The site of the break-in was coated in wood splinters and pine needles, bedsheets stuck together with sap and wallpaper ripped by thin lacerations. The child was gone by the time anyone had arrived. A woodsy smell hung thick in the air–old air and pine trees and dried blood. The kind you smelled when you pressed your face against a rabbit hole.
There was blood caked on the walls and bedsheets, but no sign of a body, nor was there a visible trail.
It was 3:02 A.M. Detective William Rook spun a pencil absently between his fingers, boots grinding pine needles and glass shards into the carpet. He was the kind of man who took great pride in his appearance, and equal effort into not looking like it. He had a beard traced with white and a gruff demeanour, accentuated by the cigarette in his mouth, sloping right eye, and flatcap.
A search of the room revealed a small wooden effigy made of pine tree branches and strawberry plants under the child’s bed. He held it in his other hand, staring deep into the carved face. It looked like a person, or at least the idea of one, wrapped in branches as though embraced by a tree. An X was carved onto its face with a sharp, jagged blade.
He could swear he felt it move in his hands, writhing just underneath the wood surface.
He had begun chewing the metal end of the pencil, but caught himself, checking around if anyone saw even though he knew he was alone. The scent of the woods was getting to him.
Rook settled into his chair, tumbler of whiskey in hand. A night cap, he called it, although he’d never been able to kick the habit of having a morning cap, or perhaps a noon cap as well. His apartment wasn’t anything to write home about. A two-bedroom apartment for a one-bedroom man meant it was destined for silence, the second bedroom turned into a mix of depression clutter and office.
The old chair he sat in had several different jackets slung over its back which he never really bothered to put away fully.
His coffee table was covered in overflowing ash from the ashtray on its corner. According to the lease, he wasn’t supposed to smoke, but he intended to die in this apartment, so the way he figured it they could take it up with his estate.
He couldn’t put the details of the case aside, though. Strange things had been happening since the woods appeared overnight. He was always a prairie man, and this had always been a prairie city, stretching off into the eternally-visible horizon. But now, when he looked out the windows of his ground floor apartment, where he once saw flat land, it was just elm and shadow.
Overnight, an entire city swallowed by trees, shrouding the streets and creeping up the walls of brick buildings. No one knew how they appeared, even when; just that one morning, there were trees so dense the sun didn’t shine.
The Elton kid wasn’t the first disappearance since the trees came.
He swirled his whiskey, staring at the letter sitting atop the ash. Liquor, he thought, sat on his nerves like the insulating rubber over a wire. Protect and contain. He took one sip for courage, another for luck, and he picked it up, haphazardly tearing the seam and extracting the contents.
His eyes widened as he read it.
Lab results for the blood in the room–and the little idol. All that blood wasn’t just one person. It was dozens, lining up with old cold cases stretching back decades.
How? He took another sip for the question, polished off the glass for the hell of it, and poured another for his nerves.
Knock, knock, knock.
A deadbolt slid and the door opened just a crack, the faint scent of lilac pouring over like frothing milk in a pan. Pale eyes stared out from inside the dark. “Hello?”
“Ethel Helgesley? I’m Will Rook. I’m a detective. I was wondering if you had a moment to talk about your husband.” Partly a lie. He had his own reasons.
“Charles?”
“Yes, ma’am.” She went silent for a minute.
“Come on in.” a second deadbolt slid and the little chain holding the door fell limp.
“Thank you, ma’am.” Rook removed his hat and stepped in.
The apartment was unusually dark, as not a single light was on–like she wasn’t even home. Further, what he had chalked up to a faint scent of lilac had grown to be an overwhelming stench almost as soon as he had crossed the threshold.
A large, old, scruffy dog approached Rook and sniffed his pant leg with his enormous, wet nose. ‘Sniff’ may be the wrong word, here. It was more as though the dog planted his nose directly on Rook’s pant leg and inhaled deeply.
“That’s Herbie. He’s blind. And old. Like me.” Ethel walked slowly and deliberately, as though her legs were toothpicks and her feet mere decoration. “Can I get you something? Coffee? Tea?”
Rook took the dog’s massive head into his hands and ruffled his big ears. “I could go for tea,” said the whiskey-drinker.
“I’ll put the kettle on. You make yourself comfortable. Herbie’s good company.” She shuffled off into the kitchen, which also didn’t have a single light on.
Then, Rook was alone–well, he was with Herbie, but Herbie barely seemed to be with Herbie, given the distant expression on the dog’s face that went past blindness and into the territory of dissociation.
