“Molly …,” Charlie said. He sat up in bed and looked out his window.
Except there was no window. There wasn’t even a wall. He was on a low cot beneath an old green blanket. The cot was on an uneven plank deck suspended between two massive tree trunks. Above him, thick living branches grew out of one tree and into the other, belonging to both trees equally. Beyond the deck and the roof, there were more trees, all of them rising up out of black water that was puckered and rippling with raindrops.
Charlie kicked off his blanket and swung his feet over the side of his cot. His right leg throbbed, but the pain wasn’t sharp. He wasn’t sure what had happened. Something about Cotton throwing rocks. Had Cotton hit him?
Charlie pulled his knee up to his chest and twisted to get a look at his ankle. His shoes and socks were gone, and a large square of sticky gauze covered the source of his pain. He peeled it off. A rough gash at least three inches long and one inch wide decorated the outside of his ankle. Thin lips of white flesh shone where it had been torn open.
The wound wasn’t bloody at all. It was packed full of busy, glistening maggots.
Charlie shut his eyes hard and swallowed, his throat tightening. He was waiting for something, something that would change what he had just seen, that would carry it all away and make it disappear.
Slowly, his mind crawled out of its sleep shell, and he knew that he had been waiting for the old woman and her kiss and a song. He was waiting for the dream to change.
But this was no dream.
Charlie opened his eyes and leaned slowly over his ankle. The wound was real. The maggots in the wound were very real. He wanted to shout and jump and shake them off. Instead, he shivered. Someone had put them there on purpose. And as disgusting as they were, they seemed tidy. He carefully pressed the gauze back down over those little wriggling gray backs. He shivered again at their squishiness, and then lowered his foot back to the floor. The pain grew as he stood. Everything from the knee down hummed.
Engravings swirled across the dark planks of the floor. Animals—panthers and gators and rabbits and birds. Snakes. Boys running. Charlie recognized the church carved on its mound. Canals. Even a few odd little buildings and streets that had to represent Taper. And there was a cane field burning—flames carved like looping waves. In the cane, crudely engraved men hacked with machetes. Crudely engraved women carried bundles of cane on their backs toward wagons waiting on a road. A man on a horse swung a whip.
Against the bottoms of his bare feet, the engravings felt like pinecones, or barnacles on a rock.
On the ceiling, the planks had been carved with moons, suns, and stars. Paths had been traced between the moons, connecting them all. The same was true of the suns and the stars. There were so many lines it was impossible to follow a single thread. Around the edges, strange creatures had been carved as well—three eyes clustered together between spread wings, a lion with hooves and wings and a roaring man’s bearded head.
“Honey,” a woman said behind him. “What are you doing up?”
Charlie spun around and winced, lifting his injured foot and balancing awkwardly on his left leg.
The woman had white hair pulled back into a loose single braid. Her eyes were blue, and her skin was pale beneath a thick spray of dark freckles. She was thin but not bony. Her shirt was square and loose and a shade of white that approached yellow. Everything about her was soft—everything but her eyes.
“You were in my dreams,” Charlie said. “Singing.”
The woman smiled and nodded.
“I didn’t recognize you then,” Charlie said. “But you were at the coach’s funeral. Beside the grave in a white chair. The man, the coach, was he …”
“He was,” the woman said. Her smile grew. “I’ve been Mrs. Willie Wisdom for fifty-nine years, and just because he died doesn’t mean I have to stop. The boys called me Mother Wisdom.” She winked at Charlie. “Prester and his brother called me Mama Molly.”
Molly. Charlie wasn’t sure what to say. He lowered his right foot and eased his weight back onto it. He pointed at his ankle.
“Did you, uh …”
“I did,” she said. “Some poisons are beyond doctors.”
“Poison?” Charlie asked. When could there have been poison? He remembered being chased, but it all blended together with his dreams. Sparks of life swirling around him, and then brutal pain erupting in his ankle.
“Mrs. Wisdom, where’s Cotton? How long have I been here?”
