Michigan author J.C. Vande Zande’s novel, "Blood of the Witness Tree," is set in Michigan’s Pigeon River State Forest. It is a sequel to his contemporary gothic horror novel, "The Dance of Rotten Sticks", which is also set in northern lower-Michigan. He is a professor of creative writing and film production at Delta College in Bay County. The book is availalble on Amazon.
By J.C. Vande Zande
Shivering in the falling temperatures, Isaac surveyed the prone bodies of his children and the others. The night was soundless. He strained to hear anything that might broadcast the return of the nightmarish creature. As the minutes passed, feeling slowly came back to his shoulders and hips and then down his limbs and into his extremities. In time, he pushed himself to standing, steadying himself with an arm against the trunk of the tree behind him. His crotch, wet and cold with urine, ached dully. He checked first on Emily and then Carson. Both lay unmoving, breathing nearly imperceptible breaths. Neither seemed in any kind of distress. Examining Harper and Dietrick, he wouldn’t call what they were experiencing sleep so much as hibernation. Using his fingertip, he opened one of Theresa’s eyelids. Her eyeball stared straight ahead with all the life of a glass eye. The pupil dilated and contracted sluggishly as the light from Isaac’s headlamp passed over it.
He lightly slapped the flat and back of his fingers against Theresa’s right and then left cheek. “Theresa? Can you hear me? Blink if you can hear me.” He released her eyelid and it drifted shut. It didn’t open again. “Come on, I need you here,” he whispered. He couldn’t imagine what his next move might be if they didn’t start coming around soon. If he secured her legs to the litter, he could probably drag Emily to the Witness Tree on his own. Still, he couldn’t very well leave the others lying helplessly while that thing was out there. Pacing, he looked at the darkness all around him and then slowly sank down until he kneeled on both knees in the middle of the path. “I don’t know what I do here,” he said, shaking his head. “What do I do here?” He looked toward the sky as though some solace might be found there.
As though answering his question, the wailing of a baby came out of the eastern darkness of the forest. Isaac rose to his feet and looked in the direction from which the crying had come. Was he hearing things again? A city block or so into the trees, a window’s rectangle of yellow candlelight trembled in the darkness. Something inside the cabin limped slowly from one side of the window to the other. Isaac squinted, not certain that what he was seeing was what he was actually seeing. A moment later, the light flickered out.
The baby cried again.
Isaac turned and looked at his children and then at the others on the ground. Not so much as a pinky finger twitched among them. When were they going to come to?
Nothing will happen to them, a woman’s comforting voice spoke into Isaac’s troubled mind, instantly calming it. He looked again towards where he had briefly seen the window of light in the woods. He felt secure, even buoyant, about everything, the way he remembered feeling in the peak euphoria of an evening’s drinking, before adding more drinks would spoil the rest of the night.
Go to the infant. Save it.
Nodding, Isaac reached up and turned on his headlamp. He looked again at the bodies around him in torpor.
I will watch over them.
He nodded again. They would be safe. He was certain of it. Without giving them any further thought, he started into the dark woods, following the path of light his headlamp beamed in front of him. Branches snapped under his footsteps. Cold air washed over his forearms. He rolled down his sleeves. In short time, the squared outline of a log cabin faded into the light. Squat and gray in the halo of luminescence, the cabin couldn’t have been much bigger than a one-car garage. A black rectangle loomed where the cabin’s entry door used to be.
“Hello?” Isaac called, cupping his hand to the side of his mouth. “Is someone here? Are you okay?” He thought of the stroller. Maybe the parents or at least one of the parents was here with the baby. Maybe they’d been caught by the storm and had taken refuge in the dilapidated cabin. “Hello?”
He was answered by the baby’s muffled crying coming from somewhere inside. He swallowed, studying the gaping maw of the canted entrance. The structure leaned to the right, looking as though it might collapse into itself at any moment.
Go in.
Something landed in the branches of a tree above him. It adjusted itself for a moment on its perch and then made no more noise. He turned his light up toward the sounds of its landing but saw nothing.
The baby cried out again in a high-pitched yowl. He recalled the cries of his own children when they were infants. With no words, they had only the one desperate way to express their hunger, tiredness, pain or discomfort.
“Is anybody here with that baby?” Isaac asked, raising his voice. “I don’t want to startle you.” He felt the exaggerated pumping of his heart in his chest. The backs of his wrists were warm with sweat. He took a long breath and exhaled it slowly. Looking back toward where he knew his children lay, he saw nothing save for the staggered trunks of trees caught in the glow of his headlamp.
They’re safe.
