Chris Grabenstein - The Crossroads

“I want to make sure Mr. Mandica did a good job. Come on.”

They left Zipper sleeping peacefully in the car and headed up into the trees.

In the darkness they could make out two new paths of raw clay cut through the underbrush: the result of a backhoe’s heavy tank treads trampling down everything in their way. A huge crater was scooped into the rocky soil where the oak tree had once stood. The stump was gone.

“Wow,” Zack said, staring into the gaping pit. “It must’ve had a ton of roots.”

The hole was at least a dozen feet deep, twenty feet wide. Its sides were scraped clean.

“I think this tree was evil,” Judy said. “I really do.”

Zack nodded his agreement. “Yeah. Me too.”

“Shoot.” Judy saw something on the far side of the trench.

“What?”

“A root. See? Near the top? Call me crazy, but I want that thing outta here!”

Judy slid down the stony slope. Zack slid after her. They worked their way around to what had to be the last remnant of the towering tree. Judy grabbed hold of the muddy runner and yanked. It wouldn’t budge.

“Let me help you.” Zack scraped away dirt until he exposed enough root to give them good handgrips.

“On three,” Zack said. He and Judy anchored their feet against the bank. “Ready? One, two—”

“What do you two think you’re doing?”

They whipped around.

Eberhart.

He looked sickly. Feeble. But he was still there, teetering at the edge of the giant hole.

“Pull, Zack!” Judy shouted.

Eberhart schussed down the far side of the pit.

“Pull hard!” They yanked. The root was a long, craggy rope.

“Let go!” Eberhart moaned. “Leave me alone!”

The root started popping up through the topsoil.

“Keep pulling!” They leaned back, wrenched harder. The root kept snapping up, cutting a narrow furrow nine feet long.

“I’ll kill you both!”

Finally, the last sinewy strands sprang free. Zack and Judy flew backward, slammed against the hard dirt wall behind them.

All they could hear was their own hard, steady breathing. Zack smelled something foul. Rotten eggs.

“P.U.”

“Yeah,” Judy said. “Sulphur. What they used to call brimstone.”

“Look!” Zack pointed to a puddle of murky sewer water sizzling in the bottom of the pit. It looked like some kind of oily acid bath bubbling in a six-inch circle of sludge. Only the bubbles weren’t popping up; they were being sucked down into the ground.

Judy and Zack crabbed up the slope as fast as they could. Their skittering feet sent pebbles and dirt showering down into the hole. When they made it to the crater’s rim, Judy, her adrenaline pumping, flopped backward and stared up at the stars. She took in a deep breath and tried to stop her heart from leaping out of her chest.

“Wow,” she said. “Okay. That was exciting. I think, you know, he’s gone. Finally. For good. This is officially over . Mr. Eberhart won’t be coming back. You know, I read this article once about how in olden days they used to bury their criminals near a crossroads so the ghosts of the damned wouldn’t be able to find their way back into town, in case, you know, they ever rose up to seek revenge like Mr. Eberhart obviously—”

Zack nudged Judy. “Uh, Judy? I don’t think it’s over.”

“Howdy, pardner! Mrs. J.”

Davy Wilcox stood, hands on his hips, at the far side of the crater.

“Hey,” Zack said.

“Hello, Davy,” Judy said. “Good to see you again.”

There was a noise behind Davy. A rustle of leaves. Three nuns stepped out from the shadows, their black habits fluttering in the breeze.

“You done good, Zack,” Davy said. “Ripped out every inch of that galdern tree.”

“Well, Judy helped.”

“Bless you both,” said Sister Elizabeth.

“Thanks, son,” said a handsome man in what looked like an air force uniform.

“Davy?” Zack asked. “Who are all these people?”

“Well, them there are some real swell nuns. And that feller in the snazzy uniform, that’s Bud. He’s the bus driver.”

“That’s the gentleman who helped me change my flat tire.” Judy waved at Bud. Bud snapped her back a salute.

“We’re behind schedule, folks,” Bud said. “Time to board up.”

Zack saw a pale blond girl dressed all in white.

“Davy?” Zack whispered. “That girl. She’s a ghost, right?”

“Yep, but don’t say nothin’. She don’t even know she’s dead—keeps trying to hitch a ride into town so she can go to a summer social!”

The crowd grew.

“I told ’em, Zack—said you were the man for the job!”

A locomotive beacon of light shone from the dead cornfield on the far side of the highway. Zack could see a silver Greyhound bus glowing from the inside out, as if it were a Japanese lantern and someone had jammed a five-hundred-billion-watt bulb inside it.

“Step lively, folks,” the bus driver said as he marched down the hill.

Several passengers followed him across the highway and into the cornfield. In the crossroads, beneath the blinking stoplight, Zack saw a motorcycle cop acting like a school crossing guard.

“Say, now, where’s the tree house?”

It was the aluminum-siding salesman.

“Move along, Mr. Billings,” Davy said. Billings tipped his fedora and headed down the hill.

“Move along, children. Two by two. Move along.”

Down in the road, Zack could see the scrawny preacher leading his Bible campers toward the light. Zack realized he had never seen any of the children smile before.

Now Zack saw six soldiers stumbling around in the cornfield. The Rowdy Army Men.

“Well, I reckon I best be going, too, pardner.”

“Wait!” said Zack. “This is too weird. I just saw the Rowdy Army Men and those Bible campers and—”

“They’re all the folks what died on account of that fool Eberhart in the flip-top Ford. But don’t you worry. Ol’ Clint is headin’ out of town, too.” He looked down into the pit. “Only I suspect he’s headin’ in the opposite direction.”

A bell pealed in the distance.

“Wait,” said Zack. “Where’s everybody going?”

“Where they shoulda gone fifty years back. But they was marooned down here on account of the memorial.”

“The tree? I don’t understand. Do you, Judy?”

“Maybe. Sort of.”

“Zack,” Davy said, “some folks will tell you that ghosts walk this earth on account of their unfinished business. But these folks? They were stuck here on account of someone else’s unfinished business.”

“Who?”

“Miss Gerda Spratling.”

“She, uh, left town, too,” Judy offered. “I think she and Mr. Eberhart have been…reunited.” She nodded toward the bottom of the pit. “Permanently.”

“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” said Davy. “She made the hour of his death so dadgum sacred, she made these other folks prisoners to it, too. Of course, me and my pops helped.”

“How?” asked Zack.

“Her tree was on our land and Pops saw no harm in letting her decorate it up if it helped her grieve. Me? I let her keep at it all them years. I didn’t know she was trapping souls with it until I checked in upstairs myself: Gerda Spratling couldn’t move on, so neither could they.”

Davy fixed his gaze on the intersection of Highway 31 and County Route 13.

“I figure when you come to a crossroads, you have a choice: right turn, left turn, straight ahead. Or you can just pull over to the side of the road and call it quits. But if you’ve got a good stretch of road up ahead and someone fun to travel it with, I say why stay stuck in a galdern ditch?”