Published by Double Dragon Publishing, January 2006

CHAPTER ONE: Twists and Turns

April Rue sighed and shut the book. She was tired of studying. She’d been at it for hours, and although she loved the subject–usually reveled in the luxury of learning folklore in a classroom, and on a scholarship to boot, when after Mama died so strangely, she’d had to sneak around at home to hear the old tales–she’d had enough for now.

She blinked as she put the book aside and looked up; she’d been so deeply immersed in kobolds and knockers and haunted mine shafts, it came as something of a shock to see the familiar surroundings of the dorm room. The late afternoon sun flooded in, making bright squares on the otherwise dingy brown carpet, and the plain white walls (well, plain except for the three matted prints that hung there) reflected it in almost painful cheerfulness. It had been a warm day, high in the eighties even if it was November, and she’d opened the window wide; the bland beige dorm curtains moved slightly in the breeze. She suddenly realized the air smelled deliciously of blooming mums and ripe apples, rich, moist earth, fallen leaves, and bonfires somewhere in the distance, and she sniffed deeply of the autumn fragrance. The leaves that remained on the trees outside her window rustled softly, and that was all the invitation she needed.

Grabbing a sweatshirt from the chair beside the bed, she left her room, letting the door slam behind her. She ran down the hallway and took the staircase two steps at a time, whistling. One thing Grantley Pemberton College had was spectacular woods, and she was going for a walk in them.

Grantley Pemberton was an old school. It had stood where it was for a hundred years, and even then, the builders had been careful to go around and between trees when they’d erected the structures that now housed the library and offices, classrooms, labs, and dorms. The trustees had been equally careful over the years to keep the grounds from becoming desecrated as modern improvements were added. So Grantley had a magnificent campus, much like a small but perfect gem in an ornate, spectacular setting.

The trees scattered around the campus were huge and old. They towered over the comparatively small brick and stone buildings as if over a dollhouse village, and their shade in the heat of summer was almost better than air conditioning for the students who came here all year–at least, for most of the rooms.

But the woods, thought April Rue as she crossed the quadrangle, were best of all. Massive looming trees rose dramatically above the thickets of hazelnut and filbert that clustered around; small, slender trees like sassafras and dogwood and redbud ran rampant; wild plums filled the air with their sweet fragrance in early spring; oak, cedar, and hickory were everywhere; and persimmons and wild grapevines vied for space with thickets of blackberry and wild rose. There was even a lake with weeping willows and swans on the far side of the campus, and she’d spent a lot of time there this summer, reading and watching the clouds.

She’d learned more about the country, she reflected as she admired one particularly magnificent hickory tree, since coming to college than she had all her life living only a couple miles from open farmland. She stood at the edge of the green and looked almost hungrily at the woods rising before her; she’d never been much interested in the country, thanks to Daddy. Since coming to Grantley, it had been a whole different story and she wasn’t quite sure why.

The woods stirred something deep inside her; gave her–well, feelings she wasn’t really able to understand, and she’d wished more than once Mama had been there to talk to about those feelings. Woods, lake, swans flying at twilight, the cries of owls outside her room, even the night sky–out here at Grantley, even though the campus was lit, she could walk just a little ways at night and be far enough away from the lights to see things in the sky she’d never seen in town, with its streetlights and houselights–they all made her feel…odd, somehow. As if she were part of them, or they were part of her, or something. Not anything she could explain. People would think I was crazy, she thought, not for the first time, shivering at the magnificence of the day with its intense blues and whites, browns and reds, golds and greens. Sky, earth, trees…it was all around her and she loved it almost more than she could stand. With a sigh of pleasure, she passed the first of the trees, and felt once more as if she’d come home–to a home she’d known a long, long time ago.

The trees arrayed around her fascinated her, as always. She had a distinct recollection of herself as a small child watching a massive old hollow tree that had seemed to beckon her to it at twilight. She’d been roundly spanked for relating that one to Daddy, and it seemed it was the last time she’d looked closely at trees till she got to college. Odd idea, that–that a tree should move of its own accord. She remembered the idea, just as she did the spanking, very clearly.

Then, too, she remembered watching, until Daddy cut them all down, the trees around the old house in Little Springs. They’d toss madly in the wild, seasonal storms, and she remembered thinking they were gesturing all sorts of things to one another, dancing with the wind, yearning to be free to follow the course of the gales that blew them back and forth…. At least she’d thought that until Daddy had done away with the idea by doing away with the trees.

