The Witch of the Wood (17 page)

He had stumbled to the base of the rise and stood there below his father. Rudy was murmuring “Oh my God,” over and again to himself, but still managed to hold the phone steady, getting it all in the shot. There was a mad screeching now about the swarm, and Wolfie in his shame and disgrace put forward his hands palm up as if asking,
“Daddy, what should I do?”

“Say it,” Rudy croaked. “Say it and I’ll make you immortal.”

Wolfie swiped at his mouth area for clearance and choked out,

“Father!”

The birds stormed his face and he mashed them away.

“Father, why have you forsaken me?”

He stretched his arms out slowly to the sides then, making his body into the shape of a cross. A pair of black junco sparrows wriggled into his mouth, then another bird, and yet another. Wolfie kept his stance as his throat bulged and they forged through him, raked across him, consumed him utterly, his thin body an opened thoroughfare.

When they finally came off him, he fell face down on the hill, his clothes mere tatters drenched in dark gold, the back of his head a wet swirl of matted blond hair pulled up in tufts.

The birds were above him now, suspended in layers of rolling waves. They rose, formed a massive V shape at roof level, and burst off into the February skyline.

Pat was nowhere to be found.

Rudy let the hand holding the cell phone rest at his side. He felt like weeping, but he was dry. From beneath his feet, he felt a vibration. Then another, and a third, like some gargantuan underground beast coming slowly awake with a guttural rumble.

He looked around him, and the earth seemed suddenly unsteady, rocking, pitching, buckling.

It was all the trees. At their bases.

They were starting to move.

First was the great rumbling, vibrations that sent numbing shooters through Rudy’s feet, pebbles and dirt seemingly from nowhere rolling and threading down the hill toward the shed, Patricia’s plywood work board trembling and shivering on its supports, then falling off at an odd angle. Next was the rocking, the skyline come alive, trees all around pitching to and fro as if engulfed in some strange hurricane that painted arcs on the horizon.

From beneath, there were great pulling sounds, stretching, yawning, a muffled army of high-tension bows being drawn as the massive network of intertwined root systems strained to the absolute breaking point.

Then the earth erupted, a million buried circus whips cracking all at once as the embedded roots ripped up from underfoot in a damp throaty roar, soil coming up in bursts and cascades, peppering the house, showering all around Rudy Barnes who covered his face with his forearm.

He thought he heard screams: a neighbor walking a dog maybe, a jogger, who knew? It got drowned out quickly by the fantastic collapse, the purging of the skyline as every tree came crashing down to the earth.

Rudy was lucky he was not killed. The border elms like the slats of some massive gate-barrier thundered down in a diagonal pattern, first smashing through the roof atop the detached garage, then the kitchen and laundry room, the rose garden, and all along the hill Rudy was sidestepping down, the ground feeling like shuffling floorboards in a funhouse. Rudy turned and tried to run. A gargantuan trunk pounded the ground, missing him by inches, and he dove off to the right. The weeping willow on the far side of the back yard smashed down into the shed, turning it to splinters, and three trees plunged across Rudy’s path a few feet ahead of where he had fallen to his stomach. He covered his head with his hands for a moment, the scratches and abrasions up his forearms wet and stinging.

The thunderous booming of it was overwhelming, rolling shockwaves pounding the ground, a riotous tumult that felt like the end of the world. It reached a tremendous peak, then slowed, thinned out, and scattered to isolated shivers, the final showers of soil and rock pelting down, then drizzling off like an engine ticking down as it cooled.

There were dull echoes. There was aftermath silence, but then came a mad skittering in the grass. Rudy raised his head and there, coming on at ground-level from the felled ruin of the wood beyond the iron fence, was a mad rush of wildlife flooding over and between the crooked nest of trunks and branches: white and gray fieldmice, chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits, gophers, small foxes, deer, all jumping and crawling over each other in a mass exodus from a world that had been turned inside out.

There were more screams now from over the hill, honking horns, cars crashing into things with gritty finality, hoarse shouts.

