Screamscapes: Tales of Terror (17 page)

Her body vanished up to her knees, then to her waist, as it greedily gobbled her down.

Then she was gone. The bright light of her spirit was snuffed out in an instant. Micah was sure he was gone, too, as he felt himself falling into a dark abyss, plunging into nothingness as he fell, the world around him a blur as it receded away in his vision. The only comfort he still had was holding Anna’s hand in his, and he thought that enough. If they could not be together in life, then together in death would have to suffice.

He clenched her lifeless hand even more tightly as he braced himself for the end.

Micah collided with the hard prairie floor, landing flat on his back, the wind knocked from his lungs in a single bone-shattering blow. He saw blurry shapes of swooning trees towering over him, silhouetted in the night sky, branches interlocked with each other in battle over the tasty morsel each desired. Then he felt himself being pulled along the earth, dragged across the ground by his feet. The world around him was going dark fast. Disoriented, he clutched Anna’s severed arm close to him for comfort, feeling for the rest of her and not finding it. He was confused.

He felt the sensation of many hands hoisting him into the air, carrying him away.

Then, he felt nothing at all.

IX. CRO-AT-OAN

T
wo days. That was how long they said he slept, in their broken English. When he finally awoke, with an old Indian chieftain who had skin as rough as dried snake hide hunching over him, he at first thought he had been dead and come back to life.

He was injured; not fatally, but enough to make even the slightest movement excruciating. It took time for him to heal, but his saviors were patient and the compassion he saw in their eyes told him they were no savages, that they understood that there were some wounds that would never heal, no matter how much time passed. Losing Anna and his family would be a scar he would carry on his heart forever, they said. Their spirits lived on in him, now.

He asked about the trees.

Cro at Oan
, the ancient chief said, in a hushed whisper drenched in a millennia’s worth of fear and respect.

Ancient beast, oldest of all earth creatures,
he said.
Here long time before sky gods brought our people to this world, to the first garden. First father and first mother disobey sky gods. They ate of tree, then tree ate of people. Cover their nakedness with leaves to hide from tree.

Micah asked them how the trees came to be here.

Sky people move people from the garden, across the big sea. Our tribe left to guard Cro at Oan, to make safe the world, to give sacrifice of single body every forty seasons to stop the hunt, to make no breed. But children of first people come back across the ocean and no listen to warning. We tell them, “Stay away from the Roaming Oak,” as we call the place in your language. But like your fathers, they not listen, they not understand. They laugh and call their village “Roa-noke,” they build houses under the branches and eat of Cro at Oan fruit on the island by the sea. Then Cro at Oan awaken and eat all the first people. They breed, they come here and we follow until they rest.

Micah asked them if the creatures could be killed.

Skin like stone, blood like fire. Only after certain seasons pass do they feed, they move, under the big moon – unless sacrifice be made. Then they eat only sacrifice and sleep, bellies full, till certain seasons more.

Once he was able to walk on his own, one of the scouts led Micah to an outcrop that overlooked a well-used trail. They camped there for several days, until finally a rising cloud of dust on the horizon signaled the approach of a wagon train headed west, Micah’s ticket out of the prairie and into his future.

X. A Sacrifice is Required, Sayeth the Lord

T
ime does heal wounds, despite opinions to the contrary - or in Micah’s case, time at the very least thickened the scars to the point that he could no longer believe his own memories. He wasn’t even convinced he had once been part of a family traveling across the prairie. He wasn’t sure if anything he remembered happening really
had
happened.

As he aged, he felt somewhat certain that during his childhood he had, in fact, eaten some sort of poisoned apple - or whatever kind of fruit it had been – but beyond that a feeling settled upon him that his other memories and recollection were nothing more than hallucinations - the whole thing, his childhood, a fairy tale. He became convinced that he had spent his entire youth lost, running around madly in a delirium, that everything before he finally became lucid again in San Francisco was but a fever dream.

Deep down, however, his subconscious mind stewed and festered. Even after he became an old man with his life behind him, dying in California, a small part of him always wondered if his family - his beautiful Anna (who still visited him in his dreams) - were still living somewhere out on the prairie, in the little houses under the big trees.

Eventually the lurking thought of it bothered him so much that, despite his better judgment and the certainty that he was acting out of nothing more than the dementia that came with old age, Micah found himself at a train station. He bought himself a ticket on an east-bound train. He boarded the train and, guided by nothing but instinct, he scanned the distant horizon for hours, as it crept along the tracks laid across the land.

As soon as his eyes lit upon the ridge, he knew it was the place where his life had very nearly met its end so many years ago.

He disembarked at the next station and hired a carriage to drive him out past the small town that had sprung up around the railroad station. Distance was hard to gauge in the wide open spaces, and Micah watched the buildings of the town thin out into nothingness. He crossed empty miles onto the open prairie, as he directed the driver towards the ridge he had recognized from the train.

Eventually, the horses slowed to a stop in the valley that nestled in the curve of the ridgeline. He instantly recognized the houses there as those from the fever dream of his youth. They slumped on their foundations, empty and decrepit, and he felt happiness for a moment that the town nearby had chosen not to settle in this evil place.

Micah lightly climbed the dry-rotted steps of the first house, the one he remembered from his dreams, where he had lived with the family he couldn’t possibly have had. The front door was unlocked, though he could have easily pushed it in, even at his age. The house was still furnished exactly as he remembered – it was all coming back to him now, becoming real as he searched through it. In abandoned dressers he found the dusty tattered remains of his family’s clothing.

In the upstairs bedroom, underneath the dry-rotted mattress, now barely more than a collection of rusted springs, he found the old faded drawing of Anna he had hidden there so long ago, her piercing eyes gazing at him from the past. He brushed a hot tear aside as he looked out the window towards the orchard, and a cold fear filled his heart as he realized what he saw there. Nothing.

