Under the Overtree

by James A. Moore

  8

  They laughed and the creatures that, unlike the birds, had stayed motionless in the hopes of being unseen, ran from their hiding spots, their instincts telling them that the Folk were in rare form that day. The Folk finished their grisly work and separated from the dreams and nightmares that They had stolen from Alan Fisk. The battered body of his wife faded into a clear fluid, as They reshaped Themselves into a form They found more acceptable. Stoney too, went back into the separate forms of over one hundred of the Folk.

  The one who liked to watch, had frightened the Chosen and that was all it took, They needed little as an excuse. This one had meant nothing to the One and so there had been no need for caution. With a malicious dance around the deputy’s mortal remains, They celebrated victory. And then, They ran through the woods, sighing that the fun had not lasted, but certain that more fun was sure to come. The Chosen seemed to draw trouble like a magnet; that was one of the reasons that They liked Him so much.

  “Soon,” They whispered. “Soon the time of change will be complete. Soon, we will be free of this love.” The love had been so tiring, They loved Him still, but not for much longer, He would soon have served His purpose, He would soon be able to defend himself. That was what mattered now.

  CHAPTER TEN

  1

  Patrick sat alone in his room and shivered in the noonday heat. He shook not with the cold, but with fear; the kind of numbing whispery fear that holds tightly to your insides and freezes your blood when you hear the slightest sound that is out of place.

  He knew now that it hadn’t been the drugs, he knew that what he’d seen had been terribly real. Unlike the strange visions he often had when in a chemical stupor, he knew that these visions could kill him as easily as they had killed Tommy.

  He had watched from his safe vantage point as Tommy had assaulted Mark and he had watched with all of the passion of a lover. Patrick didn’t like to do violence, but he liked to watch others do it; he loved the sounds of someone getting hurt. He thrived at the high pitched squeals of some macho bastard getting hurt so badly that he screamed like a girl; it was like revenge for all the times in the past, when it had been him doing the screaming.

  Like his younger brother, Patrick had more than his share of enemies in school before he suddenly bloomed, putting muscle on as if by magic. His father had been that way as well and he suspected the same lay somewhere ahead for Tyler. Unlike his younger brother, however, he had never had the rapier wit to cut his opponents even as they blasted him into a semi-conscious stupor with their fists. Maybe, if I had, he thought, I wouldn’t have started dealing drugs.

  Becoming Summitvilles’s local dealer had started because he needed an angle, a way to save himself from those of his peers who found it necessary to pound anyone even remotely different into a new shape, rather than just let them alone. After he had found a few patsies to buy the drugs, he had found a few allies to assist him whenever someone wanted to trash him. It was a simple equation: if they hurt Patrick, they hurt the supply of party-favors; without party-favors there was no fun. Patrick had never dealt for profit, only for cost. He had dealt to save his face.

  He envied his brother the strength to manage without such tricks. But, he did not envy his brother the friend he had in Mark Howell. Closing his eyes, he saw the crazy unfolding of events that just didn’t make any sense. He watched from the sidelines as Mark Howell stormed across the football field, hell bent and determined to get Tommy to lay off of Patrick’s little brother, once and for all. Part of him had been happy that Tyler had such a friend, part jealous that he couldn’t do a better job of protecting Tyler himself.

  He’d listened to the names called by both parties and felt himself get excited, knowing that a fight would be breaking out in only a few minutes at most.

  And then he’d seen Tommy Blake spin a roundhouse kick into Mark’s jaw and he’d seen Mark go down like a sack of potatoes. He’d seen the following seven kicks and punches, each faster than the last, that literally knocked Mark all over the fucking field. He knew that Mark was going to die, murdered by a bastard that would feel almost no remorse for the action, for trying to stop Tyler’s endless persecution.