Nodding, he set his hand against the left jamb of the cabin’s doorway. The damp, cold air from inside the cabin drifted out over the threshold. He shivered. Leaning his head through the cabin’s door frame, he swept his light over the inside. Its contents were sparse, including a simple, dust-covered dining table, a chair lying in a heap of its pieces, and a metal bedframe with no mattress. In the corner, a pile of what were likely raccoon bones sat nested inside its dried out, decaying husk of skin and fur. The mantle of a stone fireplace sat opposite him. Its firebox was filled with smaller stones, some of which spilled out onto the floor. The chimney had likely caved in on itself.
The author, Jeff Vande Zande
Isaac swept his light into the rafters, half expecting to see them dangling with bats, though he knew that at this time of night they would be out hunting for insects. Something with metal rods and pieces of brittle leather hung from one of the rafters. Isaac examined it, and his mind put together the details. It looked to be an antique polio leg brace.
As Isaac lingered in the doorway, what felt like a cold hand shoved him from the back, sending him stumbling into the interior of the cabin.
He barely kept himself from falling and then, standing in the middle of the room, he turned around abruptly with his fist cocked back. Where the doorway had been, his headlamp lit up only more log wall, as though the threshold had never been there. He turned a full circle and found the interior of the cabin to be nothing but walls, not even a single window. A warm drop of sweat broke from his hairline and slid down his back.
He was trapped, cut off from his children. As far as he knew, they still lay nearly catatonic on the forest floor. That creature was out there somewhere. Isaac paced the boundaries of the cabin’s interior. After kicking the walls in several places and finding them more solid than he would have guessed, he dropped to his knees in front of the fireplace. He began shoveling stones to the side with his sweating palms. He hoped to find a way to climb out of the cabin by going up what remained of the chimney. It seemed his only choice.
The woman spoke into his mind again: I told you that they would be safe. You need not worry for them.
As before with hearing her voice, a sense of security and calm washed through him, not unlike the time he’d had an appendectomy, and they’d treated his initial pain with morphine in his IV. Each administration of the pain killer had left him smiling, intoxicated with joy.
“I still need to get out of here,” he said, maybe to her, maybe to himself.
The baby’s crying started again, muffled and mewling. It sounded as though it had come from below him. Isaac stood up and paced to the middle of the floor. He listened. After a moment, the baby cried out again, and Isaac was certain that it was coming from beneath the floorboards.
Save the child.
“Wha…how?” He staggered around the space, shining his light over the pine planks. In a corner near the front of the cabin, he spotted a hinge in the flooring. And then another. Not far from them he found the inset cast iron ring handle. Gripping his hand around the cold metal, he pulled open the hatch. A musty smell of decaying vegetables, earth, and sawdust wafted up from the exposed opening. His headlamp revealed the top of a ladder disappearing down into the darkness of a root cellar.
The baby cried again, and he could hear that its cries were less muffled now that he’d opened the hatch. “I’m coming, little one,” he called down into the hole. “I’m coming.” Stretching a leg down into the cool darkness, he set his foot on a rung of the ladder. Feeling its sturdiness, he lowered his other foot down to the same rung. He stood for a moment with his lower half underground and his upper half above it. Taking a breath, he reached his left foot down, waiting to feel the solid perch of the next rung. He continued his slow descent.
A chorus of murmuring women’s voices circled around the outside of the cabin. They gasped and moaned as though they stood on a shore watching helplessly as a beloved child drowned in the middle of a lake. What sounded like fists pounded on the outside walls, shaking the interior. The leg brace fell from the rafter to the floor, clattering into pieces of metal and leather. Standing on the rung, Isaac felt suffocated in dread. Something bad was going to happen. Out of instinct, his right leg lifted toward the next rung up. When it did, the rung still under his left foot cracked in half, sending him plummeting down the hole. The trapdoor slammed shut above him. He took the brunt of the landing on his back, knocking the wind from him. The light from his headlamp flashed wildly around the blurred earthen walls as he struggled to take a full breath.
When he could breathe again, he lay for a moment on the cold ground taking an assessment. Though his back ached from the impact, none of his limbs were broken. Even his bad leg seemed fine considering the distance he’d dropped. He patted his hand around the earthen floor until his fingers touched down on the temple of his glasses. He slid them up onto his nose and over the tops of his ears. He exhaled a sigh, seeing that both lenses were still intact. His clear vision revealed walls of makeshift shelves with withered carrots, potatoes, and cabbage. A few yellowed mason jars held what looked to be canned fruits, vegetables, and preserves. He climbed up to his feet and listened.
Above him, the cabin had gone still. The voices and pounding were silenced.
The baby whimpered from somewhere nearby, sounding exhausted.
Find the infant.
Isaac nodded. Shining his light around the small space, he spotted the entrance to a tunnel in the corner. He kneeled down and shined his light into the blackness. The crown of the tunnel dangled with thin roots. The length of the shaft outlasted the range of his light.
