The thing was on him before he could regain his sight. A hand as hard as granite grabbed the back of his skull and wrenched his head back. Lawrence screamed. A ball of dirt smashed into his mouth. He shook his head, tried to dislodge the filth, to see his attacker. Blinking away enough for a hint of blurred sight, he saw only the hooded figure’s arm, directly in front of his face and shoving the soil down his throat. He gagged, spit, shrieked behind the wall of dirt filling his mouth, and finally, he swallowed. The dirt, now muddy with his saliva, slid down his esophagus like a ribbon of slime. He coughed, exaggerated the action in an effort to expel the dirt from his mouth, his stomach, his lungs, but the thing pressed harder. Lawrence could taste its fist in his mouth, and it tasted like timber.
He raised his teary gaze to the thing’s face. Shadows still embraced its details, but a creak sounded from within the darkness like a door opening upon a haunted room. It’s smiling, he thought, and closed his eyes again, praying he’d never have to see that grin. He thrashed against the thing’s pressing arm, its shoving and choking and suffocating arm…
Bark, he thought. Its arm looks like bark.
It spoke then, its voice a log dragged across bones. “The trees did more than move. They screamed.” It lowered its face to within inches of Lawrence’s own. It reeked of oak and summer. “Remember your greatest sin, murderer.”
It rose and backed away. Lawrence heard its irregular footsteps retreating, heard the moaning and spitting of his wife across the room. He shoved his fingers into his mouth, digging for loose dirt, spitting and spitting and screaming when nothing but flecks came out.
HE DIDN’T REMEMBER PASSING out, but when he awoke, the stench of vomit dominated any lingering odor of wood or mud. A crusty film of dried puke coated his face, and he wiped the gunk with his shirt, managing only to smear sweat-saturated dirt into the mess.
Brooke moaned from behind him. He sat up, reached for his wife, his fingers just able to brush her outstretched arm, her face fuzzy in the thin moonlight. She gave him a mockery of a smile.
The bravado was gone, all the spunk and grit and attitude he had fallen in love with, gone. Her eyes shook off her smile with disdain and broadcast the truth: she was terrified and lost. Lawrence had never seen this expression in her eyes before, didn’t think defeat had ever been wired into her genes. But even the effort of smiling, her attempt to placate the fear that must be plastered across his own face, spoke of the fight in her bones, the strength of her soul.
He didn’t blame his wife for her fear. He was mortified, beyond the capacity to control his terror. Every cell in his being shrieked for release, begged to awaken from the nightmare. Raw courage in the midst of insane violence, brashness in the face of murderous psychosis, spitting into the grin of your kidnapper while chained to the ground and blinded by his blade, none of those responses to the world’s basest evil held true outside of the clichéd heroes of Hollywood. In the real world, terror bit with monstrous jaws and didn’t let go after a hail of curses and a few clever one-liners. It scoffed at your defiance and giggled at your anger.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you too, Lawrence.”
“We’re gonna get out of this.” Her smile returned, even less convincing than the first.
“You were throwing up in your sleep,” she said. “I was afraid you’d choke.”
“I wouldn’t call it sleep. I think I passed out.”
“He said something to you, didn’t he?”
He let her call the hooded beast a “he,” figured to correct her by saying “it” would only add to her anguish. “He told me the trees laughed. And to remember my greatest sin.”
“Your…what the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” Lawrence lowered his head, closed his eyes against the barrage of remembered mistakes that suddenly assaulted him. But they were mistakes, not sins against his fellow man—fights by his middle school flagpole that he should’ve ended before throwing that final, nose-crunching punch; lies to college bedmates when they pressed him for his phone number the morning after; an extra few lines on his resume here, a few too many intoxicated drives home there, but nothing, nothing, that justified this hell.
“I’m a good man, right, honey?”
“The best man.”
“I never hurt you, did I? Never hurt anyone on purpose when I could help it, right?”
“No, Lawrence, you never hurt me. You’re a good man. I don’t know what this is all about either. Maybe we hurt his family or something. Caused an accident we didn’t know about? A car wreck or something?”
