The Other Tree (13 page)

The wind rose into a low howl as Luke slid behind the wheel, the engine chugging into life. Chris lay motionless on the back seat, her hands starkly bloodless against the black upholstery.

It’s going to be okay
.

Right?

As they drove onto the wooded road, Luke glanced at the rear view mirror, watching as the castle receded into the darkness.

* * *

It had been surreal.

Bursting through the flimsy hospital doors, into the strained light.

We need a doctor!

Nurses, scattered like marbles, bouncing through the wards.

English! Does anyone speak…

Trolleys straining with the wounded, rattling through the halls, or hanging in islands, waiting for help.

Help! Please!

Deflated IVs hanging from tarnished stands, gloves snapping on, tiny flashlights—

No response
.

Plastic trays rattling with implements, some of which looked raided from a kitchen.

Is she going to be—

Scissors snipping through bandage, through cloth. Pale mottled flesh, shiny, not supposed to be that colour.

Sir, you have to wait outside—

Outside.

Luke sat on an uncomfortably moulded plastic chair, his head in his hands. He smelled of sweat and old dust, and his brain buzzed like a can of shaken soda tossed into a vat of acid. The light was too dim and too bright at once, and the pastel green walls, which had undoubtedly looked soothing on the tiny colour chart, seemed to scream “You’re probably dying!” when painted throughout an entire hospital.

“Sir.”

A woman in her forties, wearing a white surgical coat, stepped in front of Luke.

“What kind of a snake was it?” asked the doctor.

“I don’t know, I didn’t see—”

The woman’s gaze flicked away, then back to Luke.

“There was some toxin left on the entry wound, but we haven’t been able to identify it. We tried a broad antivenom, but she’s not responding.”

The words echoed from far away.

“We haven’t come across anything like it before,” the doctor continued. “We’re doing everything we can, but her condition…”

The rest faded into static, drowned out by the sound of Luke’s heartbeat ringing in his ears.

Thank you
, he thought he said.

I’m sorry
, she may have replied.

Luke’s feet moved across the dull, scratched floor. People bobbed and swayed around him, the walls rippling like laundry in a headwind.

Outside, the sky was sapphire blue and clearing. Long blades of grass waved in the moonlight, carrying the scent of pine and violets.

What a silly thing to have happened.

What a stupid, wasteful thing.

Chris should have been at home, making hot chocolate and curling up with a botanical journal. Or tucked away in the university basement, playing with some exciting new plant. She should have lived to ninety, becoming a cantankerous old woman screaming at children to keep off her rare Himalayan blinking grass. She should have watched successive governments rise and fall, bought a new television set every seven years and complained about how things just didn’t last anymore. She should have had a family, possibly several. Fallen in and out of love, and hopefully back in.

She—

Oh, god…

Luke fell to his knees.

Oh, God.

Luke curled on to the ground, holding his head in his hands.

I’ve looked, and I’ve searched, and I’ve tried so hard.

Why don’t you answer?

Why don’t you ever answer?

Luke shuddered with racking breaths, his head pressed against the earth. The smell of dirt and rain and blood filled the air.

God, give me
something—

He sensed the presence before he heard the footsteps, soft on bending grass. Luke lifted his head and saw a woman standing before him, her green dress fluttering above battered hiking boots. She was almost like a shadow, green on green against a backdrop of rustling woods.

“Thena?”

Luke rose unsteadily to his feet, and the red-haired woman stepped towards him. She looked like she might have been crying recently.

“What are you—” Luke began.

“Give this to her,” said Thena, looking quickly over her shoulder as she pushed a small press-seal bag into his hands.

Luke looked down at the small, capped syringe.

“I’m not trained in venipuncture,” said Luke.

Thena blinked at him.

“I have other startled exclamations to make, too,” said Luke. “Like how did you—”

“We could go grab a coffee, but irreversible brain damage kicks in in about,” Thena looked at her watch. “Two minutes.”

Luke stared at Thena, and beneath the matter-of-fact calm, he could see something inconsolable in her eyes. Without quite knowing why, he gave her hand a gentle squeeze before he sprinted madly back towards the ward.

