IN THE SILENCE I HEARD the whooshing sound of the vultures’ wings fading up into the mountains. Soon even that sound stopped. The breeze died down and the corn stopped rustling. Through the heavy silence I stared at the man holding the shotgun, the very same man I had seen snooping around the large oak tree in my front yard only an hour or so before.
He had the same clothes on that I had seen him wearing at my house, only this time everything was covered by a tattered brown overcoat that looked way too hot for July. He had the same squinting eyes and the same slicked-back hair. He held the shotgun against his shoulder and looked very relaxed, as if nothing exciting had just happened.
Halfway between him and me was a large white animal lying among the corn, but I couldn’t get a good look at it from where we stood. It seemed that Abra and I both had the same question at the same time, because we started walking through the corn, one hesitant step after another, trying to see what it was that had drawn so many vultures. But as we grew close to it, the old man’s voice erupted, breaking the silence.
“Come along, come along,” he said gruffly. “It isn’t safe for you out here, not anymore.”
He moved quickly, without a limp, and for a moment I doubted that he had been the one in my lane because his steps were so sure and quick. He grabbed Abra roughly by the arm and pushed me along in front. Whether it was intentional or not, he led us on a way that avoided the dead animal. Still, I got a look at it.
At first I thought it was a horse, or even something a little larger, but what in the valley would be larger than a horse? And there seemed to be a lot of feathers around, but not black feathers from the vultures—they were white feathers, and they were big. Then my attention shifted from wondering about that animal to wondering how it had died. It looked like something had taken a bite out of it. One large bite.
The old man kept looking up at the sky and ducking his head, as if at any time something might come swooping down and carry us all away. Once we were in Mr. Jinn’s weed-infested yard, he let go of us and plowed ahead, muttering the entire time.
“Hurry now, almost there. No time for chitchat. Have to get inside.”
Abra and I looked at each other.
“Why are we following him?” she whispered. “Shouldn’t we run?”
I understood how she felt. It was one thing to go with that man when he was pushing us along. It was another thing entirely to follow him on our own. But I wanted to talk to him, now more than ever. I wanted to ask him about the women and what they had written on the table.
“What about the vultures?” I asked. “Won’t they attack us if we walk back through the field?”
She frowned. We kept walking.
“That’s the man I saw at my house,” I said. “The one who came up the lane before you.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“I’m pretty sure,” I said. “Same clothes, minus that ridiculous-looking overcoat. But I didn’t think he could walk this fast. He limped when I saw him. And he must have been cruising to make it back here so fast.”
“Hurry, hurry!” he shouted from the porch of Mr. Jinn’s dilapidated house. “The spies are everywhere now. No safe place.”
“Stay close,” I whispered to Abra.
“We have to stay together,” she said.
When we got to the porch, the old man had already gone inside. I saw the birdbath where Mr. Jinn usually left my lawn-mowing money. The outside of the house needed paint—what was left of the siding had peeled and twisted away, exposing rotted wood. A few of the porch floorboards had fallen through. The windows weren’t broken, but there was such a thick layer of pollen and dust on them that from the outside it was impossible to tell if there were any curtains. Not that he needed any. The grime would have blocked anyone from peering in.
We stopped for a moment, and I walked over and held open the door for Abra. “Ladies before gentlemen,” I said.
She smirked and we walked inside.
“Close the door. Quickly!” the old man shouted from inside the house. I pulled the door up against the frame, but as I was about to close it the entire way, I stopped. Something inside me said, Don’t. Don’t close the door. So I left the door leaning up against the frame, but not latched.
What surprised me most about the inside of Mr. Jinn’s house was that it was immaculate. While it was not brightly lit, I could still tell the carpets were vacuumed and the surfaces dusted. He didn’t have much furniture, but the furniture he did have was well placed and relatively new. It was strange to think of that untidy man living here, in such a clean place.
