He grinned again. “You’re perfectly right. We don’t know one another. But time will remedy that. I say this merely to indicate that I’m willing to take time. Not an eternity, of course, but a lengthy spell.”
She fetched him a pillow, helped him find a book, put out clean towels. She took herself off to bed and fell asleep almost at once, surprisingly unworried, or maybe, so she drowsily told herself, only rather drunk.
Sometime later, she thought she woke.
The world where she found herself was a rock-strewn desert, with pillars of stone standing like chessmen on calcined soil. She was walking toward one such pillar, desirous of its shade, for the sun had burned her dry. Her feet scuffed sand. Her breath rasped. The shade lay ahead of her, like a dark road, leading to the stone pillar itself. She came within the shadow and looked up to see an erose edge, the stone fanged with living things, angularly huddled shapes that looked down at her and cried out to one another in a strange tongue that she, nonetheless, understood: “See, there’s one. There’s one!”
She screamed and fled, out into the sands once more…. And woke, listening for the sound that had roused her.
There were wings outside, heavy wings, less crisp than the snap, snap, snap of a crow flight, far less silent than an owl. The roof creaked above the corner of the bedroom as though something weighty had just landed there, and through the window came the carrion smell of something long dead. The thing on the roof took a step, then another, coming across the roof toward the eave just above the window.
She came out of the bed in a flash, her hand going to the side of her head, where Jared had pulled those hairs loose. Momma had said it, Jared would have had her back by now, except she’d cleaned the house too well. She hadn’t left any hair. No fingernail clippings. No sweat on the sheets. No flakes of skin in the carpet….
Above her, the thing moved, another step toward the window.
The sofa springs creaked in the living room, once, then again. Abby said something to himself. There was a stumble, a muffled curse, and footsteps as he rose and went into the kitchen. Pipes banged, water ran and splashed. In a moment he went back to his bed.
When the silence returned, she listened for the heavy footsteps over her head, but they did not come again. She sniffed for the carrion smell, but it was gone.
Perhaps it had only come to learn if she’d been telling the truth.
Perhaps she had dreamed it. Perhaps.
When she arrived at work the following morning, Dora made a point of being very brisk and businesslike. She had the idea that anyone who looked at her could probably tell she’d spent the night with…well, something or somebody. Seeing herself in the mirror when she got up, she had thought it possible. She looked flustered. Definitely flustered, and it wasn’t Abby’s fault. He had gone early, before full light, refusing her company for the six-block walk to the avenue.
“Just tell the tree the car’s yours,” she’d remarked sleepily when he poked his head into the bedroom to say good-bye. “It’ll probably remember, anyhow.”
Then she was asleep again in the half light, until the birds woke her, caroling under a sky cleared by the night’s rain. When she was brushing her teeth, she remembered the night visitation and stopped, mouth foaming, to stare at herself in the mirror. Had she dreamed that? Well, of course. She must have dreamed that.
Still, the sense of apprehension stayed with her, showing up as a pinched pallor around her mouth, a tendency to look over her shoulder. Phil didn’t notice. He plumped himself down across from her in the office, already in full cry.
“Charlene is fit to be tied,” he announced portentously.
“What’s the matter with Charlene?”
“Well, hell, you know Charlene. Nothing stops her. She’s like the postal service is supposed to be, not heat nor rain nor dark of night, you know. So she’s got this listing on a house out on the edge of town, and even though you’ve got to walk most of half a mile to get there, she’s been showing it right along, trees or no trees. So, yesterday afternoon she takes some people out there…”
“And?”
“And the house is gone.”
“Gone?”
“Gone. I don’t mean lost or strayed or stolen, I mean gone. The foundation is still there, most of the fence and the front gate, but the place is gone. Now there’s just woods.”
“You think the trees ate it?”
