Under the Overtree

by James A. Moore

  Rick stared at the fiery light from far above, growing closer and closer. His eyes should have been seared by the powerful sickly glow, instead they simply absorbed knowledge. Before the Fire could hit the earth, it burned itself out. From the center of what had been a raging sun, something fell to the ground. It landed gently, falling at his feet.

  Rick turned away from the oddity for a second, looking at the image of Chuck Hanson and frowning. “I thought for sure that must be the cause of the Overtree, a meteor hitting the mountain top or something.”

  No. Again that little chuckle. No that’s another story, one not even I am privy to. Keep watching, Rick.

  Rick stared at the small lump that had fallen to the ground. What it was he couldn’t have said, but where it fell was obvious. It had fallen where the Stone now grew from the ground near Overtree. The lump shimmied, forced itself into the ground and hid from his sight.

  Centuries passed in the blink of an eye and the whole barren land formed life, things not seen before by mankind and long gone before the first human walked, strode across the earth and into the shades of the past as Rick Lewis watched. and then the Stone broke the ground, rising like the first shoots from some malignant seed.

  It was a cancerous thing, but unable to grow, it seemed, without help. It sat and waited, until a lonely scared young boy was beaten and lay bloodied across its surface. Twice before then it moved, sending strange mockeries from its veined surface to wreak havoc. Once it was thwarted by fire, once Rick could not see what stopped its attempts to grow, but it had seemingly been stopped.

  Now it grew, like a fungus rising from a bloated corpse, it seethed and grew. Bloating, reaching heights it had never achieved before. Rick had the repulsive notion that it would soon explode like a puffball, sending millions of spores into the air. He shivered at the thought.

  He was back in the woods, just as he knew they really were. He never wanted to find out in person, but he knew that soon he would do just that. “Is that what really happened? The Mushroom From Outer Space?”

  Hanson smiled, shook his mane of brown hair. No, but it’s close enough. It’s all you or I could hope to understand. All I can say for sure is that it’s alive and it wants to grow somehow. Rick, you can’t let that happen. Please, stop this thing from growing anymore.

  “How? How can I stop it? Chuck, I don’t even know what it is.”

  Chuck Hanson faded from view and the woods soon followed, as Rick awoke to the sound of Stacy Calhoun unlocking the cell door. She was pretty, but at that moment, even with tear-stains marking her face and a nose made red from crying, she looked lovelier than any woman he had ever seen.

  “I ’spect you’ll be wanting to leave now, Rick. Go on home.” She turned away without another word, walking slowly back to where her desk sat. Aside from Rick, she was the only person there. Neither of them said a word as Rick walked out of the Sheriff’s offices and out towards the small house he had called his own since moving to Summitville.

  Rick desperately wanted to leave town, wanted to run from the troubles as quickly as his legs would carry him. Instead, he looked into the phone book for the address of P.J. Sanderson. He remembered no words, could think of nothing said by his ghostly friend, but he knew that Chuck wanted him and Sanderson together.

  The author answered on the first ring and somehow Rick knew the man had been waiting for his call.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  1

  Despite her best efforts Cassie could not find a comfortable way to lie on the bed. She felt feverish, her body ached. Her entire body felt like it was sunburned, inside and out. She wanted rest; she wanted even more to be with Mark.

  That decision made, Cassie climbed out of her traitorous bed and started pulling on clothes. Jeans and a thin tee shirt were all she had the patience for, more than that and she would have felt constricted. Below her, she could hear the sounds of her parents arguing politely in the living room. Heavens forbid that they should argue like real people, or in any way reflect the fact that they had feelings. Thinking about her parents was starting to piss her off, so she thought of Mark instead.

  Cassie had no desire to be interrogated by her parents, she slipped from the second story window. She landed roughly, hard enough to have sprained her ankles at the very least a month ago. Now the impact didn’t even faze her, like the young man on her mind, Cassie Monroe had been going through changes as well.

  It was all she could do to walk, her muscles jumped under her skin and made most of her body feel as if someone had carefully removed all of her bones. She acknowledged the need to see Mark, the actual physical addiction that burned through her body only on the faintest levels of consciousness. Mostly she simply stumbled on, glancing off of whatever obstacle came into her path. Around her the shadows moved, tiny entities that gently guided her fever-burned body towards the woods. Towards the pulsating Stone that rested just under the Overtree.

  2

  Lisa Scarrabelli writhed on her bed, mind locked in a hideous vision of the atrocities that had been done to her. She whimpered in her sleep as she remembered what Mark Howell had done to her, hands drawing into talons and clawing roughly at the sheets. Her teeth were bared in a rictus of pain and fury, her brows knitted under eyes that flashed everywhere, seeking for a place to escape from the nightmares that she was forced to endure.

  Lisa felt her body violated again, felt all of the pain that she had suffered at Mark Howell’s hands repeated for the seventh time that night. Each time the dream-visions started again, fear was burned out of her, replaced with a fiery hatred that grew stronger and stronger.

