Sometimes the world is a cruel, hellacious place where dreams splinter and dissolve, where circumstances change who you are and who you thought you would become. You realize that mortality is unfailingly delicate, and that all of your virtues cannot defile the crux of that basic truth.
I know, because I saw the hangman’s tree.
My name is Eldon Gershon and I am an officer with the Ashby City Police. I was at the end of my shift, patrolling the service road into Angler’s Cove – a little outpost four miles from the city of Ashby – on Thursday morning, December fourth. The Cove is the most handsome area of Maider Lake; I would have enjoyed my drive back to the station had it not been for the fog.
It was heavy. It beaded my cruiser with moisture and forced me to use my wipers. I slowed to 10 or 15 miles an hour and struggled to see the white line on the asphalt one car-length ahead of me. I jumped a foot in my seat when Jonathan Vilant ran out in front of my car.
I slammed on the brakes and the wheels squealed on the wet pavement.
“Jesus, Johnny!” I hollered as I got out of the car. “That’ll get you killed! What in hell’s the matter with you?”
John was hysterical. He ran toward me, grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me, screaming like a two-year old at the onset of a nosebleed.
“John,” I said and shrugged free of his hold. “John, it’s okay.” He stopped screaming and blinked as if seeing me for the first time. He looked a lot younger than 19 with tears spilling down his cheeks. “It’s okay.”
I sat him in the passenger seat, poured him the last of my coffee, got him a blanket from the trunk and asked him what had happened. He stared at his coffee for a long time, and when I was about to ask him again, he said, “The tree.”
“What about the tree?” I asked.
“They’re in the tree.”
“Who’s at the tree?”
He shook his head and said, “They’re in the tree.”
Johnny paled and beads of sweat appeared on his forehead. He twisted his mouth into a painful grimace and gulped at the air. He looked like a fish trying to breathe above water.
“Which tree, Johnny?” I asked.
“The Christmas tree,” he answered between shallow gulps. He was in shock and close to fainting.
“All of them,” he mumbled over and over as I helped him into the back seat where he could lay down. “All of them. All of them.”
The fog thinned from cottage cheese to smoky tendrils as I drove into The Cove. The town was still. I didn’t think anything of it, considering it was twenty after 4 in the morning. Johnny mumbled to himself in the back seat while I tried to avoid driving into the lake.
The Christmas tree was in the town center, steadied by two red ropes wrapped around the trunk and tied to metal spikes driven into the ground. In two days everyone would have gathered in their overcoats and mittens to watch the tree-lighting; they would have sipped hot chocolate and sung carols around a bonfire. Some people would have hung ornaments on the boughs or lit candles to honor the lives of family members or friends who had passed away. I should have been uplifted. But I wasn’t.
I got out of the car, turned on my flashlight, and walked to the tree. Johnny was right: they were all in the tree.
Eighteen people had lived in Angler’s Cove: two married couples with two children each; a single mother with two children; an elderly couple; a grandma; a man; a woman; and a young married couple. The wife’s name was Marianne. She was six months pregnant.
They were all hanging from the tree. Their wrists had been bound above their heads, tied into a slip-knot that was connected to the noose. I had seen that particular rope trick once before in a homicide eight years ago. As long as you can hold your weight with your arms you’re okay, but the moment you start to
lose strength the weight of your body is transferred to the noose, which slowly tightens until you are hanged.
All of my career I made the assumption that I was protecting the public, making a difference, that the uniform I wore gave me some kind of authority over carnage.
And there was the evidence to prove me wrong: eighteen dead on my watch.
Blackness crept into the edge of my sight, bringing with it suspended bubbles that glittered in front of my pupils. I couldn’t pass out. I didn’t know who had done this or where they were.
They could be creeping up on me right now, I thought, ready to wrap the rope
around my throat.
I dug my nails into my gums hard enough to draw blood. The pain was violent but it brought me back.
I radioed for back-up (which was delayed twenty minutes because of the fog), and leaned against the side of the cruiser, hardly able to believe what towered in front of me, trying not to weep and failing. Then I heard a shuffling.
I looked up and saw a man emerge from the fog. His features were distorted and he walked with a limp. His limbs twitched sporadically, like he had used a toaster as a tub toy. Something was inside of that man: tumors; demons; methamphetamines. . .