“Who knows. This isn’t all. Naturally, Charlene is some upset. She can’t get a commission on a house that isn’t there anymore. So she calls her boss, and they get to bitching about one thing and another, and her boss tells her about this house being listed by a young couple because he’s been transferred to the coast, and it had two bedrooms, right, one for the young couple and one for the kids maybe someday. Only now it’s only got one bedroom. The other bedroom got filled in.”
“Filled in?” she asked, hollowly. “You mean, trees growing in it?”
“I mean, the outside corner walls are gone and the roof over that corner of the house is gone, and the floor is gone and there’s only one bedroom.”
“Unused space,” she murmured, looking at the far wall as though consulting a crystal ball. “What about window screens? My trees made me window screens. And a hammock.”
“I didn’t hear about window screens. I did hear about this place that had a leaky roof, only now there’s new roof tiles made out of bark, and they don’t leak.”
“The paper hasn’t said a word about stuff like that.”
“Maybe the paper doesn’t know. When Charlene talks about it, she whispers, like it was a secret. Like if she spoke out loud, something might come out of the woodwork and eat her.”
“I wonder if Abby McCord knows,” she said. “Somebody ought to tell him.”
“So tell him,” said Phil, shuffling his papers. “I called him last night, but he wasn’t home.”
Her face went up in flames, but Phil didn’t notice. He was busy hunting for something he couldn’t find.
The captain came out of his office and leaned on the desk.
“You got some time?”
Phil said, “Sure. I mean, we’re still working on the Winston thing. Everybody loved the guy, so up till now we haven’t found a motive, much less an idea who. We’ve got a—”
He’d been going to say that they had a new lead, but the captain interrupted. “Could you and Dora see this woman? The uniforms are two or three hours behind, responding to emergencies, people trapped or hurt or lost. Lots of people are lost. This woman has a baby gone. Disappeared.”
“Kidnapped?” Dora asked.
“She just says gone. Go out there, will you?”
Dora grabbed the dogeared city map and they went. Phil drove and she counted streets. They stopped once or twice to pull growth away from street signs so they could read them, and they had to walk the last three blocks. Phil left the engine running and the lights on.
“You mean to do that?” she asked him.
“Guys downstairs say if you leave the engine on, the trees don’t grow up around it,” he said. “Firetrucks found that out. You leave something running, they leave it alone.”
The woman was waiting for them on the front porch, largely pregnant, sitting among a cluster of shiny-faced children. Five, Dora counted, all under school age.
“You’re Mrs. Holmes?”
The woman nodded, wiping her eyes with the hem of her dress. “Alesha’s gone,” she said. “I put her in her crib while she had her bottle. She usually plays there by her own self for a while, until Bobby and Francis get off to school and the others get fed. I went to get her and she’s gone.”
“Let us see the room,” said Phil. “Where she was.”
They went into the house, through a clean but cluttered living room and into a long hall with doors down both sides. The second door on the right was open, and they went in to see a crib and a double bed. “This is the girls’ room,” the woman said wearily. “We had more bedrooms, but the t
rees took the others. We didn’t even have a chance to get the beds out.”
“How many girls?” asked Dora, in a hushed voice.
“Four. The baby and these three,” she said, indicating the three small children who had seated themselves on the bed. The fourth and fifth child stood in the door. “Four boys. Those two and Bobby and Francis. They’ve got one room, too. Jake wants us to have a football team, eleven boys, so we had six bedrooms and the sleeping porch out back, but that’s all the trees left us—three bedrooms. One for the boys, one for the girls, and one for Jake and me.”
Dora tried the windows, which were locked. She went down the hall, opening the other doors, finding forest outside three of them on the left, a bathroom and two other bedrooms on the right, forest outside the door at the end of the hall. Even though there were sizeable trees just outside the left-hand doors, there was enough space for a person to have come in between them and entered the house. Anyone could have. Dora didn’t think anyone had.
“Jake says he’ll nail them shut,” said the woman from close behind her. “He just hasn’t got to it yet.”
