THE BLOOD GROVE

THE BLOOD GROVE
by Tom Gordon

Horseshoe, Montana, 1870. The slashing and whipping blizzard-wind of the Montana mountains blustered with a ferocity akin to that of a starving scavenger, nipping and biting at any and all exposed flesh, with each rupturing gust accompanied by an almost conscious desire to draw blood and strip bones clean. Weathering this bloodthirsty blizzard was Sheriff Jan Nilsson, his heavy coat collar and thick woollen scarf pulled up to cover his neck and a hefty fur-lined hat perched atop his head to protect him from the elements. He moved through the snow with an awkward gait, his manoeuvres slow and precise in an attempt to offset the eight-inch thick snowfall of the day previous, that’d since hardened in the freezing night’s cold.

Despite his hardy Nordic heritage, he found himself much more sensitive to the cold than he was when he’d left Sweden, a likely consequence of his six-year tenure as a deputy in the New Sweden Township, Minnesota, a place that despite its namesake had ironically tame winters. He’d leapt at the opportunity to step up as Sheriff of the mountain town of Horseshoe, in Northern Montana, a decision made due to the deep feelings of homesickness he’d felt since moving out west; he’d missed the snow terribly and felt the warmth was making him soft. The people up here were nice enough, even if they kept calling him ‘John’, regardless of his efforts to correct them.

On his treacherous climb up towards the Tennemans’ cottage, he wondered what’d made the previous sheriff resign his post in the dead of winter… in his experience, most workers, no matter their trade, held firm until spring came about, when the cogs of industry began to turn once again and new jobs were aplenty. The Tennemans had, with their hats in their hands, politely pleaded for his aid regarding a plethora of canine incursions on their land, and he’d set a multitude of snares around their property during the afternoon, the same method he’d used to discourage a thieving pack of coyotes from pilfering food stores way back in his deputy days.

In his desperation to make a good impression on the locals, he’d also foolishly promised to wander up the hill to visit during the evening, a task that was now proving incredibly arduous in the currently treacherous weather conditions he was faced with. Even with that in mind, the sting of breaking his word so early into his tenure would be felt far keener than the icy, withering winds that clawed at the exterior of his coat could do. With his mind wandering so far from his corporeal vicinity, he found himself pleasantly surprised to be treading below the apple tree at the border of the Tennemans’ land. The sudden reprieve from the savage elements he’d found beneath the branches caused him to pause in his tracks, surmising that perhaps after heading so far out of town on such a terrible night he’d earned some form of respite and he leaned against the trunk of the tree to catch his breath.

He cast his gaze upward towards the apple boughs, the fruit far above hung almost motionless despite the intentions of the hostile weather, with only the furthest pieces of fruit shaking beneath the assault, and even then, only slightly. He reached up above his head and plucked a solitary fruit from the branch, feeling that his excursion required some reward beyond the thanks of a remote family, yet not a moment after his fingers clasped around the fruit did he sense something wrong with it. The skin of the fruit had a rotten softness to it, as though he’d snatched it from the ground beneath his feet rather than fresh from a branch overhead, and as he raised it in front of his vision he grimaced at the sight of its white-pinkish hue. Earlier the same day he’d been offered an apple by the Tenneman woman, as shiny and green as the apples in the stories, and this one was as far removed from that as it could be.

With a breath long-held, he swept his thumb across its surface and tossed it to the ground at his feet in shock, for with the apple in his grasp he’d not only felt movement within it, but upon its skin he’d watched it bristle with goosebumps in reaction to his cold fingertips. Exasperated, he continued his long march to the house, the scent of iron permeating his nostrils as he crushed one of the living fruits beneath his boot, his spartan dinner threatening to rise from the depths of his stomach at not only the stench, but from both the meaty squelch and subsequent crunch that echoed out from beneath his stride. In the steps that followed, and with the smell fading away into nothingness behind him, he began to question whether what he’d seen had been real at all, rationalising such a hallucination as a consequence of the poor sleep he’d been having lately, and the nightmares besides. To him, it didn’t make sense any other way, and no matter how desperately he tried to convince himself of the elaborate fiction he’d conjured in his mind, he refused to look over his shoulder to verify it.

