Maze of Trees: A Dark Fairy Tale Romance Short Story

by Claudia O'Keefe

  It hit, a sick thud that terrified the oaks nearby. The thing burrowed into the earth with lightning intelligence, planting itself. In my mind, I could see the thick tree roots under my feet recoiling at the bloody apparition’s intrusion into their space. Within seconds, the invader anchored itself in the rocky soil. Less than a minute later it swelled and sprouted spectral mycelium as thick as my wrist, root-like structures snaking outward in all directions, handless forearms that grew and grew. They carried a red river of loneliness, thickening with it until they became as big around as second-year sycamores, then century maples, then old-growth behemoths.

  Around me trees thrashed in the wind, like waves crashing on invisible rocks. I sensed but could no longer feel my actual, physical heart continuing to beat. The center of me was calm. I was the eye, and storms seen and unseen raged along stalled fronts that would not move as long as I wanted to keep them in place.

  Standing in the rain, I breathed quietly and waited. At last the voracious growth slammed up against my territory’s boundaries and could go no further. A bloody fairy-ring hundreds of square miles in size lay under all and everything I controlled. Following nature, the phantom mycelium made a 90 degree turn upward. Spores exploded from the ground, red, pulsing, veined lightballs that no longer resembled my heart, but carried a piece of it in each. One for every person who needed to leave.

  Only I could see as they sought their targets, the cheerful hearts of the tourists, the thoughtless ones, musing ones, cruel ones, careless, self-involved, loving and hateful, thousands of hearts spinning in their own individual orbits suddenly touched by the unstoppable panic and fear I fought off daily.

  “Go home,” I said. “Now.”

  Turned and walked back to my farmhouse.

  I stripped off my wet clothes. I curled up on the living room sofa under a blanket I had knit myself from wool purchased from a neighbor and watched television, mindless reality TV. Thunder made the house shiver and mountains cower. Though the village square at Frost Knob swam in frigid water, the asphalt along Route 219 was dry and welcoming. Rain clouds spared each and every road leading away. Wouldn’t want any accidents, would I? It would only delay their flight. It wasn’t just the resort’s residents I sent packing, however. My fairy-ring found all who weren’t already firmly rooted here, those with the luxury of escape.

  I smiled bitterly. A part of my mind watched the melee from afar, half-zipped suitcases spilling clothing as they were flung into the backs of SUV’s, condo and cabin doors left gaping, car doors barely closed before tires spun. Another part of my brain watched a woman on TV in a dirty bathing suit forcing down a bowl of live sand crabs. Arguments and altercations flared here and there throughout the rain-streaked Alleghenies, but they were soon overrun by the group gestalt, that primitive back brain drive to flee, lemmings to the sea of city lights awaiting them.

  My forest cried. I apologized to it, assured it that this horrible human storm would blow over by dawn, but it cried. I no longer felt the loneliness. I’d given it all away. No other emotion took its place.

  Please, the forest begged. I didn’t understand. I couldn’t be hurting it. I was the forest. I could only hurt the body to which it clung.

  I thought about that. Ariel and his rope flashed in my mind, a vision opening before me with the gaiety of a Hallmark card pulled from its envelope. But not rope.

  I threw off the blanket and ran outside again into the deluge.

  “Carly!” I heard Landry shout from uphill near the farmhouse. “Carly!”

  I shut out his voice. I made the thousands upon thousands of wildly beating hearts rage in my ears as cars hurtled along dark two-lane highways. I laughed. I laughed, cold, wet laughter with the tang of too many dead years, too much of my soul drained out of me. Joyless laughter smothered by the winds whipping the river in front of me.

  I can ask the river to help me, I thought. I don’t have to do it myself.

  “Carly.”

  I sighed, let all the breath out of my lungs as I prepared to command the black blanket lapping at my toes to reach up and let me sleep next to Mother Earth.

  “Carly, stop it.” His voice just steps behind me. “Carly.” His hands on my shoulders. Turning me around. Making me look up into his face. He was afraid, of me or for me, I didn’t know.

  “Stop it.”

  “Stop what?”

  “I know what you’re doing.”

  “Doing.”

  “This. However you’re driving them out. Stop it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I know you are.”

  “How did you find me?

  “The woman at the store, the one you had words with. Now, stop. Someone’s going to get hurt.”

  “I’m hurt.”

  “I know, honey.”

  He reached out to wrap me naked in his arms, but I stepped back up to my calves in the rushing water.

  “You don’t know anything,” I shouted.

