Seven Trees of Stone

by Leo Hunt

  “Why come up here, though?” Elza asks him. “How do you know where I live?”

  “I told them,” comes a voice from the hallway. I turn my head, careful not to make sudden movements. Two girls are standing there. Is that Holiday Simmon? It must be. I can’t tell who the other girl is; it’s too dark. They’re in parkas with fur-lined hoods, jeans, boots. Neither of them seems to be armed.

  “Where were you?” Elza asks. “Were you in my room?”

  “We hid under your parents’ bed when we heard the front door open. We didn’t know if it was safe,” Holiday says. “But it sounds like you’re just talking.”

  “Dunno,” Kirk growls, “still might have to get rough with them.”

  “We’ll explain as much as we can,” Elza says. “You don’t have to beat it out of us. But we don’t know what’s happening in Dunbarrow tonight.”

  There’s a silent flash outside, illuminating the room. All of us look out at the snow, the mist, briefly tinted blue.

  “It might take a while,” Elza says. “Is it all right if I light a fire? Help us warm up. I’m worried about Luke. We walked all the way here from the high school in the snow.”

  Kirk seems agitated. “No sudden moves,” he tells her.

  “What do you think I’m going to do to you?” Elza asks him. “If I were going to turn you into a frog, I’d have done it the second I saw a man with a sword in my hallway. I can’t hurt you.”

  I have a pretty vivid memory of Elza head-butting Kirk so hard his lip split, so I understand his wariness, but I don’t bring this up. I imagine it’s a sore spot for him.

  Kirk walks Elza to the door. I stay where I am, hands clasped on my lap. I feel stupid, never even thinking about what me and Elza must seem like to people who don’t know us as fully as we know ourselves. I sort of thought I’d gotten away with it, somehow, but I don’t know why. Holiday and her friend take seats opposite me, with Mark still standing between us. I can’t see anyone’s face properly in the dim room. Snow is still falling fast, and I start to wonder when it’ll stop. This has already gotten worse than a normal Northumbrian winter, as vicious as those can be. We’re far beyond dangerous-driving weather and into husky-team-and-a-sled weather. Nothing of Elza’s yard is recognizable anymore. I’m worried the snow will start piling up at the windows, smothering the doors, burying us in this house.

  Elza comes back with fire-lighters and an armful of wood. She kneels in front of the grate and sparks a flame, a wash of orange light playing over her face. Her shadow looms on the wall. It’s the first natural light I’ve seen for a long time, I realize, and her face looks beautiful in it. Mark stands behind her. Kirk’s leaning against the wall, by the door. They’re still guarding us; they’re just not as on edge as they were before we started talking. I wonder if they really meant to hurt us. Kirk held the sword to my neck, but would he really have killed me?

  The fire starts burning properly. Now that there’s real light in the room, I can see my old friends more clearly. Like I noticed this morning, Mark’s hair is longer now, just like mine, I guess. I stopped buzzing it so short, because Elza didn’t like that look too much, and it didn’t seem so important what the other guys thought. Kirk looks the same, maybe a bit heavier, like he’s been bulking at the gym. Holiday’s still blond, still perfect, the kind of face that was made for TV. The girl next to her is her old friend Alice Waltham, I see now. I didn’t recognize her because she’s had a haircut; her hair’s dyed dark red now, cropped way shorter. She doesn’t look like a version of Holiday anymore.

  Elza’s still kneeling, watching the fire.

  Holiday pushes hair out of her eyes. “I’m sorry for busting in, Elza,” she says quietly. “Sorry about your room, too. We were just looking for answers. We didn’t know what else to do.”

  “That’s all right,” Elza replies. “We did the same to your house a while back. Desperate times, desperate measures.”

  Another surge of blue light outside, this one sustained, a chain of blue flashes, like lightning without the thunder. Nobody says anything. My head’s spinning, so much to think about: the storm and the mist; Titus and Dumachus; what exactly me and Elza were running from in the forest. The gate is open, and the Winter Star waxes in the heavens. What is it that we can’t remember? Where are Mum and Darren and Margaux? Is this something to do with them? What about Berkley? Where does he fit into this? What did those spirits mean when they said they were the Knights of the Tree? What tree? What exactly is happening in Dunbarrow tonight?

