Authors: Lynn Cesar
Karen had to wipe her eyes on her sleeve, but felt no embarrassment. Even the cracked bone in her hand seemed relieved by this sweetness. Somebody she’d never even troubled to think about had been out there in that earlier world of hers— that world so full of nightmare and pain— thinking of her,
liking
her. She started to speak and had to clear her throat. Grinned crookedly.
“That means a lot to me. Look. What I have to tell you will make me sound crazy, but please try to hear it. First, don’t eat that fruit, not even a bite. I think Marty will want you to… and— Marty is dangerous. I don’t exactly understand it myself, but he was like… my father’s
apprentice
. My father is… my father was a very dangerous man. My lover, Susan, was killed three days ago. They said it was a traffic accident, but I think Marty had something to do with it. I’m so sorry, but I truly think it. I think my
father
had something to do with it… . You’ll know I’m crazy now, I guess, and I guess I just can’t help that. I just saw my bus pull in down there and I have to go, but I couldn’t leave without trying to warn you. I know I sound insane… but
leave
him, Helen. Take your boy and leave him.” She rose and, impulsively, kissed Helen’s cheek. Then stumbled out to catch her bus.
Raul and Isauro, in the cab of their rusty old Chevy pick-up, glanced back simultaneously at the knock on the cab’s rear window. The old woman they’d picked up a few miles back up the highway was standing there in the truck bed as easy as you please, balanced against the truck’s rocking and swaying— standing there perfectly poised though she was so skinny, so old— and motioning for them to pull over.
Isauro did so, at the rusty gates and mossy old wooden sign of the Spaith walnut orchard. They watched the old woman take up the pair of axes she’d been carrying when they picked her up and, gripping the hafts of both with one sinewy hand, jump out of the bed, incredibly spry for her apparent age. Spry, but surely addled in the head, because once on the roadside, she made a strange gesture towards the bed she’d just jumped out of, seeming to beckon… and a moment after, gently touched the air beside her. Then she shouldered the axes, saluted Raul and Isauro, and walked down the road into the orchard.
“Una vieja loca,” said Isauro, as he whipped the Chevy back onto the highway.
“Una bruja,” said Raul, somewhat dreamily. And Isauro nodded.
“Hija,” said Quetzal, speaking to the empty air, it seemed, as she walked down the lane so profusely littered by the narrow golden leaves of the walnut trees. “My daughter. We are seeking one of your sisters.”
When she had walked perhaps a quarter mile, she stopped. “We are near,” she told the air. “I will dress you now, daughter. It will help you to take hold of this world you have returned to.”
She gestured and a little wind-devil rose, snatching up a whirling cone of leaves, which began to snag on a vertical core, creating a patchy mosaic of yellow leaf and empty air. The shape of a naked woman stood beside the witch and wonderingly raised leaf-fingered hands before her leaf-sketched face. “You are clothed,” said Quetzal, “in the flesh of our enemy. Our enemy is Xibalba, the green god who blankets this earth, piercing its soil with his roots, who feeds on its rain and its sunlight, and who has been the cradle and the shelter, the food and the clothing of our race since our beginning. He who now would feed on us and destroy us utterly. Xibalba has learned to steal our minds and our eyes, the better to hunt us. But it is we, your sisters and I, who will go hunting Xibalba. Take this, Emilia, and follow me.”
She held out one of the axes. The ghost, with leafy fingers, gripped the haft. The autumnal mosaic of her face… smiled. The strange pair left the road and stepped into the lane between the trees.
“You see?” said Quetzal. Ahead, the stark ranks of autumn-denuded trees filed down to a small swamp. Black muck, a big pond of inky mud, spanned the lane, and the trees flanking it were bannered and festooned with vines and lianas. Thick moss wrapped the trunks and webs of creepers wove a velvety green fabric that tented the whole zone. Just beyond this uncanny micro-bog, a brown Dodge with front doors hanging open sat with its front bumper wedged against a tree-trunk.
Quetzal led the ghost to the brink of the muck. Mosquitoes and dragonflies clouded the air, their wire-thin song stitching the silence of the leafy acres. The witch gestured at the bog, where a serpentine trunk or massive root threaded through the muck, thick as a man but sinuous, its bark so rough it seemed like scales. “A limb of the green daemon. Daughter, we must strike it till his green blood sprays!” At these words, here and there along the fissured limb, crude black gems appeared, oily-bright knobs that stiffly stirred, that searched for— and seemed to
see
— its enemies. Hoisting her axe, Quetzal shrilled, “With me, child! With me!”
