THE SMOOTH TREE
Unsafe Spaces #19: A few of us were out in Tormain Woods last month and found a white blob on a tree. Soon after, I wrote this about it. Shout out to Ben for his feedback on this one.
Kyle clambers over the damp wooden fence and leaps down into the undergrowth hoping he doesn’t roll his ankle landing. His palm feels sticky from where it’s absorbed a cocktail of rainwater and whatever else has oozed out of the wood. Relieved, he turns back to help his friend Amber. Once both are over, they take a moment to pause and absorb their surroundings. There’s a faint breeze, blunted by the thick trees and foliage, that tussles Amber’s auburn hair and ripples the fabric of Kyle’s jacket, flapping its collar. He looks around seeing only forest in every direction bar the one they came from. There are two paths, both manmade and well-trodden, that they can choose.
‘Left or right?’ he asks, gesturing to either side of him.
‘Always be first,’ Amber grins and takes a step into the unknown, a step forwards and up the incline. The grass folds, compressing under her heavy boot as she forges a new path. He reaches up to fix his jacket collar, bracing himself against the windchill, before following in her steps - into the new.
It’s less than five minutes before he starts to find it all a bit annoying. The uneven ground plagued with stones and old roots hurt the arches of his feet, nearly twisting the ankles he worried about before. He holds in any complaints for the moment, not wanting to be a downer as Amber’s shrill voice singsongs a warped version of a nursery rhyme ahead of him:
‘Amber, Kyle went up the hill,
For a bit of laughter.
Kyle went down,
To clear her frown,
Amber came pretty soon after.’
‘Oh, you think you’re getting sexy times, do you?’ he calls out. ‘In a creepy forest?! No chance!’
She turns around laughing, her arms pinwheeling, caressing the rough branches and greenery that they weave through. She’s carefree to the scratches. He wishes he could be more like that: Less concerned of the consequences. Amber can’t get any words out, her joy rings out loud, flowing through the leaves, tickling the bark. Birds scatter above.
Over her shoulder he spots something swaying and signals towards it.
‘Cool!’ she gushes once her eyes find it too and breaks into a jog to get there first. While he’s naturally faster, and on a flat surface he’d beat her easily, here he is restricted by the barbs of the forest. He can already see tiny streaks of red on Amber’s arms, fresh ones from the nature in harmony alongside the old pale white ones carved by a historical teenage sadness.
By the time he’s there’s she’s already on it. A rope swing hanging maybe twenty feet from a giant tree. The rope looks surprisingly trustworthy, made with professional rock-climbing gear that someone has repurposed into this swing. Amber sits on a thick branch which has been fashioned into an uncomfortable looking seat, the rope coils around and holds it in place. She kicks off and begins whooping and cheering as she begins to swing back and forth.
‘Push please!’ she begs, holding out an arm.
‘Coming.’
He marches up to the top of the embankment and waits for her to come close. His first push isn’t great, catching her on the shoulder. He knows it’s poor as soon as her jacket touches his hand. ‘Sorry!’ he mutters as she spins away from him, twirling on the cord.
‘Don’t make me dizzy!’
‘Sorry!’ he says again, louder so she hears.
When she comes back a second time, he lines the push up properly. Shuffling himself to the right as she comes towards him, judging it so her back meets his outstretched palms perfectly, and allowing him to drive her forward with as much strength as he can gather.
‘Waaaaahh!’ she shrieks while sailing diagonally away from him, her hair riffling from the force. ‘That’s enough! No more! No more!’
Now he’s the one laughing.
‘Shut up!’ she calls after him, her voice tremoring from the velocity as she swings back and forth on the rope.
Kyle peels his eyes away from her to follow the cable all the way up to the branch. A lot of the bark has rubbed off from the friction, revealing a pale white underneath. It doesn’t look like the warm yellow that you usually get when you peel back the top layer of a tree or stick. Now he’s properly staring at it, this tree doesn’t look like anything he’s seen before. He follows the connecting branch to where it emerges from the trunk and then down to where it meets the ground.
It’s there he sees it. Something on the side. He runs a hand through his hair and takes a step towards it.
A white blob the size of a golf ball is on the tree, like a wet pile of chewing gum that’s gone smooth in the sun, or maybe a large marshmallow that’s halfway through melting. He reaches out a finger, but common sense pulls it back. Instead, he looks around for a stick, something to give him a bit of distance.