Sweat rolled down his back as he wove between trolleys and bustling staff. He slipped into the hospital room, rushing past several occupied beds. Chris lay on an off-white bedspread, half-covered by a rumpled green sheet. She was a similar colour, her breathing barely registering.

Trembling, Luke pulled the syringe from the plastic bag and glanced around the quiet ward. He flicked the needle and located a vein, steadying himself. They didn’t train you for this at the seminary—the only blood involved was alcoholic.

Luke concentrated on the sensation of stillness, of purpose, and watched as the plunger emptied into Chris’s arm.

“What are you doing?”

Luke slid the syringe into his coat and turned around. A Chinese intern with thick-rimmed glasses stood in the doorway with a clipboard.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” she said disapprovingly. “We’ll let you know if there’s a change.”

Luke nodded, looking down at Chris’s colourless face, then left the room.

7

Morning was pale and reluctant, washing the hospital with watery sunlight.

“You didn’t sleep there all night, did you?”

Luke opened his eyes blearily, still slumped in a chair shaped like molten Lego.

“Sleeping on chairs, sleeping on the floor,” said Chris, sitting up in the hospital bed. “You don’t self-flagellate, do you?”

“Life is usually punishment enough.” Luke stretched with a series of loud cracks.

“Do you want some pudding?” said Chris, proffering a small bowl of…something.

“I think that’s meatloaf,” said Luke.

“But it smells like ice cream.”

She studied the monochrome mush for a moment, prodding it tentatively with a spoon.

“Thank you,” said Chris.

“Hmm?”

Chris put down the bowl of meatloaf pudding, leaning back against the pillow. She was still a slightly waxy colour, and although her hands were resting on the bed now, Luke had seen them trembling.

“I think maybe you should go home,” said Chris. “I mean, I’ve got the riddles now, and if I come across some Biblical sphinx thing, I’m sure I get to phone a friend.”

She wasn’t sure how much of it was real, and how much had been the hallucinogenic properties of the toxin attacking her brain, but Chris was pretty sure Luke had endured a pretty appalling night. She remembered fading light, a room being ripped apart, a tragic story, gunshots, rattling chains, and engines roaring while the wind shrieked through the trees. And she remembered being carried, through darkness and long silences, through the echo of stone and the smell of salted meats, through ash and rain and antiseptic. She also had vague memories of a shadowy figure crushing her head with its claws, but she was fairly certain that was either a hallucination or a Romanian Dream Eater.

And then she had woken up. That had been a surprise. Luke had been scrunched up in the chair by her bed, looking like an old potato that had fallen behind the vegetable drawer and been forgotten about. Chris had never been exceptionally gifted in matters of personal presentation, but right now Luke took dishevelled to a whole new level of physical and psychological distress. He hadn’t wanted to come in the first place, and Chris had been reckless to think this would be an adventure of righteousness and reparation. Her mother wouldn’t have wanted this. Then again, Chris was discovering a side of her mother that was increasingly perturbing.

“They said there might be brain damage,” said Luke, casually cracking every joint on every finger. “But I suppose that’s the advantage of being eccentric to start with. I think the next step is finding the missing page. It seemed kind of important.”

Luke reached across and unwrapped Chris’s moist towelette, proceeding to wipe his face down before plucking the remnants of leaves and twigs from his hair. Chris watched as Luke casually groomed himself, as though they weren’t sitting in a run-down Romanian hospital, chasing arcane texts with missing pages, as though she hadn’t almost died and things weren’t almost certainly about to get worse.

“It was your mother, wasn’t it?” said Luke, removing a small, confused beetle from his lapel.

Chris looked down at the rumpled green sheet, her hands webbed with dark veins.

“I think so. But it sounds so unlike her, to do something like that.”

But obsession changes people
, thought Chris. As did grief. It was the kind of combination that made people amass mutant armies and build doomsday devices.

“Then she must have had a good reason,” said Luke.

“Or she found that the SinaCorp way of doing business got better results,” said Chris bitterly.