We followed his voice back to the kitchen. A very clean kitchen. In the middle was a small green table with two chairs. The table had deep, random scratches going in all different directions, like a three-dimensional road map. As we entered the kitchen, he came bustling in from some back room bearing a third chair, which he slid up against a third side of the table. He sat down in that chair and motioned for us to sit at the other two, one on either side of him, but just as we moved toward our seats he stood again.
“Go ahead, sit down. I’ll get you some water.”
I sat down in his chair so that he would not be between us. It seemed a silly thing to do, but Abra’s words from outside still stuck in my mind.
We have to stay together.
He didn’t seem to notice that I had taken his seat. He placed two glasses of water on the table and handed each of us a wet washcloth to clean up with. He took a seat at the end. I say “the end” even though it was a very small table, and if we all would have leaned forward at once, it’s likely we would have banged heads.
He stared at us. His eyes were dark, his pupils large so that very little white showed around the edges, and when I stared at them they felt like deep pools, a swirling mass of shadow from another universe. Time slowed. His eyes scared me.
“Well, go on,” he said, the first non-gruff words I had heard him utter. “What do you want to know? Ask away.”
Abra and I looked at each other out of the corner of our eyes. I might have been the curious one, but when it came to situations like this, Abra was the most straightforward.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“My name is Mr. Jinn. Yes,” he said, as if reassuring himself of his identity, “Mr. Jinn.”
“Why don’t you ever come out of your house?” she asked.
“I don’t like people very much.”
“So why did you help us?”
“Because I like children. Children aren’t people.”
That stopped her in her tracks, but just for a moment. “Yes they are!” she said, sounding deeply offended.
“What ate the dead animal in the field?” I asked quietly.
“Mmm,” he said, as if tasting a delicious food for the first time. “Finally a good question. But I don’t know if you’re ready for the answer.”
He took a comb out of his shirt pocket and combed his hair straight back. I realized he still had his overcoat on, but he wasn’t sweating.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He stood up and walked over to one of the kitchen windows. A small fly buzzed up against the glass, colliding over and over again with the frame. It stopped and wandered up to the top of the window before buzzing and flying again, twitching in its flight. Mr. Jinn opened the window. I thought he was going to let the fly out, but instead he clapped his hands together. The dead fly stuck against his palm. He flicked it out through the window and slammed the window shut.
“Some people aren’t always ready for the truth,” he said. “Some people are so blinded by what’s real that they’re not ready for what’s true.”
“I think we’re ready,” Abra said, still sounding indignant after being told children aren’t people.
Mr. Jinn looked at me. “What was written on the table in the antique store?”
Abra turned to me, waiting for me to answer the question.
I stared at my water and took a sip. I looked at Mr. Jinn. Why would he ask me that? He had been there. He had looked at the scribbled table.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean. I thought I saw something, but now I’m not so sure.”
There was something inside me that felt hesitant about telling him. What if he hadn’t been the man in the shadows? What if the writing was important information, information that Mr. Jinn shouldn’t know about? He made me nervous, and I wanted to leave.
“Just as I suspected,” he said with a hint of sadness in his voice. “I guess you’re not ready.”
Abra didn’t say anything, but she stared hard at me, and her eyes asked the question, Why won’t you tell him?
I shook my head. “Do you know what ate that animal in the field?” I asked Mr. Jinn.
He squinted those dark eyes, and when he nodded his entire body moved forward and back, forward and back, and the chair he sat on creaked under his enormity.
I sighed. I thought he might know a lot of things that I needed to know, and we wouldn’t get anywhere if we stayed stuck at this part of the conversation. Reluctantly, I let the words escape in a whisper.
“I thought the words on the table said, ‘Find the Tree of Life.’”
At this Mr. Jinn leaned forward and stared at me. “Is that right?” he asked. “Is that what you saw?”
There was something eager in his face, something hungry. I wondered how he had missed it, why I had seen it but he hadn’t. I nodded slowly, feeling as though I had told him something I shouldn’t have. It was a feeling I would always have around him, that I was letting things slip, that I was saying more than I should.
“‘Find the Tree of Life,’” he said quietly to himself. “So it is finally here.”
