Knock knock knock.
“Mike?” I said. “Come on, man. It’s been over a week.” I knocked again, and only after the third rap did the bolt loosen and the door creaked open, just a bit; just enough for me to see and smell all the filth inside and just enough for my neighbor to see me.
“Hey, Dave.”
“Where’s my weed wacker?” I said. “ I need it.”
He scratched his head and bit his lower lip and looked down at his feet. “Ayep. Uh… about that.” And then he opened the door wider and waved me inside. “Don’t mind the mess,” he said. “Ain’t cleaned up in a good little while.”
As I followed him to the back of the house I stepped over small mountain ranges of molded over carry-out boxes and magazines and the contents of overflowing ashtrays and all flavors and types of filth I couldn’t identify. Under my breath I said, “No shit.”
I followed him through the den and through the kitchen - just as disgusting as the room before - and from there Mike took me out the back door and down the steps and into his rear yard. There was debris and trash all throughout; where there was grass it stood at waist height, and where there wasn’t there was only gravel and weeds and empty bottles of beer. In the corner was the filthy above-ground pool and his dog, Chester, chewing on a toeless boot. The mutt paid no heed to my presence.
“A’ight, here it is, man. Sorry.” I looked back at him just as he handed me both halves of the wacker. I blinked.
“What the hell-? You broke it?!”
He shrugged. “Like I said. Sorry. Thing weren’t cut out for dealin’ with them plants.”
“The fuck’s the matter with you?! The hell were you doing with it, trying to sharpen the blades on rocks?!”
“Pretty much. Them weeds is hard as metal, boy, I swear they are.” He threw his thumb over his shoulder as he spoke, and for the first time I saw - or at least noticed - the bizarre, twisting fauna that’d climbed over the chain link and all but consumed the back third of the lot. The vines, or whatever in God’s name they were, were massive and thick and pulsing with phlegm colored flower buds and bristling with thorns. “Took the wacker to ‘em back when the damn things actually looked like weeds,” he said. “Wacker got itself all caught in the thicket and snapped in two. An’ since then those vines just got bigger an’ bigger an’ they aint slowin’ down a wink. Dunno what I’m gonna do when they reach the house.”
To no one in particular I mumbled, “The hell are those?”
“Couldn’t tell ya. You said you needed the wacker, right? You got them things at your place?”
“Not like that.”
“What, they just normal lookin’ weeds, right? Shootin’ up from between the rocks, fast an’ tall?”
“Y-yeah. But they just look like normal weeds.”
“Yeah, like I said. That’s how them things looked too. Least at first. An’ that weren’t more’n a week back. Maybe less.”
“Th-they started like normal weeds and turned into those?” I said.
“Yessir. I ain’t no science type but I reckon you don’t gotta be to know this ain’t normal. Whole neighborhood north o’ here’s got it bad, too. Henson’s yards fill of the damn things. Pat’s yard too, an’ Clarke’s.”
“And no one knows where it came from?”
“Just word of mouth at this point, since I ain’t been up to the hill. But they’re sayin’ it came from Simon’s place.”
“Who, Ed Simon? Weird old guy up on the Ridge?”
“Ayep. They say he been up to one o’ his weird ol’ experiments again. An’ somethin’ went real bad.”
—-
I took my leave of Mike, sans the tool I’d gone there to retrieve, and headed to my home a block and a half to the south. I drove slowly too, and made sure to take in the sights on the street. Sure enough, the weeds were growing fast all throughout the neighborhood. Mailboxes were under siege, as were lamp posts and stop signs and storm drains and any vehicles that’d been parked for more than a day or two at a time.
I parked my own car when I made it home and immediately went to the edge of the driveway, where the weeds had grown at the most noticeably alarming rate. With a stick I poked one of the things, and to my considerable shock it leapt off the wall and grabbed the twig and wrapped around it like a serpent and absorbed it into its mass. “Holy shit,” I said. And after I caught my breath I added, “What the hell is this stuff?”
And Mike, I soon discovered, hadn’t in the slightest exaggerated about the rate of growth. By Tuesday the things were at the base of the first floor windows of the house. By Thursday they’d curled so tightly around the mailbox that the wood of the post there had splintered; the structure of it remained upright simply because the infrastructure of the vines allowed it to. By Friday the things had covered the window glass and that of the neighbors house too, on both sides of my property.
