Dark Duets Part 34

Which wasn't even, after all, especially strange. In the small hours of a recent night, waking from the dream for the sixth or seventh time, she'd tried to lead herself back toward sleep by idly wandering the Internet on her laptop, her hand held by Google search. She sometimes found this soothing, half an hour spent meandering the unexpected roads revealed by typing random words into the search box; the way it presented you with pages of choices, none of which really mattered. Half led to p.o.r.n, of course, or would by the time you'd clicked a couple of times: trying to navigate the back roads of the Internet without joining the highway of people's obsession with nakedness became a kind of game within the game.

On this particular night, still haunted by the dream, she'd typed in the words old oak to see where that led her, tired but cozy in her bed, face lit by the screen's glow.

At first it led mainly to links to bars and country clubs and small towns in America. After a while, to the myths and legends that surrounded this most eldritch-feeling of English trees. And then . . .

She'd frozen, her fingers hovering over the keyboard.

The last link she clicked led to a report in some never-heard-of local newspaper for a town way out in the west country. At the top of the story was a photograph. It was of an old, misshapen oak tree.

More than that, it was her oak tree. The one that stood in her dreams.

She read the scant report and quickly realized (or decided) that this probably wasn't coincidence or weirdness after all. She must have simply seen the report somewhere before. People were forever posting up this kind of thing on Facebook and Twitter. You flitted across hundreds during an average week, occasionally grunting with mild interest before getting back to e-mail or work or whatever you were supposed to be doing. Her conscious mind had forgotten it. Some other part, evidently, had not.

She got out of bed and took the laptop to the kitchen, where she could make a cup of tea and print the story out.

AND NOW, TEN days later, she was here. The tree looked exactly as it had in the online photograph. Oddly so, in fact, as if the photographer had stood exactly where she now stood. But several months had pa.s.sed since the piece, too, so you'd also expect at least something to have changed. The tree looked identical, however. As if it had been her who'd stood here taking the picture, and she'd subsequently seen it on the Internet.

She pulled out her iPhone to take a photograph of her own. The twisted branches, bare but for those few stray leaves, stood out starkly against the leaden sky, like cracks across a windshield or roads mapped spreading out into unknown territory. Her phone felt awkward, the fingers of both hands painful, as if strained by some great effort. Gripping a steering wheel for hours in the freezing cold, she a.s.sumed.

The moment she pressed the shutter, it started to rain. "Christ," she muttered. Had she brought a coat with her? Of course not. That would have been a sensible choice.

She hesitated, knowing she should run back to the car but that if she did she'd just drive away, and the journey would feel incomplete. Instead she stuffed the phone into her jeans pocket and withstood the cold, bitey raindrops, walking across the field closer to the tree.

The hole in the split lower portion of the trunk was very dark. There was no sign of disturbance around it, which was no surprise, because the discovery had been several months ago. A pair of local children-maybe even related to the hoodie kid who'd given her directions-had been playing inside the big hollow trunk and found a b.u.t.ton amid the dirt. Old, tarnished.

Thinking they might be on the trail of buried treasure, they'd grabbed a couple of tough sticks and started to rootle around in the soil. Jenni considered it a testament to how bored you could be as a kid living in the country that they'd kept digging for an hour, until finally they'd found . . . something else.

She looked into the hollow, her hair soaked and hanging in freezing lines down her cheeks. The earth in there was now flat, and undisturbed. It was too cold, too wet.

Too sad.

She abruptly realized she didn't want to be here anymore and turned and walked quickly back to her car.

The rain had become a deluge that soaked her to the skin and made her shiver, her teeth chattering autumn's song. Stupid to come this far without a coat, and without a clue about why she had even come. As she sat in the car, heater on full blast and the steamed-up windshield slowly clearing, a gust of wind rocked the vehicle on its suspension.

She rubbed her hand across the side window. Through the downpour she could still see the tree. It appeared untouched by the storm, immovable.

Now I know where it is, at least, she thought.

The idea didn't comfort her, and as she drove away, concentrating on a winding road that was already awash with too much surface water, the tree suddenly felt lost once more.

I won't be able to find it again. The roads will lead elsewhere.

She arrived back at the junction where she'd waited earlier, debating which way to go. This should have been another of those endless decisions she was so bad at making, but this time it seemed to have been made for her. Night was drawing in. Her wipers barely held their own against the rain, even on full speed. Wind roared across the landscape, sweeping darkness before it.

She would stay in the local village that night. Jenni tried to convince herself she decided this because of the storm, the risk of getting lost in a network of signless country lanes, the threat of falling trees.

She had a perfectly good sat nav on her iPhone, however, and it was probably only ten or fifteen miles back to the nearest main road.