He wandered, looking at old pictures on the bookshelves and entertainment stand, which held a TV, old even by Rook’s standards. The kind of colour TV they sold in the 50s for the equivalent of a down payment.
The photos, though, were the most curious part. Ethel and Charles seemed to be very avid hikers–Rook recognized some of the locations. Trailheads in the Rocky Mountains, Banff campsites. Strange, he thought, the hikers living in the prairie. Stranger still that Charles’ face was never unobscured, always blocked by something. A leaf, a tree branch, a photo-bombing moth. In one case, a photo of Ethel and Charles standing side by side near a waterfall, the right side of the picture simply failed to develop, blotting Charles out entirely, the only trace of his existence being the skin-coloured smudge and a strong hand over Ethel’s shoulder.
Herbie whined over by the window, which was blocked by hundreds of trees, forbidding natural light from flowing into the apartment. Rook knelt down by the dog.
“What’s wrong, buddy?”
Herbie heaved the kind of heave only big old dogs give, the kind with enough bass to feel in your chest. Rook jumped.
The dog gave a couple retches before spitting out a clump of something wet and green. No vomit, though–as though it was just something stuck in his throat. He gave a phlegmy snort before resuming his prior activities of pressing his face against every flat surface in the apartment.
Rook sat on the carved wooden chair across from the two grandfather’s reclining chairs by the fireplace. The cushion was threadbare and stained with food, but well-loved. Herbie tried his hardest to fit under the legs of the chair and fall asleep.
The kettle clicked in the other room. Before long, Ethel emerged with a teacup on a platter and a cup of something green for herself. She gave Rook the cup and sat down in one of the chairs, on the edge of the fireplace light and the darkness.
“That smells interesting.” He gestured at her cup. “What is it, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I do mind.”
“Alright, then.” He gestured to the pictures. “You guys big hikers?”
“You said you wanted to talk about my Charles. Get on with it.” He tried to hide the expression of shock on his face. In his experiences, widows tended to be less… direct.
Rook cleared his throat, letting his steaming tea cool before even venturing a taste. “Yes, I did. The details on Charles’ case are a little fuzzy. I was hoping you could clear some things up.”
“I already told everything I know to the police.” She sighed. “But sure. Ask away.” Strange, he thought, given the police knew nothing, either.
“I’ll ask the uncomfortable one first. Does–did–Charles have a history of mental health issues? Schizophrenia, psychosis, any kind of hallucinations?”
Ethel drank deeply of her green liquid. “No. He was a deeply rational man.”
He marked this down. “Can you go over the night he disappeared?”
Ethel frowned. “You found his body. I don’t see how that’s relevant.”
We still don’t know how he died, he wanted to say. “We’ve had… similar incidents to Charles, recently. We think it may be a pattern, a serial killer, something. Any information, maybe something we missed before, may help.”
She thought for a good, long moment.
“It was board game night,” she finally said. She gestured over to a square cupboard on the edge of the living room shadow. “Every Wednesday, we pick a board game to spend the night playing. Helps pass the time until God takes us, I suppose. We’re too old to go gallivanting in the Rockies, anymore.” She sighed. “I hit a straight. Placed my chip down. Then he just looked up at me, blank. The moonlight reflected in his eyes. He had seizures from time to time, I thought it might have been that. I didn’t push the issue. After a couple seconds, he stood up from the table and marched into the bedroom, closed and locked the door behind him.”
“You don’t think he was upset at losing?”
“No. He was a very good loser.” Not a hint of a smile touched her face. “He was in there for a while. Muttering, but I couldn’t hear what, through the door. Then I heard the window break.”
Second floor apartment. “What happened then?”
“It’s… all kind of blurry.” She sipped her liquid. “The door unlocked. As soon as it cracked open Herbie rushed by me, into the room. Knocked me over. Hit my head on the radiator.” She looked down at the dog. “Last thing I saw was Herbie bounding off into the woods.”
“Then you woke up in the hospital?”
“They sent me home a couple days later. Window was boarded up. Case went cold. Herbie was home. Don’t know how he got back, but he’s such a good, smart boy.” Rook kept jotting down notes. “They found his body a couple days later. I’m sure you read about it.”
“I sure did.” He sipped his tea. It had started to grow cold, it was only polite. A shock hit him as it touched his lips–it tasted like ground up leaves and pine needles. Like pure earth in a fluid. He choked it down.
“Is there anything else?”
Ethel nodded, very slowly. “I didn’t tell the police this.” She reached into the pocket of her cardigan, retrieving something she hid in a clenched fist. “Give me your hand.”
