The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  Don’t go near, Gweneth had said, in her camper van on the beach. Don’t look in. Adrien needed no convincing, yet when he glanced upwards there was something about the shape of the creature that transfixed him. Its limbs were a symmetrical question, like the lines of a psychiatrist’s blot test. When they creaked it was the noise of a whole corridor of long-unopened doors, and there was something haunting about that sound that resonated in Adrien’s gut. His eyes became lost in the joints and kinks of its arms. Every limb bent and branched backwards towards that rot-black mouth at the heart of it.

  Without warning, the whisperers around him changed their chant. They turned it to a lisping falsetto and, as if goaded along, the creature made an effort to hurry towards them. It moved with a doddery gait, twisting and unbending its array of claws and knees, the twigs at the end of each leg clinging to less animate sticks for support. Limb followed limb, and at last the thing weighed its heavy frame down onto the stage.

  The stink of the creature was the air itself now, filling Adrien’s mouth and tingling on his tongue. He remained too petrified to move. He could see the creases and the wrinkles in the monstrosity’s bark, see lacerations gleaming with sap where its hide had split open. For all its strangeness and horror it seemed pained somehow, like a waterlogged spider waiting to either dry out or perish. Adrien’s eyes were drawn back to the centre of it, and there were strands of resiny mucus dangling from its maw.

  A moment later, it wailed. With the noise came a wave of shrill breath so nauseating that Adrien clutched his hands to his throat. His nostrils flared and contracted as if trying to flap out the stink, but it had filled his lungs already, and blood rushed to his head and he staggered backwards, feeling like he was going to faint. He tried to fix his eyes on something, anything at all to stay conscious, but the only thing he could find was the creature’s open mouth.

  It was a black hole. So dark he couldn’t look away. With a dizzy grunt he slouched forward, and the creature shrieked again and its breath overflowed him, seemed to sweep under him and hoist him up. Briefly he managed to fight it. He pulled himself backwards, but its hollow mouth drew his gaze in like gravity, and even as he tried to resist, he lost his balance and teetered.

  He fell. It was as if his head flopped one way and his thoughts another. His consciousness was blown away like a veneer of dust. Everything turned to pitch black.

  Time might have passed. Adrien did not know. He did not know if he was alive or dead, out cold on the stage or swallowed whole by the creature. He did not know anything, for however long he did not know . . .

  Then, after a long or short while, he knew there was a worm.

  The wriggle of its jelly body confirmed it. Where it was headed and where he was he could not tell, but a moment later a paddling of fur and claws followed it. The darkness dislodged into more of the same, and a mole caught the worm and curled up velvet as it ate. Then it tunnelled on, and for more immeasurable moments there was nothing.

  Adrien waited. He waited. He waited. Waiting was what he was. He was a sparkle concealed in the unlit world, and he remembered out of nowhere that he was biding his time for a luck of heat and rainfall. Then, suddenly, that time was upon him. He would have said he knew it in his bones, but he had no bones. He had only a kernel to know it with.

  He put forth shoots. He clambered straight and pure green into the light, feeling for the very first time its scorching brightness on his outstretched palms. His body was as thin as a thread, but all around him stood the trees that were his elders, and he could hardly believe he might reach their height some day.

  Something snorted. There was a grunt and a snaffle and the next instant he was back in darkness. The tusks of the forest hog closed around him as they dug him out of the ground, and he was crushed against molars and swallowed into acid but he did not pass away.

  He passed on.

  He swaggered through the forest with his curling tail swishing behind him, and he shoved his snout into the mud and loved the damp mush of it point-blank against his nostrils. If he found an acorn he crunched it between his teeth and trotted on, humming an oinking song in the deep of his throat. He jaunted down tracks he had long ago trampled into place, daydreaming of truffles and musing about pignuts, until a howl pricked up his ears.

  The pack were on him in a second. A weight on his back and the reek of canine piss, and he rolled over squealing and thrashing his trotters but there were too many of them. Too many biting jaws to block them all, and the wolves’ fangs found their way through his throat and belly and they tore him open and were swallowing mouthfuls of his innards, even as he felt the blood still flowing within.

