by Zoje Stage
Eleanor Queen traipsed off toward the undisturbed snow near the back of the house.
“Not too far, love.” Her daughter either didn’t hear or didn’t care that she’d spoken. Orla stepped closer to the garage, where she could keep an eye on both of them. She looked upward, but couldn’t figure out what to focus on. The sky? The heavens beyond? The woods? “If You’re listening…we’re not going anywhere. Just outside, getting some fresh air.”
“Who are you talking to, Mama?” Tycho asked.
“I’m not sure. Sometimes what happens here is confusing to us. And maybe we’re confusing to…whatever’s here.”
“Can I try?”
Orla wanted to say no, afraid of what Tycho might blurt out. He plowed through the snow to stand beside her, all smiles and swinging arms. “Yes, but be very nice.”
“Hi, world!” Tycho yelled to the sky. “Hi, snow!”
“Thank You for giving us another lovely day.” Though she didn’t yell as loudly as Tycho, she projected her voice outward. “We’re not going anywhere. See? We’re just stretching our legs, enjoying the day. We don’t always know what You want…we don’t understand. I’m just trying to keep my children safe.”
“We don’t have any more milk,” Tycho bellowed. “Can you rain us some milk?”
“That’s a great idea, but I don’t know if It can—”
“Mama?” Eleanor Queen had her back to them.
Orla hadn’t meant to stop observing her. “Eleanor Queen?”
Her daughter pointed at something. Orla tramped over, and Tycho bounded behind in her footprints.
“What is it?” But it was easy to follow the precise trajectory of her daughter’s outstretched hand. The towering tree. The ancient pine.
“It’s listening, Mama.” Her fear was tinged with awe. “It’s listening to you.”
“The…the tree. It’s the tree?” She buzzed with excitement; a puzzle piece shifted, locked into place.
Eleanor Queen had a glazed look, part concentration, part…absence. “It’s here.”
“Are you sure?” But even to Orla, it made sense. After their first visit to the land, it wasn’t the surrounding hills or the house that started appearing in Shaw’s paintings; it was the tree.
“I think so. Yes. Nearby.” She took off running through the deep snow toward the forest and the giant pine.
“Eleanor Queen, wait!” Orla grabbed Tycho’s hand and chased after her. “You can’t just run into the woods—you could get lost!”
The trees were so dense. Orla couldn’t forget how Shaw had expected to follow the trail of his own boot prints, but they had disappeared that day. And so had the towering tree. Eleanor Queen wasn’t slowing down. The bright sky faded under the canopy of tight, bare branches and evergreens. The temperature dropped. The birdsong stopped.
Or maybe it was all her imagination. Neither of the kids seemed frightened.
Tycho sang little rhymes even as Orla half dragged him forward, not wanting to let the red of Eleanor Queen’s snow pants slip from her sight.
Her eyes were so fixed on her daughter, ten paces ahead of her, Orla didn’t notice at first when she reached the great pine. It was Eleanor Queen’s absorption, her stillness and slack-jawed wonder, that made Orla stop and really look.
It didn’t appear exactly as it had the first time they’d come to see it. The graying bark was even more fissured…like the glacier. Though, perhaps because it had been made of ice, living water, the glacier had looked more alive, its fissures like vents—gills—breathing. The tree, however, wasn’t faring well. Glancing around, Orla saw debris from the upper branches—twigs and woody bits of its skin—scattered atop the snow across a wide perimeter. She tried to shutter the word dying from her conscious mind. Yet a part of her was sure: It knew. It was aware of Its own impending death.
Could this be the source of all their problems?
Tycho pulled away from her to slap his mittened hand against the bark. “Nice tree!”
“Don’t touch it!” Orla said, tugging him back.
“Why?”
“Eleanor Queen, is it safe to touch? Is this…is this It?”
The girl only gazed upward.
“I love this biggest tree!” said Tycho. “It’s a million years old, right, Ele-Queen?”
“It’s dying,” the girl said softly, full of regret.
“I think you’re right,” Orla whispered to her daughter, hoping to avoid upsetting her son. Not that he loved the tree as much as he’d loved his father, but still.
With Tycho’s hand in hers, Orla eased him along so they could stay close to his sister as she moved around the tree, gazing up, listening. A soft breeze stirred, and swirling patterns danced on the surface of the snow. Orla thought of the choreography notation, of bird tracks, of ghost writing—of a hundred invisible hands trying to spell out their desire. The more she watched the pictographs appear, fine lines etching across a thin layer of snow, the more she wondered…
“Bean?” The deeper question in her voice brought her daughter back around to investigate. “Do you think that means anything? Could it be…”
Ghosts? As Eleanor Queen knelt to study the emerging patterns, Orla went quiet. Finally, the girl shook her head. “I don’t…it doesn’t feel like anything. Unlike—”
She stood up, reaching out to touch the tree, and Orla instinctively grabbed her coat and pulled her back. “I don’t think you should—”
“I have to. It’s here—in here somewhere.”
Orla didn’t want to let her get so close. But this was what they’d come out for. Answers. And the sooner they knew what they were dealing with, the sooner they could leave. Like a blind person reading a message in braille, Eleanor Queen let her hand roam over the tree’s trunk. Curious to know how it felt, Orla imitated her. But all she felt was rugged bark. Brittle. Primeval.
