And the Trees Crept In

by Dawn Kurtagich

He has no hair.

  No eyes.

  No nose.

  Only one

  wide

  mouth.

  Which smiles.

  Nori is crying for me somewhere. Gowan is watching from a distance away. I fill up with rage and hate, and I rush at the Creeper Man with a branch in my hand. I strike him, but he grins. I hit again and again and again, over and over, feeling my body weakening with every blow. I am so tired. I haven’t eaten anything in so long. He’s too strong for me. Always grinning with that wide mouth.

  “Forgive yourself!” Gowan calls.

  All around, vines and bushes curl out of the floorboards, berries, thick and black, pregnant with juice, growing up and up.

  No. I won’t give up. I will not eat.

  I fight and I strike until finally there is nothing left. No strength. No energy. No will.

  I collapse onto the forest floorboards, and I drop the branch.

  There is a

  S

  I

  N

  K

  I

  N

  G

  sensation, like falling, a fading noise distorting lower as it winds down—a slowing of the clock as darkness takes over—and I give in to it. It would be… so nice… to just… give in.

  The last thing I hear is Gowan’s cry.

  “SILLA, NO!”

  31

  story

  Pick a petal, he loves me

  another, he loves me not,

  kiss and tell that lady

  all that was forgot.

  I don’t want to do this, but I have to. I’ve been planning it for months. Waiting for the perfect time. And that’s now.

  I rouse Nori. Quiet as a mouse.

  Squeak!

  I find the escape bag, and carry her through to the living room. He’s drunk, asleep. She’s got an arm slung over him. For warmth? Protection? To make sure he stays down?

  His beer cans are scattered all over the floor, and his snores—

  Wait.

  What’s happening?

  This feels… familiar.

  I glance behind me. “Gowan…?”

  At first, nothing.

  Then he steps through the shadows at the far side of the wall. He stares at me, his eyes full of tears, and smiles wider than I’ve ever seen.

  “You remember,” he chokes, grinning.

  My eyes open, as though they had been closed, and I am lying on the forest-manor floor. And Nori is not.

  “What just happened?”

  Gowan helps me to my feet, and then folds me into his arms. His breath is hot on my neck.

  “You almost reset,” he murmurs, holding me tighter.

  I pull away gently. “Reset?”

  Everything feels so surreal. As eerily still as this horrible place has always been, only now there is no atmosphere. I get to my feet and look around. And he’s there. The Creeper Man. Standing still as a statue, towering above me. I stumble back, but he doesn’t move. Gowan’s words: Forgive yourself. Cathy and Nori’s words: He’s already here.

  I just stare at him.

  All around me, the berries hang, oversized and plump and dark with juice. I want them. I don’t. Every berry is matched and surrounded by at least three sharp thorns.

  “I almost… reset.”

  I don’t know why I do it.

  Something inside me just melts like ice into water. I am tired of fighting. Tired of the sadness. Tired of the hunger. Tired of missing someone I didn’t even know was gone. I have carried this load long enough. And I know what I am looking at. I finally know what I am looking at.

  I reach through the thorns, flinching as they prick and tear at my arms, and I grab a handful of berries. The thorns let me go, curling away, setting me free. I step forward, up to the Creeper Man, and I offer him the berries. He raises one long hand and turns it palm upward. I let the berries drop.

  I am crying.

  I touch my face to make sure it’s real. Water on my face, water in my heart, melting away the stone.

  I am crying.

  “I’m so sorry,” I tell him, my tears still coming from a well of sadness deep inside me. “I forgive you.”

  He begins to peel away, like some awful wallpaper, like a suit he was wearing—a veneer—fading into a crumpled nothing at the feet of what was inside all along.

  Me.

  I stare at myself, holding the berries.

  “You…” I whisper. “You’re me. I was fighting… myself. This whole time, I was fighting myself?”

  The me that was the Creeper Man all along collapses onto her knees and devours the berries, all the while sobbing. I cry with her. I watch myself laughing through my tears. The other Silla nods at me, and fades away, back into myself.

