Rich Shapero (9 page)

Fristeen screeched. She was hopping and
sloshing from swell to swell. Robbie leaped after her. The moss bled, and the
blood smelled like Christmas. Your feet got soaked. You sank deeper and
deeper—up to your knees—but it wasn't hard to get out. More wild colors—amber
and mauve, burnt lake and chartreuse—and all so bright, magically bright. There
was a little wet place, and it turned into a string, a silver rill winding
between. And you followed it as the quilt divided, hopping from pillow to pillow,
shouting and slipping and crying out. It led right into the black trees.

All of a sudden, the ragged spikes were
around them.

"Robbie?" Fristeen eyed him
anxiously.

"I think it's okay," he
whispered. It seemed important not to speak loudly.

The trees were silent, without leaves that
clapped in the wind or hummed in the breeze. Some grew straight up, but most of
them leaned. The only sound was the ringing of the rills, silver and distant.
Whatever enchantment they might have felt among the aspen and birch, a far
deeper spell lay over these. Robbie felt it powerfully. It wasn't a place for
whimsy. You wouldn't find shade or safety. You felt only unease. Your eyes
searched—and you searched your mind—for something familiar. But everything here
seemed foreign: unheard-of, unthought-of, unknown.

"I'll mark the way," he said.

A taller tree stood in the clear a few
paces forward. He sloshed over to it. The spruce was leaning badly—weak, dizzy.
Or drawn by something invisible—who could say? Its arms were short and spiky,
its trunk was scabbed with ashen flakes. Robbie pulled a sock from his pocket
and tied it to a branch.

Cuck. Cuck.

A bird called in the stillness. Robbie
turned. Through the black spikes, he caught the flash of calm water. He held his
finger to his lips and motioned to Fristeen, and the two of them crept through
the leaning trees.

Cuck. Cuck.

The twigs of the spruce were tangled and
matted, like your hair when it's dirty and needs to be washed. Some of their
arms were twisted, some broken and hanging. Were they like the trees with
leaves? If you put your hand to their trunks, would you hear their thoughts?
Maybe you wouldn't want to get that close. Maybe they were thoughts you didn't
want to hear. They stood apart from each other, and their branches didn't
touch. Maybe they didn't share their thoughts, even with other trees.

They came upon a channel with water
flashing within. It led straight toward the shore of a glowing lake. They
followed it. Grass bunched up and the black trees stood back. A curtain of
reeds. Robbie stepped up to it, pushed his fingers through and drew the reeds
apart. And there was the Pool.

It was a bowl, and the water in it was red.
The hills rolled down to it, and then rolled back up on its far shore. The
clouds had spun a thick basket above it, and a single wand of sun jabbed
through.

"It's a needle," Fristeen said,
pointing to where the ray touched the surface.

Robbie nodded. The Pool was a lens of
blood. And in that lens was a world of secrets: turbid mud and coiling breeze,
hidden hummocks where silver eels nested, while on the surface water bugs
skittered and swept, scribing an alien prophecy in ciphers. On one side, the
Pool's surface was rimmed by glowing platinum; on the other, by black trees
growing upside down.

At their feet, oily rainbows scalloped the
mud. Fristeen knelt and so did Robbie, and they put their fingers in and made
the rainbows loop and swirl.

Cuck. Cuck.

They jumped. The bird was ten feet away:
black with a yellow eye, perched on an overhanging branch, staring at Fristeen.
As they watched, its attention shifted to the reeds. Something was rattling
there.

A pair of dragonflies hovered among the
shoots, wings whirring. Their long bodies glittered lemon and turquoise, beaded
as if they had risen a moment before from the depths of the Pool.

"Look at their eyes," Robbie
whispered.

They were giant globes, swollen to
bursting, cyan and gold in fluid swirls. But opaque, unfathomable.

The dragonflies fixed suddenly on other
business. They darted like thoughts across the scarlet water and into the black
trees.

Fristeen sighed.

Robbie yawned and glanced around. The spot
behind the reeds was flat and dry.

She read his mind and scooted back. Then
she smiled and stretched out.

Robbie lay down beside her and they fell
asleep.

Something called Robbie back from a
harrowing dream. He awoke, dizzy and muddled, eyes searching for some
reassuring sight. Above him was a deep gray sky, and in its center there was a
cavern of light, so dim and constricted by clouds that it might have been the
moon. He shuddered and rolled over, rising to his knees.

"Fristeen?"

His vision was blurred, but he could see
her beside him. He shuddered again, thrown back for a moment into his dream. It
was
a dream, wasn't it? Needles from the heavens pricked him endlessly, and a horde
of dragonflies held him down while his blood fed the Pool.

"Fristeen," Robbie whispered. He
was in the present now. The cavern of light was what remained of the sun, the
encircling clouds staging a gloomy dusk. He recognized the spot of grass they
had bedded down on. Fristeen's eyes were opening.

He heard a voice. Nearby or at a distance,
he couldn't tell. A sigh sounded from across the Pool.

Fristeen was staring at him. She lifted her
head.

Another exhale, sharp and urgent. Then
muttering, labored, unintelligible.

Robbie crawled forward, parting the reeds.
Fristeen's face poked through beside his.

The far shore of the Pool was marbled with
shadow.

Another sharp breath. Then something moved
in the brush. Shapes, dark shapes. One had broad shoulders. It might have been
a man, standing. In the dim light, his body glinted like the Pool. His chest
was silhouetted above the brush. He had the tallest head Robbie had ever seen.
A second shape was crawling at his feet—an animal on all fours. It had long
hair, like a woman kneeling. The silhouettes were silent, and then the woman
rocked and the tall-headed man groaned. As they pulled apart, Robbie saw what
she was doing.

A muffled gasp sounded beside him. Fristeen
could see it too.

