I clambered forward on hands and knees to where roots, bent like the knuckles of a giant hand, plunged into the dense, dry soil. The center of the tree’s trunk was split and slightly hollowed, its interior darkly shadowed.
“Whoa.” I used my flashlight to illuminate the grotto-like opening. Fresh gouges on the outer bark, close to the ground, confirmed a match with one of the photographs. Gouges meant claws—or thick nails—and perhaps a struggle, and it wasn’t clear to me on first look whether the struggle had been to get in or not get pulled out.
Leaning forward, the cool air hovering inside the trunk cast a wave of goosebumps over my neck and down my back. I hadn’t come to the orchard prepared to find severed heads, and I wasn’t prepared to come across the bodies formerly attached to the heads. If there had been a fight here…
Strands of hair and bits of faded fabric snagged on the interior surface confirmed that possibility. Tanner kneeled, his thigh pressed against mine, and added his light. Two-by-fours, roughly cut and splintered by use, framed a hole in the ground. Below that, a ladder made from thick branches disappeared into the inky darkness. I inched closer until my head and shoulders were inside the trunk. Shining the light over the ladder, I counted the horizontal pieces of wood. The top two were lightly gouged and the rest descended to a depth of at least ten or twelve feet.
“I think we should see where this goes,” I said, claustrophobia and childhood trauma be damned. I had a lead to follow, and Tanner was much too broad-shouldered and tall to maneuver through the opening. “Whatever was here—is here—feels benign, like their work is done.”
“How can you tell?” he asked.
I wiggled backward until I was fully out of the tree and could sit. A clump of sticky spider web, stretching from inside the trunk to the back of my head, set my skin to crawling. Tanner reached for my ponytail, removed the stringy mess, and wiped his fingers on the grass.
Pressing both hands to the ground, I closed my eyes and surfed for input. Every point of body-to-earth contact buzzed softly. “Bees. Happy humming. Like they’re getting ready for sleep at the end of a long work day.”
I lifted my palms, blinking at the transition and the oddness of not actually seeing any bees.
“Happy humming?” Tanner stared, his voice echoing the skepticism telegraphed by his posture.
“Yes.” I nodded hard, once, certain of what I’d felt, though uncertain of the why. “When I explored the area near the salt circle,” I continued, eager now to share because honestly, when was the last time I’d talked about my magic with anybody, “I felt nothing, like the ground had been…vacated. Here, it’s like the tree and the ground are happy, content. The feedback I get is these trees, this entire section of the orchard, is being cared for. Nourished.”
I was practically bouncing in place.
“So we have a section of the property that feels dead and a section that feels alive.”
“Very alive,” I agreed. “But I wouldn’t say dead, more like asleep.”
“Which could be a side effect of the catatonia spell.” He’d put it together before I did, but I was seconds away from the same conclusion. He continued, “I’m betting you’ll fight me on going into that hole, but would you agree to wait until the other agents are here? Please?”
I could give him that much, but joy, and one small success, made me ambitious. “In the meantime, I’d like to look more carefully at every other tree in the area.”
Tanner stood and offered his hand. “Agreed.”
He snapped a photo and noted the tree’s approximate location. I put my hands on the trunks of others nearby. We found two more with hollowed cores, both with wood-framed entrances to tunnels of similar depths. And both trees matched the photographs sent anonymously.
“Tanner, are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
We had meandered far out of sight and sound of the farmhouse and outbuildings. The apple trees in this section were gnarled to the point of appearing exhausted, unable to bear the weight of fruit-laden branches. None were completely dead, and most had at least a few branches—shiny green and optimistic—reaching straight to the sky from limbs propped by rotting crutches or stacks of large stones.
“These don’t look so healthy,” he offered.
“Or maybe they’re just very old. And tired.”
The terrain was rockier, and the angle of the afternoon sun created more shadows and shade. The bee-like humming I heard at the first tree had morphed into a steady drone of sound.
“A heartbeat,” I whispered. “A very slow heartbeat.” A very slow, melancholic heartbeat.
Tanner slid his thumb down my forearm and took hold of my wrist. “Calliope, stop. What did you just say?”
I didn’t turn to look at him, but I did stop, softening my knees and spreading my fingers, palms down. He released his grip. I blurred my gaze, loosened my joints until my body was a more fluid conduit of information and followed the beat. The ground gave a series of slow, rolling undulations and settled. I held my breath.
This was it; this was what I had been waiting for. The earth was talking to me again, and the beat was faint but present.
“Did you feel that?” I turned to face Tanner.
Gold sparks flickered at the tips of his hair, along the exposed skin of his arms, and around his eyes. “Yes.”
“It’s like this part of the orchard is alive, not just the trees and the bees but…everything.” Scanning my memories, I could find nothing that mirrored this moment. At least nothing I could verbalize. But I’d felt this before, and that achy, uninhabited place in my heart leapt. Whether in hope or recognition, I wasn’t sure.
More faint reverberations made their way from the ground into my legs.