  Gowan walks over to where she knelt and turns to smile at me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask him.

  “You wouldn’t have believed. Not then. You’d have pulled away and I’d lose you forever.”

  I nod. “I… I feel—different.” I feel whole. Full. Healed. I feel… like myself again. “This whole thing”—I gesture at the manor, the woods, the trees, where the Creeper Man used to be—“was all my doing, wasn’t it? I was trapped… wasn’t I?”

  Gowan nods. “You’ve kept yourself locked in your own purgatory—one of your own making—since you died.”

  I see it. I see it all. The truth of everything. Like all the blank pieces I once turned into darkness and shadow are suddenly there, bright and urgent. “I turned myself into my own tormentor,” I whisper. “And I used Cath’s story to do it.”

  Gowan grins. “Not anymore.”

  There is so much to process… to take in. But I don’t have time, because the trees begin to glow like lightbulbs. Pulsing like they each contain a heart of fire. The light grows, and grows, encompassing everything around it.

  I am blinded by the light. Again.

  When it fades, I am standing in front of La Baume. It is such a sad, old building. It is covered in vines—not the strange roots and vines of before, but real vines, still and old, tinged red with autumn. Spiderwebs hang from the gutters and windows and the house is utterly still under a gray autumn sky. Through the few gaps in the overgrowth, I spot red paint, peeling away, revealing blue, then green—so many colors.

  La Baume is warped and sunken. Derelict and forgotten.

  We are inside then, walking through the halls. All the furniture is covered up, dusty with time passing, lonely and sad.

  “This is where I’ve been.”

  “Yes. This is what the manor has become,” Gowan says. He is beside me. I can’t tell if he was always or only just now. “You’ve been here for a long time.”

  He nods at a shelf along the wall in my bedroom. It is covered with seemingly endless copies of my broken book. The one with the omega symbol, and the gash in its cover.

  “My journal…”

  “That’s how many times you’ve done this,” he says.

  I touch the row of them, unthinking, not really processing. “So many…”

  “At least seventy-four.”

  “So many times…”

  “This symbol wasn’t in the real thing,” Gowan observes, taking out one of the broken books. “Nor was this gash. You put them both here. Why?”

  I close my eyes. Try to find the answer. “Omega… meaning the ultimate end. Death. I read up about eschatology in the library when I was… before. It means the end of everything. Omega—the end of it all. And the gash… I guess I was just… broken.”

  He nods. “I understand.”

  We walk to the kitchen and then I open the kitchen door. I’m expecting to be in La Baume’s overgrown garden. Instead…

  A garden bigger than any I have seen. So green, so lush, and flowers of all colors and sizes. Mountains in the distance promise snow, but down here… even the bees are happy.

  And Nori…

  She is playing and dancing with Cath—the Cath who used to be, the
Cath lost so long ago—and I can’t stop sobbing. I watch her, spilling over with gratitude. These tears are different, and I’m laughing.

  “Nori,” I say, the word choked by my happiness and relief.

  Nori turns to me. “Silla!”

  And her voice! Her voice is so clear and bright and real. She smiles at me, and then she turns away, and she and Cath dance toward the mountains.

  “Wait—”

  But she is going.

  “Auntie Cath…”

  But she is going, too.

  “She had her own journey to go on,” Gowan says, coming to sit beside me in the grass.

  “But she was in the attic.”

  “In the beginning. Only you were in the attic by the end.”

  I pull at the grass and run it through my fingers.

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “A lot of what happened won’t make sense, even though you’re the one who created it all.”

  “I created that? The trees coming closer? The manor sinking, the Creeper Man torturing me at night? All of that?”

  Gowan nods. “You had some pretty bad self-hate issues.”

  “And anger,” I whisper. “I had rage. For everything. Myself. Nori. Cath.” I hesitate. “You.”

  He nods. “I know. Especially me. And why not? I left you. I failed you.”