“So he makes us eat dirt? I feel like I could throw up for anoth—” He looked at the vomit puddled on the ground beside him. The mess was thick, putrid, but free of soil. “Brooke, where’s the dirt? How could I not have thrown up the dirt?”
Tears cleared a path through the mud on her cheeks, and her soft sniffles watered his eyes. He touched his belly, imagined his stomach absorbing a mountain of mud, making it as one with himself as his blood and bone. God, I want a smoke.
“I’m gonna get you out of here. Look at me. I’m gonna get you out of this.”
Brooke answered with a scream. Lawrence followed her eyes. The hooded lunatic stood in the crude doorway. A saw dangled from his hands.
The mind bends, stretches, conforms to its surroundings with elastic resiliency and rabid stubbornness. It takes the mysteries of the universe, all the darkness and wonder, the wicked and the miraculous, the unknown and the unknowable, and molds itself into a state of either comprehension or ignorance. Only the purest experiences, the Grand Truths of the world, unhindered and unbound by any attempt at understanding, immune to man’s feeble pokes and prods, can transform the human mind into the babbling mass of jelly it is at its core. And as the towering demon strode into the room and lowered its saw to Brooke’s feet, Lawrence’s mind imploded.
He heard her sanity dissolving with her screams—gurgling, inhuman shrieks that warped his reality into a cacophony of drivel. He was aware of thrashing, screeching his own mad song. Brooke kicked, over and over like a crazed cyclist, but the thing grabbed one of her legs and jerked it straight, wrenching it into stillness. Lawrence could only see its cloaked back, but with an echoing crack its arm bent, descended, and began to pump back and forth in rhythm with the crunching of blade on bone. Blood soaked into the dirt at Brooke’s feet, pooling as the ground swallowed its fill. A toe dropped to the floor, plopped into the puddle of blood, followed by another, another, one more. Brooke’s shrieks faded into nothing, her eyes rolled back, her beautiful brown eyes, and as the creature raised its saw to her fingers, it spoke.
“Eventually everyone sins against my bride.”
As the first finger fell to the floor, Lawrence joined his wife in blackness.
HE CUT OFF HER fingers, he cut off her toes, and soon he’ll be coming to cut off my nose.
The words rolled through his conscience, high and singsong like a child jumping rope. They giggled and kicked and nudged him awake.
“You’re a rude man, Mr. Lawrence.”
Brooke. But no. She had never called him Mr. Lawrence, or rude for that matter. And her voice didn’t slice through his flesh like a rusty blade. He kept his eyes closed.
“I haven’t even touched you, yet you faint while I am speaking to you. And rest assured, I have no plans for your…nose.”
He opened his eyes, meant to tell the giant to go to Hell, leave them alone, fuck off, but his voice dribbled from his mouth as incoherent nonsense. The thing in the robes stood over him. Brooke’s leg, gray and bare and severed at the hip, hung from its hand.
The thing followed Lawrence’s gaze, then tossed the leg into the dirt. “Unnecessary,” it said. “Unaesthetic.”
Rage engulfed him, obliterated any desire for self-preservation. He saw only Brooke, his still and forever Brooke, and prayed for death’s reunion. He growled as he lunged; his fingers found his kidnapper’s neck and squeezed. It felt li
ke squeezing lumber. The thing laughed, like gravel crunching underfoot.
“Let’s stop the charade, Mr. Lawrence. Do you remember your sins?”
“I didn’t do anything to you!” He abandoned the fruitless attempt at choking his enemy and, realizing that his feet were unchained, leapt towards its face and groped for the hood. If he was to die, he would see the face of his killer.
The thing grabbed Lawrence’s arm. It twisted its wrist, and Lawrence’s forearm snapped in the middle and burst through his skin like a baby elephant’s trunk. He wailed, clutched the break. His vision blurred as if challenging the reality of his arm’s new angles.