“Good acoustics all of a sudden,” Rudy thought wildly, as he pushed to his feet and made for the tool shed, its opened back corner still standing on its own like some ancient monolith. He moved, climbed, stepped across the jigsaw of foliation, lost his footing and raked his shin, then doggie-paddled over to the “monument.” The catty-cornered shelves had held, and Rudy swiped the remains of a collection of gardening trowels to the ground along with a stack of clay flowerpots. He climbed two shelves high and wrapped his arms around the corner post for dear life.

The evacuation swarmed underneath him, yipping and rustling, and what looked like a bear cub loped right past his ankle nipping and snapping at the air. The mass covered the hill, a rippling hoard of clawing, retreating hindquarters that scurried off to the jungle that had become Hampstead and Elm Avenues and beyond.

The dust and dirt that had risen in the air was now settling to a resinous haze. There was almost a dramatic pause then, like the time for a deep breath where one could take inventory, cut his losses, and measure his options.

But along the slope of the near hill there was new movement. A sneaky sort of creeping.

It was a spread of strange coloring, an outpouring, and Rudy’s breath caught in his throat. Bone-white hands and arms were creeping out of the holes in the ground, skeletal fingers feeling about the perimeters, palms settling, then pressing, and then was the emergence.

Rudy focused on the closest cavity across the yard, where an elm had toppled down across the forest gate, bending the corner into a twisted black dog-ear. Back at its dark uncorked root-cellar, a form pushed out of the hole, black beetles and other vermin swimming off her in a sort of unveiling, white skin stretched bone-tight and spotted with filth, tangle of black hair peppered with dirt. Her bulbous black eyes shuttered open and closed in reaction to the glare of the sun, and she pushed up to a standing position, bony knees almost buckling.

Her hand was at her forehead then, in a protective salute to shield her sensitive eyes, and Rudy noticed something. He still had a clear view of her face in an odd sort of bare perspective.

“No shadow,”
he thought.

She let her hands fall to her sides and took a step forward, careful not to touch branch, leaf, or stalk of the prison column that had held her underground for so long. She gave a slight curtsey and then spoke in a voice rough with dirt, “Rudy. Rudy . . . Barnes.”

She began to change, and there must have been a seam around the back of her, because the pale epidermis dragged from the rear to the front, coming around the arm, the thigh, the shin, the waist, then down over the face hugging the contours, a sheet slowly drawn from a petrified statue. There was a brief moment when she was a skeleton, heart beating in the cage of bone, veins pulsing, muscles quivering as the receding cover of skin met in folds and creases going into her open mouth. Simultaneously was the regrowth, a burst of supple skin spreading from the vagina out, and before Rudy could make the rather juvenile symbolic connection between the consumption of the real and the birth of the façade, he came to recognize the masterpiece coming to form.

She was April Orr, bob hairdo hanging in limp strings and clots, soil-spots on her forearms, dirt caked on her pretty bare knees. But even covered by the filth of the hole, she was gorgeous. Rudy had never seen the woman naked, only bent at the banister with her dress up over her hips, and here, bared to the world, she was without a doubt the most potent sexual presence he’d ever known. The long fingers, sharp face, and sparkling eyes reflected an elegant humor that was absolutely magnetic. Then as if in sweet contradiction to the air of sophistication she downplayed was that body, lithe and engineered for passion and sweat. Those small, firm breasts had their nipples up. Those long dancer’s legs stood firm now beneath slender hips defined by squint-eyed dimples slanted on either side. There were two freckles to the right of her belly button, and a daring rose tattoo to the left, long stem snaking down to frame one side of her neatly shaved pussy-stripe.

Rudy wanted her. Now. He pictured it in his head, making his way through the clutter of branch work and kissing her, cradling and melting to the ground with her.

He climbed down from his mount and closed the distance between them. It was awkward. He almost tripped and took a header but recovered abruptly, and as she reached out her hands to him he had a sudden and awful vision of his son in the same positioning, absolutely covered with birds.

“No,” Rudy whispered instinctively.

Her head exploded then with a wet burst. Rudy squeezed shut his eyes and gave a half-turn, raising up both arms as bone shards and hot pith splattered over him. He was soaked and cut on his hands, his forehead, the right cheek, and he heard pieces landing in the grass. He opened his eyes just in time to see the headless body before him careen, walk in a drunken step forward and back, then fall in the hole it had crawled from.