A wave of hushed voices suddenly rippled down the corridor, following the sound of footsteps clacking down the hallway. Several nurses and visitors rushed past the doorway, suddenly finding other places to be. A slightly embarrassed Almovar entered the room, wheeling Chris and Luke’s bags from the castle, and holding a small, irregularly shaped package wrapped in brown paper.

“Mr. Almovar.” Luke’s smile was wan but sincere. “I’m glad you’re alright.”

Luke offered Almovar his chair as curious onlookers exchanged glances.

“I’m glad to see the young lady is recovering,” said Almovar, sitting down awkwardly.

“Thank you for all your help,” said Chris. “I’m so sorry for everything that’s happened.”

She looked over at Luke, then back at Almovar, her expression steeped in guilt.

“We owe you an apology and a full explanation,” said Chris.

“I’m not sure if I’m ready to hear it,” said Almovar with a rueful smile.

He looked down at the brown package, wound with a piece of undyed string.

“All I ask is that you answer one question for me, wholly and honestly,” said Almovar.

Chris and Luke exchanged a cautious glance.

“Okay,” said Chris.

“All those years ago, when she stole the page from the Book of June,” said Almovar. “There was one odd thing. She left this behind, on top of the book. No note.”

Almovar unwrapped the crinkled brown paper and gently lifted out a rough, grey rock the size of a large fist. One side had been sheared cleanly off, revealing in startling detail the fossil of something resembling an armour-plated sardine, with a dozen crab-like legs and a wispy, floating tail, preserved as though in mid-swish. The creature also appeared to have a single, barbed horn on its forehead.

“I had it examined,” said Almovar. “And it’s authentic Burgess Shale—a very rare specimen.”

“Is that a fish with legs?” asked Luke.

“It wasn’t as strange as you might think, several hundred million years ago,” said Almovar. “I’ve been searching for a specimen of the flying snail, myself, for decades.”

Almovar gazed at the light-grey ghost of the animal in the rock, the detail so finely etched that the individual scales were visible.

“I was never sure if she meant it as an apology.” Almovar cupped it in his hands and held it out before Chris. “Does it mean anything to you?”

Chris’s hands trembled as she traced a finger along the rough grey shale, and she blinked quickly.

Stout adult legs in the living room
.

“Chris, don’t throw that around. Marcus, you could buy a small country with—”

The smell of tweed and formaldehyde
.

“It’s fine, Rana. Kids have to play, and learn, and get excited about things. I used to dig up fossils at Bayheart Cliff and carry home rattling buckets of them. No concept of how much you could sell ’em for, just how wonderfully fascinating they were. Children shouldn’t think about things as crude as money.”

A rough, warm rock, big enough to fill two hands, with a shadowbox of life imprinted on its surface
.

Almovar watched Chris’s expression carefully.

“It was my mother’s,” said Chris, slightly hoarse. “It used to sit on her desk at home. I don’t think we even wondered where it had gone, after she…”

Almovar caught the “was.” All through life, tiny pieces of you broke away and disintegrated, taking with them small hopes and memories and pleasures, leaving only a sense of loss. This was one such moment.

“She didn’t mean to hurt you,” said Chris. “I think she was too caught up in her own pain to realise.”

Chris closed Almovar’s hands around the fossil.

“I’m sure she meant for you to keep it,” said Chris.

Almovar nodded, blinking back an old man’s memories. As he folded the brown paper back around the fossil, Chris leaned out of the bed and wrapped her arms around Almovar in a tight hug. There were mutters from the corridor, and several people made the sign of the cross.

“I’m sorry for everything,” said Chris. “And thank you for showing me this.”

Almovar rose to his feet, giving her a small smile.

“Perhaps you’ll think of me if you know anyone who is actually getting married.”

And with a small bow, he left the hospital room.

Wincing, Chris swung her legs stiffly from the bed and tentatively rested her feet on the cold floor.

“What are you doing?” asked Luke.

“I’m going to the airport,” said Chris. “What are you doing?”

“Watching to see how many steps you take before you pass out.”

Chris swayed and grabbed onto something which unfortunately wasn’t there.