Journal Entry 4
As promised, here is the transcription of what I found in the book belonging to Justin Paring. It’s pretty long, so I’ll finish the transcription in my next post.
As I write this, I am a twenty-one year old man of what I believe to be sound mind and firm spiritual foundation. Despite what I have been told over these last eight years, I am not insane and I am not possessed by the Devil or any of his lesser imps. To the contrary, even now I hold much love in my heart, with no small portion still being afforded to my tormentors. My parents and brother, though many of their acts would aptly be described as evil, are not bad people. Misguided and fearful, yes. But I do believe that they still have goodness in them.
I am given food and water, candles and occasionally a book to read or some scraps of paper to write upon. I have developed a persistent cough in the last year, and I fear that the lack of sunlight and the pervasive dampness of this sealed away space are slowly doing damage that time and medicine may not be able to reverse. I know I get sores at times from my infrequent ability to bathe, and the twin stenches of myself and the waste bucket in the corner are imperceptible to me now. I try to separate my hate for my situation from those that cause it, and most of the time I think I succeed. My hope is that writing this will help further.
I turned twenty-one two weeks ago, and as a gift my brother John gave me this notebook and a new set of Waterman Safety Pens. I didn’t know such a thing even existed, and it truly is wonderful to have such a convenient writing tool. I cried at the kindness, and outside my room John looked in and smiled his sad smile as I crouched in the dark, clutching this book and softly weeping as our mother began to close the door for the day.
I don’t have much dignity left at this point. Dignity is like a plant. Much as a plant needs sunlight and oxygen, dignity needs an audience and hope. When you are completely isolated, when you move past any idea of ever really escaping the black hole you are in, you find yourself quickly shedding things like dignity. My primary reasons for living have been a base animal drive to survive and my internal world. I had always had a powerful imagination, and in this purgatory I have spent many hours far away in some distant land of my own creation. I loved to write as well, but since my imprisonment it has been rare that I had enough paper to write much of any length. That, and the act of kindness behind it, is what made the book and the pens such a wonderful gift to me.
Yet when I got them, I found I had trouble finding things to write about. After three days of trying, a realization struck me. My imagination was starting to wither and die too. This thought terrified me in a way that losing my liberty or my dignity had not. It was the final bulwark I had against abject despair, the last remaining island in a rising sea of insanity and death. If I lost the ability to escape into my mind, I would truly be lost.
It was six days ago that I first contemplated taking my life. For some that may seem absurd, as I know many people would have considered it or committed the act long before now. I would like to say that I had abstained because of my deep moral reserves or my titanic willpower, but neither would be the truth. In all honesty, the only reason I haven’t taken my life before now is because of the Ghost Tree.
I know I need to explain myself, and to do so in a clear fashion, I need to further elucidate how I came to be confined here, a prisoner in the basement of my own home.
It all began when I was eleven. The younger of two children and raised by two strict but kind parents, I was still prone to frequent wanderings of thought and flights of fancy. I was a largely obedient child, and I had enough admiration for my brother and fearful respect for my parents that when I was rebuked for daydreaming or telling fantastic tales, I truly did try to curb those tendencies, or at least confine them to my own thoughts and late-night conversations with John.
I suppose that is why the trouble with the Ghost Tree caught me by surprise. When I woke up the day after Christmas and ran outside to play, I found a giant new tree near the edge of our yard. It stood out to me not just because of the oddity of a new tree suddenly appearing, but also because it varied so much from any other trees we had or that I had ever seen.
Where most of our trees were pine or oak, with the occasional sweetgum or poplar for variety’s sake, this tree was something else entirely. It had a massive trunk that twisted and warped upon itself before breaking out into at least twelve distinct branches of such girth and height that they all stood as substantial trees on their own. Coming off of these smaller trees were swirls of wood the color of dark red wine and sweeping greens that looked more like storm clouds that the clumps of leaves that I supposed they were.
I should be clear that from the start I had a sense of the strangeness of that tree, but I also felt profound feelings of joy and excitement at its discovery and presence, as though some looming giant had settled in our yard, intent on a deep slumber while he guarded our home. This thought was firmly in my mind as I ran to the tree and touched it.
Its bark felt strange, but was solid enough, and under the canopy of its many arms, I could smell a warm, spicy smell unlike any I had ever encountered. It made my head swim slightly, but not in an unpleasant way. The thought suddenly occurred to me that I might be the first one to discover it, and I couldn’t wait to show John and my parents my proud accomplishment.
Ten minutes later, my parents were walking back into the house, my father shaking his head disgustedly. John was still outside with me, his face stricken with worry. He was two years older than me, but he never seemed like an older brother except at times like this. It was the look he would get when he was afraid I was going to get into trouble or when he couldn’t understand something I was talking about, at which times he politely assumed that what I was saying was somehow wrong. I hated that look, but I understood it now.
None of them could see the tree.
In the two years that followed, I would occasionally bring up the tree to them, and each time I was met with greater anger and rejection. I was told that I was to give up these childish games and fantasies, that my behavior was continuing to deteriorate and I needed to start showing signs of growing up and becoming a man. Finally my father, not the most emotional of men at the best of times, struck me across the face one afternoon.
