Authors: John Langan
Ahead of me, Marie stopped. I slowed, drawing up to her but maintaining what I hoped was a safe distance. In front of us, a road ran across the forest floor. Composed of rounded stones sunk into the earth beside one another, it reminded me of the cobblestoned streets workmen in Wiltwyck occasionally uncovered when they were repairing a city street. These stones, though, were much larger, a yard across, and had been worn flat. I’m not much of a geologist: they might have been marble, or they might have been another, whitish rock. Stalks of grass sprouted from the spaces between the stones, while the ground to either side of the road, which was clear of leaves, had a red tint I hadn’t encountered in these parts. This could have been an old country road, bypassed by newer and better routes and forgotten, but it didn’t feel like that. It seemed ancient, as if it had been supporting the footsteps of men and women for as long as they’d been around. Which was impossible for this area, I knew, where the Native peoples had not favored this type of construction, and where the European settlers who had succeeded them and who would have laid such a path had been present for only the last few centuries.
My impression of the pathway’s age, however, was buttressed by the pedestal situated on the other side of the road about twenty yards to the left. A simple column, four feet high or thereabouts, supported a statue carved in that idealized way that reminds you of classical Greece or Rome. More or less life-sized, the sculpture was of a woman wearing a plain, sleeveless dress that reached to her feet. The woman was pregnant, enormously so, on-the-verge-of-delivering-her-baby big. She cradled her belly in her hands, the way that expectant mothers sometimes do. She was also headless, her neck a smooth stump. From where I was standing, I couldn’t tell if the statue’s headlessness was intentional, or an act of vandalism. What appeared to be red paint, long faded to brown, had been splashed around the sculpture’s neck, but that could as easily have been dirt from beside the road someone had smeared on it.
“The Mother,” Marie said.
“What?”
“The statue you’re staring at. It’s of the Mother.”
“Who’s that?”
“A very old goddess.”
“Oh. What about this?” I pointed my knife at the road.
“That takes you to a city.”
“A city?”
“A city by the sea,” she said. “I don’t think you’d care to visit it.”
“By the sea?”
“It’s different here.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’ll see,” she said, and crossed the road. I went after her, but I continued to glance at the statue of the deity Marie had named the Mother, until the trees obscured my view of it.
Across the road, the forest floor was less crowded with dead leaves and fallen branches. Around me, the trees, mainly evergreens, seemed ranked in straight lines. I supposed we might be passing through a tree farm of some sort, or could be, it was a patch where the trees happened to grow like this. The rain was no longer falling—hadn’t been for some time, now that I thought of it. I wasn’t sure exactly how long, but since before we’d arrived at the road, anyway.
One of the trees Marie was walking to the left of caught my eye. It was unlike any of the local trees I’d come to recognize over the course of years spent wandering through them on the way to the day’s fishing spot. If anything, it resembled a young child’s image of a tree, a straight trunk crowned with a large ball of leaves. But, to carry the comparison a tad further, it was as if the kid who’d committed this tree to paper had used oil paint, while the rest of the kids in the daycare stuck to whatever used crayons they’d been given. The tree was so vivid you might have believed it wasn’t an actual, living thing but a sculpture cast in metal and lit from within. Had I not had a view of other, similar trees standing beyond it, I would have been tempted to such a view. The rough bark that wrapped the trunk held what light there was and shone a dull bronze; the leaves clustered above it seemed to pass different shades of green back and forth amongst themselves. As I approached the tree, a citrus smell, like oranges on the turn, saturated the air. The individual leaves were shaped like spearheads, their edges serrated. I held up my hand to touch one of them, and hesitated at the prospect of those jagged edges. When I lowered my arm, Marie, who had stopped a slight distance ahead to watch me, said, “That was the right decision. If you aren’t careful, the leaves will slice to the bone.”
“Right.” The prospect of more of these trees in front of us was not reassuring.