  He’d actually been steeling himself to break up the fight when Mark got back up. He’d had what seemed like a long time to study the damage that had befallen his brother’s friend; Mark had teeth broken off and missing, he had a nose that had been crushed by a solid kick in his face and he was bleeding in several places. His jaw didn’t fit his face right anymore, it hung at a twisted angle.

  All of that changed so quickly that he still had trouble believing it wasn’t a bad trip. Mark had stood perfectly still and his body and features had run like hot wax. His teeth reformed, literally flying back into position like a film in reverse, lifting from wherever they had spilled and sealing themselves into their proper places. His nose, a ruined bloody mess, reformed on his face as perfect and straight as it had ever been. His fractured jaw slid back into the proper place with a sound like two rocks grinding together. The blood disappeared from his clothing, leaving only the dirt and grass stains behind.

  And if that hadn’t been enough, Mark continued to change. His mouth reshaped itself from the base of his jaw on up to his nose. It grew wider, the muscles bulging outward with a sickening hissing noise. His arms elongated stretching in length even as extra muscle came from nowhere, helping them maintain their original width. His fingers grew longer as well, sprouting thick and wickedly sharp nails in the process. His torso, already powerful in dimensions, expanded outward in a way that was almost comical to watch; it had made Patrick think of the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, where the Wascally Wabbit would go against the enormous wrestler/boxer who, when he flexed, popped muscles on his muscles. Only, this wasn’t a cartoon and he was definitely not in the theater or at home watching television. But, the worst part was the look in Mark’s eyes, during and after the transformation. As it occurred, Mark looked terrified, ready to scream in horror at what was happening to his body, almost as if it wasn’t him doing it. Then the metamorphosis was completed, his skin had become scaly under its stretched outer-layer and the blood in between his skin and the scales, ruptured from its vessels, turning him a grotesque crimson color. And his eyes changed; no longer frightened by what had happened, they looked terribly amused, like someone hiding in a monster suit where they had forgotten to do any work to the eyes, they shone their normal brilliant blue and laugh-lines showed themselves with crystal clarity.

  And then the Mark-thing had screamed its rage and Tommy, poor Tommy, who always thought that the world revolved around him, screamed just like a girl. Patrick was disgusted to remember the joy he got out of that shriek. Tommy tried to get away, but the Mark Monster was simply too fast, too strong. It grabbed him up by his throat and held him as if he weighed less than a baseball. He couldn’t remember clearly by then, he’d felt the keen thrill of terror gripping his own heart, but Patrick thought he saw one finger reach through the flesh of Tommy’s neck as if it was just colored air and pull something free from the inside. It must have been Tommy’s vocal cords, because after that, the only sound his one time customer could make was a whistling little squeak, like a dog’s chew-toy.

  He watched, enthralled, as the Mark-beast systematically started tearing the clothes away from Tommy and then started tweaking his toes. This little piggy went to market and this little piggy stayed home! The thought had him giggling madly, and Patrick had to bite the inside of his mouth to stop from doubling over and laughing out loud. Every toe that was tweaked made a sound like someone bending a green stick beyond the point of its endurance; he heard the little snaps from his hiding place a full twenty feet away in the bleachers.

  Patrick observed the entire incident in muted fascination, as the Markstrosity moved from the toes up, taking its time about the situation and chuckling like a river after torrential rains, the whole time. Tommy remained conscious for most of it; and when he passed out, the grinning t
hing that had been Mark Howell waited patiently until he stirred into consciousness again. Then it started on a new bone, careful not to kill its toy.

  He must have made some kind of sound—some noise louder than the hysterical, half-giggles he’d been holding back—because the Markstrosity looked at him and their eyes locked over the distance, as if the shadows hid nothing. And then it winked at him.

  As it turned away, it gestured to indicate that Patrick should clean up the mess it had made; too stunned to think, he almost did. He pulled trash-bags from the storage space under the bleachers—Malloy never locked the damn thing, he said if someone needed cleaning supplies that badly, they could have them. To the town’s credit, until Patrick himself, nobody ever had—and walked over to what was left of his client and seeing it clearly he ran for dear life, swearing he would never drop acid again. To that very day, he hadn’t.

