The Skeleton Tree Read online

  My mysterious man had hacked his way through the forest with an ax or a knife. His trail was overgrown with salal bushes, and I had to force my way through. I passed huge trees that must have been centuries old, and came to a small cabin in a clearing—a tiny house in the woods.

  Held down with ragged bits of fishing net, a sheet of clear plastic covered the driftwood-shingle roof. Another square of plastic made a pane for a small window, but it was boarded over with scraps of wood. The cabin felt empty and forgotten. It felt haunted.

  “Hello?” I called. “Hello?”

  There was no sound from the surf, no sound from the wind, but breathy puffs of air made the plastic ripple on the roof like the skin of a breathing creature.

  As I rounded the cabin’s corner I saw the door was partly open. It had hung on hinges made of rope, but two were ripped apart, and the door sagged like a broken arm, swinging in the wind as though trying to close itself.

  I held my shoes and water bottles in one hand, I put my head around the door and staggered back in surprise.

  A huge black raven hung upside down in the doorway, bound in loops of red wire. It swung in front of me, turning slowly.

  I had never been so close to a raven. Nearly as big as a Thanksgiving turkey, it must have stood almost two feet high. But its feathers were tattered, and the poor bird looked as ancient as a mummy. As it turned I saw the back of its head, where the feathers were ruffled and matted. I saw its beak. I saw its face.

  It had no eyes. I gazed right into empty holes. But in a ring around each gaping socket, where the feathers were tiny and sparse, the skull showed in a white line that made it seem as though the raven was staring at me.

  I heard Frank coming up the trail, thrashing his way through the bushes. He came in a huge rush, eager to see what I’d found. With his jacket fluttering behind him, he sprinted across the clearing. He ran right up to the cabin, pushed me aside, and wrenched the door wide open.

  The dead raven whirled on its wire.

  To Frank, it must have seemed that something had leapt from the cabin to get him. He nearly screamed as he raised an arm to shield himself. Black and ragged, the raven hurtled toward him, then turned away and swooped again.

  Behind us, another raven appeared. With a whistle of wings, it came flying through the trees, like a small shadow broken loose from the larger ones. It settled onto a branch that bent with its weight, then carefully folded its wings and tilted its head to look down.

  Clearly embarrassed by his fright, Frank swore at the dead raven. He snatched a stick from the ground and hit it. The bird reeled across the doorway, spinning on the end of the wire. It swung into the cabin and out again, and above us the watching raven began to clamor and shout.

  Frank grunted as he raised the stick and brought it down. Little feathers fluttered all around, and the dead bird spun faster while the living one screamed in the treetops. Then the wire broke, and that black corpse tumbled to the ground. Instantly, the screaming stopped.

  It was brutal and quick, and in silence Frank poked the dead bird off to the side. He rolled it through the dirt and booted it into the bushes. Then he wiped his hands and went inside. I followed him.

  The cabin was small and dark, with a rickety table and a rickety chair that had both fallen on their sides. A bed was built along one wall, its foam mattress pulled down to the floor at one corner. In the middle of the room was a fire circle made of stones. There were still ashes inside it, and the blackened ends of burnt sticks. Some of the stones had been rolled out of place, and someone had raked his fingers through the ashes, leaving long gouges that stretched toward the door.

  Whoever had the built the cabin had meant to stay a long time. It was roofed for winter and shaded for summer. But in the end he had left in a hurry. I felt like a grave robber as we rummaged through the things left behind. We claimed them for ourselves: a camp stove and a bottle of gas to fuel it; a fork and spoon; a tin plate; a pot but no lid; a tiny lantern with a candle stub inside it.

  “Look for food,” said Frank. “There’s got to be food somewhere.”

  I pulled the mattress off the bed and found only a nest that mice had built. Frank kicked apart a pile of driftwood sticks, then dropped to his knees and looked under the bed. He reached in and pulled out big sheets of plastic that were ragged and torn, an empty bucket, a bit of wood. Then he looked again and shouted, “Yes!” and reaching even farther, brought out a dozen ziplock bags. They’d been labeled with a red Sharpie: rice, coffee, raisins. But each one had been nibbled open by mice or rats, and all of them were empty.