  I take his hand. “Tell me my story, Gowan. Tell me what I just went through.” When he doesn’t answer, I say, “I told you my story once. Please tell me this one.” I hesitate. “I’m ready.”

  He laughs. “Oh, I know you are. I was just deciding if I was ready.”

  “Oh.”

  He closes his eyes, takes a breath, and—“It was 2013 when a fourteen-year-old girl called Silla Daniels fled from her London home, where she had witnessed her mother’s murder at her father’s hands, and came to live with her aunt Catherine in a manor house called La Baume.”

  I swallow. “She did, did she?”

  “Absolutely. Now, things were beautiful at first, and Silla grew to care for a boy who lived there. He was the last of Catherine’s orphans, the last of La Baume Orphanage. His name was Gowan, and he liked to take care of the garden.” He grins, and I grin back. “Things were really good for three years, until Silla was seventeen. With rumors of another war, food shortages, disease rife, and her own personal demons, her aunt Catherine had a nervous breakdown. People started leaving the town. Silla and Gowan were alone, taking care of a little girl called Nori, who was Silla’s sister. It was decided that Gowan needed to leave the manor and the town, to get some help from farther away. The world was a scary place, with talk of World War Three being around the corner, but Gowan knew that if he didn’t go out in search of help, they would all die.”

  He pauses, and sighs.

  “Go on,” I say quietly.

  “After Gowan had gone, the last bit of sanity that Aunt Catherine clung to snapped. She convinced herself she was being haunted by a menacing presence—the Creeper Man from her childhood—and she hanged herself. The Creeper Man was not a child-stealing demon,” he says, with a glance at me, “he was a legend that two bereaved little girls invented to explain the terrible tragedy that befell their little sister, Anne, in Python Wood. Silla herself absorbed this legend and clung to the idea, as did her little sister, Nori.

  “Having found Catherine’s body, and wanting to protect Nori, Silla shut the attic door and forebade Nori to ever go in there. Silla was so traumatized by it that she developed an irrational (or so she thought) phobia of the attic stairs. A closed door might protect Nori from the sight, but not from the smell. The manor soon smelled of rotting flesh—”

  “The meat! I could smell rotting meat! It was… my God. It was Cath?”

  “Partly.” He swallows.

  “Go on.”

  “La Baume reeked of death. And then Nori got sick. She contracted something from a man she encountered in Python Wood. She helped wrap his head, which had a bloody gash, and she drank from his water, and then he moved on. Nori died, painfully, in Silla’s arms some weeks later.”

  He pauses, I think because he can see me crying. Now that I’ve started, I don’t think I can stop.

  “Silla refused to leave Nori’s side,” he whispers. “And she starved to death. When Silla woke, she was back in London, getting Nori ready for an escape. She came to La Baume, and everything went wrong, and she did not remember Gowan because he had left her, abandoned her, failed her—”

  “Stop. Please, Gowan, stop.”

  I can’t take any more. This story about torture, loss, hate, rage, suffering, death…

  I don’t want to know more. What good can it do now?

  It takes a long time for me to recover enough to learn the rest.

  “When Gowan returned with food and supplies, everyone in the house was dead and rotting,” Gowan says emotionlessly.

  I take his hand. “Oh, Gowan…”

  “Rotting meat—” His voice breaks, and I see his jaw clench around his pain.

  I stare at him with horror as I realize, and my voice is barely a breath. “Oh, God.”

  “Ever since then, Silla has been in her own personal purgatory, trapping Nori and Catherine along with her in that decaying house, each of them caged, together and alone in their pain. Catherine, unable to forget the madness, unable to forgive herself so long as Silla couldn’t forgive her. Nori trapped because of her precious youth and her love for Silla, and Silla herself, trapped by her self-loathing, fear, guilt, and… rage.

  “You were right when you said La Baume was cursed. It was cursed by you.

