by Ali Shaw
Adrien tried his best to take stock of it all. It was clear that other houses had fared far worse than his own, and his next-door neighbour’s was one such casualty. Its owner, Mrs Howell, was an elderly dear who seemed to spend her every waking moment clipping her verges and manicuring her flowerbeds. She would not be doing that again. Mrs Howell’s front wall had fallen away completely and the contents of her bedroom had been offered up to the air on arms of timber. Adrien’s throat tightened when he saw her bed, and hot tears swelled on his eyelids. The bed hung above the street, punctured by three long branches that had scattered mattress foam among the twigs like misshapen blossom. As for Mrs Howell’s body, Adrien could see little of it, wrapped as it was in her bed covers. Just like the bed, it had been skewered. Only a liver-spotted hand and one lock of hair showed between the folds of the sheets.
Adrien turned away, holding his forehead, but there was no relief to be had in any direction he looked. ‘Why has this happened?’ he muttered, but the forest gave no answers. It only enclosed him in its towering prison. Smells of bark and mosses filled the air, as well as some syrupy scent that was faint but ever present, like blood in the tongue. Somewhere in the distance a building rumbled its collapse. Somewhere somebody was weeping. The sun, beginning to rise, edged with an emerald glow the leaves overhead.
A dog barked. A cock crowed.
And out of sight, on the highest of branches and in the most secret of hollows, stranger creatures went about their business.
3
Elm
Half an hour before the trees came, Hannah woke and slid out of bed, perfectly awake in a matter of seconds. Since childhood she’d been the briefest of sleepers, springing up as soon as her body was rested. Although she loved to doze off sometimes in a sunny glade, or curl up catlike on the sofa at the end of a hard day’s work, she only ever took what her body needed from sleep. Life was too precious to spend it under covers and behind walls.
Hannah’s bed was a narrow thing she rarely bothered to make. It filled her tiny room, since Seb had the bigger of the two in their house. That seemed only fair, when her sixteen-year-old son hardly ever wanted to leave his desk.
Hannah tiptoed onto the landing, where she gave Seb’s door a gentle push. The teenager lay face down on his bed, his duvet and sheets piled over him despite the warmth of the night. At the start of the summer, Hannah had suggested that he try sleeping under the stars. ‘Go on an adventure,’ she’d said. ‘Go away for a fortnight with your friends, or even ask along some girls you like. Go somewhere wild and take the guitar I bought you and a tent and your swimming shorts. Go and . . . go and skinny-dip in a lake, or . . . or cook over a campfire. Shout stuff from the top of a mountain, Seb. This could be a summer you remember all your life.’
After she had said all that, Seb had only looked at her as if she’d asked him to go to jail. He was too busy, he’d explained, for any of that stuff, having already organised some online gaming thing that Hannah didn’t pretend to understand. She didn’t pretend to understand much about Seb.
She left him sleeping and padded downstairs, where she pulled on a favourite jersey whose cuffs were too long and full of holes. The kettle hiccupped and burbled as she waited in the dark for it to boil. Hannah loved to be awake at night, when vision ceded to the subtler senses. When the kettle whistled she could taste its steam rolling in the air, and she held her breath to better hear the glugging water when she poured it into her mug. She added a teabag and leaned close and listened to the quiet work of its brewing, grinning at every miniature pop of a bubble, and at the hot condensation forming against her ear.
Once the teabag was out and the soya was in, she slipped out into the garden, holding her drink in both hands. She took a seat at the outside table and relished the warmth of the mug against her palms. Some mornings, up early doing this, she’d seen a vixen streak across the far end of her lawn. One time she’d even spied an owl, perched on her neighbour’s cherry tree. Its face had rotated to meet hers, and they’d stared at each other for what had seemed like hours.
