by Joe Sharp
He looked at her with a look that said, “I’m going to say something now” and Annabel started to panic. Maybe, she could just kiss him and take his mind off of it. But, how long could she keep doing that? His lips parted and she reached out a hand to -
The front door to her tiny log shack exploded inward. The jamb splintered and peppered them with nails and sharp slivers of wood. The source of the explosion, a giant leather boot, planted itself inside the threshold and suddenly her one-room cabin was filled with clan soldiers in blue.
Gus tried to play the valiant knight and sprang from the bed, naked. He struck the nearest soldier a solid blow, and was rewarded with a rifle butt to the chin. He fell back onto the bed, bloody and dazed, and struggled to right himself. The rifle came up again.
“Stop!” Annabel reached out a hand to intervene, her other hand holding the quilt in front of her. “He doesn’t know!”
The Bellwether hesitated, then lowered his weapon, but his eyes never left Mr. Starlight Motor Inn. He turned the business end of the rifle forward just as another soldier entered. He was older, grizzled, and obviously in charge of this welcoming committee. Annabel didn’t recognize him, but that didn’t matter; the Bellwether could only report to one person.
The scraggly-faced buzzard looked around the room until his eyes lit on a pile of clothes in the chair. He snatched them up with a meaty hand and flung them at Gus’ head.
“Cover yourself, boy,” he ordered. Then, he set his sights on Annabel, who shrank behind the quilt. “You as well, young lady. Your presence is requested.”
The old man stomped out of the cabin with a bluster and several of the clan followed. One stayed behind, a rifle cradled in his arms. He planted himself at the foot of the bed, his head turned to the side in a token of privacy. Annabel felt Gus start to raise up, and she put a hand on his shoulder.
“Just do what they say, baby,” she urged him. “We got no choice.”
They huddled at the side of the bed, out of corner of the Bellwether’s sight, and struggled into their clothes. Annabel could see the fear and uncertainty spread across Gus’ face. It was most likely a mirror of her own, and she wished she could find some words of encouragement for him, but she knew where they were going, and who they were going to see.
Annabel had only met with her once.
She had a feeling this meeting would not go as smoothly.
Eunice Pembry looked … older.
It had only been a few days since Annabel had seen the woman. It shouldn’t have mattered if it was a hundred years; it was all the same, and Eunice should have looked the same. She slumped a bit and the crinkles in the corners of her eyes seemed deeper and a little longer. There was a sallowness in her complexion, but that might have been from the lantern light. Perhaps it was an illusion brought on by their proximity to the tree and the rich soil that had swallowed up their feet with the essence of the willow.
Or, perhaps it was Eunice’s disappointment.
Annabel felt like a little child who knew she had done something wrong, but didn’t really understand what it was or why. Everyone seemed disappointed in her. Even the Bellwether soldiers, whom she didn’t know from Adam, were reticent to be in her presence.
And Eunice … she looked at Annabel like the prodigal daughter who had run off to the city to squander her inheritance and then had slunk back home under the cover of darkness. There would be no celebration, no fatted calf tonight. Annabel didn’t expect a party, but they could’ve just left her alone … with Gus.
They had covered both their heads when they had taken them away. She thought it overly dramatic, as she knew every inch of this town, its feels and smells. Before they had set foot in the soil, she had known they were headed for the tree.
To everyone in Willow Tree, the tree was home. They all had free access to the soil and the roots of the cemetery, and each resident had their special place. The bonding was encouraged, and even enforced. It should have felt like slipping your foot into a warm sock.
But, when the truck had turned onto the gravel path leading to the north gate, dread came down on her like a cold rain. When they walked her into the soil and took off her hood, she knew why.
The second truck, which carried Gus, must have been right behind them. When they slipped the bag from her head, she saw him standing in the soil, his head still covered. He was trembling and whimpering like a lost puppy. This drama was all for her benefit.
