The Good Tree

Part Four: The Good Tree

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.

Matthew 7:6

---

There are things you don't realise how much you take for granted until they're missing, Yvonne was thinking. Little things, for the most part. Her iPod was one thing she was painfully aware of being absent – Yvonne could have counted the number of times she was without it on her bus trips to and from work and wouldn't have needed to start using the fingers on her second hand. Not being able to focus on the music or the words only she could hear forced her to focus on other things around her.

Things that only I can hear anyway, so how much different is it really? She tried to think in humour, but it just made her breath hitch and feel short. Assurance of sanity was another of those little things you only missed when it was missing.

"Do you know the way to San José? I've been away so long, I may go wrong and lose my way."

She finally arrived at the stairwell of her apartment building, deeply thankful for having her wand and further thankful that the unlocking spell was one she was able to perform without speaking. Where other wizards had to rely on brute magical force to unlock doors, she understood how a lock worked, how a key lined up tumblers, so she only needed a small nudge in comparison. A little Muggle knowledge, applied the right way, could go a long way.

"Don't stand, don't stand so, don't stand so close to me..."

Yvonne was still singing to herself, a little louder now that she was alone. She had exhausted her supply of well-known songs through the bus ride home and had filled the rest of the trip with advertising jingles, theme songs to TV shows from back when TV shows still had theme songs, nursery rhymes and other scraps of schoolyard doggerel. Between the bus station and the stairs to her apartment, she had been reduced to recalling pieces of songs that were little more than the title and a couple of lines for buffering.

"With or without you, with or with-out you, oh, I can't liii-ive... with or without you."

It was a small measure of comfort – it kept away the silence which was always eerie in the small hours of empty places, and it gave her something to occupy her mind, since otherwise she might have realised that a lone, trembling voice singing just above a whisper in the night sounded eerie in itself.

"Jeremiah was a bullfrog," she breathed without tone, almost a croak, ha ha ha, "was a good friend of mine..." She looked over her shoulder just before she reached her door. Still alone. "I never understood a single word he said, but I helped him a-drink his wine..." She pulled her wand from her pocket, ready to open the door, ready to seal herself in her apartment, ready to shower and pour a drink and whatever else she had to do to fall asleep.

"And he always had some mighty fine..."

Her door was open.

Not open in a way that you could see into her apartment. Not even in a way that a person walking past might notice it was open. Yet it was open, just the smallest of fractions. It was her habit to wrench the door shut in the mornings when she left – something in the frame had expanded somewhere and prevented it from shutting smoothly, and without that little extra tug to pull it into place, it wouldn't shut and certainly wouldn't lock. She was certain she had locked her door this morning – it was part of her morning ritual, and every time she remembered she hadn't fixed it yet and really should get around to doing it, the thought that maybe she wouldn't actually get the door fixed and instead have it stay as a reminder to lock up before leaving went through her mind.

It occurred to Yvonne that she wasn't the only person in the world who could open doors without keys, and a chill went up the back of her neck. If the door wasn't shut properly, she could shoulder it open, not even have to fumble around with the handle. If there was someone in her apartment – a physical someone, and not some hallucination that somehow began with her unlocked door – she might catch them off-guard and be able to... well, Stun them, she supposed, before they got a chance to Stun her. She hadn't been especially good at Defence in school and hadn't had any cause to use any of the practical techniques since she graduated, and despite all the fiction she read about violent murders, she considered herself a pretty non-violent person, yet here she was readying herself to storm her apartment like some hard-boiled private eye.

If I don't do it now, I never will.

She took a deep breath, held her wand ready at her side, and rammed her door open, dropping her shoulder in a way she had read described but never once considered performing herself until tonight. The door flew open and hit the wall with a loud bang, and Yvonne would think later that she couldn't judge who had looked more startled at that moment: she or the young woman in her living room. The woman took a step back when Yvonne made her entrance, then looked at the wand and froze. For a long moment there was silence between them. Yvonne groped for the door with her free hand, found it, and slammed it shut with such force it produced a louder bang than it had when it was opened, all without taking her eyes off the stranger. She held an object in her hands – a little framed picture taken from the shelf above her television – and Yvonne vowed to Stun her if the mystery woman's hands did anything out of the ordinary. She wore robes of an indistinct charcoal colour and had a look on her face that Yvonne had seen only in films – the kind where child ghosts moved in jerky ways and haunted single women in apartment blocks. This woman had that look of completely unguarded fear on her face that Hollywood actresses were somehow unable to quite manage.

