Blood Fugue (32 page)

It seemed then that the tree understood his intentions. It reached out with the branches that had held those he’d freed and began to whip their unconscious bodies. Somewhere behind the ranged lines of Fugues, Carla screamed as she saw what happened. It was no human punishment, ten lashes, a birching, the cat o’ nine tails; these were huge branches, extensions of the gargantuan tree. Each blow broke bones. It was over before Kerrigan could even decide what to do to help them. The branches whipped down again and again so hard that the earth itself shook. Blood sprayed up from the bodies, and soon, severed chunks of flesh jumped and bounced as limbs and heads were shattered and separated by the force of the blows.

Knowing there was nothing he could do, but knowing he had to try, Kerrigan loosed the final two binders, the first at Dingbat and the second at José Jimenez. Both found their targets. The beating that the other branches were still dealing out, even though nothing lived in the pulped humanity they were attacking, had set up waves of motion in the other branches. When Dingbat came free he was thrown into the brush beyond the arbour’s limit and out of the tree’s reach. José Jimenez also fell beyond the boundary but he landed headfirst and Kerrigan heard the grinding crunch as his neck snapped. It was instinct that had caused him to throw those last binders, love and loyalty that dictated where he aimed them. Now there were no binders left and the task was far from over.

Kerrigan watched as the branch pounding his adoptive mother’s body picked up her head. He was amazed to see that there was an expression of relief on Kath’s face. Her eyes were still open, though he knew she was dead, and in that moment; the last he ever saw her, he felt all the love they’d shared push up from deep inside him. He acknowledged what she’d been to him — a true mother. Then the branch squeezed that wise and beautiful old head of hers and it cracked open.

Kerrigan heard someone screaming and realised it was him. The force of hatred flowed through him from the earth upwards. The Fury was upon him.

Carla watched the horrendous changes that overtook Kerrigan as he ran screaming into the arbour.

At first, because he was spinning and lashing out so fast, she assumed it was her imagination that he seemed to have grown larger or perhaps some trick of the unnatural lights throbbing from the tree. As Kerrigan hacked with his tomahawk, and thrust and struck with his staff, the tree responded by putting Fugue after Fugue in his way, manipulating them to defend itself.

It was no illusion, though; Kerrigan’s body had almost doubled in size. His clothes split and the muscles in his forearms burst open his leather wristbands. Everything fell away in tatters except for his belt. Knifelike protrusions grew from him in the form of smooth, shiny bone. Ivory blades lined his back and chest in a similar pattern to the feeding tubes that had appeared on the Raging Fugues. Bone blades grew from his knees and thighs and from his shoulders and elbows.

He danced and screamed on the edge of the arbour as Fugues and tree branches surrounded him. He was not subdued. Carla saw limbs of Fugue and tree alike flying from the confused melee. She felt the shudders of pain run through the tree each time it or one of its protectors was wounded or destroyed. Snarls and howls of pain echoed around the arbour in the amethyst midnight. The wet sounds of stone slicing flesh and snapping bone and cries cut short by beheadings were the songs of Kerrigan’s war. The tree itself began to make whistled cries of agony each time Kerrigan severed yet another of its combatant limbs.

The dismembered pieces of his enemies lay all around him but Kerrigan was not left unscathed. Many times he was caught by the flying, flailing branches and they knocked him hard to the ground. Carla saw several of his bone blades snapped off and huge cuts appeared on his back where the branches opened him up. Blood flew from him but still he twirled and hacked. One by one the Fugues were separated either from the tree or from their own heads and they fell, lifeless as broken marionettes, to the ground below the tree’s monstrous canopy.

