Under the Overtree

by James A. Moore

  “Demon?”

  “Yeah, y’know, fire? Brimstone and horns?”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Yes actually, the little beasty was more like a poltergeist really, not a solid visible manifestation.” Tyler looked at the man as if he’d lost a few marbles in the last couple of minutes. The man’s responding look didn’t give any reassurance. “What, you hunt demons for a living or something?”

  “No. Not just demons. Too limiting.”

  “Right. Sure. You betcha.”

  “Hey, you asked.”

  Tyler had to give him that point, it was a small point, but it was significant enough. “So what brings you to Summitville? Did you just find out about this on your own or what?”

  Crowley pinched his nose between his forefinger and thumb and rubbed for a moment. His hand blocked most of his face and Tyler couldn’t tell if he was smiling or not. “No, Tyler. I was called. There are rules you couldn’t hope to understand and I have to follow them. One of those rules says I have to be called. P.J. Sanderson is the one who called me. And just to put your mind at ease, he used the phone. In no way shape or form was I summoned by magic. Got a goddamn phone call at three o’clock in the morning and I got in my nice expensive car and I drove from California all the way out to this little shithole of a town because I was called.”

  Tyler looked on at the man for a minute without saying a word. He didn’t think the man had said so much on any given subject at one time in the entire amount of time they had been speaking. It was also the first time he sounded like it wasn’t all a great big joke. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend.”

  “No and I’m sure you never mean to offend, Tyler. That’s one of the big differences between us.”

  Tyler stared at the man for a moment, Crowley stared back and then abruptly looked away. “So why do you do it? Why do you hunt monsters if it bothers you so much? I mean, there have got to be better career opportunities out there.”

  Crowley smiled at that last little comment. It was the first and only real smile Tyler ever saw on the man’s face. For just the briefest of seconds, he thought he saw the real man behind the average guy mask. What he saw made him just a little nervous.

  “Tyler, I wish I could give you more of an answer than I can. Let’s just say it goes back to those rules I told you about and an old family obligation.”

  Crowley reached out a hand and slapped Tyler lightly on the shoulder, almost in a friendly fashion. “Thanks for your help, Tyler. I really needed the information and I really didn’t need the grief of putting up with Philly.”

  “No problem. Just do yourself a favor and try to relax, okay?”

  Crowley snorted abruptly. “Sure. You too, kid.” He turned away from Tyler and headed back towards town as the first glimmer of distant headlights started glowing around the edge of the road in the distance. Tyler recognized the battered front end of his brother’s car and waved his arms in the air to catch Patrick’s attention. In the distance, the car started to brake, slowing gradually. “Hey Tyler,” he turned back towards Crowley when he heard his name called. Crowley was standing almost a hundred feet away already and the man had just been walking at a normal pace. He should have still been within ten feet of Tyler. “I’m only going to say it once and if you quote me I’ll deny it.” Crowley looked him in the eyes and for an instant he seemed like he was right next to Tyler instead of a score of yards away. “I’m sorry for what I might have to do here. I’m sorry for the people who’ll get hurt.” The sound of Patrick’s car running into the gravel on the side of the road took away the last words that Crowley said. Tyler didn’t hear them, but a sickening dread in the pit of his stomach made him think they were something along the lines of “But mostly I’m sorry for what it’ll all do to you.”

  Spiders where slithering under his skin by the time Patrick reached him. Crowley was nowhere in sight. Tyler let Patrick lead him to the car, all the time nodding politely to the assurances that Patrick kept making. Things like “Are you okay?” and “It’ll be all right” with the occasional “Man, Dad’s gonna have a fit.”

  Tyler went home with Patrick and they managed to sneak into the house without waking up their parents. Patrick slept easily with the knowledge that his little brother was safe and in bed. Tyler tossed under his covers. Sleep wasn’t going to come easy. For some reason, the apologies from Crowley scared him more than anything else that had happened recently.

  4

  Mark Howell came fully awake at the sound of his mother entering his room. She crept in as quietly as she could, but to him her footsteps sounded like a giant striding through the forest. He kept his eyes closed and forced his body to remain still. He knew it was his mother by the smell of her perfume and the way in which her feet struck the carpeted floor. These days he always seemed to know who was near him.

  It wasn’t something he thought about, but his senses were all much sharper than they used to be. His sense of touch was strong enough that he found himself stroking a variety of objects whenever he was thinking; the textures he encountered were endlessly fascinating. These days he could easily have distinguished between different types of wine and to this day he had never tasted any. He never allowed himself to think about how heightened his perceptions were.

  It was almost as if he was afraid to think along those lines. Afraid he might really start to think about all of the changes he had gone through, not just the physical ones, but the mental as well. No, not a subject he relished.

  Above him, Jenny Howell stared down at her son. She lightly reached out and touched his face, running one finger lightly over the faded scar that snaked across his cheek. He could feel her smile in the darkness. She pulled his tumbled blankets back over his shoulders, perhaps afraid that he would catch a cold as he always had when he was younger. She needn’t have worried, Mark never got sick these days.

