Heart thudding against her breastbone, she tossed her flashlight on the ground and jammed her foot into a narrow hold, seized two handfuls of root, and began to climb. Finding toeholds, hauling herself up, hand over hand.
Overhead, dark gray clouds spiraled toward the sun.
Frantic near the top, when all the holds seemed to vanish—
Daddy, oh, Daddy, I’m here now, I’ve found you
—she made one final leap for the summit.
Moments later, she sat on a shelf of black rock, no burn in her chest despite the heave and wheeze of her lungs. The tree reared above her, Hiram’s corpse less than a dozen yards away. She crawled as close to the edge as she dared, then stretched her arm, could almost reach him, lacked mere inches. She steadied herself on a low-hanging branch and looked down into the wide black well of liquid below. She took the shotgun shell from her pocket, hesitated, then dropped it into the hole. It struck the surface, hung there a moment, then sank. The vine knotting Hiram’s ankles to the branch coiled back to the trunk and down into the rock, strange little hairs bristling along its surface like a million tiny feet.
Miranda judged the weight of the limb, the angle. Her own strength relative to the great desire of her—
Heart.
She flashed on Littlefish in the clearing beneath the oak. The doe’s heart in the boy’s red-slicked hands.
Yes, a deer, it wasn’t Hiram in the tree then and it’s not him now, it’s a trick, it’s the boy you want, not Hiram, the boy—
She shook her head as if to clear it. Backed away from the edge of the rock. “It’s a lie,” Miranda said quietly.
Silence, save the creak of the branch beneath the weight of the corpse.
Miranda’s hands curled into fists. “Where’s my brother?” she said, glaring up at the tree.
A wind swept out from the distant tree line, sudden and strong. Blew over the clearing and up the rock and sucked Miranda’s shirt against her and threw her hair wildly about.
Thunder cracked. The sky darkened.
The vine that held Hiram Crabtree’s corpse uncoiled like a knot slipping, and his body dropped into the dark black well below. Miranda watched him sink, then let out a cry and fell to her knees and began to pound and tear at the tree’s thick, fibrous roots.
The rock beneath her began to shake.
Lightning shot down from the clouds.
“I’ll rip you out of the goddamned ground!” she cried.
A root tore free from the rock in a red spray, struck her like a great flailing tentacle.
She pitched forward, fell long enough to suck in a single breath before black water sluiced over her. Gritty, oily, a thousand venomous barbs lancing her. She clawed at the mud, felt the sticky remains of recently dead things. Cold liquid seeping into her ears. With a great cry, she dragged herself over the lip of the mound, then rolled into the brittle reeds at its base. There she lay among the toadstools, gasping hoarsely, going numb all over.
The ground was trembling. Something big, pounding up through the earth below.
She could not move.
Miranda closed her eyes when a thing monstrous and impossible broke the surface of the black liquid and reared above her.
The noise it made an eager clicking-clucking-trilling.
Let your last thoughts be of the boy.
From behind and above came a sudden din like dry bones snapping. Something huge whipped past and she heard a crunch, as if a giant bug had been squashed beneath a giant shoe. Whatever had come up through the mound was ripped free and taken high into the air.
She heard it shrieking.
Miranda opened her eyes. What she saw was the tree itself, bending backward, rising up as if a thing alive.
Her mind comprehended it dimly, this thing, impossibly tall—taller than the trees that surrounded the bog, a dark writhing column—yet somehow human in its shape, possessed of a torso glistening green and blue like the iridescent carapace of a horned beetle. It was the tree and not the tree. Its ribs were thick, ropy vine, its arms clawed and barren branches. Its head a long, seed-shaped oval, its eyes knotholes wherein shone a furious white light. Atop its thorny pate a crown of knotted roots and stobs, the headdress of a queen.
Leshii, Miranda thought.
It held, in one of its massive hands, the monster that would have killed her.
Its body was long and white, a wicked tail curving in a dangerous question mark, a stinger at the end weeping venom. A hundred legs working madly beneath a milky abdomen, each one ending in a hooked cat’s claw, very like the claw she had found in the muck. Black eye-stalks jutted up from a round, flat head. Its narrow slash of a mouth wide open as it screamed, row upon row of shark’s teeth inside. Two giant pincers stuttering open and closed as the tree squeezed and the creature broke in half in a gory spray that lashed Miranda’s face. Each half tossed aside into the bog.
