Under the Overtree

by James A. Moore

  The bell blared its dismissal and before Mark could move, Tyler had thumped him on the top of his head, grabbed up his books and bolted away. Mark shook his head, wondering just how he’d managed to find a friend like Ty. He was goofy, obnoxious to a fault and too loud for his own good, but he was also a helluva good guy. Mark made it all the way to the end of the day with a smile on his battered face.

  Mark stepped into the house and realized that he was alone. Joe was probably still at work and God alone knew where his mom was off to. She never left a note. He dropped his books on the counter and went to sit in the den. The den was almost his private area, with endless piles of science fiction and horror books piled on almost every available piece of furniture. The room was huge, easily three times the size of his bedroom and decorated entirely to Mark’s taste. Freddy Krueger leered down from one of the walls, promising a thousand painful games with his eyes. From the opposite wall, dozens of magazine cutouts stared into the room. Prominent figures included The Phantom of the Opera, The Creature, Michelle Pfeifer, Pinhead, Drew Barrymore, and the Lost Boys. It was against that wall, that Mark had placed his drawing board.

  The board was a gift from his mother. She’d given it to him when he moved here, knowing that Mark loved to draw when he was depressed. Mark was always depressed after a move, so she’d opted to give him an inexpensive form of therapy. It wasn’t the best drawing board around, but it suited his needs.

  Mark sat at his drawing stool and stared at Julia intently, seeing nothing. He pulled a sheet of paper close and stared at the white blank expanse in front of him. Here, he could see thousands of different things. Here, the potential was limited only by his imagination and his ability. His imagination was fine, his ability, on the other hand…

  As he started moving a number two pencil across the paper, with smooth easy strokes, he let his mind move to other things. This was the best way he knew of to think. As happened so often, he thought about the past, about all of the friends he had said good-bye to and about how much some of them had meant to him. Without his mind getting in the way, the picture started to develop.

  Depression is a seductive trap. It can lead you into a warm familiarity, wrap you in its protective blankets of numbness and lull you into a false sense of self that has nothing to do with the way that you really are. It drains away your other emotions and bleeds away the colors that you would normally perceive. It can be addictive. And Mark Walter Howell was most definitely hooked. The compelling traps of the past had him almost looking forward to his almost daily trips into the realms of melancholia. Mark’s hand made motions on the Bristol paper before him, while he spun through time, contemplating the many failures in his young life.

  He’d never known his father; he had been too young when the man left his mother, never to return. His mother still had photographs, candid shots of the man that so resembled his son. The same night black hair, the same slightly effeminate features, the same sky blue eyes. But, he was leaner and harder; his eyes seemed to look at the world around him with certain disdain, his tight smile spoke of a sneering contempt for the people around him. Mark had trouble seeing himself in the man, despite the remarkably similar features. The man looked far too confident and fit to have spawned the quivering slug that Mark perceived himself to be. Never having even met the man to his knowledge, he idolized him and missed him.

  Moving on in his memories to the years where he was finally old enough to go to school, finally old enough to have more than brief snapshot memories, Mark contemplated his mother. Jennifer Gallagher Howell was far too young to have a fifteen-year-old son. In three months, she would finally break into the thirty-year-plus age bracket. She’d given birth to Mark, when she was fifteen years of age. Mark knew that she loved him, but he knew that she also harbored a great deal of bitterness for the loss of her childhood at such a young age. Her parents had been furious when they found out that she was pregnant. They had forced her to have the child and had intended that he be given up for adoption. She took one look at her newborn son and decided to raise him. Her parents, his grandparents, never seemed to regret her decision. Obviously, his father did. He knew, from the stories that his mother would tell and how she would tell them, that his father had been only a few years older than Jennifer herself. By the time that she was seventeen, he had left town.

