by Tim Meyer
“Yeah, what I saw out there in the field... it really shook me. I mean, that thing dug deep.”
“We all saw things out there, Phelps. It got to all of us.”
“That's not what I mean. It's like... whatever it did to me when it had its look inside... I feel like it left something there. Like a seed. And every second spent here, at Spring Lakes, its watering that seed, letting it grow.” She looked up at them, wondering if they felt the same way. “Do you guys... feel that?”
If they did, no one admitted it.
“I think we need to be smart about this,” Amanda said, addressing Barnes more-so than Phelps. Phelps wondered if she had talked too much, revealing too many of her feelings. She'd never been good at that, never been inclined to share personal tidbits, but she felt a closeness to Barnes and Amanda, a trust. Connected. She truly felt she could confide in them, and maybe that was because of what had happened out there, what they'd seen—but then again, maybe it wasn't. Maybe she just felt like their friends, and she was putting too much stock in their professional relationship. “I say we go out there with no intent to do anything. Just watch. Observe. Take notes. See if it... if it contacts us again. And take it from there.”
“And what if it decides to kill us?” Barnes asked, a question Phelps hadn't given much thought. The thing, as horrifying as the images it had projected were, as terrifying as the form it had taken, hadn't felt dangerous. Not to her. Though, the facts remained—it had taken lives. Almost a dozen of them, the sixty-niners of Spring Lakes, over the last thirty years. There was no news on Cunningham, but given the extent of the man's injuries, it was unlikely he'd make a full recovery. At the very least, he was bound to become half the human being he was when he began work that day. Who knew if his mind would ever recover from the atrocities he'd been shown, the stuff that caused him to put out his own eyes.
“I don't think it will do that,” replied Amanda. “Not if we don't show aggression. Phelps, would you agree?”
Phelps nodded.
Barnes looked them twice over, pausing as if he needed more convincing. “You have more confidence in that thing than I do. I don't think we should walk out there without being prepared.”
“Prepared for what?”
“To fight.”
Amanda shook her head. “No.”
“It doesn't want to kill us,” Phelps told him.
But Barnes wasn't having any of it. “You don't know that. You don't. I'm sorry—all of this sounds good, great in fact, but when you break it all down, the simple fact is that you don't know any more or less about that thing out there than I do. Or Kim Charon does. Or Cunningham. Or the residents of Spring Lakes. The Field is dangerous, and we shouldn't buy into the fact that it spared us once. Who's to say that will happen again?”
Phelps and Amanda didn't have an answer for that.
“Right,” Barnes added, after the women had failed to produce concrete evidence to support their theory. “Then we'll need weapons.”
“Weapons will only antagonize it,” Phelps said with broken confidence. “The fact we didn't have weapons the first time was the difference between us and Cunningham.”
Barnes tilted his head back, facing the sky. She could see he was frustrated over his voice not being heard. But she'd heard him loud and clear.
She just strongly disagreed.
“No weapons,” Phelps said. “We go without weapons or we don't go at all.”
“You sound so sure of yourself that it's starting to freak me out.” Barnes discarded his cigarette in the sand-filled pail next to the door.
More confident now than she had ever been before, she nodded. “I am.”
“So, what's the plan then?” Amanda asked. Her voice was far from calm. Phelps noticed her hands were shaking, though she tried hiding them by shoving them into her pockets. “I mean, what do we do? I hate to say it, but, if this thing is protecting us, why do anything at all?”
Barnes clicked his tongue. “You know why, Amanda. We just had this conversation inside. You wanna jump on Kim Charon's side of the fence?”
Amanda shot him a look, one that read maybe I do. Phelps couldn't blame her for thinking such things, especially given the nature of their future and the decisions they'd need to make. She had voiced the possibility of turning her head from the situation too, as much as she didn't want to.
“Obviously we can't let it continue to take the lives of the people here,” Phelps said, changing her tune. “Maybe there is something else we can offer it in their place.”
Barnes threw his hands up. “This is sounding more bat-shit nuts by the second.”
“You have a better idea, Barnes?”
“Yeah, I do.” He held up the book of matches he'd taken from the bar earlier. “Let's burn this motherfucking forest to the ground. Kill two birds with one stone. Take out The Field and whatever the fuck is beyond it.”
Phelps's brow arched high up on her forehead. “You boys. Always want to set the world on fire. You really think striking a match will hurt this thing?”
“It's worth a shot.”
Amanda came forward. “No, it's not. With our luck, the winds would blow the flames back toward Spring Lakes, or into the nearby town. I'm not doing that. I have enough weighing on my conscience right now. I don't need the deaths of a few hundred people on top of them.”
“Then what?”
Phelps cleared her throat, shot them a look that would have given goosebumps to anyone with a pulse. “We talk to it. Reason with it. We give it whatever it wants.”
No one offered a better solution that didn't involve putting their or anyone else's lives at risk. Phelps's went over the rest of her plan as they headed back inside to prepare for their trek out into The Field.
