“Don’t worry, I can do it. Give me two or three days and you’ll think you’re walking through the gardens of Versailles.”
I have no clue where he gets the Versailles idea from. We are no Sun King with ambitions of manicured gardens and flowerbeds. A nice cottage garden you can enter without being skinned alive would do, thank you.
The key fits and the front door opens with ease as if someone had come along yesterday and oiled the lock. Fat chance, but I take it as a good sign. We’ve had a hard life so far. I’m not going to be ungrateful for small mercies. Bring them on.
As soon as I open the door, pandemonium breaks loose inside my head. Sometimes the Tribe is terribly undisciplined, especially when everyone talks at the same time. It tires me like nothing else, and it drives Elise crazy. She calls it having a large choir in her head. That’s silly. None of us can sing. I compare it to Black Friday Sales. The doors open and hundreds of customers are trying to get through all at once. That’s how it feels inside my head right now, pushing and shoving. Everyone wants to have a look.
I’m standing in a large living-dining-kitchen area. This forerunner of the open-plan idea is the only room on the ground floor, not counting the laundry and the toilet to my right. That’s when I know I’ve been here before. I test my sense of déjà vu by opening a drawer of the kitchen cabinet. And yes, that’s where linen serviettes are. Now, this is interesting. I don’t remember ever setting foot in this house, but others do.
Our new home even comes fully furnished. There is a large, worn-out couch and two armchairs standing close to an open fireplace, a bookshelf and a dining table with four chairs in front of it stand closer to the kitchen area, and a large floor loom dominates the far corner. An old cooking range, a leftover from the last century dominates the kitchen part of the room. Close to it towers a beautiful rimu kitchen cabinet.
A thick layer of dust covers everything, and large spider webs have found a home in the corners of the ceiling. Small scratch patterns in the dust on the wooden floorboards tell the tales of families of mice calling this place home as well. I’ll leave that worry to Ama. I don’t do mice or spider webs. They creep me out.
Going up a flight of stairs is a surprise too. No creaking steps or wonky banisters. We didn’t inherit the height of modern architecture, but the house is solid and promises to last another hundred years at least. Upstairs are two large bedrooms each with a big wooden bed, bedside tables, and a simple wardrobe. Not very fancy but we didn’t come here for fancy. At least we have real beds and real mattresses to sleep on and not just piles of straw.
It looks like my job is done. I’ll leave the rest for Ama. She can get the place ready for the body to have a place to sleep tonight and whip up something for us to eat. I’m happy to help get our stuff from the van. Perhaps Luke can have a go later at getting the stove working. We could use it because the temperature has dropped in the last half hour. Perhaps I should search for some firewood?
My hunt for firewood becomes another fight with brambles and spiky bushes. The back of the house is just as overgrown and impenetrable as the front. It’s impossible to tell what grew here when the house was lived in. I lift my eyes and almost faint when I register a giant tree standing less than twenty yards away from me. Three adults would have to link hands to reach around the circumference. Massive branches thick with leaves reach up far into the sky.
I swear I hear a loud cry for help. It comes so unexpectedly that I’m unable to avoid being sucked inside.
Chapter Seven
Elise: 18 November 2015, Early Evening, Wright’s Homestead
“Help!” My lips form words but no sounds come out of my mouth. I stare at the tree and bend over, clutching my hands to my knees, trying to get air into my lungs. Like in a horror movie, the tree comes alive and moves toward me. The shadows of its giant, spindly branches creep up to me. Any moment now they’ll squeeze the life force out of my body.
Helen was right. I am bonkers, loony, crazy, kooky, nutty, cracked. Totally mental and useless. I have to get away or… I stumble backward and fall over a bucket and a stack of rusting gardening tools I hadn’t seen under the sea of out-of-control weeds. With a loud clatter, I land on my backside.
It’s such a surprise; the terror from seconds ago disappears. I laugh until tears run down my face. The spell is broken. Rubbing my behind, I get up and look at the tree. Yes, it’s a tree, not a monster. A huge tree, but just a tree. Perhaps not just a tree. It’s the tree I’ve seen hundreds, no thousands of times. Not a tree similar to this one. No, the very tree right in front of me.
It is the tree of my recurring nightmares, right down to the cut-off branch about a yard above the ground, the knotted rope dangling down at the back, and the rickety old bench leaning against it.
“Elise, don’t you remember our tree?” I clearly hear a young child’s voice chiming silvery like a delicate bell. Where is this kid, and where the heck am I?
“It’s our tree, silly.”
My head shoots up. “Who’s talking? Show yourself. This isn’t funny.”
“Elise, don’t you remember?”
I know trees don’t speak to people or attack people, other than in Walt Disney movies. As so often, my imagination is running away with me. It’s actually a beautiful giant of the forest,