At her feet, already bored, Tycho used a stick to scribble alongside the mysterious etchings. Maybe it was just the wind blowing around small clusters of snow and chaff, leaving markings in its wake.
“Oh.” Eleanor Queen, startled, abruptly lifted her hand from the bark.
“What is it? Did It…”
Her daughter turned to look at her, wide-eyed with wonder. “It—the thing—isn’t the tree. It’s the thing inside it.”
“What does that mean?” Dread made her squirm. Orla hated that she believed in any part of what was happening. And that she’d allowed—no, encouraged—her daughter to participate in it. The urge to flee surged through her again. Maybe if she took them straight through the trees, they’d reach the road. Bypass the house and the driveway and plunge cross-country toward the nearest exit off their property. But instead she asked, “What’s the thing inside it?”
“I think it lives here, with the tree. It’s not the tree, it’s something else.”
“The thing lives in the tree?” Like the human figures in Shaw’s paintings, embedded within his trees. What had he sensed, known, seen? Had he mistaken the imagery that came to him as subject matter for his artwork when he was supposed to have gleaned something else?
Her twenty-first-century self fought the urge to reach for her dead phone. She wanted to Google tree spirits. Entities that live in old trees. Malicious forest demons. Something. Anything that might get them an answer. She was ready to accept any supernatural possibility if it would help her keep the children safe. Help them get away.
“What does It want from us? Will It tell you?” She turned away from her daughter and looked upward. The branches towering above her looked so skeletal, so doomed. Her small breakfast somersaulted, rotten with jitters. Unnerved, she was tempted to laugh, knock a yoo-hoo on the thick wood: Anybody home? She was aware of her children watching her. How had this become their lives? “Why don’t You want us to leave?” she asked.
If she understood what It wanted, she could find a solution. Or strike a bargain, perhaps? Reason with It?
Maybe they were close.
A
poisonous thought blackened her momentary optimism: Had Shaw accepted what It wanted, if he’d remained open to whatever It needed him to do, probably none of this would be happening. He’d mistakenly believed that killing himself would spare his family, not understanding that the only way to spare his family was to surrender himself. And maybe, after his freak-out, the thing had found him unworthy and switched all Its attention to Eleanor Queen. Shaw had resisted and denied. And that’s what killed him; to blame his denial was better than blaming herself. Orla hated him for a moment. Everything was his fault—the move, the snare from which they couldn’t escape. What sort of father let his little girl take on the battles he couldn’t handle?
The ferocity of her thoughts startled her. Of course she didn’t hate him, and he couldn’t have known how their lives would unravel. It was grief and hysteria talking. Hunger. But she couldn’t take the time to further examine such resentments, not when she believed they were on the right track. They needed to understand what this tree was trying to tell them. And she’d promised Eleanor Queen her help.
“You’re doing really well, Bean. It isn’t too scary, is it?”
“A little.” She extended her hand back toward the trunk. “I can hear it better. It’s starting to get clearer…”
The part of Orla that had seen too many horror films expected her daughter to go wide-eyed and rigid as a diabolic force poured its energy into her; the part of her that couldn’t get away from this place fast enough hoped it would open a channel of clear and intelligible communication—Follow steps A and B and I will set you free.
But with her hand back on the tree, Eleanor Queen only looked more perplexed.
“What is it?” Orla asked.
“Around and around. Patterns, spirals. I don’t know what it means.”
Orla, again, looked at the markings on the snow, now half obliterated by Tycho’s doodles. Is that what Eleanor Queen was seeing inside her head? Feathery writing? Is that what the tree—the thing that lived there with the tree—was trying to explain in whatever way It could, hoping they could decipher the message? “Are they like these marks? Is that what you see in your mind?”
As if answering her, a gust came and erased the swirls. Tycho yelped, surprised, as his writing stick blew from his hand.
“No. Stop being so distracted.” How annoyed the girl sounded. And for a flash Orla wondered if she was only getting in the way of her daughter’s efforts. But then Eleanor Queen’s little shoulders slumped, and a weariness settled in; it was taking a toll on her.
“I’m sorry, I’m just trying to find…clues. Signs. We can try again another time.” Orla gently pulled Eleanor Queen away and refused to be disappointed. “You made progress, don’t you think?”
She huddled next to her mother. Nodded. Orla held her tight. Her daughter’s skin looked so papery, so pale, so unequipped to protect her against something so formidable.
“You okay? Should we not have tried?” Orla asked, willing herself to be a better shield, a protector. What sort of mother, aware of her daughter’s mission, didn’t provide her with the defenses she needed?
“No…we have to try.”
“I’m sorry.” Orla kissed her head. “I wish I could sense It the way you do so you wouldn’t have to do this at all.”
“I know, Mama.”
Orla clung to Eleanor Queen as they made their way back through the woods—their boot prints an easy path to follow. The girl drooped at her side, dragging her feet. Tycho tried to bounce away, to talk to other trees, but Orla kept a hand on his coat so he couldn’t stray more than a step or two.