Carla felt a change in the tree’s focus before it acted. It pulled one of the relatively undamaged males back from the fight and marched the man towards her. He was a tall, gangly man with bad skin. He wore an orange vest that hung on him as if it was two sizes too large. He wore a pair of large-lensed glasses that exaggerated the size of his eyes making him look like a skinny frog. Before he reached her, he stopped to take off his shoes and jeans. When he was naked from the waist down, his bony legs looked even more pathetic beside the penis that the tree had given him — its shaft was as thick as his calf. He walked towards her, his Adam’s apple yo-yoing up and down as he swallowed in anticipation, his orange waistcoat flapping and his penis beating and dripping in time with the pulse of the tree.

Before he was within ten feet of her she heard an outraged war cry. In the next instant, the Fugue appeared to develop a second smaller penis in the region of his stomach but as Carla looked more closely she saw it was Kerrigan’s staff impaling him. The Fugue blinked at her with his froggy eyes and tried to speak. Nothing came. He looked down at his abdomen and saw the new protrusion there without comprehending what it was. Only when he touched it did he understand that he was dead. He looked back at Carla, his eyes appealing to her but he fell to his knees and then onto his face and she saw the rest of the staff protruding from his back. The tree howled in frustration. It released the Fugue who collapsed forward onto the staff, sinking down onto it and forcing most of it back through the entry wound.

At the edge of the arbour the Fugues that weren’t dead were now too wounded to be of any use in battle. The tree made them fight on even when they had lost both arms. One Fugue, now quadriplegic, was being used by a branch to batter the Fugue Hunter with its head. The only thing keeping it alive was the will of the tree. Kerrigan ended its life by separating it from the tree with one downward stroke of the tomahawk through the branch that held it. As it had with every successful contact, the head of the tomahawk glowed bright cobalt. So drenched was it now with the sap of the tree and the blood of dead Fugues that tiny stars of mica shone deep blue with piercing brightness; Kerrigan was a source of light to rival the tree. In fact, Carla could see that the tree had lost some of its brightness since the fighting had begun.

The surviving branches that had engaged him retracted now to hide among the healthier ones above.

The Fugue Hunter stood before her, his chest heaving. Blood and sap streaked his hulking body. Carla couldn’t tell how much of it was his blood but she prayed he had some strength left. His eyes did not focus on her, but on some point high up the tree’s trunk. His voice was unrecognisable, as if an animal was trying to speak, but she understood his words well enough.

‘Let her go.’

Kerrigan raised his tomahawk, not at the tree as she’d expected, but above her head where it flamed and rained blue sparks upon her.

‘Let her go and you live to try again. If you don’t release her, I’ll kill her.’

She saw in his eyes that he would do it.

‘Jimmy, please don’t do this. I . . . love you.’

‘Shut up.’ His voice was more the snarl of a beast than it was that of a human. He raised the tomahawk higher and tensed every muscle, ready to bring it down and divide her skull into two.

She felt the tree’s grip give totally in that moment and she slipped to the ground. The pain of being released as her joints replaced themselves more neatly into their proper housings was worse than the original wrenching and she screamed.

The Fugue Hunter leaned down and picked her up carefully so that his bone blades did not wound her. He carried her to the edge of the arbour. With every step he took the tree rustled and shuddered its leaves and branches. A wailing began near the top of its trunk. Kerrigan laid Carla down beyond the entrance to the arbour and stroked her face with one enormous, clawed hand.

‘You didn’t do it.’ She said.

‘No. How could I?’

The pain in her limbs had lessened a little but she knew she could not sit up, let alone walk.

‘It’s over then. Are you going to leave me here?’

None of the humanity had returned to his voice but there was a sentiment behind his words.

‘It’s not over yet but when it is, I’ll never leave you.’

Kerrigan the Fugue Hunter stood up. He strode back into the arbour. The tree’s wailing became a yet more desperate keening at his return. Carla heard the fear in it. Though she could not see the incidents of the next hour she heard every single sound. The sound of Jimmy Kerrigan fighting off the branches that tried to prevent him entering the arbour a second time: she heard his response to each attack in the whoosh of his tomahawk and swish of his staff as he paralysed or cut every limb that advanced towards him. This advance and repulse must have gone on until the tree had no more limbs mobile enough to defend itself with.

