December's Thorn

by Phillip DePoy

  “But the point is,” I began.

  “But the point is,” she interrupted, “that you came back here. You didn’t stay in the city, you didn’t move to Wales or France; you didn’t travel the world. You came back to Blue Mountain.”

  “But you’re interpreting it as a psychological response,” I objected, “whereas it was almost exclusively an economic necessity. My parents had left me this house, a small bit of money, which, as it turned out, was not so small, and in the intervening years I— look, coming back to Blue Mountain was, at the time I left the university, the path of least resistance. I was a little depressed and it was Occam’s answer, the simplest, the most essential. But since that time I’ve— life here hasn’t exactly been boring. My old college professor tried to kill me here, a witch saved my life, I met an albino hit man and the ghost of a preacher; I lived through a coma and a surreal, Jungian exploration of my recent ancestors. And, I got engaged.”

  She turned away from the fire, leaned her elbows on the coffee table, and faced me.

  “See, this is exactly my point,” she said. “You’re a spook magnet. That’s why all these odd things have happened to you up here over the course of the last eight years or so.”

  “Christ.” I sighed.

  “No, I mean it,” she insisted. “Here’s how I think it works. All bodies, all human bodies, and maybe all living things—they all have an electromagnetic field. It’s what you read on an EKG and an EEG machine.”

  “I’m familiar,” I assured her.

  “And each of these fields,” she went on, “has a specific signature, a wavelength, a pattern—a personality. Yours, believe me, is particularly magnetic, or attractive to the more bizarre elements, people, and phenomena that surround you. That’s why you can’t sleep. That’s why so many strange things have happened to you since you came home. You have to at least admit that a lot of strange things have happened to you since you came home.”

  I didn’t want to answer her.

  “Fever,” she continued, her voice lowered, “I’ve done the research. The first day you came back from the city to this house, there was a dead body on your front porch. And as recently as last night, one of two strange things happened,” she said. “Either you hallucinated a manifestation of your young mother, or a stranger who thinks she’s married to you appeared in your house. I mean, either way—come on.”

  I sat up. I tried not to think about all the things I’d seen in my house that had not, actually, been there in the strictest physical sense. I tried not to think about all the people who’d tried to kill me, all the people who’d been killed, all the unexplainably twisted events that had, indeed, swirled around me, a maelstrom of dark matter, a turning, an ever-increasing gyre expanding around a center that wouldn’t hold.

  But trying not to think about something is exactly the same as thinking about it too much: eventually the walls collapse, the mind gives in, and there they are, the events you were hoping to solve—or avoid—sloshing in a pool all around you, a dark pool.

  “And— and you think there’s something you can do to help that situation?” I asked as calmly as I could manage.

  She brought to bear, somehow, the most intense concentration I’d ever felt from another human being, and I was her entire object.

  “I did it for myself,” she whispered harshly. “I know the way out.”

  11

  Night had arrived by the time Lucinda knocked on my door. Dr. Nelson and I had spent the entire afternoon arguing, wrangling, laughing, complaining, and, in general, getting acquainted. We had settled into a much more comfortable, albeit wary, approach to each other.

  Lucinda came crashing through the front door carrying two bags of groceries. “What’s those squad cars still doing in your yard?” she demanded. “I thought Skid would be gone by now. What’s going on?”

  I got up and took one of the grocery bags.

  “Come on in,” I said, “and I’ll tell you. Everything’s fine.”

  “Everything’s fine,” Dr. Nelson repeated.

  Lucinda looked at me, then at Dr. Nelson, and seemed to notice right away that we’d gotten very comfortable.

  “Good,” she said, absently kissing my cheek, still agitated. “You’uns getting on better, at least. That’s good.”

  For some reason I’d never understood, Lucinda laid on her mountain accent more thickly around urban company. When Dr. Andrews, my rugby-playing Shakespeare scholar friend from the university I’d abandoned, came to visit, she dialed up the quaint phraseology as far as it would go. It was curious to me that she was doing the same thing with Dr. Nelson.