That house hadn’t been theirs; it was only a rental, and the landlord hadn’t been happy. He’d been downright furious about it, in fact, and they’d had to move; Daddy had packed her up early one morning just after that and taken her over to Brother Ames’ wife to mind, and not come to get her till late at night. She remembered that very distinctly, as well as the ugly mobile he’d brought her to–their new home, which had taken the place of the charming little house she’d started her life in–a cramped, sterile, too-well-remembered old mobile home nobody else would have because it stood isolated on a hot, barren lot with no shade at all in summer. No trees. She remembered that very well indeed.

Daddy had been so pleased to get it….

And still, the image of those trees stayed with her. Well, she’d always had odd notions. It was one of the things that had worried Daddy so.

Mama had never thought they were odd…but Mama was dead, and Daddy never would talk about how she died. All April Rue knew was it had been strange and mysterious, and terribly, terribly sudden. Daddy had never been the same, and the mystery had always haunted her.

She’d lived with that for most of her young life, and the answers to her questions had died unspoken with Daddy. So she put it out of her mind, as she had so often before.

She walked slower and slower as she got deeper into the woods. The trees rose around her almost protectively, she thought, noting with loving detail the way their bark was colored, lined, covered with lichens and mosses. Almost as if they were welcoming me, she thought as she looked at the twisted, gnarled tree limbs and branches, the twigs moving gently in the breezes. Why didn’t I ever feel this way before I came here? She walked on for a few more minutes, then stopped beneath a large black walnut tree and arranged her sweatshirt on the ground. Sitting down, she studied the trees around her with a yearning she couldn’t define.

If only I could draw, I could capture them; if I could paint, I could make such pictures– She’d wished since coming to Grantley that she could draw, maybe even become an artist. But although she’d taken art classes, she was the despair of the teachers; she had the vision, but not the ability to translate it onto paper or canvas so anyone else could see it. She’d worked at it, harder than most of the others, but to no avail. And finally, she’d acknowledged that was not where her talents lay.

But where do they lie? she asked herself again, breathing deep of the woodsy air and looking up through the turning leaves to the deep blue of the sky above. I’ve found what I love to study, but what am I going to do with it? Where is my skill? Everybody’s got to have something, and I don’t seem to have any. I’m just good with books. This wasn’t strictly true; April Rue was also very good with her hands–she’d inherited her father’s talent for fixing things, as well as, apparently, her mother’s instinct for knowing what was wrong with something. She could fix almost anything made, even if she wasn’t familiar with its principles of operation.

Life as a fix-it woman, though, wasn’t exactly what she’d envisioned for herself–she’d seen enough of the uncertain income such a life brought at home. Daddy had been a fix-it man, doing well enough at putting food on the table and paying the rent on the trailer house, but that was about as far as it had gone. They wore secondhand clothes most of the time and scraped by with only an occasional spare dollar for such things as records, used books, or a once-in-a-while trip to Sassafras Springs to the movies. Daddy had found ways to get April Rue lots of things she wanted, but hours of hard work and barter had gone into the providing. He’d never said anything, but she’d felt very keenly everything he’d given her.

Especially the stake for college. When he’d died so suddenly of a heart attack, and Uncle Josh had brought her the lockbox he’d been entrusted with (Daddy never had trusted banks), she’d been stunned at how much money he had put by–enough for her first year’s tuition and a year’s insurance payments on his old car. Between that and Social Security, there was enough for a good start. She’d known then he’d wanted her to have a better life–and she knew what it had cost him to give her that stake. So she wasn’t about to waste it.

Yet here she was, a sophomore already, and she’d have to make up her mind soon if she wasn’t going to waste all Daddy’s hard work–and mine, she thought, remembering how hard she’d worked to qualify for the academic scholarship that was seeing her through sophomore year. Daddy’s college stake hadn’t been big enough to see her through more than a year, but fortunately, April Rue’s mind had been equal to the challenge; her grade point average had been high enough and her application for an academic scholarship from Grantley Pemberton had been approved. All she had to do now was maintain her average and she’d keep her scholarship; but that wouldn’t be enough to get her through a lifetime. So she’d have to give it some heavy thought.