18
As soon as they stepped foot on the path, an intimidating sense of dread draped over Amanda's shoulders, squeezing her from the inside out. She felt this magnetic pull coming from deep within the woods, a mystical something that was drawing her back to the field. She wanted to open her mouth, ask the others if they had developed the same trepidation, but unlocking her jaw proved difficult.
The forest looked different this time around. The trees were more bent, less sturdy than they'd appeared only hours earlier; as if they'd been uprooted during a big storm and were a breeze away from crashing to the leave-covered soil. As they traveled deeper, the foliage became denser, lusher. The trees had been pretty bare during their first and second walk, but now they were full of life, an explosion of green and yellow tones. It was as if seasons had passed between visits. Sunlight filtered in through the leaves, sequestering shadows and providing the path with a generous amount of visibility. Bushes were nice and round, the branches cloaked with leaves and flowering buds. Birdsong echoed from a distance, all around them, the tweets bringing with them a sense of comfort and familiarity, harbingers of fortunate outcomes. The path was less obtrusive than it had previously been, with almost no overgrowth blocking their way. The terrain was even, as if the path had been manmade, smoothed for ease of access. They got about half a mile before Amanda began to question whether they were on the same path as before, if they had unknowingly entered the woods through another entry point or had made a wrong turn somewhere.
But she reassured herself that that wasn't the case, mostly because there was only one entry point and no turns to speak of.
And no one else seemed to notice these things. If they did, no one spoke up. In fact, no one had said much at all, about anything. It was as if talking had been forbidden on their journey.
As they walked, venturing farther into their bright-green surroundings, Amanda noticed a little fig bush just off the path, maybe twenty paces. The sight stole her attention immediately, and she stopped in her tracks, stared off into the short distance as if a ghost had stood in that very place. The others didn't take notice of her abrupt stop and continued on, without her. The fig bush was in full bloom, and the figs were ripe, had reached the final stages of their
growth. She migrated over to the bush, and, as soon as she left the path, another feeling cozied up with her. This one seemed harmless as the rest, though it did make her a little uneasy. Eyes, she felt. A thousand of them on her, carefully probing her movements, documenting every second. She glanced around the wooded area, examining the spaces between every tree and bush, and saw nothing, not a single eye in view. She even looked up at the sky, browsed the tops of the trees, combed every visible branch to see if there were watchers up there, but alas, her own eyes came away with nothing. There was no one there, no one at all, only the sense of a thousand sentinels keeping track of her every step. Every twitch. Every breath.
Her blood froze then, but she was in front of the fig tree now, close enough to reach out and pluck free one of the fat fruit sacks, if she wished. And she did wish that, wished it very much. She reached out for one in particular, a juicy red-brown nugget that was almost bursting at the seam with that delicious sweet-berry flavor.
Her family had kept a fig tree in the backyard when she was little. Every year, her father would reap anywhere from twenty to thirty figs. Her mother would make snacks with them, breakfast bars and cookies. She'd eat them with cereal. They'd have them as dessert after a big dinner. Her family had bonded over those figs. As she got older, the fig tree stopped producing. Maybe her father hadn't taken care of it in those later years. Maybe they had begun to care less and less about it. Which was strange because, when she thought about it, that was exactly what had happened to her. They'd stopped paying attention to her. Stopped giving her money, weekly allowances so she could go hang out with friends. Stopped buying her food and groceries. Stopped funding her college account. They hadn't even offered to co-sign her student loans, and flat-out refused to when she approached them about it.
She'd become the fig tree.
And she knew why.
(touch it)
She had told them about her abuelo, the filthy things he'd made her do. The things that, when she'd finally mustered the guts to come forth and tell her truth, made her gag. Acid burned the back of her throat when she thought of those things, the images from all those moments, those memories of weekends spent at her grandfather's, those vile acts he had forced upon her—thinking caused that, so speaking about what had happened had made her physically ill. After she had spoken her truth, she had emptied her stomach on her parents' kitchen floor. Her stomach. Her heart. Her brain. After she had finished, she had felt nothing but hollow inside. A shell of the human being she truly was.
Of course, her parents hadn’t believed her. They had gone so far as to call her a liar, a terrible person, someone who should feel ashamed for spouting these horrendous accusations, because, after all, that was all they were—accusations—and how dare she do that to someone who loved her, had done nothing but be there for her and take care of her. Play with her.
(touch it)
They had told her not to speak another word about this to them or anyone, ever again, and, if she did, that they would disown her, cut her from their lives as if she were nothing, some common acquaintance—her, their only daughter.
And she didn't speak of it again. To a therapist some odd years later, but not anyone else, ever again. And it was funny—well, not funny, sad actually, fucking heartbreaking—but even though she had never spoken a word of what her grandfather had done to her behind his office doors, things he had made her touch and stimulate, stroke and swallow, her parents had abandoned her anyway. After she had confided in them, after she had finally harnessed enough courage to come forth, after years and years of keeping it inside, locked away, after she had finally built the strength to tell her folks the goddamn truth, they had immediately written her off. Not just her truth, but her life. Her truth meant nothing to them, and her life—well, that apparently meant very little. She'd become a stain to them, something that couldn't be washed off with soap and water or cleansed with bleach. Something they'd carry around with them forever, a burden that kept on giving.
