The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  ‘What’s happening to it?’ he asked.

  The whispering from above him intensified. When Adrien looked up, he saw a thousand tiny arms twitching and gesturing nonsensically.

  A dry wheeze began, somewhere in the body of the creature. Then, with a torturous groan, it shifted a dozen of its legs. They rose up in a kind of crooked salute, before flopping aside. By the time they had stilled with an exhausted creak, the thing had re-arranged itself among the dangling roots, revealing its great dark mouth.

  The mouth was wider than Adrien remembered it. The lips of it were mounded with blistery bunions and oozing pustules that bled out sap. It reminded Adrien of a wound that had festered, and the rank darkness inside was far too deep for the lights of the whisperers to penetrate. Yet at the same time it seemed less terrible than it had in the theatre. It did not command Adrien’s gaze as it had done there. Neither did the stink of its breath overwhelm him, although he kept his nose covered with his sleeve.

  ‘Is it sick?’ he asked.

  When he looked to the whisperers, he found that all of their gazes were fixed on him.

  ‘You can’t expect me to help it,’ he said, ‘if I don’t know what to do.’

  With a dry rattle, like the sound of dead leaves scuffing over stone, the creature exhaled again. Adrien’s lips curled and he nearly gagged as the smell floated down from where it hung, but it was nothing like as irresistible as it had been before.

  ‘Show me what to do,’ he asked of the whisperers, but they gave no response. Then it occurred to him that there might be a way to show himself, could he only summon the courage.

  At once he did not want to. He wished he’d never even thought it. Yet it was the only plan he had, and he tried to remember that he was here to help his friends and had to do whatever it took. When the creature wheezed one further time and its sigh of decay wafted over him, Adrien dropped his arm to his side and inhaled as deeply as he could.

  It was as if he had snorted up worms.

  His vision rolled and the insides of his skull felt full of pulsing movement. He staggered backwards, tripped and fell, but by the time his body hit the water the splash already sounded like a faraway tinkle. His thoughts squirmed away into darkness.

  Darkness where he drank.

  He drank below ground with innumerable buried tongues, and when the sun shone he was above ground lapping the very light out of the air. Drinking in the grandeur to which he was entitled, drinking for endless miles, shoulder to shoulder with himself across lands, across continents. Like a wave his thoughts rushed around the sunlit half of the world and swooned for the fireball blazing in the sky. He basked in it, and spread out his leaves. To wear a ruffled flower on his cactus he endured the roasting heat and the bombarding sand, and the next moment in another part of the world he dropped his pine cones to better shoulder huge weights of snow. In the mangrove swamps he felt the tides wash around him and the countless teeth of the fish nibbling his roots and he let his attentions roll on, further and further afield. Just as with one gesture he surrendered his leaves to insistent winter, with the next he touched spring and unpacked tight new buds. In the greenest parts of his being he was fanned by the flipbook thrum of the hummingbird’s wings. His fingers tapped time to the monkey’s maniac dance. He lost track over and over of the padding tiger who rubbed itself against him like a house cat rubs its master’s legs. In the cold realms where he had to hold his breath for the light, he gave up his mosses to the teeth of the reindeer herd. He had lived five thousand years as a bristlecone pine on an arid mountain summit. He was the mighty giant and the waifish sapling both, and all the bellies of the trees were his full bellies, their strong arms his arms, their straight backs his straight backs, their contortions his feats. He put up a toadstool, speckled fat and red. He put up a million bluebells and let them chime in silence on a windy day. He lent his disguise to the moth, to the shield bug, even to the jaguar with closed emerald eyes dreaming fang dreams in the aftertaste of blood.

