The Arborist

by P. T. Phronk

  I moved toward the house, my thoughts conflicted. In the crackling of the burning tree, I could hear whispering words: Sssave. Me. Protect. Me. I reeled with the overwhelming idea that my tree was exerting supernatural influence over my decision to ignore my son. But the true horror came from the knowledge that it was probably not.

  In the end, my tree saved me from making a choice.

  As I approached the house, a loud, high-pitched whistling erupted behind me. I turned. The flames had reached around the circumference of my tree. There was a hole in the bulge where the fire had licked it, and vapour billowed from it. It was like bizarre kettle, whistling and shooting steam.

  The sound got louder, more shrill, then suddenly the bulge exploded. Black and red gore flew in every direction. A drop of the stuff hit my cheek, and though it first felt cold, after a moment it burned like acid. I instinctively brushed it away.

  My tree had a hole in it. The bottom of the bulge was intact, but the top had exploded. It resembled a spout. The gas billowing from it was like no smoke or steam I had seen: thicker, and neither black nor white but tinged with red.

  Black sludge poured out of the hole and onto the ground while the gas rose upward. Then the fire directly above the hole started to go out. As the gas rose higher, each flame it touched was extinguished instantly. A gust of wind blew the gas across the flames, and in a matter of seconds, the tree was no longer ablaze.

  My feet seemed to move on their own. I found myself walking to the tree. I heard bones in my bad foot grind as I put my full weight on it, no longer feeling it. I heard my heart pounding, even over the crackling of the fire inside the house behind me.

  I had thoughts of something emerging from the gas. Some creature, maybe one of the baby-things from my dream, rising from the steam like in a bad science fiction movie. But as I approached the tree, all that emerged from the gas was more gas. It was all for nothing. Up in smoke. I had been caring for this tree, this thing, saving it from imagined threats—disease, greedy researchers, aliens—and all it turned out to be was a tube full of gas. A tube full of gas that was perfectly capable of taking care of itself.

  My tree didn’t even need me.

  Another gust of wind blew. The gas enveloped my face, and I smelled licorice and cherries and vomit and sulphur all at the same time, and my lungs burned. I coughed. My eyes stung. I felt dizzy.

  I took a glance toward Todd’s room. Tendrils of smoke seeped from the improperly-sealed windows. When was the last time I checked the smoke alarm? I’d been waiting for the right moment, I suppose.

  I fell to my knees. I couldn't breathe. My eyes, my nose, and my throat were under attack. As I lost consciousness, I was sure that I would never wake up, and the thought was not entirely unwelcome.

  CHAPTER 19

  I COULD NOT JUDGE HOW long it had been since I passed out, but it was still night and I was still lying beside the tree. I could hear crackling behind me; my burning house; possibly, my burning son. My lungs were full of acid. My head was about to burst.

  I had to get away. The tree—my tree, my life’s work—was killing me. I crawled a few inches away, toward the ravine. Away from my house. I began coughing and couldn’t stop. Black splotches appeared then multiplied in my vision, until everything was black again.

  I dreamed about Todd and Amy, coffee and happiness. I was in my unspoiled house, cooking dinner for my new wife while she played peek-a-boo with my new son. I cut up onions while I sipped coffee. Amy laughed, Todd laughed. The onion fumes wafted up to my face. My eyes watered, my throat stung, and I could feel cold, wet earth covering my hands and face.

  Now I was a few meters away from the tree. I must have crawled some distance as I dreamed. I took a glance back. Gas was still spewing from the tree. The gas seemed to be taking my life, but it had saved the tree’s. The tree was, unlike me, able to take action to save itself. It must have been feeding on the oak tree that I’d cut down, making my contribution to its lifecycle a net negative. This hyper-evolved plant could feed itself, deal with its own problems, put out its own fires. It didn’t need a father.

  Not like Todd did. If he were even alive.

  I could only crawl away from the mess I’d made. I hobbled another few feet before collapsing in pain and despair.

  The dream returned. I’d finished chopping the onions, so I put them in a frying pan. Todd smiled as Amy peeked out from behind her hands, and I was happy, so happy. When Amy got pregnant I wasn’t crazy about the idea of offspring, but this was good, this was right.

  Then I noticed that Todd wasn’t smiling, but grinning, baring rows of needle-sharp teeth. His black alien eyes scanned Amy, then he pounced at her. At the same time, the frying pan burst into flame, burning my hand. I could smell my flesh sizzling as the heat spread to my eyes.

  I awoke. I was far from the house and the tree now, almost at the ravine. The burning smell lingered in my nose, but it was not burning flesh. My head was lying on Jay’s coat. The smell was chemical; charred plastic. I continued to crawl, but my eyes and throat still stung. I briefly wondered why—I was now quite far from the house’s smoke and the tree’s gas.

  Through blurred vision I spotted something red beside me. A tube, like the one under the old oak, ran through the bottom of the ravine, which I had tumbled into at some point. My God, the tube was even longer than I had imagined. It continued farther still, entering the other side of the ravine. I crawled, every breath a struggle. My eyes watered so badly that the world was a haze. As I reached the far side of the ravine, I attempted to grab at saplings to pull myself up, but each tree pulled free of the Earth, revealing a dripping black stump where roots should have been.