For her first year, she’d been content to immerse herself in the folklore and stories she’d loved from the time she’d been tiny, with their eerie feel somehow familiar in its very strangeness, and she’d excelled to a degree that surprised even her. But the time for coasting on interests was over; she’d lived long enough near poverty to know she daren’t waste the opportunity to find a way to support herself. She wasn’t about to go back home and marry one of the boys she knew and settle down; college had awakened a whole new thirst in her, one somehow linked to the feeling she got in the woods at night, and there was no way she was going to give up whatever lay ahead for the same dismal future that belonged to most of the girls she’d gone to high school with. There were better things in life than teenage childbearing and old age before forty, like Aunt RueAnn, for whom she had been partly named.

The Rue is there for a reason, she’d decided when watching Aunt RueAnn age before her eyes, and I’m going to make sure I don’t rue what I do with my life. And there was more to life than being a secretary, or a checkout girl at the supermarket, or even a teacher in a place where education was so hard to come by, and at one and the same time, respected and almost looked down on in a kind of reverse snobbery. She wasn’t quite sure what she wanted, but she wanted it so badly, she could almost taste it.

Still, here in the woods, on a day like this, she could believe that whatever it was, she’d find a way to get it; she flexed her toes and remembered she’d come here to get away from studying, from mindwork. So she made a conscious effort to let everything go but the day and the woods she so loved.

She sighed and relaxed against the back of the tree. It was so peaceful here; so quiet. The only sounds were the rustle of leaves and the birdsongs around her. She’d been tired from studying, but usually, all it took to make her feel fresh and alert again was a walk in the woods. Daddy probably would have had a fit at his daughter’s newfound addiction to the countryside he’d tried so hard to keep her safe from all those years, but April Rue couldn’t help herself. There was so much out here to love. She giggled in spite of herself. She could handle anything if she had her woods, and her walks during the night out here under the stars.

It just makes me feel so very alive, she thought, pleased and confused at the same time, that if she’d been asked to run for miles, or fight a battle, or swim a vast distance, she would have agreed–and then done it. She blinked at the thought; that wasn’t like her. She wasn’t into running marathons, she was a peaceable type, and as for swimming–well, she was only just now learning how to swim. Daddy had never let her near the creeks and ponds where the other kids swam back in Little Springs, and although she’d splashed around in the town pool often enough, she’d never quite had the gumption to learn.

Till college–the time when everything in her life had seemed to take wing, flesh out, reveal some added, unsuspected dimension. Like that tree, she thought almost absently, and then suddenly stiffened, her back up against the walnut as if it were the only safe spot in a hostile world. That tree, she thought again, this time in shock.

The tree in question, a white birch only a few yards away, was rather large for its species, but otherwise, quite unremarkable. Except it had suddenly seemed to take on a face.

The image was there high up on the bole, and very disturbing; it was a slender face, with black smudgemarks on the bark serving for cheekbones and a somewhat pointed chin. Just above it, the branches reached out from the trunk like hair, well-lubricated with styling mousse and separated out into thick strands. It looked, she thought in disbelief, eerily like the Arthur Rackham prints in so many of the books she was studying now. Then memories of the apple orchard in THE WIZARD OF OZ crowded her mind, and images of Ents. You’ve got plenty of stuff to draw on for this hallucination, dumm-o, she told herself. You don’t exactly have an ossified imagination. And all while she was thinking these things, she couldn’t tear her vision away from that face. Angular and twiggy and somehow–treeish.

And yet, it’s not like that at all, she corrected herself, unable to look away and studying the face more closely. The longer she watched, the more defined it became, until suddenly, she could have sworn it turned its pale gray-white eyes on her and studied her in return.

I’m not seeing this, she told herself firmly, closing her eyes for a full second and then reopening them. The face was still there–if possible, seeming now to protrude from the otherwise fairly smooth trunk of the tree. It was androgynous, and neither grace nor coarseness predominated in its features; its nose was straight and little more than a shadow, its lips were brownish-black and at first, she’d taken them for more of the markings on the bark.

Of course they’re markings on the bark, she insisted rationally, and those aren’t eyes I see; they’re just discolorations on the trunk. There can’t be a face in that tree. Just then, a branch moved, a slender one whose twigs flexed and straightened in the faint breeze–like fingers stretching. She suddenly seemed to see the whole body, and while it was somewhat manlike in outline, it was impossibly contorted, following contours no human could ever have endured in order to fit within the trunkline and branches. Yet it also looked impossibly right, as if it belonged there, as if every tree should have a face, a body within its trunk, fingers reaching out at the ends of twiggy branches, roots supporting it like feet.