  A wasp landed on his petal tongue and crawled a little deeper, and he slammed shut his lips and he was the wasp, melting alone in perfumed saliva, cut off from the hive and the free air. He poisoned a tamarin for stealing his berries and he was the tamarin who had cherished those fruits as dear as gemstones, and he choked to death curled up among them. Caterpillars ate him, and he pincered the caterpillars with his beak, and then out came his golden talons to catch himself. He was swept up high into the eyrie and there he was crushed and torn apart and regurgitated for the chicks in his nest, and he was the chick side-by-side with his hated sister, seeing the world in nothing but shades of blindness, already scheming for the moment when he could push her overboard. He wrapped tight the faun in a scaly constriction, and hissed as he listened for the snaps. He was the spring-loaded mantis, lunging at the songbird’s breast, spearing its heart with his claw.

  The orang-utan seated in his branches pondered him. The dolphin playing in his coral stopped and nudged him with its bottle nose. The studious rat watched and bided.

  Along forking paths of root and branch he flowed, just as he flowed in nerves and veins. Every tree trunk was his signature, and so was every beating heart with stems and shoots of artery and every patterned leaf blowing in the wind. Round and round he blustered, and when the wind lulled and he tired of his crackling dance he settled down in layers on the dirt. The soil was his bed and he tucked himself in, and he rested under wilting sheets and crumbly quilts. His was the brown dissolving sleep from which nothing ever wakens. He slept himself into a moisture, a gift of wine for the eyeless denizens of the soil. Down into the dirt he drained, and sometimes he filtered as far as the bedrock and the secret caverns, and within one such chamber he was in a bead of fluid welling out of an earthen ceiling, and he dropped onto the first root of a vast descending tangle and ran from bristle to bristle all the way down until he swung from the lowest tip.

  He fell.

  He was a thought in a watery sphere, spinning through darkness . . .

  . . . and he landed on the forehead of a middle-aged man, slumped on his knees, waist-deep in a pool.

  With a drawn-out shiver, Adrien returned to himself. He clutched his hands to his shirt, confused to feel his own heartbeat under layers of goosebumped skin and muscle. His breathing was rapid and shallow. He felt put together wrong, with not enough pieces.

  ‘Wh-what just happened?’ he stuttered, although already he was beginning to remember.

  It took his eyes a minute to refocus, but he could tell that the creature had not vanished as it had done in the theatre. It still hung in the web of roots, looking even more wretched now than before. Above it the walls of the cavern arched, but the lights of the whisperers were all gone from their perches. Instead they shone, in one great green glow, from the pool all around him.

  While Adrien’s mind had been spinning through whatever places it had just been, every single whisperer had descended from its vantage point on high. Too many of them to float, they had piled into the water submerged or stacked on each other’s bodies, surrounding Adrien in a heap.

  Adrien heaved himself to his feet. ‘I still don’t understand,’ he said in a small voice. ‘What do you expect me to do?’

  The whisperers gave no response, so Adrien looked again to the creature. He was starting to doubt it was even aware of him, if it possessed any awareness at all. It had no mind of its own. It was just lives.

  ‘I can’t help it,’ he repeated, ‘if you won’t even tell me what’s wrong.’

  A sound came from out of the creature’s shoulders, like that of cut timber squealing before a fall. Adrien began to retreat, wading backwards as fast as he could while the whisperers scrambled and splashed to part the way for him.

  With a scrape and a rattle and a final capitulating squeal, the creature slid out of the roots and dropped into the pool. When it hit the surface it threw up a sheet of spray that struck Adrien’s face cold as hail. He wiped himself dry with his sleeves, while the
ripples from the splash lapped past his knees.

  The creature lay motionless where it had crashed into the pool, its legs bunched up in a swatted pose. Adrien held his breath and waited for it to move, but with each passing moment when it did not, he felt a curdling sense of despair.

  ‘No,’ he muttered, ‘this can’t be right.’

  He supposed that, since the theatre, he had come to think of the thing that had just collapsed before him as powerful and ancient. It had seemed wounded, too, but surely it was too potent a being to simply wither away. He held his hands to his collar and thought of Hiroko dragged off by Leonard, and of Hannah and Seb staggering after her. It was the power of the creature that he’d hoped could be somehow entreated, tweaked or diverted, to offer mercy to his friends, but now it did not even twitch. When Adrien looked to the whisperers they were as motionless as a heap of mannequins, and he began to wonder if there had been some sign of theirs that he had missed from the start, some signal they had tried to impart that had been lost on him.