I found, though, that while the Vivid Trees—as I thought of them—gradually supplanted the assortment of evergreens, maples, and birch that had surrounded us on the other side of the strange road, they didn’t appear to grow especially close together, allowing us a reasonable amount of room to pass safely among them. Nor did they hinder the progress of the person I saw walking through them in our direction. The moment’s hope I had it was Dan, searching for me, died as I saw the man striding towards us wearing a large, baggy coat that hung most of the way down his legs. It was dark, from wear more than its tailor’s design. The fellow’s chest was crisscrossed by the straps of an assortment of bags and sacks he was carrying, all of which bounced against him with each step. He was wearing a hat that resembled a nightcap someone had forgotten to finish. He was younger than I was, but older than Dan, the stringy beard on his jaw a failed effort he hadn’t given up on. His eyes were brown and big, and they grew bigger still at the sight of Marie naked before him. He called out a greeting I couldn’t distinguish, raising his right hand in what I took for a friendly wave. I figured him for a fellow-traveler, lost in wherever-the-hell-this-was.
Marie had halted when the man came into view. As he neared, she seemed to go out of focus, the ripple I’d witnessed previously sweeping over her. When the stranger was within ten or fifteen feet of her, the distortion blew away and she was transformed. Taller by a good six inches, her hair darker, curled, her pale form was covered by the most horrendous wounds. Great gashes peeled back the skin and meat of her arms, her ribs, her legs, left flesh hanging in ribbons and flaps. Deeper punctures opened her back. A ragged gash ran most of the way round her neck. Those places her skin had remained uncut, it was heavily bruised. A sound swelled from her torn throat, a scream that was as much fury as agony. My knees shook with it—with all of it.
His expression slackened by astonishment, the traveler stuttered a brace of words I couldn’t hear for the screaming. In answer, Marie shrieked at him in a language I didn’t recognize; though I didn’t have to understand it to feel the venom coursing through it. Whatever she said, the fellow flinched as if she’d slapped him full across the face. Her outburst continued, and as it did, she appeared to gain in height, her hair to rise off her shoulders, her feet to lift from the ground. The man had removed his cap and was twisting it in his hands, tears streaking his face, attempting a reply, but Marie would have none of it. She spat a series of phrases at him, the exclamation points at the end of each practically visible. At last, the fellow could take it no more, and fled from her, sprinting to his right, packs flapping, in the direction Marie had said the city by the sea lay. She flung a scattering of invectives after him.
The furious ruin she’d become turned in my direction. I was standing with my knife held out in front of me like an undersized sword, a look of stunned horror weighting my face. Marie’s features were charged with a violence that, for a moment, I feared she would direct at me. Then she shimmered, settling to the ground, and resolved into herself, again.
“Marie?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, considering my knife as if noticing it for the first time.
“What—what was all that?”
“An image.”
“Of what?”
“Something that happened a long time ago.”
“Do you know who that man was?”
“Yes,” she said, “I will.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“It isn’t important. He needed to go someplace. I helped him.” Apparently satisfied with her answer, she resumed her course. I was quaking-in-my-boots-afraid to keep after her, but I was absolutely terrified to walk away from her. Allowing an extra ten feet between us—which I guessed wouldn’t be much help if she resumed this aspect—I pursued her.
My mind wasn’t processing the events of the last couple of hours in any appreciable way. It was more taking each of them in and storing it for further review. I suppose this was because the morning had already been so fluid, one outrageous occurrence yielding to the next, even more outrageous one. Some underlying awareness of that quality allowed me not to surrender entirely to the extremes of emotion that buffeted me. I’d be lying, though, committing a sin of omission, if I didn’t admit the role that watching Marie’s calves move played in my decision to keep walking through the citrus-scented woods.
The trees had started to draw in closer together, not enough to hinder our passage, but sufficient for me to pay them extra attention. In front of us and to the left, they gathered in a small grove. Through the gaps among their trunks, I glimpsed what I took for other trees, their trunks white and smooth. As we approached the grove, I heard the wind picking up and falling off again; though the leaves on the trees beside us were undisturbed. Now I saw that the white trees were in fact stone columns, arranged in a circle, joined at the tops by their support of a domed roof, one part of which had fallen in. Temple or monument, the structure gave the same impression of incredible age as the road we’d crossed. I was tempted to detour to it, but decided it would be better to locate Dan first.