  “I know. I’ve known for weeks.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “The blizzard you predicted, the wolves, the way we found that kid. Did you think I didn’t realize what you did to me that day?”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “The gifts, Carly. Did you think I didn’t see the gifts? At first I thought it was just some freak of nature, one perfect berry, an acorn, a single amazing feather left every morning we woke up together, right at our door. But then I saw them leaving them for you. Saw them making their offerings.”

  I’d forgotten about the gifts months ago. They still came, one every morning since I’d woken in the barn beneath a corpse, but I’d stopped looking at them. It had been years since I appreciated them.

  “Landry, I—”

  Like ripples in a pool, spreading outward from where I stood, the ghosts of my heart abruptly departed. They lifted from the thousands upon thousands of bodies they controlled, drifting upward into the night, thinning into nothingness the way smoke, gray and curling, disappears above a bonfire. I felt the people I’d wanted to chase away slow and regain their senses. I heard their pulses wind down. Clouds broke off their assault on the land. Skies cleared and leaves dripped.

  Landry grabbed for and hauled me out of the river.

  “I can’t go with you,” I told him. “I want to go, but I can’t.”

  “What? Of course, you can.”

  “No.”

  He started to protest further, ask why. He thought he knew what I was, but he didn’t. So I spread my arms, and as I did, he saw what held me, who I really was.

  I was never naked in my forest. My skin was my gown, bark thick and gnarled as hickories born before Thomas Jefferson made his brave journeys over the mountains from Virginia. Honeysuckle vines caressed and strangled my throat. Branchlets budded and flowered over and over again from my fingertips. I felt that pain and struggle of unending birth, quiet death. My head was pulled back viciously by my hair, grown over the years until it became trapped inside a burl that hung behind my shoulders in the shape of a hood. Heavy, unyielding roots encased my thighs and ankles, hiding everything human in their drapes and folds. Larger, more intricate, thousands of times greater than the roots of the fairy-ring, they traveled out to touch every last growing thing in the mountains I protected.

  Landry uttered a small, stunned noise. He fought for words, but to his credit, he didn’t run.

  “Which one is the illusion?” he asked at last.

  What he witnessed melted away to leave me they way he expected. The forest stopped weeping and I began. He watched me for several seconds and I had no idea what he was thinking.

  “I don’t know anymore.”

  He picked me up and took me into the house, to my bed.

  “Carly.” He lay down next to me, wrapped us in the quilt that covered the bed, dried my face and thumbed away my tears with his gentle hands.

  “I want to go,” I said. “I’m so tired of being here.”

  “Shh,” he wh
ispered. “Let me take the pain away.”

  It was our last time together, so I gave him control. I trusted him to take me all the places I’d wanted so badly to go. I had dominion over the lonely places, but he owned all the rest, far, golden realms I barely remembered, open, noisy, crowded, landscapes dirty yet lived in, wanton human vistas set to a rhythm that lived for itself and thought of no one else, as we thought of no one. For one night. Just this one night they were mine, too. I was homesick, but he took it and spun my ache into pleasure. My desire for release became his reason. He sought redemption inside me. We were warmth and blistering heat, solace and cure for things that can never be completely healed. I dragged every memory of his world from behind the shutters in his eyes, distant sights and sounds that clung to the planes and angles of his face. My lips tasted everything he would see the next day, creative genius and traffic, jealousy and elevators, Tandoori Chicken, glittering storefronts, smog, and new hope. We were flesh on flesh on flesh and twining urgencies. We ate the moment whole. We gorged. We stole tomorrow out from under our feet and strained to keep it there with us as long as we could. Pushed. Clung. Rocked it between us.

  “Give me,” he said.

  I gave.

  “Give me.”

  I gave him everything that I had and was.

  “Let it go, Carly.”

  I shared everything I knew and didn’t, the pain, the power.

  “Let it all go!” he cried at the exact moment we touched perfection.

  Light harsher and more cleansing than if I had borrowed a day’s worth of sun, blinded me. I closed my eyes and threw my head back. Ecstasy swept through me like heated syrup. A flash burn of relieved joy prickled the damp skin at my throat, the tender insides of my wrists. Landry cried out. At first I thought it was delight, but then as physical saturation turned to scorching pain, I knew something was wrong. I looked at Landry. The light around us continued to flare so brightly my shocked retinas saw only the black form of a man outlined by a corona.

  “Landry!”

  My back arched in surprise, my body suddenly not my own. I felt as if someone stuck a spoon into the back of my throat and dug out something that clung there fiercely by its roots. I struggled, gagging, shuddering uncontrollably. It went on and on until I knew I’d gotten the wish I’d made down by the river. Oblivion. Landry collapsed heavily atop me, his weight too much for me this close to death.