And nothing either I or my neighbors tried - be it the poison or trying to pull them out by the roots - worked, either. Even the chainsaw Aaron and I used on the fence separating our yards broke when the vines there whirled around and wrapped around the blades and stopped the whirring in an instant before folding over the bulk of the machine and absorbing that too. We’d shared a look that said, Were in some serious trouble. Mhm.
On Saturday, when I noticed the glass of my back kitchen window beginning to chip and crack under the weight of a vine that’d sprung up against it not forty-eight hours prior, I decided enough was enough. I was going to pay Ed Simon a visit. So I threw on some clothes and jumped in the car and took the thing on the looping road to the Ridge. And as I drove I took careful, deep note of the state of things around the neighborhood.
Few cars still remained - and a portion of the handful that did was done over so thoroughly in twisting, thorn-covered vines that even if their owners had wished to evacuate with the rest of the locals they couldn’t have done so in those vehicles. Many houses were utterly besieged by plant-growth; window-glass was broken, roofs were missing shingles. In some of the more cheaply constructed residences the very shape of their structure was beginning to bend around the forest that was springing up where not days earlier there was little else but knee-high shrubs.
But none of it even remotely compared to the degree of ruin Ed Simon’s house was in when I parked the car. It seemed as though the full structure of the place had been built around that of the mighty vine-tree that’d sprouted from its midst and which now formed a modest canopy over his lot. For a brief moment I was a bit too overcome with dread to move forward, but when I considered my options (either solve this here and now or return home and await a similar fate that the insurance company would almost certainly not cover), I realized I had little choice. And so forward I went.
When I knocked on the door there was no response, and when I grabbed the knob and turned it and pulled the door came fully off its hinges. A quick glance at the fastens revealed they’d been pushed out of place by merciless plant-growth.
“Ed?” I called out. “Its Dave, from down the street. You in here?” If he was the responding silence gave no indication of it. “Ed?”
I moved further down the halls. It was a pleasant enough place - was being the operative word - but since the onslaught began it’d been twisted and broken and splintered and misshapen as if by an earthquake. The halls no longer connected neatly with the rooms at either end of them. The furniture had either been consumed by vines that’d shot up from the floorboards (themselves tossed aside by the sprouts), or toppled over or, in the most severe cases, thrown to the end of the room at the bottom of an incline brought on by what could only have been a monstrous presence growing beneath the house. I wiped a bead of sweat. “Ed?”
Still nothing, except the ongoing sound of creaks and groans as the house struggled to maintain its integrity as the plants grew through it and around it. I moved in further. More groans. More creaks. I noticed the floorboards splitting and splintering beneath my feet and nearly leapt to more even ground before the same began there too. I picked up the pace. How fast is this shit growing?
“Ed! You in here?”
No answer. I made it into the kitchen where vines had burst through the drywall and nudged the refrigerator into a compromising angle - any further such leaning and it would fall - and there was a considerable amount of shattered glass beneath the pantry too. When I looked up I saw the cabinet there emptied of dishes; all had been pushed by invasive plants onto the ground. I didn’t linger there any longer. Instead I took the stairs to the left and descended them, two at a time, onto the ground floor.
It was then that I noticed how dark the place was. There hadn’t been any light upstairs either, but there was enough natural daylight to make up for its absence. Here, though, I could hardly see a thing at all. I tried the switch at the bottom of the stairs and couldn’t say I was surprised when nothing happened. I took out my phone’s flashlight and swept it across the room. The place was in spectacular and growing state of ruin.
“Ed?” The house responded with further creaks and groans. “Anyone home?” I turned the corner and descended yet another set of stairs into the basement proper, where the smell became quite nearly overpowering in its strength. “God damn. Ed! Tell me where you are! I’m here to h-”
But I stopped when my foot fell onto something warm and squishy. I turned my phone down onto the floor and nearly dropped it from shock, right onto the remnants of Ed’s terrier mix Guinness - who’d been trapped and strangled to death by vines and who was in an advanced and nauseating state of decay. Instantly I threw up last night’s casserole onto the mess and stumbled backwards onto my back slammed into a metal workman’s bench by the door. I turned around.
