Deadwood (2 page)

When Nick spoke her name, the smaller boy seemed to notice her for the first time. She was so tall she probably looked like she belonged with the rest of them, even if she didn't.

“He's new. In a couple of my classes, I think,” she said, tracing the dirt with her toe.

“Okay, Martin. Maybe you don't know much about Lower Brynwood, but this is a tradition.”

“It's a stupid tradition,” Martin grumbled. “A stupid town. You keep hacking at that poor tree for luck, but it never brings you any.”

“Maybe. But I need a little luck right now. We're the underdogs, Martin—not the bad guys.”

“I can't let you do it,” Martin said, his voice firm but quiet. A cheer went up from the group, and the football players stepped away from the tree, admiring their handiwork.

“Hey, take a look, Vaughan!” Chase called. “Lo-B rules!”

Martin grimaced. “Rulz with a Z. Fool wrote Lo-B Rulz.”

“Sorry, kid. It's done,” Nick said. He sighed, and Hannah couldn't tell if he was sorry to have missed the carving or sorry that it had been done at all. “Hannah, I'm getting out of here. Do you need a ride?”

She shook her head. “I've got my bike.”

“Fine. But get home quick—those storm clouds are rolling in fast. And Martin—welcome to Lower Brynwood.”

Nick followed his friends as they crashed down the hill, straight through the brush to the gravel parking lot beyond the tree line. Hooting and shouting, they seemed to have forgotten about Martin. Hannah couldn't help thinking that was a good thing. He looked crushed already, and Chase hadn't laid a finger on him.

Hannah walked over to the tree and traced the fresh carving with her fingers. “Poor old thing.”

The letters were damp, like a bleeding, badly spelled tattoo. The older carvings circled the tree, stretching to a height seven feet off the ground. Gaps had formed in some letters, the cuts fading into the bark's ridges until they were barely legible, while others looked as thick and sore as scar tissue in skin.

Not
like scars
, Hannah realized. They were scars. The beech was alive—it wasn't some old rock or sign to be painted and repainted each year. And it wasn't as if the tradition actually brought them luck. Maybe Martin was right.

She looked at the boy, who shook with mute fury, glaring in the direction Nick and his friends had gone. He wiped tears from his eyes with the palm of his hand and turned toward the tree. “So, why don't you get out of here? You're one of them.”

“Not really,” she said. “I'm one of me.”

“Just get out of here. It's going to rain any minute.”

“It'll blow over. It always does.”

The wind gusted, and the sky boiled and tumbled, rough as seas. Hannah heard the raindrops on the leaves before she felt them—a drumming, and then a deluge. She pulled her bike in closer to the tree trunk and leaned against the scratchy bark. Her fuchsia-colored bike had been a birthday present—the first girl's bike she had ever owned after twelve years of dented hand-me-downs—and she wasn't going to let a few drops of rain ruin it. She'd wait.

She threw her head back and studied the canopy a hundred feet above, where masses of ridged green leaves churned and swayed in a pattern that defied geometry. She felt dizzy.

The rain thickened, like a spigot had been turned on. This time the storm arrived for real.

3

The Message

M
artin didn't want Hannah there. He said in his most Jedi-like voice, “It's not safe to stay. Under a tree is the worst place to be in a lightning storm.” Every Marlician ranger knew this, even if Martin had actually learned it in Boy Scouts.

Hannah rolled her eyes. “It's just rain.”

Then a bolt of lightning hit the tree with an explosion louder than anything Martin had ever heard. He slammed his body to the ground, arms over his head, though he knew he couldn't protect himself from a lightning strike. The force overwhelmed his senses. He felt the power flowing through the tree's trunk, saw with magnified clarity the loose strands of Hannah's fair hair standing out straight from her head in a halo. She sprawled motionless after diving away from the tree, yet Martin could feel her vibrating with energy, a buzz coming off her skin as surely as if he was touching her.

Yellow-white brightness surrounded them, and then it was gone. The world went slack and gray as the electricity faded. Even the rain stopped.

Martin's eyes watered and his ears rang. He felt his arms and legs, sore where he had thrown himself to the ground, but he was intact. Hannah hadn't moved yet. “Are you okay?” Martin asked.