  Alice is staring at my left hand with undisguised disgust. People don’t normally make a big deal about the finger, I’ve found; they just act like they can’t see it’s missing. I’ve come to feel more awkward about it than I imagined I would at the time I bargained it away, but I don’t feel like hiding my hand. I keep it out on my lap. Let her look at it.

  “So what’s going on?” Kirk asks us again.

  I take a deep breath.

  “It’s pretty complicated,” I say.

  “Try us,” Mark replies.

  Elza walks slowly across the room, watched closely by Kirk, and sits down next to me again. Her hand rests on my thigh. Everyone’s looking at me. The firelight casts the room in black and gold.

  “OK,” I begin, “so you know how none of you ever met my dad? Well, one day, about two weeks before Halloween . . .”

  Without clocks or daylight, I can’t tell how long I talk for. It might be an hour, maybe two. I tell my old friends the truth about my dad, about his Host, the ghosts he bound into eternal service. I tell them about the Book of Eight, about Dad’s sigil ring, about the desperate race before Halloween to banish the Shepherd and the rest of the Host into Deadside. I tell them what really happened at Holiday’s party. I tell them how I went to the Devil’s Footsteps and called on the actual Devil, how I talked with him and Dad on some gray forgotten shore. I don’t tell them about my unborn brother, the Innocent; I think some things are better kept private. Elza takes over sometimes, filling in parts about her own life, talking about how she could always see ghosts.

  I tell them about Ash and Ilana and the Widow, about the Fury and the nonpareil and Elza’s first death. I tell Kirk and Alice how they caught me and Elza with Ash up at the Devil’s Footsteps, about the Fury possessing her and Mr. Hallow. I tell them how I brought the Shepherd back into the living world, bound him to my sigil ring, and set off into Deadside after Ash. I tell Mark how the Shepherd tried to kill him, and I saved his life. I tell them about sailing the Cocytus, about the Riverkeeper that took my finger with its teeth. I tell them about my fight with Ash, about the Shrouded Lake, and about waking up in a tent with Ham dead beside me.

  Finally we tell them what happened to us tonight, all the parts we can remember anyway, from Darren’s house and Margaux’s tarot cards through to our meeting with the Knights. And then I stop.

  Nobody says a word. The fire’s died down while we were talking, from a roaring gold to simmering red. The room is blood light and shadows.

  “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” Kirk says with a whistle. “You really expect me to buy all that?”

  “Bollocks” is all Alice says. “Liar.”

  Mark runs a finger over his nose, feeling where the break mended. He says nothing.

  “It is pretty difficult to believe,” Holiday remarks.

  “It’s really true,” Elza says.

  “Your dad had, like, ghost servants,” Kirk says.

  “Eight of them,” I reply.

  “I said they were cracked,” Alice says.

  “I dunno,” Mark says, “there might be something to it. I remember being in that tent.”

  “Do you?” I ask him.

  “Yeah,” he says, “you and some long-haired girl were there. You were talking to me, but I couldn’t move. I only remembered it now.”

  “It’s called implanted memory,” Alice says. “Like, hypnotic suggestion? You only remember it because he talked about it. They had it
on TV one time.”

  “Can you prove this stuff?” Kirk asks me and Elza.

  “Look out the window!” Elza snaps back.

  “Yeah, there’s fog and weird light in the sky. Don’t mean ghosts exist,” Kirk says, not unreasonably.

  “So these ghosts came to my house?” Holiday asks me.

  “They did,” I say. “I’m sorry. I tried to stop them from hurting people, but I didn’t know how.”

  “And this Ash person stayed with me?”

  “You don’t remember anything about her?” I ask Holiday. “I know she affected your memories, but I wasn’t sure how well it worked.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Small. White hair. Always wore white.”

  Holiday shakes her head. “I’d definitely remember someone like that.”

  We never thought to take any photos of Ash, that I can remember. I should’ve gotten some pictures of her with Holiday.

