December's Thorn Read online

  She looked down at the snowy ground underneath the laurel. “The place where her footprints stop does look odd.”

  “There you are,” I said, and resumed my ever-widening circular patrol.

  “You actually are good at this,” she said.

  “Again”—I sighed—“not my first time.”

  She nodded, but it was clear that she was already lost in concentration, staring at the base of the shrub.

  Good, I thought, now she’ll leave me alone.

  I made my way more-or-less spirally around and around the spot where she was, but it wasn’t easy. I had to dodge other laurel branches in the thicket and work my way around sudden dips rendered unperceivable by the snow.

  The woods were quiet. Soft snow and windless cold seemed to muffle sound, although the air was clear. Or was it that things were silent on purpose? Was there something in the woods, something close by, that hushed the birds and squirrels, even the wind?

  I glanced up occasionally to make certain I was still maintaining a relatively concentric pattern, but most of my concentration was on the snow at my feet, the branches through which I fought, the occasional sudden movement out of the corner of my eye. As I got farther and farther away, I lost sight of Dr. Nelson’s rust-colored jacket altogether.

  Then, without warning, I came upon a flock of crows, twenty feet away from me. I was just beginning to wonder why my clumsy stumbling and heavy breathing hadn’t already frightened them away when I saw the blood.

  Black crows, white snow, and red blood surrounded an unidentifiable carcass. It was large, and freshly dead. There was steam rising up from its flayed abdomen.

  I froze. A single crow looked in my direction. The rest continued their grisly work. The staring crow seemed to assess me, then blinked, and went back to its gnawing.

  I craned my neck, trying to see what it was they were eating. My heart was hammering in my ears and my breathing, already labored, threatened me with hyperventilation. I didn’t want to imagine that the crows had come across a dead body, a human body, but the thing in the snow was the right size and approximate shape to be a human being.

  Just as suddenly as I had stopped, my wits returned and I rushed the bloody scene. The crows scattered at once, raising an ear-shattering alarm. Their cries seemed to crack the cold air, and their wings, momentarily, blotted out the sun.

  I stared down at the dead thing. It was a young deer. The birds had done damage, but the obvious bullet wound across the top of the head was likely what killed the deer. The animal seemed too young to be legally killed, but I wasn’t very knowledgeable about hunting regulations. I did know it was illegal to kill the animal and just leave it like this.

  I knelt down. The steam from the carcass was beginning to wane. The wound on the head, however, was dried and even crusted a bit. I surmised that the animal had been shot, wounded, and had run away from its assailant. It survived for a while, but eventually came to rest in the snow, where the crows had found it. It hadn’t been dead for long.

  There was a sudden snap behind me and a voice whispered, “He didn’t mean to do that.”

  I whirled around, still crouching, to see the woman in black, my phantom bride.

  I stood quickly. “The boy did this?” I demanded.

  “He didn’t mean to.” Her face was stricken. She was clearly disturbed by the sight. “He was trying to get us some food. We haven’t eaten in some time.”

  “Look,” I said harshly, taking a step toward her, “I can’t have a little boy running around these woods with a rifle shooting up my house and leaving deer to die. And I can’t have people thinking that I’m crazier than I actually am. So you’re coming with me.”

  I took another step and she took off running.

  She raced up the slope, and I did my best to keep up. But she was astonishingly nimble, and I was already winded.

  “Why won’t you forgive me?” she called out, an anguished sound.

  “I’ll forgive you if you come back down to my house with me,” I panted, barely aware of what I was saying.

  She stopped. She was, perhaps, thirty or forty feet away from me, partly hidden by bare limbs and holly boughs.

  “You will?” she said weakly.

  I stopped, too, though in truth I might not have been able to go on much farther no matter what.

  “Yes,” I gasped. “I’ll forgive you.”

  “I’m jealous of her, you know,” she said. Her voice was like the creaking of tree branches and the moaning of the wind. “I don’t have any right to be, but I’m jealous of that woman in your house.”

  I stared at her. The face was contorted by a certain kind of madness, a dizzying array of wants and needs and fears.

  “I don’t know who you mean,” I said, and it was true.

  “The one with the white, white hair, like Noah’s dove,” she sobbed.

  “No,” I said instantly. “That’s Dr. Nelson. She’s not a person that— she’s not someone who should cause you any disturbance, she’s a— she’s a doctor who’s trying to help me. I was in the hospital for a long time earlier this year.”

  “Dr. Nelson?” was all she would say for a moment.

  I inched toward her, trying not to be too obvious about my intention to lay hands on her.

  “And the other one,” she said, looking away, obviously thinking. “She wore a nurse’s costume once or twice.”

  “Yes, exactly,” I told her. “I’m under medical care.”

  She turned her full attention on me and I stopped moving.

  “But I can help you better than they can,” she said, taking a few tentative steps my way. “I have medicine—potions that can make you well. I think you know that. Or you remember it, I mean.”

  “Well, yes, of course I remember,” I lied. “And I could certainly use your help.”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice suddenly filled with benevolence. “You need my help.”

  She kept coming my way. I thought it best, then, to stay put, waiting.

