The Other Tree

by D. K. Mok

  Bale’s hands reached automatically to his gun, then his radio, then his flashlight.

  “I can,” said Bale.

  “And give us your gun,” said Luke.

  Chris looked sharply at Luke.

  “Sorry,” said Bale. “Responsible gun ownership, you know how it is.”

  “Just get out of here,” said Chris.

  Bale looked at the priest and the botanist, in all their feeble glory. He moved to leave, then paused, reaching into his pocket. Bale pulled out a thin leather necklace with an object threaded through it.

  “If you see Emir, could you give this back to him?” said Bale. “It seemed important to him.”

  Bale lowered the item into Chris’s hand, and her fingers closed around it. Bale gave them a brief nod, then disappeared through the trees. His footsteps finally faded into silence, leaving Chris and Luke alone in the deserted cavern. Chris glanced at the pressure plate, feeling a little like the person left to clean up after the house party with a hung-over bear asleep in the living room.

  Chris looked down at the object in her palm. Threaded on the leather cord was a single piece of amber, irregular and imperfect, about the size of a coin. It was the colour of late-afternoon sun, foggy in parts but rubbed smooth from frequent touch. Hanging in the golden resin was a miniature fern frond, the tendrils slightly curled like a loose fist. In the light, the amber glowed softly, almost like a living thing.

  Oh, my God, he kept it.

  It had been a throwaway find under the pine trees, on a day full of noxious weeds and ravenous mosquitos. Emir had been having a rough week at uni, and he’d decided to accompany Chris to Turook National Park on her search for Illiope ferns. It had not been a particularly successful expedition—they had been chased by a feral terrier, attacked by swarms of midges, and they’d managed to get prickly burrs tangled throughout their clothing. It had been raining that day, and as Chris rummaged through the humid undergrowth, she had pulled a cloudy piece of amber from the roots of a towering pine.

  She had given it to Emir, as compensation for an unproductive day. He had stood silently in the rain, tendrils of wet hair plastered to his neck, shoes full of muddy water from when Chris had missed seeing the brook. He had pocketed the piece of amber wordlessly, and Chris had felt vaguely embarrassed. She had never thought of it again.

  Clearly, Emir had.

  Chris noticed Luke watching her, and she tucked the necklace into her pocket. She turned to the pressure plate, piled with Bale’s backpack, the jade manhole cover, and their own battered packs. Chris picked up the coil of rope, with one end tied to the straps of their packs.

  “Do you want your stuff that badly?” asked Luke.

  “I want to get through this. I want to come out the other side and live a long and meaningful life. I want to get through the trials, bring down SinaCorp, and pull out their corrupt empire by its shrieking roots. Do you think we can do that with this?”

  Chris held up her specimen bag of assorted bric-a-brac.

  “It would certainly make for an impressive story,” said Luke.

  “And if we failed, it would make for an embarrassing one. I don’t want to get to the Medusa and think, ‘Damn, I wish I had my mirror.’ Or when we get attacked by killer crows, think, ‘If only I had my sack of birdseed.’”

  “You’ve been carrying a sack of birdseed?”

  “Killer crows!” said Chris, waving emphatically.

  “Okay.” Luke walked towards the opening in the cavern wall. “Just wait til we’re as far away as possible.”

  Chris followed Luke, unravelling the length of rope as she went. She reached the end of the coil just as they stepped through the doorway in the cavern wall. Shining their flashlights into the darkness, they could see a roughly carved corridor leading further in. Faintly luminous moss patched the walls, casting an uncomfortably dim yellow glow.

  Chris grabbed the end of the rope firmly with both hands.

  “If it triggers the self-destruct sequence or releases some unstoppable creature, you can say ‘I told you so,’” said Chris.

  “How comforting,” said Luke.

  “Ready?”

  “Whenever you are.”

  Taking a deep breath, Chris yanked on the rope and began hauling the packs towards her.

  The effect was instant.

  As soon as the packs slid from the pressure plate, there was a click as the panel shifted back upwards. There was a faint grinding noise, which grew rapidly louder, until it became a deafening roar from above. Chris risked an upward glance as she continued pulling the rope hand over hand.