  He also knew that if it hadn’t been for the support of his maternal grandparents, she would have had to go on welfare. His grandparents practically raised him after his father had flown the coop, while his mother went to college and learned a trade. Grandfather Gallagher had insisted. Nobody argued with the man when he had made his mind up. His mother had opted to study commercial art and, to her credit, was talented enough to make a good living at it. It was while free-lancing for a fantasy and science fiction magazine, that she met Joseph Howell, a man almost a decade and a half older than she was, who fell in love with her almost at first sight.

  One year later, they were joined in holy matrimony. At the ripe old age of five, Mark had his new father. On the day she turned twenty, his mother gained a new husband. It made her life much easier, having someone other than her parents or son to share her triumphs and pitfalls with and for that Mark was always going to be happy. But, it made his life a great deal more difficult. Joe was a good man, he treated his mother right and provided a home for Mark, but he had never shown any real affection to the boy. He was too busy working or being macho or hanging with his friends to give time to Mark. And they moved too much. Joe was always looking for a better job or being relocated, when a company that he worked for expanded. Mark had trouble comprehending that a job in the magazine industry could be the cause of so much trauma. He had counted them a thousand times, fourteen schools and he was just now in the tenth grade of his education.

  By number eight, he’d built solid walls around himself to avoid getting too close to anyone. He felt like a plant that had been uprooted and relocated too many times. He actually flinched at the thought of another move; his soul had been battered too many times for him to control the spasm.

  Joe had promised that this would be the last time, Mark just couldn’t believe it. He wanted to, desperately, because he could sense the first touch of caring leaking through his armor, could feel himself wanting to make friends and that could easily lead to the collapse of his already torn soul if he allowed it. If they moved again. He’d made so many friends and lost them all to the need for more money and better benefits that his family needed. He didn’t think he could stand to make anymore just to lose them a few months later. Just the thought was enough to push him deeper into his growing depression.

  With a sigh, he pushed the pencil out of his hand and stood, ignoring the grisly, bloodied form of Pete lying broken on the paper. He was eager to get out, walk in the sunlight and forget. Oh, how he wished that he could forget. It was the season, autumn always brought the blues with it, eager to befriend and embrace him. He hated autumn passionately.

  Grabbing his coat, Mark walked outside, into the chill air and started to walk a circuit of the subdivision he lived in. The Red Oaks subdivision was a fairly new addition to Summitville, barely older than Mark himself. In the early ’Sixties, Tyler Wilson’s grandfather, Alexander Prescott Wilson, had decided that the town needed new blood. Old Alexander didn’t believe in hesitation, he started construction on the subdivision, building where Summit Town had once thrived over a century ago.

  Summit Town had been even smaller than Summitville, a fact that Mark had trouble swallowing, if the old stories could be believed. It had been settled early in the eighteen hundreds, by Dutchmen. The town had only been around for some thirty years, when Albert “Stoney” Miles had come there to live. In less than four years, he had murdered the town.

  Stoney had come from the east, with his small family and a small fortune in merchandise to sell. Hungry for news about the world outside of their little community, the people of Summit Town had accepted the family eagerly. They helped Stoney in
the building of his house and in the building of his mercantile, they helped make him a part of the town. They helped destroy themselves.

  He didn’t mean to murder the town, it just sort of happened. Stoney liked to drink, as the legend went and Stoney liked to smoke his pipe. It was in the latter part of August, with a nasty drought tearing the town and its wood mills into dry kindling, that Stoney struck the killing blow.

  While on a fearsome drunk he picked a fight with Abraham Smythe, a younger man who seemed to dote a bit too much on Stoney’s wife for Stoney’s peace of mind. After a particularly scandalous bit of gossip said that they had been together, near the lake above town, reached his drunken ears, Stoney severely beat his lovely wife in front of their three year old son, Joshua.

  Grabbing his hatchet, he set out to find Abraham Smythe. And find him he did, in the woods, heading towards the Miles’ residence with a cluster of wild flowers in his hand. Stoney went berserk. The first seven blows were concentrated on Abraham’s handsome face, the remaining fifty or so on his crotch. He was found almost a week after the town was murdered, by one of the town’s last surviving founders. The man stopped counting ax blows after seventy-three.