  “Naturally”—she continued in her more loving vein—“I’m more concerned that you forgive your nephew. That’s a bond, the bond between the two of you, that I hated breaking. I wouldn’t have done it for the world. I want to heal that too. You must forgive him most of all.”

  “My nephew?” I asked before I could think better.

  She stopped coming toward me and I instantly wished I hadn’t asked the question, but as I actually had no nephew, the words had come out of my mouth without much help from my conscious brain.

  She cast her head downward. “Why do you delight in taunting me? I know I deserve it, but you were never cruel. Not until now.”

  “Yes,” I said, instantly. “My nephew. You’re right. I should forgive him, too.”

  There, I determined, that’s it. Say whatever it is she wants to hear until you get her back to the house where anybody else can see her. Sort out the rest after that.

  But she shook her head. “You’ll never truly forgive him, I know that. I had hopes, once, that the two of you would reconcile, and he could return to us. But that will never happen now. He’s dying. Away, off in a foreign land.”

  There was such an overwhelming sadness in her voice that it was impossible for me to remain objective. I experienced a very odd sensation, possibly brought on by the shock of seeing the deer. I was moved by this woman’s pain in an almost cellular way. It was clear that she was insane, but I began to wonder if Dr. Nelson might help her. That thought began to be nearly as important to me as proving to other people that the woman existed. Even at that moment, it seemed a strange transition for me.

  “Listen,” I told her softly, “you should come back to my house with me. You should rest. You’re obviously tired and hungry.”

  “We both are,” she said, not looking at me.

  “Yes,” I agreed, “you both are—you and your son.”

  It was a risk, but it seemed obvious that the boy was her son, or a person she thought was her son.
r />   “We’ve been staying here, in these woods.” She cast her eyes all around, taking in a grand sweep of the hillside. “I don’t know how long. You lose track of time in winter. The days are so short and the nights are filled with such troubling dreams: howling cold and bitter recollection. Ice and regret, that’s winter.”

  “You’ve been living in the woods all winter so far?” I asked, not really believing her.

  “He didn’t mean to leave the deer,” she said suddenly, as if some gear or cog in her mind had slipped and her thoughts had gone to a previous point in our discourse.

  “We frightened him,” I said, trying to use my most soothing tones. “We didn’t mean to, but our voices—”

  “I heard your voice,” she interrupted. “And the woman. Who was the third?”

  “That was the— that was my boyhood friend,” I responded, changing my answer in mid-thought. No point in saying the word sheriff to this woman. No telling how she’d react. “He’s helping me, too.”

  “Yes, there, you see,” she sighed, “you have so many of your people willing to help you. Why can’t you forgive Tristan?”

  “Tristan,” I repeated. “Tristan Newcomb?”

  “It’s not our fault that we fell in love. You know that. You know what happened. It’s been told over and over again down through the long years.”

  “No, I’m sorry—Tristan Newcomb? The man who owned the Ten Show, the traveling carnival that employed my parents? Is that who you’re talking about?”

  “Tristan,” she repeated more emphatically. “Your nephew.”

  “No,” I told her, “Tristan Newcomb is most certainly not my— there were rumors that he was my father, but I’m certain now that it was just gossip. He and I—Tristan and I—how do you even know about him? He’s certainly old enough to be your father, and, in fact, died, I believe, when you were around nine or ten, unless I’m guessing your age completely incorrectly. I’m sorry, but— what are you talking about?”

  She smiled and looked at me with great benevolence, but it was not a look that I found comforting.

  “Oh—you’re confused,” she said very sweetly. “I see that now. Your great jealousy has led to madness, of a sort, but that’s not incurable. You— I think you’re confusing dreams and reality. I know because I do that sometimes. People I meet in dreams seem real; people I know in my waking hours are phantasms, really. Sometimes they don’t even have corporeal substance.”

  Realizing that my plan to say whatever she wanted to hear had gone hideously awry, I thought to salvage something by asking questions, a lesson learned from field research. Ask specific questions. Let the informant talk about herself. No telling what information might come out.

  “I am confused,” I began. “That’s very true. For example, I don’t understand what you mean when you say you’ve been living in these woods most of the winter. Where? Someone’s house?”

  “No.” She was still drifting, very slowly, my way.

  Her movement was disconcerting because her dress or skirt came all the way to the ground and it was impossible to see her feet moving in the snow. She seemed to be gliding down toward me.

  “Where then?” I pressed. “I’m worried about you. Is it warm enough? Is it protected?”

  “We found a cave down the mountain from your house,” she answered, and seemed greatly amused by the thought. “Isn’t that just perfect? There’s even a kind of crystal formation in the center of one part. We’ve made it quite habitable, really.”

  “A cave,” I repeated, not believing her for a second. “Good.”

  I knew every inch of this part of the mountain, and while it was true that there were small caves here and there, certainly none of them could be made remotely “habitable” in the dead of winter.

  “And we’ve been able to find enough food,” she went on, “what with one thing and another.”

  She was still floating toward me, only, perhaps, ten feet away.

  “Hunting?” I asked, mostly to keep her talking.

  “He didn’t mean to leave the deer,” she said again, her voice hollow, her eyes staring past me into another reality.