“Your attacks were becoming tiresome,” the thing said. It grabbed Lawrence by the hair and strode towards the door of the mud room. Lawrence’s healthy hand left the wreckage of the fracture and grabbed the beast’s wrist, trying to alleviate the agony in his scalp. Like a parent dragging an irate child in the midst of a tantrum, the giant took Lawrence from his prison and showed him a glimpse of Hell.
“This is the price for your sins,” it said, and raised Lawrence by the hair until his feet dangled from the ground. Lawrence thrashed in terror, the pain in his head forgotten before the scene in front of him.
They stood in a forest. The moon shone full and heavy, illuminating every ghastly detail. Trees dotted the landscape, and they screamed in silent agony. Faces blended into the bark, blemishes in each trunk describing mouths full of soundless shrieks, eyes of the blackest fear. Hundreds of trees, hundreds of bodies, still but alive, flesh made wood, begging yet reverent to their master as it carried Lawrence into their midst. A maple the size of a teenage girl wept sap as they passed. An oak with a linebacker’s girth glared with crooked knotholes and offered unheard prayers with a furry mouth. A cone of fungus hung from a conifer and fit its grimacing face like a beard. Lawrence went slack, dangled, his protruding radius bouncing painlessly off his captor’s robes, his fight lost among the human dead and the thriving flora.
“Your kind sins against my bride with never a moment to consider her love for you, never a thought for the grace of her soul.” The beast lowered Lawrence to the ground, still grasping a clawful of hair, and dragged him deeper into the human forest. “You set up camps to praise the gift of her vastness, to cheer your own courage for daring to sleep without electricity and shelter. Yet you continue to cut, and hack, and saw at her bones. Your garbage sinks into her flesh and poisons her veins. You rob her waters of their creations, and litter her air in toxins and smoke.”
The thing picked Lawrence up once more and turned him to within inches of its obscure face. An earthy odor emanated from the shadows, a green and blooming smell that nearly dragged a mirthless laugh from Lawrence. The wind groaned through the bodies as if dreading the moments to come.
“And you burn her limbs with smoldering embers.”
With a snap and a crack, its free arm broke, bent, and pulled back its hood. Lawrence cackled with lunatic terror.
Eyes as black and deep as wormholes glared, gauged, judged. Its flesh was cracked and rough, a mosaic of grays and browns and reds. Leaf-clad branches the size of fingers jutted from its cheeks, its chin, its brows. Speaking through a distorted fissure in its bark the width of a snake hole, it said, “Do you remember your embers, Mr. Lawrence?”
And he did. He tasted the last drag off his cigarette, recalled his pride as he watched the muscles in Brooke’s legs when she stooped to roll up the tent. He felt his fingers flick the cigarette into the dry brush lining their campsite, watched its glowing orange tip somersault and fall. Banished details returned, the gathering smoke where the cigarette still burned, the scent of flaming kindling, the thickness in the air as it prepared to sear. He saw Brooke’s forgotten look of horror as a shadow grew behind him, heard a now familiar crack, then pain and the dark.
“Seventy-three trees burned before the heavens doused them with tears. Seventy-three, Mr. Lawrence. And so I replenish, as I’ve replenished since my bride first took me to her side, and I remind the sinners of their sins.”
His stomach lurched, spasmed, seemed to rip apart with a stab of pain. Lawrence tried to look down, wanted to watch his viscera uncoil, but the tree man still clutched him by the hair and held his gaze. The pain lessened, and his mouth filled with the taste of soil. His tongue rolled around the flavor and rejoiced.
“You were preparing us,” he said. His voice was a rustle of leaves. “For planting.”
“You prepared yourself when you scorched my bride.”
“Brooke … Brooke never hurt you. Never hurt your…” He spit out a raspy laugh. “Your bride.”
“Are those who love sinners not sinners themselves? And she does look quite beautiful, does she not?” The tree man turned Lawrence’s head.
Brooke stood mere feet from him. Her arms shot skyward, as dark and rough as old leather, branches and thorns lining her hide like warts, ending in fingerless hands that resembled the pine cones that would gather in their yard each fall. Her eyes, as lovely a shade of brown as they had been at their wedding, stared at the sun in reverence. Her mouth was a yawning O and ringed with a bundle of tiny pink flowers the shade of her lips in the morning. She was buried in the forest floor up to her remaining knee.
