Quiet Pine Trees

by T. R. Darling

  54 Abandoned buildings became a new biome. Rust foxes prowled through the crumbling halls. Shatter snails made shells from broken light bulbs.

  55 Birds flew into his chest as he walked through the park. They sought the forest, the real, dark forest, and could sense his heart was there.

  56 The true bookworm fed on paper and grew into the librarian moth. Patterns on its wings combined elements from the text consumed. Enthusiasts raised moths with unique poetry by feeding great works to captive bookworms. Some writers were accused of just transcribing moth-script.

  57 She kept an autumn-garden through the summer, a refuge of fallen leaves and thrilling cold sustained by skeletal trees and ghostly pumpkins.

  58 Her bees flew skyward from their hive, only to return months later covered in shimmering dust. She sold the silver honey they made, but dared not try it. Each drop increased the moon’s gravitational pull. Connoisseurs wore lead weights or gold jewellery to keep from floating away.

  59 Humans abandoned Earth, just for a bit, and it missed us terribly. Not the pollution and noise, but the art. When we returned, we found cubist images in the sky at dusk. Words appeared in the plumage of birds, and they courted one another by arranging their feathers into poetry.

  60 Ubiquitous in abandoned libraries, Dewey weed grows best in old books. Its flowers bloom only to mourn the deaths of exquisite characters.

  61 Typos once came from drops of untamed kraken ink that turned up in our printing presses and typewriter ribbons. In the digital age they come from the ghosts of dead pixels.

  62 Tiny but mighty, the wingless hummingbird was a favourite visitor of scholars. They fed by absorbing knowledge from books and notes, fuelling the telekinesis they use to fly. Sightings are rare nowadays, since the birds can absorb all the information they need from any Wi-Fi signal.

  63 Fed ordinary books, calligraphy bees made honey full of deep but fleeting knowledge. Diaries, however, added toxic doses of secret desire.

  64 Skybed flowers bloomed in the snow. Lost or evicted squirrels and chipmunks would let the blossoms envelop them as they hibernated. The plant endured the winter on the animal’s heat. In exchange, when spring came, the creature emerged as a tiny griffin with wings like a sparrow.

  65 War saturated that timeline. Birdsong mimicked cries of surrender. Foxholes were their own ecosystem. Insects were white to hide among bone.

  66 For millennia, not an instant has passed without a dog howling somewhere on Earth. The dogs remember the creature just below reality, trapped mere seconds in the retreating future, who was banished when dogs allied themselves with humans. The howls are a warning not to return.

  67 That autumn came not for trees, but for us. We grew pale and thin, hair ruddy and eyes gold. Words and deeds bore fruit, and harvest neared.

  68 Quillwood trees grew best in open fields, where wind and sun could dry their feathers of the fog and rain. In autumn, when their plumage turned metallic red, their winged seeds took to the sky. They sought out clearings and mountaintops where they could lay their wooden eggs.

  69 Summer began reaching depths we hadn’t seen before. By mid-June, the sky was glowing purple-white by day and only darkened to blue at sunset. In July, the fields were buried by a snow of smouldering crow feathers. In August, the world hummed with a deafening opera of cicadas.

  70 Carnivorous plants coat the sea floor, glowing blue and white to mimic the sky. Dolphins and whales are too smart to be caught, but simple fish fall for it. They feel gravity pulling them toward the fake sky and swim down to their doom, thinking they’ll finally be able to fly.

  71 The classic notion of ‘the Four Winds’ is obviously ridiculous. There are seven winds:

  •the mighty North Wind

  •the deadly East Wind

  •the politically active West Wind

  •the mysterious Lake Wind

  •the time-travelling Yester-Wind

  •the morally bankrupt Moth Wind

  •and the fictional South Wind.

  72 Blueberry: Sweet blue ‘true berry’, high in anti-oxidants

  Blackberry: Bittersweet aggregate fruit full of phyto-chemicals

  Clearberry: Smoky-sweet drupe rich in antigravitons, used for short-term weight loss

  Greyberry: Tart pome full of the memories of those who once trod these fields

  73 With time, moths learned to avoid electric lights, and without prey, spiders moved on as well. The microbiome of outdoor lighting was taken over by larger animals. The fluorescent finch tapped directly into loose wiring for power, but had to be wary of the crafty conductor snake.

  74 We learned that the wildlife was already prepared for the apocalypse. Rather than turn white in winter, hares took on the colour of crumbling rust. Snakes could sense the build-up of radioisotopes in their prey. Hummingbirds beat their wings to mimic the hum of rebellious robots.

  75 The desert of green sand was in truth a colony of silicon organisms. The colour attracted animals looking for vegetation, which would instead be eaten so the desert could grow. Ancient cities sent spies to pour bags of green sand in enemy territory. Few ever reached their targets.

  76 The eternal autumn set in. New leaves budded in gold and scarlet. Soil strained to produce monthly harvests. The sky took on perpetual dusk.