She nodded, her hair drifting back into place as she stood. “That was a close one.” Her eyes, already wide, opened further, showing all the whites around her irises. She gasped and said, “Closer than we thought. Look behind you!”

Something glimmered in Martin's peripheral vision. He turned around, and the glow brightened. The electricity hadn't gone.

The tree was on fire. The bark swelled and crackled, light escaping from fissures in the surface, like liquid lava beneath the blackened surface of a volcanic flow. Martin jumped back, wary—that wasn't how wood ought to burn. The glow strengthened, and Martin realized the streaks of light weren't random cracks. They were letters and numbers. The messages carved in the bark were written in fire.

2001 gets it done.'95 alive. Party like it's 1999. 2006 4ever. LBHS rocks 1992. Lo-B Rulz
.

“Get away. The tree is burning from the inside,” Hannah said, her hands trembling. She looked hypnotized, like she couldn't take her eyes off the tree.

“It's not burning.” This was no fire—at least, no fire he had ever seen. The light glowed golden, more like the sun than flame. Like pure energy. Like magic. Martin stepped close again, his hand hovering over the bark. He didn't detect any heat coming off the surface. He touched a carving hesitantly. The bark felt cool. The light faded into black.

“I think the fire—or whatever it was—is out,” he said.

But it wasn't. The light had concentrated in one place, growing stronger, then fading and reappearing four feet higher in the bark, as if the flow of energy had moved beneath the surface. The light blinked out, and the glow popped up in another carving, and then another. Then it reappeared in the original place, and then the next, cycling through quicker and quicker. Letters flashed bright as neon, one at a time.

The tree was trying to tell them something.

Holy crap.
A tree was trying to tell them something
. Hannah backed off, like she wanted to bolt but was afraid to turn her back on the electrified tree.

“It's a code,” Martin said. He felt as if the light was coursing up his spine into his brain, which hummed and cranked through every cipher he had ever heard of, images of numbers and letters scrolling through his head. The tree was communicating—he had to figure it out. “If it's a code I know, I can break it.”

Hannah was pale and jumpy, but she still managed to correct him. “It's not a code. It's a word.” She shook her head so hard her brain must have slammed against her skull. “A tree is spelling a word. No way.”

The carved H in LBHS lit up, then an E. A. L. “Heal,” Martin said. Was Hannah right? Could it be so simple? Could a tree know English? The lights repeated, then faded out.

“The tree spelled ‘heal,'” Hannah said. A new word began—an M, then an E. “Heal me.”

Martin expected the message to stop, but it didn't, racing through letters faster than a Ouija board. “Heal me. End the curse. Heal all.” At the last word, the tree blazed with light, as bright as the lightning bolt had been, and then the light disappeared as quickly as the lightning had.

“The tree…was talking to us,” Martin said. His tree had spoken. He had understood.

“No. It was texting us.” Hannah frowned, still shaking her head. “No way. That's impossible.”

“You saw it.”

“I don't know what I saw.”

“I do,” he said, gaining speed as he spoke. “I knew it wasn't just a tree. It's something more. It's a spirit. Your brother called it the Spirit Tree.”

“Spirit Tree, like
school
spirit. It's not possessed by spirits,” she said, hugging her arms to her chest.

“It's not possessed. It's communicating,” Martin said. “No one was listening until now.” He was in this town for a reason after all.

“The tree is trying to tell us it's cursed?”

“I don't think just the tree is cursed. It's the people who carved it who are cursed. Lo-B. Lower Brynwood. More like Lower Deadwood,” he said, squinting at the tall blonde girl, who set her mouth into a line. Of course she wouldn't believe. He jabbed a finger toward her. “People like you.”

Hannah squeezed her eyes tight. “I just got a text message from a tree. This can't be happening. I must be dreaming.”

“Then I'm dreaming, too,” Martin said. “And somehow we're in the middle of the same dream.”

“As if you and I would ever have the same dream,” she said.

“That's how we know this is real.” He gritted his teeth. “Look, you saw it. You read the message out loud to me. ‘Heal me. End the curse.'”