  Considering himself to have found all the proof he needed, Stoney stalked down his wife, raped her savagely and killed her.

  After only a moment’s contemplation, he tossed his son down the well. He apparently couldn’t bring himself to hack the child to pieces, but he also couldn’t trust that the boy was his. It has been hypothesized, by various rumor mongers and story tellers, that the boy’s drowning would have been acceptable to his father.

  The town’s constable found the boy, half-drowned, hanging onto the rope and bucket that Stoney used to pull water. (Visions of Daffy Duck being reeled in from the bottom of such a well with a glare of disgust came to mind immediately. Mark’s mind worked that way.) Joshua had spent over twenty-four hours treading water and clinging to the rope, his vocal cords were never quite the same after that. Not a single member of the small town expected the child to live, he was, after all, only three years old. The boy was strong enough to survive the resultant pneumonia and due to the uncertainty of the boy’s heritage, the remaining members of the Smythe family later took him in. Those that survived the day, that is.

  Stoney went on a drunken rampage that ended at a still one of the local boys had built in the woods. When he arrived there, he found several bottles of the rotgut halfheartedly hidden in the shrubs nearby. Murdering your family was mighty thirsty work apparently and Stoney took full advantage of the supplies available. He drank his newfound bounty and smoked his trusty old pipe, until the sun set. He may very well have been content to leave it at that, if it hadn’t been for Jon Stewart making an appearance. Jon owned the still and was less than pleased to find that Stoney had helped himself to over half of the bottles available.

  Jon screamed at Stoney, demanding payment in full for the whiskey that he had consumed, Stoney refused. It seems fair to say that had Jon known of Stoney’s earlier activities, he would have let him go with all the whiskey he wanted, free of charge. As it was, the slightly larger and younger man threatened to call the town’s law on Stoney, after he threatened to beat the frail looking man severely.

  Well, anybody who has ever had a serious hangover, the kind that amplifies sound and makes the faintest light a solar flare, should be able to sympathize with Stoney’s dilemma. He took his trusty hatchet in hand again and went after Jon, screaming like a banshee the entire time. He didn’t kill Jon, but he managed to knock the man senseless with his third attempt to behead his opponent.

  He probably would have killed him, if he hadn’t over-extended his last wild swing and thrown himself down on the still. It should be pointed out that Jon had freshly stoked the small flame under his poorly built contraption, before he realized that Stoney was even in the vicinity. Jon was always cautious and he had cleared away all of the dry scrub brush in the area, but he hadn’t expected the fool thing to explode. He hadn’t counted on Stoney leaping out of the flaming debris, still clutching his hatchet and streaking off into the dried out woods nearby.

  And he hadn’t even considered the possibility of a burning man running most of the way to the town, a quarter of a mile away. The rest, as they say, is history. With the town sleeping away snug in their beds and the winds blowing from the lake to the town, they never really had a chance.

  The larger part of the populace of Summit Town managed to escape the flames; they only lost all of their worldly possessions and twenty-eight people to the blaze. Stoney’s house was one of the few left unscathed. They took the problem in stride, they had had more than their share of troubles and hardships since they and theirs left the homelands and they were used to it.

  Within three months, they were well on their way to having rebuilt, a few trails away from their original sight, granted, but they worked hard and fast and soon Summitville rose from the ashes, birthed from the smoldering corpse of Summit Town.

  After hearing the stories of all the witnesses able to speak, the town’s elders pieced together what had happened and condemned Albert Stoney Miles to an eternity in Hell. They even put the curse on his headstone, in a grave set away from the church proper. There was no body in the grave, only a scorched and charred hatchet.