Annabel looked from him to the guard … and then to Eunice. Like the rest of them, Eunice was up to her ankles in the black dirt, and that meant that now, Eunice spoke for the tree. She was the only one who ever spoke for the tree. Annabel chose her words wisely.
“Why have you brought him here?”
The Bellwether soldiers detected the note of disrespect and closed in. Eunice raised a hand and they froze, quivering electrically, like wild dogs straining at the leash. Eunice glared at Annabel, but their eyes never met. One never looked directly into the gaze of the tree.
“When you brought him into your bed, you brought him to me. Now, he is of us.”
Annabel caught her meaning like a cold knife to the chest. The sensation was prophetic in its impact.
“But … you can’t … I mean, we don’t …” she babbled, knowing it was pointless to question the tree. It could do what it liked. “Please …”
“We will sample the man. He will be of us.”
“But, he’s innocent! You can’t -”
“Not us,” Eunice interrupted. “You.”
A Bellwether lurched forward and Annabel, caught off guard, staggered back. The soldier stopped inches from her and reached beneath his coat. Releasing a knife from its scabbard, he drew it out and held it for Annabel to take. She stared at it, unbelieving, until he took her hand and wrapped her fingers around the handle. He stepped back out of reach of the blade.
“We will sample the man,” repeated the Eunice puppet.
Annabel gazed at the knife in her hand, and considered her options. She had no experience with a blade, other than opening boxes and buttering her toast. At best, she could drive the knife into Eunice, and what would that accomplish? Another would take her place, and the Bellwether would feed Annabel to the soil. They meant to sample Gus, and they expected her to do the honors.
“A blood-letting will suffice?” she asked the Eunice-thing.
“We will sample the man.” It was nothing if not consistent.
Annabel walked in the soft soil and stood before Gus, trying to calm him with her voice.
“Hey, baby,” she purred soothingly. “You okay?”
He seemed to slow his trembling at the sound of her mellow voice. “What’s going on? What’re they gonna do to me?”
She rubbed her hands up and down his arms, which were strained behind him and bound with thick rope. She could try to cut the rope, she thought, but they would both be dead before a fiber hit the ground.
“They just want some of your blood, sweetie,” she assured him. “They want me to do it ‘cause they know I’ll be gentle. Just a little prick on your finger. That okay?”
Annabel could hear him crying under the dark bag, but he managed to nod almost imperceptibly. She squeezed his shoulder, then walked around behind him and took hold of his hand. She straightened out a finger and pressed the blade to it.
“Now, just hold still. It’ll just be a minute.”
She drew the blade across his finger and a rivulet of blood began streaming from the cut. The drops struck the soil and were sopped up like kerosene through a wick. The ground moaned softly as it took Gus into itself. When it quieted, she pressed his finger back into his palm.
“There, now you hold that, baby. That’s all there is.”
She wiped the blade against the side of her skirt and, as she walked passed the Bellwether, held it out to him. She took a few more steps, expecting that he would ram the knife into her back. When he didn’t, she stopped in front of Eunice and waited for what came next. She did
n’t have to wait long.
Eunice had a wrinkle of concentration on her brow, then her face went slack as the willow’s words burbled out.
“The man has been sampled. We will take him into the tree.”
The tree meant the community, and for a moment, Annabel began to think the worst was over. She turned to face Gus, and that’s when she felt the tree cry out. It rumbled from deep down in the earth and it came from deep within her own chest. The Bellwether felt it as well, clutching themselves and searching the shadows for an enemy and not knowing that it was Annabel. She had brought this on the tree, she thought. She felt the shame and the grief, and she felt deep, deep regret.
“I’m sorry,” she cried, and Gus must have thought that she was talking to him.