Yvonne's first question to the mystery woman wasn't a normal one – 'Who are you?', for example, or 'What are you doing here?' It was, "What are you doing with my picture?"

"Muggle photography is interesting," she replied, like it was normal for her to be standing in Yvonne's apartment. Like it was normal that people surprised her by bursting doors open all the time, for that matter. "I know the pictures won't move, but I keep thinking sometimes they might anyway. Silly, isn't it?"

She said all this in a cheerful, conversational tone, and Yvonne was suddenly completely convinced that this was another hallucination that was only seconds away from turning and becoming another nightmare. She aimed her wand squarely at the woman and asked her, "Can you prove to me that you're real?"

"No," said the woman, "but I can answer the questions I'm sure you have."

"You know what's happening to me?"

"Not all of it, but I can tell you what I know."

"Do it."

"It's long."

"I've got time."

"Would you like to sit down? Please."

Yvonne realised her whole body was wound tight like a coiled spring. She saw the other woman was acting in a perfectly civil way and remembered she was still aiming her wand at her. She lowered it to her side, feeling foolish. The woman hadn't hidden herself in any way, although she easily could have if she were planning some kind of surprise attack, and she had been waiting inside her apartment instead of outside, because how was she supposed to know that Yvonne wouldn't just Apparate home? This woman wasn't an apparition – she probably was, or had been, in the same situation Yvonne was, and she had almost attacked her. Of course. Jesus.

"Sorry," she said, feeling a little ashamed of the person this... whatever was happening was making her, and sat in her armchair.

The woman sat on her couch and offered a smile, although it seemed incapable of reaching her wide eyes. She placed the picture frame she had been gripping in her hands on the coffee table face down. "It's understandable," she said. "Well... I understand. I don't know what's been happening to you, but I can guess. And maybe I can help. Moss and I can fix it. I think." She put her hands to her temples and closed her eyes, visibly frustrated. "I'm sorry. Can I start from the beginning?"

"Please do," Yvonne said. She could feel her body wanting to tense up again and willed herself to relax. She wanted to trust this woman. She wanted to believe that she knew what was going on and, more importantly, that she could help.

"Alright." She took a deep breath. "My name is Christine, and I work for the Unspeakables. I was a curse-breaker full-time until about six months ago when I was transferred to the Unspeakable Department. If you've ever dealt with them, you know they don't exactly tell you all about what you're going to be doing until you're doing it." She paused, perhaps to let Yvonne give some input on dealing with the Unspeakables. Yvonne had none to offer.

"Moss is an Unspeakable proper," she continued. "We were working on a translation project – there were maybe four or five other teams doing similar work, but we didn't get to talk with them much, just got some notes every so often from higher up in the Department. I guess we were the first ones to make any headway in the translation."

"What were you translating?"

"Stones. Tablets. No modern methods of translation worked on them, so the Unspeakable Division scouted out people who specialised in deciphering long-dead languages, and there're a lot of experts in curse-breaking, so... Anyway, the stones – the ones we were working with, at least – were ancient. Egyptian, or Sumerian, or maybe older. We're still not sure about that." She paused and then said, more to herself than Yvonne, "But, I don't think you care so much about where they came from, do you? I'm sorry, I just..." She stopped and began a new thought.

"We managed to translate most of our stone, and Moss was reading from it – sort of like to himself, you know how you do – when he collapsed. It was like he fainted. I started to get worried after three days and that's when I took him to St. Mungo's..."

"That was you?" Yvonne couldn't hide the shock in her voice. Things were starting to line up and come together, like the gears of a huge clock pushing the mechanisms into place to chime the hour.

"I thought a Healer might be able to help him, keep him safe. I didn't think I could do it on my own." Christine still looked fearful, but she also sounded a little ashamed at this admission. "He was supposed to wake up on his own, but he told me when he did it didn't seem right. Do you know what happened to him?"

"Healer Archer extracted his memories," said Yvonne, not giving this much thought. She was more interested in other information. "What was..."

"Extracted? What do you mean 'extracted'?"