Her eyes snapped open. “Then maybe the electricity turned the tree into a cell-phone tower, picking up signals. Or maybe the lightning did something to us instead—crossed the circuits in our heads. Fried our brains. Because trees don't talk. They don't send text messages. It's not possible.” She stood up.

“You're going to turn your back on this?” Martin said.

“Watch me.”

“I don't need you, anyway!” Martin yelled. “I knew you were one of them.” Hannah had already swung a leg over her bike. She hurtled down the hill in a spray of mud. He lost sight of her in the brush and gloom before she reached the bottom.

“I should have known she wouldn't help,” he said aloud. She was gone, and he was glad. Martin put his hand on the tree. The sudden storm had darkened the woods so he could no longer see the carving—just rain-blackened bark. After being so angry earlier, he felt strangely calm. He had thought the tree was the only friend he needed, and he was right. A talking tree was no more bizarre than an elf or a dragon or any of the other creatures from
Dragon Era
. It was somehow more plausible. At least he knew trees existed. Why shouldn't a tree send messages? Why wouldn't it be cursed?

“I tried to stop them,” he said. “Stupid jocks. They deserve to suffer.”

The light flared up beneath the bark, and a thrill passed through Martin. He backed away for a better look—another message was coming. The letters lit up in sequence.

“Heal me. Stop the bad one. End the curse,”
Martin read.
The bad one
. He shivered. “Heal all.” Then the message changed. “End
the curse. Heal yourself,”

“Myself?” he repeated. “What did I do? I'm the one who tried to help. And I can't be cursed. I'm already stuck in Lower Deadwood. It's not like things could get any worse.”

Martin suddenly thought of his mother, halfway around the world in an Afghan war zone, and realized that his life could be far, far worse. He felt cold. He was alone in the forest now, the way he had wanted it, just him and the trees, but now he wasn't sure this spirit was his friend. This was magic—real magic—but what kind? It felt dangerous. If a tree could speak, it could also lie. And who was the bad one? Was he—or she—watching him right now? This was too much, too fast. He'd been preparing for something like this his whole life, but he wasn't ready.

“That's it. I'm out of here, too.” He turned for Aunt Michelle's house, but as fast as he ran through the woods, he heard a creak and crackle above his head, as if an electric charge leapt from branch to branch, following him as the trees swayed, crossing branches in the wind. Martin stumbled over rough ground, twigs snapping underfoot. He peered over his shoulder, half-expecting to see the forest collapse into a tangle of old wood, vines grasping to drag him into the rubble.

Finally he burst out of the trees and into the wide streets of Brynwood Estates, which Aunt Michelle proudly called “the most prestigious development in Lower Brynwood.” Martin suspected there wasn't much competition for that title. Usually he hated the cardboard-box conformity that passed for affluence around here, but today he was so glad to see it, he almost kissed the sidewalk.

Amid the ordered houses, Martin ran past a moss-covered cottage, surrounded by brambles like Sleeping Beauty's castle, seemingly abandoned except for laundry that flapped on a clothesline stretching from the porch. Some of the sheets and underwear had blown off into yellowing briars and drying stands of perennials. A striped sheet twisted in the branches of a gnarled dogwood, torn and caught fast.

Martin knew just how it felt.

4

The Spirit Tree

T
he way trees remember is nothing like the way you remember.

Yet the beech recalled a time when the sky was distant and the ground close.

Those creatures that moved on two legs—humans, it learned—towered above it.

They cleared the land around it with axes and scythes and fires, but still the tree grew. Without siblings for cover it stretched toward the sun. As it outgrew the humans, they sheltered beneath it, and its branches stretched outward.

Days and seasons passed. Its roots delved downward into the earth and wider than its branches. It drew in water and minerals, which surged upward against gravity. It reached for the sun and turned light into food—first for itself, but with bounty to share. Bees and hummingbirds swarmed to its blossoms, caterpillars fed on its leaves, squirrels gorged themselves on the nuts that weighed its branches down and tumbled to earth.

It breathed, exhaling oxygen and ions that streamed upward to the heavens like prayers.