  “He still won’t use my first name,” Dr. Nelson complained.

  Lucinda went into the kitchen and set her bag down on the counter before she noticed the damaged tiles.

  “What the hell!” she said suddenly. “This is where they shot up your kitchen?”

  “Yes,” I said quickly, coming into the kitchen and setting my bag down.

  But when she turned to face me, she noticed the plywood over the window and interrupted my explanation.

  “Look at that window!” she roared.

  “That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier on the phone,” I said, taking hold of her shoulders. “A boy, a young boy, shot a hunting rifle through the window and into the kitchen earlier.”

  “But that was hours ago,” she raved.

  “Well, see, I called Skidmore,” I said, deliberately calm, “and he came over, and then we went out—Dr. Nelson and Skidmore and I—and now Skidmore and Melissa may have found the place where the boy is hiding out—”

  But again she interrupted me. “Hiding out?”

  “There— there’s a cave,” I stammered.

  Dr. Nelson swept into the kitchen and began talking. Her words were lightning fast and preternaturally calm. “A boy shot at me through this window. We called Skidmore. The three of us searched the woods. Fever saw the strange woman again. Skidmore and Melissa are currently examining a cave down the slope behind this house because that may be where the boy and the woman are staying. They should be back any minute now. Everything’s under control.”

  Somehow the way Dr. Nelson had spoken seemed to calm Lucinda. I felt it too. It was almost as if we’d been hypnotized, just a bit—if there was such a thing as a dash of hypnosis.

  “Now,” Dr. Nelson continued, a little slower, “let’s sit down at the kitchen table and have a cup of tea or a drink or something. Skidmore and Melissa will be back soon, and we’ll figure everything out.”

  Lucinda blinked. “Fever,” she complained, but that was all she said.

  “Tea?” I suggested.

  “Actually,” Dr. Nelson said, “I wouldn’t mind something stronger.”

  Lucinda sat down. “Tell the truth? Me too. I had a really hard day.”

  I started to say something, because it was so unusual for Lucinda to have liquor except on special occasions, and never on a weeknight. But I looked at her profile, and I could tell that she had something on her mind.

  “I do have some superior apple brandy,” I suggested. “It’s made from a three-hundred-year-old recipe by a family that lives within five miles of this house. This particular vintage has been aged in oak for five years, corked, and set aside in a cave for another ten. It is the equal of any Boulard or du Pays d’Auge Normandy Calvados, and the best I have ever tasted anywhere in the world.”

  “Glowing reference,” Dr. Nelson said, smiling. “I’ll start with five glasses and see where that gets me.”

  “It is good,” Lucinda said softly.

  I went immediately to the cupboard over the refrigerator and pulled down one of the bottles. The top of the bottle had been wound around with brown twine, and the cork was firmly in the bottle.

  I fished in a drawer, found a knife and a corkscrew, cut the twine, popped the cork, and set the bottle and the cork on the table. The vapors rose everywhere around us, and promised unearthly delights.

  I pulled thr
ee brandy snifters from a relatively unused shelf and set one down in front of each of us. After a moment, I poured the copper-colored nectar.

  The first taste was cinnamon, then vanilla, and finally, baked apples with a hint of sweet caramel. All three of us closed our eyes as we swallowed the first sip.

  Lucinda smiled. “Tastes like Christmas.”

  “Well, Christmas is right around the corner.” I nodded.

  “God in heaven.” Dr. Nelson sighed.

  We each finished a first glass, and a second. On the third round, when all three of us seemed much more relaxed, Dr. Nelson launched into what she must have thought would be a surefire way to engage me.

  “Did you ever dwell, for any length of time in your academic studies, on the Arthurian cycle?” she asked, staring into her snifter. “My father, God bless him, was a fanatic.”

  “I taught a course called the Literature of Folklore,” I said. “The stories are much more wide-ranging than most people imagine. I’m sure you were curious, at some point in your life, about your name, if that’s what you’re getting at. Of course the stories that involve your namesake are a bit tangential.”