The sound of fighting stopped for a short while and she heard only the sound of his footsteps as he walked towards the unprotected tree. Then came the hooted whistles of panic as he used his talons to climb the tree’s trunk. By that time, he was too close to the centre of the tree for any branch to reach him and the hoots of panic became deep honks of terror. They made her think of some vast cathedral organ playing sharp and flat screams instead of notes. And in her mind she imagined a dismembered man, still alive and helpless while his attacker advanced with a gleaming blade and dark intent.

She heard the Fugue Hunter hack into the bark of the tree and was thankful she could no longer hear its thoughts. The hacking made a moist, fleshy squelch as he sliced through the bark and tore into the muscular tissue below. The echoes of butchery resounded across the arbour as Kerrigan bludgeoned relentlessly into the body of the tree. Then Carla heard what she recognised as the sound of stone on bone and the agonised screams of the living tree reached a new and insane pitch. Not long after the chopping stopped she thought she could make out the ragged breathing of the tree as it tried to recover from the quartering it had been given.

Towards the end she heard the faint tinkle of smashing glass as the Fugue Hunter dashed his bottles of wellspring water against the exposed bones deep inside the tree’s wounds and the hot roaring hiss that followed like steam being forced from the ground. Finally, the tree began to collapse. She heard limbs falling all over the arbour, higher ones crashing through lower ones as they fell, taking many more with them.

A moment later the Fugue Hunter was with her again and he lifted her up in time for her to see the trunk of the tree splitting in half and falling open. All the limbs that were still attached came down then with a creaking, thundering crash; the sound of a whole forest felled in a single cut.

Mexico

One year later

When Carla told him she was pregnant Kerrigan was ecstatic.

They went down to Pepito’s place on the beach and drank Coronas and tequila until they could hardly walk. They weren’t married, but it would be easy enough to organise. For the time that the euphoria and alcohol held him in their thrall, he was the happiest man in Mexico.

That night, while Carla slept in something of a stupor, he dreamed of the forest below Bear Mountain. They were standing next to a heap of ash in the centre of what had been the arbour. The broad space was filled with light and saplings sprouted everywhere.

The sallow man fixed him in the glare of his dead eyes.

‘You will destroy everything you fought to protect.’

‘I’ll never hurt her,’ Kerrigan protested. ‘And I’ll never feed. I’ve kept up the rituals just like I always did.’

‘You’ve spoken the words that every Fugue Hunter has uttered when they realise their destiny is to become a feeder. He searches for you even now.’

‘Who does?’

‘The boy you recovered. David Slater. He will find you and when he does you will initiate him or leave the world without protection.’

Kerrigan knew the sallow man was right. But was everything he said true?

‘There’s Fugue outside the valley?’ he asked.

‘Of course. It’s a disease, foundling, and it can occur anywhere.’

‘But surely there are other hunters.’

‘You are the last,’ he said. ‘But that is not the worst of this. Let me show you something.’

Night fell across the arbour and where the pile of ash had been, now the Fugue tree had returned in all its pulsing glory. The sallow man pointed and Kerrigan saw himself in fury, fighting the Fugues that hung from the tree’s branches. He’d never witnessed such brutality, but that was not what the sallow man wanted him to see. He brought the scene closer and showed him the wounds he sustained and the places where the tree’s sap splashed into his cuts.

‘The tree won that night. It lives on in you, foundling, and now you’ve fulfilled your lust, it lives in the belly of my great granddaughter — the place it always wanted to be. She bears its seed.’

Kerrigan heard the tree laughing, the piped hoots of its voice making him scream and cover his ears.

‘Trees thrive on light, foundling, and so too will her child.’

He woke up then, sweating hard with his heart near to bursting in his chest.

Carla slept on.

Acknowledgements