The shape stepped in front of my window.
I pissed myself. It ran hot and wet down the front of my pants.
Its hand rose up in a small fist and knocked on the pane of glass.
I couldn’t stop looking at it. It took me about thirty seconds to recognize what I was seeing, and it wasn’t the shadow man.
The figure knocked again on the glass of my window, urgently, and then I heard a voice. A familiar but muffled voice.
“Kevin, it’s me, Bobby.”
I looked carefully. Was this a demonic trick? Was this the way it got inside?
“C’mon, Kevin. Open up!”
He didn’t look evil now. His voice had dispelled the horror, and I could see the marred shine of his bruised face from the fight earlier in the day. I realized it was him and began to breathe again. It was Bobby all right. He must have sneaked out of his house to come up here in the middle of the night.
I unlatched the window and raised it quietly.
“Let me in, man. Hurry!”
“Shit,” I whispered, popping the tabs on the screen and pushing it out. “Get in here and hang on. And be quiet.”
I took myself and my piss-wet boxers to the bathroom across the hall, cleaning myself off and changing into clean dry clothes. Then I went back into my shadowed bedroom. The window was still open. The sounds of frogs and cicadas echoed from the woods and the creek bed, and forest-scented humid air dispelled the dry coolness of the air-conditioned house. I slid the window closed and looked at Bobby there on my bed.
I was glad to see him, but damn it.
“You scared the crap out of me, man.”
“Sorry. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“What are you doing here?”
“We’ve got to do it. Tonight.”
“What?”
“The Bone Tree. We’ve got to burn it.”
The next words out of my mouth should have been, “Are you crazy?” or “No way” or something equally sane, but the way his eyes glistened in the gloom I could tell something had happened tonight.
“Did you see it again?”
He just nodded. My throat tightened so I couldn’t swallow. My eyes flicked to the window, scanning the yard and driveway again.
Had it followed him? Maybe now that he came here for help, the shadow man would hone in on me, and I’d be his next target. For just a second I was angry that Bobby’d come here, drawing the ire of whatever haunts roamed the night forests around our homes, but then I instantly felt bad about it. We were in this together. We were in everything together.
The fact was, we had to do it. For all we knew, neither of us had very much time, but probably Bobby and his mother had less time than me or my family did. I’m not sure what really convinced us of that, but we were both sold on the idea that the evil that had come for the Pleckers now searched the woods, looking for its next victims. The Nolan home was the next closest house to the cemetery and the Bone Tree. After that, it was us.
“What about your mom?”
“At home, asleep. I didn’t know what else to do, man. I didn’t want to leave her, but...we’ve got to hurry.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Get the gasoline.”
“Oh jeez, Bobby, I don’t know if I can—”
“I don’t have a choice.” He gripped my shoulders, eyes looking squarely into mine. “Look, I don’t want to get you in any more trouble. Just give me the gas can and a lighter or some matches and I’ll go do it myself. Then you won’t have to worry.”
I regarded the dim features of his face. I knew he’d do it alone. But as much as the thought of having an out appealed to my jackrabbiting heart, I also knew I couldn’t let him. The mere thought of him making his lonely way down to Greathouse Cemetery, through the woods and across the log bridge to the place we’d seen the Bone Tree, was scary on its own. I knew I’d never forgive myself if something happened to him. But, more than that, it was my duty. I cared about him, loved him like a brother, and silly as it sounded, I would have rather died at his side than lay like a coward in my bed while he marched off to do it alone.
“No,” I said. “I’m going with you.”
An immense weight seemed to lift off of Bobby as I said it. I quietly opened the drawer of my nightstand and grabbed the flashlight I used for reading under the covers. Then I motioned for him to follow me into the hall. We crept like stalking cats through the house into the kitchen, through the laundry room to the door leading into the garage.