  He passed on. Running with the pack through the dappled light of the forest smacking his tongue against his lips to taste the salt pig blood and the wind of his running. When he came upon the scent of a stag it wrenched him after it and his brothers and sisters understood and they ran with their ears flat against their necks. The speed at which they ran was so great that before he knew it he had already passed on all over again. He had hooves galloping through the leaf litter, and his antlers were raking the branches and his ears swivelled and tracked every chasing wolf and he knew he could outpace them all. Then before he had time to make sense of it he was bounding over a branch with his bushy tail flicking out behind him, and he leapt into the air and suddenly had black feathers for fingers and he was ascending, up and up with the rest of his murder through the leaves of the canopy. Beneath him was the roof of the forest crisping to brown, and his thoughts whirled above it like the leaves thrown up by the crows’ passing, and then the birds flew on while his thoughts drifted down, down, down towards the trees.

  His hair came in many shapes and hues of green. In patches it was tinted orange or to a copper that rustled not just for the flights of crows but for every bird that combed it with its wings. Caterpillars itched him like head lice, and sometimes a cow or a horse or a kirin would reach up with blunt teeth and yank out a mouthful of his locks. That did not trouble him. He would need no hair in the coming days of winter. In readiness for the cold he bastioned himself in upright trunks. He armoured his fingers in gauntlets of twisted twigs. He bunched his toes up underground.

  He was a hundred-branched oak, straddling the forest, lightning-scarred and full of crags. He was a canny old yew, polishing his poison berries. He was a sapling thin as a ribbon. He was a bulb, back in the soil, and one moment later he was a vole prospecting the bulb. He was the owl that plunged from on high, and he wailed a shrill rodent death-wail even as his beak tore triangles out of himself, and he savoured the meat he was stripping from under his fur and he spat his bones back out in a pellet. He was a fly, drunk on the leftovers, boggled by the prism world seen through his thousand-faceted eyes. He was a millipede tapdancing beneath the damp of a rock. Down into the dirt and up again. He was a white moth taking off on its lightning flight, and a bat chasing the thunderclaps of the moth’s wingbeats. He was more things than he could think of at once. He was a snail corkscrewing backwards into his shell, a bee in drunken love with nectar, an ant marching after an ant into an egg chamber where his queen lay in never-ending labour. Down into the dirt and up again. He was every mosquito in the swarm that hatched above the river, and he buzzed into the forest to go dipping for blood. He bit a rat: he was a rat scurrying into the warren mouth. He raced through the tunnels and he was a flea on the rat’s back and he ricocheted from hide to hide. At the bottom of a burrow, far underground where they had a hundred squeaking words for darkness, he became the mother rat who had long forgotten the number of her offspring, and beneath her fur and muscle he became each half-formed life growing in her womb. His cells doubled and redoubled until he was seventeen foetuses, each reclining in the heat of his mother’s belly as one might in a hot bath, and he waited with sealed-up eyes for his lives to begin. When the time was right, he kicked himself free and knew only to seek out his mother’s teats in the pitch, and he was again that mother rat who had long lain in ch
ildbirth, and how ravenous he was. And look, the seventeenth among his babies was a runt, who could never struggle hard enough to survive. He drew it in close, in the tenderest embrace, and he was that blind runt too, glad of the sudden maternal warmth. His incisors slit through his own newborn ratflesh like scissors through silk, and he put himself back in the belly from whence he had come.

  Down. Down into the dirt.

  And up again.

  Adrien cried out and flung himself to his feet. He stood upright, on trembling legs, in the theatre, and the creature was gone. The throne tree had vanished too, and all of the whisperers save one. That was a malformed thing, hung with foxgloves as a leper is by bells, and it hissed at him with a rasping tongue and then turned, and limped away.

  A minute passed before Adrien could even think about moving. His hair and shirt were sweated to his skin and each of his muscles ached in its own fashion. When he finally tried to take a step, his thighs and calves cramped at once, and he had to sit down gasping and feeling rigid as wood. Strange afterthoughts flitted through his mind. Feathers. Fur. Soil against his tongue. He crammed his fist into his mouth to stop himself from vomiting.