  ‘It’s dying, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  Nothing in the cavern moved, save the ripples on the pool.

  ‘But . . .’ Adrien shook his head despondently, ‘I needed it to help me.’

  He looked back towards the tunnel he had come down. He felt, not for the first time in his life, like an abject failure. It would be a cold, difficult walk towards the surface, and all of his muscles already ached in so many places. How tired he was. The backs of his eyes felt like slices of glass.

  ‘I have to do what I can for my friends,’ he told the whisperers, as firmly as he could, then began to wade back towards the tunnel. They did not try to stop him. Instead, those in his way parted before him like rats scrambling out of a sewer. He reached the pool’s bank and dragged himself out of the water, dripping his way up the soil. He did not let himself speculate on what the creature’s demise meant for everything he had seen in that strange state brought about by its breath. All of his energies were needed for getting back to the surface, and for trying to help Hiroko, Hannah and Seb.

  Something split behind him.

  It was a brief, sudden crack, like the sound of an axe slamming through a log. When Adrien looked around, the creature had broken nearly in half. The rot surrounding its mouth had finally given way and its entire body looked snapped at the jaws, its branches divided into two wretched portions.

  Despite that, none of the whisperers were looking at it. They were all watching Adrien go.

  All except for two.

  Adrien did not think he had seen any quite like them before. They had climbed atop the remains of the creature, where they were busying themselves with some sort of labour, bending their heads close to its frame and inserting their fingers like keys into its rotten bark. They were half as big again as the rest of their kind, and their skin was silver, and each had a single wooden antler screwing out of its scalp. The prongs of those antlers were decked in black clumps of moss, as were their wooden skeletons, which were shaped as if the bones of some nimble deer or leaping hare had been forced into an approximation of human form.

  With a dead crunch, the body of the creature slouched further into the water. One of the two silver whisperers glanced up for a few seconds, black ribbons of vegetable matter strung from its mouth, then ducked its head again and continued its work. Adrien bit his lip. At first he’d assumed they’d been trying to fix the great creature, but now he could see they were picking the last of it apart.

  With one last feeble groan and then a glug of water, what remained of the creature’s core sank into the pool. The silver whisperers, however, had separated a trophy from its body, and now held it aloft between them. It was a ring of jagged black wood, its circumference not much wider than Adrien’s forearm, its bark glazed all over by a dripping gel of resin. It was some part they had cut from its mouth, and Adrien fancied it might be whatever passed for the creature’s throat or gullet. Holding it in their fragile arms as if it weighed no more than an ounce, the whisperers turned to face Adrien.

  ‘What is that?’ he asked. ‘What are you doing with it?’

  They began to limp towards him, down off the carcass of the creature and onto the bodies of the other whisperers, who only purred when used as stepping stones. The silver pair moved at an unerring creep, bearing the circle of wood as if it were some torc or relic at a coronation.

  Adrien backed away. He had reached the tunnel mouth but he felt no safer there, even if none of the whisperers had tried to prevent him from leaving. In the pool, the two silver relic-bearers drew to a halt, their circle of wood still raised above their antlers.

  ‘I . . . I came down here for my friends,’ he spluttered. ‘If you can’t do anything for them then . . . I’ve got to go.’

  None of the whisperers responded. Nor did they stop staring at Adrien.

  ‘I needed your creature to send a . . . a bear or something. Anything, to rescue them from Leonard. That was what I was asking for, in the woods, when I said I’d do whatever it takes.’ He pointed to what was left of the many-legged creature. ‘But now look at it.’

  Not one of them did.

  Adrien cleared his throat. ‘Goodbye,’ he croaked, and turned to hurry back up the tunnel.

