The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  It was quiet in there. Not quiet as a cathedral or a grand old library is quiet, but quiet like the depths of the subsoil where only the lonely roots sink (Adrien wished he didn’t know what that was like). With the leaves hanging in silence, the sole noise was that of his puffing. He leaned with his hands on his knees, trying to regain his breath after hurtling down the valley’s slope. Above him the maze of branches intertwined, with phantoms of dust following their paths. The tree trunks divided into many leaning columns, rising and rising to become lost amid the brassy foliage. ‘Well?’ he said to them, and to the whisperers if they could hear. ‘I’m here, aren’t I? So what now?’

  His question echoed away into nothing. The tree trunks dwarfed both the lobby’s stone pillars and the grand staircase, carpeted by moss, that led to the hotel’s upper floors.

  ‘Adrien.’

  He spun around in alarm. ‘Oh! Oh . . . hello Michelle.’

  She stepped into the lobby through the door he’d just used, and she looked the weariest he’d ever seen her. A lump formed in his throat, for he felt responsible for those bags under her eyes. All through their marriage he had guzzled her love and generosity and now, when she looked drained and in need of restoring, he didn’t even have the time to help her. The trees creaked above him like scraping saws, as if to underline the point.

  ‘I just saw you sprinting down the hill,’ she said, with a nervous laugh. ‘What on earth are you doing in here? Can’t you see the whole place is collapsing?’

  ‘Michelle . . . I wish there was time to explain.’

  She raised an eyebrow. She always did that when he withheld things from her. ‘So you’re not going to tell me why you just came belting in here, as if your life depended on it?’

  ‘You wouldn’t believe me, even if I could.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘My . . . my friend is in trouble.’

  ‘Hannah?’

  ‘Maybe her, too. But Hiroko’s been taken by Leonard. Hannah and Seb are looking for her.’

  Michelle only had to hear Leonard’s name to look terrified for the others. ‘Where has he taken her?’

  ‘I don’t know. Hannah thought there might have been a chapel.’

  ‘Where she found David . . .’

  ‘Yes! Do you know where it is?’

  Michelle shook her head. ‘If I did I’d be there in a flash. But you’ve come running in here . . .’

  ‘Because,’ said Adrien, and took a deep breath. ‘There’s something here I hope can help us.’

  ‘There’s nothing here but ruins. I don’t understand.’

  ‘I don’t even know if I do either.’

  ‘Adrien . . .’

  ‘There’s no time to persuade you,’ he said, ‘but there are things in this forest that whisper, and that showed me . . . maybe they showed me something that can help.’

  Just as he’d expected, Michelle looked lost for words. Then, although Adrien hadn’t heard any wind blow, the branches stirred. A scattering of sunshine fell between them, and brightly lit the moss-covered staircase.

  ‘You should be out there with Hannah,’ frowned Michelle. ‘Leonard is a dangerous man. You know that as well as I do. Why on earth would you come running in here if—’

  The trees above them whined, and things skittered through the foliage. Michelle heard them too, and they both craned their necks. ‘Adrien,’ she began, suddenly nervous, ‘can you see a . . . a . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  The leaves parted and a whisperer crawled headfirst down a trunk, pausing midway to regard them. It had eight bulbous eyes, each like an embedded acorn.

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Adrien, as calmly as he could. ‘I expect it’s come here to show me the way.’

  ‘It’s come here to what? What is that thing?’

  ‘There was a vicar we met in the forest, who reckoned they might be devils or angels. They’re definitely some kind of servants.’

  Again she could only gape at him, but this time the whisperer had given him some hope. It had scared the disbelief out of Michelle.

  Long, sinewy moans came out of the trunks. The leaves stirred, rustling in their thousands as they parted wide enough to let even more sun fall on the staircase. A path of intense light ran up the steps, turning the mosses a sickening green, and it was as if the trees strained to hold themselves open and reveal it.