  ‘What the hell just happened?’ he muttered, a minute later.

  But he was alone with the trees, and they offered no answer.

  13

  Direction

  Hannah could guess that something had happened as soon as she saw Adrien staggering back across the road towards the café. His hair was stuck down by sweat and his skin was blotchy all over. He moved as if he’d forgotten how to properly use his legs, so she hurried out to meet him. Without saying a word, she wrapped her arms around him and at once he mumbled, ‘Thank you,’ and leaned against her. She guided him back to the café and lowered him onto a stool, while Seb fetched his rucksack and rummaged for spare clothes.

  ‘Was it the whisperers?’ asked Hannah.

  ‘Yes,’ croaked Adrien. ‘And . . . and . . .’ He buried his face in his hands.

  Hannah didn’t let go of him, but they all stood around in silence, unsure how best to help. It was some five minutes before Adrien tried to speak again, and then only in half a voice.

  ‘There was something else. I looked into its mouth, and . . . and . . .’

  ‘Take your time,’ advised Hannah, while Adrien looked back fearfully towards the theatre. ‘Don’t talk if you don’t want to.’

  At that he looked grateful, and accepted her offer of silence. It took him an hour to be ready to set out, and although he kept pace with them he also kept his eyes lowered and his lips sealed. Hannah did not press him on what he’d seen, hoping he’d find a way to describe it in due course. They followed the compass north by north-west, coming out of the town and into flat land filled with thick trunks. Some of the trees the lightning had stricken, and turned skeletal despite their girth and grandeur. Others were as orange as fireworks, and sometimes their leaves drifted free like fizzing sparks.

  Hannah kept Adrien company while Hiroko picked them a path. Now and then he flinched at something in the woods, but never at the things that had always used to terrify him. The eerie creaks of branches and the sudden screeches of birds he ignored, whereas at smaller sights he often lurched away and covered his mouth with his fist, or unashamedly reached out to grab hold of Hannah’s arm.

  The sun was huge and sinking, and sending sideways beams of light through the forest, when Adrien tried again to talk about what had happened. The land had begun to slope and they were trudging uphill past an isolated industrial building that might have been some sort of factory, when suddenly he covered his face. He groaned and sank into a crouch, and Hannah whistled to Hiroko and Seb to slow up. Then she knelt beside him and slipped her arms around his shoulders.

  ‘Adrien, what’s wrong? What can I do to help?’

  He cleared his throat and pointed to the factory’s wall. ‘It’s the lichen,’ he whispered, and she looked and saw ochre circles of the stuff all over the bricks, and more made from tiny plates of pewter green.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, taking off his glasses and wiping his eyes. ‘I keep remembering stuff. You must think I’ve gone crazy.’

  ‘No. Just . . . help me understand.’

  He gestured again at the wall, although he obviously couldn’t bear to look at it. ‘It’s not one thing, is it? A lichen, I mean. It’s a fungus and an algae living mixed together. You’d know about a thing like that.’

  Hannah nodded. ‘But I don’t see why—’

  ‘Would I? Would I know about it? So how come I do?’ He covered his mouth and held his breath for a minute, then nodded and carried on in a whisper. ‘It’s because I can remember it, Hannah. As if I was lying on a hard stone bed, as if my arms and legs were all tangled up with somebody else’s. Only I wasn’t on a bed, was I? And I wasn’t with somebody else. I saw so much, Hannah, and I keep remembering more.’

  ‘I . . . I don’t understand. Adrien . . . please try to tell me what happened in that theatre.’

  He bit his lip. There were tears in his eyes. ‘The whisperers came. And another thing.’

  ‘Another whisperer?’

  ‘Maybe. But a hell of a lot bigger. A hell of a lot more frightening, too.’

  Hannah reached out a hand and helped him get back to his feet. ‘Listen carefully,’ she said, not letting go. ‘Whatever’s happened . . . all three of us are going to help you to face it.’

