My impression of the pathway’s age, however, was buttressed by the pedestal situated on the other side of the road about twenty yards to the left. A simple column, four feet high or thereabouts, supported a statue carved in that idealized way that reminds you of classical Greece or Rome. More or less life-sized, the sculpture was of a woman wearing a plain, sleeveless dress that reached to her feet. The woman was pregnant, enormously so, on-the-verge-of-delivering-her-baby big. She cradled her belly in her hands, the way that expectant mothers sometimes do. She was also headless, her neck a smooth stump. From where I was standing, I couldn’t tell if the statue’s headlessness was intentional, or an act of vandalism. What appeared to be red paint, long faded to brown, had been splashed around the sculpture’s neck, but that could as easily have been dirt from beside the road someone had smeared on it.
“The Mother,” Marie said.
“What?”
“The statue you’re staring at. It’s of the Mother.”
“Who’s that?”
“A very old goddess.”
“Oh. What about this?” I pointed my knife at the road.
“That takes you to a city.”
“A city?”
“A city by the sea,” she said. “I don’t think you’d care to visit it.”
“By the sea?”
“It’s different here.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’ll see,” she said, and crossed the road. I went after her, but I continued to glance at the statue of the deity Marie had named the Mother, until the trees obscured my view of it.
Across the road, the forest floor was less crowded with dead leaves and fallen branches. Around me, the trees, mainly evergreens, seemed ranked in straight lines. I supposed we might be passing through a tree farm of some sort, or could be, it was a patch where the trees happened to grow like this. The rain was no longer falling — hadn’t been for some time, now that I thought of it. I wasn’t sure exactly how long, but since before we’d arrived at the road, anyway.
One of the trees Marie was walking to the left of caught my eye. It was unlike any of the local trees I’d come to recognize over the course of years spent wandering through them on the way to the day’s fishing spot. If anything, it resembled a young child’s image of a tree, a straight trunk crowned with a large ball of leaves. But, to carry the comparison a tad further, it was as if the kid who’d committed this tree to paper had used oil paint, while the rest of the kids in the daycare stuck to whatever used crayons they’d been given. The tree was so vivid you might have believed it wasn’t an actual, living thing but a sculpture cast in metal and lit from within. Had I not had a view of other, similar trees standing beyond it, I would have been tempted to such a view. The rough bark that wrapped the trunk held what light there was and shone a dull bronze; the leaves clustered above it seemed to pass different shades of green back and forth amongst themselves. As I approached the tree, a citrus smell, like oranges on the turn, saturated the air. The individual leaves were shaped like spearheads, their edges serrated. I held up my hand to touch one of them, and hesitated at the prospect of those jagged edges. When I lowered my arm, Marie, who had stopped a slight distance ahead to watch me, said, “That was the right decision. If you aren’t careful, the leaves will slice to the bone.”
“Right.” The prospect of more of these trees in front of us was not reassuring.
I found, though, that while the Vivid Trees — as I thought of them — gradually supplanted the assortment of evergreens, maples, and birch that had surrounded us on the other side of the strange road, they didn’t appear to grow especially close together, allowing us a reasonable amount of room to pass safely among them. Nor did they hinder the progress of the person I saw walking through them in our direction. The moment’s hope I had it was Dan, searching for me, died as I saw the man striding towards us wearing a large, baggy coat that hung most of the way down his legs. It was dark, from wear more than its tailor’s design. The fellow’s chest was crisscrossed by the straps of an assortment of bags and sacks he was carrying, all of which bounced against him with each step. He was wearing a hat that resembled a nightcap someone had forgotten to finish. He was younger than I was, but older than Dan, the stringy beard on his jaw a failed effort he hadn’t given up on. His eyes were brown and big, and they grew bigger still at the sight of Marie naked before him. He called out a greeting I couldn’t distinguish, raising his right hand in what I took for a friendly wave. I figured him for a fellow-traveler, lost in wherever-the-hell-this-was.
Marie had halted when the man came into view. As he neared, she seemed to go out of focus, the ripple I’d witnessed previously sweeping over her. When the stranger was within ten or fifteen feet of her, the distortion blew away and she was transformed. Taller by a good six inches, her hair darker, curled, her pale form was covered by the most horrendous wounds. Great gashes peeled back the skin and meat of her arms, her ribs, her legs, left flesh hanging in ribbons and flaps. Deeper punctures opened her back. A ragged gash ran most of the way round her neck. Those places her skin had remained uncut, it was heavily bruised. A sound swelled from her torn throat, a scream that was as much fury as agony. My knees shook with it — with all of it.
His expression slackened by astonishment, the traveler stuttered a brace of words I couldn’t hear for the screaming. In answer, Marie shrieked at him in a language I didn’t recognize; though I didn’t have to understand it to feel the venom coursing through it. Whatever she said, the fellow flinched as if she’d slapped him full across the face. Her outburst continued, and as it did, she appeared to gain in height, her hair to rise off her shoulders, her feet to lift from the ground. The man had removed his cap and was twisting it in his hands, tears streaking his face, attempting a reply, but Marie would have none of it. She spat a series of phrases at him, the exclamation points at the end of each practically visible. At last, the fellow could take it no more, and fled from her, sprinting to his right, packs flapping, in the direction Marie had said the city by the sea lay. She flung a scattering of invectives after him.
The furious ruin she’d become turned in my direction. I was standing with my knife held out in front of me like an undersized sword, a look of stunned horror weighting my face. Marie’s features were charged with a violence that, for a moment, I feared she would direct at me. Then she shimmered, settling to the ground, and resolved into herself, again.
“Marie?” I said.
“Yes,” she said, considering my knife as if noticing it for the first time.
“What — what was all that?”
“An image.”
“Of what?”
“Something that happened a long time ago.”
“Do you know who that man was?”
“Yes,” she said, “I will.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“It isn’t important. He needed to go someplace. I helped him.” Apparently satisfied with her answer, she resumed her course. I was quaking-in-my-boots-afraid to keep after her, but I was absolutely terrified to walk away from her. Allowing an extra ten feet between us — which I guessed wouldn’t be much help if she resumed this aspect — I pursued her.