“Sam? Are you in there?”
I looked through the screen. It was Abra.
“What are you doing here?” I asked as I opened the door.
“I don’t know. I’m just here.”
“No, no,” I said. “There was a guy out by the tree. He started walking up to the house. I heard a knock . . .”
“Which was obviously me,” Abra said, then asked in a quieter voice, “Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”
Her blue eyes got all sad, and I knew she was thinking about my mom, which made me feel sad.
“I’m fine,” I muttered. I pushed past her and walked down the porch steps and out into the yard.
“What’s wrong?” she blurted out. “I mean, I know what’s wrong, but is there something else?”
We walked through the soft ground over to the tree, and I leaned against the trunk. I looked at the lightning scar that had split the bark, and there were definitely red marks on it from where the old guy had been touching it. He must have touched the blood on the ground where the groundhog died and used the same finger to examine the tree.
“There was an old man here not thirty seconds ago,” I said, looking hard into her eyes. “These are his fingerprints. I don’t care if you believe me or not.”
“I believe you,” she said, and I knew she was telling the truth. She gave me a hesitant smile and pushed some strands of her blonde hair back behind her ears. I went ahead and told her about the three dogs and how they fought with the groundhogs, how one of the groundhogs had died, and how it gave me a strange feeling.
“It’s all connected somehow,” I said, wishing I could figure it out. My voice trailed off under the weight of that uncertainty. We sat there in silence for a long time. I noticed a shovel stuck in the ground in the corner of the garden, so I walked over to it. Abra followed me, her shoes squeaking in the wet grass.
“I’ll bet my dad buried the groundhog here,” I said, looking over at Abra. But she was looking up at the sky, shielding her eyes.
I actually heard them before I saw them. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, long and sinister, like someone saying “Sh!” over and over again. I looked up.
There were at least thirty vultures. They glided through the air like dark holes in the sky, following each other around and around, looking for a place to land. The sound came from the long flaps of their wings—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, the sound made when you swing a green branch through the air.
“Where did they come from?” Abra asked. Usually the vultures traveled the valley in groups of two or three, looping lower and lower to clean up roadkill, but I’d never seen that many in one group. The highest ones were nothing but black dots, but I could see the feathers ruffling on the wings of the lower ones, and their pink heads were bare and gaunt.
Suddenly they wheeled and flew in an almost straight line for the northern end of our farm, the side that bordered our neighbor Mr. Jinn’s place.
“Jinn,” I said.
“What?” Abra asked.
“Remember what the three old ladies at the fair said? They had been talking to Jinn at the antique store. Mr. Jinn.”
“So what?”
“So what?” I said. “I want to find out what they meant by ‘Find the Tree of Life.’ If that was Jinn in there on Friday, he can tell me.”
“Sam,” Abra said, concern in her voice, “why do you care so much about this Tree of Life?”
I couldn’t explain it because I didn’t think Abra would believe me if I told her I wanted to bring my mom back. Or at least I was pretty sure she’d think I had lost my mind. I think I was scared that I wouldn’t believe myself if I heard the words out loud, outside of my own mind. So I didn’t try to explain.
But I knew there was something there, some connection between all the strange happenings and Mr. Jinn, the neighbor I had never seen before. Everything felt like pieces to a larger puzzle, a puzzle I didn’t even have the picture for.
I put my hand on the shovel in the corner of the garden and yanked it out of the ground. It was a little long for me to use, and kind of heavy. I carried it in two hands, and my walk turned into a run as I passed the house and entered the cornfield, the same direction the vultures flew. I looked over my shoulder, and Abra was right behind me.
It was deep in the afternoon, that time during a summer day when it feels like the sun will never set. By the time we approached the northern edge of my father’s fields, the vultures were already circling again, this time over a spot close to Mr. Jinn’s ramshackle farmhouse. A few of them had landed and were hopping through the almost-waist-high corn, pecking at something.
I slowed to a walk and Abra practically ran into me. When I looked back past her, I could see the farmhouse where I lived way off in the distance, tiny against the southern sky. I was startled at how far away I had gone, and how quickly my familiar surroundings had faded. On both sides of us, off in the distance, the mountains stood like walls covered in the deep green of summer trees.
I held my finger up to my lips, bent over as low as I could, and crept forward. My jeans were already wet from running through all that corn. The stalks still held a lot of rain from the previous storms. A strong breeze came down from the mountains and raced through the valley. The sky was cotton-candy blue with puffy white clouds drifting from west to east.
Most of the vultures had landed. A few stragglers glided in and skidded to a stop. They tore at whatever it was they were eating, and they fought among themselves for the strips of dead flesh. I thought it must be a huge animal if all of those vultures were trying to eat from it.
“On three, we’ll stand up and scare them off,” I said.
Abra nodded, her big blue eyes reflecting the sky. “Sure must be something big,” she muttered.
“One . . .” I gripped the shovel tightly in my hands. “Two . . .” I turned away from her, toward the host of vultures.