"Healer Archer has been working on a new technique for dealing with patients with significant mental trauma, one that's similar to the removal of memories for use in a Pensieve and the suppression caused by memory charms, but more permanent so there's no risk of the memory ever resurfacing. Just the other day he had the technique approved. I guess that Moss was his first official patient."

"Did he look at the memories? This Healer Archer?"

"No," said Yvonne, feeling that Christine's fear was beginning to spread, "but I did." She was about to ask what was on the tablet, what it was that she saw in Archer's Pensieve, but saw that Christine was not paying attention to her.

"Moss was right about it being something to do with memories." She turned her focus back to Yvonne. "Do you know much about how the extraction works? What specifically happens? Did you work on any of the..."

"What was on the tablet?" Yvonne asked, a little shocked at the hysteria in her voice but finding she didn't really care. Technicalities could come after she had the big picture.

Christine stopped talking and avoided Yvonne's eyes. "Of course, I'm sorry. I'll try to keep... It's just a difficult thing to explain; I've been working on this non-stop for so long." She took another deep breath, and Yvonne unconsciously leaned forward in her seat.

"The tablet described God."

For a moment, Yvonne couldn't think. Was that an answer? What did that mean?

"Described God." She wasn't sure if she was asking or confirming.

"It's... There aren't proper words for it. Not ones that exist any more, I don't think. The tablet, if a person reads from it, they're supposed to gain knowledge of... everything."

"But that's..." began Yvonne, confused and struggling for something to grasp onto for stability in the turn this conversation had taken. "...Not what God is," she finished somewhat lamely.

"What is God, then?"

Love, she thought immediately, her knowledge of the Bible limited to what she had seen in films and heard in Johnny Cash songs. "I don't know. All-knowing and all-powerful, I suppose."

"So if a person knew everything there ever possibly was to know – the thoughts of every living thing, the number of stars in the sky, and the true form of a Boggart – wouldn't that person be like God?"

Yvonne remained silent, considering this. Christine continued with her explanation.

"God is just a label people give to something bigger than themselves. The formula on the tablet won't make a person Jehovah, or Zeus, or Odin, or Gaia, or anything people have ever called a god, because that's not what God is. God is infinite – a concept that's beyond human understanding – so the idea of some infinite power that binds the universe together gets filtered down into things a person can understand."

"Like an old man with a beard who lives in the clouds," Yvonne said, "or a Viking riding an eight-legged horse."

"That's right. Those things aren't God, they're more like... people's reflections of God."

"But what happens to a person when they read from the tablet? They turn infinite and... what? Disappear or something?"

"They're supposed to fall into a trance, where all the understanding of the universe fills their mind, and at the end, they're supposed to emerge from the trance 'perfected', so the tablet said."

"So if they were interrupted from this trance..." Yvonne began.

"There's no real knowing what would happen, but I suppose they wouldn't be perfect yet. When I spoke to Moss at St. Mungo's, he seemed... different. Distracted. He was still himself, but I didn't have to say a whole sentence before he understood what I meant."

"When was this?"

"Earlier tonight. I felt him wake up, if you can believe that. Maybe he sent me a message somehow. He told me about you and told me to come find you, make sure you were okay."

"Am I okay? Do you know what's going to happen to me?"

"No," she said, "but I can make a guess. You saw Moss's memory of the perfecting, God-becoming process, and it... touched you a little. But since his trance wasn't complete, you gained a kind of imperfect understanding of the universe, and since it was from a second-hand source of sorts, it was reduced in strength. Something like that. This is all educated guesswork, you see. This isn't magic that's meant to be enacted halfway – even if it's incomplete, the effects are going to be powerful."

"Maybe it's something nobody should be invoking, if it's so uncontrollable."

Christine glanced to the side, reflecting. "Perhaps so," she mused to herself.

"Do you think I'll go into a trance, like Moss?" Yvonne asked.

"I don't think so. I hope not. I think perhaps your Healer Archer could extract the memory from you and destroy it, and you would be fixed."

"You've no idea how much I want that to be true."

"What's been happening to you?" Christine asked, her voice oddly void of concern. "I'd be interested in documenting the... Oh, that's terrible of me, isn't it? You look like hell and I want to study you. I'm really sorry; it's just that I've been around the tablet so long, it's so loaded up with magical strength, that it keeps finding ways to crawl into your head even when you're not..."