  “King Arthur?” Lucinda asked. “The round table? That’s folklore?”

  Since the bulk of my own studies had focused almost exclusively on Appalachian material folk culture, songs, and stories, I rarely talked about the wider scope of my interests. With Lucinda, it had simply never come up.

  “Folktales, folk culture, oral traditions,” I began, “are the basis of all history and culture. Long before most human beings could write things down, or read anything that had been written, we told one another stories. Some were about our families; some were about important events. Some were told to explain things, like the origin of the world, or the beginning of our race. Every culture on the planet, for example, has a specific creation myth, a sort of Garden of Eden story, an explanation of how men and women were made. Some of the bigger or more important stories like Gilgamesh or Beowulf or King Arthur—it’s almost impossible to separate what might have been historical description from a larger or more general moral or educational purpose. Joseph Campbell describes his Hero with a Thousand Faces in such a way as to make it understood that the hero character is universal, something common to all cultures and all people. And the beauty of these stories to me is that they’re told over and over again. There are elements of the King Arthur saga in twentieth-century American politics. You know, for example, that the early Kennedy years were often referred to as Camelot.”

  Lucinda grinned at Dr. Nelson. “He likes you,” she said. “He only talks like that, like a college professor, around people he likes.”

  “No,” I protested, “I was just trying to say…”

  “My first name, Ceridwen,” said Dr. Nelson, to Lucinda, “figures into the Arthurian cycle, which is what he’s trying to get at.”

  “Exactly,” I said, glaring at Lucinda.

  Lucinda continued to grin and shoved my shoulder. “You like her. Go on. Admit it.”

  I looked down at the table. “Ceridwen,” I said very deliberately, “is a name from Welsh medieval legend. She was an enchantress. She and her husband lived in Bala Lake in North Wales. She owned the cauldron of poetic inspiration. Some writers give that name to the Lady of the Lake in the Arthur stories, but that name is also given as Vivian, Elaine, or many variants of those names.”

  Dr. Nelson stared at me with an overwhelming intensity. “But it’s not my name you’re really trying to figure out, is it?”

  I looked up. “What?”

  “You’re trying to remember the name of the mystery woman,” she said, very clinically, I thought.

  “No I’m not,” I snapped. “I don’t even— what makes you— why are you saying that? Damn it. Now I am trying to remember her name. What are you doing?”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes it works,” she said. “You make a kind of sudden, shock statement, see where it gets you. Sometimes it throws the conscious mind off guard just enough so that your deeper response tells you something.”

  I scowled. “How did that work out in this case?”

  “Just seemed to confuse you more.” She smiled. “Sometimes that happens, too. Sorry.”

  “Are you just— do you actually have a degree in psychiatry or something, or are you just guessing at what to do next?” I shook my head and glared at Lucinda. This was her fault, really.

  Dr. Nelson only smiled bigger. “Why can’t it be both?” she asked.

  I kept my gaze locked on Lucinda. “What good is this doing?” I asked her. “Do you think this is helping me? Because it’s not. It’s irritating.”

  “It’s irritating because it’s not you that’s in charge of it,” Lucinda mumbled.

  “It’s irritating,” Dr. Nelson chimed in, “because I’m a stranger in your home and you think that I’m trying to prove you’re crazy. Anybody would be irritated by that.”

  “You’re not trying to prove that I’m crazy,” I admitted. “I know that. You’re trying to see how crazy I am. It’s really just a question of degree, right?”

  “Right,” she said instantly.

  Lucinda poured herself another snifter of apple brandy. “All right,” she said, “I think I’m calmed down enough to hear a little bit more about what’s going on, or do I have to wait for the sheriff to come back and get him to tell me?”

  “A boy shot at me with a rifle,” Dr. Nelson said matter-of-factly, “and broke the window in the kitchen, also cracked up some tiles. We called the sheriff.”

  “You already told me that,” Lucinda complained.