  Frank turned instantly from happy to furious. He hurled the bags onto the bed and looked around the little cabin. “See what’s up there,” he told me, pointing to a shelf high on the wall.

  I climbed onto the bed, reached up and ran my hand along the shelf. Down fell a toothbrush and toothpaste, a roll of toilet paper in another ziplock bag, and then a small black box that bounced off the mattress and landed in the ashes.

  We stared at that thing, for a moment too surprised to speak.

  Frank snatched it up. He held it tightly, as though he had captured an animal that might try to struggle away.

  “It’s a radio,” I cried.

  “No kidding, Marconi.”

  It was almost exactly the same as the one that Uncle Jack had tossed to me in his last moment. “Here, let me try it,” I said.

  I jumped down from the bed, but Frank turned aside to shield the radio. He pressed a button on top, and a red light came on. Numbers lit up on a small gray screen.

  We looked at each other, and for one instant we were a team, bound together by that radio and all that it offered.

  Frank licked his lips. He lifted the radio up to his mouth. He pressed the transmitter. “Mayday,” he said. “Mayday. Mayday.”

  He let go of the button. We both kept staring at the radio. A faint crackling came from the speaker.

  “Squelch,” I said, mimicking what Uncle Jack had taught us. “Turn the—”

  “Shut up,” snapped Frank. “I know what I’m doing.” He turned the knobs for squelch and volume, and the sound became a roaring hum. Then he called again, “Mayday. Mayday.”

  A woman answered. Her voice was faint and crackly, but oh so wonderful. “Station calling Mayday: this is U.S. Coast Guard radio.”

  I grinned at Frank; he grinned at me. Both of us grinned at the radio. We were like a pair of chimpanzees, all teeth and foolishness. The woman’s voice shattered with static. “What is the nature of your emergency?”

  “Tell them our names!” I shouted at Frank. “Tell them we’re lost.”

  “Shut up.” Frank pressed the button again and spoke into the radio. “We need help. We’re—”

  The radio beeped. The numbers went out; the screen turned black. The little red light faded away, and the radio switched itself off.

  Frank pressed every button; he turned every dial. Then he swore and hurled the radio across the cabin. It smashed against the wall. The back cover flew off; a battery ricocheted under the bed.

  “Piece of junk!” shouted Frank.

  “It’s not the radio; it’s the batteries,” I told him.

  “Who cares? It’s still useless!” He gave me a furious look, as though I was the one who had drained the batteries. “It’s all junk. A stove without matches.” He sent that flying across the room too. “A candle you can’t light.” Wham went the candle in its little holder. Then he folded his arms and dropped to the bed, pouting like a two-year-old.

  I felt just as angry. I wished we had never found the radio, that we had never found the cabin. It was worse to have had our hopes raised so high and dashed again. But I started picking up the things that Frank had scattered. I had to crawl under the bed to chase the parts from the radio.

  “Leave it,” said Frank. “You’re wasting your time.”

  “There might be spare batteries,” I said.

  Frank snorted. “And spare matches?”

&nbs
p; “Why not?” I backed out from the under the bed. “If the guy had a stove, he must have had matches.”

  “Look in the spare room,” said Frank.

  Well, of course there was no other room. Frank was just trying to annoy me again, and he was getting pretty good at it. But I believed there had to be a box of matches somewhere, and probably another battery. So I set the rickety chair on the bed and peered over the edge of the shelf.

  “There’s something up here,” I said. “There’s a couple of things, I think.”

  The first was a book, an old paperback with pages coming loose. Kaetil the Raven Hunter, a novel by Daniel J. Chesterson. On the cover was an unbelievably muscular man wearing animal skins, and on his shoulder perched a raven with a black hood, its talons tipped with silver spikes.

  I read the blurb on the back aloud.

  Left as a baby to die on a mountainside, Kaetil was rescued by ravens. Taught to hunt like a raptor, to think like a bird of prey, he grew up with one ambition: to find the man with yellow eyes. The man who’d killed his father.