Maybe she just wasn't yet ready to leave.

THE HORSESHOE TURNED out to be a pleasant, cozy pub, larger than it looked from the outside, with a friendly atmosphere and no hint of the tumbleweed moment she'd feared as she entered. Yes, they had a room available. Yes, they were still serving food. Jenni took a corner table, close to the roaring open fire-something she wasn't used to, a city girl through and through-and with a view across the rest of the pub. A group of locals sat at the bar chatting and laughing, and several other tables were taken with families or couples eating. If she caught anyone's eye, they traded smiles.

There was no discernible reason for her anxiety. But then . . . there rarely was. Anxiety is never about cause. Presumably it must therefore be about effect. Or perhaps something hidden in the circle between the two.

It took two gla.s.ses of merlot for her to settle, and halfway through the third drink her meal arrived. The food was extremely good, but she only ate half of it. Both of her ex-husbands used to comment on her childlike appet.i.te.

"My dad caught that," a voice said.

Startled, Jenni looked up to see the hoodie-wearing boy from earlier in the day, the one who'd given her directions. His sweatshirt was unzipped now, hood down, and though the phone was still in his hand, he seemed to be back in the land of the living. He even offered a tentative smile.

"The duck," he said, nodding at her plate. "Dad caught it."

"It did taste very fresh," Jenni said. The boy did not reply, so she tried again. "Very tasty."

"You didn't finish it, though."

"I ate a big lunch." She wasn't sure why she lied, but she was sure that he saw the lie.

"He shot it at the pond by the Dying Tree."

Jenni pursed her lips, nodded, looked into her wine again. She'd been staring there when the boy had startled her, but she could no longer recall what she'd been thinking about. Debating whether or not she should have another, perhaps.

"You find the tree?"

"I did, thank you."

"You a copper? Or a reporter?"

"Have you had a lot of reporters around here?" It felt strange, talking to someone else about the tree. It made her feel naked, as if she was sharing her dream.

"Couple," the boy said. "Not for a while though." He knelt by the fire and poked at it, throwing on two more logs. Sparks flew. A knot popped. One of the locals-a woman, perhaps the boy's young mother, or older sister-glanced across at Jenni and the boy. She looked away again just as quickly, laughing at something said by the barman, unconcerned. "Talked to the coppers, too, for a few days after I found it."

After I found it.

Jennie picked up her wine and took a big swig to still the thudding of her heart. She closed her eyes as she drank, seeing the tree. Its branches offered so many possibilities. Enough to trap someone forever.

"Oh, so it was you," she said casually.

"Me and Billy." He became more animated. "Found the b.u.t.tons first, when we were exploring the big hole in the trunk. Been in there before, loads of times, but it's always different when we go back. Found a dead squirrel in there once, and a used condom, and a wine bottle filled with p.i.s.s. So we got digging, and Billy found the first bone."

His eyes clouded, just slightly. Jenni wondered how haunted he was by their discovery.

"Ran away when we saw the bones were inside a sweater. Told Mum." He nodded back over his shoulder, and Jenni caught the woman's eye once again. This time the woman looked mildly troubled.

"b.u.t.tons?" she asked the boy. "I thought you only found one. That's what the papers said, and the local news site."

The boy's smile changed. He was just a little boy, for all that he wore a teenager's clothes and carried a phone, and he'd been caught out.

"Kept one each," he admitted, looking into the fire. When Jennie did not reprimand him, he asked, "Wanna see?"

Jenni smiled and held out her hand. Her other hand tightened around the winegla.s.s.

"Tom?" a woman's voice called.

Jenni nodded at the boy, biting back a comment. Come on, quick! Before someone stops us.

He dug around in one pocket and then dropped the b.u.t.ton into her palm.

"Tom, leave the lady alone."

She looked at it for a moment, then rolled it around her palm, working it up between her fingers. The sight of it, old, metallic, tarnished by its time in the ground. The feel of it. And when she rolled it between thumb and forefinger, it felt so familiar.

Her mouth dried. "The Dying Tree."

"Yeah. That's what they call it around here."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "Because it's dying?"

She nodded, though it seemed unlikely the tree had been ailing for long enough for the name to become embedded local custom. "I thought you'd found a body in there?"

"Tom, here, now!"

The young boy stood to leave, but he looked at her almost in fear. At her, down to the b.u.t.ton, up again. He wanted it back. He knew it was important to him, even if he didn't understand why.

"Oh, he's no bother," Jenni heard herself say. She dropped the b.u.t.ton back in the boy's hand and watched him walk away, wondering how he-or his mother-could not have noticed what she had about the left sleeve of his hoodie, about what was missing there. She reached for her phone to look at the photo of the tree one more time.

