by Scott Hale
Herbert North kept his distance as the oak finished its meal, using some impressive footwork to avoid the roots that kept snaking towards him.
“My god,” Connor said like every commander in every action movie ever made. He used to play on this thing, climb into its mouth.
“A man, Amon Ashcroft, came through here once,” Herbert told him as he joined the frightened writer. “He left a few things behind, as he often does.”
Connor felt lightheaded, dehydrated. He turned away from the tree, looked back, and then turned away again. He could hear a rumbling inside the oak, as though it were digesting the steak with its wooden organs. “Is … is this what you wanted to t-tell me?”
“No.” Herbert placed his hand on Connor’s shoulder again, who twitched at his touch. “But it seemed a good starting place.”
Connor bit his lip, because he knew if he didn’t, he’d make himself look like an ass trying to disprove what was so obviously indisputable. “Kids play on that thing all the time,” he whispered. “People come to Bedlam sometimes just to see it, from Brooksville or Bitter Springs. Fuck, man.”
“Some people go missing. Pets, too.”
The tree went still, a sludge of meat inching like a snail down its splintery lips.
“It only wakes up once a year, at the same time. Monsters are things of routine. It’s convenient.” As though sensing Connor’s next question, he said, “I did try to cut it down. Trust me, I did. But until you can buy nukes wholesale, this baby isn’t going anywhere. Its roots run deep.”
Connor quickly made a mental inventory of all illegal and controlled substances he had consumed over the course of the week. After concluding he wasn’t hallucinating or teetering on the brink of psychosis, he asked the obvious question: “What the fuck?”
“I can’t keep coming back here,” Herbert said, “and scared as you may be, you can’t help but admit this is a little exciting.”
That was true: Connor’s nipples were rock hard.
“Your town has its fair share of freaks, just like everywhere else. But I have a good feeling about you, sonny Jim boy chap.”
“Hang on, hold on,” Connor said, stepping back. His skin prickled as rain leaked from the clouds above. “What are you getting at?” He pointed to the old oak. “It was a coincidence! I didn’t know! I mean, look at it. It looks evil. It was a freaking coincidence.”
Herbert North, trying to look cool, reached into his pocket and then flicked a piece of gum into his mouth. It smacked against the back of his throat and lodged itself there. Eyes bulging, he punched his chest, spitting the square piece of white death into the gathering mist.
“I’m a professional,” he said, looking anything but. “I’m a… Listen, I’m only going to ask you to do a little more than you already do right now for ‘Macabre.’”
“What?” Connor shivered as fat drops of rain plopped onto his scalp. “Write about things I thought were impossible but are actually real?” He laughed, tried to act like the offer was no big deal as his imagination ran wild with the notion. “What choice… I mean, come on. What can I do? You showed me this. I can’t forget it. I can’t think of anything to explain… You fucking with me?”
Herbert lifted his overcoat up past his shoulders, over his head and said, “Let’s go, boychick. I’ve got some exposition for you to chew on.”
THE CRIME SCENE
Herbert’s windshield wipers moved like metronomes, pushing aside the rivers of rain and their tributaries on the glass. In front of them, brake lights blinked like irritated eyes as pockets of traffic formed at the crosswalks and four-ways.
“It never fails. One drop of water and everyone forgets how to drive,” Herbert said, looking at Connor, who was pressed up against the passenger side window.
Crack. Lightning whipped across the firmament, scoring the back of the swollen sky.
“Sometimes I wonder if we’re really worth the trouble,” he continued.
Boom. Thunder shook the road, rattling the car and sending kids on the sidewalks running.
“I know I’m worth it, but is everyone else?” Herbert nudged Connor. “That sounds bad, doesn’t it?”
Garage doors went down as umbrellas went up, and in a matter of seconds, the only signs of life left in the world were those cars rumbling in the murk through the deluge.