They couldn't have that; it was easier to cut the cord.
She hated them for it. For everything. They had meant nothing to her since then, and they meant even less now. Just a memory, like a bad dream you experienced when you were a child; there, somewhere in the distance, but mostly forgotten.
But the figs were the last good image she had of them. And so, she had held onto that throughout the years, the mental snapshot of the fig bush in the backyard, the one that bloomed so beautifully come springtime.
She let a cluster of three figs dangle on her palm. Running her fingers over their velvety skin, she tried to remember what they'd tasted like. Sweet, yes. Almost berry-like, but squishy like a banana. And full of seeds. She remembered spending ten to fifteen minutes in front of the mirror, picking seeds out from between her teeth, her father behind her dangling a long strand of floss, his belly shaking with laughter as she tried to pinch the seeds with her tiny fingers.
She chose one of the figs, the biggest of the trio, and plucked it from the branch. Placing it beneath her nose, she sniffed, taking in the sticky-sweet aroma. She closed her eyes and saw her father hunched over, pointing out which figs were ready for mother's cookies, and the seven-year-old version of herself dancing around the fig tree, plucking each ripe one he'd given her permission to take.
When she opened her eyes, it was just her and the fig and the still forest. The birdsong had faded some, was still there, but not as present. Instead, there was this low hum, this drone that continued to buzz in the background, slowly becoming prominent over the rest of the forest's tunes. Soon, that was all she heard; everything else had gone silent except the drone.
The fig called to her.
Begged to be eaten.
Almost as if she didn't want to, she brought the fig to her lips. Opened her mouth. Put the fig between her teeth. Bit do—
Something smacked her hand, hard enough to send a shot of pain up her arm. The fig went sailing into the nearby brush and got lost amongst the fallen, dead leaves.
“What are you doing?” Barnes asked, now standing next to her. He'd come, seemingly from nowhere, as if he'd materialized from the ether of some surreal nightmare.
She rubbed her hand, the pain traveling, causing her fingers to tingle. “You... hit me.”
“You were going to eat something. From the forest.”
Behind Barnes, Phelps stood on the path. She hadn't stepped foot off the even surface, and she didn't look as if she intended to.
“So?” Amanda asked. The figs attracted her eyes. An overwhelming urge to stuff a handful of them in her mouth entered her mind, and she found the desire hard to shake. “So what?”
She reached out again, and this time Barnes grabbed her hand. “Amanda, no.”
Amanda fought him with little energy. Her weak attempt to grab at the fig tree was easily defeated by Barnes's strength. The irresistible urge that she needed a fig, needed one in her mouth, needed to bite down and flood her tongue with its juicy flavor, suddenly conquered her mind and, for a second, that was all she cared about. It was as if nothing else existed but that phantom taste. The desire was so strong she seriously considered kicking Barnes between the legs, giving his testicles a little more than a love tap. That feeling only intensified the longer she kept the tree in her sights. And then, in that exact moment, she knew the figs and the tree were bad. Not only bad, but poison.
Poison for the mind, she thought.
She broke free from Barnes's grip, and, instead of reaching out, plucking a delicious afternoon snack from one of Earth's most precious treasures, she ran, scrambled her way back up the small incline, back toward the path where Phelps was waiting for her with open arms. She grabbed her hand and with Barnes's help from behind, made her way back to even terrain.
Once back on the path, she could hear the fig tree calling to her. Not with words or a song, nothing she could hear, but something she could feel. In her mind. As if whatever had put the damned thing there had done so just for her, and t
ouching it, putting her fingers on a single fig, had granted the thing access to her. To her thoughts.
The image of the tree kept flashing in her head, over and over again, toggling back and forth between the one she'd just seen and the one that existed in her parents' yard. And, as she separated the two, or as the thing did so for her, she began to realize that they were, in fact, the same fucking tree. The same. Exact. One.
“Impossible,” she said, the words falling out in a breath.
“What's that?” Barnes asked. “What did you see out there?”
She looked away from the tree, which still appeared closer than it ought to. “You...”
“All I saw was you reaching out and grabbing something. It looked like you were going to put something in your mouth, so I just... reacted.”
Amanda turned back to where the tree was, but now wasn't. In its place was a small mound of dead leaves, the top of the pile moving due to a gentle breeze that had streaked through the forest. No tree. No figs. No evidence that there ever was one.
“It was just there,” Amanda said, and she hated how manic her voice sounded. How panicked she had become. She hadn't heard her own voice strain that way since... well, a very long time.
(touch it)
(mom, dad, why don't you believe me)
(touch it)
(he did things to me)
(touch it)
(he abused me)
She felt her face grow wet with tears. Phelps pulled her close, hugged her. She cried into her shoulder, soaking the fabric of her sweatshirt.
Barnes kept his hand on her back, his touch filling her with a sense of comfort. A sense of warmth. Something good. The vibe conquered her body, killing the panic, the stress, everything the fig tree had gifted her.
They remained huddled for what seemed like a very long time.
19
