“Open up, damn you.”
I stared at the brick wall, as though my concentrated gaze could bore past the barrier through sheer will alone. I’d run my hand over the dark outline of the man a dozen times now, feeling for a questing root or yielding bit of stone. Something that would allow me to push back into those strange tunnels once again.
But no.
For awhile I’d felt certain the tree wasn’t done with me—why else was I compelled to return again and again?—but it had no use for me at the moment either. It had moved on…with my help, even…and I knew enough to know it was a fruitless exercise to make demands upon it now.
And why did I want to enter the tunnels again? To try and kill it? To reason with it? To threaten and cajole it until it gave me what I wanted?
Or perhaps there was another reason. The guilt that nestled in my belly like a restless seed. Roiling my insides and making my new life—a life free of all the terrible things that had come before—tainted. Bitter instead of sweet. A cold, hollow life plagued by fear and self-loathing and the inexplicable need to come back to this damned place again and again.
I sat back down on the bed, clasping my hands to stop them from shaking. It helped, but only outside. Inside, my stomach twisted hard enough to make me wince. My constant passenger was stirring again, reminding me that I didn’t belong out there. That I’d bought my supposed liberty with coin that wasn’t mine to give.
That I would never truly be free.
When I slid the last brick home into the wall of Rachel’s prison, I’d done it without hesitation. I was full of restless, hungry anger that was driven by righteous indignation and pain. In that rage, it was easy to ignore her relative innocence in everything—she was only there because of me, after all. And hadn’t I been planning on tricking her into taking my place since I first met her in this world? The hypocritical aspect of my feelings of betrayal wasn’t lost on me, but it seemed very small and unimportant at the time. The anger didn’t care about fairness or morality, you see. Only the acquisition and distribution of pain. The brokerage of suffering.
The first time I’d known that kind of anger was when I returned to this world and murdered my parents and my brother John. I didn’t consider it murder at the time, of course. At worst it was a kind of delayed self-defense against my years of abuse and abandonment. In the moment, it hadn’t felt wrong at all—to the contrary, it felt like I was the moving hand of God, meting out due punishment for the sins of my family. I was no longer powerless and hated. I was strong and righteous and in control and…
But what was I in control of, really? By the time I came back and snuffed out my family while they slept, my own flame was guttering low. I had seen so much horror since I first escaped my own cell and began visiting others of similar design and function. Visiting other versions of myself—many of them dead and more than a handful insane.
By the time I came back home, I’d already seen close to fifty versions of the evil my family had visited upon me. Out of those worlds, four contained versions of me that were still alive and imprisoned in their basement cell. The first was wracked with infection and fever. I tried to move him, but he would begin to howl in pain, his ghastly pale, paper-thin skin tearing at the slightest provocation. I believed he was beyond reason or sanity, but I still held out hope that if I could get him into the tunnel the tree might heal him or open a path to a kinder world where he might still be saved. Gently as I could, I swaddled him in his rotting linens and tried to lift him again.
That’s when he pressed his hot, cracked lips to my ear with strength I’d have thought beyond his ability. His voice was a painful whisper, but I felt every syllable resound in my head and my heart.
“Free…me. Kill me…please.”
The linens were already growing wet with new wounds. There might be versions of me that would be disgusted at that or horrified at the thought of taking a life, even in mercy. But they had not seen the life I’d been given—or worse yet, this pitiful thing that was begging me for release.
It was a simple thing to do. A few moments of pressure and he was gone. The next four—two lost to infection and two more to insanity—proved even easier. I took no joy or pleasure in killing them, but it did bring me a kind of satisfaction nonetheless. As though I was righting wrongs or saving some small portion of myself. Providing new memories of my family’s atrocities in other worlds and stoking the flames of that anger that ultimately ended their time in this one.
But when it was done and the anger was gone, all I was left with was pain and loneliness and sadness. I was untethered from anywhere or anyone, and for a time I feared I might drift on forever—sustained by the tree but never allowed to find a home or peace or love. When I did find love a few years later, it felt like being truly free for the first time. The joy of it made me foolish. I’d been testing the boundaries of my tether for years, and had been growing more and more sure that the time I was forced to spend within the tunnels corresponded multiplicatively to the time I spent without, but I lied to myself that it wasn’t so. Or if it had been, that this time would be different. That my love would make it different.
I learned otherwise. And with the loss of that love, I felt the last bit of hope and mercy being taken from me as well, leaving a man who could spend years trapped alone without breaking and hurt others as he had been hurt without feeling the insistent sour pain of guilt at his core. A man who could trap a woman—a very good woman—in his place without a backwards glance.
Except…as I ascended the steps of the basement for what I felt sure was the last time, I felt my anger already cooling again. I could hear Rachel calling to me from behind the wall, and all I could think about was my first night in that cell—hands bloody and face raw from crying as I begged my mother to come let me out.
I hesitated at the top step. Looked back down toward the open doorway that led to the bifurcated room beyond. It was too late to take it back, I told myself. Too late to help her escape. The tree had her now. She could serve her time like I had, and then someday, if she was as clever as I thought, she’d find a replacement as I had.
