by S. T. Joshi
Ralph was too amazed to turn and follow her, even with his eyes. He stared stupidly at the point where her face had been, then at last passed a hand over his brow and shook his head as though dashing away a loose blindfold.
As if freed from an enchantment, he squared his shoulders, breathed deeply, and jerked his eyes around through the murk as though they were searching hands. Then he shrugged, laughed shortly, as though at a poor joke, and returned into the house.
Edna was licking the last of the chocolates from her plump fingers. “They get all gooey when it’s so hot,” she complained. “Did you take a look at the roses? Aren’t they just wonderful? I do say that our yard keeps as green and nice as if we’d hired a gardener to take special care of it!”
She crumpled up the candy-bag. “Mrs. Cross told me that the man who owns the lot is going to chop down Miranda’s tree one of these days.”
“No!” Ralph’s passion surprised him as much as Edna.
“Yes!” she said.
She lay awake. “Ralph!” she called softly. “Are you awake?” But he did not answer. She stirred uneasily, and snapped on the light, gazed at her bedroom. There was nothing to fear! She switched off the light and lay back. And there it was again—a whispering of leaves in the wind . . .
Someone was in the room! Edna dragged the covers up to her face, too frightened now to put on the light. It seemed to be a woman, a naked girl, her body faintly phosphorescent. A ghost! Edna hid her face under the bed clothes and sobbed.
Ralph was at work when the cutters arrived to fell the tree, but Edna and Elaine stood at the railing of the front porch, watching. The men had tied ropes to the thick limbs: they shouted to each other, stopped sawing on the trunk. They dragged on the ropes.
The air was stabbed by loud cracklings, like miniature explosions. The tree tottered, then toppled, crashing down, the ropes sagging. Elaine scrambled excitedly down the porch steps, over the grass toward the tree.
“Elaine!” Edna reached after her anxiously. “Come back here: You’ll get hurt!”
“No, Mama, I won’t! I just want to get a branch and make me a switch!”
She tugged unsuccessfully on a broken limb, gave up and went around the fallen giant to admire the stump. Her eyes gaped; she slapped a palm over her mouth in dismay, then screeched and pointed. “There’s blood on the tree! Mama, come an’ look at all th’ blood! Did somebody get hurt?”
Edna scurried off the porch to her; the cutters gathered around the stump. A slow rill of blood welled from the tree’s split trunk. In the fissure was a woman’s arm, bleeding badly. Edna’s fingers clawed her hair, horrified, and she drew back, reaching down to haul Elaine with her.
The men worked feverishly to widen the split with crowbars and wedges. The news was shouted to passersby by Elaine and Edna, then relayed around the neighborhood. The scene became bounded by curious bystanders; newspaper photographers appeared to snap pictures, their flashlight bulbs weak lightning. When the woman was freed from the tree, policemen forced the pushing crowd backward, their shouted commands blurred by the babbling voices.
She was Miranda, her once aging body now firm and blooming, her thick hair glossy and glorious. She was unconscious, dying, and as she was carried into the house, her face was distorted by intense pain.
“She was in the tree!” Edna exclaimed again and again, her eyes vacant with shock. “But how could she get into it? She said once that there are plants that catch flies and move away if you touch them, but—” She shook her head, dazed. “When she wakes up, we must ask her—”
But when Miranda opened her eyes, just before she died, there was only one sound which she could utter—a whispering as of leaves, fluttering in the wind.
The Beautiful Fog Ascending
Simon Strantzas
Spiderwebs of branches, woven together in the brittle air. A sparrow’s warble; the rustle of drying leaves. Manifold sat perched on the large rock, dressed in his finest suit, wringing his arthritic hands. He stared at the spot where the dirt path vanished into the undergrowth.
The sun had not risen. Instead, it had simply given up the fight and stayed asleep—much as Manifold wished he too had done. Light diffused through the grey sky in a uniform pale, illuminating everything, but nothing so much that Manifold could say it was lit.