Notes. Pictures. Beakers. Newspaper cutouts. Numbers on a chalkboard that’d been used and reused and erased so many times it was hardly legible at all. The hell’s Simon been up to?
I looked at the mess in detail and flipped through the countless notepads and scribbles. Plants. Experimental fauna. Pando. I’d heard of Pando - the massive Utahn forest all connected by an extensive root network into a single organism. From the look of things Mr. Simon had been trying to uncover the secrets of the thing and replicate it. And somewhere along the way things took an unnerving downturn.
12/1 - Achieved rapid growth in the aspens, one scribbled journal entry read. Almost too rapid. Vines grew a full inch in under six hours.
12/4 - Worked up a special poison that should take these things out. Works like chemotherapy, almost - heads into the fast-dividing cells that help the tree grow, and shuts them down right in the nucleus.
12/5 - Well that didn’t work. At all. Did I mutate this thing? Will do further research to find out. But if anything the rate of growth has increased.
12/8 - still unsure about the nature of this poison. I tried it on an isolated specimen to watch its progress more carefully, and hell if the thing didn’t speed up its growth tenfold. Will need a new substance to combat this. Beginning to think this whole damned experiment was a real shitty idea.
12/10 - The isolated vine has merged with the maternal colony and been absorbed into that organism. Unsure about the mechanics of how that happened; I’m sure some bookworms at the university would love to work all that out. But this is too dangerous a thing to keep in my basement. Will hopefully have the new poison completed by the end of the week. Can’t come too soon.
12/15 - Good news at last! The new poison appears to have been successful: I used it on another isolated specimen (kept well out of reach of the maternal organism) and the weed withered and died within seconds. Interestingly, all its labyrinthine sprouts that’d covered the table since I brought it here died too - even the ones that’d been detached for one reason or another - and in quick order. Perhaps the damage can be reversed yet. Of course, I’ll need a much larger dose to deal with the growing monstrosity in the basement. Needless to say I intend to spend the rest of the day and beyond cooking up an adequate amount.
12/18 - The poison is ready. I do hate to have wasted all the effort and all the time I’ve expended into this project. But I’ve taken extensive notes and know exactly how to repeat it; with proper equipment and in an isolated and controlled location, perhaps, I can bring my own Pando to life once again. But this current version - whatever it is - cannot be allowed to live. Already it has grown well beyond even my wildest and most optimistic (or pessimistic?) expectations.
The notes ended there. I flipped through the pad for more, but there wasn’t more than a scribble in the back I assumed was to wet the ink of the pen. I threw the pad in my pocket, just in case, and grabbed my phone again and headed back upstairs where I’d hopefully have enough cell reception to call the police. The house creaked and groaned as I and the plants moved on through it, and then-
”FUCKING HELL!”
I threw myself backwards just as an upshooting vine burst out of the rotted drywall by the main door and spilled all the debris in my path before stretching across the wood, blocking the door. I stood there for a moment, and I blinked, and I yelled again - ”FUCK!” - and I panicked and threw myself into the fray in the hopes that if I brought all my weight and all my momentum against the barrier it’d break, not yet having had time to harden up. I kicked at the thing and I punched it and dug my nails through the flesh of it. But it was no use.
In fact, the effort was less than useless - not only did I fail to force a breakthrough to the exit, but the plant seemed to take offence to my assault; it sprouted subsidiary vines, covered all up in thorns, from the mainmast, and those things whipped and tossed themselves about the room and tore after me.
“Oh, no, no, no, no, no!” I ducked and dove back into the kitchen, where the pantry fell off the wall to make way for a new vine that smashed through where it’d been and split, with half crawling across the ceiling and the other half hurtling towards the floor - and me. Without even getting to my feet I rolled left, down the stairs, and as I tumbled I saw the twin vines collide into one organic mass that redirected itself downwards like a crashing wave. The house shook and buckled and chunks of the wall and bits of railing bannister flew off as they were smashed aside. For my part I scuttled backwards on my hands and feet until I reached the basement door. Then I slammed the door shut and nearly dove down the rest of the stairs - catching nasty splinters in my legs and hands as I did - and reached the bottom and slipped into a dark corner just as the surge of vines burst through the door with negligible effort and tunnelled after me. The frame of the house bent and buckled further; I could hear the wood inside the walls splinter and shatter. The roof began to collapse, but its descent was halted by the mass of the plant and instead it leaned inwards, with its lowermost corner jutting into the basement not inches from where I was hiding.