Beyond the temple and its grove, the smell of citrus was interrupted by another, the stench of meat a day into spoiling, accented by the copper reek of blood. The sound of the wind gusting was drowned out by the heavy buzz of flies. In a small clearing, we found the source of smell and sound: the carcass of a huge animal, its legs splayed out to either side of it, its head gone, cut from the thick neck that had spilled a lake of blood onto the forest floor. Fat, black and green flies half the length of my thumb roamed the beast’s back, its flanks, sat at the shore of blood and sipped from it. From the sheer size of its remains, I assumed the animal must be an elephant, albeit one whose coat was a rich, red-gold. Its legs, however, ended in hooves, each one large as a man’s chest. I had paused to survey the remains; Marie had stopped and was waiting for me. I said, “What is this?”
“One of the Oxen of the Sun,” she said.
“I never knew cattle could grow so big.”
“These are special—sacred, you could say.”
“Not too sacred, if someone did this to it. Do you have any idea what happened?”
“It was taken,” she said, “for bait.”
“Bait? For what?”
She uttered a word I didn’t recognize; it sounded like “Apep.” I said, “I don’t know what that is.”
“Not what—who.”
“Okay. I don’t know who that is.”
“Come this way,” Marie said. “We’re almost there.”
Away from the carcass of the great cattle, the odor of decay receded, the ebb and flow of the wind returned. Except, I understood that I hadn’t been listening to air, I’d been hearing water, the rush of the surf rolling itself up a beach. Marie and I had arrived at the edge of the woods we’d been crossing. The Vivid Trees ended in a line so straight it might have been planted there. Beyond them, an expanse of reddish ground rose into a low hill that Marie was already climbing. She continued over the top, and down the far slope. I stopped at the crest.
An ocean sprawled before me, its corrugated surface black as ink. Long, foaming waves tumbled and splashed onto a rocky beach. Distances are tricky to estimate over water, but at least two hundred yards offshore, a spur of gray rock slanted up from the water and ran parallel to the beach on my right, forming a kind of bay. Marie headed in this direction, picking her way across the stones that cluttered the beach. Larger waves burst against the stone wall, tossing spray high into a sky that was empty of the gulls you would have expected to see hanging in it, crying to one another. Nor did there appear to be any of the detritus you usually encounter on a beach, no clumps of dried seaweed hopping with sandfleas, no driftwood scrubbed and bleached into abstract sculpture, no fragments of crab left by sloppy gulls. Although the waves continued to collapse onto the shore, there were none of the tidal pools higher up that might have indicated the water had been any closer. There wasn’t much of a sea smell, the briny stink of the ocean and its contents. A fine mist shone on the rocks closer to the water; otherwise, the scene was curiously static, as if I was surveying a vista that had not changed in millennia.
Already, Marie had moved uncomfortably far down the beach. I descended the hill. Stones clattered under my boots. To my left, the surf curled onto the beach with a hissing rumble, while further away, the ocean struck the rock wall with irregular booms. To my right, up the rise, the Vivid Trees maintained formation. A mile or so along the shore, the rock barrier swept in towards the shore, lifting into a cluster of large, jagged rocks. There was activity down there, a lot of it. Figures moved to and fro on the beach and, it appeared, in and out of the ocean—but I was too far removed to distinguish their actions.
I assumed Dan would be waiting for me, ahead. How he had found his way here, I couldn’t guess; though after what had befallen me, I supposed I shouldn’t have been too surprised at it. It seemed reasonable to imagine he’d encountered Sophie and his children, just as I’d met Marie. What it all meant was beyond me, which I knew was not a good thing, but which I hoped to delay reckoning with for as long as possible.