Chapter 110
I asked a favor of Sabine Drew, one to which she was reluctant to agree because she was frightened. I told her she was right to be, and I was frightened too, but we would not be alone. Angel and Louis would be there, and Tim Sadlier said he would come with us.
Finally, Sabine agreed to help us locate Brightwell. We had to do it now, before winter set in. Once the snows came, we would not be able to enter the woods so easily, and all the time his reach would grow.
We drove north, to where the wreckage of a small plane had long lain lost in the woods, by the site of an old fort.
As we drew nearer, Sabine became noticeably more anxious.
She was sitting in the back of my car with Sadlier.
In the rearview mirror, I could see her holding his hand tightly.
Louis and Angel were in a car behind us, staying close all the way.
At last we came to the point on the road from which we could hike the shortest distance to where last I’d seen the child: Brightwell, in his new incarnation.
Louis and Sadlier had brought axes and knives, while Angel and I carried pistols.
Each of us had a small pack with water and snacks, but Sadlier had also put together a larger backpack, with an emergency medical kit and more, should we end up spending longer in the woods than we’d intended.
“Well?” I said to Sabine, as we stood by the tree line.
“Yes, he’s in there, but he’s not alone.”
“Who’s with him?”
“A little girl, or what was once a girl. She’s the one holding him captive. It’s odd.”
“What is?”
“I can hear him calling. I think he wants to be found.”
“Is it a trap?”
Sabine regarded the woods, listening for voices audible only to her.
“Oh, he’d harm you if he could, and he did try to have your friend killed. But he failed, and now you represent his last hope for freedom.”
“We’re not here to free him.”
“Aren’t you?” She grasped her walking pole. “Because he says you are.”
We walked for an hour, and while progress was slow—there were no trails—it was not uncomfortable. The air was cool, not cold. Only as we reached our destination did I notice that the singing of birds had ceased.
Sabine stopped, but even before she did, I was already shrugging off my pack, and Angel was doing likewise.
We felt it, all of us: the stillness, and a kind of charge in the air, as if we had wandered too close to an industrial power cable.
The air smelled of decay, and I heard a sound like leaves whispering, but there was no breeze.
Before us stood a rotted American sycamore, a species of tree now virtually extirpated in the wilds of the state, so that this was a relic of an older time, even as it was no more than a trunk and branches, all heavy with toadstools; decomposers, breaking down wood and organic matter for nutrients.
Yet however singular the tree was, I had almost missed it.
It was both there and not there, like an optical illusion, a projection of light on air.
It was real, but its reality was tenuous. As it decayed, it embraced evanescence.
“He’s inside,” said Sabine. Her eyes darting over the trees as though following a sprite. “And the girl is nearby. She’s watching us. She doesn’t want us to take her pet.”
Her “pet”: If the girl had ensnared Brightwell, we should be more scared of her than him.
Louis and Sadlier went to work on the tree with the axes.
Though rotten, the trunk was thick, and the bark and flesh clung to the blades, so that once a cut was made, the two men struggled to free the axes and start again.
Sadlier broke through first, revealing a hollow heart and releasing the reek of decomposition.
From then on it was easier, and they used the axes like crowbars, wrenching chunks of bark and cambium from the whole, slowly moving downward until—
“My God.”
Sadlier dropped his axe and backed away, coming to a stop by Sabine. Louis stayed where he was, and Angel and I moved forward to join him.
From the core of the tree, a face stared out at us.
Its eyes were open but milky, its skull hairless, its skin translucent.
On the neck, collapsed but still apparent, was a goiter.
The head was held fixed in place by tendrils, as though the root system had grown up instead of down, allied to ivy with blood-red leaves.
The tree might have been corrupted but it was not completely dead, just as it existed on the periphery between the seen and the unseen.
As we stood before him, Brightwell’s lips moved, but his mouth did not open and he could not speak.
One of the tendrils had pierced the soft tissue beneath his chin to impale his tongue.
“He can’t be alive,” said Sadlier.
“But he is,” I said.
“He wants it to stop,” said Sabine. “He wants you to bring it to an end.”
I thought I glimpsed movement in the undergrowth, but when I looked in that direction, there was nothing. Still, the girl was close. Sabine had warned us.
“Show him mercy, Mr Parker,” said Sabine. “Please.”
I put my hand on my gun, but Louis stopped me. He took an Elk Ridge hunting knife from its sheath. The blade was less than four inches long but wickedly sharp.
“It has to be this way,” he said. “It has to be, if Epstein is right.”
“I’m not sure I can do that,” I said. It is a terrible, intimate thing to take a life with a blade.
“Not alone,” said Louis. “All of us.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to know for sure.”
He placed the tip of the blade against Brightwell’s throat. I gripped the handle, and Angel’s fingers closed over mine. Brightwell’s sightless eyes blinked once.
“Now,” I said.
The blade sank deep, stopping only when the quillion touched the skin.
A thin trickle of blood wept from the wound, mixed with a yellowish, viscous sap.
Brightwell’s lips ceased moving, but there was no revelation, no confirmation.
I felt only regret, and a sickness inside.
From the forest, I heard a child scream.
I let go of the knife at the same time as Angel, leaving it for Louis to wrench the blade from what remained of Brightwell.
I reached out to close his eyes, and only then, as I touched the eyelids, did a void open, the place of nonbeing, the nothingness that was before everything, and I knew then that Brightwell was truly gone, his existence forever expunged.
“It’s over,” I said.
No one spoke. We gathered up our belongings.
“Are we just going to leave him like that?” asked Sadlier, when we were ready to go.
“What do you suggest?” asked Louis.
Sadlier reached into his pack and withdrew a small bottle of white gas, the liquid fuel used in camping. It would burn hot and clean.
“The ground is damp,” said Sadlier, “and there’s no wind. I reckon we’ll be okay, but if it shows signs of spreading, I have an Element fire extinguisher in my pack.”
“Best to be prepared, right?” I said.
“I don’t believe anyone could have been prepared for what I just witnessed,” said Sadlier.
He let Louis spray the white gas inside the tree before handing him a box of InstaFire matches.
Louis struck one, tossed it, and retreated fast as the fuel ignited.
We stayed to watch the tree burn long enough for what was inside to be rendered unidentifiable.
Sadlier stood by with the Element, which resembled a foot-long baton, but the blaze only licked at the exterior wet bark, and finally the flames began to die down.
Sadlier smothered what remained of them with the extinguisher and we left the clearing, left it to the weeping of a child.