Hannah’s garden table had been carved from wood, and she often liked to trace her finger along the maze of its grain. Her brother Zach had built it from an elm and, instead of giving it legs, had fitted it to the very stump of the tree he’d sawn its planks from. It was a monument as well as a piece of furniture, since like most elms in the country Hannah’s had committed a kind of suicide. Elms had been doing that for years. When she and Zach were just kids, beetles had spread a parasitic plague from tree to tree. There had been an elm in Hannah’s childhood garden, from which her parents had hung a swing, but not long after her mother died the beetles had come upon it and its leaves had drooped like autumn come early. Zach, thirteen at the time and four years Hannah’s elder, had already learned enough about trees to explain its decline. ‘It’s a fungus, see, a parasite on the beetles that’s doing it. And what the elm does is it tries to block it off. That’s why you see all these bulges of wood, here . . . and here. They’re the elm making walls in itself. Problem is, they work too well. They block the food coming up from the roots. The elm starves itself to death by accident.’
Zach, by far the biggest boy in his school year, had felled that elm with an axe. Just like Hannah, he had grown up ahead of his years in those strange months following their mother’s death, when their father had done nothing but sit at his window seat and grieve. Only when Hannah and Zach cremated the swing along with the elm did their father rise, and come staggering into the garden as if he hoped to rescue the wood from the flames.
Hannah clenched her fist around the handle of her mug, and waited for the memory’s stab to fade. A stag beetle ran across the table, coming within a horn’s length of her finger, and at once Hannah embraced the distraction, delighting in the insect’s top-heavy wriggle. Then she laughed doubly to see another two following it, a duo scuttling past with the waddle of slapstick clowns. Then three more rushed after them, and Hannah’s smile began to vanish, and then a half-dozen more swarmed by and she rose uneasily to her feet. Feathers rustled, further down the garden, and Hannah frowned to see the dim outline of a blackbird hopping about, its beak tapping manically at the grass. All over the lawn, worms were oozing out of the soil. Bees, who should have been tucked up with their honeycombs at this hour, were in flight. The flowerbeds were pebble-dashed by snails.
Hannah backed away from the table, her tea still steaming where she’d left it. Pillbugs had begun to mill there along with the beetles, and ants and chafers and a rabble of weevils each the size of a lentil. Something fine and threadlike touched her cheek, and when she brushed it aside she found her fingers strung together by spidersilk, and looking up saw hundreds of them hurrying this way and that on their tightropes. A gruff yap snapped Hannah’s attention away from them and, in a burst of leaves, the vixen she had seen on past occasions rushed across the bottom of the garden and was gone again through her neighbour’s hedge. But had that been (Hannah shook her head even as she thought it) something tiny riding on its back?
Perhaps she would have dwelled on that last thought had not, at that moment, something else happened, something that expelled all else from her mind.
The trees arrived.
Each plant burst from the ground like a geyser, an upward torrent of thickening bark and branches that thwacked each other flailing as they grew. Hannah threw herself aside just in time to duck the sweep of a bough that would have knocked her head from her shoulders. Instead, it crashed into Zach’s elm table and all the planks and struts were smashed at once, just as the stump base was ejected from the earth by another tree rising. The remains of the table were buffeted left and right by the skyward punches of the forest, dead roots trailing in their wake. Hannah’s mug of tea was lobbed aside and whirled out a spray of hot liquid before it shattered off a trunk. Then it was done. The trees had arrived, and Hannah, slowly, stood upright beneath them.
‘What the . . .’ she whispered, ‘what . . .’ but she didn�
��t know what else to say. Stray leaves flaked from the treetops, and Hannah gaped at what had become of her garden.
Then a thought burst into her mind like one final, late-coming tree.
‘Seb!’ she yelled, and was at once sprinting towards what remained of her house. The back wall was a dust cloud and the roof was spread like a net across the treetops. Hannah had no time for that. She charged inside, tripping and stumbling, only to find the staircase twirling in pieces like a child’s mobile. She didn’t hesitate, having climbed more trees in her lifetime than she could count, and was at once scrambling upward, thinking of her son and nothing more.
‘Mum! Mum, where are you?’
His voice was such a powerful relief that Hannah nearly lost her grip and fell. Instead she swung herself the final distance, on to what had been the landing, and with a shout of ‘Seb!’ threw her arms around him. They embraced in the spot where Seb’s bedroom doorway should have been.
‘Mum?’ He looked as bleary-eyed and helpless as he’d been when he’d wailed in the night fifteen years ago. ‘Mum . . . am I dreaming?’