Molly Wisdom took Charlie by the hand. She led him past the empty cot to the other open wall. More trees. More rain. And two flights of covered stairs that curled away behind the huge trees. On the right, the stairs went up. Mrs. Wisdom went left, to stairs that descended.
She took each step first, holding Charlie’s hand, supporting him with her soft shoulder as he limped behind. The stairs were just long enough to wrap around to a lower room on the other side of the tree. This room had trees on two sides, one wall open to the swamp, and one that connected to a narrow footbridge that seemed to run from tree to tree above the water. There was a soft rug on the little room’s floor, a bookshelf, a dresser, a cupboard, a small bed, and two red chairs with worn but bulging cushions. Quiet embers glowed in a metal bowl on the open side of the room, and a bright blue teakettle hung on a hook above it. A few raindrops reached the kettle and the fire bowl and hissed themselves dry on impact.
Mrs. Wisdom helped Charlie to the nearest chair and then bustled over to the teapot. Charlie watched her pull heavy stone mugs from the cupboard. He watched her pack herbs into a little metal strainer above the mugs and then trickle steaming water through the leaves into the mugs. Finally, she pressed one heavy mug into Charlie’s hands and then nestled herself into the other chair, pulling her feet up onto the cushion beneath her. She held her mug with two hands, inhaled the steam, and then smiled.
“So, Charlie Reynolds, I suppose you’ll be wanting to know everything.”
Charlie nodded. “Yes, ma’am.” He looked down at his mug. It felt like a large hot rock. The rim was almost too thick for drinking. The liquid—tea, he assumed—was the color of caramel.
“Double honey and cream and a little extra something for that infection of yours, doll,” Mrs. Wisdom said. “Do try it. Now, you learned some things in your dreams, but I never know how much sticks. So, how about you tell me what you’d like to know first.”
Charlie watched Mrs. Wisdom watching him as she sipped her tea. He licked his lips and then looked at the rain.
“Where am I?”
Mrs. Wisdom laughed. “Why, you’re right here with me.”
Charlie shifted in his chair, frustrated. Mrs. Wisdom leaned forward and held up one hand.
“Don’t be squirming, honey. I know what you meant, and I’m sorry for making light. You’re in a swamp grove that once stretched strong all the way to Old Nick Slough, not too far from Moonshine Bay, in the shallow western waters of Lake Okeechobee herself. If it weren’t for the dike named after the lovely Mr. Herbert Hoover, you could see the lights of Taper glowing from the tops of these very trees. My dear departed Willie trained and built this part of the tree house, and Lio helped him. Most of the rest was trained and made by those who came before.”
Charlie raised his mug and decided against it. He let it rest on his leg, and then moved it quickly to the soft threadbare arm of the chair.
“Where’s Cotton?”
Mrs. Wisdom nodded. “You’re a good boy, Charlie Reynolds. You must be wondering all sorts of things right about now, but worrying about your friend comes first. And it should. Cottonmouth Mack is asleep. Across the bridge with all the others.”
“The others?” Charlie asked. “What others?”
“Sixteen of them,” Mrs. Wisdom said. “Poor little dolls. Four more than Willie and I ever had to care for out here, but sadly fewer than actually needed my help.”
“I don’t really understand,” Charlie said. “You’re saying that Cotton’s okay?”
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“He is,” Mrs. Wisdom said, but her voice grew heavy. “As okay as any of us are right now, and to be honest, that isn’t very okay at all. He could be dead by midnight. As could you be. As could every poor soul in the sweet little town of Taper, Florida.” She dragged her fingernails across the arm of her chair. “We’re outmatched, Charlie Reynolds. All places and peoples have their ends, just as much as they have their beginnings. I’m just one more selfish old woman who doesn’t want the sun to set just yet.” She smiled with tight lips, and her blue eyes were wet. “You’ve seen the mounds. The weak chalk stones. The Gren. Your eyes have seen the life magic in the muck.”
“All the dust that turned into sparks?” Charlie asked. “That was a dream. I’m not really made of fiery dust.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Wisdom said, “you are. You’re made of tiny spinning bits as fast as light. But those bits aren’t all of you. They fly off. They get lost, and new ones come on and join the swirling Charlie-shaped dance that is your body. And dwelling in that dance, woven through every racing bit, heating it all with life and guiding it, there is a fire, a soul—you. It takes a dream to see something like that, something closer to the way things really are.”