  No matter the otherworldliness of the scene he now left behind him, Adrien felt an all too familiar despair to have come down here when his friends needed him most. The rush in which he’d charged after the kirin now seemed at best a fanciful miscalculation and at worst raw cowardice. How like Adrien Thomas, he told himself, to find the deepest hole to hide in when the going got tough. How like Adrien Thomas to look for something he could beg to save him, before he had even attempted to fight his own fight.

  He looked back over his shoulder. The silver whisperers were watching him go, their circle of wood still held aloft between them. Adrien only shook his head and toiled on up the slope. He could hardly bear to imagine what had happened while he’d wasted so much time down here. He thought of Hiroko, not strong enough despite all her bravery to win out against a brute like Leonard. He thought of the heartbreak that waited for Seb if he lost her. He thought of his dear friend Hannah, who had lost all her faith in second chances. He doubted he could be of much use to any of them now and, for an awful moment, he pictured himself burying them. Yet, with the creature crumpled away to nothing, their only hope left was Adrien Thomas.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ten steps later.

  The vision is a test, the man in the pharmacy had said. A question.

  ‘Ohh,’ said Adrien again, feeling the blood run out of his cheeks.

  And now he could remember something else that poor, broken man had said. At the time Adrien had thought it nothing but a plea for company, in the final hours of his life.

  Can I keep you?

  Adrien turned slowly to look back down the tunnel. Right at the bottom, lit by the eerie light of their kin, were the silver whisperers with their circle of wood. ‘You can’t be suggesting . . .’ he began, clasping his hands to his collar. ‘I mean . . . I’m not even close to strong enough.’

  Yet even as he protested, Adrien knew it was not a strong man whom the whisperers had been searching for. Strong men only drove the world to ruin.

  He would have liked to have paused and taken even so little as a minute to consider things further, but he suspected he had wasted too much time already. This was his chance to make a difference, perhaps his only one. Slowly at first, and then at a terrified scamper, he headed back down to the pool’s edge. He nearly lost his balance when he slid into the water, for his heart was pounding and the pool seemed even more freezing than before. He steadied himself and took a deep breath and began to wade towards the silver whisperers as determinedly as he could.

  They awaited him with their circle of wood raised. It had a shape like a shark’s jaws, but there were buds packed beneath its resin rind just as there were rotten roots and stalks as tight as tendons. ‘Will it hurt?’ gulped Adrien as he approached.

&nb
sp; The whisperers tilted their heads and changed their noise to something hymnal.

  Adrien knew every moment was precious, but he stopped within arm’s reach. It took him several seconds to find the bravery to say, ‘Do it, then.’

  The silver whisperers lowered the wooden ring over his head.

  It came to rest against Adrien’s neck and shoulders. It was lighter than he’d anticipated, hardly weighing a thing, but the sap in which it was coated began at once to glue to his flesh, and he could feel it hardening there and binding, and he shuddered. Other than that, nothing happened. He had expected something overwhelming, such as the first time he’d looked into the creature’s mouth, but all he felt was a tickle behind his left knee. He turned to see a whisperer climbing his leg, then a second going up the other one and another pair following those. As nimbly as beetles, and with more flowing behind, they hurried up his trousers, over his hips and onto his back. Adrien clamped his jaws and tried to stay still, fighting the urge to thrash around and try to bat them off. They weighed next to nothing, and even as more of them swarmed onto him he hardly had to stoop to bear them. None climbed any higher than the wood around his neck, but on his back they milled and grappled and, if they could find no part to cling onto, simply grabbed another whisperer by the limb and dangled from there. All the way down to the pool they hung, like the patchwork of a leafy mantle.

  When the two silver whisperers climbed onto his shoulders to join the rest, Adrien had to swallow a scream. With spindly arms they caressed his cheekbones and forehead, and up close he could see that they were whiskered by the thinnest white twigs, and the bark around their eye sockets was cragged into something like crow’s feet. They reached out to lock limbs around his skull, and he only managed to stave off his panic by thinking of the people he still somehow hoped to save. They would not understand that he’d done this for them. They would never infer it from Michelle’s account of him entering the basement. That didn’t matter. He had never really known any glory, and he was content to finish things that way.