The Man in the Tree Read online

  THE MAN IN THE TREE

  Larry put the truck in gear and drove around the curve of the loop.

  "What's that?" the giant asked.

  "A hopper. Where they load coal, I guess." As they drove under it,

  something white flashed toward them, a leaping figure, arms waving. Larry

  hit the brakes; the engine died. He had just time to see that the pale

  figure was a dummy, a scarecrow with a face, jerking and swinging in

  front of the windshield. Then the cab shook to an insane roar; the

  figure was gone behind a tumbling stream of darkness that cascaded past

  the windshield.

  "Oh, God!" said Larry. "We're going to be buried alive . . . "

  Berkley books by Damon Knight

  THE MAN IN THE TREE

  THE WORLD AND THORINN

  DAMON KNIGHT

  THE

  MAN

  IN THE

  TREE

  BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK

  THE MAN IN THE TREE

  A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with

  the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Berkley edition/January 1984

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1984 by Damon Knight.

  Cover illustration by Carl Lundgren.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,

  by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  200 Madison Avenue, New York. New York 10016.

  ISBN: 0-425-06006-3

  A BERKLEY BOOK ™ TM 757,375

  The name "BERKLEY" and the stylized "B" with design are

  trademarks belonging to The Berkley Publishing Group.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  I have taken some liberties with geography in this

  novel, but Dog River, Oregon, exists, although it is

  no longer called by that name. There really is such a

  place as the Lost Forest, and it really is not on most

  maps.

  I wish to acknowledge my debt to the authors of

  two books not mentioned in the text: Jesus the

  Magician, by Morton Smith (Harper. 1978), and The

  Trial and Death of Jesus, by Haim Cohn (Harper,

  1971).

  D.K.

  To

  AMIT and MAGGIE GOSWAMI

  The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye

  slew and hanged on a tree.

  Acts, 5:30

  Now I Joseph was walking, and I walked not. And

  I looked up to the air and saw the air in amazement.

  And I looked up to the pole of the heaven and saw it

  standing still, and the fowls of the heaven without

  motion. And I looked upon the earth and saw a dish

  set, and workmen lying by it, and their hands were in

  the dish: and they that were chewing chewed not, and

  they that were lifting the food lifted it not, and they

  that put it to their mouth put it not thereto, but the

  faces of all of them were looking upward. And

  behold there were sheep being driven, and they went

  not forward but stood still; and the shepherd lifted

  his hand to smite them with his staff, and his hand

  remained up. And I looked upon the stream of the

  river and saw the mouths of the kids upon the water

  and they drank not. And of a sudden all things

  moved onward in their course.

  Book of James, or Protevangelium, XVIII:2

  Chapter One

  When I was young we were giants' captives.

  They stripped us, tortured us with facecloths,

  Left us to endure alone

  The moonwashed branches on the windows

  In the long clock-ticking night.

  We voyaged deep under that black ocean

  Where Earth eats her daughters in silence,

  And always returned. By day we had red-jam smiles,

  Breadcrumb fingers, corn hair.

  In our pockets were stones, gray string, nails

  Scavenged as we went. We knew the secret

  Undersides of things, the roofs of tables.

  Only insects were smaller than ourselves.

  We caught locusts and made them spit tobacco,

  Poured dust on pismires, puffed ladybirds away.

  We dreamed of being smaller still: built pebble fences,

  Roads in dirt, peered with one eye

  Under green blades. All Eden was

  Our afternoon. It was the time before

  They taught us time: before we knew.

  --Gene Anderson

  Before he was born he remembered the darkness and the light. The darkness was the color of old blood, and in it there were drifting shapes that were not stars.

  He remembered the doctor's face -- he had plump cheeks and a ragged black mustache -- and a voice saying: "My gosh, he's a big one, isn't he?"

  When he was four, he told his mother some of the things he could remember; later he heard her saying to his father, "What an imagination Gene has." But she was thinking, What a strange child.

  By the time he learned to walk, he was already too large for infants' clothing, and his mother had to buy shoes for him at the boys' store. His father, who was worried about money then, said that he had taken up the wrong trade; he should have been a cobbler.

  The Andersons lived in a small town called Dog River in northern Oregon. It was the only world Gene knew, and he did not understand then how pure the air and water were, how blue the sky. From their yard he could see two snowcapped mountains, Hood and Adams.

  From the time Gene was very young he could glimpse the other worlds that were all around him; in some of these worlds, things were just the same as they were here, and in some they were different. He was not more than two when he found out how to reach with his mind into another world and turn it. He could put a marble on the floor, for instance, and then reach into another world where the marble was in a slightly different place, and bring it into this world: then there would be two marbles. He was four when he first realized that other people could not do this.