Charlie stared at the old woman. He’d listened in science class. What she was saying wasn’t really all that different from how Mr. Kahn had talked about atoms and electrons and all that stuff. Even the look in their eyes was the same—bright and wild, like they were talking about magic. Because they were.
“Charlie?” Mrs. Wisdom asked. “Are you okay?”
Charlie stared down at his untasted tea. “In my dreams, the muck was all fiery, too. But it’s dead.” He looked up.
Mrs. Wisdom turned and pointed at the embers in her fire bowl. “The muck is like those coals. Quiet, still, full to overflowing, waiting to erupt back into the dance of life. Millions of lives from millions of different kinds of living things have formed our black soil. Putting a seed in that ground is like throwing paper onto my coals. But plant an evil seed …”
Mrs. Wisdom’s voice trailed off. She rose from her chair, walked to the fire bowl, and stood beside it, looking out between the trees at the rain and the water.
“Charlie, honey, come here.”
Charlie limped over to her. Rain dribbled off of the roof. Spatters reached his toes and hissed quietly on the lip of the fire bowl beside him.
“The Gren are not alive with their own fire,” Mrs. Wisdom said. “They are human seeds made into vessels for an evil as old as Cain, and the mounds were used to feed them. Long ago, the Seminole pushed the Gren back into the swamps and set twelve stones into the mounds to cut their power and cage the evil. Now only three stones remain. Two protect water. One protects the fields around Taper. Lionel tends it, but with my husband gone, he cannot hold it long.”
“The one by the church?” Charlie asked.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Wisdom. “And if that one is broken, the mounds will feed again, the Gren will grow, and Taper will be empty within the month.”
“Empty …,” Charlie said.
“Burned. Dead,” said Mrs. Wisdom. “Devoured. If Lionel had not saved the body of my Willie, it would be done already. The stone would have been shattered and my Willie would be one of the Gren. But he’s safe now, even if we are not.” She pointed straight down at the water. Charlie watched the drops pucker the surface. He watched slow rings grow and collide with each other, and then his eyes focused beyond the surface. A long stone box sat in the tree roots on the bottom, its lid looking almost within reach. Even through the rippling distortion, Charlie could see two letters carved side by side on the lid.
“So much life in my Mr. Wisdom.” Mrs. Wisdom dabbed her eyes, laughed, and then slid her arm around Charlie’s shoulders and pulled him into a soft hug. “Do you mind, doll?” she asked. “I’m sorry, if an old lady needs a hug, she takes a hug.” She retreated back to her chair. “Now drink that tea and tell me what else you want to know.”
Charlie’s eyes were still focused underwater. Beyond the old coach’s box, there was another, and another—ghostly rectangles hiding under the rippling surface.
Mrs. Wisdom nodded. “Every graveyard for miles around is empty of its dead. The Gren would take them to a grove where their mother plants bodies and harvests muck-born sons. My Willie stole them first and gave them peace in the water. Water keeps them out of reach.”
“I want to go home,” Charlie suddenly said. “Please.”
“Home,” said Mrs. Wisdom. “Soon, love. But not just yet.”
Charlie turned around. “Why not?”
Mrs. Wisdom nodded at the mug in Charlie’s hands.
“It’ll be cold now, honey.”
Charlie raised his mug and gulped the entire drink down. It wasn’t cold at all. It was hot and sweet and nearly scorched his throat. When he’d finished, there was a heat in his gut so heavy he felt like he’d swallowed the mug itself. He exhaled and was almost surprised not to see steam.
“Why not?” he asked again. “How long have I been here?”
“Three days,” Mrs. Wisdom said. Her blue eyes grew heavy. “You can’t go home, doll, because this is the only place in the world where you are still alive.”