  I blacked out.

  It wasn’t even dawn. No sunlight filtered into my room when I felt someone sit down beside me on the bed. I wanted to wake and speak, see if Landry was okay, if I had hurt him when we made love, but as hard as I tried I couldn’t sit up. I didn’t even have the strength to open my eyes.

  “Sleep more,” I mumbled.

  “Sleep more,” Landry agreed.

  Minutes or hours later, I found myself being carried fully-clothed outside. Heard gravel crunching under Landry’s feet. Smelled the dew beginning to settle. I struggled to open my eyes, managed brief slits before the effort taxed me completely. Still dark.

  “What’s wrong?” I said, “It’s not morning yet.”

  “Hush, little one,” he said. He settled me in the passenger’s seat of the Tracker, buckled my seat belt, and tucked the sleep tousled hair that had fallen into my face behind my ear. “I want to show you something.”

  I drifted in and out as the car sped along. Why did I feel so strange? Why was I trapped in sleep? I dreamed I felt weak, weaker than I had in eight years, but also lighter, like someone who had lost 50 pounds surviving a deadly illness. As if I was unbothered by gravity. I could spring up stairs, climb like an 8-year-old, run and run until I fell down panting and laughing in the grass somewhere

  with. . .

  “Landry?”

  I found myself on my feet, standing next to the Tracker. What was going on? Landry passed his hand over my eyes and, slowly, I was able to open them. Disoriented, I didn’t recognize where we were at first. I turned in a circle and realized we were at the farthest edge of my territory, where the forest touched the frontage road leading to the Interstate. I hadn’t dared try and come this far in years.

  “What is it? Why are we here?” I asked. “What did you want to show me?”

  “Freedom,” he said.

  “What?”

  I gazed up into his face. Lit by the rising sun, his eyes held pure wildness. Their feral mysteries confused me. His skin gave off the scent of bark and the musty fullness of birch leaves in May.

  “Oh, God. .”

  He gestured at the Tracker behind me, loaded with packed suitcases and boxes of possessions, all of them mine.

  “This is as far as I can take you. I can’t go any farther than this. You understand, don’t you?”

  Panic filled my chest, my heart stuttered, but the anxiety, the strangling call of the mountains, the crushing weight on my chest were missing. I was so many things at once. Dazed, bereft, outraged, sad, lightheaded. I could breathe.

  “The pain,” I said.

  He playfully touched his finger to the tip of my nose. “Gone,” he said.

  But I saw the grimace of pain tightening the corners of his own eyes, freezing the humor that once lived there.

  Seconds after he stepped back from our last kiss I could still savor him, like a wine’s finish. Within his aftertaste were two things, utter shock at a loneliness too heavy for any human to bear, and a regret to which he would never admit, the loss of his dream to build a new life in the city.

  He turned toward the forest on foot.

  “Landry,” I cried and ran after him. “Landry!”

  His trees cloaked him before I was no more than a few steps into the wilderness.

  “Landry!” I cried again, frantic.

  I stumbled on, but I couldn’t read the branches or the leaves. The oaks no longer answered me and the breeze was just a breeze. Soon an unfamiliar feeling rooted itself at the back of my neck. Fear. Like the thousands I had sent fleeing the night before, I looked at the shadows and primitive hysteria flowered. Landry was responsible. My power had jumped to him, leaving me without the ability to fight him.

  I came to a halt in a small clearing. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t get my feet to take me deeper into the forest. He barred my way now, as I had done to others when I protected the woods, forcing me toward escape and the bright new life his willing imprisonment had bought me.

  In the center of the clearing stood a single white dogwood in full bloom. As I watched, the sun topped the evergreens and a ray of light reached the lonely tree.

  “Landry,” I begged a final time.

  My voice triggered a shower of white petals that floated back and forth lazily to the ground. When every last petal lay on the moss below, one of them unexpectedly fluttered up into the air. Not a petal, but a tiny bird. It flew toward me.

  “I love you,” it whispered as it passed.

  About Claudia O’Keefe

  O’Keefe’s work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Shudder Again, Ancient Enchantresses and others. Her short fiction has been chosen for inclusion in Best New Paranormal Romance, and Best New Romantic Fantasy 2, and received Honorable Mentions in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection, as well as The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2007: 20th Annual Collection. Among her five books is the novel Black Snow Days and the anthology Ghosttide. Email the author at claudiaokeefe@gmail.com.

  Table of Contents

  Maze of Trees

  About Claudia O’Keefe

 

 

 
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