The Bone Tree

by Christopher Fulbright

  Tom stopped just as we got close to the cemetery. We stopped too. A gentle breeze rose in the hollow and rustled the leaves. All three of us stared hard at the shadows between the trees.

  Behind the cemetery rose a wall of dense forest. Sutter’s Creek twisted ‘round and ran back there, and across the creek was a hillside full of trees that eventually thinned out on the other side at the edge of the Plecker property. From there, Tom said, he’d worn a path up the hill.

  We regarded the cemetery with youthful disdain, simultaneously contemplating our plan of attack and routes of escape.

  “Okay,” Bobby said finally, a critical eye appraising the terrain before us. “If anyone comes out of the trees after us, we won’t run through the creek. Our best way is to come back through the trees to the road and run to Kevin’s house, and his mom’ll drive us home, okay?”

  I nodded. My mom would take us, no problem. In fact, I was on the verge of suggesting that we do that anyway, but Bobby forged on ahead across the small expanse of green grass that led to the edge of the graveyard. Tom and I hung a step or two behind, but not too far behind.

  I looked over at the little fella. I guess he wasn’t really a whole lot smaller than I was, but something about raw fear seemed to strip away the layers of years that grow on a boy. He was determined. He wanted to go home, and Bobby wanted to get him there.

  We made our way along a mossy path. It led through the arched front gate that stood askew and around the edge of the graves before it cut straight through the cemetery. Each of us looked askance at the crumbling markers, the cryptic stone crosses, blackened with mold and graying with age. Some plots here and there were fenced off by very old chicken wire. In some places, the earth was sunken in the shapes of coffins. I imagined a rotted casket beneath the earth, a wet-boned skeleton with dirt for eyes and worms for brains.

  I ran to keep up with Bobby and Tom, who quickened their pace as we crossed the expanse of graveyard. They had almost reached the path that cut through the forest and came out at the prairie below the Plecker place.

  A cool breeze rolled in from the hollow we’d left behind, carried across the mossy earth of sunken graves, rustling dry leaves that had gathered at the edge of the cemetery. They whirled in a whispering dance, floated around us like a ghostly portent.

  Bobby held up his hand for us to stop.

  We had reached the head of the path.

  Tom and I stopped behind Bobby. Tom tensed up. His eyes scanned the shadows.

  All three of us hesitated to step into the forest. It was still daylight, and behind us, where the tree house was, the sunset blazed bright and golden through the upper branches. But here, heading away from the setting sun, we faced an uncertain path, and the sunlight did not directly touch anything that lay before us. The foliage here was thicker. It was darker green, the branches a bit more gnarled and twisted. Bushes grew up around the path, which led first down a steep slope and disappeared before it reached the creek. No sounds emanated from the forest there. Neither a chirp nor flutter. No squirrels and no chattering.

  It was green, dark, and still.

  We heard a creaking branch somewhere deep in the woods.

  A black water snake slid out from the undergrowth and crossed our path, then disappeared.

  I watched it go. I had to remind myself to breathe again.

  Tom looked like he was having a hard time swallowing.

  “Let’s go,” Bobby whispered.

  Neither one of us questioned the reason he chose to whisper. It seemed like the right thing to do.

  Bobby led us down through the brambles and into the woods. Each of us kept our eyes on the shadows.

  We could hear the faint chirping of birds in the far distance. Still no signs of anything living within a good hundred-yard radius of us though.

  It seemed as if the sun had disappeared, slipped suddenly below the horizon, growing a deep twilight around us. We forged on, Bobby still in the lead. He picked his careful way along the path, pulled branches and held them for Tom. Tom pulled them back and took a step in Bobby’s path, then handed them off to me. I brought up the rear of the group, taking an occasional furtive glance behind us.

  The woods swallowed us. I didn’t feel too good about that. I felt like we stepped deeper into forbidden territory. The words froze in my throat when I tried to tell Bobby.