  “You guys were best mates for, like, a week. Are there no selfies? Nothing online at all?”

  Holiday holds up her phone, a mute black slab. There’s no way to check.

  “I remember Ash, man,” Kirk says. “I kept saying! None of you listened!”

  “They’re making it up,” Alice whines.

  Elza fixes her with a look.

  “OK,” Elza says, “fine. We’re making it up. Off you go, then. Go home, Alice. I don’t want you in my house. I’ve never liked you.”

  Alice doesn’t reply.

  “Seriously, you’re welcome to wander back off into the town. Since there’s nothing going on.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Alice says to Holiday.

  “Nothing that happened in town made sense,” Holiday replies, still looking at me. “We all saw it. We all saw the fog.”

  “That’s true,” Kirk says.

  “I mean, all those people going crazy, now this light in the sky . . . something’s happening,” Holiday continues. “We can all see that. And we all decided, didn’t we, that Luke and Elza would know something about it.”

  There’s a general silence. Nobody disagrees.

  “And now they’re telling us as much as they can about what’s happening,” Holiday says, still looking at me, as if she’s waiting for me to correct her, “and we don’t want to hear any of it.”

  “They didn’t tell us what happened,” Alice says. “Not tonight.”

  “Do you believe any of what I said?” I ask her.

  “I dunno. How can I? It’s crazy.”

  I wish there were some simple trick I could do to prove it to them. Pull a rabbit out of a hat. Turn water into wine. But I can’t, and my “magic stuff”— the Book of Eight and sigil ring — is in my house, on the other side of Dunbarrow. All I can do is talk.

  “I can say what I think is happening,” I tell them.

  “All right,” Holiday says.

  “Normally, there’s Deadside, where the dead are, and Liveside, where we all are,” I continue. “They’re separated. There are gates between the two worlds, but usually they’re shut. Not just anyone can pass through. I think tonight . . . it might be different. I think the gate has opened the whole way. I think Deadside is spilling through to Liveside, to here, like water through a hole in a dam.”

  “What makes you think that?” Holiday asks.

  “The fog and the light are coming from the gateway. The Devil’s Footsteps. Me and Elza don’t remember what happened, but we were running away from the gateway when we came back into ourselves. And those monsters we saw, the Knights of the Tree . . . they’re from Deadside. They’ve crossed over, somehow, and they’re here in Dunbarrow.”

  “Right,” Alice cuts in, “the talking horses.”

  “I saw something,” Kirk says to her. “Out in the snow. When we were coming across the fields. I saw something like that.”

  “What?” Alice whispers.

  “I didn’t wanna scare the rest of you,” Kirk says. “But I saw, like, a horse wearing a mask, or something. It was far away. I didn’t see it properly.”

  “So if what you said is true . . . how do we stop it?” Mark asks loudly.

  “I don’t know,” I reply.

  There’s another flash of green light outside. The snowdrifts on the window ledge have to be at least six inches deep now. Elza stands up and moves over to the fire. She kneels, throws a couple more logs in there, pushes at the ashes with the poker. Hundreds of sparks fly up the chimney. As the flames take hold of the fresh wood, the room lightens from deep red to a more hopeful honey color.

  “So what happened to you?” Elza asks them. “We’ve said our part.”

  “We were in the square,” Holiday says, “waiting for the New Year. The countdown, you know. Everyone was drunk. And just as it turned midnight, everything changed. The people changed.”

  “Changed how?” Elza asks.

  “Just . . .” Holiday swallows. “They were different. They went crazy, started smashing up the shops. The man next to me was speaking this language I’d never heard in my life. They were all singing, and someone started lighting fires. I was really scared.”

  “Clock didn’t strike neither,” Kirk says. “Was stuck just at midnight. Everyone’s phone went dead then too, I reckon. But we didn’t check that until later.”

  “Was that when the light started?” I ask him. “The sky, I mean.”

  “Yeah . . . I think so? We had a lot on our minds.”