  Of Stoney, no sign was ever found. For years on end, he became the town’s bogeyman, an evil that chopped little children to pieces if they were naughty. Mark found it amusing that every little town he had lived in had at least one such character woven into its history. But he liked the story of Stoney Miles best. It seemed to have some small basis in fact. He’d even seen the tombstone, Tyler had pointed it out to him. The inscription was faint, worn by the years, but readable. ALBERT MILES—STONEY TO MOST—MAY YOU STAY IN HELL—FOR ALL TIME TO ROAST.

  He thought it was priceless. He especially thought the fact that some people even crossed themselves, or looked around quickly, hoping no one would notice, when they heard the man’s name was hilarious. At least twice a year, according to Tyler, some child claimed to have seen the burned man running through the woods, demanding to know where he had left his hatchet.

  From the moment that the town heard of the plan, some of the people protested the building of the subdivision. They claimed the land should be preserved, as a sign of respect for the town’s founders, or that the town was large enough, thank-you-just-the-same. Wilson didn’t care. It was his dream and he could afford it with the money he had made after the great depression. (He never told of how he’d made the money, but most people suspected that it was by keeping up the old town tradition of bootlegging.) To make them all shut up he built the school. It was a beautiful school, even Mark had to admit that and it was named after the man who had founded the town. Charles S. Westphalen. Mark often pondered such a British name being the name of a man who founded a Dutch settlement, but no one seemed to have an answer to that one. Before the project was finished, old Alexander kicked the bucket. He had a massive coronary, one that left his only son to finish the project, or let it die. Out of respect, he finished the development and then proposed strict rules about building any new structure to the town council. He was one of his father’s strongest opponents when it came to the project, but he wouldn’t deny his father this last dream. Tyler and his parents were the first to move in, giving up the mansion that was the family’s ancestral home, in order to establish a town library and historical society. Like his father before him, he had learned that to get what you wanted, you had to give something as well. His proposal about building restrictions passed through the town council and was accepted in near record time. By the time all was said and done, easily half of the town had become historical monuments, most often kept up by the older, wealthier families as a tax write-off. Mark’s reflections where broken when he ran straight into Cassie Monroe.

  10

  Cassie slammed into the wall, hard. She stepped back and lost her balance, landing on her ass in the Nelson’s unmown
lawn. S’funny, she thought, I don’t remember any trees on this part of the sidewalk. Mark Howell was towering above her, looking absolutely terrified. It took her about half a second to realize that he was the elusive moving tree that she had run into.

  “Oh God,” he stammered, “did I hurt you? I’m sorry, really, I should have been looking where I was going.” He held out his hand and when she accepted it, he lifted her easily into a standing position. He was practically glowing with embarrassment. “Are you all right? Did I hurt you? Jesus, I really am sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. I didn’t mean to hurt you. Do you need a doctor? Should I get your parents? Oh, shit, I,” he continued. The words flew at around a hundred miles an hour.

  Cassie smiled and thought about the fact that he was kinda cute, in a teddy bear sort of way. “I’m fine, don’t worry about it.” He looked like he was about to pass out and she realized that he had a crush on her. He couldn’t even look her in the eye, without turning a darker shade of red. “Are you okay?”

  He looked her in the eyes and she started to feel slightly uncomfortable. His eyes were so intense! She looked towards the side of his face, where the angry red weals of the stitches could be seen and felt for him. “Uh, yeah, I’m fine,” he managed to stammer out. She brushed herself off, watching his face as she did so. He seemed paralyzed by the thought of being so close to her. She reached her hand out and touched him lightly on the arm and he practically jumped out of his skin. “Relax, I’m fine. And I don’t bite, y’know?” He blushed even more furiously and she wondered how a person could turn that red and not rupture blood vessels. “Hey, look at me.” He looked and she thought it must be causing him actual, physical pain. How was she supposed to handle this? Cassandra Monroe’s mother had always told her to be direct in her statements. That she should always tell a person what she felt and hope for the best because at least she would know that the person’s reaction to her would be an honest response to the real her, not just what the person perceived to be real.