  The next day the going became harder, up and down furrows full of ever bigger stones. On the steepest land the trees leaned sideways out of the soil for a chance to cheat the sunlight, and it was in the shade of one such slope that they came upon a set of narrow rail tracks. They were the kind used by mine carts of old, and they headed north-west along with their path. Eventually they plunged into the mouth of a tunnel.

  The travellers rested for a half-hour in the opening, although the pause was chiefly for Adrien’s benefit. He had slept fitfully all night, waking them often with sudden cries or the thrashing of his arms. In the morning he had seemed more composed, but spoke only rarely and remained easily startled by sights and sounds from the undergrowth.

  Eventually, he signalled that he was ready to proceed, and they stepped into the tunnel. Hiroko, however, stopped them at once. She had spotted something on the arch of the entrance.

  ‘Look,’ she said, tracing a finger over score-marks in the brick. ‘And here and here. As if somebody’s sharpened a giant knife against it.’

  ‘Or a horn,’ said Seb.

  ‘The kirin came through here, then,’ said Hannah, clapping her hands. ‘It’s going ahead of us. Showing the way.’

  She grinned at them all, but Hiroko and Seb had never seemed much moved by the kirin and Adrien was in no fit state to smile at anything. Hannah sighed and reserved her delight for herself. For an innocent moment she looked forward to telling Zach about it. Then the pain of her grief swallowed her happiness just as the tunnel swallowed the light when they entered.

  The passage ran far longer than any of them had envisaged, curving subtly on its course so that they could see no exit and all vision dimmed away. There was no choice but to tread on blindly, cold vegetable tendrils brushing through their hair. When Hannah raised a hand she could feel stalactites of root hanging from the ceiling, but underneath the cement was weirdly smooth, untouched by the trees.

  They were midway through the passage, their footsteps ringing muted echoes off the walls, when a gunshot sounded. Hannah jumped and gasped, but the sound of her own breath was much louder than the shot had been. It had come from far off, beyond the tunnel’s exit.

  ‘It’s alright, Mum,’ said Seb, somewhere nearby in the dark. ‘I think it was a long way away.’

  ‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘I’m okay.’ But she reached into her pocket and gripped tight the thing that came to hand, which was the seashell Nora had given her.

  Seb took her other hand and squeezed it, and Hannah let out all of the breath she had been holding since the shot. Then Seb said
something to Hiroko ahead of her, and she realised it had not been his hand that had squeezed hers. It was Adrien’s, and she smiled gratefully in what she hoped was his direction.

  At last a navy smudge emerged ahead of them. Gradually it brightened, and their first glimpse of the tunnel exit appeared like a hairline moon, waxing fuller as they progressed, until they had to pause and shield their eyes before they could look again. They began to see each other’s faces once more, and Hannah realised they were all looking at her with concern. She tried to smile for them, but she was unsure what expression she managed to make. She touched Nora’s seashell to her ear and the sound of the ocean was at least some reassurance.

  They continued along the cart tracks, past a derelict factory whose chimney stood dwarfed among fir trees. ‘Here,’ said Hiroko, pointing at the earth. And there were the kirin’s footprints, clear and fresh, and Hannah tried to fix her mind on them and forget about the gunshot.

  Beyond the factory the land built gently through a series of uphill ridges. When they reached the crest, Hannah expected to find an amenable downhill on the other side. What they found instead was a pit. It was a vast scar left by some mining operation, slopes of grit on three sides and the telltale dust of coal on the air. The trees had struggled to find purchase and only grew in scrawny bunches, many of which had lost their hold and tumbled head-over-heels into the pit. It was the first time Hannah had seen the forest so beaten by what had gone before it. Nothing grew at the bottom, for it was a graveyard of ash-rolled logs, but into it the cart tracks wriggled, heading for various tunnel entrances all boarded up. It was a sight so sweeping and empty of life that it took Hannah a moment to notice the kirin.

  It lay on its side in the deep middle of the pit. A man was crouching over it with his back to them, pulling things out of its body. By his side stood an eager Alsatian, transfixed by its master’s butchery. Hannah covered her mouth, for although they were too far away to see the bullet wound, the opening the man had cut into the animal’s belly was a smile, bright and red.