  “When the sheriff got here,” Dr. Nelson went on, as if she hadn’t been interrupted, “the three of us went out into the woods to look for the boy. We found footprints, two sets, followed them until one disappeared, then Skidmore…”

  “Wait,” Lucinda held up her glass. “Wait. One set of footprints disappeared?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Nelson breezed along. “So Skidmore followed the boy’s prints and Dr. Devilin and I tried to see what had happened to the second set of prints. Dr. Devilin believes that he met his mysterious bride for a moment, then, but she ran off when I came up the hill to where he was.”

  “Wait,” Lucinda said again, more exasperated than before, “wait. He saw that woman again?”

  “I did,” I confirmed grimly. “And then Dr. Nelson yelled out, and she ran away.”

  “I see,” Lucinda said. Then she took a very deep gulp from her glass. “And Skidmore is somewhere down the mountain, with Melissa, looking for the boy and the woman in some cave that wasn’t there before today.”

  “What makes you say that?” Dr. Nelson asked, cocking her head in Lucinda’s direction.

  “I never knew there was a cave down there,” she said. “And Fever never knew it was there either, I could tell by the way he mentioned it.”

  “All right, well, then,” Dr. Nelson concluded, “that brings us to this moment, when I’m trying to get Dr. Devilin to remember the name of this strange woman.”

  “She told you her name?” Lucinda asked.

  “She did,” I said, rubbing my eyes, “I just can’t— I can’t quite remember it. It wasn’t a common name.”

  “Fever,” Lucinda said, setting down her glass a bit clumsily, “you know I love you, but you surely are one for trouble. I mean, getting shot at’s a common thing with you. I’ve come to live with that, and with the dead people dropping all around you. But when you start making up an imaginary wife, I have to try and get you some help. You understand that, right? You need to listen to Ceri, and be nicer to her, and do what she says. She’s the doctor. I’m— I’m tired.”

  I looked at her. She had closed her eyes. Her face was a little flushed and her lips were dry. I suddenly, quite suddenly realized the effect that my odd life might be having on her. I hadn’t really ever thought about it before.

  “I can tell, most of the time, if I really think about it,” I began softly, “the effect that e
vents in my life are having on me; but it’s harder to gauge how those same events might affect the people around me, the people who care about me. I hadn’t ever really considered that before now, before right now. I’m sorry.”

  I put my hand on Lucinda’s.

  She let out a sigh that I thought might break the kitchen table in two.

  “I had a patient a few years ago,” Dr. Nelson said, not looking at either of us, “a commercial shrimper from Charleston. He’d fallen overboard and nearly been eaten by a shark. All his coworkers saw the shark and were yelling and screaming and genuinely afraid—imagining everything that might happen to their friend. But the man who had fallen into the water was only thinking about one thing. He was only swimming for the boat. His insurance required that he see a therapist, but it turned out that he’d been less traumatized by the event than the rest of the crew.”

  Lucinda and I stared at Dr. Nelson as if she’d been speaking in tongues.

  “The point is,” Dr. Nelson went on, “that Lucinda might be more troubled by these events in your life, Dr. Devilin, than you are.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m beginning to understand that possibility.”

  Lucinda opened her eyes. “I’ll be fine.”

  But her voice lacked all conviction.

  Loud stomping on my porch prevented further emotional exploration. Seconds later, and without knocking, Skidmore came into my house, Melissa immediately behind him.

  “Nobody,” he declared. “Nobody down in that cave now.”

  “Oh, but there’s been people there all right,” Melissa said.

  They both looked cold as they came into the kitchen, faces red, eyes blinking.

  “Hey, Lucinda,” Skidmore said, taking a seat at the kitchen table. “What are we drinking?”

  He stared at the half-empty bottle of apple brandy.

  Melissa stayed in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. “I’m going to run on back with the prints and all, right?” she suggested.

  “Okay,” Skidmore said absently.

  “You found fingerprints?” I asked

  “Plenty,” Melissa said enthusiastically.