  “We frightened him,” I assured her. “Our voices.”

  And just at that moment, a sudden shout frightened us both.

  “Fever!” Dr. Nelson called. “Where the hell are you?”

  My ghostly wife began to run back up the slope.

  “No,” I called after her. “Wait!”

  “What?” Dr. Nelson shouted.

  “Quiet!” I yelled down at her.

  “What?” she called again.

  By that time the woman in black was twenty feet away from me, and disappearing into the undergrowth. I barely had time to catch sight of something strange. Her cloak dragged heavily in the snow behind her. A closer, quick examination of the hem revealed that it had been knotted all along its edge with small stones. The stones weighted the cloak down just enough to drag a small amount of snow after the hem. This had the very significant effect of completely erasing her footprints. Behind her, where she had just run, the snow did not exhibit a single sign of her passing, no trace at all. A second later, she, likewise, vanished altogether into a twist of branches, darkness, and the odd, dizzy patterns there.

  At that exact moment I heard Dr. Nelson right behind me.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded. “I thought we were going to—”

  I spun around. “Tell me that you saw her.”

  She stopped dead still. “What?”

  “Tell me that you saw the woman, just up there.” I stared into her eyes.

  She stared back, and then glanced behind me for the merest of seconds.

  “Fever,” she said firmly, “there’s no one there.”

  “Actually,” I said, my voice a little high pitched, “there is someone there. She’s just past that loblolly pine. If we hurry—”

  “We’re going back to your house now,” she said, and I heard the iron in her voice. “It’s already been a half an hour and we have to meet Skidmore, so come on.”

  “It hasn’t been a half an hour,” I told her.

  She held up her expensive watch. I was forced to reevaluate my statement.

  She took a hold of the fabric on the forearm of my jacket and pulled. “You think you saw your phantom bride again, but you didn’t. Let’s just get that out of the way right now. And I’ve got news. On further examination of the threads that I found on the branch down there? I think they came from Skidmore’s sweater. I think he’s wearing a black sweater underneath his police coat.”

  She tugged once more on my forearm.

  “She was right here!” I told her, pulling my arm out of her grasp.

  She sighed. “Really? Where, exactly?”

  I turned and pointed.

  She took a few steps in that direction. “And her footprints? You don’t see footprints here, too, do you?”

  “No,” I said quickly, “she doesn’t leave any footprints.”

  The instant I said it I wished that I hadn’t. Dr. Nelson looked deeply into my eyes, as if she were looking to find something hidden in my pupils.

  “Well, you’re not having an episode, I don’t think,” she mumbled. “And you seem too awake and coherent for a fugue state performance, so, I’m not sure what’s going on.”

  I started to try to explain about the stones on the cloak and how they could erase footprints in the snow, but as I was piecing it together in my mind, it sounded almost as crazy as saying that she didn’t have footprints. So I decided to stick with something that I hoped would be completely verifiable by any so-called sane observer.

  “All right,” I said, chin up, “but there’s something over here that might be interesting, although it’s a little disgusting. I think the boy with the rifle shot a deer recently, then heard us and ran off. He left the deer, it died, and crows got at it.”

  She frowned. “You think you saw an animal carcass.”

  “Yes.” I started off
in the direction of the deer.

  “And you think that it has something to do with the boy who shot at us?” She took a few tentative steps after me.

  “Yes.” I didn’t look back. “Come on, you have to give me this one. If it’s there, then you see at least one weird thing that I see. And if it’s not, then you can give me shock treatments or whatever it is you people do.”

  She followed along behind me. I could hear her feet sloshing in the snow.

  It didn’t take long to find the deer. Crows had already returned. They had gathered around the food, heads bowed, like priests at a silent table. Though, as I got closer, I began to hear the liquid noises of their ravening.

  “Jesus,” she whispered, behind me.

  I still didn’t turn around to look at her. For some reason it was hard to take my eyes from the macabre feast. It seemed, at that moment, to have significance beyond the actual phenomenon. It seemed to mean that everything living off of death and blood had surrounded the innocent.

  “I’m having a genuine Yeats moment,” I whispered to Dr. Nelson over my shoulder.

  “What?” she whispered back.

  “I look at this,” I explained to her, “and ‘things fall apart; the center cannot hold.’”

  “You’re— what?” she said a little louder, coming up to me.

  I motioned my head toward the grotesque avian banquet. “‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere. The ceremony of innocence is drowned.’”

  It only took her a moment to understand.

  “Yeats,” she said. “‘The Second Coming.’ That’s what you’re thinking of?”

  I nodded. “‘The best lack all conviction,’” I said.

  “‘While the worst are full of passionate intensity,’” she went on. “I know the poem.”

  “Do you know why I’m having this feeling, then?” I asked, a little off kilter.

  “No,” she said, more steadily. “Do you?”

  “Well,” I said, a bit more animatedly, “look.”

  We both stared at the spectacle for a moment.

  “And you think the boy shot this deer?” she said finally.

  I nodded. “Come here.”

  I started toward the blood circle, stomping a bit as I went. The crows complained, and some were reluctant, but all of them flew from the carcass when I clapped my hands twice.