  One afternoon he was turning somersaults on the lawn with Zelda Owens' little brother Danny, mesmerized by the stiff grass-blades against his forehead, the green sun-warmed smell, and the surprising way the world turned to thump him on the back. Danny was looking for something in the grass, tearing out big clumps with his fingers. He was crying. Gene asked him what the matter was, and he said he had lost his nickel.

  "Why don't you make it come back?" Gene asked. Danny did not seem to understand; he kept on beating the lawn with his hands, pulling up grass and dirt. Gene gave him a nickel to make him stop crying, and then Danny said it was his nickel and that Gene had stolen it, and ran into the house to tell his mother.

  Later that day, on Zelda's porch, Zelda and Petie Everett were playing "Can you do this?" Zelda could wriggle her ears and cross her eyes; Petie could make a noise like a cork by putting his finger into his mouth and pulling it out again, and he could bend his thumb back until it touched his arm. Gene could not do any of these things, but he said, "Can you do this?"

  A beetle was crawling across the warped yellow boards of the porch. Gene knelt and put his finger in front of it to make it change direction. Then he reached into the shadows and found the place where it could just as easily have gone the other way. Gene turned it there, and then there were two beetles. He turned the beetle again, and now there were three, crawling away from each other as fast as they could.

 
; Zelda and Petie were crouching beside him. Petie said, "Aw, that ain't nothing. You had them in your hand."

  They argued about this, and Gene lost because he was outnumbered. When he left, Zelda and Petie were shouting, "Liar, liar, your pants on fire!"

  One day when Gene was five, after a hard morning rain, he was sailing walnut boats in the gutter. When he tired of this, he brought a bucket full of dirt from the garden and made dams. The mud washed away, but he built the dams up again with twigs and straw, and sent his boats down the stream to watch them tip over the dams and spin in the whirlpools.

  A boy he didn't know came down the street carrying a long stick. Before Gene realized what he was doing, he had broken one of the dams. "Don't do that," Gene said, but already the boy was breaking another one.

  Gene got up and rushed at him; he was the taller, although the other boy was two years older. The boy jabbed him with his stick and danced away; Gene could not get near enough to hit him. The boy broke the last of the dams and then hit him with the stick again; Gene was crying with anger and pain. At that moment he felt with his mind where the nerves and muscles of the other boy's arm were; he reached in and turned them in a way he had never done before. The stick fell. Gene picked it up and began to beat the other boy, who ran away crying.

  That evening the boy's father brought him to Gene's house with his right arm in a sling; he said the boy's arm was paralyzed because Gene had hit him on the shoulder. He was very angry, and shouted at Gene's father. Gene denied everything, but he was frightened, and he reached in again to make the boy's arm well. When the father saw him moving his arm, his face changed, and he took the boy away.

  Gene's parents were nearly the same height, but his father was squarely built, dark and muscular, whereas his mother was small-boned and had thick auburn hair, now turning gray. Her skin was very pale and fine, and she had bright blue eyes. Gene was their only child. She told him, weeping, about her two stillborn daughters, and he used to imagine that he would meet them in heaven. His birth had been so difficult, she told him, that she could never have another baby. He felt guilty about this, and resolved to make it up to her by being a good son, but he forgot this whenever he was angry with her.

  Gene's father was a carpenter; he had a shop in the garage where Gene often sat and watched him work. Gene loved the aromatic smells of cut pine, glue and shellac, and he liked to watch the clean white shavings curl out under the plane. When he was still very young his father began letting him help with small tasks, carrying boards from the stack, measuring, clamping pieces together to be glued. He let Gene use the hand-saw and play at nailing boards together. One day when he was busy, he said, "Cut this piece eighteen and seven-eighths inches for me, Gene, can you do that?" Feeling proud and honored, the boy measured the board and sawed it, but when he brought it to his father, it was too short; he had made a mistake in the measurement. "Well, that's ruined," his father said, and threw the piece down.

  Gene's eyes filled with tears. "I can fix it," he said.

  "No, you can't." His father went to the other side of the room for another board.

  Gene picked up the rejected piece and laid it on the worktable beside the frame his father was making. He reached into the shadows to a place where he had cut it correctly; it jumped a little and was longer. "Look, Dad," he said, "it's all right."

  At first Gene's father would not come; when Gene insisted, he looked at the board impatiently, then stared at it, picked it up, and finally measured it with his steel rule. He knew it was the same board because of the two knots near one end. There was something in his mind that he would not let himself think.

  "It's all right, isn't it?" Gene asked. He was afraid, and didn't know why.

  "Yes, it is," Gene's father said slowly. He rubbed his eyes with his hands. "I must be getting tired. Gene, you go on out and play."

