by P. T. Phronk
A crazy idea, I knew, but an idea that took root in a mind made fertile by too much caffeine, and it grew throughout the week, sprouting tangents and hypothetical horrors that put my tree and my family at risk. I decided to stay home for a few more days.
I found myself walking back to the sun room hourly, checking on my tree. It was still growing, and the bulge grew with it. It now looked stranger than ever, with the teardrop deformity hanging off one side of otherwise symmetrical perfection.
One night, I woke with a start. I listened, wondering if I’d heard whispers, if it was only the rustling of the trees, if it was only in my head, or if it was some combination, all of the above. I heard nothing further. Nevertheless, I jumped from bed and went to the window. Nothing further to see, either.
“Stop movin’ around,” mumbled Amy.
Instead of returning to bed, I tip-toed downstairs. Something had woken me, and if there was even a chance that scheming graduate students were trying to prod at my tree, I needed to be out there.
I flicked on the light out back, so that I would startle anything that was creeping in the dark. I looked for movement. Nothing. No sign of any figures. No footprints, no pale face, nothing.
I crunched across the lawn, my heart leaping at every shadow at the edge of the light’s range. It was freezing, but I took my gloves off so I could feel my tree. It warmed my stiffening fingers. I cupped the tree’s bulge in both hands, and then, it moved.
I pulled back. It wasn’t much—only a subtle vibration—but with my senses in overdrive, it was enough to shock me.
I bent down and put my ear against the bulge. I could smell the vomit-licorice of it, stronger than before. There was silence for a minute, but then I felt it vibrate again, accompanied by a sound: a quick gurgle. I was immediately transported back to when Amy and I used to cuddle on the couch, watching TV. I would lie with my head on her stomach, and occasionally I would hear gases in her belly push through sphincters in her intestines, making little gurgles, and we would laugh. I would hear the same noises, louder, when her belly bulged with the fetus of Todd. Those were exactly the sounds that my tree had started to make.
I stayed, bent with my ear to the tree and my face away from the house. I heard a few more gurgles. What mysteries this tree had chosen to give me. I closed my eyes, and let a chemical soup of feelings trickle through my mind—confusion, hope, nausea, helplessness, responsibility, duty.
When I opened my eyes, there was a face staring at me from the darkness.
Bulbous eyes picked up the reflection of the light and twinkled in the blackness. As I bolted upright, the glint disappeared and I heard footsteps crunch in the snow, moving right, along the ravine. I bolted into the darkness. The footsteps sped up, and so did I. The snow was deep here in the unmaintained brush and my legs ached immediately. I ran past our yard’s side fence and into our neighbour’s yard, still hearing movement in front of me.
As my eyes adjusted to the moonlight, I could see the figure’s footprints. I aimed my own feet into the indentations, which would surely give me a speed advantage, if I were not already getting winded. I hadn’t run in years.
As my eyes further adjusted, I could see the figure ahead. It was a bobbing white orb against the oily black sky. This had to be the same thing that I had seen before. I could just barely make out billowing black below the white head.
A fence lay ahead. This one went all the way around somebody’s yard, rather than only along the sides. The ravine dropped sharply behind the yard, leaving only a narrow ledge between the fence and a fall into a freezing stream. Discarded wood and overgrown vines obscured the path. The figure paused for a moment before pushing forward, but in that hesitation I gained ground. I was nearly upon the figure before it disappeared behind a clump of bushes.
Without hesitation, I turned sideways and shimmied along the ledge. Weeds clawed at my feet, and I felt my shins bang against stacks of wood, but I continued on. I reached the clump of bushes, then clawed it aside and stepped over.
A searing pain shot up from my foot.
I looked down, and in the moonlight I could make out a shiny object sticking to the top of my boot. I thought a piece of ice had gotten caught on it, but when I tried to take another step, a slab of wood stuck to the bottom of my boot; it hit my other foot, and I tripped. My face hit a branch on the way down, and I cried out as my face and my foot screamed in simultaneous agony.