  I could not keep my eyes open. I hobbled up the embankment, blind, thinking only about flight. Each breath felt like inhaling needles. Or needly baby teeth. I reached flat ground, but tripped and landed in something jelly-like; muddy, but not entirely cold. I choked and retched, my body wanting to vomit, but I argued with it. We could not afford any time taken away from breathing. Nevertheless, the vomit won the argument.

  CHAPTER 20

  MORNING LIGHT SEEPED THROUGH MY eyelids. My eyes felt better after being forced to rest, but I was already coughing when I woke up. I lay on my side, and could feel something wet running down my cheek: probably vomit, maybe blood. I opened my eyes, and they started to sting again. The ground was black. Even though I could see my breath in the cold, my cheek in the earth felt warm. The sickly-sweet smell of the red tree was strong in my nose.

  I forced myself to sit up.

  The forest on the other side of the ravine had changed. What used to be a sea of green and brown was now red and black. The tree in my yard was not unique after all, for there was an entire forest of them in front of me.

  The beautiful variety of vegetation that had made up the forest—riotous flowers, and bushes, and gnarly oaks, birches, and pines—was now indistinguishable, as it was devoid of leaves and blackened. The trees oozed the dark goo from their trunks, gobs of it spilling from holes and gouges, feeding the underground network of red tubes that connected every red newcomer.

  The red trees were identical, right down to the irritating symmetrical pattern of their branches, and the bulges in their trunks. Some had already burst and were spewing red gas into the air. A crimson haze obstructed distant forest.

  My eyes burned as I scanned the landscape, but I kept them open, trying to take this in. Still trying to understand.

  I attempted to get up, but slipped in the muck. My hand hit something solid, rubbery. A shoe. My gaze crept up the leg it was attached to, and fell on Jay, lying sideways against one of the gas-spewing red trees. He no longer bore the pale alien face that played tricks with my mind in the dark. Where his cheek touched the tree, skin became jelly. His skull seemed to merge with the trunk. Black splotches covered the rest of his head. The dark liquid oozed from his mouth, and from the wound on his forehead where I’d bashed him.

  The tree must have burst in his face
just as he got near it. Perhaps it had burst because he got near it.

  I spun around to retch. When I finished, I looked up and could make out flashing lights at my house on the other side of the ravine. Fire trucks, and probably police. I could hear sirens, too, but they were not coming from my house. They seemed to surround me, as if every ambulance in the city were active. In the distance, I could see clouds billowing up across the city. In every direction I turned, deep red blossoms dotted the horizon, puffy at the top like ghostly trees born of trees.

  I tried to imagine where Amy could be, but I could only picture her with her back turned to me, as pale and still as she was when she slept.

  I could not understand this. The puzzle was too complex. The mystery was all I had left, but I no longer relished even the thought of solving it. How did I get here? If I had let Robert Urban see the tree, maybe this could have been prevented. Maybe he could have figured out where these things came from, or who put them there. Maybe these red trees, with their poison gas, could have been stopped from bursting. I ignored his warnings. Now it was not only my family destroyed, but anyone near the clouds now drifting throughout the city. Maybe throughout the world.

  As I hobbled forward, coughing, there was a wet pop beside me and I felt a splash on the side of my head. A nearby tree’s bulge had just burst. The gas spewed into my face, filling my lungs.

  Finally, I stopped coughing, as my chest refused to expand or contract. The bulge in the tree puckered in on itself, closing the new orifice, as if it had made an error in bursting on me. As if it recognized me. But I’d already gotten too much of it. I fell onto my back as I clawed at my throat, suffocating.

  The last thing I saw—and I pray that this was only a dying hallucination—was a shadow, kilometers away, but large enough to tower over the trees even from my vantage point in the mud. The ground rumbled beneath me. A pair of throbbing blue lights pierced the red haze and reached my consciousness—headlights? Eyes? It shifted, the very Earth creaking under its weight, and although my eyes were able to take in its shape more clearly, my mind would not allow it. Like the entity on the cliff in my dream, it was present but unknowable, inaccessible to human understanding.

  Most of my mysteries were solved before I left the Earth, but isn’t it always the case that more take their place?

  As I drifted away with that sick smell in my nose, I was happy to realize that my last thoughts were of family. Not a dream this time, but a memory, from when Amy was eight months pregnant. We’d just bought the house. A television show about terraforming blared in the background. We stood in the sun room together, holding hands, looking over the landscape of our new yard.

  “It’s beautiful.” I said.

  “Isn’t it?” replied Amy. “He will really love it too.” She smiled, rubbing her oversized belly. Then, seeing in my face that I still wasn’t entirely comfortable, she added: “Oh, honey, it will be fine. I think you’ll love having something to take care of.”

  I beamed. Something about what Amy said had clicked.

  “It will be a whole new world for you,” she added.

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  THANKS

  Thanks to:

  My family.

  Ronny, for editing.

  A bunch of people at Kboards, for advice.