  ‘I think I have to go up there,’ said Adrien, as the whisperer scuttled around the trunk and disappeared from sight.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they want something from me, or at least I hope so. If there’s nothing I can do for them, I don’t know how I’ll get them to help me.’

  It was clear that Michelle didn’t know what to say, and nor would Adrien expect her to. He only wished she didn’t look so small and frightened. He was supposed to be the small one.

  ‘Listen, Michelle . . . I know I’ve no right to ask anything of you, but will you gather up anyone you can and try to find Hiroko? Try to find Hannah and Seb.’

  Michelle gave a tiny nod. ‘But what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m not really sure,’ said Adrien. ‘I’m just . . . following a hunch, I suppose. Acting on instinct, and all that.’

  She shook her head. ‘But you don’t. You never do that.’

  He raised an arm to gesture to the trees all around them. ‘I think the whisperers played a part in this, Michelle.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘The forest. In why it’s here. Maybe they’re even the reason.’

  Michelle only stared at him with such puzzlement that it was as if they’d been decades apart, not months.

  Adrien shook his head. ‘I wish I had time to explain everything. I wish I had time to somehow make things up to you. But I haven’t, so that’s why I’m going to say this instead . . . It wasn’t so bad, walking all the way here. With Hannah and the others, I mean. Even if we only had mushrooms to eat, we still ate most nights, and that was because those three knew how to get by.’

  ‘Adrien . . . why are you telling me this right now?’

  ‘Because if you get the chance, after all this is done, I think you should stop and think about where things are headed here. Roland, I mean, and how he’s running this place.’

  ‘Roland is already history,’ she said quietly. ‘I finished with him this morning. What he let happen to Yasuo was the last straw.’

  Adrien was so grateful that for a moment he could hardly breathe. The trees creaked urgently above him.

  ‘Hadn’t you better get going?’ whispered Michelle.

  He nodded, took off his glasses, wiped his eyes, then pushed the glasses back up his nose. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I suppose I’m going to climb that staircase now.’

  ‘I suppose,’ repeated Michelle, folding her arms tight.

  Then, with a tremor that shook the floor beneath them, the hotel rumbled and collapsed further. Two huge blocks of mortar fell out of the branches where, a minute ago, the whisperer had crawled. They exploded against the flagstones and both Adrien and Michelle ducked their heads from the shrapnel spray that followed. A third block, the biggest yet, a right angle of bricks that had once been two walls of a hotel room, plunged through the foliage and crashed into the staircase. Steps snapped in half and flew into the air, and the sheer force of the impact carried the block through the planks and banisters and into the very foundations of the hotel.

  Only when it became clear that no more debris was falling did the two of them straighten up. Dust swirled in the lobby air. Sunshafts shone through it, like spotlights in smoke. Loose leaves twirled towards the floor.

  ‘What now?’ asked Michelle, looking at the place where the damage had been done. There was no longer any way up, for the falling walls had left only a cavity where the staircase had been.

  Adrien watched the floating leaves drift and ebb and, one after another, disappear down the hole the bricks had made. ‘Oh,’ he groaned, ‘of course. That makes sense.’


  ‘What does?’

  ‘Down. Where the soil is. That’s where they want me to go.’

  ‘You’re actually going to go through with this, aren’t you?’

  He nodded.

  ‘It isn’t like you.’

  ‘But that’s . . . good, right?’

  Michelle tried to smile. He looked her in the eyes. She only seemed appallingly sad, and he could hardly bear that he was going to leave without fixing things with her. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said.

  ‘Of course you do.’ She reached into her pocket. ‘So take these. I was saving them, using them sometimes when I needed to find things in the night. There’s not much fuel left in the lighter, but . . . here, just take them.’

  She handed him a cigarette lighter and a stub of white candle, and they both let their hands touch when he took them.

  ‘Are you going to be alright with those?’ she asked.

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

  ‘Because of the candle.’

  ‘Oh . . . yeah. I think I’ll be able to cope.’

  She smiled.

  ‘Goodbye, Michelle,’ he choked.