Cautiously he points the stick at the blob and eases it forward. The texture is almost spongy, and it pushes away when the wood prods the skin. It feels unnatural, like there’s something hard within, a sort of skeleton. He stops himself from breaking the surface of the gooey shell suddenly afraid of what may be inside. Spiders? Bugs? The thought of hundreds of tiny insects swarming out snaps his hand back.
Stop being daft. He tells himself. It’s not a spider egg. They don’t look like that. This is something else.
‘Hey! One more push!’ Amber calls out, her momentum is fading, and her bravery has returned.
He holds up his left hand to signal. ‘Give me a minute.’ Urgency and impatience drive him forward, a determination to know what’s inside this weird globule. The stick pokes into the soft side except this time he doesn’t relent. There is a second where he worries it might burst, showering him with cold goo and whatever nastiness is within, but no, instead a small black tear appears. Instinctively he yanks himself away. His mind floods with images of untold horrors pouring out of the wound, onto the stick and then up and onto him.
Over the shouts of Amber calling out for another push he can hear his blood pumping in his head. He waits, barely breathing.
Nothing happens.
He starts to unclench his body.
‘What is it?’ Amber shouts out.
‘Not sure. Thought it was an egg or something.’
Satisfied he turns away, back to his love. She’s swaying back and forth gently on her own momentum, her eyes dancing on him. Kyle approaches, all innocence and smiles, before launching into her as hard as he can. She hurtles away, spinning like an out-of-control yoyo screaming and laughing. ‘You dick!’
In the same moment he hears another noise behind him, like a nail scratching on metal. His eyes find the egg. In his mind’s eye he’s sure he sees it rustling; the shell squirming as something inside tries to push its way out like a zombie baby in its mother’s stomach. It could just be a trick of the light, a sort of shadow play but he thinks he sees a white needle-like arm emerge.
It’s maybe two seconds before Amber comes flying back towards him. Her legs flailing in every direction. He knows what’s going to happen, sees it play out in his head…
Amber hurtles towards the tree and her right boot kicks out and stomps the egg flat. In his head he hears a crunch, a tiny synthetic scream. She doesn’t even know what she’s done. It’s purely accidental.
‘Go!’ he cries, trying to grab hold of her twirling body to bring her to a stop. ‘We have to go!’
Amber looks at his puzzled. ‘What’re you talking about?’
Kyle stares at the gloopy mess on the tree, whatever they’ve killed is a bundle of pale white needles and green tinged guts crushed into the ridges of the bark. To him the Rorschach of its corpse’s splatter look like the grim reaper’s scythe. The more he stares the more the pastel bark around it begins to lighten. While he’s still questioning this reality its crust begins flaking off like an immolated corpse giving up its blackened skin.
That’s when the tree moves. Then when Kyle sees it is not a tree. As its skin dissolves into dust and impossibly floats vertically upward, the smooth white chitin of the creature’s skeleton is exposed beneath. Every branch is a limb, amongst the tangle he can’t make out a face or eyes. All he can see are bone appendages bending and cracking. He thinks he finally hears its howl and looks to find the mouth but that gut-wrenching noise was Amber. She’s been swung towards the long stem of its body and made contact. Her white midriff has welded into the smooth trunk. That same white goo ruptures out, spilling onto her flesh and melds her to it as if she’s a piece of solder. When her hands reach out to beat at the trunk and wrench herself away, they sink in too. More gelatinous marshmallow splurges out over her flesh, melting the form of her hand into a smooth red-pink paste.
His voice dries up in his throat, but Amber’s screams are very much present. Almost deafening against the relentless crunch of the creature. His mind is blank. Its mere existence breaks every rational thought he has, challenging every preconceived notion he’d had of nature. Amber is absorbed into silence as the wet goo runs down her face, the skin pouring off like a pressure washer blasting away dirt and her lips and tongue dissolve.
Too captivated in horror to run he suddenly feels stuff on him. Looking down there is a tide of bonestick insects carpeting the undergrowth, crawling over his boots and up under his trouser legs. He’s infested within seconds. The needle arms pierce his flesh and then they’re under his skin, digging into his organs. The muscles in his legs slacken and his tendons liquefy as the creatures begin to mulch him from the inside out. Soon they’re onto his bones, their pin sharp arms chiselling miniscule holes into his skeleton weakening it through hundreds of perforations. Kyle’s legs give out as the bones splinter nd he collapses into the creatures that continue to pour out of the smooth tree.
On his back he watches the white paste that once was his girlfriend Amber run down the trunk of the monstruous tree and sizzle onto his forehead and eyes, blotting out the world forever. The last thing he feels is the eggs being lain into the fresh caverns of his bones.