  “That sounds pretty good,” said Frank. “What else is up there?”

  I looked again. At the very back of the shelf was a box made of orange plastic. Frank snatched it from my hands and flicked the little latches. “A bunch of junk,” he said, and dropped it on the mattress.

  I got down and picked up the box again. Inside was a whole survival kit: a space blanket made of shiny foil; a whistle with a tiny compass fitted into the tip; a small mirror with a clear hole in the middle. There was a metal tube the size of a pen that I held up for Frank to see.

  “Yeah, so what?” he said.

  “It’s a flare gun,” I told him.

  “You think I don’t know that?” He was so angry that he looked ugly. “There’s nothing you know that I don’t know.”

  “But there’s a flare too.” I held it up, a little red cylinder.

  Frank’s voice broke into a squeak. “Who cares?” He swept his hand across the mattress, sending the whistle flying. “You moron. You think you can go out there and shoot off a flare and somebody’s going to come and save us?”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Because NOBODY’S THERE!”

  I tried not to let him bother me. “The world’s not all that empty,” I said. “There’s ships and planes and stuff, and somebody’s going to come by. They’re probably searching for us already.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Frank. “It’ll be weeks before they even know the boat’s missing. They won’t have a clue where to look. There are thousands of miles, and they can’t search every inch. It would take forever.”

  “So what do you want to do?” I asked.

  “So whaddya wanna do?” he said, mocking my voice. “I want you to die, that’s what I want.”

  That made me feel cold and small and awful inside. I was standing there like a butler, holding the flare and the little gun, and I didn’t think I could take much more of Frank. I dropped the things on the bed and went outside.

  The raven shouted at me.

  He had dragged the dead bird from the bushes and was hunched over it now. Stuck in his beak were tiny black feathers. He thrust out his head, puffed his wings and shrieked at me.

  He seemed a cruel thing, a little cannibal busily chewing away at his dead companion. He had covered the ground with bits of red insulation pulled from the wire. It was obvious that he was telling me to keep away, so I held up my hands as I stepped around him. “Okay,” I said. He swiveled his head to watch me with his black eyes.

  To my left was the trail coming up from the beach. To my right, another path led into the bushes. The branches on either side nearly met in the middle, but I could see that the trail had been used many times. There was a rut worn into the ground.

  I took that trail through the forest. Twisting between the trees, it led me toward the narrow finger I had seen from the beach, the sound of surf growing louder. I came out onto a small meadow surrounded on three sides by the sea. Yellow grasses bent in the wind, and a lonely tree stood black and gaunt against the clouds. Storms had shaped its trunk into a twisted cord, its branches into spidery fingers. Black with age, almost bare of needles, it looked like a crippled old woman, a hag dressed in fluttering shreds of moss.

  Squinting against the glare of the setting sun, I saw four wooden boxes set in the crooks of the branches.

  Made of cedar planks, they looked nearly as old as the tree. Spotted with lichen, turned silver by sunlight, they were slowly disintegrating. Two had split open; their ends had caved in. I could see leg bones and ribs inside, and the round top of a skull. They were coffins.

  In the red light of the sunset, I felt a cold chill. I thought of the skeletons sleeping together in their separate boxes, like astronauts in a spaceship or something. I backed away slowly, through the shadow of the tree where it sprawled across the grass. Then I turned and ran to the cabin.

  The raven was still on the ground, tearing now at the wire that bound the corpse. Again he raised his head and spread his wings. He opened his beak so wide that I could see his tongue inside, a little orange dart. He made a strange sound that rattled from his chest, as though he was trying to speak.

  He was big enough to seem threatening. I was wondering how to get around him when Frank came up the trail from the sandy beach. At that moment, the raven lifted into the air and flew away between the trees.

  Frank was angry. “Where did you go?” he said.

  “Out there,” I told him, pointing down the other trail. “There’s a tree with coffins in it. And there’s skeletons inside them.”

  He looked doubtful. “Show me,” he said.

  “It’s nearly dark,” I told him.