  ‘Yep,’ she said, in the tiniest voice.

  He teetered towards her, and she to him. They each held the other as if they were two fragile vases, and then they stepped apart.

  ‘Okay,’ they both said at once.

  Adrien took a deep breath and walked across the hall, to stand on the brink of the cavity. The broken staircase entered into it, but he could not see the bottom. He looked back over his shoulder, and Michelle was watching him from the place he had left her.

  The loose leaves danced into the hole. The branches squealed overhead.

  Michelle turned and stumbled out of the hotel.

  Adrien was expecting the sudden loneliness that hit him, so he absorbed its blow and took his first downward step, onto the broken boards of the staircase. Together with chunks of brick and other rubble, they formed an unstable slope he could descend. As he got lower, everything became murkier, but he resolved to save the candle until he really needed it. For now, the faint light from above would have to be enough. He edged into some sort of basement room that smelled of tannins and alcohol. When the light unearthed green glimmers in a hundred places, he realised it had been a wine cellar.

  In a crater of smashed glass lay the fallen chunk of bricks, but it was not the only intrusion in the cellar. There were also many roots, each of them giant enough to support the great trunks they nourished. He could see only their beginnings here, for they bulged into the floor without narrowing.

  ‘So what now?’ he whispered to the forest, peering around for some other exit. It took his eyes a minute to find it. Another hole, beyond which the light gave out entirely. Its entrance lay below an archway, formed by part of a root, and it was not man-made. It was simply a rend, a seam which the trees’ growth had left torn in the earth. He approached its opening and struck the lighter. The flame wavered yellow and showed him a path, just wide enough for him to walk down and almost precisely his own height. He touched the fire to the candle’s wick, then proceeded in its faint and dancing light.

  The passage curved as he went, and squelched underfoot. It was no long-established tunnel with dried-out floor and walls, but more of an accidental seam, a narrow air pocket running through denser soil. From somewhere nearby came a constant dripping. From somewhere else something slithered. The tunnel continued as far as the candle would show, progressing steeply downhill. Out of its walls poked more twists and turns of enormous root, moisture slicking their pale surfaces as if they were sloppy drinkers. The soil they had bored through was spongy and soaked, but that was all Adrien could take in before a chill air current blew and the flame quivered out.

  Slow music, deep notes played by the creaks and groans of plant fibres and the weight of the earth, began to make itself heard from somewhere deep below him. Adrien’s thumb jittered at the lighter’s button, but before he could get it sparking a drip struck the back of his neck and he flinched as if it had dropped from a guillotine. Then there was a sound as of something pattering across the ceiling. Something else brushed his ankles. He finally got the lighter working and, in the moment of touching its flame back to the candle, saw a diminutive silhouette tottering away from him down the tunnel. Then it was gone around a bend.

  ‘Okay,’ he nodded to himself. ‘You should be used to them by now. You can just let it lead the way.’

  He plodded on with all the bravery he could summon, and the air grew even colder and damper against his cheeks. When the candle blew out again he spent a frantic minute flicking his thumb against the lighter. Michelle had been right that there was not much fuel left inside. When he got it burning the flame was small and weak, and the wick took what seemed like an age to catch.

  The tunnel wound gradually downward with no end in sight. Adrien plodded on as bravely as he could, and once more the air shifted, becoming the coldest so far. The next time the candle went out, he could not get the lighter to spark. He had no choice but to continue blind, one arm outstretched and the other clenching the useless wax in the ball of his fist. A worm writhed against his fingers when he pawed at a wall.

  And then there was light.

  At first he thought it was some trick played on him by his retinas. A green smear on the otherwise perfect dark. Yet as the tunnel bent it became steadily brighter, until he came upon its source.