Phil asked about the baby, age, weight, how dressed. Dora wrote it all down. She asked for a photograph and the woman came up with a fuzzy polaroid shot of a stout little pajamaed figure standing up in her crib, grinning toothlessly beneath a single upturned flip of light hair.
Then they hiked back to the car and sat in it, stunned.
“It’s like Charlene’s boss told her,” said Phil, at last. “The woods just kind of ate parts of the house.”
“It left them one bedroom for the boys, one for the girls, and one for the adults,” said Dora. “Maybe that’s all it figures people need.”
“Some places in the world, a family’d live all in one room,” Phil said. “You know. Like on the Discovery Channel. Or National Geographic. Those tribes along the Amazon. They don’t even have beds, just hammocks. Or grass mats.” He ran his fingers through his thinning hair. “Maybe this is just the first step.”
“You and Charlene still have a guest room?”
“The dogs sleep in the guest room, and it was still there this morning when Charlene took them out for their walk.”
“Let’s get back to the office. I want to call Abby McCord.”
She did call Abby, finding him in his own office. She’d planned to tell him about Charlene’s experiences and the missing bedrooms and the missing baby, but first she found herself answering a lengthy interrogation about how she’d slept, and how she felt, and how much Abby had enjoyed the evening, and, and…
Finally he asked, “So, what’s going on?”
Dora told him, then surprised herself by saying, “I think the trees decided that woman had enough children. They’re not going to let her have any more.”
“She has…what did you say? Eight left?”
“Today she does. Plus one in the oven. I have no idea how many she’ll have tomorrow.”
“You think the trees…what? Killed the baby? Ate it, like maybe it ate the cows?”
“Or relocated it. Lots of people want children who don’t have them.”
Long silence. Then a murmur, “Speaking of relocation, would you mind if I relocated to your place tonight? I’ll bring supper.”
Her ears turned warm. She started to say, no, not tonight, too soon, too much, too quick, but the words wouldn’t come. Besides…besides, there were those bad dreams. That was a good enough reason. “I’d really appreciate the company,” she murmured back, feeling the words like honey on her tongue. Oh, God, she was…she was, well, whatever she was!
“About seven,” he almost whispered, over a voice husky with enjoyment. “I’ve got some stuff to take care of first.”
She hung up and stared at the phone, looking up at last to see Phil staring at her.
“What would you appreciate?” he asked.
“Abby and I are having dinner together.”
“I told you!” he crowed. “Nice guy, isn’t he?”
“He’s very nice,” she said, desperately trying to keep her face nice and neutral. “And you were very sweet to think of me, Phil. I take back anything I said to the contrary.”
“Women,” he snorted. “Don’t even know what’s good for you.”
“No,” she agreed. “We’re just like men in that regard.”
He grumbled his way off somewhere, leaving her wondering, what was good for her? She flushed, yet again. Tonight, suppose she said yes. Not that she planned to, but suppose she did. It would not be a good idea to go getting pregnant right off the bat. Getting pregnant would definitely not be a good thing right now.
When Phil went to the men’s room, she called Dr. Silva and said it was an emergency. Her doctor said there’d been a lot of those recently and come over around four.
“What kind of emergencies were you talking about?” Dora asked as she put on her shoes after the exam. “You said you had a lot of them.”
Dr. Rebecca Silva stripped off her gloves and wrote something on the chart in a minuscule hand. “False pregnancies. Women we thought were pregnant who aren’t anymore,” she said. “At last count, I had eleven of them.”
Dora held up her hand like a traffic cop. “Let me see if I can guess. They all have other children, probably more than one.”
Dr. Silva frowned. “Let me think. A couple of them are new patients, it’ll be in their histories, but I don’t remember off hand. The others, the old-timers, yes. I’ve delivered other children. I don’t know, two or three, maybe, but certainly more than one. How did you know that?”