“Hey, babe -”
A root the size of an arm drove up through the soil beneath him, splitting him in two and severing his spine. The root rose until he hung from it like a marionette, his useless legs dangling, his arms in a savage rigor. The thick tendrils pierced his chest and coiled around his throat, choking off his dying breath. When his arms finally hung lifeless at his sides, the root pulled him down into the dirt, disappearing from sight, until nothing remained but a faint mist and a shiver in the ground.
Annabel shouted a scream into her hands, clenching them over her mouth tightly so she wouldn’t wretch into the soil. Even now, she thought of the tree. It was ingrained in her, and she hated herself for it. Her body convulsed in on itself, and she fought to swallow the bile. With her eyes clamped shut, maybe she wouldn’t see it anymore, and if she didn’t see it, then maybe she wouldn’t remember.
“You will remember this,” said the Eunice-tree, and a thin branch shot up through the soil and into her throat, breaking off a bit of itself. Annabel gagged, her hands going to her neck, choking on the green fluid that dripped down her windpipe. It burned through her gullet, and she fell back on the soil of the cemetery, struggling for breath, and thought, and life. As the essence of the tree seared the lining of her stomach, the Bellwether tenderly lifted her into their arms.
After all this, still gentle.
Eunice paused … only Eunice now, she suspected. The woman looked down at Annabel and spoke the last words this Annabel would ever hear.
“Take her to where her bones are buried.”
Doctor, October 10th
The girl trembled beneath her touch.
Paula pressed her hands firmly against Lacey’s soft, pink shoulders. She could feel the girl’s skin burn red with embarrassment and she shook her gently.
“Just look at me,” she commanded. “Don’t look at anyone else.”
Lacey’s eyes darted from side to side warily. “But … there are others watching.”
Paula surveyed the grounds around their part of the cemetery and did notice a few eyes gleaming in their direction. Well, what would you expect, she thought? Where else would the Paladin, or the Hatchet, see this much creamy flesh other than in a magazine? Lacey could certainly fill out a few of those pages, but Paula doubted that’s why all eyes were on them.
It had long been rumored that the Bellwether were the pussies of Willow Tree. These rumors were whispered furtively over a smuggled pint of rum, as the Bellwether leader, Eunice Pembry, was most decidedly not a pussy.
She might be a man; there was some contention on this point. But no one seemed anxious to verify that hypothesis.
Still, Paula could imagine the others salivating over the prospect of Lacey being ejected from the soil at the hands of the Hatchet. Normally, she’d pull up a chair and watch, but tonight, she was part of the festivities. She had to ensure that the girl got into the soil in one piece.
“They watch no one,” the doctor assured her. “They are in the thrall of the tree, as you will be soon.”
For her first time in the soil, the girl was assigned to Paula, who was assigned to the Full Moon. It was the luck of the draw, and they had both come up short. There was no privacy in the glow of that luminous ball. Lacey was getting an education.
She stole glances at Paula’s naked body. The rope-like veins that wound their way around her limbs and torso seemed to throb to the rhythm of the rippling soil. The taut cords in her neck sported blue spidery tracks that led all the way down to the cleft in her buttocks. The look of sickening distaste on the girl’s face was evident. It made Paula want to slap the holier-than-thou out of her, but that might be frowned upon by the council. One never made the council frown.
“Is there something you’d like to say to me, child?”
She called her child, but the few years that separated them could have made them sisters. True, life had been harder on Paula before she went into the ground; she might be a bit more weathered. But in the ancestry of Willow Tree, she was the older, wiser aunt … and Lacey was the infant.
“I just … why do you look like that?” asked the girl uneasily.
“Does it bother you?”
The girl shook her head. “No … I was just curious … does it hurt?”
Paula chuckled softly. “No, child, it is as natural for me as that plain skin is for you.” She decided to let her off the hook. “We all come from the roots … differently. The Hatchet are the way they are because they are closer to the tree. In what way, we don’t know, but they are more like the Willow than the Paladin. The Paladin are more like the Willow than are the Bellwether. But, we all come from the same soil. And, in our own time, we must return to the soil. Do you see?”
