Copyright (c) 2006 Matthew Lowes
First Published in AlienSkin Magazine, Jan07/Dec08
*****
All of Austin’s dreams were overwhelmed with the fear that he would never leave this forest, a gripping, relentless terror that he would never escape this valley alive, that he would die here, alone. Exhaustion came over him in waves. He panted for breath. The Latin names of mosses and lichens ran through his mind like an incantation to ward off insanity. In some veiled corner of awareness he knew that he was desperately dehydrated. His mind whirled with a cacophony of discordant thoughts. He thought about how he came to this place, as if by figuring out the details of events, or some hidden course of causation, he could find a path that would save him.
It is the aspiration of many young ambitious scientists to establish themselves through some new exciting discovery, to enter the annals of their profession with a drama and flourish reserved for those startling revelations of knowledge that from time to time punctuate the world of science. Austin Rutherford, an Auxerre University undergrad in his third year of a major in Botany, envisioned making just such a monumental discovery in an old growth forest near his home town of Westridge, Oregon.
Locals called those woods the Hillema after Joe Hillema who was a pioneer in the area. Austin had heard it said that deep in the Hillema was a valley where a strange kind of tree grew that didn’t grow anywhere else. It was just a story, but if Austin discovered a new North American species as an undergrad he could go to any graduate school in the country. The Hillema wasn’t protected land, so it was a peculiarity in itself that it had never been logged. Austin was sure that what stayed the hand of loggers for all these years was nothing more than superstition. A devil lives in that place they said.
He took the train west from Wisconsin, and as a landscape lush with the green of early summer rushed by his window he fantasized about the recognition he would receive if he discovered a new tree. It was always a strange feeling coming home. The horizons of his world had grown since he moved to Auxerre, but his old high school friends were still either cutting timber or working at local businesses. He had branched out, but they just seemed to turn in on themselves and wither. He found it more and more difficult to talk to them.
When he told his friend Trace that he wanted to head up into the Hillema for a couple of days, Trace warned him not to. “Steer clear of that place,” he said. “It’s no joke what they say. Old Minkleson says they lost a whole crew up there in the old days. And you know Joe Hillema himself disappeared up there. They never found him. Over the years some forty two children have disappeared in the woods around this town. How many of them do you think headed up to that valley?”
Austin and Trace had been sitting over a couple of beers at The Millhouse. They sat in silence now as if the increasing gap between their lives had just gotten bigger. There was a haunted look in Trace’s face that made him look like a stranger. Trace had never been afraid of anything in high school. But out of the silence Trace spoke softly now as he stared off into an unseen distance. It seemed as if he was changing the subject and answering Austin’s unsaid question all at once. “I watched a man die last month,” he said. “Crushed by a log…nothing we could do. I looked into his eyes Austin, and I watched him die.” He said this as if to explain the change that had come over him, and as if to show why nobody should ever venture into the Hillema.
Austin rode a four wheeler up to the end of Reeder Trail with camping gear and a weeks worth of food. He unloaded his gear off the rack and donned his backpack. From there he walked all afternoon before crossing into the Hillema Forest. The woods he walked through that morning had been clearcut long before he was born. There were trees of considerable size now, but because they were all the same size, the ecosystem as a whole was still unhealthy. There was only a single layer of canopy, and there were no dead trees or fallen logs to serve as essential habitats and sites for nitrogen fixation. Still, he saw two black-tailed deer walking through the lattice of tree-trunks, and Douglas’ squirrels frolicking in patches of sunlight near Harper’s stream. And he occupied his ever-active mind by reacquainting himself with some of the smaller plants and trees that had managed to reestablish themselves.
For three days Austin trekked across the Hillema. The old growth held a primordial beauty, the beauty of a thing untouched by man. Fallen logs and snags littered the forest, covered in moss and fungus, rotting from the inside out, worlds unto themselves for countless species of insects, rodents, and birds. Light filtered through the trees and the greens and browns of the forest embraced him, welcomed him into the hidden realm of living, conscious plants. It was a botanist’s daydream, a sense that Austin sometimes had when he was surrounded by trees, that they held within them some watching presence, some collective sentience alien to mankind.
On his third day out, Austin came to the top of a tall ridge and from an outcropping of rock, he looked down into a lush valley. This must be it, he thought. There was no hint of hesitation as he started to descend into that valley. He was only eager to make his discovery. It was, in the final reckoning, an incredible discovery he made. In the forest of that valley Austin found his tree, or perhaps, he thought in the end, it found him, for there was a price to be paid in making this discovery.
Austin had been almost running, head down and impatient to reach the heart of that valley, for some strange and almost irrational intuition told him that only there would he find what he sought. There was no need to look around him till he got there. He lost track of time, and of the ache in his feet, and of the thirst in his mouth.
