10

WHEN I HEARD THE KNOCK AT THE DOOR, I knew I’d have to go answer it. There was no way I could stay up in my room and pretend I wasn’t there. I felt certain there was some connection between this man and everything else that had been going on. I wondered if he might be a piece of the puzzle in bringing my mom back. He had connections with the three old women. He might be able to help me.

So I left my room and walked down the stairs, trying not to make a sound. I wasn’t even breathing. I crept to the edge of the door and stood there, my back against the wall, waiting for who knows what. It’s one thing to decide you should talk to a complete stranger who you think might be a little bit crazy. It’s another thing entirely to open the door and let him into your house.

I heard a knock again, really loud, so hard on the wooden frame that it made the screen door rattle. I took a deep breath, and as I was about to look through the door, I heard a voice I didn’t expect.

“Sam? Are you in there?”

I looked through the screen. It was Abra.

“What are you doing here?” I asked as I opened the door.

“I don’t know. I’m just here.”

“No, no,” I said. “There was a guy out by the tree. He started walking up to the house. I heard a knock . . .”

“Which was obviously me,” Abra said, then asked in a quieter voice, “Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”

Her blue eyes got all sad, and I knew she was thinking about my mom, which made me feel sad.

“I’m fine,” I muttered. I pushed past her and walked down the porch steps and out into the yard.

“What’s wrong?” she blurted out. “I mean, I know what’s wrong, but is there something else?”

We walked through the soft ground over to the tree, and I leaned against the trunk. I looked at the lightning scar that had split the bark, and there were definitely red marks on it from where the old guy had been touching it. He must have touched the blood on the ground where the groundhog died and used the same finger to examine the tree.

“There was an old man here not thirty seconds ago,” I said, looking hard into her eyes. “These are his fingerprints. I don’t care if you believe me or not.”

“I believe you,” she said, and I knew she was telling the truth. She gave me a hesitant smile and pushed some strands of her blonde hair back behind her ears. I went ahead and told her about the three dogs and how they fought with the groundhogs, how one of the groundhogs had died, and how it gave me a strange feeling.

“It’s all connected somehow,” I said, wishing I could figure it out. My voice trailed off under the weight of that uncertainty. We sat there in silence for a long time. I noticed a shovel stuck in the ground in the corner of the garden, so I walked over to it. Abra followed me, her shoes squeaking in the wet grass.

“I’ll bet my dad buried the groundhog here,” I said, looking over at Abra. But she was looking up at the sky, shielding her eyes.

I actually heard them before I saw them. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, long and sinister, like someone saying “Sh!” over and over again. I looked up.

There were at least thirty vultures. They glided through the air like dark holes in the sky, following each other around and around, looking for a place to land. The sound came from the long flaps of their wings—whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, the sound made when you swing a green branch through the air.

“Where did they come from?” Abra asked. Usually the vultures traveled the valley in groups of two or three, looping lower and lower to clean up roadkill, but I’d never seen that many in one group. The highest ones were nothing but black dots, but I could see the feathers ruffling on the wings of the lower ones, and their pink heads were bare and gaunt.

Suddenly they wheeled and flew in an almost straight line for the northern end of our farm, the side that bordered our neighbor Mr. Jinn’s place.

“Jinn,” I said.

“What?” Abra asked.

“Remember what the three old ladies at the fair said? They had been talking to Jinn at the antique store. Mr. Jinn.”

“So what?”

“So what?” I said. “I want to find out what they meant by ‘Find the Tree of Life.’ If that was Jinn in there on Friday, he can tell me.”

“Sam,” Abra said, concern in her voice, “why do you care so much about this Tree of Life?”

I couldn’t explain it because I didn’t think Abra would believe me if I told her I wanted to bring my mom back. Or at least I was pretty sure she’d think I had lost my mind. I think I was scared that I wouldn’t believe myself if I heard the words out loud, outside of my own mind. So I didn’t try to explain.

But I knew there was something there, some connection between all the strange happenings and Mr. Jinn, the neighbor I had never seen before. Everything felt like pieces to a larger puzzle, a puzzle I didn’t even have the picture for.

I put my hand on the shovel in the corner of the garden and yanked it out of the ground. It was a little long for me to use, and kind of heavy. I carried it in two hands, and my walk turned into a run as I passed the house and entered the cornfield, the same direction the vultures flew. I looked over my shoulder, and Abra was right behind me.