“What?”
“Give me your hand, Detective William Rook.”
He hesitated. She glared at him with the eyes of a predator. He offered his hand, and with the speed of a closing bear trap she placed it in his hand, covering it with hers. It was warm and rough and hurt to hold. Not only that, it was sticky. “Don’t look at it until you get home.” Herbie’s ears twitched. He opened his mouth to bark, but thought better of it, turning it into a yawn. Rook’s neck hairs had begun to stand on end.
She gestured to the door. “I’m rather tired. Please, leave.” She barely even tried to hide her dismissal.
He rose, tucking the object into his jacket pocket. He grimaced as it stuck to the fabric inside. “Well… thank you, Mrs. Helgesley.”
Her eyes narrowed, reflecting the moonlight from the window into lethal pinpricks of white light. “No, thank you, Mr. Rook. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
She shuffled him outside and slammed the door shut behind him.
He rounded the hallway corner, away from the peephole on her door, and reached his hand into his pocket, retrieving the object, fighting against the clumped fabric. Merely holding it felt like worms digging into his nerves.
He uncurled his fingers, revealing a small wooden effigy, made of twigs and strawberry plant stems. It was sticky with sap.
He wrapped the bandages tight against his right palm. Pain shot up his arm and he tossed the roll of gauze to the side, reaching for the nearby glass. He raised it to his lips with trembling hands and drank until he could see the bottom.
Exiting the bathroom and clutching the glass he went to the kitchen, avoiding looking at the drawer in the corner. The one he set the effigy in. He poured himself another glass of liquor and took heavy steps to the living room, slumping into his chair and doing his best to ignore the pain. To suppress the itching he felt beneath the flesh of his palm, the scratching in his bones.
He had to have been imagining it, he thought.
The night was cold and quiet, moon pressed against the sky as if impaled by hundreds of thousands of trees. Branches rustled with the wind. The magpies had long since died, swallowed whole by the great void of pine. The ravens had since moved in, cawing with loud, braying calls.
He always wondered what they could be saying. Who they could be talking to. Why.
Wood groaned. He ignored it, reaching a bloody, bandaged hand for the TV remote. He pressed the big red button in the upper corner, and it blinked to life.
He stared blankly at the static. Bits of audio came through, crushed and mangled through the interference, bits of weather channels and sitcoms and local news peeking through like bits of paper pressed against a wall of wet paint.
Like holding a conversation over a nuclear klaxon.
He knew the words weren’t real or even close to new. Just garbled echoes of the past. He fell into them all the same. Maybe he was chasing some semblance of normal. Maybe he hoped he’d have some revelation, watching the pixels blur and stagger.
He tried desperately to pull his mind towards the case. Charles had been found mangled, as though split from the inside by plants. Only his heart remained normal. Why?
The liquor didn’t mask the pain in his hand. It grew tighter. Fiercer. More alive. As though it beckoned him, somehow. Some way. He didn’t want to look under the bandage.
His kitchen had begun to groan. He knew, somehow, that the thing had begun to grow, rooted into the wood of his countertop and drawers and cupboards, warping them in natural, gnarled shapes. Calling him.
Knock, knock, knock.
Three confident, heavy strikes pounded the door. He waited. There were no further attempts, no elaboration. No calls through the door. Just three distinct, matter-of-fact knocks.
He rose from his chair, snapping the sprouts which had begun to tether his hand to the fabric of the armrest. He stepped past the kitchen, which had grown so, so much worse. It had begun to fall away, wall bending outward, the infection working its way into the joists and trusses of the apartment, blossoming out into the forested night like an exit wound.
Grabbing the door handle, he opened it in such a way his hand was hidden. “Hello?” He didn’t sound like himself. He sounded wrong. Foreign. He could picture his own larynx moving as he spoke and it disgusted him.
“William Rook.” The figure was cloaked in a rough, reddish fabric. “I have a letter for you.”
“Why not pass it under the door?”
“Because you need to know it will be alright.” The figure produced an envelope, dirt-brown in colour and stamped with a crimson seal. Wordlessly, he handed it to Rook, who took it from his gnarled hand. “Until we meet again.” He turned and strode away, down the apartment hall, without even a chance for Rook to have the last word.
Rook closed the door, turned around, and found his kitchen back to normal.
His hand still hurt.
The dark had settled in. The sun had not risen in days.
His lips were split and cracked in the cold evening air, his breath fogging in front of him. Blood seeped from fissures in the bluish-pink skin on his lips, mingling with his beard. Bloodshot eyes stared out into the night. Blackness tugged at the edge of his vision, visible eukaryotes swimming in his eyes.