The remainder of his journey was mercifully uneventful, the only thing of note he’d witnessed as he approached was a complete lack of tracks of any kind leading up to the orchard, canine or otherwise, bringing to question whether or not the owners had been honest regarding the apparent threat they’d been faced with. With newfound conviction, Sheriff Nilsson allowed it to spur him on towards their home, and though his speed hadn’t, his motivation to get to the bottom of this situation had substantially increased. His first case as Horseshoe’s acting Sheriff, this’d be the one that created the pattern, and he had no intention of starting with a failure. With the lights on inside the Tenneman farmhouse, he knocked with an urgency to not only find the truth behind their claims but, to a lesser extent, to also get out of the cold.

“Sheriff John, come in!” exclaimed Nancy Tenneman, causing the Sheriff to instantly bristle, a gesture that was thankfully masked in its entirety by the atrocious weather outside. Without any hesitation beyond his dislike of being wrongly named, he entered the abode and lingered in the hallway, turning away any and all offers of hospitality. The conversation was primarily small-talk, but he managed to get the truth out of her husband, Jerry, when he finally deigned to join the discussion. After some prodding, the husband admitted that there hadn’t been any canine sightings, only that their two cows had completely disappeared over the last couple nights, one then the other, leaving no trace behind. Intrigued, Jan wondered if they’d had any other such goings on recently, but apparently it had all started when they cut down the second apple tree in the yard, the older of the two, because the apples it’d grown were smaller with each passing year. The previous owner had allegedly asked that neither tree be cut down, as, in his words, ‘they belong together’.

With everything firmly secured in his mind, Jan walked out on the porch to say farewell and the Tennemans followed him out, stepping out onto the snowy ground to see him off, a very neighbourly gesture to be sure, but they’d given him a lot to think about. The moment he turned away after a polite wave, he was met with an awful cacophony of creaking, followed shortly after by two blood curdling screams. He turned to face the Tennemans and watched, helplessly, as they were engulfed by the very earth beneath their feet, the ground shifting and reshaping as if it were water. It was as though hell itself had opened its gaping jaws and gobbled them up, crunching them between wooden teeth purely for the pleasure of doing so, their screams barely discernible above the howling wind and muffling mud that’d swallowed them. He fumbled clumsily for the revolver at his hip, but by the time he’d felt the grip in his fingers and the weight in his wrist, the Tennemans were long gone, and an eerie silence had fallen over the orchard, a silence that not even the roaring wind of seconds before would dare break.

He fled from the hill as fast as his legs would carry him, and a little further beyond that, his egress far removed from the careful and considerate method he’d used to climb up. Even in his panic, he made sure to circumvent the apple tree entirely, and he didn’t stop until he’d almost made it into town where he fell to his knees from the exhaustion of it all, realising he’d dropped his gun in his haste to depart the orchard. The cold didn’t bother him so much anymore, but what he’d seen up there? It wasn’t natural, he knew something dark had overtaken the orchard and something had killed the Tennemans, he trusted his eyes and he knew what he saw, but it was unlikely anyone in the town was going to believe him if he told them. No, he needed to strategise, but properly, and to do so he immediately scampered into his office and made himself a cup of coffee by the lantern’s light, his constantly shaking hands adding an unnecessary difficulty to the process.

He recalled a story he was told as a boy, of elves who lived in trees and reacted harshly when their homes were demolished, bringing complete ruin to any farmers disrespectful or stupid enough to do treat them poorly. It was then he remembered something significant from the stories of his youth, a minor detail that caused him, with renewed vigour, to march across the room and snatch up the book of old stories he had inherited from his father with a promise they’d continue to be told, and thumbed through it looking for the exact passage he had recalled. He wondered if his mind had truly been claimed by desperation, contemplating how he was currently flipping through a book of fables to uproot a curse hanging over a mountain town in the middle of a blizzard: he felt like a character from the book’s pages himself, rather than an outsider seeking answers within them. It was then he found it – The tale of The Mother and Father Tree.

It is said that when two trees have been proximal to one another for a lengthy period of time, that their roots are bound together and they become a singular one, this occurrence is considered incredibly rare and is rumoured to bring incredible and overwhelming fortune to the farmers who maintain the land around it, as a means of the tree showing gratitude to those who tend to it. However, should one of the trees be felled either by man or by nature, the land itself mourns its loss, and the land upon which it remains must be either abandoned or a sapling from the tree’s own family must be reunited with its parent, lest it be cursed forever more.

