Thick as worms, Louis had said. Yet just the previous night, Malcolm had seen Christine with no makeup. The thickest of those scars was hair-thin.
Malcolm knew how long it took for facial scars to dissolve in the body's healing fluids. He'd had plenty of them.
Christine had survived ten years of rape and torture with no lasting effects. She'd never used a contraceptive, but had never conceived. Her scars were fading at an impossible rate.
Hope surging within him, the immortal sent a prayer of thanks in an impossible direction.
"Finally."
==
Epilogue
It was a few minutes past noon, and the brilliance of the sun promised a warmer day than usual for the first of June. Christine had driven many miles already that day. She needed a break. The suspension in the old truck was marginal at best, and the constant jouncing and shaking were doing unpleasant things to her lower back. She didn't have much idea where she was, and could not be sure that a conventional rest stop was close by. She began to look for a hollow alongside the road into which the truck would fit. It wasn't long before she found one.
She could have just sat long enough to regain her energy before moving on. Instead she dismounted and locked the truck, took careful note of the surroundings, and ambled into the woods.
It was an old forest, yet densely grown for that. The underbrush was minimal. The trees were a mix of all that continental New York has to offer, with oaks, pines and firs predominant. There was no noise of wildlife or from other human visitors. Only a slight sighing from the breeze competed with the muffled crunching of her footsteps.
Louis would have loved it here.
The stiffness slowly faded from her back and legs. Six weeks of wandering, which had covered most of the Northeast, had freed her from any sense of urgency. She merely walked, only taking care to remember the direction back to the road. Her years with the Butchers had granted her one gift, at least: she felt no anxiety amid unfamiliar surroundings.
A large, raggedly circular clearing took her by surprise. At the center stood a great oak, an enormous tree more than a hundred feet tall and at least five feet through the trunk. The trees that formed the perimeter of the clearing were pines and firs of unusual height: a fitting honor guard for the creature at the center of the circle.
She went to the great oak and touched it gingerly. It had to be several centuries old, perhaps a thousand years or more. Louis had told her that trees of such caliber were rare, because they grew so slowly. To achieve such dimensions and yet endure against the elements and the pull of the Earth required that their annual increments of height and girth be tiny, such that their growth could only be perceived over a span of decades.
I bet it's not as old as Malcolm.
She chuckled to herself. Too long a baseline cheapened the glories of the world. No man but Malcolm could dim the august majesty of this being. Malcolm himself would agree. Yet she knew what else he would say.
It has no eyes, or ears, or heart or brain. It has endured the years, but it has not witnessed them, let alone affected them. You say it is beautiful, and awe-inspiring, but the beauty is in your appreciation, and the awe is in your heart. It is Man's heart and mind that create beauty and awe. Nothing else in all the world can do it. Nowhere is there anything as great as Man.
A rustling of footsteps came from the edge of the clearing. A young girl stood there, a teenager. She was plain, a little heavy, and carried herself uncertainly: not in manifest fear, but as if she were unsure of the protocols of the situation.
Christine smiled at the girl, and she approached. She put her own hand to the trunk of the great oak and smiled shyly. "It's beautiful, isn't it?"
Christine nodded. "Very."
"Have you ever been here before?"
"No, why?"
"Just asking." The girl caressed the tree, letting her fingertips trail down the rough bark. "I used to come here a lot. Not lately, though."
"No time anymore?"
The girl snorted a laugh. "Teenagers always have too much time. Don't you remember? You're not that old."
No, I don't remember, but you aren't going to hear about that.
"I write a lot. I used to do it here. It didn't work out too well." The girl seated herself against the base of the oak. She gestured to Christine to join her. Christine lowered herself into a basket formed by the tree's roots.
"I used to write about trees and forests," the girl continued. "I figured this would be a good place to do it, right? But it was crap. I kept trying to make the words say what I felt when I was here, and it always turned out to be crap. I threw it all away as soon as I finished it."
"Did you ever figure out why it didn't work?"
The girl shook her head. "I just gave up after a while. I hated to do it, but I had to. I was getting madder and madder at myself every time I tried it."
Christine nodded. "So what do you write about now?"
The girl shrugged. "Oh, stuff. People, things, you know." Her expression of world-weary pessimism fit poorly on her adolescent countenance. "It doesn't matter. It's all poetry, and that never goes anywhere anyway. People hardly even read it anymore."
"What's your name?"
"Lori. What's yours?"
"Pleased to meet you, Lori. My name is Christine." She held out her hand and the girl shook it.
"Lori, why do you write your poetry, if you don't think it goes anywhere?"
The girl looked uncomfortable. "Well, maybe it'll go somewhere. And I like to do it, anyway."
