And now a new illness, she thought. What had brought this one about? Not coal effluent, if it was happening all over the world.
She started toward the bzzz sound, and hadn’t gone half a dozen steps before she saw the first of the fairy handkerchiefs, and understood what Willy had been talking about. You saw them in the morning, mostly, spiderwebs jeweled with dew. She dropped to one knee, reached for the patch of filmy whiteness, then thought better of it. She picked up a twig and poked it with that, instead. Thin strands stuck to the end of the twig and seemed to either evaporate or melt into the wood. Which was impossible, of course. A trick of her tired eyes. There could be no other explanation.
She thought about the cocoons that were growing on women who fell asleep, and wondered if this could possibly be the same stuff. One thing seemed obvious, even to a woman as exhausted as she was: it looked like a footprint.
“At least it does to me,” she said out loud. She took her phone from her belt and photographed it.
There was another beyond the first, then another and another. No doubt about it now. They were tracks, and the person who’d made them had been walking toward the meth shed and the trailer. White webbing also clung to a couple of tree trunks, each forming the vague outline of a hand, as if someone had either touched them going by or leaned against them to rest or to listen. What, exactly, was this shit? If Evie Black had left webwork tracks and handprints out here in the woods, how come there was no sign of the stuff in Lila’s cruiser?
Lila followed the tracks up a rise, then down into the sort of narrow dip that country fellows like Willy Burke called a brake or a holler, then up another hill. Here the trees were thicker—scrub pines fighting for space and sunlight. The webby stuff hung from some of the branches. She took a few more pictures with her phone and pushed on toward the power pylons and the bright sunlight ahead. She ducked under a low-hanging branch, stepped into the clearing, and just stared. For a moment all her tiredness was swept away by amazement.
I am not seeing this, she thought. I’ve fallen asleep, maybe in my cruiser, maybe in the late Truman Mayweather’s trailer, and I’m dreaming it. I must be, because nothing like this exists in the Tri-Counties, or east of the Rockies. Nothing like this exists anywhere, actually, not on earth, not in this epoch.
Lila stood frozen at the edge of the clearing, her neck craned, staring upward. Flocks of moths fluttered around her, brown in the shade, seeming to turn an iridescent gold in the late afternoon sunshine.
She had read somewhere that the tallest tree on earth—a redwood—was just under four hundred feet high. The tree in the center of the clearing looked taller than that, and it was no redwood. It was like no tree she’d ever seen. The closest she could come to a comparison were the banyan trees she and Clint had seen in Puerto Rico on their honeymoon. This… thing… stood on a great gnarled podium of roots, the largest of them looking twenty or thirty feet thick. The trunk was comprised of dozens of intertwined boles, rising into huge branches with fern-like leaves. The tree seemed to glow with its own light, a surrounding aura. That was probably an illusion caused by the way the westering sun flashed through the gaps in the twisting sections of the trunk, but…
But the whole thing was an illusion, wasn’t it? Trees did not grow to a height of five hundred feet, and even if this one had—supposing it was real—she would have seen it from Mayweather’s trailer. Terry and Roger would have seen it. Willy Burke would have seen it.
From the cloud of ferny leaves far above her, a flock of birds exploded into the sky. They were green, and at first Lila thought they were parrots, only they were too small. They flocked west, forming a V—like ducks, for Christ’s sake—and were gone.
She pulled her shoulder mic, thumbed the button, and tried to raise Linny in dispatch. She got nothing but a steady wash of static and somehow wasn’t surprised. Nor was she when a red snake—thicker than one of Van Lampley’s pumped-up biceps and at least three yards long—slithered from a vertical split in the amazing tree’s gray trunk. The split was as big as a doorway.
The snake lifted its spade-shaped head in her direction. Black eyes surveyed her with cold interest. Its tongue tested the air, then withdrew. The snake slid rapidly up a crevasse in the trunk and coiled over a branch in a series of neat loops. Its head pendulumed. The impenetrable eyes still regarded Lila, now viewing her upside down.
There was a low, rippling growl from behind the tree, and a white tiger emerged from the shadows, its eyes bright and green. A peacock strutted into view, head bobbing, fanning its glorious tail, making a noise that sounded like a single hilarious question, repeated over and over: Heehh? Heehh? Heehh? Heehh? Moths swirled around it. Lila’s family had owned an illustrated New Testament, and those swirling insects made her think of the diadem Jesus always seemed to have, even as a baby lying in a manger.
The red snake slithered down from its branch, dropped the last ten feet, and landed between the peacock and the tiger. The three of them came toward Lila at the edge of the clearing, the tiger padding, the snake slithering, the peacock prancing and cackling.
Lila felt a deep and profound sense of relief: Yes. Yes. It was a dream—it definitely was. It had to be. Not just this moment, and not just Aurora, but the rest of it, everything since the spring meeting of the Tri-Counties Curriculum Committee, in the Coughlin High School auditorium.
She closed her eyes.
Joining the Curriculum Committee had been Clint’s doing (which was ironic; he had, in the end, been hoisted by his own petard). This was back in 2007. There had been an article in the Tri-Counties Herald about the parent of a junior high student in Coughlin who was determined to see Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret banned from the school library. The parent was quoted saying that it was “a dammed atheist tract.” Lila couldn’t believe it. She had adored the Judy Blume novel as a thirteen-year-old and related intensely to its portrait of what it was like to be an adolescent girl, how adulthood suddenly loomed up in front of you like some strange and terrifying new city and demanded you go through the gates whether you wanted to or not.
“I loved that book!” Lila said, extending the paper to Clint.
She had roused him from his usual daydream, sitting at the counter and staring through the glass doors at the yard, lightly rubbing the fingers of his left hand over the knuckles on his right. Clint looked at the article. “Sorry, hon, it’s too bad, but the book’s gotta burn. Orders direct from General Jesus.” He handed the paper back to her.
“It’s not a joke, Clint. The reason that guy wants to censor that book is exactly the reason girls need to read it.”
“I agree. And I know it’s not a joke. So why don’t you do something about it?”
Lila had loved him for that, for challenging her. “All right. I will.”
The paper mentioned a hastily formed group of parents and concerned citizens called the Curriculum Committee. Lila enlisted. And to bolster her cause, she did what a good police officer knows to do: she went to her community for assistance. Lila rallied every like-minded local she could think of to come out and support the book. She was unusually well-positioned to raise such a group. Years of settling noise complaints, cooling down property disputes, letting speeders go with warnings, and generally showing herself to be a conscientious and reasonable representative of the law, had created a lot of good will.