“Sorry, just thinking,” Connor said finally. He smiled as he noticed the gardens sprawled out across the yard, soaking up the storm and enjoying their time away from the hardheaded horticulturists who’d planted them.
“Seth and I, my partner, started out like you. We did our own little investigations. Not much became of them, until we were up to our necks in things that wanted to rip them out. It happens like that. Real fast, like. But at that point, we couldn’t turn back. It was our calling, and nobody else, as far as we knew, was doing it.”
Connor yawned and sat up; the sound of rain always put him to sleep. “How old are you? How long have you been doing this for?”
“I was born in 1804,” Herbert said as he twisted on the defroster. “Vegetables, my boy, eat them up—” he hissed, a pain in his side giving him pause, “—and you’ll be as fit as me.”
Connor shook off what was most certainly a lie. “What have you seen?” He looked at Herbert North and, for the first time, noticed the faded scarring on his neck, which looked like primitive symbols of a cruel initiation.
Herbert grinned, his worn-down teeth coming together crookedly. “Telling doesn’t compare to showing. You know you wouldn’t have believed me if I had just told you about the tree.” He eased the car to a stop at an intersection. “Give me a little more time. Worst comes to worst, you think I’m crazy, and at the end of the night, you’ll have a couple hundred bucks in your pocket that weren’t there before.”
Maybe he’s an escapee from the local sanitarium. Maybe the oak just has an infection, some incredibly rare, not plausible in any shape or form virus. But even as Connor considered these things, neither seemed all that likely. When Herbert North spoke, he did so genuinely. It was irrelevant whether or not Connor gave credence to his beliefs: The old man was going to do what he had to do regardless.
A carnivorous tree? Connor could deal with that. There were worse things in the world. It wasn’t much of a step-up—okay, it was—from a carnivorous plant. No, what truly worried him, he thought as they weaved through Bedlam, was the story Herbert had yet to tell; the one he’d contacted him about in the first place.
“I need you to act as a journalist, not a fiction writer.” Herbert’s bullshit detector had seen through Connor’s monthly ruse, it seemed. “I want you to keep track of what happens here. Write it up and report it back to me. There’s a woman in Bitter Springs, Dagmar, she’ll be your partner. She already has your contact information.”
“Mr. North,” Connor said, deciding to play along until he figured out where the old man was taking him, “I live here. My parents live here. It’s a small town. Not terribly exciting, but I like it. If I go out every day kicking the same hornets’ nest, my ass is going to get stung.”
“I’ll pay you every two weeks, just like one of them real jobs all the kids talk about nowadays.”
The car hydroplaned down a small, drowned alley, the bricks that lined it looking warped under the run-off.
“I don’t want you to save the world. I just want you to keep an eye on things and spread the good word, so that the next time someone sees something lurking out the corner of their eye, they keep on walking.”
Connor took note of their surroundings: They were entering the oldest neighborhood in town, where the middle class invasion had pushed out the poor. “You said a man came through here? What’s that mean?”
“Maybe man was a poor choice of word. He’s a catalyst, an aggravator. A monster with a plan. Old as me, if not older. Dresses all in black, like an asshole.”
The car chugged as it drove across a rain-choked sewer, splashing a tongue of water over the sidewalk.
“You’ve never caught him?”
“He’s not easy to find, and I can’t say I’ve ever been equipped to stop him. He’s a pain in the ass, but he’s not ending the world anytime soon.” Herbert tapped his fingers on the steering wheel, twitched, and swallowed hard. He’d held something back. “That vampire priest you wrote about—” Herbert sped up, turned down a cul-de-sac, “—you were a little off about that one.”
“Oh?” Connor smiled. He didn’t know where to start with this man, so instead he let him take the lead.
“Fancies himself a demon. I caught him trading all kinds of bodily fluids with Sister Mary Pascal. He’s different all right—never could quite clean the blood all the way out of his moustache—but definitely no monster.”