It was deep in the afternoon, that time during a summer day when it feels like the sun will never set. By the time we approached the northern edge of my father’s fields, the vultures were already circling again, this time over a spot close to Mr. Jinn’s ramshackle farmhouse. A few of them had landed and were hopping through the almost-waist-high corn, pecking at something.

I slowed to a walk and Abra practically ran into me. When I looked back past her, I could see the farmhouse where I lived way off in the distance, tiny against the southern sky. I was startled at how far away I had gone, and how quickly my familiar surroundings had faded. On both sides of us, off in the distance, the mountains stood like walls covered in the deep green of summer trees.

I held my finger up to my lips, bent over as low as I could, and crept forward. My jeans were already wet from running through all that corn. The stalks still held a lot of rain from the previous storms. A strong breeze came down from the mountains and raced through the valley. The sky was cotton-candy blue with puffy white clouds drifting from west to east.

Most of the vultures had landed. A few stragglers glided in and skidded to a stop. They tore at whatever it was they were eating, and they fought among themselves for the strips of dead flesh. I thought it must be a huge animal if all of those vultures were trying to eat from it.

“On three, we’ll stand up and scare them off,” I said.

Abra nodded, her big blue eyes reflecting the sky. “Sure must be something big,” she muttered.

“One . . .” I gripped the shovel tightly in my hands. “Two . . .” I turned away from her, toward the host of vultures.

“Three!” we said together, and we both stood up and started shouting, waving our arms.

I didn’t expect what happened next.

They came at us.

As soon as we stood up, they looked at us, cocking their heads to the side. Most of them raised their wings up as if they were trying to frighten us away. But as we kept yelling and I kept waving the shovel, they came at us, half flying, half hopping through the corn that was just about as tall as they were.

Abra scooted behind me, and I started swinging the shovel at whatever black shapes I could find.

“Get some rocks or something!” I shouted. Soon baseball-sized rocks started humming over my shoulder toward the approaching birds. She had a good arm and managed to hit a few. The first wave of birds paused, but when more started coming, they joined back in.

I had never seen anything like it. Vultures always fly away. Always. They might fly a short distance away and perch in the upper branches of a tree. They might drift to the other side of the road and wait for you to pass by. But they never stayed. They never advanced. And they most certainly never attacked.

What was going on?

I brought the shovel down hard on the first one that approached us. It didn’t get back up. I caught the second one with a glancing blow and it kept coming, so I had to hit it again. And again. Which made me feel kind of sick because I had never killed anything with my hands before. I’d shot small animals with a pellet gun, and more recently with my dad’s .22 rifle, but I’d never felt the impact. I didn’t like it.

But I kept swinging because now they were on us. I heard Abra scream and saw that they had circled around behind us. She was flailing, and I realized she had one on her hands. She threw it away from her, but it came back faster than before. They tangled their claws in our hair and our clothes, and I imagined that they leered at us, suddenly aware that we were nothing more than scared children.

Soon all I saw was flapping black feathers and their naked little heads. Their beady eyes. Their beaks pecked at our faces and their talons reached for us. They were all over us. Abra let out a few screams as the birds started to overwhelm us, but I was silent. I don’t know why—maybe I couldn’t catch my breath with all those beating wings. Maybe I was so focused on fighting that my mind didn’t have room for calling out. Maybe I didn’t think there was anyone in the whole world who could save us.

I had always heard that vultures aren’t strong creatures, that they can only eat food that’s already been torn apart for them. Maybe that’s true, but in that moment, covered with flapping, scratching birds, I thought we were goners. I thought for one moment that I was about to die.

At least I’ll be with Mom.

I heard the blast of a shotgun as loud as thunder. Then another. The birds rose and heaved their bodies into the sky. I lay on my back in the corn and heard another shot. One of the vultures plummeted from the blue, and the rest flew west as quickly as they could. Another shot, and another vulture fell.

I reached around and found Abra, and the two of us helped each other to our feet. She had scratches on her face and her shirt was torn at her shoulder. I reached up to wipe away a bead of sweat, only to realize I was bleeding from a few cuts on my forehead. Both of us were covered in mud from falling into the field.

What had just happened? What was going on?

But nothing about those vultures shocked me as much as when I turned and saw the person wielding the shotgun—or when I finally got a look at what the vultures had been eating.