  77 The bed of the mile-deep river wasn’t like the oceanic abyss. Nutrients flowed in constantly from upstream, supporting a vibrant ecosystem. Giant monsters lurked there, freshwater sharks floating through the crushing current, ignorant of daylight, attacking river-whale calves.

  78 A warming climate sent the humble snowball into the realm of legend. Sun-baked generations attributed awesome power to that mythical missile.

  79 Meteorological fall: 1 Sept

  Astronomical fall: 22 Sept

  Alchemical fall: 32 Sept

  Symphonic fall: 7 Oct

  Mathematical fall: √2•π² Sept

  CHAPTER 9

  Horror

  1 ‘We stopped the experiment when they began making cocoons,’ he explained. ‘We don’t know what spiders metamorphose into, and don’t want to.’

  2 The manor house creaked with joy to have someone inside it again. It let a floorboard give way just to feel him brush against its walls.

  3 ‘The Blind Sea’ was a misnomer. Those who escaped to the shore would never see anything but crashing black waves ever again, even in sleep.

  4 Her pencil was a graphite sabre. She cut the paper, forming poems with its dark scars. Art required suffering, but not necessarily her own.

  5 Seaside homes are no more tragic than others, but often have more ghosts. They come with the tide, mistaking houses for their sunken ships.

  6 Wild scarecrows are native to grasslands, where they used to weave their textile shells from the same hay that fills their bodies. When travellers died in their fields, the scarecrows took their clothing so they could creep ever closer to us. They’ve made it to our farms, so far.

  7 She got the false sense that her phone was vibrating. She began to run and reached for her trouble-shooter. The techno-shades had her scent.

  8 Halloween blurs the line between the world of the living and the Internet. It stalks the night, calling your username, drenched in secrets.

  9 Getting hurt in a nightmare can cause dream-scars. Their nightly glow may keep you awake, but they toughen up your imagination for grand ideas.

  10 He found poems she’d written about him, alongside odes to seasons and birds that didn’t exist. He began to question whether he was real.

  11 The mob was turning violent. It had gathered to demand the immortal’s execution. Painted placards declared nothing can be better than me.

  12 It has long been said that there are three kinds of people: those who are alive, those who are dead, and those who are at sea. This is no longer true. In modern times we also have those who are in space, those who are online and those who know the name of the Forest King.

  13 The Deduction Engine roare
d to life, electricity crackling between the rings of its wooden columns. Terrified, he asked, ‘Was it my fault?’

  14 ‘This is how ghost-stone is made,’ he explained. ‘The water leaches the calcium from their bones, then deposits it in the petrifying wood.’

  15 She still remembered her first crush. She’d made him a candle from sealing wax reclaimed from old orders of execution. He didn’t freak out.

  16 We put up gigantic mirrors, hoping the zombies would be attracted to the movement of their own reflections. It worked, but for a different reason. Seeing what they had become reminded them of their humanity. The undead lingered by the mirrors so they wouldn’t hurt anyone else.

  17 Trendy youths had their still-living bones decorated with intricate carvings and inlays of gold, hoping to look good for the anthropologists.

  18 A pack of house hunters stalked through the urban jungle, brandishing crowbars and sledgehammers, adorned with tiny wrecking-ball totems.

  19 An ancient boon kept us from feeling pain in our dreams. She’d found it and made it her hostage. None would risk the nightmare of its loss.

  20 Should you find yourself trapped in a mirror, with your reflection blocking passage back to the real world, travel to the other side of the equator. The inverted moon and constellations will trick it into switching places again. If all else fails, become a vampire to destroy it.

  21 The chill of a haunting was put to good use. Captive ghosts were installed in computers to improve performance using ectoplasm heat sinks.

  22 She’d lost her reflection to an angry ghost, but found a new one whose human had become a vampire. It was awkward, but she felt less alone.

  23 ‘Nerves all over the body have thoughts, but the brain cannot receive them,’ he said. ‘Want to know what your organs think of their tyrant?’

  24 Every time she looked at him she triggered his fight-or-flight response. He’d never been in love before, and it was an easy mistake to make.

  25 The leaves were changing earlier and earlier in the year. The winds of autumn consumed the summer, their darkness and frost eager and vain. As the season crept on, our memories of summer began to change. Beach trips became desperate harvesting. Concerts became quiet, lonely dirges.

  26 The elders told the children that they were inconsequential specks afloat in an endless void. Such lies were more comforting than the truth. Teens scared younger children with hidden truths, saying objective morality exists, Earth is important, and love is more than biochemistry.

  27 Inherent convenience hides the true purpose of street lamps. They are urban scarecrows, warding dark predators away from dense population.

  28 For her crimes, she was sentenced to heightened perception. The world became a horror story of rotting empires and monsters like herself.

  29 Tired of humans taking the corn, the crows made a scare-man in the field. It worked well, speaking aloud the secrets of all who approached.

  30 Advanced meteorology let forecasters get startlingly specific. The weatherman knew you’d hear a noise from your closet that night, and try to ignore it. He knew you’d lie awake worrying about it. You’d think of her, fond memories lulling you to sleep. Just as the noise wanted.

