” the doctor replied. “A man of faith ought to listen to a man of learning. Don’t put so much stock in an old wives’ tale. The truth lies in books, not in fancy.”

  “One yoke is as good as another,” Lucas answered back.

  Lucas had read his share of books. His hands always seemed to be cupping at the air, as if he didn’t feel right without some other man’s words riding in his palms. He had accepted more than a few from booksellers, teachers and his fellow seminarians.

  And, of course, his father.

  Of them all, only his father was responsible for the removal of just as many books. His father believed in one book only.

  “The Lord is a balm and shadow in hard places,” Lucas’s father had preached.

  One yoke was as good as another.

  Lucas had turned and walked.

  He walked to the water and never looked back.

  “The Lord is my shepherd,” Lucas whispered. “I shall not want.”

  I’m losing her, he thought.

  He struggled fruitlessly to hold the raft true to her course. Wind-coaxed tears pooled up in the corners of his eyes. He tried to read the surface flow but he might as well have been staring blind. Three years to sea and he was no more a sailor than the captain’s cat.

  He’d served as a ship’s carpenter. Picked up what he could but no one offered any help. The other sailors left him alone.

  “Failure,” he whispered. “Half-a-man.”

  The only one who believed in him was his wife, Tamsen. She knelt by the sheep, her knees bent on a pillow of rough woven rope, trying to calm the sheep just by being there.

  “Tamsen,” Lucas called out, raising his voice over the rush of the river. “Can you see anything?”

  She shook her head.

  “Trees,” she said with a grin. “All I see are trees. I believe we’re out in the woods.”

  He had to laugh. She was a brave and self reliant woman with a heart as hard as stout oak. She hid things, not in a mean way. Hid them behind her grin so well that Lucas never knew what she might be struggling with.

  “Are the trees moving?” he asked, grinning back.

  “Back and forth,” Tamsen said. “They wave back and forth.”

  “Might be they’re just being friendly,” he said.

  “Maybe,” she replied.

  She was a proud woman and always kept her spirit high.

  Pride goeth before destruction, his father often warned – and a haughty spirit before a fall.

  Lucas spit.

  He wasn’t his father. He liked watching Tamsen wrestle with trouble, biting her lip and holding her tongue in silent, willful determination to deal with whatever bedeviled her.

  She was as strong and Lucas liked her that way just fine.

  “Keep a weather eye open,” he warned. “We’re not out of these woods yet.”

  “Can you land this thing?”

  “That’s the third time you’ve asked me.”

  “Three times without an answer.”

  “I can land…”

  The oar twisted in his grip like an angry snake. It threw him to his knees on the wooden deck.

  “Lucas!” Tamsen reached for him. The twist of their course sprawled her. She rolled towards the edge of the raft, catching hold of the safety lines Lucas laid about the craft’s perimeter.

  While he was reaching for her the raft began to drift.

  “Damn,” Lucas struggled to straighten their course. He fought the current for every inch, praying that the creaking oar wouldn’t snap.

  Tamsen crawled towards him, wanting to help.

  “Stay down,” Lucas warned.

  She dragged herself forward but a rope had snagged about her ankle.

  The raft yawed into a slow current-bound cartwheel.

  “Lucas,” Tamsen called.

  Lucas stared past her, towards the long thing that rose, Dagonesque, from the depths before them.

  “Sea serpent!” Lucas shouted.

  Tamsen looked back over her shoulder and screamed. Looming over her was the blunted tip of a mud-bound log, rising from its riverbed grave. Its slime slicked surface slid up and over the raft, looming higher as the current drove both raft and log hard together.

  The raft tipped forward as the weight of the log began to tell. Lucas let go of the oar and grabbed Tamsen in a run for the side, hoping his momentum coupled with a well timed leap would carry them to safety.

  “Jump,” he shouted.

  At the brink of the leap the raft chose to yield to her assaulter. The sheer mass of the log bore down upon her deck. The raft tipped upwards and broke. The sudden upward lift catapulted both Lucas and Tamsen out over the river, airborne like a pair of winged angels.

  In the height of his arc Lucas glanced at the shoreline.

  A great black antlered deer calmly watched his approach.

  And then he was under. The shock of total immersion slapped him into chilling reality. The river seemed deeper by fathoms than his last sounding had showed. He felt confused, not knowing top from bottom, looking for the light and hanging onto his breath and the small white hand of his wife.

  She wasn’t swimming. Perhaps from the shock or perhaps she didn’t know how.

  He felt her sink.

  He held on to her. His breath beat upon the walls of his lungs, begging to be freed. He saw the glimmer of daylight through the water overhead, taunting him. The river seemed bottomless. He continued to sink, his attempts at swimming thwarted by his wife’s dead weight.

  Was she breathing?

  He couldn’t tell.

  He spared a glance, catching sight of the rope trailing behind her.

  Let her go, an unseen voice whispered.

  He wouldn’t listen. He kicked and struggled. The blood throbbed and beat in his temples, pounding him downward. His mind raved in panic. He heard singing – his father’s low dirge-like voice tolling “Washed in the Blood” as the old man held children beneath the sacred still waters of his pine barrel baptistery.

  “Let her go,” the unseen v
oice whispered deeper.

  The Lord is my shepherd, Lucas wordlessly recited, counter-spelling the river’s deep terrified commandment.

  Let her go.

  Lucas forced himself to relax. He tried to float. He felt no comforting upward pull. He remembered the summer his father threw him into the lake below their house.

  “Sink or swim, Lucas, sink or swim,” the old man had gaily called.

  “Let her go,” the voice shouted.

  Lucas remembered his father’s final shame-filled walk into that same cold lake.

  Father, forgive me, Lucas told himself.

  Tiny spots of light danced like frightened fish before his eyes.

  He maketh me lie, Lucas mentally chanted.

  He reached out a hand towards the dark shapeless mass that hung close beside him.

  Beside still waters.

  He felt what seemed to be the slimy surface of a tree, leading upwards. An underwater root? He caught hold of the root. He steadied himself for a moment. He swallowed water, gritting his teeth against the impulse to cough out. He kicked upwards and began to swim. His hands slid from the rotted surface.

  Let go, let go, let go.

  In a moment of panic Lucas almost surrendered.

  Tamsen nearly slipped away.

  Lucas swam steadily, paddling with one hand while clinging to Tamsen’s still form with the other. When he weakened he reached for the root’s dead wooden meat. He drew vigor from somewhere within the wood’s murky heart, working his way upwards, humping along like some bizarre form of water bug.

  He’d been holding his breath for a while.

  How long?

  Seconds? Minutes? Hours?

  Days?

  He watched the glimmering daylight filtered through God only knew how many fathoms, taunting and laughing at him, wishing him dead.

  Yea though I walk through the valley…

  Goddamn, goddamn, God-be-damned I want to live!

  At that last thought he emerged from the depths, laughing and gasping and choking, his left hand firmly entwined within a clot of rotted tree root.

  “Praise God,” he croaked.

  It was only then he remembered Tamsen, still hanging limply from his right hand. Her head bobbed serenely – face down in the dirty silent water.