Connor shook his head and laughed. There was no doubt in his mind this was by far the strangest day he’d ever had in his entire life. He should’ve brought an audio recorder or a pad of paper for notation, to make permanent those things which would inevitably be lost or twisted by memory. He usually did, so why hadn’t he this time? Six issues in, and he was already getting lazy. I hope to god this doesn’t bite me in the—
The car stopped, and though he could see little, Connor saw enough to know where Herbert had brought him, and knew enough about it to know they shouldn’t be here.
Like all houses of ill repute, this one sat the end of the street shrouded in shadow and circumstance. Six months ago, the family of five who had inhabited the house for four years were found dead, bodies desecrated. Despite a thorough investigation and a media frenzy, the Zdanowiczs’ killer was never found. Bedlam being as irrelevant as it was, Connor had expected the story to turn from small town shame to profitable pride and joy. But to his surprise, and certainly the news station’s dismay, public interest quickly waned. People just stopped giving a shit.
“What’re we doing here?” Connor stared at the doorstep where the sixteen-year-old son, Oskar, had been found sitting with his head in his lap. “Mr. North, I appreciate the offer but this is fucked up. Someone’s going to call the cops. Let’s head back. Do the interview elsewhere.”
“Call the cops? You sure?” Herbert unfastened his seatbelt. “Look at the houses on this street, man. Nobody’s home.”
He was right. There were eight houses lining the cul-de-sac, four to the Zdanowiczs’ left and four to its right. But it was only the furthest, nearest where they turned in, that showed signs of habitation. The others, Connor noted, were abandoned, disemboweled—their fates given over to the “For Sale” signs now impaling the fouled earth before them. He wondered if the exodus here had happened immediately when news of the murder broke. Or if it had been a slow process of heated discussions between partners trying to balance the scales of fear and financial responsibility.
Herbert North put the car into park and shut off both the headlights and engine. He leaned over the steering wheel and said, “Do you see it?”
“What?” Connor returned his attention toward the Zdanowiczs’ house. “See what?”
Just as he had in the copse, Herbert North shushed Connor. He pointed with one shaking finger at the bay window that looked into the living room and whispered quietly, “There… there.”
Connor pressed himself against the dash. He strained his eyes to pierce the veil of rain that had been pulled over the house. Little by little, he saw more and more. A couch, a chair… the glint of glass and a coffee table—pieces of forlorn furniture with no other purpose now than to bear the burden of the darkness gathering inside.
“Herbert, I don’t—”
The darkness moved, and with its moving, it took form. Behind the window, a gaunt, black shape stood, its blood-red, blade-like fingers splayed across the glass.
“Don’t. Move.” Herbert gritted his teeth. “It doesn’t know we are here.”
“Take me home,” Connor demanded, the date having soured. And then, curiosity overcoming him: “What the hell is it?”
“That—”
The creature pushed in, its face to the glass. Its eyes were like melted chunks of silver, glowing scratches of firelight running across them.
“—is the Zdanowiczs’ killer.”
A long tongue, barbed and forked, fell out of its mouth and went halfway down its body. The tongue quivered and wandered across the window, like a bloated leech in search of a body to bleed.
“It never left,” Herbert said.
Herbert North flicked on the high beams. The blinding light cut through the miserable air, setting aglow the trail of piss-colored drool that dripped down the glass. The creature retracted its tongue, startled. It stood there, statue-like, as though it meant to be admired, and admire it Connor did. For in that fleeting moment, he saw clearly the distillation of all his most hopeful dreams and terrible nightmares.
Its flesh was black—an all-consuming, unrelenting black accented by the iridescent bands that ran along it. Its body was taut, well-defined; angular in all the right places to kill and maim. At the top of the seven-foot monstrosity, a head like a bone-forged miter jutted out, as though the thing were some papal phantasm from some dreadful heaven.
“Look away, Connor.”