It pruned her, he realized, and his mind slammed shut like a coffin lid. He dimly noticed the tree man had set him down, but any thoughts of running vanished into Brooke’s pleading wooden eyes.
“It took her fingers and it took her toes and it will not be done ‘til it buries my soul.” He laughed the words like a poorly delivered punchline.
“And your soul will replenish all that you have taken,” the tree man said, stepped between husband and wife, and drew its saw from its cloak.
“Mother Nature is a forgiving bride,” it said. “Nature’s Father, however, is not.” Its crack of a mouth fractured into a crooked grin. “Today is Arbor Day, Mr. Lawrence. Let us celebrate.” It raised its arms. The saw gleamed in the moon’s pale glow, and the trees welcomed a brother.
THE GREENHOUSE GARDEN OF SUICIDES
by Kirk Jones
Doctor Bryukhonenko’s Experiments in the Revival of Organisms, and the accompanying footage of a small canine head severed from its body, its life sustained with the help of machinery, now flashed in Dick’s mind as he watched the severed head of a middle-aged woman in the same condition. Like the dog in Bryukhonenko’s tests, the woman reacted to various stimuli. Her eyes lazily followed his hand when he waved them before her. She squinted under heavy lighting. She was, in a scientific capacity, alive.
As he scrawled the results down in his journal, the woman’s eyes spun like a roulette wheel, darting from one corner of the room to the next. Then the scattershot movements slowed, and she settled on him.
He dismissed it as chance and continued in his journal until a rhythmic clicking drew him back to the head. Her jaw fell agape as she continued looking at him. Then it snapped shut. Her features distorted to a look of terror. She opened her mouth again. Only a faint gurgle issued forth, but he saw the movements of her lips, and knew what she was trying to say: “Where am I?”
SWEAT BEADED AND STREAMED down the phone as Dick waited for his contact to answer. Finally, Sands picked up.
“Agent Sands here.”
“She looked at me,” Dick stammered.
“Dick?”
“That woman, she looked directly at me and tried to speak.”
“Then the experiment was a success?”
Dick wiped the sweat away from his receding hairline. “I think she’s conscious.”
“That’s great!”
“I can’t do this.”
“Dick, you need to calm down. Tara’s a suicide victim.”
“Please don’t use her name.”
“Sorry. She was clinically dead for nearly two hours before we got her up there. She’d be six feet under by now if you hadn’t revived her.”
“I can’t test a live specimen.”
“Look,
it’s probably just muscle reflex. You were the only thing moving in the room and her eyes responded to the stimuli. Jaw spasms are normal as well. You know this.”
“I don’t think I can go back in there.”
“That’s fine. Your contractual obligations have been met. You’ve tested her reflexes and the results were more than we had hoped for. I’ll send someone up tomorrow to clean up, and you can get back to the university.”
“Thanks, Sands.”
Dick hung up the phone and looked out past the garden to the greenhouse where the suicide victim’s head rested in a large plastic dish. He thought about the eyes, a deep green clouded with death, reverberating with fear. A few days earlier, he imagined she would have stirred something in him long since gone, a rekindled sense of purpose, of youth perhaps. But now she was incapable of inspiring anything but fear. He shuddered as a wave of cold washed over his back and trailed down his spine like a slug scrolling down the leaf of a maple. Sleep wouldn’t come easily for him, and the nearest liquor store was over twenty miles away. The neighbor had been watching his movements closely during the past few evenings, and leaving the greenhouse out of range seemed like too great a risk for a bottle of scotch. So he decided to go through the motions, the ritual to prepare for sleep that would never come.
As he opened the toothpaste on the bathroom sink and squeezed the innards onto his brush, he thought about the girl in the greenhouse opening a bottle of prescription tranquilizers and filling her stomach with them. He spit, let himself fall into bed, and writhed beneath the blankets, thinking of the aging woman doing the same, only uncovered on her bathroom floor. The paramedics had found her naked, completely exposed to the world.
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