  The worst part was yet to come, however, when he almost ran into Mark in the woods. He hadn’t thought about it as he ran, he’d just run. In the same direction that Mark had. He spotted the thing that Mark had become, falling to its knees in front of a large rock and stared in amazement as it literally dropped what seemed like millions of little creatures from its body. Each of the tiny ones looked enough like the big one to make him think of the pictures he’d seen in biology; pictures of a mother spider carrying her countless legions of young on her broad back, where they would crawl all over her and each other without the least bit of concern for any of the siblings they stepped on.

  The little ones noticed him and fell to the ground laughing as they would at the best joke they had ever heard, shrieking little laughs that sounded all too human for comfort. Some of them got up after their belly laughs and darted into the surrounding woods towards the school. Others caressed the unconscious form of Mark Howell—who looked perfectly normal again, as if the creatures had been inside of him, like an allergic reaction that swells some poor soul like water in a balloon and now the reaction was over and he was just Mark again—and cooing to him like a lover, running their sharp little claws over his body and through his hair. Mark moaned as if he was in the arms of a voluptuous, voracious woman, and the bulge in his jeans was painfully obvious.

  Patrick lost it then and there: somehow he managed to get home with only a few scratches on his arms and face, no worse for the wear. He knew that he would never go into the woods again.

  He had honestly convinced himself that it had all been a bad trip and he still never meant to touch the shit again. He’d believed that he could live safe with the knowledge that the only thing screwed up was his own brain, until Jack Watkins had told him about the body that was found at the lake, found when he cut his foot on something in a plastic bag, just like the ones that he’d dropped next to the body of poor Tommy Blake. He wondered briefly how the bags had gotten from the school to the lake. He prayed fervently that the water had washed his fingerprints from the plastic; he prayed for that almost as much as he prayed never to see Mark again.

  As with all people, many a prayer seems to be ignored. The water had indeed washed away the fingerprints on the bags, but as for Mark, it was a small town and the fates had other plans.

  2

  P.J. reached into his breast pocket and produced a cigarette from a crumpled pack that rested there. Tyler was taken aback, he’d never known the man to smoke and he’d known P.J. for quite some time.

  “When did you start smoking?”

  “About twenty years ago,” the writer responded as he stuck a match and brought the flame to the tobacco stick’s tip. He looked at Tyler and grimaced. “I quit ten years ago, never thought I’d be doing this to myself again.” The man started coughing violently and continued until Tyler brought him a glass of cold water. He nodded his thanks and gulped it down eagerly. Then, with a look of pure disgust on his face, he crushed the cigarette out. “To hell with it, I think I’ll just stay quit.”

  The man looked everywhere but at Tyler for several minutes. Tyler, with his normal patience, waited through the silence knowing that the man needed to sort out his thoughts. Finally, P.J. Sanderson looked at his young friend. “So, you want to hear a story.

  “The best way to start, I imagine, is at the beginning.” He took another sip of water and rubbed futilely at his temples, trying to get rid of the tension threatening to crush his skull.

  “Once upon a time,” he began, his rich voice modulating as if he were talking of a story that had no great purpose save to amuse, “when I was a much younger lad, I found a book, on these very premises.

  “My grandfather purchased this house back in nineteen forty-seven. He moved here because he wanted to escape the troubles he felt brewing in the big cities, the growing crime rate, mostly. Well, My father and his young wife moved with him, they had no money and my grandfather told them that they could stay with him until they got on their feet. I might add that the town was only a little smaller in those days than it is now. No building had been done in this town for many a year and the old man opted to buy a house that was, even in those days, remarkably cheap.” He looked at Tyler briefly and a hint of amusement touched his eyes for just that moment. “The house had something of a reputation in town, as a haunted dwelling.”