His mind was a raging ocean of worry and fear as he re-read the words for a third time, shaking his head dismissively at the notion that the land could be abandoned. All he could think about was the heroic reception he’d receive upon freeing Horseshoe from the Curse of the Hell Tree, and how the town and himself would go down in history for his deeds. With pride at the forefront of his mind, he rose from his seat and began digging through old town records – if he could find someone who had descended from the previous owners and set up an orchard nearby, he’d be well on the way to lifting the curse.

The sun had risen by the time he’d found a name, a young couple named Graham and Elizabeth Nolan who had customarily taken a sapling of their own from the Tenneman’s orchard back when it belonged to the original Nolans. By the time he emerged from his office, it was already day, and he swiftly saddled his horse and set off for the young Nolans’ orchard, determined to save his town. Deep down he was thankful he didn’t have his gun anymore, he knew he was desperate, and a desperate armed man is a dangerous thing in the wild west, history meant he knew that all too well.

It took him a solid day’s ride to return with a seedling from one of the trees descended from the old apple tree, and if the ascent to the Tenneman orchard had been gruelling before, it was more so now, even if accompanied by a premature sense of relief at potentially putting the curse to rest. He hadn’t seen a single other person in Horseshoe on his return, nor on his way up to the orchard, and even from the vantage point the hill provided, he still saw nobody. The wind whistled hauntingly as he approached the apple tree, his fingers clasped tightly around the little case within which the sapling resided. He bowed in reverence before the branches and boughs of the ancient tree, it’s limbs twisting and coiling around themselves in ways they hadn’t previously, in a mess of criss-crossed and tangled branches that gave an air of the conflict to the place, as if the very tree was in a deathly struggle with itself in its blind rage toward those who wronged it.

He fell to his knees in prostration and flipped the lid of the box open, believing that in some small way, the gesture may allow the tree to witness his sincerity. He felt a solitary tendril rise from the soil and snow beneath him and watched as it reached towards the sapling, his lips curling into a smile at the prospective reunion. Maybe he’d have to add this tale to his father’s book of fables, he thought, but the speculation would not last. In a sudden and painful movement, the tendril had wrapped itself tightly around Jan’s wrist, the jagged edges of it digging hungrily into his flesh, with more rising from deep within the soil to share in its feast. In no time at all, Sheriff Jan Nilsson was screaming and writhing beneath the grip of the growing multitude of roots that’d come burrowing to the surface to constrict and bind him. He took a breath to continue screaming but found he could no longer, for even his mouth was now held closed by the jagged and ravenous roots of the demonic tree.

His knees were forced painfully into his chest as he felt himself slowly descending into the soil and snow, the ravenous roots tearing the sinew from his bones, peeling the flesh from his body and draining the blood from his veins with the ferocity of their constriction. In his final moments he glimpsed the remains of his townsfolk, spread far, wide and deep among the soil beneath the tree, all consumed by the overwhelming rage and unrelenting hunger of the blood grove. He glanced up into the midday sky one final time before the ground had reformed around him, and in complete darkness he was torn asunder and devoured by the very earth he’d endeavoured to purify.

Horseshoe would fade from all maps and records in time, and those who had survived the blood grove’s banquet would neither return nor speak of what they’d witnessed, men, women and children swallowed whole by the earth itself, their screams echoing from beneath the soil. It is said that high in the Montana mountains, the blood grove remains, and the years have done little to dull its hunger. If you find yourself up in Montana in search of gold, don’t trouble yourself by setting up camp under an apple tree, because you might find yourself joining the residents of Horseshoe beneath it, for all time.

Fiction © Copyright Tom Gordon
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay

Tom Gordon has had a passion for the written word for as long as he can remember, in both its reading and its writing. Digitally self-publishing a short novel in his late teens enlightened him to the incredible joy in sharing one’s works with others, and seeks to do so for as long as his fingers continue to work. He looks forward to creating and sharing with the writing community, and can be found over at @TomGordonWrites or in his apartment in Sweden.

And no, the Steven King novel “The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon” wasn’t written about him.