  It was a fungal colony, some two dozen ears of gelatinous matter growing out of the wall. Theirs was a delicate luminescence, no more powerful than moonlight, but when Adrien looked down at his body it was lit up in phantasmal greens, as were the contours of the tunnel, along which more of the strange fungi shone. He began to walk quicker again, and was just passing one particularly bright stack when it detached from the wall. It slopped onto the path in front of him and propped itself up on doddery legs. It was a whisperer with a glowing head of mushrooms. It loped ahead of him, showing him the way in a viridescent aura, and he followed it until the tunnel reached its terminus.

  The space it opened into was a yawning cavern, its ceiling rising high overhead like a cathedral’s. Adrien was surprised to have come so far below ground, then immediately wary. He felt the same seasick sensation he’d had upon leaving Hannah’s nursery, when the road had been stolen from them for the first time on their journey.

  All the way up the vaulting walls, hundreds more of the mushroom lights twinkled. Some were fat globes and some small as stars, but they were all reflected in a shallow subterranean pool that was the polished floor of the cavern. Adrien had emerged onto a ledge of soil, some six feet off the water’s surface, and in other circumstances he might have stopped to admire its serene beauty. Instead, he arched his neck and stared upwards, at an enormous chandelier of roots that hung all the way down from the ceiling. Each giant tendril was as pale as the wax of his candle, and descended tangled with the others to within a few feet of the water. ‘Are these the roots of the throne tree?’ he asked, but the reply he received did not come from the glowing figure who had guided him.

  It was a chorus sung without melody, an anthem hummed by bone-dry throats, and now Adrien realised that none of the mushroom lights that covered the walls were ordinary growths. They were all the haloed heads of countless whisperers such as his guide, and in turn they lit up a host of thornier figures, who clung to the dirt in between those that shone. The longer Adrien looked, the more of them he saw, gathered like choirs on every ledge and vantage point. Some of them were pallid things with corkscrewed limbs, and others were brittle and gaunt. Every last one had its gaze bent on the same thing, something caught at the very bottom of the flow of roots.

  It was the creature. Like some immense squid dragged up in a net from the ocean bottom, it hung limp above the surface of the water. It had been easy to miss at first, for compared with the roots its bark was dim as shadow. Nor was it moving, and several of its legs drooped so lifelessly towards the water that Adrien wondered if it m
ight in fact have perished in this cavern.

  ‘What . . . what’s wrong with it?’ he asked, looking up at the audience of whisperers.

  They responded with urgent sibilance, but he had no idea what they were saying. Then the one who had guided him down the tunnel brushed past his ankle and walked straight over the ledge, to fall with a plop into the pool. It bobbed back to the surface at once, breaking the calm water into circles. Then, using its own body as a raft, it headed for the pool’s centre, above which the creature hung. There it paddled to a halt and stayed floating on the spot, like an eerie green prayer candle pushed out onto a lake.

  Adrien took deep breaths of the underground air. He suspected he was being asked to follow but, more than ever before, he was aware of the limitations of his body. Aware of how his legs ached after walking all this way, of the elasticity in his spine that had always stopped him from standing upright, of the cold air against his bald spot, even of the fillings in his teeth. He didn’t like one bit the look of the water, and didn’t think he could find the strength to step into it. Surely the whisperers knew he was a coward. He had never pretended to be anything but.

  ‘Maybe this isn’t such a good idea,’ he said, trying his best to raise his voice. ‘Maybe I should just . . . just go back up the tunnel and find someone better. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll come back here with someone far more capable.’

  But by then, he supposed, everything would already be too late.

  Adrien slid down the banked dirt of the ledge and landed with a splash in the pool.

  The water only came up to his knees, but it was instantly freezing. He gritted his teeth and waded after the floating whisperer. As his steps stirred the pool they made its remaining reflections vanish, but as he sloshed closer to where the creature hung he began to get a better view of it. The rot in its wood looked worse now than it had in the theatre. Each cut in its bark had widened, and the air this close was thick with the reek of decay. Adrien covered his nose and mouth with his sleeve, but the smell still got through. Mould and sulphur and sap and blood on the tongue. He could feel it in his lungs and stomach like the settling layers of some filthy sediment.