Dead Willow (14 page)

“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 didn’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.”

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.”

The girl nodded slightly and latched onto Paula like a lifesaver. Paula had to give her credit; not everyone could let the tree in. Some had to be ripped from the cemetery like a handful of weeds, screaming hysterically. But, first times were always the hardest, weren’t they?

Lacey lurched forward and dug her claws into Paula’s shoulders. The retching began as the dark clouds pooled in her eyes. Soon, her irises were gone, filled with the blackness of space as the air rushed from her lungs in a death rattle. From here, it appeared as agony. But, Paula had memories of what Lacey was really feeling, and it was as close to heaven as any of them would ever get.

Lacey’s hands went limp and slipped from Paula’s shoulders. She seized the girl’s wrists in an iron grip as she pressed her forehead to the other’s. Paula could feel the earth pulling them both down, but not before Paula’s question was answered. The question was always the same.

“What do you see, child?”

Lacey’s black eyes twitched and she found herself hanging between death and the tree. Paula suspected that Lacey now wanted the tree. So much for her virginity.

“What do you see, child? Open your eyes.”

The girl Lacey jerked back her head and gazed around the dark sky. Was she seeing, wondered Paula? Was she comprehending? Or, was she the Helen Keller of Willow Tree?

Even Helen Keller had her moments.

“What is it, child? What do you see?”

Lacey’s doll’s eyes latched onto a point in space and were riveted. There was something there.

“Rock … thought … death …” she muttered, oblivious to whom.

Paula’s countenance fell.

“Nothing else?” she gasped.

“Death,” the girl murmured again, then her dark eyes drifted out of focus.

Paula felt the earth pull again and she relinquished her hold. Lacey started the slow fall into the soil. The dirt was percolating like a cup of black coffee, and it wrapped her in its roiling waves and pulled her down until all that Paula could see were the last few bubbles of the girl’s breath. Then, the earth was quiet, another child claimed, another spell broken.

Paula could feel the soil worming its way inside her, but the bliss never came, not after so many years. She envied the girl this gift as well.

“Enjoy it, child … it will never come again.”

The roots poked up through the soil and intertwined with the veins around Paula’s legs, gripping her firmly. She felt the kernel of warmth sprout down there, and she gazed out into the darkness hoping to see something … anything. Her attention was drawn to the top of the hill, to a square of light shining from an open window of a second floor hotel room. In that far off window stood a woman gazing back at her … watching. She strained to see the witness, but already the deadening was on her. Soon, she saw nothing.

The dirt consumed her and she went down into the soil dreaming of rocks, and thought, and death.

Not the stuff of God.