  Soon the path branched to the right and left before us. The creek lay straight ahead. A broken old cottonwood had fallen across the creek bed, and Bobby climbed right up to make his careful way across the deadfall bridge. Tom hopped up and made his way across too. I followed a few feet behind, reaching out for balance.

  My foot slipped. I cried out as I started to fall toward one of the spiky branches. I twisted to the right and reached out and grabbed one of the branches to hang from as my second foot slipped, and I was falling. I just missed being impaled.

  I desperately grasped the last handhold with my left hand. I cried out again, “Bobby!” And my voice echoed through the dead woods like a call in a long deserted cavern.

  Tom was closest and saw what had happened, but he was too small to pull me up. He did wrap his legs around the tree bridge though, wedging his body in-between two other old branches and reaching out a hand. I grabbed onto him and started to pull myself up.

  Bobby crossed back over to us in a hurry. He braced himself above Tom and gave me his other hand. Between the two of them they were able to pull me back.

  I struggled back up onto the tree bridge.

  I was about on my feet again when the look on Tom’s face turned from one of relief to one of horror. All of the color drained from his cheeks. His mouth opened slowly in a silent scream, sucking air. His eyes grew wide. Bobby, behind him, followed suit.

  I turned around.

  There in the brush just past the fork in the trail, stood a dark man. And yet, it wasn’t a man, just like Tom had said. Just a dark shadow, a translucent black form that moved slowly toward us.

  It had eyes though.

  I swear...red, malevolent eyes.

  It floated toward us, passing through the bushes.

  Whether a trick of the light at the time, I don’t know, but I took it for what I thought I saw, and Bobby and Tom did likewise.

  “Holy shit!” Bobby said.

  “Get, get!” I hissed at Tom, but Tom was already running, and we flew across that tree bridge.

  I slipped again. My foot caught on one more branch. A small wooden hook had snagged my shoelace. I yanked and almost fell completely off of the log. My leg went crooked and my ankle bent awkward underneath me. A weird pain kind of sproinged up my leg and I cried out.

  Bobby came back.

  I fell on my butt onto the log, which sent more pain through my body. But that wasn’t the important thing right then.

  The shadow man was coming. He floated along the log, his dark form transformed into a less recognizable shape, arms lengthening into narrow, tree branch claws, eyes no longer red, but white, evil, the head growing longer, misshapen, with horns like antlers...its legs were nothing but shreds of darkness that floated through the spiky forks of the branches.

  I was still stuck.

  Bobby grabbed my stuck leg.

  I frantically struggled to get free.

  We both yelled and yanked, ripping my shoelace in half, and Bobby dragged me to my feet but ran like the dickens away from that tree bridge down the path after Tom, who I could see farther ahead in the distance.

  I didn’t turn around. I ran on my sprained ankle, pain shooting up my leg. The fear kept me from caring too much about that. Bobby ran and I sprinted to catch up.

  My heart beat harder than an Indian war drum. My lungs felt raspy as dry wool.

  I chanced a look behind us.

  The shadow thing was gone.

  I was still half running, head cranked around to peer behind me. It was gone all right—

  I ran smack into the back of Bobby.

  He didn’t cry out, just
gave a bit of an “ooof” and reached out to grab onto me and steady me. They were looking at something else. Something awesome.

  We had reached an edge of a clearing. Green grasses grew up to the edge, but nothing grew in the circle. There was no grass, no leaves had fallen here, even the mud seemed dead, more like ash than dirt. It was about twenty yards across, and only one thing stood in the center of the dead ring—the fearfully wonderful tree.

  The trunk of the tree was thick; its roots were bunched and gnarled rising from the earth in every direction from it like the knobby knuckles of broken hands. It split out from its trunk in many directions, looking very much like grasping claws; branches twisted like the pain-wracked frame of a fleshless corpse. At each bend there was a knotty snarl of twisted wood, like diseased elderly joints. It had been struck by lightning; it was split and shocked. Still it grew. Somehow though, there was not a shred of greenery or life upon it. It was barkless and stark white. The living bones of death.