Natalie Mack paced in front of a wall of glass. One arm hugged a ragged gray sweatshirt to her chest. Her other hand pulled at a row of absurdly large championship rings hanging on a simple silver chain around her neck. She fingered through them like beads as she walked along beside the huge floor-to-ceiling windows in the beach house Mack had rented. She knew why she was holding Charlie’s sweatshirt. She wasn’t sure why she had put on Mack’s rings. Because she wanted to trust him?
No game he had ever played mattered as much as what he was trying to do right now.
Outside the glass, rain was attacking an uncovered pool and pelting scattered deck chairs. Beyond the pool, palm trees swayed and bent in the wind like ferns on fishing poles. Beyond them, the Gulf of Mexico thumped on sand.
Natalie forced her pacing feet to stop. She couldn’t stop her pacing mind.
One hour. A lot less given how she would be driving. That’s how far away she was if the call came. And it would come. Mack would call. He would hand Charlie the phone. She would hear her son’s voice and then she would load Molly into the car and they would fly through the rain.
Even as she thought it, she knew it wouldn’t happen that way. If Charlie was fine, Mack would bring him to her. Taper wasn’t safe right now. It was like the whole town had unhinged all at once. Every old grudge had blossomed into a feud. Every old feud had exploded into violence. She couldn’t be there with Molly. Her first two nights had proved that completely. She’d heard the gunfire and seen two buildings burning from their motel room. While Molly had slept, she’d stood looking out at the midnight fires. And she had seen him—Bobby Reynolds, Charlie’s father—sitting on the hood of his truck beneath a streetlight, ignoring the flaming chaos only a block behind him, staring at the motel from beneath a battered trucker cap. Smoking.
Natalie had snapped the curtains shut, gathered Molly up in a blanket, carried her daughter into the bathroom, and locked the door. Her fingers had been shaking when she had called Mack. Bobby had been gone by the time Mack had arrived.
After that, she had been willing to move to the beach.
How things could get so crazy in such a small town, Natalie had no idea. And Charlie was stuck in it. Somewhere.
Natalie turned away from the window. Behind her, Molly had pulled a shaggy white faux-fur rug onto one of the three white leather couches and nestled in on her back. She had a small plastic zebra in one hand. Her other hand was empty, but it was still managing to carry on a conversation with the zebra. They were talking about Charlie. All three of them—the hand, the zebra, and Molly—were in agreement. If Charlie were here, he would sneak out with them to play in the rain and everything would be better.
Natalie crossed the room and slipped onto the shaggy not-fur beside her daughter. Her ar
ms slid around small ribs and squeezed. She pressed her face into her daughter’s hair. She inhaled life. She wanted to count every breath, every quick beat of Molly’s heart that she could feel against the inside of her arm. She wanted to thank that little muscle for every single one of those small thumps.
Molly and her hand and her zebra chatted happily, ignoring the grown-up and her very wet face.
Natalie’s phone rang.
“I don’t understand,” Charlie said.
“You’re alive,” Mrs. Wisdom said. “Here. But only here, among my trees. If you left, the farther away you got from them, the more that Gren poison in your leg would grow, the hotter your fever would burn, until …” She grimaced. “You were dead when I found you. Cotton had managed to get you to the first of my trees even with that awful knife through his shoulder. He had one arm around you and one arm hooked over a cypress root, poor love. He died shortly after.”
Charlie’s feet stopped. Mrs. Wisdom tugged on his arm, but he didn’t budge. Cotton? Dead? Knife? Charlie remembered being in the water. He remembered Cotton coming to help him. And then he saw it, the Stank drawing that long bone knife and raising his arm to throw.
“He’s breathing now,” Mrs. Wisdom said. “But not well. C’mon, honey. I’ll take you to him.”
The narrow bridge was slick with rain. Charlie’s eyes were on the water as they walked, watching pale stone coffins ripple and warp beneath the surface.
“The great trees drink of the deepest muck magic,” Mrs. Wisdom said as she walked. “They drink, are filled, and overflow. Just breathing their air does wonders. Many times, I nursed my Willie’s wounds in this place, as my mother nursed my father’s. By the end, when Willie’s old heart finally stopped, he had so much swamp life stored up inside, it practically erupted out of him. Lio said a tree sprang up in his grave overnight. Did you see it?”