The Black Country (28 page)

P
eter Price was shouting, and so she eventually opened her eyes to see what he wanted. The first thing she saw was a billow of brown and white, and she blinked hard, refocused her eyes, and saw that she was in the top of a tree. But she was lying on the floor of the inn, and gravity seemed to be all wrong. She blinked again and now the top of the tree was above her, and the world spun and righted itself around her. Or rather, her perception of the world righted itself.

The ceiling was only partially there. Above it, the top floor seemed to be gone and had been replaced by the very old tree that had always stood beside the inn. Branches of the tree, each of them as big as any normal tree she had seen, had invaded every nook and cranny of the inn’s many rooms. At least, all of the inn’s rooms that she could see from her position on the floor, and she could see a surprising number of them. Snowflakes and errant brown leaves fluttered down and about, and already there was a fresh skin of snow everywhere inside.

Of course, inside no longer seemed to be quite so inside as it usually was.

Peter Price was still shouting. Jessica sat up and checked herself for injuries. Aside from a multitude of scrapes and scratches, she seemed to be fine. The tree had apparently pushed her down and across the common room without doing her much damage.

Next, she looked around for Peter. He was pinned against the far fireplace by a tangle of strong and flexible branches. He was waving at her, his eyes wide and frantic.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“I seem to be fine,” Jessica said. “How about you?”

“My arm hurts.” She looked through the massive wooden nest and saw that Peter’s arm was twisted strangely. Possibly broken.

“Can you move?” she said.

“No,” he said. “And I think it’s on fire.”

It took her a moment to figure out what was on fire, but then she saw the tendrils of smoke weaving their way around the boy and realized that the tree had inserted part of itself into the fireplace.

“Wait there,” she said, then realized it was a ridiculous thing to say since Peter had already admitted he couldn’t move. But it did seem to calm him.

The roof had slowed the tree’s progress through the building, but it had been moving fast. Thin, strong wooden limbs had thrust their way through her dress, just missing her legs, and into the floor. She broke through them with her wrist. Quick jabs. She looked around for her missing left shoe and found it under a lot of brown. She grabbed it and stuck it on her foot. She took hold of a bigger branch above her and pulled herself up, groaning with the effort, then looked around for the next big branch between herself and the fireplace.

“Where’s Anna?” she said, shouting to be heard over the rushing wind.

“She’s upstairs. You sent her there.”

Jessica looked up. There was no upstairs.

She hiked up her skirts and straddled a branch that was as big around as her body, swung her other leg over, and hoped Peter wasn’t looking her way. There was no time for modesty. Her feet touched the floor and she gauged the distance to Peter again. Closer, but it was going to take a while to navigate through the sudden thicket, and she was worried about the smoke forming behind the boy. She considered kicking off her shoes. She could move faster that way, but the floor was covered with splinters, some of them huge, jagged, dangerous. Bare feet would quickly become a liability.

“Peter!”

“Yes?”

“Look around you. Look for a fireplace poker or a stout stick.”

She watched him swivel his head around, then he disappeared from view as he bent from the shoulders to look at something. She heard him stifle a gasp of pain. He must have wrenched his bad shoulder even more. She continued to make her way toward him, but too slowly. Her hip still hurt from her fall at the Price home, but it took her weight.

“I found this.” Peter’s head popped back up into view and he raised his good arm. He was hefting a long flat iron bar, twisted nearly in half, with wicked hooks set at regular intervals. It was the mount for the inn’s fireplace tools. It had been securely bolted to the mantel, and Jessica wondered at the force necessary to wrench it loose and bend it. She nodded, excited.

“Yes, that’s brilliant. Can you use it to lever yourself loose?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can’t see what’s pinned you down. I can’t help.”

“Come closer.”

“I’m trying, but there are too many branches in the way. I’ll be there as soon as I can, but you must try to help yourself.”

The boy swallowed hard, and his head disappeared once more as he bent to his task. He could only use one arm and he wasn’t a heavy boy. He didn’t have a lot of upper-body strength to put into the effort. On the other hand, he was skinny enough that she hoped he might be able to slide out from behind the tree limbs if he could create just a little more space for himself.

“Peter,” she said. She pulled herself up onto a limb and balanced, teetering there for a second, looking for a place to put her other foot. “Hurry, Peter.”

“It’s a little bit loose now,” he said. She still couldn’t see him and she held on to a solid branch beside her, going up on the toes of one foot, the other foot still dangling in the air. The smoke was denser now where Peter was, but it had thickened imperceptibly. She hadn’t realized that she couldn’t see the stones left from the crushed fireplace until they were gone. She couldn’t tell if Peter was standing or was still bent over his task. Then she saw shuddering orange tongues flicking in and out of the smoke. The great broken tree was on fire!

“Peter!”

“I’m loose!”

“Move!”

“Which way?”

“Toward my voice!”

“I can’t see where you are!” Then, softer: “My arm hurts.”

“Peter, listen for me and follow my voice.”

“I can’t!”

The air in the room wavered as flames licked out toward Jessica, and there was a rending sound as if two trains had gone off their tracks in unison, locked in combat. She lost her grip on the branch and slipped, fell hard against the trunk of the tree, and the breath went out of her. She shook her head and sat back up. Her leg was bleeding.

“Peter!”