April Rue stared at the tree in mute fascination, unable to move, powerless to do anything but watch. The breeze picked up just for a moment, and the branches waved–seeming to beckon to her. The eyes blinked once and glowed suddenly bright like
foxfire in the night, the lips parted, and she seemed to hear a whisper on the wind that was more leaf-talk than voice.

Ssseeecretssss….

That was when she decided she’d had enough. Something in her brain clicked, and she found herself able to move again. Without hesitation, she scrambled to her feet and ran. Behind her, the breeze subsided, and the branches stopped swaying. But the whisper seemed to carry after her….

***

April Rue ran, not back to the quadrangle, although that was what she’d intended, but deeper into the woods. Her legs carried her with amazing speed, until at last, she realized which way she was going and stopped. When she thought about it, she realized she was trembling. And here she was deeper yet among the trees–the trees that suddenly seemed to be so much more.

It’s happening again, she thought wildly, breathing far faster than the sudden spurt of exercise warranted, grabbing onto a nearby, very ordinary oak for support. It’s all happening again, and I still don’t understand, and there’s nobody I can tell, nobody I can ask– She gripped the tree harder, till the bark dug into her palms and the pain penetrated her panic. She looked around, at once relieved and frightened there wasn’t a soul near–no one to have seen her panicked flight, no one to reassure her that she was not indeed going crazy.

Then her practical side reasserted itself. If there was no one around to calm her, then she’d have to do it herself. After all, she had been through things like this before…hadn’t she?

Don’t be silly, she now scolded herself roundly. You fell asleep after all and you had a stupid dream. That’s what you get for studying about supernatural creatures. After that cram session, if you’d even gone near a cave, you’d have heard knockers. She forced herself to breathe evenly, slowly; then she cursed when she realized her sweatshirt was still beneath the tree where she’d been sitting.

She hesitated for a moment, but then she shook her head. I’ll have to go back for it, she resolved reluctantly. It was her favorite shirt; Granny Cinders had sent it to her for her birthday last year just before final exams, and April Rue had been delighted. The shirt was sky blue and embroidered with dogwood and redbud blossoms–at least it had been, until she’d adopted it as her good luck piece and worn or taken it everywhere with her. Now it was somewhat faded, but April Rue was superstitious enough not to leave it behind when anything important was in the offing.

And to leave it close to that tree!

She squared her shoulders and turned around. She’d go back for it, in spite of everything. Head high, she started back toward the tree.

And stopped suddenly when she heard the rustle of leaves not thirty feet away from her–and getting closer.

Now this is really too much, she told herself, but nonetheless, she couldn’t make herself move any farther than to duck behind the nearest bush. She wasn’t timid by nature, but suddenly, there was no way she could make herself leave the clearing and see what was making that noise so close by. It wasn’t a breeze; the air was still. Yet the leaves moved, softly and distinctly, now closer still. She hunkered down behind the bush to wait–and then nearly fell over when a rabbit bounded into view, then went hopping off to her left.

“Silly ass,” she told herself out loud. “Now you go back to that tree and you get that shirt, and let’s have no more of this nonsense, April Rue Stoner.” Flooded with relief, she set off back down the way she’d come, and before long, had reached the black walnut.

She inspected the birch across the clearing warily, but this time, it seemed no more than a tree–although she could see the characteristic birch markings arrayed in a pattern very like a face. She made herself walk over to it, examine it closely. It was still a tree. She shook her head.

“Dumm-o,” she told herself softly, “see how stupid you were?” She deliberately turned her back on the tree and went to retrieve her shirt.

She was just shaking the leaves from it when she heard a whispery, leafy sound behind her. She froze. Suddenly, she realized how late it had gotten; the afternoon sun was low now, and casting long shadows all around her. The breeze stirred leaves in whispery gusts that hinted at secret conversations from which she was excluded, and again, there came that soft sound from behind her–almost a whirring. The slanting gold rays of the sun suddenly seemed to surround her, to focus in a pool of light on the forest floor just where she stood–and on the black walnut tree just in front of her.

She shivered and stared at the wrinkles on the walnut’s bark. It couldn’t be–she didn’t see another face taking shape in that liquid golden flood of sunlight–it couldn’t–

And then she heard a step behind her in the leaves, and screamed.

And here’s a story from Klassic Koalas, entitled Didane and the Trees. Please do download it (right-click, choose “Save Link As…”); both the story and the illustrations are lovely.