He stood up and paced back and forth in the kitchen. When he passed by me, his overcoat flapped, and it smelled like mud and summer. He snapped out of that short reflection and looked at me again, saying matter-of-factly, “It was an Amarok.”
At first I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“What?” Abra said in a sharp tone. She sounded almost angry, as if she believed Mr. Jinn was trying to make her look silly.
“You heard me.”
“An Amarok?” I asked. I didn’t even know what that was.
“Is that even a real animal?” Abra asked.
“What is real?” he asked. “What is true?”
Abra jumped to her feet, her chair shooting out behind her. “I want to go look at that dead animal,” she said. “Let’s go right now.”
Mr. Jinn didn’t look upset or bothered. “It won’t be there any longer,” he said, shaking his head and pulling his comb from his pocket. “They’ll have taken it.”
“The vultures?” I asked.
“The vultures may have come back,” he said. “Or maybe the black dogs.” He gave me a knowing look. “Maybe the Amarok came back for it. If it did, you probably won’t make it home through the field. But that’s not likely in the day. The Amarok prefers, shall we say, the shadows.”
I remembered the combined voices of the three old women, and a chill swept through my body.
Protection from what lives in the shadows.
He raised his eyebrows and shook his head, and his mouth showed regret. His voice hardened. He stared first at me, then at Abra, who was still standing.
“Do you know what it means to ‘Find the Tree of Life’? Do you want to know why the old women wrote those words on the table?”
He paused. Abra looked at me. I nodded.
“Your mother and that oak tree were killed at the exact same moment by that lightning strike.”
“The tree’s not dead,” I interrupted. “It’s still green.”
“That tree won’t survive the year,” he snapped. “Your mother substituted her life for yours. Her sacrifice, combined with the death of the oak tree, brought something wonderful into the world.”
I stared at him. All of his talk about my mother made me angry. Who was he to talk about her? What did he know, this man who never left his house, this man who wore overcoats in the summer? But he just kept talking.
“Now the Tree is here, somewhere.” He waved his arms around. “The war is beginning. They are gathering and taking sides.”
When he said “the Tree,” he sounded like he was talking about something very holy or very dangerous or both. And he liked it. There was a lust for blood in his voice, a desire for destruction. He seemed excited at the idea of war.
“Who’s taking sides?” I asked.
Abra backed away from the table. “Let’s go, Sam,” she said. “We need to go.”
“What do you mean by sides?” I asked him again.
“You would do well to heed the words you read on the table,” Mr. Jinn said, his eyes piercing me. “You would do well to find the Tree.”
“You still haven’t told us what an Amarok is, or what it was doing in the field, or what that animal is that it killed.”
“The Amarok being here, it’s a sign,” he said, and in his voice was a pleading for us to understand, as if a greater understanding would lead to our being on his side. “A sign! Just one of many signs that prove what I told you about your mother is true, and that the Tree is close. The Amarok is drawn to the Tree. It is always drawn to the Tree. It’s how we know the Tree is here.”
His voice sounded more and more like a plea. We stared at him, and I wondered if he was sane.
Abra pulled at my shoulder and I stood up.
“She’s right,” Mr. Jinn said, looking at the window in the kitchen. “You should go. Before it gets too late in the day. You don’t want to be walking by yourselves at night anymore.”
We walked quickly out of the kitchen and across the porch. The sun was already dropping behind the western mountain. I saw small black specks against the darkening sky, some of them flying, some of them perched in the highest branches of faraway trees. Vultures? Or my overactive imagination?
We half walked, half jogged through the weeds to the cornfield. We stopped for a moment where the white animal had been, but Mr. Jinn was right. There was nothing, not even any blood. Only broken cornstalks and feathers, some black, some white.
Mr. Jinn shouted to us from his house, “Don’t worry. I’ll come to your house tomorrow, after your mother’s funeral. We have a lot to talk about and even more to do. Remember, find the Tree! Now run! Run! The darkness is coming!”
The sun was barely over the mountain as we ran through the corn, our shadows dashing along beside us.