No answer. Her leg didn’t hurt much. No broken bones. She’d live. She pushed aside the smallest branches near her, and a bird’s nest fell out of them and rolled to a stop at her feet. It was empty, useless. She kicked it aside, and it bounced off an oddly shaped bundle trapped in the branches three feet from her. She made her way to it and reached out, touched it. It was white and soft, like a pillow. Like a pincushion. Bennett Rose was on his side, resting on the floor of his inn, his apron pulled up over his head. Countless thin branches, none of them any bigger around than Jessica’s thumb, had skewered him through his chest and abdomen and throat. Blood, more than she had imagined could be in a person’s body, had trickled, was still trickling, down his body, pooling on the floor, shiny and black. She rolled him over, the branches resisting her, and pulled the apron from his face. One scraggy branch had been driven through his eye, and something clear oozed from the corner of it down the side of his nose. His other eye rolled and looked up at her and she screamed.

Rose twitched his hand as if to reach out to her, then he went slack by degrees. His legs never moved, but his hands fell loose, then his arms, then his upper body seemed to relax and his head lolled on his neck and the scraggy branch plucked its way out of his eye socket and whipped a spray of blood at Jessica.

She backed away and bulled her way through the top of the tree, headed toward the murkiest part of the room, the smokiest, where she thought she had last heard Peter. The tree had settled and shifted, rolled slightly to one side, and she no longer knew where she was in relation to anything else, but the smoke was her guide.

The inn had never seemed so large to her before.

She pushed on a branch and it sprang back at her and struck her across the eyes. She cried out and felt tears welling up, running down her cheeks. Where was Peter?

“Miss Jessica?”

She turned at the sound of his voice and looked up. Peter was balanced on the huge branch she had fallen from. He was practically hanging there, his good arm wrapped around an overhead tree limb, shirtless and grinning down at her with his hair wild and smoky, his face and his furrowed chest smudged, like some wild boy from the jungle. His shirt had been tied around his neck and made into a sling to support his damaged arm.

“Peter? How did you . . . ?”

“He sent me for you. Because I’m smaller. It’s easier if you go this way. The branches are more broken over here.”

He grinned again and scampered along the giant limb. Jessica followed him and, gradually, the branches did thin out and she began to smell fresh air. She hadn’t realized how warm she was until she felt a lovely cold draft against her wet cheeks.

And then she was outside.

The far wall of the inn was completely gone, vanished under the crushing weight of the centuries-old tree, buried in a tunnel somewhere beneath her. Peter ran past her, his feet bare in the snow, and stopped at the side of a man who stood with his back to her, slightly stooped under a weight. The man turned and she was relieved to see that it was Dr Kingsley. He was cradling the small still body of Anna Price. He looked at Jessica and then down at Anna and he smiled.

“She’ll be all right,” Dr Kingsley said. “We were lucky the tree knocked us out of there before it did its nasty work on your inn.”

“How did . . . ?”

“The branches really are somewhat sparse over there. I was able to get to young Peter, but he was very brave to find you.”

“He made this out of my shirt,” Peter said. “My arm feels better.”

“Is anyone else still in there?” Kingsley said.

Jessica shook her head. She didn’t know whether Peter had seen Rose’s body and she didn’t want to say anything out loud. The children had already been through enough.

Kingsley nodded. She watched his breath drift away on the breeze. “Well, then,” he said, “the boy has no shoes and the girl has had a shock. We ought to find shelter for them. And quickly.”

There was another tearing sound from the inn and some part of the tree invisible to Jessica crashed down, sending a shower of sparks into the night air. A portion of the wall caved inward, and fire sprang up to take its place.

“The fire will take this whole road,” Jessica said. “Everything on it.”

“The detective will help,” Peter said. He beamed at her, his eyes glittering in the firelight, and Jessica did her best to smile back. Then she saw what he was pointing at. Two shadowy figures struggled toward them holding lanterns aloft.

“Hallo!” Inspector Day said.

Jessica gave a great sigh of relief. Her legs disappeared from under her and she toppled into the snow. Before she lost consciousness, she heard the inspector shouting out orders.

“Henry, can you carry the schoolteacher? I’ll get the boy. Good gracious, he has no shoes.”

H
ammersmith trudged forward through the snow, driven as much by the nothingness behind him and all around him as the desire to catch Oliver Price’s killer. He passed through his own exhalations, his warm vaporous breath freezing in his eyelashes, gluing them together and threatening to drag his eyes closed. His mouth was sealed shut by a crust of snot. He could not have opened it if he tried, but he didn’t try. He thought of nothing.

The Black Country was different than Wales had been, and they did things differently here, but a coal mine was a coal mine and Hammersmith looked without thinking for the familiar signs. He did not think of his childhood, not of the ponies clopping through the long, dark tunnels, not of the rats crawling over his legs, not of the silence or the loneliness. He simply followed the depressions in the snow of Sutton Price’s boots and looked for the dark shape of a pit.

And, eventually, there it was, a snow-covered mound, a scabbed-over black maw that had recently been scraped open. The snow around it was trampled and had been smoothed back over by a fresh accumulation. Hammersmith ducked and entered carefully. He listened, but heard nothing. He backed slowly down the wooden rungs and into the mouth of the seam. It was warmer here, and he sank down, rested with his back to the dirt wall, gave himself a few minutes.

He was in no shape to deal with a murderer and he knew it.