As she had rolled the b.u.t.ton between her fingers, time had rolled as well. When she looked at the image of the tree, she was not surprised. The fuller branches, the healthier hue, the narrower maw in the tree's wounded trunk . . . perhaps she had projected her dream onto the tree earlier and it wasn't actually as old, as gnarled as she'd believed.

Perhaps.

There was one way to know for certain.

Looking at the rain-speckled window, Jenni finished her wine.

THE SHORT WALK across the pub car park had her half drenched once more, but by the time she'd been driving for ten minutes, the storm had started to abate. It didn't fall to nothing but reduced at least to a persistent, thoughtful kind of rain.

The first thing she noticed were the road signs. It wasn't like there were so many, but they were at least there, revealed by the sweep of her headlights. At several points where she'd decried the lack of them that afternoon-or thought she had-stood st.u.r.dy little poles with small signs pointing in opposing directions. This was so inexplicable that at first she grew concerned she'd somehow taken a wrong turn out of the village, gotten herself on some entirely different and yet eerily similar set of roads, roads whose signs had always been there.

Then, however, she found the junction where she'd sat becalmed, and she saw a sign there, too. An old sign on a weathered post right in the base of the Y, as if its presence had been what caused the roads to separate and go their own ways.

She jammed on the brakes and skidded to a halt, stopping a few feet short of the sign. She stared up at it through the windshield. Two arrows, one either side. Both pointing up one of the available roads.

Both blank.

She opened the door and got out. Looked back to check that no one was heading toward the junction. No sign of lights, and it was hard to imagine why anyone would be out driving these roads at this time of night.

Anyone apart from her.

She approached the sign. Two little metal panels, both battered and old-looking. Still blank. She stretched closer, expecting or hoping to see the remnants of previous village names or destinations on them, scrubbed or chipped off at some point, for some unknown reason.

But there was nothing. Either someone had done an immaculate job of erasing any names, or there had never been anything there.

Never, or not yet.

She got back into her car and shut the door. Reversed a few feet. Now she was here it seemed impossible not to go ahead and do the obvious thing. She indicated left and drove along the road that led to the old oak.

SHE WAS SOMEHOW not surprised to see that it looked different now. Different even from her own photo from earlier in the day. She pinched herself, feeling absurd, but all this achieved was raising a pinky-blue weal on the back of her freezing wrist. She wasn't asleep, or if she was, she was sealed within an experience impervious to simple solutions.

It didn't look like an old oak now. It just looked like an oak. A huge, robust tree, in the prime of life. The tree itself was not dying, if that's what the name had ever been about. The gap in its side, the wound, remained, but the opening was narrower.

Still wide enough for a boy to crawl into, however. A boy hiding from the rain, or from a playmate. A boy who for some reason never made it out again, and whose flesh slowly rotted until the only thing left to find were three tarnished b.u.t.tons from the left sleeve of the sweater he'd been wearing. The hoodie he still wore, and which still had the ornamental b.u.t.tons on the other sleeve.

Jenni bent closer and looked into the hollow. The s.p.a.ce inside remained the same. Easily large enough for two to play. She knew what she'd seen in the eyes of the boy when she'd first happened upon him, earlier in the day-when he'd given her directions to the tree. He'd looked away, keeping his eyes on the screen of his phone, because he knew there was no escaping what had already happened.

Jenni wondered how many times he had dreamed of it. More than her? Perhaps. Impossible for her to know. She did know, however, that people would later say that they had seen the boy talking to an unknown woman in a pub, the night he disappeared.

She knew this because she'd read it online.

Awkwardly at first, and after quite a lot of effort, Jenni managed to squeeze herself through the gap and into the hollow in the oak. Once inside it was more roomy. If she curled up, it would be a comfortable enough place to spend the night, and the next morning or day, or however long it took.

She retreated back into the darkness to wait.

To wait for the boy to come again.

SHE WOKE RELIEVED, as always, to realize that she was at home in London, safe in her own bed. She'd slept like a log, curled tightly on her right side. Her back protested and her knees clicked as she straightened, as though they'd been locked up in the same position from the moment she'd closed her eyes.

She rolled onto her sweat-dampened back and pushed the covers down, yawning ma.s.sively and releasing the arm that had been trapped beneath her. It was a little numb, but not too bad.

As she opened her fingers to waggle them back into life, she heard a soft plopping sound.

She looked down and saw a tarnished b.u.t.ton, lying on the sheet beside her hip.

RENASCENCE.

Rhodi Hawk and F. Paul Wilson.

New York City.

1878.

1. Under a Harvest Moon.