  Even the threat of the shadow man that had chased us and now disappeared inexplicably, was of no consequence in comparison to the marvelous, terrible vision before us. And it did seem very much like a vision. Each of us stood at the edge of the clearing and gazed at it.

  The sudden change of temperature caught us unaware. The woods around us grew cooler, darker, and the roof of trees above the clearing seemed to knit itself together to strangle any remaining shred of light. We realized what was happening. Though it was impossible, darkness and shadow had come alive to gather around this tree. Spirits stirred. Something near us began to moan.

  CHAPTER 3

  We ran.

  We out and out broke like hell for the path that we’d lost, and Tom, bless his heart, scrambled, crying, for the edge of the woods and sprinted the last bit of distance back into the blessed light of the sun. Neither Bobby nor I were doing much better, and we were hot on his heels as we came thrashing out of the woods and onto the prairie grasses that led the rest of the way to his house. We ran that last little bit uphill, and the warmth of the day soaked back into our youthful frames. The welcome hiss and scent of the knee-high grass ushered us fully back into the reality of day.

  Tom’s house was at the top of the hill. We all went barging in the side door of the house that led to the kitchen. His mom was standing there when we came in, worried as all get-out about her boy, and she practically started crying when she hugged him. Bobby and I were kind of embarrassed, so we let them have their moment.

  As soon as she recovered a little bit, Tom’s mom, her hair tied up in a whispy golden bun, seemed to realize for the first time that we were standing in her kitchen. Her mouth said thanks, but her eyes measured a yard of distaste between Bobby and the door, so we said our goodbyes and stepped outside.

  The pain from my sprained ankle made itself known again. It throbbed down at the end of my leg, and I looked down woefully at my ripped shoe and snapped shoelace.

  “How’s the leg?” Bobby asked.

  “Hurts like hell,” I told him. My heart was still racing a bit. I limped a few steps and then almost fell over.

  “Lemme give you a hand,” Bobby said. I leaned on him a bit, and we made our slow way down the dirt road. It led around the bulk of the woods that surrounded the cemetery. It would’ve taken us a fraction of the time it took to get home if we’d only just cut through the way we came, but there wasn’t no way that was gonna happen the way we felt right then. We did take a shortcut down the Bellham’s driveway though, into the creek bed that ran under the tree house, and then over to Greathouse Road. Then all we had to do was cross the plank bridge, and we were almost home.

  By the time we made it back to my house, the pain in my ankle had subsided a little bit, and I could walk on it again. Our house was on a small rise, in a bit of a clearing with a big front yard—the whole plot was probably about two acres or so. Dad kept talking about putting up a barn out back and getting some horses out there. Mom just nodded her head, but knew he probably wouldn’t get to it for a while. He had lots of other projects going on all the time.

  Mom was fixing us some PBJ’s when we walked through the garage and in through the side door to the kitchen. She stood at the counter and looked over at us, smiling her magic Mom smile—the smile that fixed just about everything in the whole wide world. Bobby always said my mom was pretty for a white gal (“She’s no Ororo, but she’s got poise,” like that meant something sexy, and I’d always groan and feign puking) and he got all soft when she talked to us. Her reddish-brown hair was naturally curly and pulled back in a ponytail. A few stray strands of hair flew like crazy around her face, glowing and frayed. She had her apron on and the dishwasher was running. The small TV in the corner of the kitchen was mumbling—Donahue was on.

  “Well, hello boys,” she said. “A little late coming in this afternoon, eh?”

  Bobby just smiled and shrugged.

  “Yeah,” I said and limped a bit to get her attention. It worked of course. It always worked. Anytime you’re hurt it seems fine, until you get around Mom, then you’ve gotta have that special attention. “We walked Tom Plecker home. He was being chased, so we took him through the woods to his house.”

  “Chased?” Her voice turned to concern as I climbed up onto one of the barstools near the island in the center of the kitchen. Bobby climbed up beside me and Mom gave us our PBJ’s on paper towels. Then she leaned down and looked at my ankle, touching it tenderly. All three of us examined it with serious looks on our faces. “Twist your ankle, Kevin?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Hurts.”