  “You all repeated the terrible cycle of the last months of your lives in that house, over and over, exaggerating the worst elements of it, inserting clues but cutting off the truth—creating your own versions of hell, until this last time. When I came in.”

  “Why now? Why didn’t you come before?”

  “You died in 2016 when you were seventeen. I was only eighteen. I was… deeply affected by it, Silla. But I lived. I died an old man, alone in my chair, when I was ninety-two, in the year 2090. I could only come and find you when I was dead. Before all of this”—he gestures at the garden around us and the mountains in the distance—“I didn’t believe there was anything more. I lived my whole life thinking you were just a photo on my coffee table. Just a fading memory. And then I found myself in Python Wood, staring at you tilling the soil, seeing Nori spot me, but not recognize me. I knew we were dead, I just… I didn’t know what was going on at first. I kept having to leave to figure it out. I knew, though, that you had to free yourself. I could only try to convince you. And when that hole appeared… I knew that if you gave in to that, it would be over. Soul death.”

  “Soul death,” I murmur, remembering how my father’s voice tried to lure me in.

  “I went from being an old man, barely able to walk, to the young man I was when I lost everything—when I lost you.”

  I stare at him, processing this news. “You… were an old man?” A deep and powerful affection settles comfortably inside me. “I wish I could have seen that.”

  “Oh, I was crotchety,” he says, and grins. “By the end, all I did was sit in my chair and drink tea. Waiting.”

  “Waiting?”

  He smiles sadly. “I was just waiting to die. Hoping there was something more after. Hoping I would be with you again.”

  I touch his face, trying to imagine it. “Ninety-two…” I pause. “I was in that place… living that hell… for seventy-four years?”

  He nods, and I see it. I see in his eyes the life he has lived. The memory of him is similar but I can tell. It’s in the eyes. His eyes, right now, are ancient eyes, full of scars and memories and hurts. Wisdom, experience, and age. He is him, but more.

  And I kiss him.

  Gowan. My Gowan.

  “You were out there, living. The whole time. Did you marry a girl? Did you have a family? Did the war happen?”

  His smile is sad, and I know the answe
rs before he tells me.

  “No family. There was no one after you. There was just an endless life. Empty. Long. Survival. And, yes. I’m sad to say that the war did come, as people said it would. It was a terrible time. Many died. It was senseless. I signed up to fight and I survived five years as a soldier. I was almost glad, at times, that you weren’t there to suffer through it. I had no idea, of course, that you were trapped, suffering just as much as I was.”

  “We were together in that, then, I suppose.”

  He nods, and we stare out at the mountains. Nori and Cath are specks in the distance, shining under the sun.

  “Such a waste,” I whisper. Our lives, both gone before we could really be happy. “I need you to show me something.”

  He closes his eyes; he knows what I want. “I can’t.”

  “I know it will be difficult. All of this has been… more than difficult. But… I have to see what happened when you found us.”

  Gowan’s face is a waterfall in slow motion.

  “But… why?”

  “I need to face it. The… after.”

  “It was… a dark experience, Sill. The most difficult thing I have ever…” His calm is gone. “Please. Let yourself be free.”

  I smile. “I already am. But you’re not. Show me this last piece. Let me free you from it.”

  The tension in his spirit is made suddenly and brilliantly visible. It hangs like a shadow—a heavy shadow, clinging to his shoulders and hanging down his back. A cloak of pain.

  “Please… don’t make me. Don’t make me do this.”

  I gather him to me. “Please.” It is a whisper. A word I said too often in my life. And in my purgatory. It is a plea. “Show me. I need this. And you do, too.”

  He doesn’t answer, but the world around us shifts and changes.

  A Story

  Gowan Returns

  The sun shines through windows that are no longer grown-over with seventy-four years of vines. The door bursts open. Silla watches as Gowan, so young, so mortal, bursts in, stumbling with the momentum.

  “Sill?”

  Breathless,

  sigh…

  the silence hits him.

  “… Silla…”

  He runs,

  rushes,

  up the stairs,