Only when the vine passed by under the wreckage did I lean my head back up against the bent support beam and close my eyes and catch my breath for a bit. Then I looked up - I could see the sky - and, reasoning I might have signal under the conditions, felt for my phone. Nothing. My heart skipped the same beat it misses when I’m missing it under normal circumstances. But given the situation I felt a bit of true panic was warrented. Fuck.
I fidgeted around some more to search the immediate area. And no sooner did I realize I must’ve dropped it in my bid to escape upstairs then the basement lit up anyway. After another skipped-over heartbeat I looked up and saw that the vine - the mass of which had now wrapped itself throughout much of the basement proper and knocked over the experiment table with the notes - had illuminated the place via a network of snot-colored bioluminescent pods along the length of it. The damn thing was searching for me.
Slowly I crouched down to my hands and knees and, when the bulk of the twisting vine had vanished into the shadows of the basement, I made my break for the incline of the roof. I scratched my knees getting onto the thing, but I ignored that. Then, making no further effort at all to quiet my movement, I scrambled chaotically for the top of the roof and made it to the lip of the split. Beneath me I could hear the manic rummaging of the vine as it moved to follow, but I’d outrun the thing. Or so I thought.
I stood at the top of the ramp and instead of searching for a way down, I stopped. And I looked out at the whole of the yard and beyond, into the neighborhood and beyond that too. This plant - this massive, mighty beast - had spread its vines like tentacles throughout the place and turned itself into a forest. Homes were destroyed. Roads had been split and broken and tossed aside to make way for jutting roots that twisted and curved and settled into knots. It was like a new dimension had replaced our own, and I-
”Shit!”
Before I could react properly or defend myself, I felt loose, whipping vines the size of shoelaces wrap themselves around my ankles and around my left wrist. Then came thicker vines that did the same to my legs at the knee, and my elbow. I fell onto my stomach and the things began dragging me down into the depths of the basement. I tried to scramble for a grip, but even when I caught one it was useless. Fresh vines wrapped themselves around my right arm too, and then around my face - ”Mmmmphhauauuccgghhnnooo!” - and then down I went, unable to kick or scream at all, into the depths of the dark.
I did my best to resist the pull; I struggled and thrashed against the restraints - but all I was doing, I realized, was exhausting myself. If I ever kicked a vine loose two more would replace it before I could exploit the breakthrough. And so I forced myself to relax, to bide my time, savor what little strength of arms I had left for what I assumed would be a death struggle.
And I watched, too, as the ruined cement of the basement gave way to soil and mud and dirt and filth and knotted roots and all the worms and insect life teeming within. The Plant, I realized, hadn’t made its home in the basement. It was too big for that. No, it had burrowed beneath it, tunnelled into the depths of the earth itself and had spread its roots like spears throughout the dirt there. A superorganism indeed.
After an extended period of being pulled through hotter and hotter and thicker air I began to sense a slowing down. And then that intuition was confirmed when I was shifted upright - a position that’d been impossible to achieve in the tunnel - and only then did I see I’d been taken to a chamber of impossible size with the pulsing heart of the Tree at its center, from which roots and vines jutted out in all directions, burrowing through the soil and each forming their own basis for a forest. The Tree itself was a twisted, knotted monstrosity; it was made of a type of wood I couldn’t recognize at all. It was lit only by those bioluminescent pods that shed bits of light through the cracks in the bark. And protecting it was what appeared to be an impenetrable matrix of thorns and bristles and jagged branches. The vine that’d captured me took me in deeper and deeper towards the center, close enough where I could see other, smaller pods emitting small spore-clouds of glowing dust that I did my best not to inhale. I watched the motes of the stuff descend to the ground, and where they landed a fresh plant sprung up and was quickly absorbed into the mass of the Mother Tree.
But I saw something else, too. Ed Simon was in there, not far from where I’d been stopped and almost within arms reach. Through the bramble surrounding my mouth I managed, “E-ed? Ed, c-can you hear m-me?”