In the garage there were two red gas cans, one marked “mower”, the other marked “oil mix”, and we grabbed the one marked mower since it was about two-thirds full. Next to Dad’s big crystal ashtray filled with pipe ashes on his workbench, was a small box of Diamond Strike Anywhere matches. I tossed them to Bobby and he dropped them into his pocket. He grabbed a bigger flashlight and a hatchet he found in a dusty box of camping gear. I snagged one of my old Louisville Sluggers out of the corner with the fishing rods.
When we opened the side door of the garage that led outside, we did so like burglars sneaking through the Louvre. I left the door unlocked so we could go back in that way if we had to. It occurred to me that I left my family unprotected that way too—that the spirits of the tree could just as easily come this way up the hill, as the other way into the valley for Bobby’s mom.
“Let’s go.” Bobby headed down the driveway.
Warm air enveloped us, humid and rich with the scents of the forest. Creatures of the night chirruped and hopped through the grasses at our feet.
We left the flashlights off until we got to Greathouse Road. The night felt heavy. The great trees that hung over the road blacked out what little light came from the sliver of moon and stars, making a tunnel of darkness. Gravel cracked under our feet as we went down the hill to the plank bridge spanning Sutter’s Creek. With no recent rain, it was thick with mud in the bottom, and mosquitoes had spawned in the puddles. I swatted a few on my neck.
When we reached the bridge, Bobby marched on across. Our footsteps thumped against the thick boards and echoed through the hollow. I tried to walk lighter. Bobby paused and waited for me, gas sloshing in the can.
Across the bridge we came to the gravel pull-off for Greathouse Cemetery. Its iron gate loomed in black outline against the soft shades of night. One of the gates hung loose, slightly crooked like it had always been, but neither of us were immediately willing to touch it. Beyond the portal, the old gravestones crookedly marked this field of death, and it seemed like a long away across.
“It’s dark,” I whispered.
Bobby nodded. He clicked on the big flashlight I’d given him, and it almost seemed like the wrong thing to do. Like it was a giant beacon announcing our presence to whatever might be lurking out here. Something flittered near my ear and I jumped. A moth, coming for the light.
It did feel like something was waiting for us. Something worse than Confederate Private Isaac Aaron’s ghost. Something malicious, malevolent. I don’t know how I knew that, maybe it was just being there, surrounded by the towering dark trees, the forlorn graves that no one had visited in years, graves of people forgotten by time, the thought of their rotting corpses beneath that hallowed ground.
My eyes scanned every angle of darkness before us. The Louisville Slugger propped on my shoulder gave me little comfort. The worst thing that could have happened would have been that I had to use it.
Bobby pushed open the gate. I expected it to squeal but it mercifully opened quietly, with just a hiss across the grass. I followed him into the graveyard. Shadows closed in around us, and the openness of being on the road was strangled by the menace of quiet solitude. We made it across the expanse of graves by the light of Bobby’s flash. I turned a couple of times to check behind us. The open air at our backs was unnerving.
I remembered that first day with Tom, coming this way. The shadow man and how he’d looked. What I’d seen. The black shape morphing from the shadows of trees into an
imposing figure with red glowing eyes.
Bobby slowed as we left the cemetery behind and followed the path into the woods. We walked next to each other, so close that our elbows pressed together. Old trees above us thick with foliage made a black ceiling. Their leaves whispered in a slight stirring breeze. Here and there, bare branches of deadfall looked like the skeleton of night. The occasional sloshing of the gas and crunch of our feet on last autumn’s leaves seemed alien here in the serenity of the nighttime forest. Hunched shapes seemed like more than just bushes, they filled us with the dark expectation of movement. The heart of the forest called us forth, and we answered with fear, advancing to the edge of the ravine where the spiky old tree spanned the distance between here and there.
When Bobby spoke, it was the quietest thing I’d ever heard him say.
“Can you make it?”
I nodded. I had my flashlight. I didn’t think I could make it holding onto the bat, too. I remembered the last time. I sure as hell didn’t want a repeat of that—not with pitch darkness in the ravine below. God only knew what was down there.
Bobby picked up on my dilemma.
“Throw it across,” he whispered.