They brandished their axes, ghost with living woman, against the blue October sky and Quetzal cried, “Hunaphu! Ixbalanque! Itzamna! Strike with us!”
In tandem, their axe-heads whickered down, the arcs of their honed bits flashing silver. Green sap sprayed, the limb convulsed. Again the axe-bits rose, flashed down… again… again, as vegetal tissue and geysering sap arched up from the wounds.
A shudder went through its anacondan length. The eye-knobs dulled, a waxy pallor frosted them.
Quetzal sighed, her shoulders sagged from their militant tension. She reached over and gently touched the back of her hand to the leaves that partially shaped one of long-dead Emily Fox’s cheeks. “Sweet hija. Queridita. That man, that lover who killed you with grief. You know now what possessed him. You know what he served and what he— deep under the earth— still serves. You know what your dear daughter fights, y que todavia tiene que luchar— what still she must fight. What
we
will fight. Y mira! Behold! We will not fight alone!”
She faced the swamp— already less black, its tent of vegetation seeming to shrink, beginning to shrivel. Her sleeves fell back a bit with her priestly gesture and showed the stark thinness of her forearms, yet showed withal the tendony strength of those brown limbs.
“Lupe!” she cried. “Tienes tu libertad! Ven a mi, pobrecita! Ven a mi, queridita tontita!”
A muddy shape rose from the drying muck, a woman-shape from which the soil slid off, till she was only a sketchy earthen shadow— a shoulder, a thigh, a pendulous breast. Quetzal commanded a windy cone of leaves and clothed her. The full-bosomed shape staggered, raised the gapped yellow sketch of her face to the blue autumn sky… touched with foliate-hands her foliate torso and lifted the voids of her eyes in wonder.
“Mis hijas,” said Quetzal. “Vamos a salvar otras, y otras, y otras. We are going to raise an army of murdered women and men! Vamos a matar a nos matadores! We are going to kill our killers and we are going to kill the killer of us all. Will you follow me?”
Airy Emily Fox, a thing of sky and leaves, turned her half-invisible face to airy Lupe. Lupe reached for the second axe that Quetzal held and gripped its haft, brandishing and testing it. A smile spread across both their leafy faces.
“Entonces, que vamanos!” cried Quetzal, smiling a smile of her own, a triumphant smile, her seamed eyes red and wet with tears both of tenderness and a jubilant anger. “Y mira!” she cried in a tone of discovery. “Here is our chariot!” She made one brief, beckoning gesture. The brown Dodge shuddered. Its front doors creaked shut and its engine came to life. It backed off the tree, with a slight creaking of its bent bumper, swung a half-arc in reverse, wheeled round, and trundled over the cloddy earth of the next lane over. Stopped. Both doors on its nearer side swung open.
“Come, my sisters. We have brothers and sisters, who are waiting to join us!”
Assistant Chief Deputy Marty Carver, acting sheriff of Gravenstein County, with one lordly finger on the wheel, steered up the Gravenstein Highway, sifting in his mind, as a miser sifts his wealth, the seeds of power he had planted and was about to plant. Jack Fox’s mantle had not been draped upon unworthy shoulders!
The ape Babcock was a done deal, as Rabble and his bitch would shortly be. He’d given Rabble the orders last night and even now the crippled cowboy should be picking up his hooker at the bus station. Once Marty made sure of Babcock, he would check on the retired Chief Deputy. Then his next bit of business would be that dope-growing punk next door.
Babcock’s long absence all but assured Marty the ox had accomplished the one thing he was fit for: feeding the green god. Marty prepared his courage. Where the god had been fed, one of his dragons would be born and Marty would finally confront a soldier from the demon army he had been chosen to raise.
Less than a mile from Spaith’s, straight at him in the opposing lane, came… a brown Dodge, one of the Department’s unmarked cruisers. And by the plate, the very one Babcock had checked out this morning! But Babcock was not at the wheel. No, it was some old Mex bitch, with white hair curling out from under a battered gray hat. She glanced and grinned at him as their vehicles passed each other… and from her rear window… a shape of yellow leaves thrust out! A knot of yellow leaves hung in the air, alongside the window, somehow contracting and clenching? A
fist
of yellow leaves it was, a fist from which a single, jointed leaf rose up. A leafy fist, giving him the
finger!