A pulsing blast of light from one of the pods on the bark illuminated him further, then, and I noticed two things. One, he was dead. Long dead. Broken and twisted and with a face stuck in a permanent state of horror and shock. Through his mouth and ears and nostrils - and even his now emptied eye sockets - roots and branches had burst forth; now he was little more than a shell-host for further plant growth. But I also saw cradled in his grip a sizeable canister containing what could only have been the poison, and when the bioluminescence pulsed again I saw exactly how such a mechanism worked, too - a simple trigger released the contents of the canister.
But I had no time at all to reach for it before the captor Vine had slammed me right up against the trunk of the Mother Tree, where I was bound by fresh branches and twigs and whipping, thorned-vines that burst from the bark and wrapped around me. I squirmed and thrashed and tried to throw my weight back and forth, but it produced nothing except fruitless exhaustion.
And then the vines began to crawl. First they spidered their way up my arm. Then they crawled up my chest and towards my face.
“N-no, no, no! GET THE FUCK OFF OF ME!”
Needless to say they didn’t respond to the request. Instead they inched ever forward towards my head and wrapped loosely around my throat while I screamed. When they approached my mouth I snapped my jaw shut and grit my teeth and sealed my lips and did everything I could to resist the invasion. Then the vines began to pry my lips open, and I turned my head.
As they reached the outer layer of my ear and my nostrils I saw Ed again, not a full arm’s length to my left but entombed in bark. His fate would be mine if I didn’t act quickly. Fortunately, my left leg was free below the waist, as the vines were busy attempting to infiltrate my skull. I kicked the Mother Tree as I hard as my compromised position would allow. The vines ignored me. But Ed shifted, ever so slightly. I kicked again, and reached out the fingers of my trapped left hand. I kicked a third time; Ed shifted a bit more and loosened his grip on the Canister. It began to slide, ever so slightly, down in my direction.
The vines had now entered my right ear and were slowly advancing inwards. I could hear them, millimeters from my ear drum, scraping and scratching and crawling and spidering their way in. I turned my head as far as I could towards my shoulder to slow its growth, and it worked, for a bit. But it did nothing to stop the other vines that were now entering my nose, and which had pried open my lips and begun to work on slithering through my grit teeth. Another vine formation had ascended from above and begun working its way towards my left ear, and there was little at all I could do to stop it.
I kicked again. The Canister fell, finally, out of Ed’s grip and only with an excruciating stretch and twist of my leg did I manage to catch the backstrap of the thing before it tumbled to a ground so far away it couldn’t be seen in the absence of light. Then I twisted and stretched further; I bent my leg up until the outermost edge of my extended left-hand middle finger grabbed the strap, and I worked and pulled it up and with my knee as balance turned the form of the thing until the trigger was fully in my grasp. By the time the Mother Tree knew what was happening and peeled off my face to trap my hand, it was too late; its own involuntary pulsing and writhing as it shed its glow and produced the spores provided me an opening through the twisted Bark, and I exploited its panicked release of my full left arm and jammed the Canister inside it and squeezed.
Instantly all the bindings keeping me fastened to the Trunk snapped backwards, and down I went, leaving the Canister jammed into the Bark. I fell long enough to feel the rush of wind before it was cut short by landing torso first onto a massive root. The impact knocked the wind out of my lungs, but I couldn’t stop to recover. Instead I picked myself up, slid down the massive Root just as it and several more just like it reared up in agony as the Mother Tree died, and on my way down I hit several more branches and twisted an ankle and smacked my elbow on the edge of a root. But I made it down to a flat Root just beneath the lip of the tunnel through which I’d entered, and with all my remaining strength I grabbed that edge and pulled my bruised body up into the yawn of it. Then I turned around.
The Mother Tree had descended into a state of utter panic, if not something worse. Her twisted Bark had unraveled and her inner life-glow, periodically revealed through those now-dead-still bioluminescent pods, was unveiled fully. The light shuddered and blinked in and out and in again, and all around the bulk of the Tree’s mass the roots and twigs and branches and vines whipped furiously and crashed dead to the ground. Those buried deep in the earth were retracted into the chamber, too, causing the tunnels they’d carved out to collapse with a tremendous rumbling and all the loose soil to pour out into the chamber. For a long moment I was too awestruck at the sight to move.
