Sunday, May 18. 2008
It was a tree. Not particularily big and very much dead, massive stumps of splintered wood protruding almost completly in place of branches, what limbs it did have left looked fragile enough to break in the lightest of breezes and the small amount of bark still wrapped around it's withered trunk seemed ready to fall off at the slightest of provocations. Glancing at the other side of this structure revealed a black-rimmed mouth carved deep into the trunk, almost certainly brought about by a lightning strike many years ago.
There wasn't anything strange about it, at least not while you were there. It was perfectly possible to approach, walk around, even climb if you were feeling suicidal...not that anyone had ever fallen from it of course, those branches were tougher than they looked.
It wasn't important, wasn't scary, wasn't dangerous, certainly wasn't mysterious. Overall the whole thing just seemed so...so...
Forgettable.
Hikers in the woods where it stood passed by, stopped to wonder how long it'd be before the tree either fell or was cut down for presenting a safety hazard, moved on...and came out of the woods with a confused expression, trying to recall something that had caught their attention earlier but seemed like it had happened years ago. The children playing around the trees would treat it just as they did any other, then come home and not remember the slightest detail of what had occured around it's ancient trunk.
The tree didn't smell like rotting wood, it's exposed body had not the slightest trace of bore-holes, nothing grew on any part of it, no lichen on it's bark and no birds in it's branches. When the wind blew strongly it didn't even quiver, when rain fell it didn't get wet, when it snowed not a trace of white graced the darkened skin. When touched it felt so real...but the memory of that touch faded so quickly that it may as well not have happened. If you looked inside the lightning carved mouth for long enough then you might just see a flash of pristine white buried amongst the collected leaves, which stirred almost constantly regardless of the weather.
That mouth was a problem though, you didn't forget that. It wasn't menacing, to be honest it was a bit of a stretch to even call it a mouth, there was no symmetry to it, no noises to worry at the ears, no fractures of wood that might have been teeth, nothing to even suggest the presence of a face. No, the mouth was nothing more than a hunk of wood carved out of an ancient tree...
Oddly enough, it was still a mouth.
There were no stories about that tree. If you saw it again then you'd remember seeing it before, but the same cloud would descend over your memories as soon as it was out of sight, besides, it was only a tree and a dead one at that, nothing at all new to see, hear and tell there. For this reason it was pretty much left alone. Mostly left alone anyway.
Thomas Flagarin had got a new chainsaw for his 21st birthday, family and friends had put together enough money to buy the tree-surgeon a top of the range model. A few days after recovering from the celebrations Thomas took his new tool into the woods with the intention of putting it through its paces with some semi-legal trimming. Having no intention of doing serious damage he proceeded to look for something dead with low-lying branches.
It doesn't take a genius to leap to the conclusion of what he found there.
2 hours later he stumbled out of the woods, one leg mangled beyond repair, the ruined remains of the chainsaw clutched in his fingers, with no memory of even entering the woods. There wasn't any great mystery about it, he had been using a chainsaw after all, obviously he was simply a victim of a bad accident.
Obviously.
Jeeves knew about that incident, finding the remnants of the shattered chainsaw blade was part of his motivation for going into the woods. He'd asked Jenna if she wanted to come as well but she'd been busy and no one else was available. He had a vague idea of where to look, there was only one major path inside and once you were there the closeness of the trees and undergrowth meant that you pretty much had to stick to it.
So he found the tree.
It really wasn't very impressive.
But scattered around it were the chunks of metal and plastic that he'd expected from the wreckage of the chainsaw. This was puzzling, there weren't any markings on the tree, and it looked like none of the surrounding ones had been cut at either, but the only way the chainsaw could have been this damaged was if someone intentionally pressed it against something it couldn't get through...since there didn't appear to be any unnaturally large diamonds around this was a bit of a problem.
Something sparkled on the trunk.
Going over, Jeeves could see that a small piece of metal had imbeded itself around the edges of the mouth, there wasn't any scarring, no suggestion that anyone had ever tried to cut into the wood at this point...just a single tooth of the saw, sticking out of the surface like something had driven it in with a hammer. Jeeves reached out to touch it and -
"OW!"
Came away with blood on his fingers, the tip of each and every one of them bearing a deep cut, at the same time what felt like an electric shock ripped through his feet and with a huge gust of wind the world spun upside down.
He woke up sometime later, outside the woods, the wounds on his fingers scabbed over, huge bruises on both knees and a pounding headache. Wondering what the hell had happened at that tree he managed to make his way home.
Inside the woods, the bright specks of red on the tree trunk gleamed in the sunset, and at the tips of the few remaining branches, buds which had not been there before began to slowly open, the endlessly stirring leaves lay still, the scorched wood surrounding the mouth faded to it's normal colour, the ground heaved as motionless roots suddenly pushed out from their shallow graves and thick bark grew to cover the once exposed trunk
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