I looked up. The figure had stopped at the sound of my cry. It looked back, and I momentarily forgot about my pain. The figure’s eyes were too big for its face. My vision had blurred, but I could swear those eyes had no pupils. They were black orbs within a hairless skull. I could not help but think of the drawings of aliens they showed on the daytime television shows.
The figure stayed a moment, motionless, staring at me. There was absolute silence as it eyed me curiously, its black eyes unblinking. It took a step toward me.
Then a light came on nearby, and the figure bolted, quickly fading into the darkness.
A sliver of light poured through the fence, and I got a clear look at my foot. A rusty nail was poking from the top of my boot, fixing my foot to the board that the nail was driven through. My foot had twisted at an uncommon angle, and I suddenly noticed the pain in my ankle as well as in the hole going straight through my foot. Blood dripped from my boot, leaving black-looking spots in the snow. I could feel another trickle of heat down the side of my face. I took another look toward the direction the figure had gone, then began calling for help.
CHAPTER 9
DURING THE HOSPITAL STAY, AMY stayed by my side. I could tell that she didn’t want to be there, and she frequently stepped outside to call colleagues on her cell phone, but she was there. And I appreciated that. I loved her for that.
“I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you the other night,” she said, shortly after my arrival at the hospital. “I’ve been ... distracted.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she stroked the side of my face with her fingertips. “I’m sorry, honey.”
Tears also welled up in my eyes, and I told her that I wished things were different too. That I had also been distracted. I felt a moment of intimacy that I didn’t realize I’d missed. Amy kissed my forehead and held me, and, at that moment, all the crap about being angry at her very presence, and all the crap about the tree, and the figure in the yard, seemed distant and unimportant.
Todd came to visit too. I saw genuine concern in his puffy eyes, which was the first time in months that I’d seen him express an emotion other than anger. I hugged him and asked him if anything was wrong, if there was anything he wanted to tell me.
“Dad, I’m not the one with problems right now,” he replied, and patted the cast on my foot. It hurt like Hell, but sent me into a fit of hysterical laughter. Todd laughed, too—another thing he hadn’t done in a while—and we giggled together.
Some of the best small moments of my life happened in that hospital bed.
I had a monster headache on the day they sent me home. I think it had something to do with coffee. Although Amy brought me some in the hospital, it was not nearly as strong as the stuff I made at home. I’d seen people at the office quit coffee cold turkey, and they spent their mornings in a daze, like zombies with hangovers. I decided that rather than return to my strong coffee, I’d sleep off the headache and gradually cut down on caffeine. Anything that made my head feel like this could not be good for my health. Cold turkey wouldn’t work, but I could start by cutting back to watery hospital coffee before switching to decaf.
I’d be on crutches for a while. The rust-crusted nail that punctured my foot not only left an infected hole, but managed to keep my foot still while the rest of my body toppled over. The point between my stationary foot and my falling body happened to be my ankle, now snapped in two places and in constant pain.
Amy had to assist me up the stairs. I took a glance out of the bedroom window before lying down. My tree had not grown much in the days I had spent in the ho
spital, but the bulge on its side had. It was no longer subtle about its presence. The bulbous deformity stuck out further than the trunk was wide.
I lay down and had a chance to think. The broken ankle aside, my vacation from viewing or contemplating the tree had been pleasant. I’d spent quality time with the family, and anyway, wasn’t it unusual to be so obsessed with a tree? Still, thinking about it again did feel familiar. It felt right. I couldn’t abandon the tree cold turkey. I remembered that just before spotting the figure, I had heard sounds inside of the tree’s bulge.
My head pounded in pain, and an idea came to me: something alive was growing in there. The bulge looked like a pregnant woman’s belly, did it not? Also: it was warm to the touch. Animals generate warmth, not plants. Maybe it wasn’t really a plant, but some massive stationary animal of undiscovered species and origin. Or—and this idea felt more plausible—perhaps the tree was an animal’s cocoon.