‘Seb!’ was all she could gasp, pressing her face into his hair.
‘But, Mum,’ he said, ‘what’s happened?’
‘I don’t know.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’ve no idea. You’re okay?’
‘Yeah. I think so. But . . . but . . . the house . . .’
‘As long as you’re okay, Seb, so is everything else.’
He drew back from her and looked fearfully around them. ‘Is it? Is this a forest?’
Hannah couldn’t answer. She knew that forests could not be conjured out of nothing, and she knew more than most about the power nature had. Nevertheless her bedroom had vanished and a tree grew there now, and beyond it the road had filled with more of the same. With a bang and a sizzle a van’s engine exploded into flames. Incinerated leaves wriggled away in fiery streaks, and the air smelled of burning rubber. The trees withstood the heat as if it were nothing. They cupped the van’s inferno as casually as they might a bird’s nest.
Hannah supposed she was in some sort of shock, and might think differently later, but now that Seb was safe she felt more awestruck than terrified. It was a more reverent kind of fear, one she had felt only a few times in life, such as when she’d stood on the edge of a vast canyon with her toes poking over the brink, or when on a trip to Oregon she’d seen a mountain lion prowl across her path.
‘Oh my God,’ despaired Seb. ‘I can’t believe this . . . Our house, Mum! All of our things!’
Hannah wasn’t listening. She was, in fact, beginning to smile. The burning van across the street was held in the arms of an oak, and nearby stood beeches and limes, but by the roaring light of the fire she could make out the leaves and patterned bark of the trees that had demolished her house.
They were neither oak nor beech nor lime.
They were elms.
4
Murderers
At first Adrien found himself habitually sticking to the pavements, even though the trees had grown up through them as often as they had through the roads. Other people did the same, when they were not milling around in shock or rushing this way and that bellowing the names of loved ones. Their shouts echoed through the forest, which replied with low and straining creaks or occasional shivers that ran through the foliage. Adrien swigged on his hip flask, even though his head ached from last night’s drinking. Right now he needed whatever kind of courage he could come by.
The rising sun had found the many dead among the branches, their bodies flapping with crows and jackdaws. Adrien had already looked into the lifeless eyes of one poor woman who was slowly being licked away by housecats, the bells on their collars tinkling as they ate. He had wanted nothing more than to run from that sight, but for a long half-minute his disbelief had transfixed him. When he had finally wrenched himself free he had rushed in the opposite direction, running until he was breathless, which had not taken him very far. Then he had filled his mouth with whisky and somehow found the will to carry on.
He was currently heading for the centre of town, although all he really wanted was to draw clear of these new woods. Trying to stay composed, he pictured the reception awaiting him once he’d escaped. Perhaps he would be cheered like one pulled from an earthquake, then wrapped in a blanket by an aid worker and handed hot food to help him overcome his ordeal. Perhaps journalists would wish to interview him. Perhaps he would appear on the news. After that, he could find a working telephone and contact Michelle.
The trees made the world seem smaller. At some thirty yards they drew shut a branching curtain that crossed out everything beyond. Adrien heard things long before he saw them, such as two dogs whose barking preceded them by a full minute and continued into the distance long after they had chased each other past. Most other sounds were strangled noises he could not place. Human voices warped by the forest, or the moans of buildings coming down. Sometimes there were whispers, but if Adrien dared to look up he’d invariably see another corpse among the leaves. Other times what he took for bodies were in fact just lengths of wood, with offshoots jutting out like human limbs. Once, his imagination even tricked him a step further. He thought he saw a kind of figure, an emaciated thing no bigger than a monkey, watching from above. A moment later he realised it was just a coincidence of the way the sticks and foliage grew, yet he quickened his steps all the same.
He took a shortcut through the grounds of a primary school, where the trees were full of tiny chairs. Hanging from twigs in a wrecked classroom were pictures drawn by the pupils, and at once Adrien wished he hadn’t come that way. The pictures showed childhood monsters with many limbs, and among them enthroned fairy queens and wolves that walked on their hind legs.