He wondered why he had come, what he was searching for. What use was there in leaving the house when the outdoors held nothing for him but a reminder that the world continued? That he was but a small and insignificant cog in the great machine. No, not a cog, because without a cog the whole cannot function. There was nothing quite that special about him. He had lived his whole life to become unnecessary.
At least outdoors there was chatter, movement, unlike his unkempt house. Those four walls, once full of life, full of Sandra, had grown silent; forty years of life accumulated there with nothing to show for it. The house stood on, while Manifold slowly fell apart.
His pocket buzzed, the ring of the cell phone his son, Herbert, had bought him. Manifold did not answer it. No one telephoned him, not even Herbert, who was too busy with his wife and children to spend more than requisite holidays with Manifold; who since Sandra’s death had barely seemed interested in doing even that. Sandra had been the bridge between the two men, and without her . . . Without her so much was gone. It was worse than he could have imagined. There were days when getting out of bed was impossible. Days when he could not bear to face the mundanities the world had in store for him. There were days when he wanted nothing more than to sleep so deeply he rose into the sky. He found himself praying for salvation, for some solution to his misery. He had searched every avenue of his life and come up empty. There was nothing.
The phone in his pocket buzzed again. He reached his aching fingers in and removed it, then set it down gingerly on the smooth rock beside him. Vibrations echoed through the flecked stone, deep reverberations subsumed by the greyish woods. Manifold stood up, his brittle knees complaining fiercely about the weight, and did not look at Herbert’s gift, rattling. Instead, he abandoned it and walked toward that fading point where the path disappeared into the thickness of trees, that point where the woods converged, where everything else would be left behind him.
Each step he took sank into the soft earth, as though the ground itself were trying to stay him. He continued forward, persevering even as his wrought lungs revolted in excruciating pain. There was something beyond that vanishing point, something he sought that drew him onward.
Stones riddled the edges of the worn path, and they slowly rolled as he approached, revealing their once-hidden aspects. He stopped to witness the phenomenon and sensed beneath his feet the ever-shifting ground vibrate, detected in the air a low insectan drone. A peculiar noise distracted him, the sound of a bird like the laugh of a child, somewhere above in the trees. He looked up into the tangle of branches and saw only slate sky.
It had become colder than it should, even so late in the turning season, far colder than it had been earlier when he left his meager house. Had he closed the door before setting off into the woods? He could not recall—his memory in the weeks and months since Sandra’s death more porous, his thoughts more clouded. He remembered, vaguely, cleaning the house one last time; he remembered laying out his wedding suit across the bed; he remembered washing his calloused feet and crooked toes. He remembered these things, and yet could not recall leaving the house, could not recall entering the woods, could not recall anything between that bath and sitting upon the smooth, flecked rock. A giggle in the air, a cold gust, the rattle of his phone in his pocket. He reached for it and realized it was only a ghost, vibrating against his skin.
A memory from the depths surfaced, unsummoned. Herbert’s solitary visit after Sandra’s death. How could Manifold have forgotten? He had arrived with wife and children in tow—no more familiar to Manifold than faceless strangers. Herbert’s face was drawn down, as was his nameless wif
e’s, yet both seemed insincere. The terrible children were honest at least, playful and indifferent. That perhaps was the most infuriating. Had none of them decency enough to respect Manifold’s pain? Did they have to flaunt living before him so, when he had struggled and failed in his own search to go on?
And why did that memory manifest itself at that moment, while Manifold stood, breathless, in the midst of the autumnal woods? What was it about the trees’ slender trunks, like Sandra’s arms reaching for him from her deathbed, that made him recall all that had been sensibly buried?
He heard a suppressed cough. He turned, squinting in the cold to focus his eyes, but he saw nothing.
“Hello?” Manifold called, voice shaking. “Hello? Who is there?”
But there was no reply. Just the sound of butterflies, of squirrels.