The tree was important. It could be preparing to give birth; a miracle, according to some humans. Plus, something else was interested in it.
The figure.
A fresh explosion of pain erupted in my head. The figure must have been after my tree. Oh, sure, it had broken into my house and stolen a camera, but could that not have been a clever distraction? An act of camouflage?
When I called the police after my injury, they told me that they would keep an eye on the neighbourhood, but there was nothing more they could do. The figure I had seen was, after all, in the ravine and not technically on my property. My injuries were the result of my own clumsiness, not malice. I couldn’t very well tell the police that an unknown entity was trying to steal my weird plant.
I didn’t mention Robert Urban. I had no proof. Because it’s crazy. Crazy. Right? I certainly didn’t tell anyone that the figure had abnormally large, unblinking black eyes. That was beyond crazy.
The pain in my head intensified, and thoughts bled together. Images of grad students, aliens, and grad students dressed as aliens danced in a circle. And in the center of them, a many-limbed thing, like an enormous red stick insect, about to give birth.
Crazy. I needed this mystery to be over, and it would be over when that bulge burst and let out whatever was inside. As soon as that happened, I could get over this. Cold turkey. Life would go back to resembling that day in the hospital room. Loving my wife and giggling with my kid.
And to return my life from its spindly clutches, the tree would have to survive. Come to term. Shed its pupa. Aliens and sneaky grad students were things that I could not control, but there was one threat to my tree that I could do something about.
Disease. Rot. Death. I could hear the words whispered in the creaking of branches.
A shred of certainty in my confused, pounding head relaxed my nerves, and I finally fell asleep knowing that tomorrow I would be able to take control of this mystery, in some small way. And cut down on coffee, too.
CHAPTER 10
AMY ASKED ME WHAT THE Hell I was doing when I hobbled into the garage and came out with an axe and a shovel. I passed her on my way to the back door, trying to clamp the tools against one of the crutches.
“That oak tree in our yard is diseased,” I told her. “I need to chop it down before it … falls down, and damages the … house.”
“Honey, you need rest,” she said.
“Rest will drive me crazy. It’s only my foot. I’m not going to stay in bed all day because of one little hole in one foot.”
“So you’re going to chop down a ginormous tree with those little rusty tools? While in crutches?”
She had a point. I furrowed my brow, thinking of a comeback.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” she asked before I could reply. “You’ve been obsessed with yard work. We’ve barely talked about what happened. Are we okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, “yeah, we’re fine. I just have to take care of a few things and heal up. I promise I’ll be back to my charming self.”
She rolled her eyes playfully, but I saw worry flit across her face. “Okay,” she said. “Well, a good start would be hiring someone to dig up that tree instead of marching out there on your own like a limpy lumberjack. Let someone else worry about it.”
I told her she was right, and kissed her on the forehead before she let me know she would be home late again, then headed off to work. She was late a lot. Something about a new business opportunity at the security company that she had to put time into. Begrudgingly, I made a few calls, and found a landscaping business that would get rid of the tree for a reasonable price. I told them I wanted it completely gone, roots and all. I didn’t want the tree’s diseased tendrils wrapping their black death around my red tree.
Some large men arrived with large machines, and I pointed them to the oak. First they cut it down with a chainsaw. It was evident that something was wrong, for branches chipped off before the chainsaw got through with them; the vibration alone caused a rain of crumbling twigs.
“Yup, good thing you called us,” said one of the men, after hours of cutting away at the diseased thing, “this one was on its way down.”
The men drove a vehicle they called an excavator into the yard. They used its scoop to dig under the dead stump, then lift it from the ground. It seemed to pop out of the thawing earth easily, like an old splinter finally plucked from healing skin. Odd; I had expected hundreds of thick roots putting up a fight.