He stopped dead, right in the middle of the highway and, in the rearview, saw his slack face was beaded with sweat. He had come braced for awe, but of a marvel
he
had summoned— for a nightmare surely, but one whose horror
he
would harness. Marty fought to breathe. Why couldn’t he draw air? It seemed he’d just been inhaling the pure atmosphere of Power, only to have it punched out of him. Because suddenly Power was elsewhere, Power was with that chicken-killing white-haired bitch, Lupe’s neighbor. Was she a witch? A bruja? To command a fucking demon of dead leaves? How the hell did they get Babcock’s car?
He could not doubt the powers his master had given him, he
dared
not doubt them. He had to shake this trance off and see his mission accomplished. Accelerating towards Spaith’s, he snatched up the mouthpiece and thumbed Central. “Bruce? Sheriff Carver. Gimme anyone northbound on Gravenstein Highway.”
“Copy that, Chief.”
Marty was pulling into Spaith’s acres when his earpiece crackled. “Shurrf? Haynes here. My Twenty is three miles north of town.”
“Step on it, Haynes. One of our un-markeds has been stolen, maybe five miles north of Spaith’s by now. I want ‘em shackled and brought in, do you copy?”
“Copy that, Shurrf. Shackled an’ brought in.”
“Report on contact, you copy?”
“Report on contact, copy that, Shurrf.”
Very slowly, Marty rolled through the orchard, scanning left and right, the disregarded wealth of walnuts loud beneath his tires. Ahead he saw a spray of soil on the asphalt, where someone had accelerated out of the midst of the trees. He turned and rolled downslope between those two rows.
There, a hundred yards ahead. When he emerged from the cruiser, he had to steady himself. A swamp spanned the lane, the swamp already a patch of black, fast-hardening mud. Shriveling festoons, a canopy of vines and creepers, stretched between the flanking trees. Explosive greenery had webbed this lane but was already brittle, gray as ash, its shriveled leaflets drooping like dead fingers. A massive, crooked, crocodilian shape lay half sunk within the hardening muck. As he drew near enough to see clearly, his legs half-buckled and he went down upon one knee.
Brutal axe-wounds bit its scaly dorsum. Hindquarters sunk, its frozen forelimbs clawed the air, stiff as dead branches. The great jaws might have been a lightning-split bough lined with thorns that were all too plainly fangs. What brought Marty’s reverent terror to its peak were the pallid fungal nodes that studded the head like a pustulous pox. All
eyes
they were and in the milky spheres of some, the dimming outlines of a human iris gleamed.
The raw shock of miracle— before he could collect his full-grown self about him— threw Marty back in time, far back into a younger self. It was back when he first picked for the Foxes, a gawky pre-adolescent, when he first— come evening amid the sweet-smelling plums— sensed something in that Fox earth, sensed a privilege, a potency, a promise in that soil. Back in those days, he saw a beautiful sinister something in Jack Fox’s eyes, eyes that hinted there was a secret in that ground, a precious power, an
immortal
power. That was the year Jack Fox had become, in his heart, his true father.
What Marty remembered, as he looked upon the miracle of his God’s murdered scion half-sunk in the mud, was a single fleeting moment in that crucial childhood autumn of his. It was a moment
before
the immortal power had seduced him. In that instant, young Marty Carver had felt only
terror
of the secret he sensed in Jack Fox’s earth.
And just for an instant now, as he looked at the corpse of the green god’s dragon, that younger Marty cried, “Thank God!” within his heart.
But Acting Assistant Chief Marty Carver was made of much sterner stuff, was far more powerful than that long-vanished adolescent. The treachery of his heart became rage. He towered to his feet and shook his fist. The green god had an enemy, this enemy had power… but Marty was the green god’s general, his first in command. That gray-haired bitch, that witch. She would die in pain. She would die in
pieces
!
He plucked out his cell-phone and thumbed the speed dial. “Rabble?”
“Hey, Marty.”
“Where are we?”
Some throat-clearing. “I’m in town to pick her up,” Rabble answered. “I think that’s her bus that just pulled in.”
“Listen carefully. You fuck this up and I’m going to snap your spine. You got that,
sir?
” The sneer at Rabble’s nominally superior rank was an infallible goad to the man’s abject compliance. It recalled to him his last moments as Marty’s actual superior, writhing on the floor of his office, his shattered leg shattered anew.