But then that damned rumbling edged its way closer and closer and closer to me, and by the time I realized the great Vine occupying my tunnel was retreating to die with its source, it was nearly too late; already the walls and ceiling of the path were beginning to shake and stir and dump loose soil onto my shoulders. Without another moment’s hesitation I began frantically climbing up the path as the vine flew the other way.
Come on, come on, come on!
I grabbed anything I could for support - smaller roots, branches, clumps of dirt, rocks and stone - and used their relative stability to boost myself further up. Before long the sight of the dying Mother Tree was behind a hundred feet of earth, but the entrance to the house - if it was still there - was further than that. Every second that passed brought more instability and all the cacophonous noise that came with it. The dirt fell in sheets now, and it filled the air, and from the withdrawing vine inches to my left those plant-spores spilled onto the ground and formed sprouts that died in seconds. Through it all I pushed myself forward, ever forward, blinking madly through the showering dirt and gritting my teeth and squeezing myself down a canal that was narrowing by the second.
”Aaahccckkphhtthh!” The roof of the cavern tunnel suddenly fell in chunks; and for a terrifying moment I was unable to move through it at all. But I survived uncrushed, and threw all my effort into digging through the pile of the stuff that’d formed in front of me while behind me there was only madness and thunderous noise and falling stone, now, to join the dirt. The tunnel to my rear had ceased to exist, and still the vine withdrew itself.
But between the showers of all the falling earth I saw little points of light. The basement was close, I now realized - agonizingly close; I doubled my efforts and trudged on through, and just when I heard the final, tremendous, earth-shattering crash of the tunnel I realized a falling sharp rock had severed the vine as it withdrew, thus preserving the foremost section of it to hold the entrance of the canal up just long enough for me to tumble back out into the basement and no longer. Within seconds of my leaping free the tunnel and the vine with it collapsed into what I now realized was a growing sinkhole centered on where the Mother Tree had resided.
Then chunks of the basement cement were breaking off and tumbling in it as well. I leapt over the splits and gained the lowermost staircase and launched myself up the flight two, three steps at a time as the basement fell inside the earth. Then came the ground floor, and no sooner did the whole home begin to collapse and tumble than I finally, at long last, reached the destroyed roof I’d attempted to escape by before. I half-climbed, and half-ran up the rising slope and leapt clear into the front yard of the estate - twisting my ankle further and rolling sloppily into his fence - just as the house itself broke and tumbled into the pit. I collapsed onto the ground and closed my eyes. And for the first time in hours I felt able to breathe.
The neighborhood, needless to say, was never quite the same. The mighty twisted roots and branches that’d made their home throughout it were dead, fortunately, but they didn’t vanish into the ground and they didn’t wither. They simply stayed there, having destroyed the roads and a half dozen homes (while severely damaging as many others), making much of the place unliveable. My house was still standing. But after an appraisal of the damage brought on to its foundations I realized it was best to liquidate the damn thing - wasn’t worth much anyway - and move elsewhere. Preferably somewhere with as few trees as possible.
As it turns out, though the city isn’t as safe from such pestilence as I’d first imagined it to be. Those little spores - the ones that’d I’ve been finding a bottomless abundance of in clothes and various nooks and crannies of my new apartment, like sand after the beach, are quite formidable, it seems. Whenever one takes root - which they do virtually anywhere they land - it produces a tiny little sprout that usually isn’t too much trouble to rip out before it becomes a nuisance. But there’s always another one. And another after that, and another after that. In the cupboards. In the back of the shower. In the drains. In the rafters. And last night I found two that’d found each other and merged, into a tiny little vine. It was almost cute, back when it was only a half-inch long and tucked away in the corner of the door where there’s just enough in-tracked soil to grow. Almost cute.
But then it ate my damn scissors, and my gardening shears, and fuck, man - I never did grab Simon’s weed poison formula, did I? Anyway. Damn thing’s blocking the way out, now. I hope the couch I’ve laid up against my bedroom door can hold, just a little while lo-
Submitted December 31, 2017 at 08:29PM by TheJesseClark http://ift.tt/2luqtXg nosleep
No comments:
Post a Comment