  From these things he learned that his power was somehow dangerous and shameful, and he kept it a secret. For a long time he did not even use it when he was alone, unless he had lost some toy and wanted to bring it back. Once or twice it happened by itself, and that disturbed him.

  He often daydreamed that he was a magical changeling, a prince given away in infancy, and that someday his real father would come to take him away to his kingdom, or perhaps would touch Gene on the forehead while he was asleep, conferring on him some power greater than he could imagine.

  In the first grade he was a foot taller than any of the other children. The desks were too small for him; he had to sit sideways with his legs in the aisle. On the first day, the teacher gave all the children strips of purple and yellow paper and showed them how to make paper chains, first a purple link, then a yellow one. Gene liked the yellow ones best, and made his chain all of yellow. A girl across the aisle showed it to the teacher and said, "He's doing it wrong."

  Later they were coloring in their books; there was a picture of a rabbit; Gene colored its fur blue, as the teacher had told them, but he made the insides of its ears yellow instead of pink. When the teacher came by to look at their work, the same girl said, "Look, he's doing it wrong again. He can't do anything right, can he?"

  The teacher said, "That's all right, Dolores; he can do it that way if he wants to," but when she was gone the girl stuck out her tongue. Gene was angry, and turned all her crayons to yellow ones. When she saw them, she called to the teacher that he had taken her crayons. Gene denied it, and the teacher brought her other crayons, but as soon as her back was turned Gene changed them to yellow too. She began to scream, and the teacher moved Gene all the way across the room. From that day on, the other children understood that he was a troublemaker. They began calling him "Big Feet," then just "Feet." They were not brave enough to attack him, because he was so much bigger, but they threw stones at him from behind, and when he chased them they scattered, shouting, "Fee-eet, Fee-eet, can't sit in his sea-eat."

  After a few weeks of this he discovered an overgrown corner of the playground where he could lie hidden, and then he spent every recess there, pulling sweet grass stems and sucking the nectar. He daydreamed often of sending himself into another world, but his power was not strong enough for that: the largest thing he had ever turned from one world into another was the piece of wood for his father, and afterward he had had a headache. Even with smaller things, if he used his power too often, he became weak and dizzy.

  After school and on weekends life was better; there was a group of neighborhood children of mixed ages, none of whom were Gene's classmates, and they did not mind his being tall. In the winter they went sledding and had snowball fights, and made snowmen that melted little by little until they were only slumped mounds in their circles of grass. In the long summer evenings they played King of the Hill, Red Light and hide-and-seek. He never forgot the scent of the tall lilacs in the dusk, and the lonesome sound of "All-ee-all-ee-out's in free."

  Long after the other children had left it behind, he was still engrossed by the world of small things. There were different sorts of grasses that were good to suck: one kind slipped with a sliding sweetness out of its sheath, and another would only break. There was a weed growing close to the ground that bore tiny grayish-green buttons, and these buttons were also good to eat. He learned to stretch a grass-blade tight between his thumbs pressed together as if in prayer, and then by blowing into the hollow between the first and second joints of his thumbs, to make a shattering squawk. Noises could be made with the bitter milky stems of dandelions, too, and with the stalks of green onions.

  He never had a tricycle, because by the time he was old enough he was too big. When he was seven his parents gave him a bicycle, and all that summer he explored the country roads across the river and into the hills.

  Often he left his bicycle beside the road and walked up a little way into the woods. When he sat down with the trees all around him, he had a curious feeling that they were aware of him as he was of them, or at least that there was some intelligence watching him. This feeling disturbed him, and he ne
ver stayed long in the woods, but he kept on going there because he needed solitude.

  Even in town, however, there were quiet places where he could be alone. One of them was the long tree-shaded lawn below the library, where he sat for hours reading books of fairy tales. The library had a set of Grimm, with old-fashioned engraved illustrations that were all the more mysterious because they were so dark and badly printed. He avoided stories about giants -- they were always monsters, to be outwitted or killed by the hero -- but he liked stories about the Little People, their trickiness and magical powers, and he liked the "Brownie" books of Palmer Cox. The verses were labored and dull, but he never tired of the illustrations; each one was full of hundreds of tiny figures, all doing different things, but all together. His daydreams were of secret caverns under the earth, hidden treasures, and a mysterious fellowship.

  Because he was growing so fast, his clothes seldom fitted; either his wrists and ankles stuck out and his shirts bound him across the chest, or, if he had new clothes, the sleeves hung over his hands and his pants-legs had to be rolled up. He used this as an excuse not to go to church with his parents, but there were other reasons. The first time he went to Sunday school, the lesson was about David and Goliath, and after that, for a while, he had a new nickname. The hard pews in church made his bottom ache, and he did not understand the purpose of all that varnished wood, the tall organ-pipes, the minister in his pulpit talking on and on, the bad singing.