  “So what?” He tossed his hair aside. “You scared?”

  I hated the way he smirked. Yes, the skeletons had scared me. But I wouldn’t admit it. “Let’s go,” I said.

  By the time we reached the meadow, the sun had gone down. Beyond the forest, a jagged mountain rose like a crouched giant, and the skeletons rested unseen in their boxes, under a purple sky.

  Frank stepped toward the tree. I had a sudden fear that he would break off a branch and start bashing at the skeletons.

  But he was solemn and serious. He walked twice around the tree without speaking, his feet shuffling in a slow funeral march. Then he stopped, with his hands on his hips, and stared up at the coffins. The highest one was so small that it must have held a child. A lower one had broken open, and scraps of cloth hung from the box like cobwebs. I saw the skeleton inside, stretched out on its back with its skull tipped sideways, as though staring across the sea.

  Frank went closer, but I wouldn’t move. He noticed, and laughed. “You are scared,” he said.

  “No,” I told him. “It’s just creepy.”

  “Why?” said Frank. “It’s just a cemetery. There’s so much rock and stuff, this is how the Indians used to bury people. They’re just old bones.”

  “That used to be people.”

  “So what?” Frank tossed his head. “Everybody dies. I’d rather be put in a tree than buried in the ground. Who wants to be eaten by worms?”

  “Who wants to be pecked by birds?”

  Frank shrugged in his annoying way. He went right up to the tree and touched its black bark. He ran his hand along the trunk.

  “What sort of tree is that?” I asked.

  Frank stared up through the branches. He looked at me, then walked away. “It’s a skeleton tree, moron.”

  The wind was fading, the sea becoming calm. Waves breathed up against the shore, and a seagull cried as it flapped its way home. But these were sounds I barely noticed anymore, a background hum like traffic in the city, so I heard quite clearly the little scratch and shuffle that came from the tree. In the fading wind, it could not have been a creak of branches. It was something scraping on wood, something scratching.

  As I turned to follow Frank, I noticed something strange. In the shadows of the open cof
fin I could see the skeleton’s gaping eyes. It had turned its head to peer down at me.

  Even now, weeks later, I still feel a prickly chill when I think of the skeletons.

  I’ve had nightmares trying to figure them out. Why are there coffins up in a tree? Could the tsunami have tossed them there? Were people put in the coffins alive and left to die? Did they climb up there themselves?

  Or maybe Frank is right. Maybe once, long ago, a village stood along the sandy beach, and the tree is just a graveyard in a land with a lot of rock but not much dirt. Maybe the most important people were put to rest in the branches of the skeleton tree. That makes more sense.

  But I can’t get it out of my mind that the skeletons come down in the night. I’ve imagined them lifting the lids of their coffins, peering out at the twilight, then clambering down to run through the forest.

  What’s that sound behind me? If I turn around now will I see the skeletons climbing back to their places? I can imagine one swinging his long bones over the edge of the box, sliding into his coffin like a fighter pilot into his cockpit.

  I will be glad to be away from here. But I don’t think I’ll ever forget the skeletons. They’ll appear in my dreams for as long as I live.

  •••

  I knew it that first day, when Frank left me alone at the skeleton tree. He went away without telling me, and I looked back to see him already at the far side of the clearing, nearly at the forest. “Wait up!” I shouted.

  He laughed and kept going.

  I started running. As I stumbled across the grass, Frank looked over his shoulder and saw me. He started running too. He vanished down the black mouth of the trail.

  It pleased me to think that he was at least a little bit frightened. But that wasn’t true; Frank was only planning ahead. He didn’t care about skeletons; he had only hurried away to claim the only bed.

  By the time I arrived in the cabin he was already sprawled across the foam mattress. The orange box and all its contents were dumped on the floor.

  I felt stung, but there was nothing I could do. I managed to pull the door shut and wedge it in place, but the old wooden latch was broken. The boarded window made the cabin as black as a tomb, and I had to feel my way to the corner, where I settled down on the bare floor. I fell asleep in a moment, only to snap awake again. Something was moving outside.