by Jon Jacks
Looking up at the flashing sparks, the shards of electrical energy running along the millions of connecting branches, I realise that Pearl might be right after all.
For that’s what all this reminds me off: the insides of an immense, living brain.
*
Chapter 44
Once again, Pearl tries to push her way through the massed, interlocking branches.
Once again, the stems flash and spark – and remain immovable.
The voices now are angry. Even a little afraid, as if they sense that they’re under attack.
‘She wants to hurt us!’
‘She’s a danger to us!
‘They’re a danger to us!’
‘They know we’re here!’
At first, I mistake Pearl’s warning cry for one of the millions of voices now laying siege to our ears.
‘We have to get out of here!’ she shrieks urgently, trying to violently force her way through the intertwined stems.
She breaks a few of the weaker branches, raising howls of pain and anger from amongst the innumerable voices.
‘They don’t want to be a part of us!’
‘They want to leave!’
‘Stop them, stop them!’
The branches surrounding us now begin to writhe, to stretch out, their ends of slender twigs like the bony hands of witches. They lash around my wrists, my ankles. They wrench me suddenly back towards a trunk, holding me firmly there.
Pearl has been similarly snatched at by the branches. They drag her back, despite her renewed, frenzied protests. They crash her hard against a trunk, binding her evermore securely as more branches wrap around her. Cocooning her against the tree’s thick body.
Only Jeanie has somehow managed to avoid the grasping branches. In a panic, she ducks and weaves, crashing frenziedly through the branches.
‘Run, Jeanie, run!’ Pearl urges her, her cries partially strangled by the stems curling around her throat. ‘Look for the twin suns!’
I’m not sure Jeanie hears.
She’s just running wildly, lashing out violently at any branches drawing close. She’s snapping them before they have time to take a firm hold.
I’ve no idea how far she gets.
She vanishes into the darkness of the forest.
I hope she manages to get clear. To get home.
Although looking at how me and Sis are so tightly bound to these trees, I can’t see how we have a hope in hell of ever being able to join her.
But that’s always been me, hasn’t it?
Always just thinking of myself.
*
‘It’s been nice knowing you, Sis.’
Yeah, it’s a clichéd line, isn’t it?
I should be capable of coming up with something more original. Something more personal and unique.
But heck, it’s quite apt in the circumstances, I suppose.
‘And to think, you’ve only just got to really know me; right?’
I’d nod in resigned agreement if only these damned branches would let me.
‘Then again,’ Pearl adds with a sour chuckle, ‘I don’t suppose we’ve ever really had the opportunity to just talk to each other like this, have we?’
‘You’re taking all this quite lightly,’ I point out. ‘You know, the fact that we’re caught up in some gigantic, evil, living brain.’
‘You too, don’t you think?’
I’d nod again, if I could.
‘Yeah: why is that, do you think?’
‘Because, maybe, we can’t really believe all this is really happening? We’re hoping it’s all just some crazy dream we’ll wake up from? I mean, we’ve managed to escape everything else that’s been thrown at us, haven’t we? Aren’t we just hoping that we’ll miraculously get out of all this too?’
‘I forget: just how old are you really, Sis?’
Maybe we are taking all this too lightly.
Maybe, once we stop kidding ourselves this is all some great adventure and start facing up to reality, we really will begin to panic.
To fear for our lives.
But before all this can take place, something even worse drags us back to the awful reality of our situation.
From deeper within the forest, coming from the direction that the fleeing Jeanie had headed, there’s a wailing shriek.
*
Chapter 45
The shriek is followed by another wailing scream. Then another.
Soon, the whispering voices around us are drowned out by what could be hundreds of fearful shrieks. Like a terrified crowd.
The connecting sparks and surges of energetic electricity flow through the branches so wildly that the darkness is now completely lit up. Yet this amazing glow is as nothing to the bright flashes of yellow, of red, that light up and urgently crackle through the massed trees that lie farther off from us.
The voices crowding around us now whisper anxiously the same word over and over again.
‘Fire!’
‘Fire!’
What more could a forest fear than fire?
Clouds of grey and black smoke curl through the trees. Wisps of smoke are already reaching us, making it difficult to breathe, giving both Pearl and me painfully hacking coughs.
‘Jeanie – did she start it, do you think?’
‘She’s scared of fire.’ Pearl’s reply, like my question, is racked with harsh coughs. ‘But if she got desperate; if she realised fire was the only way of putting an end to this evil forest – then yeah, she might have felt she didn’t have any choice.’
‘Even though we all die horribly too?’
‘Yeah: even though we all die horribly too.’
*
The shrieking of the trees, the branches, is now mingled with the continuously sharp cracking of splitting wood and stems. There’s also the roaring of a wind being sucked in by voracious flames.
There’s another kind of crackling and sizzling mixing with it all too; the sharp fizz of the electrical bursts of energy frantically rushing from one branch to another, one tree to the next. Yet some of this energy is fading, even vanishing, some parts of the forest stretching high above us now dark and lifeless.