Suddenly, crows took flight from the depths of that dark wood in flurry of flapping and branches. Austin looked up to behold the gnarled massive trunk of a strange tree, and knew instantly that he had made his discovery.
The tree was like nothing he had ever seen before. Its trunk was twisted and irregular, with knotty protrusions like branches whose growth had been aborted. The roots were huge, and exposed above ground in a tangled heap all around the perimeter of the tree like a brood of giant constrictor snakes. Above him the full braches reached out like the broken fingers of misshapen hands. The leaves were an unsettling shade of green and had an odd shape that was neither oak nor elm, nor even remotely like any leaf that Austin knew of.
He should have been taking pictures, or writing notes, but something stayed his hand, a feeling of awe, of amazement that drew him closer to that tree. There were large bulbous fungi spore sacs growing on the trunk. They were made of a grey, fleshy skin balled up like a wrinkled hollow bag. At the tip of each bag was a black opening. Austin stared at one of the openings. It was so impossibly black in the hole that he leaned in for a closer look. When he did the bag suddenly collapsed. A puff of air blew a cloud of spores in his face, and startled, he staggered back.
An acrid smell filled his nostrils and as the fine particles entered his lungs he coughed twice. He felt a rushing sensation to his head, lost track of his limbs and stumbled over a root. As he did, he glanced down and in a knotty section of root saw a face looking back at him. He had only a moment, filled with confusion and the first tracing arcs of fear that flew across the firmament of his mind. Then he collapsed unconscious to the ground.
When he opened his eyes he saw those branches above him. They seemed to move, as if that horrible hand was slowly closing. He shook his head, which felt to be about five times as heavy as normal, but his vision would not clear. Everything seemed to be slightly moving, as if the whole forest was lurching near to bury him alive. He tried to move, but although he could move his head, his left arm seemed stuck. It was hard to think, to work this out. What was holding his arm? His legs seemed stuck also.
He turned his head to look at his arm. It looked normal enough, but when he tried to lift it he could see there was something under it, some kind of white elastic growth that spread, tendril like, between his arm and the ground. He tried to get the clouded mechanics of his mind turning. Perhaps it was some kind of fungus? But it was so difficult and he kept losing his train of thought. It was the same with his legs. The stuff had grown right through his pants. He could feel it pulling painfully on the skin of his calf. How long had he been unconscious? The sun was almost setting. Again, a mounting fear began to take root in his thoughts. He was stuck deep in the woods, far from any help, and the spores from that pod obviously had some sort of psychotropic effect that was making it hard to function.
Austin marshaled all the strength of his will to turn on his side and sit half way up. He took a breath and pulled his arm as hard as he could. It felt as if the skin of his forearm would rip off. A few tendrils near the elbow ripped, but the pain was intense and he hadn’t the strength to keep up the effort. With his free arm he reached into his pocket for his folding knife. He opened it with his teeth, reached over, pulled his arm up and cut a few of the tendrils. There was a strange stinging sensation as he did it, but he was careful not to cut his skin and quickly freed his arm. The stuff on his legs had grown right through his jeans. He worked to cut between the fabric and ground feeling the same strange stinging up and down his leg as he cut.
Austin stood, unsteady, his head like a ball of lead on his shoulders, the world slowly creeping around him. He was breathing hard now, aware of the danger, but unable to think clearly about it. He looked at his arm. It seemed to crawl with a milky slime. The white fibers that held him down clearly went through the skin. Without warning he doubled over and vomited. He tried to slow his breathing, to pull himself together, but a wild panic was beginning to take hold of him. My God, it was like some kind of flesh eating fungus! Then he did the only thing he could think clearly enough to do. He ran.
Terror stricken, dropping his pack and everything that he had, he ran. For a while he ran like a wild man, as if screaming through the forest. He just had to get out, just had to get back home. But home was so very far away, and after some time he grew tired, stumbled on a rock and fell to the ground. He would just rest for a few minutes he thought, and then press forward. He looked around, trying to take in his surroundings for the first time since he began running. Now he saw that scattered in the forest were more of the strange trees, and his fear began to overwhelm him. In the gnarled roots and trunks he thought he saw more faces and shapes of people and animals. Surely he was hallucinating. The toxin from the spores, the coming darkness, all was conspiring against him. He just had to keep going.
When he tried to get up, his hip and thigh were stuck. More of the white sticky stuff had taken root in the ground after only a few minutes of resting. Was the stuff growing into him…or out of him? He lurched forward with all his might, yelling first with the effort as he ripped himself free, and then with pain, for as he tore each tendril he felt a pain like lightning that went straight to the nerve. It was as if those growths were a part of his body. Had he rested there for just a few more minutes he would not have been able to tear himself free.
