Evan Tyler Kirkwood: No one comes down, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Klappentext

Before there was a house on Signal Hill at the summit of Magazine Mountain, there was a tree no axe would mark.

It stood alone above the spring, taller than the surrounding white oaks and bare even in summer. Lightning had opened its trunk from crown to root. The wound should have killed it. Instead, the exposed heartwood moved slowly beneath the split, tightening and loosening like muscle around a bone.

The first settlers called it the Widow Tree.

In 1796 a surveyor named Orrin Creed climbed the ridge with two chainmen and a Cherokee guide whose Christian name was John. The federal map showed unclaimed mountain. John refused to cross the spring.

"That ground keeps shapes," he said.

Creed laughed and drove a stake beside the tree.

Sap climbed the stake against gravity.

The chainmen watched it fill the carved survey numbers, blackening each groove until the wood appeared burned. Creed drew his hatchet and struck the trunk.

The blade entered without sound.

Somewhere beneath the mountain, a woman screamed.

Creed tore the hatchet free. A strip of pale cloth clung to its edge. It was wet with blood and embroidered with initials none of them recognized.

John left without collecting his pay.

The chainmen remained because Creed promised each man twenty acres. Before dark they cut three saplings and raised a lean-to beside the spring. At midnight the shelter acquired a fourth wall.

No one had built it.

Creed woke inside a narrow room. The chainmen were gone. Their bedrolls lay neatly folded on two chairs that had not existed before. A third chair waited beside the cold hearth.

From within the new wall, the missing men begged Creed to cut them out.

He swung the hatchet until dawn.

Each blow added another board.

Creed came down alone. He told Old Magazine the chainmen had deserted. No one believed him, but the promise of untouched timber outweighed two missing men.

Within a year a charcoal road reached the spring.

Every crew found more of the structure waiting: a stone hearth, a roof beam, a door facing downhill. Men claimed a hermit was building there at night. Others said the mountain raised the house the way earth raised mushrooms after rain.

Orrin Creed never returned.

His hatchet did.

It appeared embedded in the mercantile door one winter morning, its handle covered in living bark. Cut into the metal head were five words:

I HAVE ROOM FOR MORE.