  The ceiling was falling.

  Not falling like tumbling chunks of rock, but falling like a solid slab of obliteration. The previously unseen ceiling now raced towards the cavern floor like a meteorite plunging to earth. Shimmering trees and stone animals splintered with a noise like a million glass bottles exploding, spraying the cavern with multicoloured shards as the roof crushed downwards. Chris leapt backwards in the tunnel as the ceiling crashed to the floor, hitting the ground with a resounding crack. For several moments, her ears rang with muffled echoes, and she could feel the shock of the vibration still shuddering through her bones. She stared at the opening, now blocked with a wall of solid stone.

  “And so fell Eden,” said Luke.

  “Did we just fail something?” said Chris.

  Half of Chris’s pack lay crushed under the solid rock, while only a third of Luke’s pack had made it into the corridor, protruding sadly like a burst tube of toothpaste. Chris picked through the scattered mess, salvaging what she could into a canvas satchel. Luke managed to extract a handful of battered items from the remains of his pack, distributing them amongst his pockets.

  “Okay, first trial is the Cherubim,” said Chris, looping her satchel over her shoulder. “Assuming that wasn’t the Cherubim.”

  Luke felt that perhaps this comment was directed at him, since Chris had rather arbitrarily nominated him the expert on apocryphal riddles. And although he did feel exceptionally lucid, this was not the same as feeling enlightened.

  As they proceeded down the passageway, the light from the moss was so weak it made their eyes ache. Just as Luke was starting to worry that perhaps this tunnel would mirror their earlier descent, they arrived at a plain sandstone archway. Whereas the passage so far had been hewn from the surrounding rock, the corridor beyond the archway was paved in smooth, oyster granite, and the plaster walls were covered in faded frescoes. Small frosted panes embedded in the ceiling illuminated the hallway like skylights on a cloudy day.

  Luke considered the unadorned archway and the silent corridor beyond.

  “Do you think it’s a trap?” asked Chris.

  “This entire complex could be a trap,” said Luke. “Would it make any difference?”

  “Probably not.” Chris stepped into the illuminated corridor.

  Luke winced instinctively, half-expecting something to explode, possibly Chris. He was exceedingly relieved when pieces of her didn’t come raining down.

  Chris reached up to one of the softly glowing panels and tapped it with a fingernail. It appeared to be a pane of translucent quartz, ensconced in the plaster ceiling.

  “Maybe fireflies, or bioluminescent moss,” she mused.

  “Perhaps reflected light, channelled from the surface,” said Luke. “The light in the cavern had to come from somewhere.”

  Luke stepped carefully over the threshold, into the softly lit corridor. He had been expecting some sense of wonder or spiritual affinity in this place, but as they continued down the hall, the only sense he had was of a place deserted, like a hotel on a dead world.

  The cracked frescoes told faded stories of fertile plains and fields of waving wheat. There were human silhouettes painted on the walls, almost like shadows cast by unseen figures. They were loosely draped in long robes, carrying sheafs of barley and ears of corn. Other figures played wooden pipes and small lutes, while flocks of dun sheep grazed on
the long grass.

  Chris noticed a faint rumbling noise, which she had earlier dismissed as the aftershocks of the cavern collapsing.

  “Do you hear that?” said Chris.

  “The noise like a giant boulder rolling towards us from very far away?” said Luke, unruffled.

  “Do you think it’s the Cherubim? Do you think we’ll recognise them?” Chris tried not to think about the consequences of having the wrong answer to the wrong riddle at the wrong time.

  “Eventually, yes.”

  “Was the Cherubim the one about wisdom? Or was that the flaming sword?”

  Chris rummaged through her satchel, pulling out a page of scribbled notes which didn’t make nearly as much sense as when she was writing them.

  A sudden piercing scream shattered the air, trailing into a deep moan, and then silence. The noise hit Chris and Luke like a wave of freezing water—there was something uncontrollably visceral about a human scream, commanding every instinct to turn and run. There were domestic pest control devices which played looped recordings of dying vermin, in the belief that it would deter other pests. They had not thought to conduct any studies on the psychological impact of the device on the human occupants.