"Sounds to me as if you have all the reasons you need." Christine relaxed against the tree, allowed her eyes to close. The warmth of the day and the faint melody of the breeze had begun to lull her to sleep, and she couldn't think of a reason to resist.
"Do you think trees have souls?"
Christine opened her eyes and turned toward the girl. "I've never thought about it. Why do you ask?"
"I used to think they did. There was this book I read about a race that turned into trees when they died. I thought that was neat. I used to think that maybe we could do that when we died, if we really wanted to."
"But then the soul would be from you, right? The tree would have a soul because you, a human, had turned into a tree. Not because all trees have souls."
"Oh, I don't know." Lori's eyes misted over. "Maybe your soul would just find a good tree and move in. What would you call it then?"
Christine smirked as drowsiness crept over her again. "A mixed marriage."
Lori laughed, and suddenly turned sober.
"It's weird, you know? You never know how stuff's going to turn out. Like, I've got this boyfriend, and he's really nice, and really good to me, and we might even get married some day, but less than a year ago I hardly knew him and he tried to rape me, right here where we're sitting."
Christine came fully awake.
"Is that why you don't come here much any more, Lori?"
The teenager cringed and turned her face away.
"Sort of." She seemed to have run out of words.
Christine reached over and turned Lori's face toward her. The girl was startled, but did not resist.
"Lori, listen to me. Bad things like that happen. Sometimes they happen in bunches, and to very good people. But you don't let them ruin you. You don't let them dirty the things you love. You keep them separate. When you get a chance to do something about them, you do it. And in the meantime, you go on with your life, doing what you want to do and loving what you want to love. Do you understand me?"
Lori nodded.
"I've been raped too, Lori. I understand."
Lori's eyes widened in astonishment and incomprehension. "You were? But...you're so beautiful!"
She means confident.
I know what she means, Nag.
Christine nodded. "Thank you, dear. It took a lot of time and the love of a very good man to pull me through. More than anything else, it was the very good man. He was on the spot when I neede
d him, or I might not even have lived to sit here and tell you about it."
Lori whispered, "That's what happened to me, too."
"It was?"
"Yeah." The teenager's face tightened. "Jimmy was trying to get my jeans off, and this guy came running and knocked him down, and talked to him some, and made him apologize to me." Her body trembled, and beads of perspiration formed on her brow.
Christine took Lori's hand. "You don't have to tell me about it if it makes you unhappy, dear."
"Okay." It was a whisper. "Was it like that for you?"
"Well, sort of, yes. Except the, uh, apologies came much later, and I had to collect them for myself."
Took some doing, too.
"So you got to like Jimmy eventually, hm?"
"Yeah." Lori sniffled. "A lot. I'm gonna miss him."
"Why? Are you going away to college?"
"No, he is." The girl stared into the woods.
"If it's going to work, you'll have to stay in touch. That won't be that hard, will it?"
"I guess not." She sniffled again. "You're really nice, you know that?"
The unexpected compliment warmed Christine inside. "Thank you, Lori. I think you're nice too."
The teenager looked at her with hope. "Do you live around here?"
"No, not really. Why?"
"I like talking to you. I was hoping, you know, maybe we could be friends?"
It was as if the fist of God had closed around her heart. Christine found herself struggling for breath.
"What's the matter, Christine?"
"Nothing, nothing." She forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply. "There's no reason we can't be, Lori. I mean, I don't live that far away."
The teenager's smile was all the reward she could have asked.
"Come sit by me, dear." Lori slid over against Christine, who put an arm around her and pulled her close. "Let's just sit here a little longer. I really like this tree, you know?"
"Okay. Then what?"
"Well," Christine said, "then we walk to where I left my truck, and I'll drive you home, so I'll know where you live and be able to visit. I'd like to meet your mom, too, to make sure it's all right."
"Okay." The teenager let her head rest against Christine's shoulder.
You're going to need an apartment nearby, you know.
No shit, Nag. Anything else?
Don't let her down, Christine.
I won't.
The sun had passed its zenith. The temperature had crested, but the mild breeze kept it bearable. Lori was soft and snug against her side, and the great oak was comfortable against her back. The clearing had a sense of welcome and security about it that eclipsed even the usual peace of the forest. For that moment, it was home. Christine let her eyes close again, and Lori joined her.
Presently, they slept.
-- The End --
We will return to Christine, Malcolm, and Onteora County in Shadow Of A Sword.
==
About the Author
Francis W. Porretto is an engineer, fictioneer, and commentator. He operates the Eternity Road Website (http://eternityroad.info), a hotbed of pro-freedom, pro-American, pro-Christian sentiment, where he and his Esteemed Co-Conspirators hold forth on every topic under the Sun. You can email him at [email protected]. Thank you for taking an interest in his fiction.
On Broken Wings Page 42