There was a murmuring now, a gritty hum coming from along the hill, the Gregorios’ back yard, the space on the other side of the property now exposed where there was a vacant area overgrown with clover and ragweeds, and of course the broken heap of a forest spreading out past the black iron gate.

It was a massive, rising congregation, a sweeping haunt of skeletal forms with red lips and black eyes, thousands of them pushing up to standing positions beside their prison holes, focusing hard on the man at the foot of the hill and droning,

Then came the gory fireworks echoing across the landscape, wet ruptures of blood, bone, and brain torching upward like exploding party favors at Temple University’s Cherry and White Day, then raining down on the headless bodies collapsing upon the wood and grass in an awful sort of haphazard symmetry. Rising behind the carnage were more witches, a blurred mass closing steadily.

“Rudy!” someone said from behind.

It startled him, but the voice was clear, no drone, no grit.

He turned, and it took everything in his willpower to do it gracefully, without putting his arms and elbows in front of his face, cowering.

It was Caroline Schultz from up the block. She was a thirty-something blonde who worked for the water company, or the gas works, one of the utilities, he couldn’t remember. She’d traded recipes with Patricia a couple of times, and they shared the same lawn service company; that’s all he knew about her. That, and the fact that she liked wearing hats. Today she had one with army fatigue colors. No coat, white T-shirt, black yoga pants that flared at the bottom, and pink Converse All Stars.

“Come with me,” she said. “Unless you want to kill a thousand more witches.”

Rudy’s mouth opened a bit and hung there for a moment.

“What?”

She came down to his position at the base of the rise.

“It’s now or never, Rudy. You’ve got to trust me and ask questions later. Kill any more and you’ll gain the wrong followers.”

“Me? Kill more?”

“No one can look in the face of God and live, Rudy.”

“I’m not—”

“To them, you are.” She took his elbow and looked off to the west. “I’ve got to get you out of sight, and if you don’t cooperate I’m going to have to kill you.” The corny, outdated phrase was offered as almost an afterthought, a ghost of what seemed her “pre-disaster” offbeat humor, but when she turned toward him she was only smiling a little.

“O.K.,” he said quietly.

There was a new round of wet bursts to the right, and it sent them running off to a hoarse and breathless escape, leapfrogging and hurdling together through the Gregorios’ yard, then the Goldbergs’ and the Denardos’, all cluttered with a cross-hatch of wooden debris and fallen construction, and in the distance was a wide, opened panorama, now exposed all the way down to the Schuylkill Expressway. It was a mass of halted traffic, scattered fires, downed trees, and crawling human forms, the calico and then the pale white following close like a virus.

Bald,
he thought.
The world has gone bald,
and the second wave of exploding craniums in the forest was overshadowed by the ones coming on right behind them, marching numbly across the bodies of their fallen sisters, and calling Rudy’s name with voices of dirt.

Brian Duffey was trying to do that cool fucking trick Nickie Walters had shown him in bio class, where you snapped your index finger to the middle one making a “whapping” noise, when the kitchen roof caved in. Ma was at the stove cooking scrambled eggs and cheddar on the long griddle pan, and Pop was coming through the archway. Brian had turned to give him his usual grunt of acknowledgment, and the man didn’t respond, heel of his hand pressed to his forehead. Duffey turned back to his finger trick. Pop was too hung-over to work again and was saying, “Both of you can just shut the fuck up,” when the rumbling started.

The house shook as if it were made of balsa, and the first thing Brian thought was,

Aqua’s working on the water main this early?
followed quickly by,
Yeah, it would take an earthquake for that Wolfie motherfucker to get out of a fight, just my luck.

Then came the great crash from above. Duffey had his eyes on his mother, looking around in disbelief, pink terrycloth bathrobe, long wisp of hair hanging in her face. The ceiling split open like the end of the world and the maple from the front yard smashed through, crushing her against the oven, splintered floorboards and insulation showering around her. Duffey pushed up out of his chair and turned to the shattered doorway behind him. The massive trunk was on Pop’s back, severed branch running him straight through between the shoulder blades, coming out through his chest like a throwing spear. The point was embedded in the floor, and the man slid down, re-slickening the peeled and splintered shaft, arms and hands quivering and going still the second he hit the linoleum.