  That weird tree I spotted out of the corner of my eye on the bus, and never saw again.

  PREVIEW: STARS AND OTHER MONSTERS

  Here are the first three chapters of P.T. Phronk’s debut novel, Stars and Other Monsters. If you like what you see, you can get the whole thing here: http://forestcitypulp.com/books/stars-and-other-monsters-by-phronk/. The first sequel, Of Moons and Monsters, will also be released soon.

  1. MEET-CUTE

  WHEN THE STRANGE WOMAN RUINED Stan Lightfoot’s life, he was not minding his own business.

  It was, in fact, David Letterman’s business he was minding. Pictures of the talk show host still engaged in an illicit affair could sell to tabloids for tens of thousands of dollars. Stan grinned at his trusty dog, Bloodhound, wagging her tail in the passenger seat, then turned on his camera.

  He was oh so close to getting that picture; Letterman was right there. Stan knew he was in the right place because Bloody had barked when they drove past the row of novelty shops and antique dealers, all peeling paint on paneling, connected by a sagging porch.

  “You’re a good girl, Bloody” said Stan. Bloody looked at him and sighed through her nose, frowning.

  Stan broke off a chunk of his McDonald’s hamburger. The dog flipped it into her mouth, swallowed it in one bite, then leered expectantly at Stan.

  “You’ll get more when we get our picture,” said Stan as he scratched the scraggly gray hairs on her head.

  Letterman leaned out of the doorway of a gift shop. If Stan hadn’t been expecting him, the talk show host would have been unrecognizable. He wore a trench coat with the collar popped to cover most of his face. The rest was obscured by a brimmed hat and tragically unfashionable sunglasses. He held the door for a younger woman, who was also obscured by sunglasses, but most definitely the woman whom Letterman had supposedly ended his affair with.

  Bloody put her paws on the window of the car, panting as she stared at the couple.

  “Down girl! You want them to see us? Jackass.”

  The dog grumbled before getting down.

  “C’mon. Give her a kiss,” muttered Stan as he zoomed in with his camera. The couple disappointed him by shuffling to the next store, one behind the other, as if they didn’t even know each other.

  Two larger-than-life-sized cigar store Indians—feathers and all—guarded the entrance to the antique store. A bit culturally insensitive, but what else could be expected from this no-name shit-hole stretch of highway? Letterman bowed before the Indians, each in turn, flashing his trademark gap-toothed grin. With a smile like that, the biggest sunglasses in the world couldn’t hide his identity.

  Behind him, his mistress giggled. Stan snapped pictures, but a smile wasn’t enough. He needed something dramatic, something scandalous. Come on, a peck on the cheek. He’d even settle for wiping an eyelash from the corner of his eye, or adjusting the hat on his head.

  They disappeared into the store. Stan sighed and rubbed his temples. Bloody leaned over the gear shift and licked his hand.

  “Thanks girl,” said Stan.

  Bloody licked his hand again, then stared at him with a serious expression.

  “Oh Christ, you just want more food.” Stan reached into the McDonald’s bag on the floor to toss his dog a cold French fry.

  He zoomed in on the store window. He could make out roughly human forms, but through the tinted car windows and the gloom of the store, pictures came out dim. Stan groaned.

  The way the couple laughed and smiled at each other, there was no doubt they were still fucking. Stan didn’t even know he’d find them together when he started following Bloody’s directions to New Hampshire. He figured he’d catch old gap-tooth on a miserable 24-hour bender, wearing sweat-pants and stuffing himself with Cheetos.

  And that would have been great. Maybe five, ten thousand bucks to Star or TMZ. But when Stan caught Letterman with his not-wife, who he’d been accused of boning, it h
ad been one of the happiest moments of Stan’s life.

  Just the pictures of them together would net five times more than a drunken solo shot. Ah, but one shot of unambiguous intimacy, selling it as an exclusive to some major gossip rag, that’d get him the mother lode. He could ditch this paparazzi bullshit. Buy a nice house with a pool, then sit beside it all day feeding Bloody all the fries she desired. Maybe he could even help his poor mother out.

  Inside the antique shop, Letterman took off his sunglasses. Perfect, except Stan’s camera still couldn’t penetrate the murk of the shop. He briefly considered going inside, but Dave wasn’t a stranger to stalkers. He probably had an evacuation procedure planned.

  Letterman unsheathed an antique sword and held it pointed at the woman’s chest, his face contorted in mock menace. His lips moved, sending the woman into fits of laugher.

  “Wish I could hear what they’re saying. I bet he just said something really funny, better than the stuff on his show,” Stan said. “I need one of those audio satellite dish things. The ones that the FBI uses to spy on people from across the street.”

  Bloody glanced back at him, snorted, then returned to watching the window.

  “You think those are even real? Or is that just in movies? Bah, you don’t believe me, but I bet they exist. Remind me to get one, huh?”

  The couple looked happy. Maybe it was for the best that old Dave ditched his wife to be with her. It was a shame they had to be so secretive. The thought crossed Stan’s mind without a hint of irony before a pang of guilt hit him. He pushed it deep down, inhaling as he raised his camera.