“Three!” we said together, and we both stood up and started shouting, waving our arms.
I didn’t expect what happened next.
They came at us.
As soon as we stood up, they looked at us, cocking their heads to the side. Most of them raised their wings up as if they were trying to frighten us away. But as we kept yelling and I kept waving the shovel, they came at us, half flying, half hopping through the corn that was just about as tall as they were.
Abra scooted behind me, and I started swinging the shovel at whatever black shapes I could find.
“Get some rocks or something!” I shouted. Soon baseball-sized rocks started humming over my shoulder toward the approaching birds. She had a good arm and managed to hit a few. The first wave of birds paused, but when more started coming, they joined back in.
I had never seen anything like it. Vultures always fly away. Always. They might fly a short distance away and perch in the upper branches of a tree. They might drift to the other side of the road and wait for you to pass by. But they never stayed. They never advanced. And they most certainly never attacked.
What was going on?
I brought the shovel down hard on the first one that approached us. It didn’t get back up. I caught the second one with a glancing blow and it kept coming, so I had to hit it again. And again. Which made me feel kind of sick because I had never killed anything with my hands before. I’d shot small animals with a pellet gun, and more recently with my dad’s .22 rifle, but I’d never felt the impact. I didn’t like it.
But I kept swinging because now they were on us. I heard Abra scream and saw that they had circled around behind us. She was flailing, and I realized she had one on her hands. She threw it away from her, but it came back faster than before. They tangled their claws in our hair and our clothes, and I imagined that they leered at us, suddenly aware that we were nothing more than scared children.
Soon all I saw was flapping black feathers and their naked little heads. Their beady eyes. Their beaks pecked at our faces and their talons reached for us. They were all over us. Abra let out a
few screams as the birds started to overwhelm us, but I was silent. I don’t know why—maybe I couldn’t catch my breath with all those beating wings. Maybe I was so focused on fighting that my mind didn’t have room for calling out. Maybe I didn’t think there was anyone in the whole world who could save us.
I had always heard that vultures aren’t strong creatures, that they can only eat food that’s already been torn apart for them. Maybe that’s true, but in that moment, covered with flapping, scratching birds, I thought we were goners. I thought for one moment that I was about to die.
At least I’ll be with Mom.
I heard the blast of a shotgun as loud as thunder. Then another. The birds rose and heaved their bodies into the sky. I lay on my back in the corn and heard another shot. One of the vultures plummeted from the blue, and the rest flew west as quickly as they could. Another shot, and another vulture fell.
I reached around and found Abra, and the two of us helped each other to our feet. She had scratches on her face and her shirt was torn at her shoulder. I reached up to wipe away a bead of sweat, only to realize I was bleeding from a few cuts on my forehead. Both of us were covered in mud from falling into the field.
What had just happened? What was going on?
But nothing about those vultures shocked me as much as when I turned and saw the person wielding the shotgun—or when I finally got a look at what the vultures had been eating.
11
IN THE SILENCE I HEARD the whooshing sound of the vultures’ wings fading up into the mountains. Soon even that sound stopped. The breeze died down and the corn stopped rustling. Through the heavy silence I stared at the man holding the shotgun, the very same man I had seen snooping around the large oak tree in my front yard only an hour or so before.
He had the same clothes on that I had seen him wearing at my house, only this time everything was covered by a tattered brown overcoat that looked way too hot for July. He had the same squinting eyes and the same slicked-back hair. He held the shotgun against his shoulder and looked very relaxed, as if nothing exciting had just happened.
Halfway between him and me was a large white animal lying among the corn, but I couldn’t get a good look at it from where we stood. It seemed that Abra and I both had the same question at the same time, because we started walking through the corn, one hesitant step after another, trying to see what it was that had drawn so many vultures. But as we grew close to it, the old man’s voice erupted, breaking the silence.
“Come along, come along,” he said gruffly. “It isn’t safe for you out here, not anymore.”
He moved quickly, without a limp, and for a moment I doubted that he had been the one in my lane because his steps were so sure and quick. He grabbed Abra roughly by the arm and pushed me along in front. Whether it was intentional or not, he led us on a way that avoided the dead animal. Still, I got a look at it.
At first I thought it was a horse, or even something a little larger, but what in the valley would be larger than a horse? And there seemed to be a lot of feathers around, but not black feathers from the vultures—they were white feathers, and they were big. Then my attention shifted from wondering about that animal to wondering how it had died. It looked like something had taken a bite out of it. One large bite.
The old man kept looking up at the sky and ducking his head, as if at any time something might come swooping down and carry us all away. Once we were in Mr. Jinn’s weed-infested yard, he let go of us and plowed ahead, muttering the entire time.
“Hurry now, almost there. No time for chitchat. Have to get inside.”
Abra and I looked at each other.
“Why are we following him?” she whispered. “Shouldn’t we run?”
I understood how she felt. It was one thing to go with that man when he was pushing us along. It was another thing entirely to follow him on our own. But I wanted to talk to him, now more than ever. I wanted to ask him about the women and what they had written on the table.