He knew then that his only chance was to keep moving. Amanita muscaria, Lepiota clypeolaria, Paxillus involutus. He tried to remember as many as he could, partly to keep him going, partly to reassure himself that he wasn’t losing his mind. In the darkness, amidst the trees, and fallen logs, it was difficult to be sure of his direction. Nevertheless, he pressed on, trying to keep a straight line, unable to admit to himself that he may be hopelessly lost, even going in circles. In his panic he had left his pack, his water, even his knife back at the tree where he had been infected. That was how he thought of it now, an infection. A foreign organism had infiltrated his body, it was spreading through his blood, attaching to his nervous system, and trying to take root in its native soil.
The forest became alive with an orchestra of nocturnal sounds. Without light, these sounds enveloped him. He heard the cry of night birds, the rustlings of rodents foraging in the underbrush, and even it seemed the crunching of insects eating vegetation, and the legs of millipedes, the fall of dead leaves, and the slow rotting of logs. The whole forest was feeding on itself, cannibalizing its dead. And for the first time Austin saw the forest as much as a landscape of death, as of life. It reeked of decay. The life of the forest was dependent on death.
But it was so hard to keep his thoughts. They seemed to drift away in that sea of death, to disappear in the darkness. Something was happening to him. The infection was spreading. He walked on in a state of increasing delirium. He bumped into trees, tripped on logs, stumbled, fell, got up, knowing only that he had to keep moving. His legs became increasingly stiff, as if his very flesh were solidifying. At some point in the night he noticed that he had lost the use of his left arm. It was like a dead thing hanging from his shoulder. But he had to keep moving.
Just when he had stopped, or how it had happened he had no clear idea. Had he tripped and hit his head on a log? Had he collapsed from exhaustion? He didn’t know, but for a moment as he awoke, he felt peace. He was propped up, half inclined against the stump of a fallen tree. He felt rested. He felt comfortable. The day was dawning. He stared up as light began to filter through the green canopy.
Austin lifted his head. That was as far as he got. He had no feeling in the rest of his body, and when he rolled his eyes downward he saw that he was covered from shoulders to feet in a massive growth of white residue. The nightmare resumed now, as if only in the light of day could Austin appreciate the full terror what was happening. Thick tendrils grew like roots from his body into the ground. And from the mound of milky matter that covered his torso two tiny saplings grew from where his belly would have been. Even now he could feel the stuff creeping upward toward his neck and head, spreading at an incredible rate. He knew then that there was no going back. All paths were closed to him except the plain horror of what was actually happening. He swore; he cursed; he screamed for help; he screamed in fear, but it was no use. The forest was taking over.
Looking around, he saw that he had never even made it out of the valley. There were those strange trees all around him. Although nobody would ever know, they were his great discovery. But what were they? Here, so near to the end, he desperately searched for an answer, as if through knowledge he might still somehow save himself. Growing from the mound of fungus that covered him there were two saplings. So the tree and the fungus must be coexisting intimately in a symbiotic relationship.
There was a precedent for this after all. Lichens formed a unique organism through relationship between fungus and algae. Fungi feed on organic matter like rotting leaves, wood, or upon the tissues of living and dead animals, or he thought, people. He recalled that there were even some fungi that actively hunted nematodes. Some produced a sticky substance that trapped their prey. Others made snare like traps to capture them. There were even some fungi that worked with plants, each one helping provide desirable nutrients for the other. Perhaps this new organism was something similar on a grand scale. The fungus trapped large prey and somehow spread the seeds of the trees simultaneously. As the prey begins to break down, the trees take root, and the symbiotic circle is complete, each now helping to provide for the other.
He didn’t have much time. The fungus had spread around his neck, which he could no longer move. He could feel it creeping up toward his cheeks and his cavity of his mouth began to seal up and fill in. Only his eyes could move now. He rolled them left and right, taking in the narrow vision that had become his whole world. Then he saw again in the gnarled roots and bark of those trees, faces, tortured faces, grim faced and in agony. Fear returned to him and he remembered all the people who had disappeared in these woods. Had they all been trapped like him, consumed by the forest, transmuted into wood and bark and fungus? Was he seeing in those faces some vestige memory, some consciousness that remained of those lost souls that shaped the growth of trees?
There always seemed to be a kind of consciousness in the forest, and now he could almost hear its breath. The fungus covered his eyes and soon all was darkness. He had no sense of his body, just his thoughts, in the darkness, and his fear. Was this death, or something worse? Filaments of fine white thread invaded that darkness of his mind like the web of alien presence, creeping into his most secret thoughts, his most hidden memories, his most treasured dreams, and began to break them down like so much rotten wood. The forest was taking over. It was an old growth; Austin could sense it, even as his own sense of himself receded into the background, constrained by its power. It was as old as the Earth itself.