  “But no fog?” Elza asks them. “We’re trying to get a timeline here. Me and Luke, like we said, we’re missing something. Maybe even a lot. We’re missing the time between midnight and us running away from the stone circle. We don’t know how long that was.”

  “Couldn’t keep track,” Mark says, frowning. He sits down on the arm of the other sofa, cricket bat against his legs. He doesn’t seem to think we’re a threat anymore. That’s a start, I guess.

  “We never saw no fog until after Luke’s . . . after your house, I mean,” Kirk says.

  “What did you do at my place?” I ask them.

  “We were going to break in,” Kirk says, “but that dog was going crazy in there. Didn’t fancy it.”

  It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking about Ham. I remember then that they don’t know Ham died. They heard Bea barking inside our house and must have thought she was Ham.

  “She’s new, actually,” I say. “Ham’s gone.”

  Still, good job, Bea. I haven’t thought about her at all since this started. I hope she’s all right over there. We need to go to my house for a number of reasons, but this just added one more.

  “Sorry. So, anyway. There was nobody there but the dog, far as we could see. Wasn’t about to open that door. Looked around, through the windows, couldn’t see nothing. So we thought we’d try here.”

  “And the fog appeared as you were walking over here?” Elza asks, sitting back down next to me. They all nod in agreement.

  “We first saw the fog when we were running away,” I tell them. “It was thickening up by the time we reached the school. So you must’ve been on your way over here then. So how much time did we lose?”

  Mark shrugs. “No way to know. It must’ve been a couple hours, though.”

  That’s longer than I thought. What happened to us in those missing hours? Whatever it was, it’s crucial to what’s going on here tonight.

  Kirk finally sits down, with his back to the fire. He lays the sword on the carpet. We seem to have won them over, at least for now. I look at the faces around the room: Elza, tired and worried-looking. Alice’s face is closed off, expressionless. Holiday is scared, I think, fiddling with the zippers on her jacket, staring down at the carpet. Mark and Kirk are scared, too, but hiding it behind stern frowns and stiff backs. I’m warming up, at least. I don’t think the spirits can get in here. We’re safe for the moment, but we’ve no idea what’s happening down in the town itself. It sounds like everyone in Dunbarrow is affected by the gate opening, except for us. Can anyone get i
nto Dunbarrow from somewhere outside, like Brackford? I think with snow like this, we have to assume they can’t. We’re on our own.

  I’m standing in Elza’s bathroom, holding a candle, trying to get a look at my back teeth in the shaving mirror. The others are still down in the front room; the house feels like an icebox when you’re away from the roaring fire. The bathroom window has frosted glass, and it’s difficult to see out of it on the clearest of days; tonight it might as well be another wall. The wind is a high, desolate note and sneaks into the room through a crack in the window frame, causing my candle’s flame to twitch and dance. The shadows move with the flame, ebbing and flowing like the tides. I think about Deadside, creeping into the living world through a crack. My face is lit from below in candlelight, my hair pushed back from my forehead. I look myself in the eye. Is this my fault? Did I do something, break the balance of the worlds? Was this because of the debt I owe Berkley?

  I don’t know. The knowledge must be there, but there’s no way of getting it.

  I pull my mouth open as wide as I can, the candle resting on the edge of the sink. It’s terrible light, and I can’t get a clear look at my back teeth, but I can definitely see something that wasn’t there before, a dark protrusion where my bottom right wisdom tooth would have come through. The lump itself isn’t tender, doesn’t really hurt to touch, but I can feel it with my fingers, cold and hard, some kind of invading mass. What does this have to do with what’s happening tonight? Why have I grown an extra tooth?

  Someone knocks softly on the door.

  “Just a moment,” I say.

  “It’s me,” Elza says, “can I come in?”

  I unlock the door. She’s holding another candle, smiling thinly. She’s changed her clothes: loose black sweater and jeans.

  I lock the door behind us again.

  Elza sits on the edge of the bathtub.

  “I gave them some chips and stuff,” she says. “I don’t think they’d eaten for a while. Do you think they’re still drunk?”

  “Yeah, maybe. They’ll sober up soon, though. . . . They’re the last people I expected to see tonight,” I say.