The trees were gone. No stumps, no piles of decaying wood, no sign of any kind that they had ever been there. The verdant, green lawn that had once carpeted the valley below was also gone, he realized, as was the pool of clear water at the end of the valley, and the thick cesspool, too – both now dry as a bone.

He slipped the drawing of Anna into his pocket and headed back to the waiting carriage, the thick ache of forgotten fear welling up inside of him. As he left that cursed valley he knew the nightmares of his imagined childhood
were
real, and that his attempt to forget what had happened here as an adult, was, in reality, the childish dream.

The carriage bumped its way along the rough road, it headed back into town and Micah spied the tall white spire of a church piercing the sky in the center of town, framed on each side by an impossibly enormous green canopy of trees, looming above the town.

After certain seasons pass -
the words of the old Indian Chief rose up in Micah’s mind. The last great beasts of hell were well equipped to wait, he remembered, and like every living organism regardless of size, to adapt.

He leaned over the front seat and asked the driver to head into the center of town. As the carriage rolled to a stop near a curb by the church, bathed in the cool shade of the massive trees, Micah spotted a child’s tricycle a few feet from the gargantuan trunk. It was overturned and deserted, front tire still spinning. On the ground beside the tricycle rested a single, impossibly red apple, shiny and delicious. From down the street he heard a mother’s panicked cry approaching.

The
Cro at Oan
had survived. Now they stood before him, hiding in plain sight – the monsters of his childhood made flesh and blood, drawn from the faded memories of days long past and suddenly thrust into the vivid realness of now - patiently waiting to feed.

God had cast mankind from the Garden of Eden for a reason - for their own protection - but now the garden had found man again. The ancient guardians were gone, rounded up and herded off to the reservations. There would be hell to pay for this town, without a sacrifice.

Micah opened the carriage door and stepped onto the curb, pulling his wallet from his pocket to pay the driver. He started to pull out several bills, then thought better of it and handed over his entire wallet to the driver instead, waving aside protestations.

He walked over to the tricycle, stopping the spinning wheel gently with his shoe before reaching down to pick up the apple. As he felt the warm pulse of the fruit’s flesh in his hand, he closed his eyes and smiled.

The novella ARBOREATUM had been simmering since the summer of 2008, when I awoke at dawn one morning from an incredibly lucid dream. I ran to my desk to jot out a five page outline of the story before it slipped from my mind.

I shouldn’t have worried. Bits and pieces of this strange tale have been bubbling up for the last three or four years - a bit here, a bit there - and I dutifully added each new piece to the tale as it came to me. I hoped I would be able to recognize when it was finished.

Over time this tale (that I originally envisioned as a 20-30 page short story) continued to grow and grow, until the revelations about it finally stopped coming towards the end of 2012 and I knew at long last it was time to polish it up and release it into the wild.

This is one of those stories that came to me from some unknown place that exists apart from conscious thought (CURTAINS FOR LOVE is another). The setting and the themes are definitely not ones that I would have purposely written. I secretly like to imagine that this story is true, but don’t tell anyone I said that, okay?

Nose Hears

G
eorge lay down to take a nap. He was always tired on Saturday afternoons, after mowing the lawn and trimming the hedges; a couple hours on the couch helped to refresh him.

But this Saturday, something strange happened.

Just as he was about to fall asleep, he heard the murmur of soft voices, the sound of whispered words that rose and fell with each breath he took.

George sat up in bed, holding his breath, listening; but the voices were gone.

Finally content that what he had heard was nothing more than his imagination, he lay back down and tried, once again, to fall asleep. As his breathing settled back into a steady rhythm, the soft voices started up again, indistinct words spoken so faintly that he could not quite tell what they were saying.

George was sure that the source of the whispering had to be close by; it sounded as though it was almost in his ear.

He held his breath again to listen and again the voices stopped.

It was becoming frustrating, he really needed his nap.

A realization settled upon him: the sound he was hearing was nothing more than his own breathing, air passing through his nostrils, and vibrating in his nose hairs.

Now fully aware of it, the noise in his nostrils began to drive him crazy. It was as if a muffled conversation was constantly taking place inside his nose, as though the two sides of his nostrils were talking to each other.

Day after day it continued. He was afraid he might be going insane, and decided it would be best not to tell anyone else about the voices in his nose.

Two days later, George was working at his desk. His eyes were drawn to the computer microphone there. It gave him an idea.

He checked to make sure nobody in the house was paying attention to what he was doing and turned the volume of his computer speakers up, then inserted the tip of the microphone into his left nostril.

A booming voice burst forth from the computer speakers, clear as day. The voice was deep and mature, like a radio announcer, rambling on in excruciating detail about the news of the day, the weather in Topeka, what the neighbors next door were having for dinner tonight.

George was relieved at finally being able to hear what the voices in his nose were saying.

He put the microphone into his right nostril to see if it yielded the same result.

It, too, was talking, but in a slightly different-sounding voice, a running commentary that responded to the factoids coming from the left nostril, adding its own observations, tossing out humorous quips.

Completely blown away by his discovery, George grabbed the microphone and jumped into his car, eager to show his best friend, the only person he trusted not to lock him in an asylum if it turned out the voices were really only in his head.

He had to know if other people were able to hear the voices in his nose, too.

It would prove that he wasn’t crazy.

Once at his friend’s house, he eagerly plugged the microphone into the speakers and stuck it up his nose, into his left nostril.

His friend played along with him, laughing heartily at his silliness.

George cranked up the volume and sure enough, the voice in his nose came booming out of the speakers, discussing this and that: polling results in Des Moines, the weekend-only sale at Dillard.