Roots twined into two great legs, each one tearing free from the rock, cracking it like a shell as the thing—tree, monster, demon—reached down its terrible arm beneath a sky where clouds hung like the clots of a hornets’ nest and the earth came apart in a horrible ripping, and the monster’s hand closed around Miranda Crabtree and lifted her and rolled her in a palm of moss to face two bright, shining eyes—
bees, its eyes are bees, millions
—and then something flashed, a silent thunderhead, and her mind became so much static.
She was transported.
FAULT
It ran the length of Nash County like a cable buried in the earth.
The first quakes that morning knocked cans from cabinets and dropped panes from windows like loose teeth in rotten mouths.
In the town of Mylan, a stoplight snapped its wires and fell, and Shifty’s Tavern lost six good bottles of whiskey to the floor.
At the Pink Motel, a picture window cracked in an empty room, the women who had long inhabited it now gone.
A second round of quakes struck when Miranda Crabtree departed this land for another.
Throughout the bottoms, trees pitched up as the earth heaved.
Thunder and lightning split the sky.
Fat plops of rain began to fall.
Embankments slid away beneath bridges all over the county.
People took to their windows to look out. Some stood on porches and spat tobacco at the ground and listened to the roar of the water on their tin roofs, reminded, perhaps, of a storm ten years past, their thoughts turning to time and how it gets away, day by day.
Twenty miles upriver, just over the state line in Texas, not too far beyond a boat ramp where three bad men lay with arrows in them, a portion of ground sloughed away from an earthen dam sixty feet high, on the other side of which was Lake Whitman, over twenty thousand acres of water surface.
After the last tremor passed, the rain fell harder, and the fissure that had opened in the dam grew wider.
MIRANDA IN THE TREE
First: the void.
Suffocating.
Infinite.
Her senses return, one by one: the clotted stench of mud long unturned from its bed. Tiny pinpricks of light resolving into stars. The rustle of wind in the treetops. A breeze against her skin. The taste of blood. Out of the water she climbs, whole, onto the floating dock, the river sliding past, black and viscous and reflecting no light. Behind her, the mercantile. Upstairs, a light, fanning out warmly. The night strangely silent beyond the borders of the dock. Her body slicked, her clothes soaked.
From above, a sound. Small and hard, a single chock.
The white crane stands at the edge of the dock, belly and legs black with mud.
Chock. Chock. CHOCK.
Downriver, the johnboat’s Evinrude. The boat emerging out of the dark into the mercantile’s lonely glow. Hiram, alone, ties off and climbs out with a croaker sack. The sack is heavy, bulging with weight. Miranda says his name, but he does not hear. He lifts the sack from the bottom and tips it, and the dead crane spills out onto the doc
k, its neck bent oddly, wings a heap. An arrow in its chest. The meat from its breast will feed them for two, three days.
“You taught me that,” she says, remembering.
Hiram looks at her, his eyes sad. He turns away to pull the arrow from the bird, and the sound it makes coming free is the sound of all the violence in Miranda’s life, her initiation into a world without grace.
Another sound, falling down from the kitchen.
Chock. Chock.
CHOCK.
Hiram is gone.
Miranda climbs the iron ladder.
Cora cuts carrots in the kitchen by the sink. A small, slight-framed woman, a head of dark curls falling between her shoulders. Her arms in her sleeveless dress pale and freckled. She chops and the knife strikes the board and makes a sound like the ticking of a hollow clock.
June beetles pop in front of Miranda at the fly-screen.
She does not go inside, not yet, only watches the woman in the kitchen.
The blade goes through the carrot into the wood. The carrots roll to the floor, only they are not carrots, Miranda sees, but red wax pieces of shotgun shell.
Cora smiles over her shoulder, and her face is pretty and soft.
Chock. Chock—
Down the hall, yet another sound: soft band music on the Victrola, a woman singing. Drifting through the kitchen.
Miranda yanks open the fly-screen and rushes inside.
In the living room, in the soft glow of a late evening twilight, curtains rustling in the breeze, Hiram dances with a woman in a blue flower-print dress, the dress somehow familiar.