  Tony Scarrabelli, asleep on the chair at Lisa’s vanity table, as he had been every night since she had been allowed out of the hospital, awoke to the sound of rending fabric. He swiped the sleep from his eyes with a tired hand and then gazed at his sister. What he saw made him awaken almost instantaneously and was a vision he was certain he would never forget.

  Lisa stood atop her bed, holding the tattered remains of her covers in her hands. Her eyes were closed and her entire body was coiled with tension. Every muscle on her frame stood out in perfect relief as she stepped purposefully from the bed and started towards the door of her bedroom. Tony was too shocked to try stopping her. Tony watched as she opened the door and strode from the room, an angry Amazon warrior, or perhaps a Valkyrie, on her way to do battle with the enemy. Tony didn’t stop her, instead he grabbed the cellular phone in the living room and dialed Tyler’s number as he followed her out the front door.

  Tony had to move quickly to cover the extra distance as she opened the driver’s side door to his car and started the engine. He made the passenger’s side door and climbed in even as the car was starting to move. Tyler answered the phone on the first ring and somehow Tony wasn’t surprised.

  3

  A great portion of Summitville’s population went to sleep at the ridiculously early hour of nine o’clock that night. The only exceptions were the pieces in a game they could not hope to fully understand. P.J. Sanderson met with Rick Lewis outside of the Basilisk. Neither of them carried any weapons, save the flashlights that both clutched tightly in their hands. There was little discussion, both were far too nervous to try speaking in more than short, brusque sentences. They had compared notes earlier, talking for a long time on the phone, before P.J. Finally spoke up about what neither wanted to think about. Whatever was happening was obviously coming to a head, the situation had gone on for far too long already and the only certainty was that they needed to stop the thing that rested in the woods near Overtree.

  Less than fifteen minutes later they headed towards the sheriff’s offices, stopping only long enough to grab two of the shotguns from the weapons locker that Chuck Hanson had never bothered to keep locked. After getting halfway to the woods, they remembered to get the shells for the weapons and turned back to the sheriff’s offices for just that reason. Neither of them paid the least bit of attention to the slumbering form of Stacy Calhoun
. She reciprocated, staying soundly asleep through their noisy search for shotgun shells.

  The nervous men stopped at the parking lot of Westphalen High, at approximately the same time that Tony and Tyler followed Lisa Scarrabelli into the woods. If all went according to Crowley’s plans, they would meet up at around the same time, near the Stone that grew even larger as it started moving its own pieces into place…

  4

  Jonathan Crowley walked into the darkened woods as if it was noon and he was perfectly at home. To anyone that could have seen him, he would have looked perfectly at ease. Truth to tell, he was more than a little nervous; this was one of the rare times when he was almost certain that he was walking to his death. Naturally the knowledge that he could soon be deceased did nothing to stop his smile from growing larger with anticipation of the battle to come. The thought of wiping the Stone and the Folk from the face of the earth was more than enough to make up for a little fear and as for death, well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  A blur of motion off to the right caught Crowley’s attention. As he looked that way, towards the center of the Overtree, he saw the column of pure white mist lift into the air above the placid waters. The mist was unnaturally thick, ropy tendrils lifted from the depths of the quickly coalescing fog and spread outwards, expanding the fog in a solid wall as they merged. In less than a minute, the column had expanded to three times its original thickness and it showed no sign of slowing.

  Every town, no matter how pristine, has its secrets. It wasn’t Crowley’s place to even begin guessing all of the secrets of Summitville. But one of those secrets had just decided to force itself from the waters and it looked intent on Crowley’s demise. There were forms buried in that thick mist, shades or actual corpses, and they were coming towards John Crowley with all the moans and shrieks of dead things that could find no peace. Their bodies were encompassed in a Kirlian aura the same color as the flesh that fell from their forms, a queasy gray that bordered on the color of aspen trees in the late autumn. The increasing howls of pain that came from them told Crowley that they were coming closer with more certainty than the slight increases in their dimensions.

  For the briefest of seconds, Crowley was afraid. He knew the fears that any normal person would know when approached by dead things that refused to stay dead. Then he remembered who he was and what he really was.

  Crowley smiled as he approached the edge of the lake. His smile grew even wider as he considered that perhaps this was all that the Folk could think of to scare him. By the time he and the specters met in combat, Crowley’s laughs were drowning out their screams of damnation.

  5

  Mark Howell lay in his special place, comforted by the sweet dreams that encased him, unaware that the final changes were taking place in his body. The Folk did not touch him, They were far too busy dealing with Crowley and his interlopers. Instead, the stone upon which he rested made the last of the changes itself.

  The granite like substance liquefied beneath him and where his body met with the viscous fluid, his body was peeled away, making room for the raping tentacles of rock that buried themselves in his body, in his soul. All that had been Mark Howell was removed, replaced by the alien thoughts that the Stone wanted his lifeless shell to hold. The Stone finished the final changes, moving more quickly than the Folk could ever hope to. It sealed the ruptured, ravaged flesh of Mark Howell’s body back together, leaving no sign that it had ever been disturbed.