I nodded. I gave the Louisville Slugger a good heave. It whirled through the air. Before it reached the other side of the ravine, one end of it hit one of the branches that stuck out from the log bridge. It made an awful crack, and sent the bat tumbling into the darkness of the ravine below. We didn’t hear it land.
We had a moment of silence for the loss of the bat. Paused there as my stomach sank down into my bowels. My only weapon was gone.
Bobby lifted up the hatchet. He slipped its handle through the belt loop of his pants and made sure it was secure.
We crossed the tree carefully. Halfway across, my knees got weak. I breathed deep. Bobby had just made it across to the other side. He was motioning to me to come on. I froze for just a minute, but pulled it together and pushed on, crossing the last few feet. I slipped at the last minute and Bobby reached out to stabilize me before I fell. I gave a giggle that sounded eerie. Bobby’s eyes shone with pinpoint reflections of our lights.
The final path lay before us, leading on to the clearing.
Our last steps along the way were the slowest of all. The sounds of wildlife and cicadas and the hush of wind were behind us now. Stillness ruled the forest here.
We crunched through a copse of sere bushes and grass. On the other side was a dead clearing. And there stood the Bone Tree.
It was an awful sight to behold, especially in the dark. Several feet around its trunk the cleared circular area looked as if something had scorched the earth with poison, leaving it all to die. The tree’s twisted trunk and branches, bone white, were gnarled and raked the sky like ghostly claws.
All around it was silence. A barely perceptible sense of tension. Energy maybe. Dark energy. It seemed to hold Bobby in its sway. He stood staring at the lightning-tortured tree, and I was reaching out to touch him when I saw it.
A dark figure stood three feet away from Bobby, at the edge of the clearing.
I tried to inhale, but my lungs seized. I tried to move, but I was paralyzed. I tried to speak, but my tongue could not obey, and all that was left was to stare in horror at the figure that stood behind him.
“Bobby,” it said.
Bobby turned. He had the flashlight in his hand. The light beam swept across the figure’s feet. They were a shroud of black mist from which its legs emerged.
“Dad?”
In that moment I witnessed turmoil in my friend that wrenched the deepest feelings of my love for him. He began to tremble. At war in the strained features of his face were hope and fear, pain and sorrow and longing for everything the man had meant to him, all the times he’d heard his mother crying through prayers at night, all the suppers they’d spent avoiding looking at the place where he once sat, all of his mother’s embraces that he could never fully fill. He wanted so badly for this to be his dad, to be able to say all those things that would never be said, but maybe even more than that, to hear the things that he’d never hear again from his father’s lips. That he was loved, that he was a good boy, that he’d done the right thing, that he’d made his father proud.
“Bobby,” the figure said. It reached out an arm. There were two elbows, and they bent the wrong way. It extended a hand. The fingers were too long.
It stepped toward us and came into the glow of Bobby’s light.
It was his father’s face, but the eyes were fully black. The head tilted the wrong way. The neck too long. The skin over his cheeks was stretched too tight, shining like waxed plastic.
“D-Dad...”
His dead father’s eyes held him mesmerized. But when the grasping long fingers of the alien hand touched him, Bobby screamed. The sound ripped through the silent pocket of night that had settled around this area and upset a force too powerful to stand before it.
Bobby dropped his flashlight. It settled on the ground so the beam of light illuminated the figure’s face.
“Baaaaaa...” It began to say his name again, but the syllable hung, like the final note of a morbid song. Its jaw opened too wide and ripped from the face. A black tongue lolled from the decayed mouth and melted into a pile of worms caked with grave dirt. As the bottom half of its face disintegrated, worms fell to the ground and squirmed on its chest. Its black eyes shriveled into blackened sockets. Its nostrils ripped open like the skin of a rotten peach and spiders swarmed from the orifices of its face. It came apart, split open, caved in. The entire shape that had been his father dissolved into a fetid mist that curled around his hand and knocked the gas can to the ground.
The gasoline splashed all up and down Bobby’s side. The rest of what didn’t douse Bobby began glugging from the can, soaking into the earth.