His heart beat in an uneven pulse, like the thumping hooves of a wounded deer.
Rook stood at the treeline, clutching the wooden thing in his hand. It hurt in a way he’d never hurt before. Like loathing made form.
He didn’t look down to his hand–he did not want to see what it had become.
A still forest was never a good sign. A still forest meant you were being hunted.
Moonlight seeped through the trees, cut into narrow slices by branches. He knew what he had to do. Just as he knew he needed to eat, or breathe, he knew he needed to go in.
He was barely in a state to wonder if this feeling was what Charles experienced before the end. Before they found him.
He took one step down the knobbled path, knit with roots, wrinkled like skin. His knee throbbed with pain. The trees embraced him, their shadow washing over him.
Every step took him further from the comforts of civilization, away from concrete roads and buildings and artificial lights, and deeper into the green, into the deep abyss of the forest. Away from comfort. Towards truth. Towards the eyes in the dark, the heart pumping in his throat. Cortisol’s true purpose.
The path grew darker and darker. Wood groaned and shifted around him. A twig snapped. Something moved just beyond the tree line. He bent his body to squeeze between trees, the walkway growing narrower and narrower until he could no longer walk in a straight line, awkwardly weaving himself between trees in a way humanity has forgotten. The trees observed his bumbling gait, his palm’s unfamiliarity with bark, and marked him accordingly.
He fought the splinters, the pine needles in his eyes. He pressed on.
He knew it had its eyes on the effigy. On his hand.
His push became feverish, claustrophobic. His breath was clouded, hoarse, suffocated by the trees. Gnarled flesh marked bloody handprints on wood. Further. Further. Further.
Further, yet.
He knew he was close. He could smell it. The scent of strawberries and pine and carrion on the night wind.
The trees parted.
He knew it wasn’t God. He was a human creation, an attempt to make sense of things in the dark. An idea given shape by dead animal skins and rock and temple. A thing to offer to, in hopes to survive the coming night. There was no God here. No one God. No lord to pray to. Only the trees.
The thing in the trees was a pile of effigies, knit together by wild strawberry plants and sinew and tendon weaving between threads of bark. A solid mass beating like a heart, leaking a creek of blood.
He fell to his knees, dropping the effigy in his hand. Vines and roots snapped as it broke contact from his skin, hitting the forest floor. The fog lifted, and like an Alzheimer’s patient he had a single moment of horrible, terminal lucidity.
He screamed, and the forest revelled in it. A primal noise. The noise before language. The communication of beasts. His lips cracked further and bled as his mouth opened to its limit, blood marring the colour of his yellowing teeth.
“You made it.”
Rook turned his eyes to face him. The messenger, emerging from the trees. He glided past them as if they were all he had ever known, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to him.
Rook licked his lips in a futile attempt to bring moisture to them, but only succeeded in peeling off dead skin with his dry tongue. “Why?” All he could muster, his voice hoarse.
The robed figure’s voice was like rubbing bark. The smouldering ember of an old bonfire.
“The world as I knew was magical and terrible. Mysterious. Humanity huddled around their bonfires at night, staring into the darkness and wondered, feared. Everything defined by the flickering of a gentle flame in the underbrush. But I’ve seen your kind, growing, “progressing.” Peeling wood from its home, ripping rock from the ground. Making homes of dead things, blocky, unnatural shapes and forms and lighting the night with a sickly, actinic glare. Your own sun.” He stepped closer to Rook. Branches had begun to wrap around his knelt form, roots slithering into his skin, up his veins. “You’ve forgotten the darkness. You’ve forgotten the violence of survival. You’ve banished the things that hunt you in the night.” He leaned closer. Two wide, rectangular pupils on red irises stared back from underneath the hood. “You’ve forgotten the woods.”
The roots slithered deeper, thicker. Into his blood, into his cells. He could feel it, as it warped his skin, turned his muscle from blood to fiber, blood to cytoplasm. He screamed as it reached his lungs, holding tight his last breath. Tar from his smoking habit was wrung from his lungs like juicing a fruit. “Good night, Rook.”
Branches twisted and bent, a horrible groaning and splitting sound bounded off the trees. Wet grinding, like wringing out hundreds of plants, trees bending in the wind, fleshy yet not, increasingly stiff. The buckling of a ship hull.
Before long, all that was left of him was an effigy on the forest floor, beating with a gentle, arrhythmic heartbeat.
by Winter Publicover
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