She lived in an ivory tower near Witch Road. The ivory tower was a squat, crooked building in a wooded working-class neighborhood, located by the St. Joseph River in southeast Michigan. It was a shabby, unfashionable river dwelling, built almost a century ago, with a two-bedroom living area on the second floor over the garage that protected it from the river’s periodic flooding. She had been renting it since her divorce five years ago.
The ivory had become dingy over the years, the aluminum siding loose at one corner. The outside concrete stairs to her dwelling were narrow and crooked. They were dangerous in an ice storm. Once, while she was at work, a heavy rain had turned to sleet. When she’d gotten home, she’d been forced to crawl up the icy stairs in order to get inside. Still, the interior was warm, with old pine paneling and scarred but beautiful hardwood floors, and it had a brick-and-flagstone fireplace. The first time she had stepped inside, something seemed to flow over her, embracing her in an invisible hug. She fancied it was the spirit of the place, welcoming her. Despite its dirty condition and the many ways in which it was inconvenient, she had known she would live there the first time she’d seen it. Sometimes she wondered if she would die there.
For all its shabbiness the ivory tower embodied an ordinary yet powerful magic. In the view from the picture window, there was no sign of the street below or of the neighboring houses that dotted the dead-end road. It gave the generous illusion she was in a cabin in the woods, far away from anyone else. She could stare out the window for hours at the evergreens, oaks and sycamores, watching flurries of white snow swirling in a snowstorm, or shadows moving in the trees as daylight changed and faded.
Witch Road, as she had named it, was a nearby street in the same neighborhood, part of a loop she had mapped for a daily two-mile run. The route cut close by the nearby river and had gradually pulled her under its spell as she jogged it through the change of seasons.
Small houses were overpowered by tall, thick, deciduous trees whose bones were uncovered with the death of every year, from the ones with straight willowy lines to those that had a more arthritic beauty, with their gnarled joints and twisted limbs that shot in unexpected directions, ending in thousands of spidery-thin fingers grasping at air. The underbrush was secretive and tangled. Thick vines and fallen limbs discouraged trespass from outsiders. The trees met to whisper overhead in the ebb and flow of restless days, enclosing the narrow asphalt road in the summertime with a leafy green canopy.
She was too tired for her normal run. She walked the route instead.
The leafy canopy was fast returning with the warmer weather. On the other side of the green-edged lattice of tree limbs, fluffy cumulous clouds traveled across the sky at such speed, they seemed to be running from some unseen menace. The trees shifted and rustled. Leaves and twigs, the detritus from the death of the forest last autumn and winter, danced in circles that followed her down the street.
The swirling circles whispered to each other in small voices.
She’s not the one, stupid.
How do you know? She smells like blood.
She paused and turned to look behind her. What a thing to fantasize. She was imagining that, wasn’t she? The only sounds in the silence were the murmurous trees, the distant report of a car door slamming, the sound of the wind tumbling sticks and leaves around like a child playing at jacks.
She shook her head, turned back around and resumed walking again.
You saw! She looked. Does that mean she heard us?
Normal people don’t hear us.
She jerked to a halt and broke out in a fresh sweat.
I didn’t just make that up.
I’m hearing voices.
I’m. Hearing. Voices.
An internal quake rattled her bones. She turned backward in a circle, staring around her with wide eyes. There was no one else close by. Down the street, two children with their school bags exploded out of the front door of a house.
A couple yards away twigs and pine needles tumbled in a tiny pagan dance.
Everything else had stopped. There was no wind, no lick of breeze against her skin. Even the trees overhead had gone silent, waiting.
There was nothing to cause that turbulence of air. It was wrong, impossible. The hair at the back of her neck raised and her teeth clenched. She stamped her foot at the dancing sticks and leaves, and hissed, “Stop it!”
The small voices burst into chatter.
Yes, she heard us. She did.
We must go!
As abruptly as they had started, the voices stopped. The leaves and twigs dropped to the ground.
Nothing else disturbed the stillness, just a few cars pulling out of driveways as people headed to work under the watchfulness of the looming forest, as some of the trees only tolerated the humans who had moved into their territory—
Where had that thought come from? Why would she think such a thing?