  Chris flashed a glance at Luke. He stood motionless, listening to the suddenly terrible silence. Chris took a step forward, and then another. In her experience, the longer you stood still after something disturbing happened, the harder it was to start moving again. Sometimes, she had gone into the empty biology labs in the evening to borrow some scalpels, only to find a traumatised first-year student huddled in the corner, still covered in amphibian innards from the morning’s practical session, muttering, “The thing, the thing— Oh God, it— How did they get inside—?!”

  Chris found that, if you didn’t scrub down straight away, scrape everything off your lab coat, and step outside for some sunshine and fresh air, you would eventually have to be led away to the infirmary and the careers counsellor. She had seen a lot of undergrads turn vegetarian after those early lab sessions.

  Chris placed one foot firmly in front of the other, following the turning corners of the decorated hallway. As they rounded another bend, the corridor suddenly opened up into a narrow antechamber, about ten metres high, with a vaulted plaster ceiling. The walls were lined with standing human silhouettes, darkly painted, all squarely facing into the room like a waiting crowd. The chamber ended in a tall, arched door, carved from milky blue marble, veined with ripples of white. Engraved in the double doors, where the handles should be, were a pair of magnificently ornate angel wings.

  Luke turned at the sound of an electronic click and found Chris peering through the viewfinder of her mobile phone. She grimaced at the snowy image before tucking the phone back into her pocket.

  “I guess this is the Cherubim,” said Chris.

  This was it—the first gate, the first trial. Taking a deep breath, Chris and Luke pushed on the tall marble doors. The doors swung open as though on hydraulics, noiselessly parting to reveal a high, pale chamber on the other side.

  The room was flawlessly carved blue marble, luminously lit with softly glowing panels which rippled down the walls. The ceiling was about fifteen metres high and flat, polished to a glossy finish. Where the floor should be was a pool of still, black water, reaching from wall to wall, smooth as obsidian. A straight, narrow path of smoky marble stretched from the doorway to an archway on the other side of the room, like a bridge across the inky waters. On the far end of the path, just before the other doorway, a large smear of fresh blood stained the marble.

  “That’s ominous,” said Chris.

  But perhaps the most disturbing thing about the chamber, more disconcerting than the skeletal remains which littered the path, or the bleached bones poking out of the still water, were the statues. The room was full of white marble statues, rising from the water. Winged angels on pedestals, cherubs lying level with the path, robed, half-clothed, crouched, posed magnificently, wings sprouting from powerful shoulders. Dozens of beautifully carved likenesses lined the length of the room, all facing the path from archway to exit. All watched with glassy eyes like polished topaz, seeming to glint with an internal light.

  Chris reached into her satchel and pulled out a balding tennis ball. Staying carefully behind the threshold, she bowled the grubby green ball down the marble path. As it rolled smoothly down the pale stone aisle, a deep, layered humming noise began to fill the room. If the noise were a perfume, it would be described as having a base of monastic chanting, with top notes of an angry apiary, and just a hint of sizzling flesh.

  Chris suddenly noticed that the eyes of the statues were changing. They started to glow, not just with reflected light, but like lamps, then like beacons across the sea, and they grew brighter still, like the heart of the sun. As the tennis ball reached the halfway mark on the bridge, the humming burst into a crescendo, and dozens of beams of light shot towards the rolling ball. There was a noise like a piece of charcoal being crushed on asphalt.

  When Chris’s eyes recovered from the blinding flare, all that remained of the tennis ball was a tiny pile of soot, which appeared to be vaporising before her eyes. Luke stared at the rising wisp of smoke.

  “I suppose you want me to go first?” said Luke.

  Chris looked at the eyes of the Cherubim as they faded slowly back to their dull lustre.

  “I think you were right,” said Chris. “They’ve harnessed some kind of reflected sunlight. The magnification must be phenomenal.”