The sheer existence of it was too much to bear. Connor felt himself drifting as his mind opened up to the creature, making concession after concession to allow himself to cope with what stood before him. The luminous bands bent and widened and became gulping mouths on the creature’s tenebrous husk. Even though the house, yard, and car stood between them, Connor could feel the mouths inside him, teasing out fragments of fears and long murdered memories. There, childhood and the bullies. And there, Kate and the heartbreak. And there, breaking through subconscious soil, his mother, dead drunk, showing him what he didn’t need to see.
“Connor!” Herbert North punched him in the dick and sent him reeling out of the car.
He felt violated, and the pounding rain didn’t help much. Thunder streaked across the sky, splitting its purple flesh to bleed a flood onto the sputtering city. Connor looked back to the bay window, but the creature was gone. Herbert North hadn’t brought him here for an interview but to bear witness and tell his own tale. It was tempting, terribly, excitingly tempting, but who’d believe him? And would he want anyone to?
“This isn’t right.” Connor wrapped his arms around his body to hold back the tremors. He glanced over his shoulder to Herbert, whose face was a blur behind the fogging windshield. “What do I do? What do I do?” His teeth chattered as he spoke to himself. He could taste Bedlam in the rain.
He closed his eyes, expecting to see there a triptych of his dying—the tree, the man, and the beast—but found the cover of “Black Occult Macabre, Vol. 1, Issue 7” instead. It looked old, faded, barely held together by the bits of bone that made up its spine. He touched the spine, and it felt like flesh; he could feel wounds in the cracks, and in the wounds crimes. With his fingers to the cover, an image started to form. Eldritch blood oozed out of every leathery pore. It pushed upward, spread outward, until it pooled in his mindscape into the shape of the creature that had nested its image and being inside him. It was beautiful, the cover and the unholy creation, and better still were the words outside it, on every poster-plastered wall and every trembling, thankful lip. It would be his masterpiece, his absolute purpose.
Connor snapped out of it, but he’d drunk enough of the Kool-Aid to get back in the car. “Why are we here? Tell me true.”
“I’m here to kill it.” Herbert gave Connor the up-down. “And to give you a taste and see what becomes of that hunger.” He nodded. “That’s a good line. Use that in your story.”
The old man opened his door and stepped out of the car. The sky had turned monochrome, the rain t
hat fell from it like silver drops from an inker’s pen.
“Why are you here?” he shouted as Connor came out after him.
He followed Herbert around the car to the trunk. “I got to see this through. And I want to do something worthwhile. I should be scared shitless, right?”
Herbert nodded, blinking the rain out of his eyes.
“I am.” He drummed his fingers on the trunk lid, stopped when he noticed Herbert had noticed how much he was shaking. “Ha, yeah, I am.”
Herbert smiled and popped the trunk. Weapons—handguns, shotguns, rifles, and knives—in holsters and blankets, held in place by the blank books wedged between them. There was a comfort in clichés, and so far, he was glad Herbert North had hit them all.
“No holy water?” Connor could hardly speak through the smile on his face. “No grimoire?”
“Oh no, I got them.” Herbert dug around for a flask and chugged it dry. “Grimoire’s back home propping up my kitchen table. Grab that machete.”
Connor bit his lip and grabbed the rune-engraved weapon that was attached to the back of the backseat.
“Shit,” he said, dropping it as he felt something bite into the thick of his palm. Six drops of blood dotted his skin, and then the storm swept them away.
“It’s a sacrificial weapon from this place called Our Ladies of Sorrow Academy.” Herbert grabbed the shotgun from the trunk. “It keeps what it kills. But it’s bound to you now, so make sure it’s fed.”
Connor felt sick. “What the hell?” He wiped his hand on his pant leg, as though that would undo what the old man had done to him. “Are you kidding me?” He imagined pushing Herbert, making a big manly show of things, but instead he just threw his arms up in disbelief.
“I’m not,” Herbert said, taking the machete by the blade and handing it, handle first, to the fledgling investigator. “Why you, right? Why did I pick you?”