The baby’s crying came from the far end of the passageway.
“Jesus Christ,” Isaac muttered.
You’re running out of time…
“I can’t…” Isaac started, but then just shook his head. There was no way the baby was going to come to him. He took a deep breath and started into the entrance. He crawled on hands and knees for about five feet before the narrowing passage pressed him down to his elbows. Not much farther along, he was forced into an army crawl, ratcheting himself forward and pushing with what purchase he could get from his feet, knees, and hips. If he was moving, he could keep himself from getting too consumed in the closing in of the space. He was staying one inch ahead of crippling claustrophobia. The sounds of the baby were growing closer too, motivating him to keep going despite the spikes of panic when he’d try to imagine how he was going to get out. If he was going to get out…
You’re almost there.
Isaac kept on, even as the sides of the tunnel squeezed his shoulders. As he inched forward, his sleeves saturated with water that had wicked up into the floor of the tunnel. After struggling his way through a tight spot, he lifted his head. The light from his headlamp revealed something moving.
It wasn’t a baby.
Instead, his lamp lit up a sickly coyote staring at him with red eyes. The only way to describe its expression would be to say that it was smirking. The animal was largely furless from mange, and its skin was a mosaic of either crusted over or freshly scratched wounds. It lay at the end of the tunnel in what looked to be a small den. Isaac was wedged at the threshold. Keeping its eyes fixed on him, the coyote rose to standing on three legs. Atrophied to a quarter of its size, its left front leg dangled from the shoulder joint like a twisted stick. Drool dripped over its cracked lips. The air swam with a scent of decaying flesh.
Thought had abandoned Isaac, leaving him to react only out of instinct. His body jerked and shimmied with his desperate attempts to get some kind of backwards movement. As he kicked and scrambled, he felt the crown of the tunnel give way, pinning him from the waist down under collapsed earth. He struggled to take a full breath.
The coyote stalked toward him. Opening its mouth, it emitted a sound just like that of a baby crying in distress. Then it laughed a staccato laugh, sounding first like a woman—whose voice this time brought Isaac no comfort or calm—and then like an old man chortling vindictively. “I’ll start with peeling your face from your skull,” the coyote spoke in the old man’s voice.
While the canine laughed mercilessly, an invisible force picked it up and slammed it against the wall, where it stayed as though it had been hung there on a nail. Its eyes bugged out, and its tongue protruded over its pink, blood-stained teeth. Whatever the unseen entity, it clearly had the coyote by the throat.
A man’s voice, confident and ethereal, boomed into the space of the den. “You will leave him be!”
The coyote thrashed against its captor’s grip, only to be jerked back from the wall and slammed into it again. It gave a choked-off yelp.
“You’re a long way from home, skincripple,” the man’s voice bellowed.
Isaac watched the coyote slide up along the wall, like an iron filing pulled by an unseen magnet, until it was pinned against the ceiling. Its good legs dangled helplessly, kicking. Its scrawny front leg curled and pressed in against its ribs.
“How long did you think your presence would be tolerated? You’re wanted here no more than you were wanted by your own pack, outcast. You may have felt called, but this land does not want you here.”
Through its choking, the coyote managed something that sounded like speech. “T'áá hó\'ájitéégóó, t'éiyá.”
“I don’t understand your tongue. If you’re asking for mercy, be gone from this forest before light touches the eastern sky. The faster I forget, the better for you.”
“I’ll leave…I’ll be gone,” the animal croaked, still speaking as an aged man.
Isaac watched as the canine suddenly dropped, yelping again as its side slammed into the ground. After a moment of recovery, it scrambled up to stand on three legs. With no acknowledgement of Isaac still wedged in the tunnel, the coyote found its bearings and turned three quick circles, seemingly chasing its own tail.
Everything went black.
Moments later, when Isaac’s sight faded in to the half-dark around him, he lay on the forest floor with his lower body under a pile of leaves and sticks. The full moon’s light filtered through the leaf canopy overhead. Kicking out from under the debris, he scrambled to his feet. Though he stood where it had been, there was no trace of the cabin. He staggered over to a tree and steadied himself against its sturdy trunk. His settling adrenaline mixed with relief and lingering terror had him feeling as though on the verge of uncontrolled sobbing. “There’s no time…” he managed, his voice cracking.
“Dad?” Carson’s groggy voice called. “Where are you?”
Isaac hastily brushed the back of his hand under each eye. He sniffed in a long breath. “I’m here, bud! I’m here.”
Following his headlamp’s light, he started at a jog through the trees back to the others.
The author will talk about characteristics of gothic horror and sign copies of his books on Wednesday, Oct. 1, at 6 p.m. at the Detroit Public Library at 6 p.m. and Wednesday, Oct. 6 at 6 p.m. at the New Baltimore Public Library.