Robbie felt her hand on his arm. Fristeen
was trembling.

The man began to groan again.

Robbie's face was burning. His stomach felt
sick. "She's eating it," he said. Why didn't the man fight back?

"No. It's still there."

The Pool turned slowly, brimming with
blood. Robbie rubbed his eyes and took a breath. Fristeen was right.

"They're gigantic." Fristeen's
voice was full of portent.

Robbie didn't understand. And then he
realized: the tall-headed man was growing. And so was the woman. Their dark
silhouettes rose out of the black trees, into the cold slate of the sky.

With an insistent huff, the man stooped and
laid hold of the woman. He rose, growing hugely, his chest expanding, head
thrusting like a giant stovepipe. He seemed full of rage. He was lifting her
up. The woman spread her arms, but they weren't arms—they were thick and broad,
and they batted the air like wings. What did the man intend—to crush her in
midair? Hurl her to the ground? The spectral light fell on the gap between
them. Robbie felt Fristeen clutch him. She was shuddering, and he was too. They
both could see what the man was going to do.

A jagged moan rose from the impaled woman.
Not a human sound. It was a beast crying out, the agony of some wounded creature.

Robbie swung to face Fristeen. "He's
killing her. We have to do something."

She nodded with an urgent expression.

A second cry reached them, more desperate
than the first. Fristeen put her fingers in her ears. They shouldn't be
watching this.

Robbie followed suit, stopping his ears,
and they turned together, hurrying back through the grass. As they burst
through the shrubs, he saw wild thoughts racing in Fristeen's eyes.

There—the silver ribbon. They followed it through
the black trees as quickly as they could. When they reached the viburnums, they
paused and looked back.

The giant silhouettes had billowed, edges
furred and backlit like roiling clouds. And they continued to inflate,
bulbing and rising and changing their shapes. Creatures from another
world—spectral and behemoth—met in this hidden place to perform some rite.
Something strange and unsuspected, unmeant for human eyes. Why this Pool? Had
they found their way over land? Did they live in the black trees? No, they came
from the skies, and into the skies they were rising—black cumuli bent around
the cavernous sun. The giant man grew monstrous, head mushroomed on top, body
bristling with horns, while the woman was torn into ashen plumes, feathers set
loose and scattered by the wind. Her moan reached them again—crazed, but this
time strangely jubilant, as if some triumph had been won. The sound drifted as
they listened, trailing down from the heavens and settling in the black trees.

Fristeen turned and cocked her head with a
puzzled look.

Something terrible
has happened,
Robbie thought. And then he saw in that cavern of light that hung between the
perpetrator and the victim, a mind that knew what the giants were doing, and
why. Robbie recognized its glimmer—the hints of life within. And from the
depths of dream, an indelible voice reached him: "Look into my eye."

They faced the viburnum slope and started
up it. By the time they reached the top, they were breathing hard. They didn't
stop again till they reached the Two-Tree. They circled it once, then turned to
look back.

The Pool was clearly visible, but the
giants had vanished. The sky was cloudless, leaden gray around the bowl of sun.

They regarded each other, wondering.

"Maybe it just happened in our
minds," Fristeen said.

But they knew it was real.

"What was wrong with his head?"
Robbie gave her a disbelieving look.

"I feel sorry for her," Fristeen
said.

"He killed her."

Fristeen nodded. "That's what she
wanted."

"What do you mean?"

"Didn't you hear? The last time she
screamed?"

Robbie could hardly forget. But—

Fristeen shook her head. "That's what
she wanted. I'm pretty sure."

Full of foreboding, Robbie's gaze returned
to the black trees.

"The strangest place," Fristeen
muttered.

Robbie nodded. "Too Far."

"Remember what He Knows said,"
Fristeen reminded him.

The oracle had warned them not to stay
late, and it would be evening soon. There was no time to waste.

They descended to Used-to-Be, traversed the
Great Place, crossed Trickle and passed beneath the Jigglies. It was there that
they felt the first icy drafts. They shivered and traded dark looks, and the
looks grew still darker when they reached the Needle Patch. A thin mist was
drifting over the Perfect Place. They squirmed through the tunnel, and when they
emerged on the far side, they let the scratches go untended and hurried across
the meadow. But the mist was thick around the Dot Trees, and Robbie couldn't
find the sock.

The chill cut through them. Fristeen's
hands began to shake. They were feeling through the branches, looking for the
marker. Through an aperture between two alder clumps, Shivers' milky eye
appeared, glazed and bulging.

"Where are the birds?" Shivers
whispered. He wheezed over them, giant brow curdling, cheeks sagging behind.
"And the bugs? There's not a click or a buzz—" He spoke as if to
himself. "Is it Shivers they fear?"

Robbie held his breath. Fristeen stood
motionless beside him. Shivers seemed not to see them. Then the dripping nose
shifted, the bulging eyes fixed on them, bloated lips leering.

"Is it
Shivers
?" he
hissed. And then he was tittering.

Robbie felt the cold spittle prickling his
face.

"Your marker is lost," Shivers
observed. "What now?"

Robbie didn't reply.

"You could close your eyes and climb
into the fog." Shivers' stringy chin coiled around a Dot Tree.

Robbie remained mute.

"Or you could wait for—conditions to
improve?" Shivers sniggered. His chin snaked through the leaves, circling
Fristeen.

Robbie's chest spasmed with chills.
Fristeen's lips were turning blue.

"Poor children." A greasy tongue
wagged out of the reeking maw.

"Poor you," Fristeen barked at
him.

Shivers' sigh was like a freezer door
opening. "I have no tears, so . . . rain must do."

Gray billows were sliding down the slopes
toward them. You could hear the drops rattling the leaves. The billows rolled
over them, and the rain came pelting down.