  Luke gazed across the blank faces of the Cherubim, all staring blindly ahead. They had been carved by human hands, with extremely sophisticated engineering, no doubt, but there was nothing holy, nothing divine about them. They even resembled contemporary renderings of angels and cherubs, with proud faces and detailed musculature. Eyes, lips, and ears, all human, thought Luke with faint disdain.

  A sense of hollow dread began to seep through him, like a rising chill. Things had been going well, in a sense. He thought they had been getting closer, tracking down Eden, homing in on the answer to his burning question. The truth was supposed to be revealed here, the fate of the Garden, the fate of humanity, the meaning behind the randomness of existence.

  This was supposed to be his miracle. This was supposed to be his Tree of Knowledge. This was supposed to be his salvation. Luke gazed at the stone figures in their frozen poses. This was just the work of man, another mimicry of an older belief.

  He had followed lies all his life. Lies about the goodness of humanity, lies about justice in the world, lies about the wicked being punished and the good being rewarded. He had chased those lies to the ends of the earth, knowing in his heart that they were phantoms that vanished when you needed them most.

  Perhaps it was time to let go.

  Luke stared grimly at the ghostly figures flanking the chamber and stepped out onto the marble walkway.

  “Maybe if we ran really fast and then jumped— Luke!”

  Chris noticed too late that Luke was striding down the central bridge, the discordant humming already rising to jarring levels.

  There was no time to think, and Chris’s feet were already pounding down the stretch of marble. Luke was almost halfway across the bridge by the time she reached him. She grabbed his arm, desperately trying to drag him forward.

  “Maybe if we jump and roll—!”

  Luke suddenly grabbed Chris and wrapped his arms around her tightly, his face stony.

  “Don’t move,” said Luke calmly. “Just hold still.”

  This was not one of Chris’s top ten options. It was actually slightly below diving into the skeletal waters, and she could already see how well that had worked for previous visitors. However, there was a time to walk with someone, and a time to believe in them. Something in Luke’s face told her that the time was now.

  As the eyes blazed around them like a private constellation, Chris stayed perfectly motionless, her heart pounding like an orchestra of drums. This wasn’t how she wanted
to die, but it was kind of cooler than slipping in the bathtub. She saw Luke close his eyes, his arms tensing around her as the humming reached fever pitch.

  A single bolt of burning light shot through the air, winging Chris on the hip.

  “Argh!” growled Chris, her eyes widening in shock.

  The smell of burning flesh wafted upwards.

  “Whoops,” said Luke.

  “Frickin’ whoops?” said Chris through gritted teeth, the edge of her jeans smouldering around the neatly cauterised, finger-sized graze.

  “I got the rest of it right,” said Luke. “Part of understanding the difference between good and evil is accepting judgement. You have to accept the consequences of your actions, rather than running from them. That’s the difference between knowledge and wisdom.”

  “That’s really Zen, and I’m glad you had a little revelation, but you can let go now.”

  “Are you going to punch me?” asked Luke.

  “Maybe.”

  Chris took a slow breath, the scorching pain easing into a dull ache.

  “Okay, no,” said Chris. “I’m good.”

  Luke unwrapped his arms, and they looked around at the dull-eyed Cherubim.

  “Can we run now?” asked Chris.

  “I hadn’t thought that far.”

  They sprinted towards the far exit as the humming began to rise again. The statues’ eyes lit up rapidly with white-hot brightness as they pounded down the path.

  “Being punished once was plenty,” huffed Chris as she dove through the archway.

  She stumbled breathlessly onto the dark red dirt of the passageway, and Luke skidded through the doorway after her. Dozens of blazing beams scorched through the chamber behind him, criss-crossing the air.

  “We seem to have some communication issues,” panted Chris.

  “Would you have let me try if I asked you?”

  “We could have tested it with a Hacky Sack first!”

  “You brought a Hacky Sack?”

  “You expect to just walk into a—” Chris stopped, her gaze drawn to a disturbingly shaped pool of shadow.

  A booted foot protruded from a pile of dark clothing, the leg bent at a horrible angle. It was then that Chris noticed the bloodied drag marks across the dirt floor, leading from the bloodstained marble walkway to the rumpled figure by the wall.