A weight settled on me like the pressure of a gathering storm. In my belly, the first stirrings of that acid guilt began to form. Swallowing hard, I tried to ignore them both as I made the final step upstairs. Made it out of the house. Out of the town and even the state.
Two weeks later, I returned.
My long life has given me plenty of time for introspection, but I don’t know how well I’ve used it, for I now realize that it was only after I condemned Rachel that I saw myself clearly. Finally recognized that I’ve wholly defined the shapes and contours of my life by its negative spaces. Its losses.
The betrayal of my family. My various imprisonments, from the basement cell to the tunnels of the Tree to the constant and limitless expanse of my interior wasteland—a desert of self-loathing, anger and regret in which nothing good could ever grow. The theft of my only real love and the life I thought I might have with her…before the tree taught me the cruelest of its lessons.
I had hated the Ghost Tree for so long. It had no face or voice, and wherever I went, it was there. It was easy to see it as the chief devil of my Hell. There were times I even blamed it for my family’s sins. For my own. It was easy to ignore that it had kept me young and strong. Had freed me from my cell and given me the chance to see hundreds of other worlds. Had sustained me even when I didn’t want to be sustained. I frequently rebelled at what I felt was a violation—a usurpation of my free will—but it didn’t change the fact that the Tree hadn’t actually done anything to harm me…other than bring me back to it from time to time.
And that was significant, particularly when it kept me from the life I wanted. But that was also viewing it solely through the lens of my own wants and desires, when clearly I was dealing with an entity whose very nature seemed to imply it was greater and more important than the happiness of just one man.
Perhaps it took some measure of perceived freedom for me to see that clearly. Like a starving animal, at first I would do whatever it took to satisfy my sadness, my anger, my hunger to be loosed from the Tree. However, once that hunger was sated, I found what I had dined on far less palatable.
My family’s lives. Rachel’s freedom. The best parts of my own soul.
These thoughts were always at the forefront of my mind as I’d go back to visit my family’s home. I found myself wondering if it had all been worth it. If the life I had won was worth living if I had such a hard time living with myself. What if the Tree really was important? What if it needed me? If I could help it? Was there anything I could do in this life more vital than to be a part of something so wonderous?
Every visit, I was tempted to go and visit Rachel in the basement. I wasn’t ready to free her, and offering false hope would be cruel, but I remembered that loneliness. The crushing black of that place. In the beginning, you would turn inward, filling your existence with the landscapes and colors of your interior world. But the gravity of the cell was always pressing inward, compressing the outer limits of your imagination, your heart, your soul. Driving your interior toward a singularity—a black hole of self.
A place of void and inconsistent logic from which no light could ever escape.
I didn’t want that for her. For anyone else. I told myself that she had escaped into the tunnels and the infinite worlds it provided. Or that she had broken through the wall and freed herself weeks or months earlier. But somehow I knew different. Despite my best efforts, I was still tied to the Tree, and through that I had some dim sense of her down there, living and dying as I had, one terribly long moment at a time.
I reached the point that I was visiting nearly every day for an hour or so. There was a long dirt access road that ran behind the house, and while it was some distance from the house, its elevation gave a good view of the house and the massive red and green tree that stood in its front yard. The branches of that tree would sway on some unfelt breeze when I drove up, almost as if it was a greeting to an old friend. Maybe it was. As time went on, I found myself spending more and more of my time staring at those waving branches, almost hypnotized by the rhythmic rolling of its green leaves, constantly ebbing and flowing like tides of some strange and distant sea. To my surprise, seeing the tree didn’t make me angry or fearful anymore. In a way I think I missed it, whether that was a symptom of my growing awareness of myself and what I had done or some magic of the tree itself, I couldn’t say or know. What I did know is that I was growing ever closer to the idea of tearing down the wall I’d put up. Of freeing Rachel physically at the very least, and perhaps…just perhaps…asking the Tree to take me back instead. I was sitting in my car, wondering at the insanity of these impulses, when sudden motion drug my attention from the tree to the house’s porch.
The front door had opened, and now Rachel and a large man I didn’t recognize were coming out.
I felt the barest twinge of jealousy as they clasped hands and made their way off the porch. More than that, I felt a pang of loss. A part of me had seen freeing Rachel as a path toward some kind of redemption, and now I’d missed my chance. I watched them forlornly as they headed for the road and began walking toward town, my mind abuzz with questions. Where had that man come from? Who was he? Was Rachel safe with him?
The irony of that last question wasn’t lost on me, and I felt I could judge the answer even from a distance. There was a comfortable ease to the pair as they walked, whoever they might be to each other. It made me think of that past life I’d had so briefly—the easy joy of that love.
I lowered my head to the steering wheel. What was I to do now? Would this be enough for me to stop hating myself? Stop coming back to the grave of my past? Could I finally be free?
I didn’t look up at the Tree as I pulled away.