It was at this point that Yvonne's stomach, which had been relatively well-behaved all through the bus ride home, made its presence felt with a loud rumble that made Christine trail off mid-sentence. Both women glanced at each other, and after a moment, Yvonne said, "I'm going to make myself something to eat."

"Of course. I'm sorry about running on."

Yvonne stood and headed for the kitchen. "It's not a problem. I'd actually rather not, you know, be in silence. Tell me about your work. Tell me about Moss, what's he like? Is that name short for something? Amos."

"I don't think so," Christine said, "it's just Moss. Moss Browning, if you can believe that." She sounded like she was smiling, as if the name was a joke of some kind – Yvonne didn't get the joke, but she gave some acknowledgement as she fumbled a loaf of bread from the breadbox, and Christine continued.

From the kitchen, Yvonne could feel Christine's whole demeanour change. She heard about how Moss was brilliant, and focused, and driven, and a host of other wonderful attributes as she fumbled with the stupid little plastic thing that sealed bags of bread. Yvonne picked up a knife and found her hand was shaking terribly, not out of fear but out of hunger. Low blood sugar? Something like that. She took a slice of bread and finished it off in two bites, not bothering to put anything on it. Feeling more confident in her ability to hold the knife steady now, she buttered two pieces of bread (which was about as complex a food as she felt her stomach could handle at the moment) and put away the butter but left the bread and the dirty knife sitting on the counter. Christine was still talking about Moss – his hair, specifically – when Yvonne came back into the lounge. It was like Christine had forgotten momentarily that she was speaking to someone else, not herself; she continued on for a moment before she seemed to realize that Yvonne was watching her, studying her.

"What?" Christine asked, looking defensive.

"Nothing, nothing. I was going to take a shower when I got home – would you mind terribly if I went and did that?" She was about to explain about her feet, thinking that actually all of her felt dirty in a similar way, but Christine waved her on.

"Are you sure?" Yvonne continued. "I could turn on the television, or put on a..." She stopped herself, seeing Christine's blank stare. "Sorry, I don't have guests very often."

"If you're gone for long, I'll look at your bookshelf," Christine said, then smiled, but Yvonne got the feeling this was just for reassurance. She would probably just sit, drum her fingers and bite her lip. This woman looked like a lip-biter.

"If you're sure," Yvonne said, and again Christine waved her on.

---

Getting clean – being clean – was one of life's simple pleasures, Yvonne thought, running her hands along her head and slicking down her hair. A shower had a lot of elements in it that created a calming atmosphere – it was warm, came with a nice noise-warping effect that both allowed room for thinking and provided a veil of distortion to enhance the illusion that one had a good singing voice, and it was a deeply personalised place. Other people's showers were almost like foreign countries, with their own topography and customs that would constantly surprise you – you could only be really at home in your own shower of origin. Just how far was too far in changing the temperature, what the right pressure of the water was, where important things like soap and razors and shampoo sat were all individual customisations that people were incapable of communicating to each other.

This was the flow of Yvonne's thoughts as she showered. Her mind needed a break and had decided to take it now: she would think about contacting Archer, what to make of Christine and Moss, and the nature of Man and God, later. Right now, she was going to wash as much of this horrible nightmare of a day off her and down into the drain as she could.

She was lathering her face when she felt it – something had brushed up against her ankle. She reflexively pulled back and suddenly realised that she was temporarily blind. Panic and paranoia rushed in and held fast. She opened her eyes for a moment and couldn't see anything worthwhile through squinting and the soapy foam. She turned her face into the stream of water and pawed furiously at her face, ready to open her eyes and see that something stupid like the soap or the loofah had brushed against her, when she felt it again. It was not the soap, nor the loofah.

It was a hand.

The shower had expanded somehow, its proportions blown out enough to house a giant. Nothing seemed to be in her reach, although the water still played on her back. At her feet was a figure in pale-green robes, face down on the tiles, the water matting down its hair and darkening its robes around the shoulders. It raised its head, revealing a face that was slick on one side with a substance other than water.

"Help me," pleaded the figure, and then it seemed to lose all breath and grow slack and rubbery. Its grip loosened on Yvonne's ankle. She saw the spreading, red stain on the back of the figure's robes and knew without doubt that Healer Jean Paul Archer had just been murdered.