  Mom gave me a hug. “Eat your sandwich, and I’ll get you an ice pack to put on it.” She patted my head and kissed my scalp. Then she ruffled Bobby’s hair. “How are you doing today, young man?”

  “Okay.” Bobby smiled and shrugged, suddenly transformed from stalwart brave and fearless leader to melting little boy. “Thanks, Mrs. Burkett.”

  “Want some milk?”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  She brought us our glasses and we devoured the sandwiches while she tooled around in the kitchen, putting away the dishes, polishing the countertops and stopping from time to time to watch Donahue.

  When we were done, Bobby and I went into the living room to play Atari while we waited for 5:30, when his mom would be over to pick him up. Mom gave us a plateful of cookies and refilled our glasses then sent us on our way.

  Bobby took command over the game, switched the TV/Computer switch that hung from the antenna connections, and powered up the Atari. It was actually one of the cheaper Sears models, but Bobby didn’t care. His momma didn’t make very much money at all, and things had been tough for them since his dad died. Our house was paradise for him. It helped me to appreciate what I had, because even to hear my parents tell it, we didn’t have as much as we needed to cover everything sometimes. They would argue in the kitchen, or in the living room past my bedtime when they thought I was asleep, but I could hear them. And I always thought of Bobby and his mom, home at their house, her with no one to argue with about money. Bobby did a lot of the work around there, while his momma worked at the hospital to pay the bills. The time we spent together after school every day was his free time, and that’s about all he got. And we loved every minute of it. We used to pretend to be Confederate soldiers in the Battle of Antietam, using the plank bridge as Burnside Bridge, or sometimes we’d play Star Trek and I’d get to be Kirk, and Bobby’d be Captain Nolan, the first black captain of a Federation starship, but after last summer some of the thrill had gone out of that kind of stuff, so we’d abandoned toy guns and velour shirts for playing Atari, digging through my dad’s records, and reading comics.

  “Dang it,” I said, packing my ankle with the ice pack Mom had given me. I munched on a chocolate chip cookie. “We left the comics at the tree house.”

  “Ahh,” Bobby shrugged, “They’ll be okay up there. We can read ‘em tomorrow.” He plugged in Combat. The familiar blocky graphics appeared on the screen. Soon B
obby and I were cross-legged in front of the TV, both of us waiting intently for that static-tank rumbling sound before we maneuvered our joysticks in a tank duel to the death. When we pressed the red “fire” buttons, bullets that sounded like bounced ping-pong balls streaked across the screen. Bobby hit me first. My tank spun as he scored.

  “So,” Bobby said, munching a cookie with one hand between shots. “What do you think about the tree?”

  “I can make it,” I said, half listening.

  “No, dufus. The tree we saw. The Bone Tree.”

  We stopped playing the game for a moment. That rumbling sound droned on as the blocky tank shapes faced each other, motionless on the screen.

  “It did look like bones, didn’t it?”

  “Darn right it did,” Bobby said. “Dead, white bones with knobby knuckles and sharp pointy claws for branches. Man, that thing was scary.”

  I nodded. Looked down at my leg. Remembered for a moment the shadow man that had chased us. I ran through the encounter again in my head and wondered if I’d seen the same thing those guys had seen.

  “Bobby, what did you see? When we were running? Did you see the shadow man?”

  Bobby looked at me for a moment. A cookie was half eaten, momentarily forgotten in his hand. Finally he nodded agreement.

  “I saw something,” he said.

  “Just something?”

  He shrugged and took a bite. “I saw a shadow. It kind of looked like a man, but...”

  “Do you think it was a ghost?”

  Bobby shook his head no. But then he shrugged, noncommittal. “Maybe. Heck, I don’t know. It was all, like...weird. That’s all I know. And that tree—the Bone Tree—that thing had something...happening around it.”

  I nodded my head in agreement. We locked eyes and seemed to share the memory of the shadows gathering around the base of the tree, the rays of light slowly strangled into darkness as a premature twilight closed in.

  “Weird,” I said.