I didn’t know. But something was terribly wrong.
“Ashby Police!” I called and pulled my gun from its holster. “Identify yourself!” The man said nothing, only continued to lurch toward me. He held something in each hand. “Stop where you are! Drop your weapon!” I raised my gun and he threw something at me. I fired a shot but it went wild, striking something behind him.
He raised his other arm and, before I could fire another shot, I was struck in the forehead by a rock slightly larger than a golf ball.
I fell and hit my head hard against the pavement. My vision darkened and blurred, my ears rang and I could taste blood in my mouth. I lay on the ground, groaning. I tried to get up and I couldn’t. And then he was there: a blurred shoe in my shaded field of vision.
I could feel his foot on my hand. He toed the gun away from me and kicked it under the cruiser. A moment later he held me by the ankles and dragged me across the parking lot toward the tree. That’s when I passed out.
I awoke to a tugging on my wrists. My head hurt and my neck was sore. It felt like an anaconda had wrapped its rigid coils around my neck, tightening and constricting, breaking and squeezing until I finally stop twitching – like a hanged man.
That thought brought me back. I opened my eyes and tried to sit up but someone yanked on my wrists and I fell.
“You won’t be leaving so soon, will you officer?”
I looked up and saw the distorted face of the man who had brained me with a stone. There was no mercy in those eyes, only a darkness shifting just beneath their surface. He shook the rope that bound my wrists and curled around my throat. I tried to cry out but I had been gagged, and he laughed as I struggled.
“Calm down, officer,” he said and threw the rope over a branch. “You’ll be joining them soon enough. Keep struggling and it won’t be quick.”
Hand over hand he tugged the rope, pulling until my feet dangled three feet from the ground. The line tightened around my neck.
Suddenly I heard muffled shouting. My captor turned and looked into the night. He cocked his head to the side and listened. Johnny was screaming from the backseat of my car.
Locked inside, Johnny banged on the windows and called, trying to distract the man that was hanging me. It didn’t work.
The man smiled, secured my rope around the trunk of the tree and then lurched toward the car.
My muscles were shaking from holding my weight. I had to get down but my hands were bound and my gun was gone. Terrified, I lost all control and started squirming.
Calm down, I told myself. The rope is tightening! If you panic now you’ll never get down. Look around you. What do you
see? I looked up.
I saw a pair of mottled, swollen feet dangling 3 feet from my nose. They swayed back and forth in the tree; pine needles pattered my face. My frantic squirming shook the whole tree and all the bodies in it.
I looked into the night and saw my captor half-way to the cruiser, directly in line with the tree. Johnny screamed and made a futile effort to escape from the car.
I pumped my arms and started myself swinging. I had to bounce the limb, and with every spring the noose tightened. The cadavers rustled in the tree, issuing a rising
shish into the night as their pendulum-like motion hastened to match my own.
The tree wrenched forward and the red guide wire snapped. The spike jumped from the earth and into my leg. I would have screamed but I was gagged, the noose was tight, and I was blacking out. The tree began to fall and I rushed with it toward the ground.
I remember the hangman turning, seeing the tree speed toward him – his large, dinner-plate eyes. He tried to get out of the way but he was too twitchy to run. I closed my eyes and said a prayer, both for myself and for those in the tree. The last thing I recalled was the sound of his bones breaking under the crushing weight of the tree.
I woke up in the hospital. I was bruised, had a broken collar-bone and a bad rope-burn around my neck. The hole in my leg from the spike burned and itched, but I was alive.
Alive.
Johnny was waiting in my room. He told me that I was on the ground for five minutes before help arrived. “It’s a good thing they came when they did,” he said.
I agree – if they hadn’t I wouldn’t be telling this story.
I returned to the force after a month of recovery, determined to raise the standards of the slogan
To Protect and Serve.
The hangman’s name was Arden Rawlins. He was riddled with disease. The doctors found melanoma, leukemia and syphilis, just to name a few. His features were distorted because of broken boils and oozing ulcers.
I pray that whatever was in that man really were methamphetamines, tumors, and schizophrenia. I really do, because I saw the swirling darkness behind his eyes, and I’m seeing it now in the residents of Ashby.
Lord help me, I’m seeing it in my own.
Copyright ©2005, Deanne Boast All Rights Reserved