  One last touch on the side of his head as she dragged her fingers across his hair and she was gone. The whole thing had taken only a few seconds, but Mark held the memory of those seconds as closely as he could. His mother’s touch was still reassuring at the age of fifteen, possibly more now than ever. Knowing that she cared enough to visit his room nightly and reassure herself that he was still all right, that was his mom’s daily allowance of serious affection. She seemed to have a problem with showing her feelings, almost as if she felt the distance between them was a way of acknowledging to herself that she was still young.

  Mark didn’t mind. She was still young and she needed to have a certain amount of freedom from her son and her obligations to him. He’d seen kids his age with mothers that worried themselves into ulcers over every day things like a scraped knee or a black eye. He believed that seeing his mother that way would have killed him. At the age of fifteen, the last thing Mark wanted was a doting mother. If she was the type to worry too much, he would never be able to go to the woods.

  Even now the woods seemed to call him. Not in words so much as waves of feeling, but they called just the same. He would go tomorrow, maybe the day after. More important than the woods was the need to see Cassie. Being with Cassie was like being alive and allowed him to study her with his senses. Study and memorize, against the day when they would inevitably be separated. It was only a matter of time before Joe got the wandering blues and decided to move on. Mark hoped it would be a while yet, just long enough for his book to come out and for him to make a deal with P.J.. Mark never intended to move again if he could avoid it. Summitville was home now. Summitville was the only home he’d ever known.

  Mark prayed that Joe wanted to stay long enough. Mark had grown to like Joe in the last few months and really didn’t want to see anything happen to him. Mark drifted off to sleep then, content in the knowledge that Joe would either stay in Summitville or Joe would no longer be a problem. The thoughts didn’t really register in his fading consciousness, they simply seemed a part of a distant dream. The only person or thought of any real importance in this world was Cas
sie. In his dreams she came closer, clothed only in the flesh that nature provided. The dream was wonderful, as always. So why was it that he kept hearing another familiar voice, Lisa’s, screaming and begging him to stop before it was too late? It took serious effort, but eventually he managed to block out her screams for help. There was nothing he could do for her. She was already beyond his reach.

  Lisa faded away to whispers in the presence of Cassie. Soon even the whispers disappeared. Had Jennifer Howell picked that moment to visit her only son’s room, she might have been surprised by the smile on his face. Or by the tears that flowed from his tightly closed eyes.

  5

  The sun was finally rising above the tops of the trees when Chuck Hanson reached the woods. Hanson was glad for that, it had been a long time since he had been in the woods at all and he was terrified of getting lost out here. Even with the dawn’s light filtering down to the ground at his feet, the woods looked dark and menacing.

  Born and raised in Summitville, Chuck still thought of the woods as a nasty place, a place full of secrets best left untouched. Chuck had worked the family farm when he was a boy growing up and the only trees there had been in his father’s feeble attempts at an orchard. If seven trees placed here and there without any thought to pattern could be called an orchard. He could never remember a single apple growing on any of those seven trees, but he could remember the one that sprouted near his tree house.

  The thought of that old fort was bittersweet, bringing memories of playing there when he was nine and ten years old and hanging around with Philly Sanderson and Sam Wilson. Back then they had all been friends. It was high school that had destroyed that friendship; for some reason he just hadn’t fit in anymore after the age of twelve. That was all in the past now, years gone by. He was surprised to find the memory still held feelings after so long a time.

  When the time had come for Chuck to go to college, he even attended the same university as Sam and Philly. All of them managed to make their own groups of friends, but now and then, he’d spot one of the others on the campus and wish he could go back to the age of ten again. Time hadn’t healed the wounds of his separation from his childhood friends at all. It had just built up a thick callus, a scab too hard to be broken by any of them. He wondered if they ever missed that friendship as much as he did whenever he saw them.

  Hell, both of them had more money coming in a month than he made in a year. What was to miss? He chided himself for the uncharitable thoughts, but they remained just the same. The only time Sam ever spoke to him was to tell him something was wrong somewhere near Red Oaks, a busted light on a street lamp or maybe a kid playing his car radio too loud for Sam’s delicate ears.

  P.J. was different though, P.J. had at least made a few attempts at pleasant conversation with Chuck since they had both moved back home. Much as Chuck was lamenting the loss of that friendship at the moment, he always seemed content to brush away those efforts on Philly’s part when they were happening.

  Maybe that was resentment on his part. It was hard to take a man who called himself by initials and made millions every year very seriously when you were staring him in the face. It was hard to accept that the taxes his old friend now paid were more than he himself now earned in a year. Maybe it went deeper even than that, Philly had come home to a family that already had money enough to allow him his dreams as a writer; Chuck came home to a family that resented his not wanting to stay on the farm. His dad had never come right out and said anything, but the resentment had been obvious from his first day on the job as deputy sheriff.

