The Arborist

by P. T. Phronk

  CHAPTER 11

  A SECOND MYSTERY WAS SOLVED that evening, when I checked my email.

  _Wesley__,

  I apologize for being unavailable. I have been out of town pursing an important research problem. I do need you to call me right away. My personal cell phone number is below. I have some rather urgent information to share with you regarding your tree. I would like to meet you in person about this at your earlier convenience. This is not something that should be transmitted over email.

  There is one thing I should tell you. Do not tamper with the tree. Do not touch it. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CUT IT DOWN OR REMOVE ANY BRANCHES.

  I know this is blunt, but please believe me when I tell you that this information should be taken seriously.

  Call me.

  Robert Urban

  I was not entirely surprised by the email’s unusual content. I knew the tree was important to me, but the message solidified its significance in the mind of another, and that social validation gave my ideas a fertile context to grow within. I felt a mix of dread and excitement soak through my body. I sat in silence, savouring and hating that feeling as it pushed buds of sweat through my pores.

  The figure in my yard probably had nothing to do with Robert Urban. That was clear from the desperate tone of his email. If he had already found out where I lived and sent a lackey to investigate, then he would not be begging me to contact him. One more mystery solved—or at least on its way to being solved. I now knew who the figure was not, but that left me to wonder who it was.

  CHAPTER 12

  I REFUSED TO CALL URBAN. He had forcefully expressed the importance of reaching him, but that was probably for selfish reasons. He may not have been sneaking around my house, but I was surely correct all along about him wanting the discovery for himself. Of course he told me not to tamper with the tree; he wanted the entirety of the credit for scientific poking and prodding. The ominous tone of his email was more of a reserved sign than a danger sign. More CRIME SCENE: DO NOT CROSS than WORKERS OVERHEAD. It had to be.

  I flexed my hand, which was pink where it had touched my tree’s root.

  The dread/excitement premonition continued through the day. It was amplified when I prepared an entire pot of extra dark coffee, and drank it black, in the course of two hours. During this time, I sat in the sun room, letting the caffeine nourish every neuron in my brain as I stared at the yard and thought deeply. Amy and Todd had already migrated to their daytime habitats, so I was alone in mine, and it was—finally—an ideal morning.

  I felt jittery, so I hobbled outside. The snow had receded, and the grass was slick. Thunder muttered in the distance, and I could smell the humidity of an oncoming storm. My red tree’s red root still ran through the hole where the oak had been. It was completely free of black goop now, and leaning closer, I determined that the entire hole was devoid of it. The root had soaked it all up.

  I went to my tree. I tentatively touched its trunk in the middle of the bulge, half-expecting it to deliver a painful jolt. It did no such thing, and its warmth was, in fact, comforting. I had longed to be rid of this obsession—and wasn’t I supposed to cut down on coffee too?—but that was forgotten as I put my face to the bulge, smelling its sweetness, and feeling the faint vibration inside. I balanced there on one foot for several minutes, and three times I heard and felt that gurgling movement inside. It was getting more frequent.

  Whatever was living inside the bulge would come out soon. I was sure of it.

  I did this a few more times throughout the day, hopping outside to be with my tree between bouts of watching TV and self-medicating with even more caffeine. Forget giving it up. I could do that when this tree business was done. Soon.

  Todd came home and said “Hi, dad” when he walked in the door, then lingered behind the couch I was sitting on, looking at the TV, which displayed some ridiculous show about terraforming Mars to make it fit for human habitation. His lingering was unusual, for he usually grunted a “hey” upon arriving home, then went straight upstairs. I turned to him. There was a conflicted expression pulling at his face; also a change from his usual air of numb apathy.

  “Is anything wrong, Todd?” I asked. He opened his mouth as if he were about to say something, then stopped. His lips assumed a more controlled position, and he said “No. Nah, I’m fine. You?”