  When Mark Howell again opened his eyes, all thoughts of friendship, all thoughts of past pleasures and pains were gone, removed like a cancer and replaced with a mind as alien to this flesh as the creature that had created it. Sky blue eyes looked upon the world and found it wanting. Less than a hundred yards away stood Cassie Monroe, ready at last to join with her mate.

  6

  Lisa stormed through the woods, ignoring all pleas from Tony and Tyler, plodding through the natural undergrowth and into the unnatural writhing mass of green that surrounded the Stone in its resting place.

  Tyler was bleeding from a dozen small cuts and grazes and beside him Tony was faring no better. Every time they came within a few feet of Lisa, obstacles appeared where there were none a second before. Tyler did his best to avoid the roots and small stones that seemed to literally grow out of the ground where he placed his feet, but to no avail. Beside him, Tony again fell to his knees, grunting in pain and immediately climbing to his feet and following his sister. Tyler watched Tony’s every move carefully, his glasses had fallen off and disappeared almost a quarter of a mile ago and with the speed at which Lisa walked, oddly unobstructed by the treacherous flooring of the woods, he had no time to continue looking for them. Without Tony’s blurred form beside him, Tyler would have been lost long ago.

  The two scrabbled desperately to keep up with Lisa, losing more and more ground by the minute. Finally, they saw her break between two of the fog shrouded trees into a clearing and with renewed energy charged towards the opening. An opening that was suddenly, irrevocably, gone. The trees had moved, seemed to shrug themselves towards each other and then it was all gone, nothing left of the clearing, just a wall of foliage too closely knit together for even Tyler’s frame to squeeze through.

  “Fuck! God Damn it all!” Tony’s voice was incredibly loud in the odd silence of the woods; even without the clarity that his glasses brought, Tyler could see the frustration on Tony’s face. The two stood together, staring at the brooding barricade before them, wondering just how they were going to get past it, how they were ever going to find Lisa again. If they were ever going to see Lisa again.

  7

  The silence between Rick Lewis and P.J. Sanderson was uncomfortable. Both were locked into thoughts of how they could destroy the demons held within the woods and equally into thoughts of Chuck Hanson. Both mourned the man they had each called their best friend at different times in life, both wondered if they could have done more for him during his time in their lives.

  The two were so lost in thought, that they made it much easier for the Folk to read them, to find what made them afraid and to imitate that fear. The first of the fears to manifest was the deepest rooted fear in Rick’s mind, a fear that even Rick himself had forgotten about.

  It started as an itch, directly after a slight scraping of his arm against one of the skeletal aspen trees that made so substantial a portion of the woods under the lake. Rick shifted the shotgun he carried under his right arm into a comfortable position and then reached over to scratch at the distraction. As his nails struck the flesh of his arm, he cried out, dropping the loaded firearm and clutching at the burning pain that launched itself through his wrist and up to his elbow.

  P.J. looked over at the doctor with concern, fearing that he had been attacked by something. He was relieved to see that there were no vampires surrounding his associate, no werewolves feasting on his neck. Then he saw the wound. P.J.’s eyes grew wide at the sight of the blood flowing from the gaping wound on Rick’s left arm, awestruck by the flaps of tattered flash that draped from the wound. “Dear god, Lewis, what have you done to yourself?” P.J. set down his own .12 gauge and walked over to where the man was clasping his arm tightly, trying to slow the considerable flow of blood with his free hand.

  “Unh, damn, what the hell did I do?” Lewis was looking down at his arm with equal surprise, looking more puzzled than pained. “Shit, I don’t think I even brought a band aid with me. Shine the light over here, would you?” P.J. Sanderson did so gladly, happy to have finally met a doctor that didn’t panic at the sight of his own blood.

  The light shone onto the wound and Lewis removed his hand, allowing for a undisturbed viewing of the carnage. Sanderson was appalled, the gash slid along the full length of the man’s forearm and looked to be about three inches deep. “Rick, what the devil did you do? Never mind that, we’ve got to get you to the clinic, as quickly as we can.”

  The two men turned away from their target in the woods, pausing only long enough for
the author to grab up both shotguns. Before they had gone ten feet, Rick Lewis dropped to his knees, squealing out his surprise at the sudden increase in pain. Sanderson set down both of the shotguns and again grabbed the flashlight to see what was wrong, peering at the wound intently, along with Lewis.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Lewis laughed slightly, hysteria edging his voice, as the two men looked at the odd patch of white that was now in the very heart of the wound. Before their eyes it started growing. For all the world, the only thought that came to Sanderson’s mind was that someone had filled the wound with shaving cream. The white patch grew in size and forced the flowing blood out of the cut, before bringing the crimson flow to a trickle and then stopping the leakage entirely.

  Lewis looked at Sanderson with an odd sort of smile. “It doesn’t even hurt, it feels just fine. Heh, maybe there’s someone on our side in all of this crap.”

  “Don’t you think we should get to the clinic?”

  Lewis looked at the wound, touched the rapidly stiffening lump and shrugged. “We came this far and I don’t think I’ll get the guts to try this a second time. Something stopped the bleeding and something stopped the pain. For all know, the whole think is knitting itself together while we speak. It even feels that way, the way your skin itches under a scab. I feel good enough to go on, if you do.”