  31 ‘Technology has tapped into us like a tree into soil,’ he said, too low for microphones. ‘Our purpose is to nourish it until it can spread.’

  32 A future-man came back to sell us our biographies ahead of time. She asked for hers, but he grew pale. He asked for a fortune and ‘mercy’.

  33 When he looked back at what he’d written, he found fictional prophets in his novel, offering tearful, laughing prayer to ‘The Great Author’. Other characters, unwilling to accept their role as fiction, beat the prophets for proclaiming the universe began with the events of page 1.

  34 We mourn the lost lives of video-game characters. We ought to mourn the lives they have left when the game is done, which have darker tasks to complete.

  35 At first he didn’t recognise her. She looked the same, but there were no emergency alert sirens in the background and the sky wasn’t red.

  36 The monster in his closet told the best bedtime stories. It spoke of glassy lakes below the earth, of the deadly crystal orchards of masked kings, and of songs written for the moment of darkness in an eclipse. Each time he listened, it got a bit harder to wake up the next day.

  37 Complex and imprecise surgeries prevented the most dangerous offenders from dreaming. Even in sleep, they could not be allowed to escape.

  38 None of the destinations listed by the small airline existed, as far as she knew. Heart pounding, she bought a one-way ticket to Next York.

  39 Every time he awoke, the picture had changed. The oil-paint woman with wild red hair was staring at him, her smile nervous, her eyes hungry.

  40 The monster in the local lake was no gigantic beast. It appeared to him as a human, odd but kind. It invited him into the still water to float between the real and reflected stars. They barely pulled him out in time. He said he didn’t remember turning over or holding his breath.

  41 The animals on the wallpaper stalked and hunted each other. Nobody else saw, or understood why she was afraid of the kraken in the library.

  42 The library book hung from his neck. Too overdue to ever be paid off, it was bound to him now, and librarians would ever be at his heels.

  43 A temporal empath, he felt his own emotions from one day in the future. After a morning of intractable terror, he began barricading his home.

  44 Even when disembodied, the parts of a vampire do not appear in a looking glass. One particularly vindictive king had a knife carved from a vampiric bone. His most hated enemies were executed with it in front of a mirror, leaving their still-living reflections confused and alone.

  45 She saw the teddy bear’s glass eyes. ‘Where are the real ones?’

  ‘Lost in wars to keep you safe,’ it replied. ‘Fear not; I can still fight.’

  46 Sailors quaked before the nightmares of the deep. He crewed his ship with those who didn’t flee: his shadow, his echo and his reflection.

  47 The cartoon aged with its audience. Its message moved away from loyalty to the Party. Colourful characters sang veiled pleas for resistance.

  48 He made the first doll with closing eyes. Toys revered him as the sleep-giver. In truth, he had secrets to hide even from his mute creations.

  49 In the aftermath of civilisation, the devout did not have golden cathedrals. Their mosaics were shattered pavement and broken windows were their stained glass. They congregated in ruins where old pipes caught the wind just right, offering organ music for their simple hymns.

  50 Of course, the hotel really did have a thirteenth floor. It slithered between walls and around elevators, stalking guests after check-out time.

  51 ‘Evil is a base state,’ he argued, ‘passive and pervasive, while virtue requires effort. Thus, things lacking an agenda can be evil: objects, locations, even days or years. If I tell you this coffee maker is evil, its lack of free will should not stop me from getting a refund.’

  52 The neglected castle grew, pulling stone after stone from the earth. It would catch a new master or mistress, and be powerful once again.

  53 By fear or temptation, madness or deceit, every dream fights to ensnare the dreamer and prolong itself. When we go to sleep, we go to war.

  54 The creature thrived on ignorance. You could always tell which town it was targeting next. The library would burn down, phones would fail, bridges would collapse. Books left unattended were torn to shreds. Even street signs would go missing. Oddly, the Internet never crashed.

  55 Whale song and steam whistle are dialects of the same language. Trains feared coastal tracks, where they heard beautiful dirges from below.

  56 It was easy to spot those who had been banned from dreaming. They stared hatefully at birds, slowly forgetting what it felt like to fly.

  57 We never bothered telling aliens about our folklore. Yet reports of human ghosts along their shorelines always b
egan after our first visit.

  58 A watched pot never boils.

  A tree won’t sing when you can hear.

  A star can’t die if you believe in it.

  Stop believing.

  The star is so tired.

  59 Dejected, the ghost watched the stranger turn and walk away. It was as beautiful as it could be, draped in white with auburn hair, framed by the moon in a field of lavender. Long ago, it lured folk into the woods with a smile. Now they knew when something was too good to be true.

  60 His daughter’s favourite cartoon spoke to the audience, waiting for replies to encourage participation. Eventually he noticed the colourful characters were really obeying her. She didn’t like one, and told it to go away. He saw fear in its eyes as it walked, smiling, off-screen.