  Todd’s eyes were red—lined with thousands of tiny branches, as I’m sure my own were. I smirked as I shook my head slightly. A hint of a smile came across Todd’s face. We both knew that there was plenty wrong with both of us. The wordless communication of this fact felt like the beginning of a better connection with my son. A bonding that was not perfect, but was ours.

  The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, they say.

  That evening, after Todd and Amy had gone to bed, I stayed up searching the web. I even considered calling Urban, to hasten the playing out of this mystery, so I opened up the email he had sent me. Then I noticed something that had escaped my attention the first time:

  _Wesley__,

  This is how his email had started. At work, I often sent identical messages to many people at the same time. When I did this, I would type out the text in a word processor, and I would leave a blank space, __________, at the top of it. I’d paste this template into my email client, and personalize it by replacing the blank space with a name. I could imagine performing this process hastily and leaving some of the line around the name, forgetting to completely delete it. It would look just like Urban’s email. He was in a hurry. And he had sent the same thing to multiple people.

  Before I could contemplate this further, there was an aggressive knock on the front door.

  I got my crutches and swung my way to the door. I awkwardly opened it, and the breath flew from my lungs when I saw who was there.

  The figure had arrived.

  The figure was no alien, and he was no grad student either, judging by how he dressed. He was a young man, no older than 20, but with a weathered, pale face. Despite the fact that it was dark outside, he wore oversized oval sunglasses which turned up slightly at the outer edges. His head was shaved bald, and he wore a leather trench coat that went past his knees. It was not entirely surprising that I had mistaken him for an alien.

  “Todd home?” the figure—the young man—asked.

  “W-what?” I stuttered.

  “Todd. We gotta talk.”

  “Nuh. No. No, you can’t talk to Todd now,” I said, a hint of indignation seeping into my voice. “He’s in bed. What is this about?”

  “It’s important,” said the man, and he smiled a toothy fake grin that revealed small, stained teeth. “Please, mister, sir, just let me tell him something. I know he’s awake. His light is still on.”

  “You were in my yard,” I stated. I felt my fingers clench tight around the crutches. This damn kid was the one who was intruding on my property, stomping around my tree. He stole my camera. He put a rusty nail in my foot and a cast on my ankle. All this shit, caused by a punk child friend of Todd’s. Not an alien. Not even a mystery. I could figure this kid out in a glance.

  “No—I mean, well yeah—but just let me talk to him for a second, man, sir. It’s important, so let me in, eh?” The kid was looking past me, looking into my house.

  “No. Get off my property, now. I’m not chasing you off again. I’ll find out who you are and call the police if you don’t get off my fucking porch.”

  He slid his sunglasses off, so I could see his tiny baby-blue eyes. Leaning close to me, his face inches from mine, his breath smelling like beer and smoke, he dropped the forced politeness: “Ah,” he said, “that was you.” His beady gaze flicked down to my cast, then back to my face. “How’s the leg?”

  This fucking kid, with his cocky grin and undersized, soulless eyes. I’d seen that look before. From assholes at the office who thought themselves at the top of their game. They’d call me big guy and say things like you probably just didn’t see it before and flash that toothy grin before swagge
ring away. Like they owned the place.

  Now one of these assholes, a child who thought he was better than me, was invading my territory, wanting to come into my house and harass my son. The same child who had been prancing around my tree in the middle of the night.

  The kid twitched forward, as if he was going to push into the house. My house.

  I lost control of my limbs. My fist tightened around the crutch’s grip. I became one with the wooden rod, my arm a weighty branch. It flew in an arc from the ground to the kid’s pale little face. The end struck him in the nose, sending a spray of blood down the front of his chest as he exhaled in shock.

  As if the wind had caught it, I swung the other crutch, the other branch. I hardly noticed the searing pain in my broken ankle. With a wooden clunk, the crutch collided with the side of his head hard enough to send him tumbling to the ground.

  My limbs rained down on him. He raised his flesh-covered arms into my way, his alien sunglasses still in one hand. The crutches ignored them and the sunglasses shattered against the kid’s face, cutting at his flesh like that rusty nail had torn through mine.