  Chuck had managed his revenge for the resentment well enough, when his folks passed away he had sold most of the farm’s land to the Brundvandt’s next door and left the remaining parcel with its small farmhouse to grow weeded over. He still liked going past the old place now and then, just to see how the deterioration was coming along. Sometimes he hated himself for enjoying those little visits.

  His parents just hadn’t understood his need to preserve Summitville as it was, not let it become another ski town that lived for four months of the year and died the rest of the time. Chuck had always taken the nickname Chief very seriously in his own way. He felt the need to keep the peace and keep out the riffraff that would have let his hometown become another Breckenridge or even worse another Aspen. Chuck Hanson wanted his family to grow up in the same world that he had, providing he ever got around to a family. He wanted more than anything else to keep his town pure. To keep the people of Summitville safe from the changes going on all around them was the one thing that Sheriff Chuck Hanson believed in. For him, the protection of Summitville was more than a job, it was almost a religion.

  Hanson was drawn out of his reverie by the certain feeling that something was horribly wrong with the woods around him. He couldn’t place what it was, but there was definitely something out of place. He stopped walking and started concentrating on his surroundings. The leaves on the trees were still glistening with droplets of morning dew, the mulch beneath his feet was wet enough to allow the dampness to edge through the leather of his boots. The only sounds he heard was his own breathing and the wind through the branches rattling like a dying man’s last breath.

  No animals. Not even a cricket could be heard chirping away for its mate. Shit. That just wasn’t the way a stretch of woods this size was supposed to sound. He drew a tight breath and held it for several seconds, hoping to hear more than just the cold wind’s hiss. Nothing. Damn, but this was starting to make his balls shrivel up.

  “What the hell’s goin’ on out here?” he asked just for the pleasure of a voice, any voice. Looking around in a slow circle, he spotted a clearing peeking his way from over near the bottom of Overtree’s incline. It had been years and then a few decades since he had been in the woods, but he just didn’t like the way this was looking at all. That clearing hadn’t been there before. He would have remembered an area that large that stood alone. Even Chuck had brought a girl or two out here for sneaking kisses and hugs when he was younger and that clearing would have been a perfect place for such nocturnal activities.

  It took a long while for him to gather up the courage to go forward into the silent woods. Eventually he decided it was time to look the clearing over. Chuck Hanson started walking towards the last minutes of his life, pausing only long enough to light a cigarette.

  6

  Starting her day off right was always a pleasure for Cassie. And the first part of starting the day off right was a shower, breakfast and a cup of hot tea. She’d tried starting off with coffee once and had almost retched on the bitter flavor. After she had taken care of the morning’s essentials, Cassie traded her robe for her running outfit and waited for Mark to show up.

  When Mark arrived his predictable five minutes late, she ignored the frosty glare of her mother and father, waved a goodbye to them and ran out to meet her beau. Mark flashed a smile meant for her alone, one that she returned as the two of them started on their run. Once upon a time it had been difficult for Mark to match Cassie’s pace, these days the opposite was true. His long powerful gait was effortless and far quicker than it used to be. Cassie liked that, the challenge of keeping up with Mark added a sense of friendly competition that Cassie missed from the days in the gymnastics classes. By the time they had passed the Basilisk and were getting ready to turn back the other way, Cassie realized that he actually was holding back for her, if only a little.

  When they had finished their morning run, Mark looked at Cassie’s house and risked a quick peck on the cheek. They were going to meet again after showering. Today’s agenda included going back to Mark’s and working on a new idea for a collaborative book. It was best to leave the writing at Mark’s for fear her parents would go through the ceiling in a fit of rage. Maybe if the story could be accepted by a publisher, she could tell her parents about her plans. It was safer that way; she had suspicions her mom and dad wouldn’t hesitate to send her off to a private school, the type used for disciplinary proble
ms, in Denver if she didn’t have proof that she could make a living as a writer.

  Cassie showered quickly and got ready to meet with Mark. They were already on chapter 8 in the outline of the book and so far it read well in her eyes. It was possibly a bit clichéd to write a book about a haunted house, but the story had a few good twists in her opinion.

  Lately, Cassie had become a bit more optimistic about the story, or maybe she was just optimistic about writing the story with Mark. Either way she was happy.

  Twenty minutes later she was on her way, unaware that a stranger in town was watching her every move. Jonathan Crowley looked at the girl as she jogged by and followed. He needed confirmation on his suspicions before he made any moves.

  7

  Breakfast had been awkward. Jackie ate in embarrassed silence and Rick couldn’t think of any way to break that silence. In a fit of desperation, he mentioned Crowley. “How old is Jonathan Crowley? He didn’t look much over thirty-five.”

  Jackie looked his way and he could see her gratitude for any safe subject. Neither of them had really intended to go to bed together, it had just sort of happened and neither of them had thought about protection until well after the fact. “I think he’s somewhere in his fifties, but you’re right, he just doesn’t look that old.”

  “Well preserved man.”

  “Actually, I was wondering if that might be his son or something, the man I heard about was more…I dunno, scholarly is the best word I can think of. He was the type to always have a book in his face and a pocket protector in his shirt, if you catch my meaning.”