He had tears in his eyes when he did it, his voice carrying a note of raw desperation as he gripped my arms and gave me a light shake. He asked me why I persisted with this tree story, and what had they done wrong for me to become as I was. Didn’t I care how I upset my mother? Didn’t I care what people in town said about my strange ways?
What was I to say? His words would have hurt more when I was eleven, but I was growing a thicker skin due to regular sharp words and scornful looks. Still, it did strike a nerve, him accusing me of not caring, of being so thoughtless. All while they blindly punished me for being able to see something they could not. So out of frustration and anger, out of a need to end the debate and the accusations once and for all, I did the one thing I had always held off from doing in anyone else’s presence.
I climbed the tree.
I heard my father yelling angrily for me to stop whatever it was I was doing. But even from his vantage on the front porch, I was only two feet up before he could tell at a distance that I was no longer touching the ground. His voice died in his chest, but it was too late. I was now four feet up and the earlier commotion had brought out Mama and John. I was focused on climbing the familiar bark of my special tree, the strangeness of scaling it during daylight hours or for an audience not lost on me but of secondary importance.
Then I heard my mother let out a scream and I almost lost my grip. I shifted my feet and leaned against nearest branch for a moment, catching my breath and my bearings. Turning to glance back at the house, I saw all three of them staring at me with abject horror. I considered going back down, but no. It was time for this to be done.
So I continued to climb until I was over thirty feet up and perched like a raccoon on one of the tallest branches that could support my weight. It was strange, but despite my general dislike of heights, I never felt scared climbing that tree. It made me feel invigorated, as though I was taking part in some secret ritual of nature that was replenishing me body and soul. At the top, I took a moment to take in the sprawling land around us in the fading afternoon light. It was so beautiful.
With more than a little reluctance, I turned my eyes back to my family, who sat huddled and broken on the front porch steps, my brother and father still watching me while my mother wept softly into her hands. I had always imagined their reaction being something like this. To them, I suppose it looked like I convulsed and leapt my way up a tower of nothingness, and now I sat perched in midair. I tried to give them a comforting smile, but I couldn’t quite manage it and they likely couldn’t have seen it anyway. Instead, I planned to go down and explain to them that I was not making up the tree and that just because they couldn’t see it didn’t mean it was imaginary or something to fear.
Things went rather differently. As I made my last careful movements back down to the earth, I felt a rope around my neck. I grabbed at it, losing my balance as I was tugged off my feet. It was John and my father. They meant to bind me.
I fought but it was a short contest. I tried to explain, but they would hear nothing more from me. I was locked in the basement that night, and by week’s end, this room had been constructed and I was told it would be my new home until “I was released from the Devil’s clutches”. I found all of this terrifying of course, and I screamed and cried to be released, but it was no use.
In the back of my mind I also found it all very strange, and upon reflection I find it even more so. My parents were religious people, as were John and I, but not overly so. I had never known my family to be prone to bouts of overzealous piety or religious hysteria. And while I had no doubt that what they had seen when I climbed the Ghost Tree was disturbing, I would never have thought them capable of anything approaching this—the abject abandonment and imprisonment of their own child.
Yet I have no clear alternative answer for the past eight years. Their determination has never waivered, and I have never seen any real sign of hope from them that they would reach a point where they would release me. Rather they move about like corpses, or hot air balloons floating along on the buoyancy of sad acceptance and insane conviction. They go through the routines and rituals of caring for me the minimal amount that is required, but I imagine they try their best to forget about me the rest of the time. Just as I can feel my memory of the world and all its colors and smells and sources of joy and imagination fading from me, I can only imagine I have faded away from the world. A ghost haunting the lowest chambers of this house and my family’s minds.
And as I have said previously, it was my knowledge and belief in the Ghost Tree that sustained me through all these dark years. The feeling that it was special, that it had somehow picked me, and that the magical connection between myself and it would bear more fruit that me dying in this makeshift cell. But still, I felt the last candle of even this secret hope guttering low.
Then I saw the root poking through the wall. It was a tiny thing—three feet up the back wall of my room, it was impossible to see in the dark and easy to miss in the candlelight. When I saw it and recognized it as a root from the tree, I felt a thrill of excitement run through me. Reaching out a probing finger, I touched the tip of it gently and gasped at the rush of energy that shot through me at the contact. Images and sounds flooded through my mind, and I felt a vitality return to me that I hadn’t know since my family had first betrayed me.
My finger had come away from the root at the shock of that first touch, and when I reached towards it again, I saw the root move to meet me. Holding my finger to it the second time was less shocking, but no less profound. I felt my mind drifting as my eyes lost focus and my breathing slowed. I was sitting on the edge of my bed, leaned forward with an index finger touching this strange plant, and as I watched, the wall in front of me seemed to melt away. It was no longer a brick wall, or even the bare earth behind it. Instead, it was a large tunnel a foot taller than I was, wreathed in roots from the Ghost Tree and filled with a sweet-smelling breeze.
The smell was the most powerful part at the time, as though my body and mind were so starved for air that wasn’t rancid and stale that the breeze from the tunnel sent me into a deep state of euphoria. I stood and walked into that tunnel without hesitation, unaware of where I was going, but resolute in my determination that any place had to be better than the one I was leaving behind.
As you might imagine, I had much to learn.
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Credits
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