Lacey was still processing this information. “I suppose.”
Paula could admit to a bit of cultural envy herself. That she should feel inferior because she didn’t have acres of smooth skin was a prejudice she had lived with all of her life. But, knowing it was a prejudice didn’t make it any less real.
It was amazing what they could make you believe when you believed in nothing.
The girl shivered as her skin prickled and her nipples stiffened painfully. A cold, fall wind tumbled leafy fronds across the ground, and Paula prayed for the warmth of the earth.
There never was a shortage of naked flesh in the cemetery. It would have been better had there been privacy. A newborn’s first time … well, Paula could still remember her first. The feelings would never be that intense again, no matter how hard she chased it. She often wished she could have experienced it without eyes gawking, but there were already hundreds in the town before she was born. It was difficult now to even secure a spot in the soil. And the soil was … everything.
Paula had heard talk of conservation of resources. This was not even a concept in her day. The idea that you could run out of clean water or breathable air or usable land for farming was far from their imaginations. The earth was vast, its resources unlimited. The smoke from a fire simply floated away into the clouds. If you poured lye soap into a stream, it disappeared as the water absorbed it. If you chopped down a tree, there was always another.
But, the paranoia of this current generation was infectious. The closer they came to another imagined global apocalypse, the more the unthinkable crept into her nightmares.
What if they lost the tree?
The soil was no longer spreading. The little over two acres that it occupied was the largest it would ever be, and with more Willow Tree residents coming out of the soil everyday, she wondered how long before enough became too much.
Or, would the tree go on forever? Because they would go on forever, wouldn’t they? Wasn’t that what this was all about?
The only one who might be able to answer those questions was Eunice, and asking Eunice, well …
So, the question would rear its ugly head every month when she stepped into the soil, and every month her experience with the tree would be sullied a little more.
As the two of them were slowly swallowed into the dirt, she looked at Lacey and tried to remember when she had ever been so dewy-eyed and naive. Every year Paula found less and less reason to be enamored of the Willow Tree Way of Life. After sixty-eight years, it
wasn’t so much a way of life anymore as it was a way of not being dead. She had gone round and round the tree like a dog chasing a squirrel, and the leash that tied them together was getting shorter and shorter and …
Cynicism seemed to have taken Paula like a creeping fungus.
She looked down at Lacey’s body, shining a stark white in the moonlight, and she saw the black soil rolling up her thighs. It was time for the tree to find its home in her again, and there was only one way. Paula looked the girl hard in the eyes.
“It’s close; it’s time. You have to let it happen.”
Lacey stared down at the crawling blackness that was moving between her legs and she started to panic. She struggled in the soil, fighting the pull, but it was quicksand to her. Her eyes reached out to Paula.
“I cannot do … that! I’ve never … I’m a virgin!” she pleaded.
But Paula knew that buried somewhere in her mind was the truth.
“No … you’re not. Not anymore. Do you remember being with the tree? Remember when the tree was your whole world, inside and out? It will be again, just for a little while. You have to let it come in.”
“But, how could I?” she groaned desperately, gripping Paula’s bare arms with her nails, digging into her flesh. “It would be as if my own father … you cannot ask me to do that, Paula! Please!”
Paula was unaware that the girl even knew her first name. Great! That’s all she needed, a little more guilt to throw on the crap pile that was her life. She glanced down at their bodies and confirmed that they were both up to their asses in the swirling soil. Paula could feel the tree coming for her, too. Soon, the girl would be in thrall, and she would not have to reassure her anymore. She stared into her pleading eyes and waited for the deadening. It would appear in the eyes first.
“This is … indecent!” Lacey refused to look at Paula, turning her head away. Paula pulled her head around.
“This is your family! This is your life! You cannot survive without this!” She put her hands on either side of Lacey’s face and forced their eyes to lock. “Now, just sink down into the soil, and soon you will wonder why you were so afraid.”