I somehow had enough presence of mind to dive for the can. I grabbed it and uprighted it before all the gas spilled. I tried to get up and carry it over to the base of the tree, but an invisible force held me to the gas-soaked ground. I cried out, and I could hear Bobby behind me, but I couldn’t move, and maybe he couldn’t either.
I realized that black shapes were all around us in the darkness. They stood around the edge of the clearing. Silently watching.
The tree began to glow.
A silver shimmer started at its knurled roots and gradually edged higher along the trunk to the twisted branches. No sooner had the iridescence filled the clearing with its eldritch light, then all of the knots up and down the tree darkened.
Black smoke swirled, pouring from the knotholes, formless for a moment, but then taking shape. Phantom shades of evil, clawed horrors, translucent winged nightmares escaped the tree and flooded the clearing, swarming us. I felt them enter my body, inside me, threading through me. I screamed. Bobby screamed too, but he was screaming words. Sentences. Scripture from the Bible. And about the time he started doing that, it was like somebody hit an unholy wasp’s nest with a dousing of holy water, because an arctic wind kicked up, emanating from the tree itself, blasting across the ground as a swift, constant gust. The tree shimmered like a desert mirage and was engulfed within a funnel of flitting shadows, swirling like a tornado of souls.
The winds from some spiritual otherworld still buffeted me, but had changed as if the tree was the center of a vortex. Suddenly I could move again.
I grabbed the gas can, ran as close as I dared to the Bone Tree, and doused it with what was left in the can.
I yelled for Bobby. He rushed forward, had the matches, and I had no idea how in the hell he was going to get one lit. And then, too late, I realized he damn well better hope he didn’t because—
It happened in a flash. The match-head flared on the side of the box. His arm exploded into flames. He spun in a panic and his arm knocked against the tree.
The Bone Tree ignited like a torch. The whoosh of fire caught the trunk of the tree, the winds seeming only to fan the flames that leapt immediately to each limb. Its dry and brittl
e wood, twisted with evil, was engulfed from top to bottom.
Ethereal smoke swirled in a column to the sky, enveloped by the white smoke of burning wood. The tree sizzled. Green ichor flowed from the knotholes. The sound of a thousand tortured screams pierced our ears then grew quickly distant.
I dived on top of Bobby. His arm was blazing. He collapsed beneath me and we both rolled. There was so much going on I don’t remember what we said, if anything, or if we just yelled like crazy while we were trying to put him out, but we managed to get him extinguished and scrambled from the clearing.
We got the hell out of there, hurrying back to the edge of the ravine, but collapsing there with fear and anguish.
Bobby was crying. The flesh of his arm was swollen, purplish red and blistering. When he moved it he cried some more, tears pouring from his eyes. I didn’t know whether to cover it or leave it open or what, but one thing was for sure—we’d have to wake up our parents and get him some help, which meant we wouldn’t get away with all of this.
Not that it mattered. Not now that we knew.
Bobby groaned, leaning against me and hissing as if every jarring motion sent pain through his body as we crossed the log bridge. On the other side, we took a final look back.
The Bone Tree was ablaze. It shot a pillar of flame like hellfire into the air, and the curling wights of phantom nightmares that had poured from its knotholes into our world were gone. Nothing remained but flames. The shapes that I’d seen in the darkness around the clearing were gone too. At least for now.
Hopefully forever.
We struggled back to the graveyard. Bobby had it bad. He wanted to go home.
“It’s closer.”
He woke up his mom. The jig was up, but the work was done.
All over but the cryin’.
CHAPTER 10
As far as the Bone Tree and everything that happened, there’s not much left to tell. Nothing except the fact we got in a heap of trouble. The way I remember it, seems like the whole town showed up for the fire. My parents came down the hill after Ms. Nolan called them. More folks stood around than helped, while the local fire truck came without much to do other than use fire extinguishers to finish off the blaze. There weren’t any hydrants in the area, so they filled the darkness with white clouds that left a residue on everything, which lasted till next rainy season that fall.
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