Glass crunched, and Ruth turned to see Bill by the window. It was her turn to think he had lost his mind. He’d put on his shoes but was otherwise stark naked, skin so cold it looked pink in the gray morning light.
She started around the bed. “I gave you those shoes so you wouldn’t cut your feet, but I thought you’d have sense enough to at least put on a shirt and some drawers. You’ll catch your death.”
Bill shook his head. “Would you look at that,” he said softly, almost a whisper.
Ruth crunched over the broken glass, arms crossed, the sweater not enough to warm her. She bent to peek out the other window, to Bill’s left, and straightaway, she could see what had given him such pause. The ancient oak tree in the cornfield had split in two. Half of the oak lay across the ragged stumps of old cornstalks, while the other half remained upright.
“Lightning, you think?” he said.
The sky hung low and gray, but there hadn’t been a drop of rain, nor had they heard thunder, unless they counted the one seismic moment when the ground had bucked beneath the house.
“Doesn’t seem likely,” Ruth replied.
Neither of them offered any further suggestion. Instead, they stared at the split in the ground. Ruth noticed that the earth beneath the oak tree had risen into a kind of hump. Two of its thick roots had burst up through the ground like dinosaur bones revealed by a desert wind.
“I’ll get the broom,” she said again, hurrying out into the corridor. As she descended the stairs, Ruth tried to make sense of the way the house and land had cracked, and the way the earth had bucked beneath the oak tree, almost like something down there wanted out.
Two thick roots had been broken when it thrashed in its sleep, in that moment when—far away—Maggie Wise had taken her final breath. Other roots still held it in place, one around its throat, one that twined tightly around its pelvis and left leg, and another that had grown in such a way that the root melded with its right forearm—wood and bone fused.
And yet…
Weak as it may have been, trapped, still buried beneath what remained of that splintered, ancient tree… the thing beneath the oak had awoken. After long centuries, it tasted the marrow of the world and wanted more.
6
Paxson Keates was an uncommonly handsome man. In Malcolm’s mind, undertakers were supposed to look like the grim reaper in a business suit. His image of the typical undertaker certainly didn’t include the fellow looking like he’d be more comfortable romancing Lana Turner on some Hollywood movie set. Pax had perfect hair, gray at the temples, and eyes so blue they seemed unreal. Once upon a time, Malcolm had heard his mother tell his sister, Jennie, that if she were twenty years younger or Pax had been drunk enough, she’d have taken the man to bed. Jennie should have been scandalized—young Malcolm certainly had been—but instead, she’d offered to fight her mother for the privilege.
He’d managed to forget that conversation, but with Pax standing in his mother’s bedroom now, it made an unwelcome return. The memory made him laugh a little, quietly and on the inside. That had been his mother, bold as brass.
“She had a bit of a crush on you,” Malcolm said, surprised to find the words on his lips.
Pax smiled down at Maggie Wise’s hollow shell. “The feeling was very mutual. She was beautiful, age be damned.”
Malcolm must have made some noise of surprise or disapproval, because Pax gave him a curious look.
“That shocks you?”
“Not shock, precisely,” Malcolm said. “But I always thought she made people around her pretty nervous.”
Pax smiled. “Ah yes. Of course. ‘Maggie Wise will take your eyes.’”
“Ouch. I haven’t heard that one in a while.”
“That’s what they said when I was a boy. We’d dare each other to knock on the door, when your father wasn’t home and it was just Maggie, baking strange-smelling things in her kitchen. Sometimes delicious smells, sometimes revolting. After your sister, Jennie, was born, there was less of that sort of thing. Having you kids made Maggie seem less mysterious.”
“But people still said she was a witch,” Malcolm replied.
“Once your father was gone…”
The words trailed off. Pax studied Maggie’s face, then bent over to finish sewing the thick canvas shroud he’d brought for just this purpose. The bedroom was scattered with evidence of the preparations the undertaker had made for this moment. On the nightstand, a pair of enormous hypodermic needles gleamed in the early-morning light. On the floor lay the remnant of the rubber blanket he’d brought, and then cut down when he realized she had become so small that only a portion of it would be needed. Pax had placed the rubber blanket beneath Maggie’s corpse, injected her with a startling volume of chemicals, then wrapped her first in the rubber and then the canvas shroud.
Now he sewed the final stitch, snugged it tightly, and tied it off before looking up at Malcolm.
“I wish I had the time to embalm her properly, but her instructions were strict.”
“They always were,” Malcolm muttered, mostly to himself.
“Give me a hand?”