The brain is damaged. The brain is dying.
The branches binding me suddenly don’t seem anywhere near as tight or inflexible. Here and there, they droop away from me a little.
Like limp limbs. Like nothing more than normal branches once more.
When I struggle against them, they don’t fight back. They don’t attempt to restrain me with an even stronger hold.
They simply bend back, as if the way they’d clung to me was simply the way they’d naturally formed as they’d grown. As if, somehow, I’d simply managed to get myself tangled up amongst them.
Pearl also seems to have realised that the branches are no longer under the control of a greater intelligence. She, like me, is pushing her way clear of the tree’s trunk. She’s pushing or even breaking the branches away.
‘Which way?’ I ask, shrugging off the last of the stems that had been so securely holding me.
‘It may seem the craziest thing to do,’ Pearl answers, ‘but it has to be towards the fire.’
Yeah, that does seem the craziest thing to do.
That means running into what even from here looks like a solid wall of flame. The fire appears unstoppable, unquenchable.
Pearl senses my unease when she catches my doubtful grimace.
‘If we run the other way,’ she explains, ‘we’re running back into a part of the forest that’s still alive. It could trap and hold us again.’
We take off at a run, forcing our way through branches that are now only naturally rather than intelligibly resistant. It’s still hard going, the branches whipping us as we force our way past. Some of them still form an obstruction, until we plunge through with no care either for them or ourselves.
The nearer we get towards the swiftly advancing flames, though, the worse our position seems to be.
&n
bsp; The heat alone is increasingly intolerable, like a wall in its own right, apparently sucking up every drop of moisture from our bodies in an instant. It leaves us gasping for air, sore throated, and near fainting.
This is crazy!
Madness!
And as we run towards the fire, it’s running towards us at an even faster rate. Chuckling happily, it greedily sweeps through the wood.
Everywhere around us now there are falling, blazing branches. Each flaming branch sets alight the thickets of lesser stems and twigs it falls through.
Larger trunks, already afire, crash through it all, like the great beams of a cathedral being rapidly ravished by an inferno.
‘We can’t survive this Pearl!’ I scream worriedly at her.
‘There,’ she shrieks back, pointing towards a point somewhere deeper within the fire, ‘we have to head there!’
I can’t see what it is that she could be pointing at.
It all looks the same to me: all a massive, onrushing tsunami of flame, looming over us. Preparing to consume us as easily as it has this vast wood.
‘The suns,’ Pearl continues to yell, continues to urgently point, ‘the twin suns!’
With my eyes dried by the heat and smoke, everything around me is little more than an indistinguishable blur. All Pearl appears to be pointing towards us yet even more of the oncoming fire.
How are you supposed to spot a sun amongst a wall of flames?
‘That’s just the fire!’ I scream back.
She shakes her head. Urgently and almost brutally, she pulls me across to where she’s standing. She points once again to the exact spot amongst the trees that she wants me to look at.
‘See the trunks, the fallen beams of the wood?’
It’s an area of the wood where the massed, darkened trunks have toppled against or even fallen on top of each other. It all forms a virtually solid wall. A solid wall apart from two small gaps, where the fire beyond glimmers through it all like viciously blazing eyes.
‘It’s acting just like a henge,’ Pearl shrieks above the almost overpowering noise of the advancing fire. ‘That’s how a henge works: blocking out all but the most important light!’
‘It’s just fire…’ I continue to protest, even as I follow after Pearl.
She sprints towards these twin blazes of light. We abruptly find ourselves in a tight corridor of charred and blackened trunks, an area where the fire has obviously already rushed through.
Either side of this dark corridor, the fire continues to race through the rest of the wood, a sort of parting of the Red Sea.
Everything around us is still ferociously hot, including the ground we’re passing over. Darkened plumes of smoke and ash rise from the charcoaled shards. Areas still glow red, still burst briefly back into flame.
Amongst it all, there’s a different kind of glow. Small and bright, and sparkling.
A shard of white rather than sheer blackness.
It’s the glint from a broken pair of spectacles. Alongside the shattered lenses, there’s also the charred remains of a blue bow; Jeanie’s blue hair bow.
Pearl meets my own curious gaze with one of her own.
‘You think Jeanie…?’
What’s the point of asking the question?
We both know the answer.
Jeanie, despite her fears, had started this fire. To rid the world once and for all of this evil forest.
Had she also managed to escape?
Probably not: more likely, having started the fire in such a dry, tightly packed area, she would have been caught up in the worst of the swiftly expanding flames.
Ahead of us, the glimmer of the fire shines through the two gaps in the blackened tangle of trunks. This close, the flames glare at us more like eyes than ever.
Between the two flaming gaps there’s another gap created by the toppled trunks. One at ground level. One that could be a nose, lying between the blazing eyes.
‘The doorway,’ Pearl sighs confidently. ‘That’s the way out of here!’
Her hopeful sigh is met with the groan of the delicately balanced and crumbling trunks shifting and slipping against each other. And with a sickening lurch repeated within our hearts, the branches forming the doorway cave in towards each other.