“You can run around in the yard when we get back, okay? Not here.” She turned to her daughter. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, just…thinking.”
“You’re still trying to hear It, aren’t you?”
“It’s important.”
“I don’t want you to tire yourself, or—don’t obsess on—”
“It’s not just important to us. It’s important to it.”
Orla had believed she was onto something with the dying girl and her pentagram. But a thing that lived in a tree? And Eleanor Queen still referred to it—she clearly didn’t sense anything the least bit girl-like. “All the more reason not to obsess. Eleanor Queen, we don’t know what we’re dealing with—”
“But the sooner I understand—I want to go home!”
“Are we going home?” Tycho asked, full of pep.
“We’re going back to our house, not the apartment. Remember, we can’t go back there. But while you’re playing outside I’ll see what I can do about the garage. We can’t leave it like that, it’s a hazard.” She tried to make her thoughts like a deck of cards, flipping them facedown so only the innocuous design repeated on the back was visible. She hid the image of herself shoveling out the car. She hid the image of driving her children to Pittsburgh, to their Lola and Lolo. If only they could get there by Christmas. Her parents would be so surprised, but they’d shower their grandchildren with love, help to soften the trauma of all they’d experienced. But she didn’t voice it, for fear of disappointing them.
“Look!” Tycho gasped as they emerged from the woods into the clearing around their house.
Orla shielded her eyes when they left the shade of the trees. A cluster of snow rollers had formed in the yard. Some were small, only a foot high. But the larger ones were the size of the hay bales they so resembled. Tycho pulled from her grasp and ran ahead to explore, more interested than he’d been the first time.
“So many, Mama!”
Indeed. This time the phenomenon struck her as unnatural. They’d formed by rolling in the same direction. Away from the house. Toward the path they’d used to enter the forest. An unsettling welcome party.
The wind gusted and all of the snow rollers crawled toward them.
Tycho screamed and galloped back to his mother.
They stood where they were for a moment and watched. Along came another exhalation of wind, and the rolls inched toward them again.
“They’re gonna get us!” He clambered up her side.
Orla lifted a hysterical Tycho into her arms. The aurora borealis hadn’t frightened him. Nor the much more perilous glacier. But every time the wind made one of the rolls move, he screamed.
“Tycho, love, it’s okay—it’s just the wind.”
Just the wind and a little help from the weather-loving thing that lived in their giant tree.
“I think…” Eleanor Queen strode out among the snowy field of rollers. “It’s not trying to scare you, it…I think it thinks it’s playing. It just wants to play—”
The wind gusts turned hard and frequent, increasing the movement of the rolled snow.
“Mama, help!”
Orla had no choice but to flee toward the house with her frightened son rigid in her arms, skirting the snow mounds in her way. Behind her, Eleanor Queen shrieked an alarm.
“Eleanor Queen?”
Orla stopped on the porch, Tycho still on her hip. Behind her, Eleanor Queen barreled through the obstacle course and chaotic wind. The snow rollers spun around, picking up speed as they chased her. Orla set Tycho down, ready to plunge into the minefield to help her daughter. But Eleanor Queen was quick. She leapt onto the porch, reaching for her mother’s hand. Orla opened the door and the children scrambled into the house.
Beyond the steps, the bundles of snow lay in wait. A trick of the icy particles misting off their arched shapes gave the illusion they were breathing. Panting. A pack of wild dogs, different sizes, alert and hungry.
They wouldn’t let her leave.
She wished she understood how It did these things, and she still wasn’t certain if It was transforming the land—the snow, the sky—or their minds. It felt real. Looked real—real enough that she’d mistaken her husband for a polar bear. But how was it possible? No mere ghost would have so much power over terrain or people, right? And what was It trying to say, or do? Its desperation seemed obvious now, and lac
king other evidence, she assumed there was a connection between Its dramatic behavior and the quickening decline of the great white pine where It “lived.”
The pack of snow rollers tracked her every movement as she lingered on the steps. They didn’t have eyes, but she felt them observing her. Judging her. Waiting to pounce if she did the wrong thing. Orla wanted to swear at them—at the fucking being. It wasn’t fair that she couldn’t understand It but It could read her. So much for her plan to finish shoveling out the car. Speed away. It was too easy to imagine the horde rolling up on her, smothering her. Making orphans of her children.
No, she knew better.
“Okay. We’re trying.” She held out her hands: Stop. Raised them: Innocent. “We’re trying.”
The snow rolls waited, an impassive audience. For the next act—
Orla exited the stage and disappeared into the house.
31
Before she left the city, Orla read a book by a Korean-American who’d gone to Pyongyang to teach at what was considered an elite school. North Korea was a fascination she and Shaw had shared; they watched every documentary they could find about the secretive, authoritarian nation. The young people were so sheltered, forced like meat scraps through a grinder into a homogenous consistency. Even their ideas of friendship haunted Orla; “buddies” were assigned and they looked out for each other, but what of free will? What of love? It was all so very Orwellian—eliminate language to eliminate thoughts, except nothing can permanently suppress human emotion. That would require some science fiction tinkering, the surgical removal of an essential part of the soul.