  I landed a few more blows, shattering blood vessels, making him turn black and red. His kicking legs finally found purchase, and he escaped my reach.

  I realized I was yelling. I don’t know long I had been yelling, what words were coming out of me, or if they were my words at all. I almost lunged at him again, but some shred of sanity held me in place. He whimpered in pain, holding his head. A gash in his eyebrow dripped blood into his eyes.

  The kid took hesitation as a chance to back away on his hands and knees, tumbling down the steps of the porch before managing to get to his feet. He looked back, and I could see a glint of his ugly little eyes shining through the streaks of red around them. “You’ll fucking pay for this. You and Todd will both pay.” His voice was calm, and I shivered despite the fire inside of me. He shambled away, his hand tightly pressed to his bleeding head.

  Suddenly, the pain in my ankle rushed back into my consciousness in a terrible wave. I fell to my knees. Todd was at the top of the stairs. Tears streamed down his face. I wondered how much he had seen. Amy arrived a moment later, pushing past Todd and sprinting down the stairs.

  “What have you done, Dad?” Todd pleaded, through a rain of tears. “Oh God … Dad, what have you done?”

  CHAPTER 13

  THAT NIGHT, I DREAMED ABOUT the day Todd was born.

  In reality, it was beautiful. Amy held baby Todd in her arms, and I’d never seen her happier. I have still never seen her happier. Her joy was infectious, and on that day, I barely even regretted the decision to have a kid.

  In my dream, however, she was delivering baby Todd in a fire-and-brimstone version of Hell. In the rocky desert landscape, flames shot from fissures in the ground, sending maroon smoke into the blood-red sky. I could hear screaming all around me, and I could see hundreds of other mothers lying on the rocky ground, bellies bulging, legs spread.

  I was the only father in Hell, squatting beside Amy. She screamed in agony; sweat poured down her face, making her hair darker, matted against her face in branching strands. Blood seeped from between her legs, and I could hardly bear to look, but there was no doctor around so I’d have to deliver the baby myself.

  I could see the crown of a pale head poking out. It was covered in black goo in addition to the blood. When I grabbed and pulled, Todd slowly squeezed out. Except it wasn’t Todd. The baby’s eyes were too big to be human, and pure black. Where its nose should have been there was only a vaguely triangular hole. Its face was a skull made of flesh.

  As I removed it from Amy, at first I thought that it had no umbilical cord. But pulling further still, I saw that it had several, all branching from its feet and ankles. Little roots, covered in blood and black goo, were keeping the alien baby bound to my wife, who had stopped screaming. I put the thing on the ground and backed away. It opened its mouth to reveal tiny, razor sharp teeth, and coughed up oily black liquid.

  It raised its feet with surprising strength, and chewed at the umbilical roots sprouting from them. More black goo squirted from the severed roots, dotting its repulsive face. I was soon squatting in a red and black puddle. When the roots were severed, the thing flipped over into a crawling position. It regarded me with animal intelligence in its black eyes. It looked off to the side, then back at me, as if making a decision. Then it scampered past me, faster than any newborn should scamper.

  Amy was not moving, and her face had gone pale. I turned and watched the baby-thing crawl away. Around it, hundreds of other mothers lay on their backs in pools of dark liquid, all of them dead. The things that had killed them all crawled in the same direction, toward a rocky cliff in the distance. The sky was darker red in that direction.

  One of the baby-things crawled over a fissure in the earth just as a plume of flame erupted. The thing was incinerated, as if it were made of gasoline. I got some grim satisfaction out of this.