  He watched the dawning realization in Tyler’s eyes and nodded his affirmation of what was on the boy’s mind. “Yes, this very dwelling belonged a long, long time ago, to one Albert Miles. A fact that most in this day and age have forgotten about. A fact that I knew nothing of until I was almost fifteen years of age.

  “I was born in this house and so was my sister Antoinette, who is now married to Tony’s father, though I suspect, not very happily. But all of that is an aside. Back to the story.

  “When I was fifteen I finally decided, aided by some less than gentle prodding on my father’s part, that it was time to give the attic a proper cleaning. It seems that the people who had been living in this house had no belief in throwing away what was no longer to be used. They simply tossed it all into the growing piles of relics that rested in the attic. It would have taken me about two months, after school and on the weekends, to clear out that monstrous attic by myself. Luckily, I had assistance. My one true friend in town, Alex Harris; a boy who had moved to Summitville only a few months earlier.”

  “Alex was a voracious reader, who still managed to look like a dark-haired god. He was funny, friendly and adventurous. I was none of those things. For some reason, he took me under his wing and allowed me the pleasure of his company and protection from the many who wanted to tear my head off.” Again the writer paused in his narration and looked at Tyler with a haunted sort of happiness. “Oh yes, my fine friend, my mouth was almost as deadly as your own in its time.

  “Anyway, it was Alex that found the book. I believe it was buried under a thick pile of clothes, in the very farthest corner of the attic, in an old steamer trunk, that had definitely had its better days in the last century. Being the adventurous type, he set the book in a special spot and we went back to putting the finishing touches on the cleaning, which at that point was mostly opening the attic’s windows and tossing all of the garbage out for collection when we were done. It was easier than hauling all of it down several flights of stairs.

  “We looked the book over and while we could read some of the words most were beyond us. It had been written in an odd mixture of Celtic and old English and it was a mystery to our young minds. Never one to be pushed away by troubles, Alex set off and actually found books at the Denver library that allowed us to translate the cursed tome. It was fascinating reading, I assure you.

  “The book was a book of dark magic, a history of the sordid past that this town never knew Stoney Miles was involved in. The man was decidedly foul. He had written stories of events that would turn your most devout pacifists into a hanging mob were they to know what he had done. He talked not only of events, mind you, but of the secrets that he’d learned in traveling a good portion of the world. Secrets I dare say he would have been be
tter off without.

  “Being fifteen and as enthralled with monsters then as I am now, I found the book fascinating. Alex found the book to be irresistible. We spent almost the rest of that summer looking over the passages that had been written down, trying to translate every story completely; many of the words in the book were beyond our comprehension, I believe that they may have been written in a third language, one that may not even be remembered to mankind. Or, possibly they were written in a code, that only a few would know. Anything is possible, for all I know they were simply misspelled, but I doubted it even then. You see the book was written on soft leather, with odd rusty colored ink. Perhaps, it was human flesh and blood, I certainly took many of my descriptions of the books in ‘Stirrings,’ from what I remembered of that particular tome of horrors.

  “There were whole sections of that book that contained nothing but what looked like magical spells and being the adventurous type, Alex convinced me to join him in the woods; to try to perform the rights for ourselves, just to see if they would really work. I hesitated at first, but Alex had always been able to sway me from what my own heart knew to be right. It was done on Halloween day, for flavor not because it was necessary. And as it was the proper season, we brought our girlfriends with us on that day, certain that the attempt would excite them as much as it did us. And we were right, they did enjoy the show as much as we did, not that it mattered in the long run, because nothing seemed to happen. We tried and when we failed, we tried again. Nothing seemed to work you see, because at least one portion of each incantation was written in that damnable code. I grew bored with the entire thing, but Alex was insistent, he fairly demanded that we try them all. I didn’t want to lose my only real friend, so I went along with him. Several of the spells required blood and since neither of us wanted to be the donor, we bought three chickens with the money my father gave us for cleaning the attic and we used them in substitution.”