“Strange, eh?” said the large man, “I ain’t never seen a tree slide right out. It ain’t got roots!” Indeed, the few roots that did poke from the bottom of the stump only reached a few feet before stopping in a dripping wet end. As if they had all melted off.
The men lifted the chunks of tree and stump into a dump truck. There was still a gaping hole in my yard. When I asked one of the men if they were going to fill it back up, he said he’d have to call someone else, that it would cost extra, and it’d take a few days to get the soil in. I told him not to bother. I paid them, then went back to my yard to figure out how I’d fill the crater that now disrupted the landscape.
I stood for several minutes, propped on my crutches, judging how much dirt I’d need. Then I smelled sweet decay. It was like my tree—the licorice-vomit smell—but overwhelming. I moved closer, bent down, and sniffed. I almost produced my own vomit due to the stench. Then, staring at the muck in the hole, I spotted a hint of dark red. The unmistakable colour of my tree.
I eased myself into the crater. I got on my knees, to avoid putting any pressure on my foot. My hands came down on cold mud. The smell was nearly unbearable, so I forced myself to breathe through my mouth. I could almost feel the damp air stinging at my lungs. The reddish spot peeked through the muddy base of the crater. The mud was more than just wet soil—a foul black gel squished up around my fingers as I crawled. I reasoned that it must have been the decayed remains of the tree’s roots. The filth that all living things turn into, someday.
I scooped away this gunk around the red spot, revealing more red. There appeared to be something buried just below where the machine had scooped the hole. I clawed away more gunk, tossing it over the lip of the hole, until I had uncovered a portion of it.
It almost resembled another red tree, buried and horizontal. A shaft of the same reddish-brown bark that made up my tree ran from one side of the hole and into the opposite side. There were no ridges on this one, however. I peeked over the edge of the hole where the shaft emerged from the hole’s wall and, unsurprisingly, if the shaft continued a few more feet underground, it would connect with my tree.
A root of some kind. That must have been what it was, though all roots I’d seen were spreading, dendritic things. This was a solid tube of bark.
Some of the oak tree’s roots wrapped around the tube. Leaning closer, I saw that there was black gunk where the oak’s roots had wrapped around my tree’s tube. I brushed my finger over one, and the oak’s root globbed aside, leaving a smudge of black goo on the tube.
So, this underground root had gone under the oak tr
ee and disintegrated its roots. Maybe spread the disintegration up the oak’s capillaries, killing it. I recalled the black lines I had seen under the tree’s bark as it chipped off.
That was one mystery solved; one less thing to worry about. Stupid me, I thought the oak tree was the dangerous one.
Now there was a new mystery: what the hell kind of a root was this? It appeared to spread far. The hole was a few feet from my tree, and the root continued on farther still. Did it reach out in other directions? Would I enter my basement one day and find a red tube chewing its way through the wall, like in that movie Tremors that they showed on TV all the time? If this was indeed a root, then how did it function without tiny root hairs to wick up nutrients from soil?
Perhaps the tree had read my mind, for this last question answered itself before my eyes. The root had been covered in smudges of black gunk, but as I stared, it appeared to wash itself. The line of gunk that had been left by the snapped oak root was nearly gone. Drops of gunk turned into smaller droplets before disappearing altogether.
The root was absorbing the black stuff. That had to be it: my tree’s root disintegrated any plants it came in contact with, turning them black and jellified, then absorbing them.
I put my hand on the root. I felt a faint vibration—the sensation that something was moving in there. I had thought that property was unique to the bulge part of my tree.
Perhaps it even attracted its prey’s attention before destroying it.
I suddenly pulled my hand away. I may have—though perhaps it was my racing imagination—felt a sharp burning sensation on my palm. It was probably just the cold. I convinced myself that I was tired of sitting there in the mud and it was time to go warm up and wash myself off. I had just spent a lot of time, money, and sanity trying to save my tree. Surely it would not hurt me.
I glared back at it through the window. My hand sure did tingle.