The photograph, she remembers. Her father’s service annual. The double exposure of Cora.
The knife in the kitchen cuts: chock, chock, chock.
The couple turns and the woman, her cheek pressed close to Hiram’s heart, is not Cora Crabtree. Miranda recognizes her from Hiram’s funeral, standing alongside the preacher in the downstairs store, holding a covered dish of some casserole Miranda will end up throwing out.
Lena Cotton dances with her father.
They kiss, break apart, and Hiram leaves the room, goes to the closet, passing where Miranda stands unseen, enthralled, and Lena turns away, bare feet on the carpet, to peer out the window into the night. Hiram calls to her over Miranda’s shoulder, and when they both turn, the camera flashes, recording the image over the first in the roll that has remained intact inside the camera since Cora Crabtree died. The faces merge, the corona effect in the picture no trick of light but the luminous glow of Lena Cotton’s blond hair.
Miranda takes a step backward.
Chock goes the knife in the kitchen. Chock.
Lena cuts her eyes to Miranda. For an instant they flash wide and gold like those of the crane. Then dim. “Billy’s a liar,” she says. “There’s nothing of him in that girl. Can’t you see it?”
Miranda looks at her father. He’s laughing as he winds the camera. A smile she remembers from her youth, like the parting of the clouds to reveal the sun … and yes, she sees it, the resemblance suddenly so clear. Outside the bathhouse, the girl had smiled at Littlefish just this way, warm and quick. Unconsciously, like a child fidgeting, Miranda’s hands make a shape, the word for sister.
Lena turns away, to the window, where Cora’s hurricane lamps burn like sentinels against the wet, thunderous dark. “Hiram will weep,” the preacher’s wife says, her voice oddly flat, devoid of emotion. “When he sees how he ruined your mother’s picture. And then he’ll tell me it’s over. That it just can’t be.” She half turns from the window, and Miranda sees that one hand is across her belly, which is now distended, grown full. “I won’t even tell him about the baby. Sometimes it keeps us safe, not knowing the truth. Don’t you think so, Miranda?”
The music has fallen silent, the Victrola’s needle scratching, bumping.
“Myshka.” A voice, behind her.
Miranda turns.
The woman chopping in the kitchen is no longer Cora. Now her smile is ugly and hard, teeth gray and stained.
“Myshka,” Iskra says, and the old witch is bleeding from the top of her skull, each fall of knife on board somehow opening a new wound beneath her hair, gash after gash. The blood streaming down her neck and arms, soaking the dress to her skin, which is old and veined and wattled.
Blood courses over Iskra’s face and drips onto the linoleum between her brogans. She crosses the kitchen to a cabinet, leaving a trail of crimson shoeprints. Only the cabinet is not a cabinet but a curtain of oyster shells, and from behind it Iskra reaches a jar—green glass from the witch’s bottle tree—and holds it out to Miranda. Her legs have taken root to the linoleum of the kitchen now, the freckles along her spider-veined calves darkening the color of tree bark, and each of her ten toes has punched through her shoes and into the floor. Flowers open from her knees, little white blooms, and there are white bees swirling inside them.
Miranda recoils from the jar when the woman-tree-thing sets it on the counter.
River water and silt, out of which the eye comes swimming like a fish to peck at the glass. An iris cornflower-blue.
Handsome Charlie.
“You have other BUSINESS,” the old woman says. As she speaks, her voice deepens. “THINGS YET TO SEE.” Cheeks sprout vines that sprout leaves that unfurl like the fingers of a newborn babe.
“You’re the leshii,” Miranda says.
The creature bows its head. I AM THE EARTH, THE AIR, THE BORDERS OF THIS GREEN LAND. I AM THE LAND. I AM LIFE. I AM DEATH. I AM.
The leshii’s face weaves anew, hair blooming with yellow flowers. It drops the kitchen knife and the ground begins to shake. The creature throws its arms wide and its limbs are branches punching through the beadboard walls. The floor cracks, splits as the monster grows, filling the room, the very house itself. Growing up through the floor in the center of the living room, pushing through the collapsed ceiling, the trunk of the tree taking shape, wide and strong and old. Within its twin knotholes, roiling still, the light of the sun, the room itself made a white-hot furnace. Light pulsing, weaving along the branches, blood in veins.