And the next day I was back. I was doing this for me, not Rachel. And besides, I suspected very little had really changed. The Tree wouldn’t just release her, and that meant that whatever freedom or life she might have, it was temporary. Even with what I’d told her, she would inevitably lie to herself. Tell herself that the rules of the Tree wouldn’t apply to her. That she could run from it or beat it somehow. As with myself, it would take time for that hope to be crushed from her.
On the one hand, that meant she was still doomed to the fate I’d led her to. On the other, it meant there was still hope that I could save her from it, and in turn, save some piece of myself.
My legs shook as I went back down into the basement the first time. The air down there seemed thick and stale, and I could hardly think over the pounding of my own heart. Each step was trembling and slow as I crossed to the back room and stared at the hole left behind by Rachel’s escape. The idea of stepping past the threshold into my old cell was terrifying, but I ultimately sucked in a breath and dove forward, as though diving deep into hostile waters.
Perhaps the analogy wasn’t inapt. Even after all this time, I could feel the strange and alien subterranean world that lay on the other side of that far wall. The inherent anxiety and danger of the worlds that lay beyond. Could I really do it? Even if it would listen to me, even if it would take me back and free Rachel, could I really make myself a prisoner again?
I glanced behind to reassure myself that the wall was still broken, that the path out was still clear. It was, the cold fluorescent light of the outer space giving the floor a dull but welcome glow. Despite myself and the best of intentions, I stepped back toward that light. I couldn’t do this. Of course I couldn’t. It was madness. I’d have to learn to live with the guilt. Accept that I had the right to be happy. Move on and trust that Rachel could eventually figure a way out of the mess I’d brought her into.
I was dripping sweat by the time I made it outside again, and as I left the porch, I vowed to myself it was for the last time. I couldn’t blame the tree any longer. I needed to take responsibility for myself. Stop being so weak. Leave the past behind.
The words sounded hollow as I thought them, and three days later, I was back in my spot, staring at the house again. Within a week, I started talking to the tree in the yard, though it never seemed to notice. It took time, but before the year was done, I was making trips back down into the basement like I had today. Begging for Rachel’s freedom some days, and other days just my own. I often wondered if I was just insane, and the idea was a comfort to me. Better that than all the horrors I knew in my heart of hearts to be true.
Through all these months, the Tree never responded to me. And there were many times where I left the house with some paltry sense of satisfaction. I had tried, after all. Tried to fix things. Tried to atone. And if it wouldn’t answer me, I should take it as a sign that I was truly free from its bindings, and that I should similarly free myself from the cold iron grip of my guilt. Enough was enough, I’d tell myself. Time to stop this for good.
And then I’d go back. Just like I did today. Begging for it to open the wall. To talk to me. To give me a sign. Even making an offering of sorts in the form of my dearest possession—the pen John gave me so long ago. As though returning it to that terrible place would show the Tree I was truly ready to make amends. But it all amounted to nothing, and as before I left angry and discouraged and disgusted with myself.
I slammed the door as I got back into my car. I still parked far away, but the walk back had done little to cool my temper. I was just wasting my time with this. Nothing was ever going to…
A car was coming up the driveway, fast. It was a small brown sedan with the left side severely dented and scraped—perhaps recently given the precarious nature of some of the trim. As the car skid to a braking halt, I felt my confusion turn to alarm as I saw who was leaving the vehicle—if I wasn’t mistaken, it was the same man I’d seen leave with Rachel nearly a year before. And yes, there she was too, though she had been pulled out through the driver’s seat and didn’t look at all like a willing passenger.
What was this? Was this man carrying her back to the tree? Had she tried to trick him into taking her place and he somehow figured it out? None of this made sense.
The man was much larger than her, and it took little effort for him to pull her up onto the front porch despite her resistance. And she was resisting, but only a little. Did she have a plan? Or was this somehow different than I thought? Maybe I was misreading everything, and even if I wasn’t, did I really want to get involved?
They were apparently arguing on the porch about something, as he seemed to be demanding something that she refused. Perhaps it was her copy of the key, for he suddenly turned and kicked the door open with one hard blow before dragging her out of view.
No, something was very wrong. I should help, shouldn’t I? Or should I leave it to the Tree to sort out? Surely it would protect her, or if not, wouldn’t that bring a resolution on its own?
I grimaced at my train of thought. I needed to decide what to do, because if I didn’t, I had a feeling it was going to be decided without me. Maybe I could just…
Another car came roaring down the driveway, this one a small SUV with damage on both sides and a broken headlight and grill. It slowed as it drew near to the house and a man jumped out. It…it looked like the same man that had just drug Rachel inside the house. He looked around the first vehicle before seeming to notice the open front door on the porch. I was fascinated as I watched him. Maybe the distance and my own imagination was playing tricks on me, but it was the same man, wasn’t it? What did it all mean?
I suddenly noticed movement in my vision’s periphery and cut my eyes toward the giant towering over the overgrown lawn. The Ghost Tree’s branches weren’t lazily drifting in some phantom breeze any longer. Now its arms waved and whipped frantically as its frothing leaves heaved and tossed like waves meant more for sinking than sailing. Something new was happening. Something new and dangerous, and I could feel the weight and electricity of it in the air. The storm wasn’t coming any longer.
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Credits
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