  Something emerged at the top of the distant cliff they crawled toward. They say you can’t read in dreams, and I find that whenever I try, the words are blurred or I can’t quite make them out no matter how much effort I exert. The entity on the cliff was the same way; no matter how much I concentrated, my mind would not let me take it in. My emotions reacted even in the absence of recognition, a consuming dread paralyzing me. A blue glow reached the peripherals of my vision and awareness. I stomped my broken foot, hoping the pain would snap me out of the fearful grip the entity on the cliff held over me, and—

  I woke up. Amy had walked into the room and flicked the light on. Red smudges dotted the front of her t-shirt, and for a moment I thought I was still dreaming. Then I realized that she had been cleaning the kid’s blood off the front porch.

  I opened my mouth to thank her, but before I could speak, she said “Not now. In the morning.”

  With that, she turned off the light and collapsed into the bed with her back to me, becoming as still as she had been in my dream.

  CHAPTER 14

  AMY ASKED ME WHAT GOT into me. I stared at a smear of blood on her arm as she fidgeted with her hair. Before I could answer her question, she was asking more questions, each louder than the previous, until she was screaming.

  “Who was that?”

  “Why did you hit him so hard?”

  “What the Hell has gotten into your head?”

  “What are the police going to say? They’re probably on the way!”

  I told her that we would not be calling the police, and that the kid wouldn’t either. A little brawl would be the least of his worries with the law. I tried explaining that this was the kid, one and the same, who was sneaking around the yard. That he was the one I chased, and he was responsible for the hole in my foot. He had broken into our house while we slept and stolen my camera.

  Todd breathed in quickly.

  I turned to him. He hadn’t said anything all morning, but stood at the kitchen counter overlooking the table where Amy and I sat across from each other.

  “Todd? You going to do some explaining?” I asked him.

  Amy half-stood, probably about to interrupt to say that Todd was not the one that needed to do some explaining, but the harsh glance I gave her must have been enough to quiet her.

  “He is—was—a friend of mine,” Todd said, his voice hoarse. “His name is Jason. Jay. Sometimes we’d,” Todd paused, looking at his mother with eyes unable to focus, on the edge of panic. “We’d skip classes and hang out at his place. A bunch of us. Sometimes I’d go there after school, when I told you guys I was going to Chris’s or Dean’s.”

  Amy exhaled in shock, but I had a feeling he wasn’t done. “Why did you lie? What did you do with him?” I asked.

  “Nothing serious, dad,” Todd’s voice was shaky, that panicky look in his eyes getting stronger. “I mean, marijuana. Just pot, dad. Nothing serious. But it wasn’t even about that.”

  Amy’s face went pale. “Dammit, Todd,” she said. “We talked
about this. We sat down, right at this table, and I told you about drugs. Were you even listening?”

  “Yeah, but, I,” Todd sputtered.

  “What happened after that?” I asked, interrupting. “Why did you say Jason was your friend?”

  Amy looked at me as if that was the stupidest thing I could possibly have asked.

  “Because I didn’t want to to do it any more, dad. It was fun, me and the other guys—Dean was there too—and Jay would bring weed and we’d just chill, watch TV, or play cards, or whatever.”

  “Then Jay started asking for money. I thought that made sense, yeah, sure, so I gave him some of my allowance. He asked for more, and when we didn’t have enough, he’d get in a real bad mood. Once he punched Dean in the gut, and Dean showed me the bruise at school. It was bad. His whole belly turned purple and he got sick.”

  Amy bounced in her chair, like her feet were already fleeing the room. Always with Amy: fill the room with words, set things in motion, then leave. Like a mushroom bursting to release a cloud of spores before dying.

  “Then?” I asked Todd, calm, motionless, demonstrating stability.

  “We got Jay money however we could. Dean thought of the idea to tell our parents that we needed money for shop class, and to get them to write the check out to each other and say it was the teacher’s name.”

  I remembered writing that check. Being fooled made anger feel appropriate, but I forced myself to keep it buried.

  Todd continued, looking at me as he talked. “It was stupid. We had no money, we were all doing bad in school. It wasn’t even that fun with Jay pissed off. It wasn’t the weed; I just liked having people to hang around with. I’m not good at making friends, you know that. So I said we should quit with Jay.”