Manifold looked down at the dirt path and wondered whose feet stood upon it; whose hands dangled at his side, wrinkled, emaciated, ancient. He wondered whose misshapen and bent body he inhabited. And, most importantly, he wondered what it was he searched for. What answer did he seek? It was difficult for him to remember, difficult to think things through. He winced, shook his head, tried to snap the loose wires back into place. At once the world shifted, focused, and in that brief moment of ultra-clarity he realized what he was being beckoned toward, but as swiftly as the thought formed it dissipated, narrowly escaping his tenuous grasp.
He was not used to walking, to any sort of exercise. He stopped repeatedly, panting for breath until his mouth tasted of rust. He looked behind him at where he had come from, and it was unfamiliar. Nothing was as it had been. Not the path taken, not his marriage, not his family or friends, nothing was the same, because everything was gone. His heart raced, his breathing rushed, and all he could smell was the sweat building beneath his clothes. He took off his wedding jacket and discarded it. He loosened his shirt, desperate for more air in his lungs.
He paid no attention to the vibrating phone in his pocket. If anyone needed him, they would have to wait.
When Manifold saw the large rock ahead, rolled to the edge of the path, he wondered if it was the same rock he had been sitting upon in his past. But this rock was covered almost entirely by black lichen and bore no evidence of human contact. There was certainly no cell phone left upon its stone tableau, though Manifold could still feel a residual ring echoing from below its surface.
His sweat had not abated since discarding his jacket, and his jaw chattered in such a way that he worried he might be suffering a stroke. His vision was blurred; his legs threatened to give way. He questioned not only his senses, but his slipping sanity. Nothing around him appeared real. Especially not the advancing creatures resolving from the aether. They slithered through the underbrush, fallen leaves sluicing off their shadowy forms. Manifold managed to scramble onto the large rock as they passed underfoot, and he was panting as he watched them go, fading between the trees.
Manifold slowly climbed down, careful to avoid further scraping his feeble legs. When he stood, he realized his shirt had been stained black by lichen, a map of the rock’s surface across his chest. It was ruined. One more cherished symbol of his love for Sandra destroyed.
Manifold unbuttoned his shirt with trembling fingers. He sensed Sandra there, shaking her head, not understanding, but paused when he felt another presence, appearing from nowhere in the wooded depths. He lifted his head to see a tall lean man watching him, standing where the trunks of the trees were their thickest; where, even leafless, the branches blotted out the sun. The dark-skinned stranger wore a thick fur coat that gave him a goatish appearance, and he smoked a longstemmed wooden pipe. It was pungent and smelled of musky foreign tobacco. Manifold dropped his shirt and hobbled forward, stumbling over a root snaking from the ground. Cold prickled his naked back and arms.
“Excuse me,” he said, straining to be heard over the birds chirping in the branches above. “I don’t know where—I need help. I can’t remember how I got here.”
The man smiled and leaned against a tree. The wide trunk bent beneath his weight.
“Where do you think you are, old man?” The stranger placed the pipe upon his tongue as it puttered bluish grey fumes.
“For the life of me I don’t know. I don’t know how I got out here.”
“Is out here not where you want to be?” An eyebrow raised.
“I don’t know. I don’t know where I want to be.”
The man nodded sharply, then removed the pipe from his mouth and knocked the bowl against the flat of his heel. It made a hollow pop, and the birds in the branches above dispersed, scattered to the sky. The man put the pipe in his fur’s pocket.
“Then come with me.”
Manifold held his arms tightly, trying to shield himself from the chill. He half suspected the stranger had made off with his shirt and jacket, just biding the time until he could secure the rest, but Manifold did not yet know why. It had become difficult to piece things together. To think. Much easier, then, to follow.
They walked for aeons, the sky shifting colors as though floating on oil. Manifold’s feet burned, and he looked down to discover his shoes were missing, his socks in tatters, his wrinkled yellowed toes exposed and bleeding. He could suddenly feel the mold and dirt and moss underfoot, squeezing between his digits. He looked to the stranger for some explanation, but the man had vanished, leaving Manifold alone. The buzz of insects had increased, and with it the rattling of branches as animals scurried.