He had no sooner left that classroom than he jumped from fright. Ahead of him stood a small child, boy or girl he could not tell. It had bare feet and cartoon pyjamas and its hands were folded behind its back. Its face was pressed against a tree trunk and it stood so still that for a cold moment Adrien took it for another of the dead. Then it bounced twice on its heels and peered around the edge of the trunk, away from them both. Adrien cleared his throat to alert it to his presence, at which it turned and stared up disinterestedly. A little girl, who ran giggling to another tree and pressed her face against it as before.
There was no one else in sight so, much to Adrien’s dismay, it fell to him to try to help the girl. ‘What are you doing here,’ he asked nervously, ‘and where are your mummy and daddy? Are you playing hide and seek?’
The girl held a finger to her lips.
‘What are you doing? Do you think this is a game? You’re . . . you’re going to have to trust me. I’ll try to help you find your parents.’
The girl laughed and sprang away between the trees, where Adrien lost sight of her. ‘Wait!’ he cried, stumbling in pursuit, but he did not see her again. The trees seemed to close ranks in the direction she had run in, and only her laughter continued as if it were a thing alive unto itself. Adrien leaned against a trunk and felt not much older than the girl, and certainly less capable. He mopped his forehead with his cuff and puffed out his cheeks, unsure how much more of this he could shoulder. ‘Come on,’ he urged himself, ‘pull yourself together. There can’t be much further to go.’
The trees in the town centre were the biggest Adrien had yet seen. Here and there people stared up at them, slack-jawed, and Adrien overheard someone suggest that the trees had grown that large to match the height of the buildings they’d replaced. He didn’t like that idea, and shuddered and doubled his pace, trying not to breathe too deeply the dust-filled air. All around him, the ground floors of office buildings smoked with the ashes of their upper floors’ collapse. Several men were braving the ruins to look for, as far as Adrien could tell, some folders full of papers. Two women were helping a wheezing man to walk out of another wreck of a building, his body dun with powder head to toe. ‘I can’t see!’ he kept exclaiming. ‘I can’t see anything!’
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Adrien could feel the ash settling in his own lungs and lining the insides of his nostrils. It tasted by turns like metal and paper, and he spat out as much as he could. When he got clear of the office blocks and was again among smaller buildings that had not been so crushed by their own collapsing weight, he felt perversely thankful, even for the returning smells of sap and woodland flowers.
He stopped. He stared. Then he picked his way into a building whose walls had all been lifted away like the lid of a butter dish.
It couldn’t be, and yet it was. Here were the maps of Italy, now tattered and slug-tracked. Here were the magazines whose cover photos showed families lazing on beaches or in olive groves, their holiday smiles made to look leering and tasteless by their new surroundings.
The language classes Michelle had taken, and forced Adrien to attend along with her, had been her gift to herself following her big promotion. And here, still standing, covered as it was in dropped leaves and scraps of ceiling, was the very desk at which the two of them had sat. Adrien reached out and touched it, and the cool of its veneer and the right angles of its frame made it seem like some object from the distant future, beamed down to this place of tangles and jagged wood.
Adrien hadn’t really wanted to learn Italian, but could hardly refuse when Michelle’s gift to him had been so much more generous. ‘I want you to take a career break,’ she’d said. ‘We’ll have to be strict, but with this new job we’ll have enough. You hate teaching and I can’t bear to see you so miserable. Take some time, Adrien. Work out what you really want from life.’
With a grunt of dismay, Adrien staggered out of the other side of the building. Work out what you really want from life. How vile of chance and memory to bring that up right now, as if he had no more urgent problems. It was an easy enough ask from someone like Michelle, someone who could sit down and assess her wants and drives as if they were items on a restaurant menu, but over the course of the nearly twelve months since he’d quit the school, Adrien had made only this progress: he wanted to be a good man, ideally a great one. A man who would go down in history as the solver of some global crisis or the architect of some peace treaty (he didn’t much care which). Yet he also wanted to get up late. He wanted, if at all possible, to sit for most hours of the day in his boxer shorts, eating junk food and watching leathery men spur horses between cacti. He had quickly learned to dodge Michelle’s question. His career-break had become one long exercise in avoiding it.