“I ain’t afraid of you,” Miranda said. “The boy’s mine, not yours.”
Laughter, great and booming, shaking the walls. Dropping pictures from their nails.
YOU CANNOT CHANGE HIS PATH. HE IS DESTINED TO DO MY WORK.
“You can’t have him.”
LITTLE MOUSE, LITTLE FOOL, WHAT WOULD YOU TRADE FOR HIM?
“Anything, if I have to. Everything.”
WILL YOU TAKE HIS PLACE?
Miranda hesitates, then gives a single nod.
The leshii laughs, and now the walls are collapsing, sloughing boards like meat from bones. Miranda flees downstairs into the mercantile, where the leshii has burst through the floor in a great tangle of moss and root and earth. She crashes through the screen door into the night, where the only sound is that of the cicadas, hammering out their frantic song from the trees.
“Dear child,” the old preacher says.
Like the pendulum of some hideous clock, he hangs by his feet beneath the boughs of the gum tree, over her father’s empty grave.
The grave is open, yawning dark, a heap of wet red clay earth beside it.
Cotton opens his mouth, as if to speak or sing, and out of it comes a swarm of white bees a million bright like the mist that showed her the way once before, when she was stumbling through the night with the child, her brother—
Littlefish.
His webbed hands cupping the deer’s heart, holding it out as a gift to her.
All her love poured into the boy, a torrent, cutting new shapes roughly and surely and filling them like a river flooding its banks.
DO YOU SEE YOUR PATH?
“I do.”
WILL YOU WALK IT?
“I will.”
Beneath a night sky that is not the night, in a place that is nowhere and everywhere, she reaches for the quiver she does not know she has on her back, and the arrow all but sp
rings into her hand. In her other hand: her father’s bow, the Bear. She nocks her arrow and aligns the broadhead with the old preacher’s heart. She lets fly and the arrow streaks through the air and buries itself in its mark.
The singing of the bees falls silent with a sudden hitch.
When Miranda lowers the bow, the old man is not the preacher.
Her father hangs before her, something of peace on his face.
“In the land of Spain,” he says.
Through tears, Miranda draws again.
Aims for the vine that holds him above the black slash of his grave.
The arrow leaves her bow without so much as a whisper.
Hiram Crabtree drops silently into the earth.
Miranda drops her bow and quiver and steps forward to the edge, unfathomable darkness before her, and with a single breath she steps out over the pit and drops, plunging down until she strikes wet earth. Alone in the grave, no Hiram, she thrusts her fists into the muck like a grub burrowing, feels the wet rush of mud and water into her ears, nose, mouth, and is swallowed by the dark. Here, in the void, there are creatures. The same monstrous guardians who would have torn and gnashed and devoured her at the base of the rock, save for the leshii’s grace. She cannot see them, only senses them, like great behemoths swimming beyond the reach of light. They took Hiram after the old witch drained him. Took him with their claws and black round eyes and milky bodies. Clawing up from the darkness over which he hung to snatch him away into the deep. Suffocating now, lungs full of mud and black tar, she thrusts deeper into the void as if chasing a catfish in the currents of the Prosper. Finally, the tips of her fingers close around something familiar, and she seizes on the shaft of her arrow and pulls, and out of the sludge with a great wet CHOCK—
* * *
The sky was flat, gray, pouring rain. The rain fell on what was left of Iskra’s cabin. It fell on the bayou. On the woods. On the bog, where the canted rock had split and the earth was ripped open. One half of the rock had sunk in the mud, but the tree stood still, tall and gnarled. After a time, the whole of the clearing flooded and the mound at the base of the rock began to run in little gray rivers among the toadstools. Then, with a great thunderclap, a hand thrust through the ichor, followed by an arm, a shoulder. A head of mud-plastered hair. Shambling up and over the edge of the mound, Miranda dropped into the wet spongy earth like a thing reborn. Clutching to her breast a grisly rib cage, a spinal column, a cracked skull plugged with mud. She rolled to her side and vomited a gout of black water, in her arms the oldest of her heart’s desires—the remains of her father. Shivering and wet, the rain pouring down and mixing with her tears, she held him close.
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