It was then Manifold saw the tree.
Had there been ten of him, holding hands, their bodies pressed up against the deep-grooved bark, they could not have encircled its massive trunk. The giant tree was dark grey and old, and it reached up through the canopy woven by the woods’ branches—up into the heavy blanket of grey clouds.
Ripples moved along the ridges of the trunk, and it took Manifold a moment to realize it wasn’t his failing watering eyes but hundreds of thousands of insects of all sizes covering the tree. Flies buzzed around it, circled it, lighting for an instant before flying away. Ants scurried along the deep grooves, walking around and over the dull black beetles that remained still. And the branches, full of birds chirping and screeching discomforting songs. Everything in the woods was converging on that one place, at that one moment, and Manifold felt a chill trickle down his back. He was dreaming, yet could not wake.
He wanted to scream, the wave of emotions flooding over him, drowning him, but he could not make a sound. And yet the creatures had no trouble. The birds chirped, the insects buzzed, the woodland animals rustled and chittered and howled as they climbed over exposed roots or hung from hollowed- out tree knots.
Was this what the stranger had been leading him to? The giant tree, incongruous with what surrounded it? Was it what everything led to?
There was a sound beneath the buzzing and rustling and chirping. A sound like a voice, one he knew better than any he had ever heard. A sound he longed for so that it tore pieces from his heart. “Manny,” it said, the voice from the distance, from somewhere up in the tree. “Manny.”
It could not be Sandra’s voice, but he knew it was. He gazed up into the thick tangle of gnarled branches and saw the amorphous swell of clouds, swirling among the canopy of twigs and branches. He strained, looking for movement in the mist, but ultimately found nothing. Only shadows of hopes.
He was naked, stripped of all ballast. His clothes, his family, his wife, his job—everything he had known, every place he had belonged to, everything he ever had—was gone. What remained was only this: the tree; the birds; the insects; the animals. All he had left was in front of him. The rest receded into darkness.
“What are you going to do?” the stranger said, and Manifold saw him leaning against the wide trunk of the tree, once again smoking his pipe, grey smoky tendrils twisting upward, up around the lowest of the branches.
Manifold paused in thought. He felt insects light on him, cr
awl over his flesh, buzz every few steps. Then he forgot they were there at all.
“I think—” he tried. “I think I’m going to—” He looked up again at the giant tree endlessly looming above. He looked behind him at the path he had traveled, his footsteps filling with dirt and moss. He looked ahead at the path that quickly faded away into nothing. A dead end. “I think I want to climb.”
The man shook his head, blinked twice, then bared his teeth and laughed like some strange animal. His feet clopped like hooves on the rocky ground.
“You found it,” the man said. “Allow me to give you a hand.”
Mirthfully, he put his pipe in his mouth and held out his meshed, wrinkled hands. They looked familiar, but Manifold stepped into them anyway.
Hand over bloodied hand, foot over bloodied foot, Manifold climbed the tree, leaving everything behind him. He climbed upward, higher and higher, ascending into that beautiful grey fog.
Exit Through the Gift Shop
Nick Mamatas
What happened to the drivers so foolish as to stop for the phantom hitchhiker of Rehoboth? Nothing, really. He’s just an intense red-haired man, eyes wild, musk dripping from his pores. When he vanishes, he leaves behind a cigarette, though it’s been decades since anyone has lit up in another person’s car without asking. And the laughter, the howling maniacal laughter?
What’s so funny, anyway? Anyway, not anyways. That’s hillbilly talk. A remnant of Middle English, preserved by the toothless and inbred lower classes of Scots-Irish extraction. You can always tell that a kid’s some jumped-up bumpkin in town for his college edjumication if she says “anyways.” This is New England. Anyway means one alternative way. Anyways means that there are so many possibilities out there, doesn’t it?