*
Chapter 46
Without having the good sense to stop and think about how impossible all this should be, I leap forward, reaching up for the end of the branch forming the top of the doorway.
I’m holding it up, the beam supported more by my shoulder rather than my arms and hands. Even so, my back is aching, near to splitting I would guess.
The incredible weight I’m supporting is ridiculous. All I can think is that the trunks and branches are so closely entangled that some of the weight is still being borne by other, still intertwined beams.
Whatever the reason, I feel sure that if I step away, the particular branch I’m supporting will continue to slip out of place. And that will bring the rest of the pile above it all crashing down, filling in the doorway.
‘Quick, quick, get through Pearl!’ I gasp and mumble through teeth held firmly together. ‘I can’t hold it much longer!’
‘No, Dia! I can’t leave you here too! I can’t save myself after losing all my friends!’
‘You can save yourself because I’m your older sister and I’m telling you to save yourself!’
‘No! Let it go: step back! We’ll find another way out of here!’
‘You know there isn’t any other way! Go, now! Please, for me!’
‘I–’
‘Go! I’ve been wrong, all my life I’ve been wrong! Complaining that Mom and Dad were always putting you first. I was the one being selfish! Now I’m putting you first!’
Pearl looks my way, like she’s going to protest again. I glower angrily at her.
‘Go! I think I can duck through; once you’ve gone!’
Realising she’s only wasting time, Pearl rushes by me, ducking beneath what is now an incredibly low beam. Even then, she turns, raising her hands to support the branch as I attempt to slip through behind her.
But no one could hold up this giant, shifting pile with nothing more than raised arms. Least of all a young girl like Pearl.
Besides, it’s now all too late.
The charcoaled, crumbling trunks crack and shatter, slip and shift.
The main, supporting branch splinters, dissolving into blackened ashes that fly up into my face.
With a fearful rumbling, everything above it jolts, shakes, lurches – then tumbles down on top of me, burying me as surely as any grave digger.
*
Chapter 47
I’m seated in the boat.
The little boat, being rowed up to heaven by a grinning monkey and goose.
They’re alive. They’re real, this monkey, and this goose: how bizarre is that?
They stare at me with wide, admiring eyes. Like, for once, I’ve really achieved something in my life; achieved it by dying.
Wow, if only it had been that easy to impress everybody else in the world.
They’re in no rush, my otherworldly rowers.
As before, they’re taking the long route up to heaven.
The pretty route.
It’s a languid, lazy, corkscrewing course. One giving me every opportuning to peer over the sides of the boat. To see the wonderful landscape stretching out beneath me.
It’s not what I was expecting.
Sure, the forest is ablaze. The smoke curls up around us: vast plumes as black as the trunks being left behind by the fire on the ground.
What I wasn’t expecting, though, is that the emergency services would be on call in whatever strange world I’m exiting.
Yet there they are.
The fire brigade, pouring on great, surging waterfalls that turn to nothing but steam as soon as they plunge down onto the crackling flames.
The police, their cars’ brightly revolving lamps casting their own eerie re
d glow.
The ambulances, parked as close to the burnt out sections of the forest as they dare. Their uniformed crews are already rushing amongst the charred shards.
There are houses, too. And streets.
Streets I recognise.
My street.
My house.
And there’s our back yard. The wendy house, like the nearby forest, ferociously on fire.
Dad is rushing down the path towards the blazing wendy house. Fearfully screaming out our names
‘Dia! Pearl!’
The wendy house’s door flies open.
Pearl dashes from it. Straight into Dad’s gratefully spreading, gloriously embracing arms.
But he’s still frantic. Still glancing anxiously towards the blazing wood.
Still anxiously crying out for me.
Of course, I shout back
Of course, he can’t hear me.
Can’t see me.
And yet, I’m not in a completely different world.
I can still feel the intense heat rising from the flames soaring up towards us from below.
The highest of the flames even lick around the edges of our little boat. It’s like we’re rising on a torrent of fire.
The wood singes, crackles. Darkens.
Then it too – remarkably, strangely – bursts into flames.
*
Chapter 48
Flames are odd things, aren’t they?
There doesn’t really seem to be any real substance to them at all.
One second, there’s a bright orange flare right in front of your eyes.
The next; it’s gone.
As if there had never, ever been anything there at all.
Yet, of course, they hungrily feed off, actually gain their own life, from every other substance they can reach out to.
As I fight my way through them, they’re like an all-enveloping veil. One that hurts agonisingly if I’m foolish enough to touch it.
But suddenly, I am through them.
I’m in a garden.
Before I can work out where I am, Dad’s there. Dad throwing his arms around me. Dad drawing me so close. So warmly, lovingly close.
‘Dia! You made it too! Oh thank the lord, thank the lord! I couldn’t bear to lose you!’
Pearl’s with us both too, the three of us together. All holding each other close, like we haven’t done since Mom died. Since I persuaded myself the world was an evil place, a world I needed protecting from.