Find the Tree of Life.
“What about the vultures?” I asked. “Won’t they attack us if we walk back through the field?”
She frowned. We kept walking.
“That’s the man I saw at my house,” I said. “The one who came up the lane before you.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“I’m pretty sure,” I said. “Same clothes, minus that ridiculous-looking overcoat. But I didn’t think he could walk this fast. He limped when I saw him. And he must have been cruising to make it back here so fast.”
“Hurry, hurry!” he shouted from the porch of Mr. Jinn’s dilapidated house. “The spies are everywhere now. No safe place.”
“Stay close,” I whispered to Abra.
“We have to stay together,” she said.
When we got to the porch, the old man had already gone inside. I saw the birdbath where Mr. Jinn usually left my lawn-mowing money. The outside of the house needed paint—what was left of the siding had peeled and twisted away, exposing rotted wood. A few of the porch floorboards had fallen through. The windows weren’t broken, but there was such a thick layer of pollen and dust on them that from the outside it was impossible to tell if there were any curtains. Not that he needed any. The grime would have blocked anyone from peering in.
We stopped for a moment, and I walked over and held open the door for Abra. “Ladies before gentlemen,” I said.
She smirked and we walked inside.
“Close the door. Quickly!” the old man shouted from inside the house. I pulled the door up against the frame, but as I was about to close it the entire way, I stopped. Something inside me said, Don’t. Don’t close the door. So I left the door leaning up against the frame, but not latched.
What surprised me most about the inside of Mr. Jinn’s house was that it was immaculate. While it was not brightly lit, I could still tell the carpets were vacuumed and the surfaces dusted. He didn’t have much furniture, but the furniture he did have was well placed and relatively new. It was strange to think of that untidy man living here, in such a clean place.
We followed his voice back to the kitchen. A very clean kitchen. In the middle was a small green table with two chairs. The table had deep, random scratches going in all different directions, like a three-dimensional road map. As we entered the kitchen, he came bustling in from some back room bearing a third chair, which he slid up against a third side of the table. He sat down in that chair and motioned for us to sit at the other two, one on either side of him, but just as we moved toward our seats he stood again.
“Go ahead, sit down. I’ll get you some water.”
I sat down in his chair so that he would not be between us. It seemed a silly thing to do, but Abra’s words from outside still stuck in my mind.
We have to stay together.
He didn’t seem to notice that I had taken his seat. He placed two glasses of water on the table and handed each of us a wet washcloth to clean up with. He took a seat at the end. I say “the end” even though it was a very small table, and if we all would have leaned forward at once, it’s likely we would have banged heads.
He stared at us. His eyes were dark, his pupils large so that very little white showed around the edges, and when I stared at them they felt like deep pools, a swirling mass of shadow from another universe. Time slowed. His eyes scared me.
“Well, go on,” he said, the first non-gruff words I had heard him utter. “What do you want to know? Ask away.”
Abra and I looked at each other out of the corner of our eyes. I might have been the curious one, but when it came to situations like this, Abra was the most straightforward.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“My name is Mr. Jinn. Yes,” he said, as if reassuring himself of his identity, “Mr. Jinn.”
“Why don’t you ever come out of your house?” she asked.
“I don’t like people very much.”
“So why did you help us?”
“Because I like children. Children
aren’t people.”
That stopped her in her tracks, but just for a moment. “Yes they are!” she said, sounding deeply offended.
“What ate the dead animal in the field?” I asked quietly.
“Mmm,” he said, as if tasting a delicious food for the first time. “Finally a good question. But I don’t know if you’re ready for the answer.”
He took a comb out of his shirt pocket and combed his hair straight back. I realized he still had his overcoat on, but he wasn’t sweating.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He stood up and walked over to one of the kitchen windows. A small fly buzzed up against the glass, colliding over and over again with the frame. It stopped and wandered up to the top of the window before buzzing and flying again, twitching in its flight. Mr. Jinn opened the window. I thought he was going to let the fly out, but instead he clapped his hands together. The dead fly stuck against his palm. He flicked it out through the window and slammed the window shut.
“Some people aren’t always ready for the truth,” he said. “Some people are so blinded by what’s real that they’re not ready for what’s true.”
“I think we’re ready,” Abra said, still sounding indignant after being told children aren’t people.
Mr. Jinn looked at me. “What was written on the table in the antique store?”
Abra turned to me, waiting for me to answer the question.
I stared at my water and took a sip. I looked at Mr. Jinn. Why would he ask me that? He had been there. He had looked at the scribbled table.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean. I thought I saw something, but now I’m not so sure.”
There was something inside me that felt hesitant about telling him. What if he hadn’t been the man in the shadows? What if the writing was important information, information that Mr. Jinn shouldn’t know about? He made me nervous, and I wanted to leave.
“Just as I suspected,” he said with a hint of sadness in his voice. “I guess you’re not ready.”
The Day the Angels Fell Page 7