Dora rubbed her brow. “Let me tell you a story, and you tell me what you think. There are these trees, suddenly growing everywhere. At the edges of the town, any houses that’re left vacant disappear. The trees eat them. Occupied houses, the trees eat any room that isn’t used. In some occupied houses, where there are a lot of children, the trees eat all the bedrooms except three, one for boys, one for girls, one for the adults. I don’t know about grandparents. Or aunts or uncles. Also, where there are large numbers of children, babies disappear…”
“Babies…”
“Disappear. This afternoon, Phil—Phil’s my partner—and I went with a police dog team out to a house on Cayuga, pretty far out, and we had the dog sniff the crib where the baby had been, and then we went out looking for the baby. The dog smelled the trees and the grass and took a drink from the creek and chased a rabbit. This is one of the best tracking dogs known to the department. The guy who trains them, he and his dogs have found people in places you wouldn’t believe, but today, nothing.”
“Well, whoever took the baby probably carried it…”
“Right. And this dog should have been able to smell that. It was moist, but there wasn’t any rain to wash it away, so the smell should have lingered on the air. He didn’t smell anything. Which says to me, the baby didn’t leave the house. Not as a baby.”
“As what?”
“I think the trees ate it. Very gently and peacefully and without hurting it. The kid never yelled. I had eight brothers and sisters, so I figure if it had been hurt, it would have yelled. She would have.”
Dr. Silva looked at her, appalled. “You’re not serious.”
“Right, I’m not serious. So, can I have the pills?”
“Here’s the prescription. I’m still using a virgin spec on you, Dora, which is unusual in this day and at your age. I presume you intend to change your status. Please discuss sexual diseases with the intended. The pills are only for birth control; they won’t protect you against the bad stuff. At this point in your cycle, you should be okay. Start the pills after your next period. If you don’t get your period within the next week, come see me.” She made a note. “You were just kidding about the baby, weren’t you? I wouldn’t recommend your telling that one where any media reporter can hear you.”
“Right.” Dora smiled again, feeling the falsity of it. A false smile moved your face differently. It felt stretched, as though it weren’t participa
ting. “And you were just kidding about those false pregnancies, weren’t you?”
Dr. Silva’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.
23
Opalears: From Seeresses to St. Weel
Prince Sahir was terribly annoyed. It was he who had wanted an audience with the emperor, but it was Prince Izakar who got it. It was Prince Sahir whose guards and handlers were so much in evidence, and it was Prince Izzy who was telling them when and where and what for. I could feel the explosion coming. I went in search of Soaz, finding him near the stables.
“Will you please go up there and talk to the two princes?” I begged him. “Prince Izakar is becoming all too authoritative, and Prince Sahir is resenting it. Something is going to blow up, and I can’t imagine it would be wise to have the emperor angry at us just now.”
Soaz made a troubled sound in his throat and went off to see to the two boys while I wandered around the stable yard, kicking bits of umminhi kibble that had been dropped by the grooms. Most of the mounts in the stable were horses, but people like the emperor preferred carriages or chariots, and the umminhi were evidently used to pull the imperial vehicle that stood in the nearby carriage house, large and golden and carved all over with mythical creatures.
When I thought it was safe, I went back up to the broad terrace outside the palace. Things were a bit quieter, though Sahir was still simmering. Prince Izakar was speaking to him in a conciliatory tone, while Soaz looked on benignly, his armored hand on Izzy’s shoulder, one of the claws just tickling his neck. I wondered if the effect was calculated, deciding it was.
Izzy looked up at me and grinned. “The emperor is giving us two wagons. They’ll be ready tomorrow, and I’ve asked for a meeting with the Seers of Sworp—”
“Thereby delaying us unnecessarily,” said Sahir in his most annoying drawl. “I prefer to leave today. Soaz, will you see to it.”
The air simmered again. Soaz took a deep breath. And then, from under the portico, came a languid voice. “Oh, Prince Sahir. And I was so looking forward to traveling with you.”