Chris & Kevin — Part V: The Forest and The Descent
War — Wonder — Drowned — Hole in the ground — Glowing Tendrils — Save him?
A steep incline rose before them, framed by craggy walls crowned with pines. Heroth had somehow already taken the lead, limping ahead with great enthusiasm. Kevin was slightly behind, looking at Chris. “You comin or what?”
“We shouldn’t be here.”
Kevin waited.
“It’s forbidden for a reason.”
“So we didn’t stray where our parents couldn’t keep an eye on us. That’s the only reason.”
Chris kept glancing behind him. “There could be something here,” he said. Though he started along.
“Like what,” said Kevin. They both fell into step beside each other.
“I don’t know. Ghosts. Monsters.”
Kevin scoffed. “I’ve seen monsters. There’s no monsters here.”
Chris scoffed right back. “What do you know about monsters.”
“Whatever you can think of. I know them all. Vampires and werewolves and ghouls. Even witches.”
“Shut up.”
“I know the Silverhearts, too.”
“Alright.”
“I’m not joking.”
“Of course.”
Kevin stopped. “You haven’t heard.”
Chris wasn’t looking at him so he walked on ahead. He was looking everywhere else, searching for some kind of evil in the dark. “Heard what.”
“The purification wars.”
“What about em.”
“They got started again.”
“Oh.” Chris stopped. “Wait.” He looked back at Kevin. “You…?”
“Yeah. If not for Heroth I’d have probably still been there. Picking through the rubble for some food. I knew a lotsa people that did that. Probably still doin it.”
Chris looked up ahead at Heroth’s silhouette swaying up the rise. Then back at Kevin. “Shit,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“But I thought you were just an apprentice. I mean, what does that have to do with any war?”
Kevin smiled. “The vampires don’t really care what you do, Chris. Nor do the werewolves. And the Silverhearts, they don’t give a damn about anything at all.” He looked down at the earth as if there was something terrible beneath it. As if concealing it was the earth’s actual purpose. “Only if you’re in their way or not.”
Chris frowned in sympathy. He wanted to offer more but he had nothing. Then the silence stretched too long until no words were appropriate.
“And I was a Journeyman,” said Kevin. “Not an apprentice.”
“A Journeyman? What’s that?”
“It’s…” he seemed to lack the proper words. “It’s high enough for me to design my own buildings.”
“Oh yeah? Did you actually build something, or…”
“A few things,” he said. “A dining hall for some duke.”
“Ooh, fancy,” said Chris, with an effort at cheer, but Kevin’s face darkened. Some shroud fell over him while his eyes ignited with bright outrage and he hawked and spit at the ground. “It was while it lasted,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Silverhearts burned it down.”
“Oh.”
“Whole lotta people lost their homes. The duke let me bring em over to hold it out. The streets were too bloody. Then were these rumors. A vampire among us. Nobody could tell.” He spoke swiftly and efficiently as if listing construction materials while looking at the ground and he hawked and spit again. “Silverhearts burned it all down.”
Chris blinked. “They… I mean, with the…”
Kevin looked at him. “They burned it all down.”
Chris nodded. He felt his heart go out to his old friend but not the way it used to. Back then in that other time their hearts never went out to each other because they were never separate in the first place, but now his did and he felt enveloped in some of Kevin’s darkness.
Then up beyond the rise there flared a light. An enormous pool of gold slithering bright tendrils into the night, creating a corrugated auroral glow, as if somewhere beyond this slope a ghost of a dragon breathed ghostly fire through the grill of some giant furnace concealed within the rock, and Heroth cried out.
Chris and Kevin looked at each other. They ran up.
They found Heroth kneeling in the dirt. They found rows of pines along the cliff’s edge, those very pines visible from the town below. However contained within that border they found a forest. A forest of different kind altogether.
Strange trees of red bark shaped like question marks growing from the earth. Their branches extending horizontally in flowing spirals seamlessly blending into each other, like a wooden sea suspended in the air, all of it alight with round furry things that may have been a type of flower or fruit and that opened and closed and opened and closed again, revealing spheres of bright white and green and yellow and blue and orange and red and beyond all else gold, and sometimes revealing sharp darkness to account for the night and its presence. Among these trees were also speckled mushrooms the size of a man with caps that inflated and inflated like balloons and the larger they grew the brighter they shone, until they popped with sudden darkness as new caps began to grow in their stead. There were also mauve shrubs that vibrated and buzzed like giant bees and flowers that hissed out scents of both autumn and spring and also of blood and there were vines that blinked across colors and blackness much like the trees did. Much like all else here. An entire forest alive with the perpetual cycle between growing light and abrupt darkness. A cycle that for all they knew lay dormant and had awoken only for their observing presence.
Heroth seemed near tears. “Dear gods,” he said.
Chris was just as awestruck as him. He stared unblinking trying to contain it all in his mind and reconcile it with his fears. Kevin on the other hand was more guarded. His jaw had indeed fell and his eyes perhaps brightened but his fists were clenched and his body stiffened, for he had come to mistrust beauty.
Chris was the first to step forward.
“Careful,” said Kevin.
Beyond where Heroth knelt the dirt gradually shifted into some other type of rock that looked like marble, but when stepped on it clinked like glass and rippled like water. He let out a dazed half-smile. Then he reached one of the question mark trees. He reached for one of the furry things, glowing blue. It snapped shut over his hand and Chris jerked it back, sucking on his finger. “Ouch,” he said.
Kevin relaxed a little. He stepped onto the rippling marble slowly and with care. “You still wanna go?” he asked Heroth.
“Do I wanna go.” Heroth slowly rose to his feet. His eyes were like dark wet pools that reflected all this light. “Young man do I wanna go. Did you know about this place? Hmm? Did you?”
Chris and Kevin dumbly shook their heads.
“All this,” said Heroth. “All this right here and you ain’t never saw it?”
They shook their heads again. They didn’t know what to say.
Heroth smiled his child’s smile. Then he shook his head at the sky as if to call out the gods on their mischief and laugh along with them at his expense. He limped along to one of the glowing flowers, Chuckling at the marble’s rippling with his every step. As if each step was the first one. He bent at the flower and examined it. Smelt it. He paced along the fauna scratching his beard, reaching for things and flinching back, laughing and reaching again and touching and losing himself in every color and every scent.
“Freaky,” said Kevin as he walked up to Chris.
Chris smiled. “Yeah. I’d say freaky.” Though he wasn’t as afraid anymore. But not overly curious either. He surveyed everything with an easy smile and an easy posture as this visage served to confirm for him an aspect of the world he dearly needed confirmed, and he was content with only that. “I guess maybe you were right. About the stories. About this place.”
“Yeah,” said Kevin, frowning around him. “Maybe. Let’s go.”
They fell into step again. Their lazy steps clinking. The forest blinking around them. Light to dark, dark to light, light to dark, dark to light.
An insect emerged from one of the glowing fruits. Something like a bee, yet fatter, rounder, its stripes indigo and white. It had no sting and between its gleaming fish-eyes stretched out a tiny snout. It landed on Kevin’s nose and ran its snout along its bridge. He flinched and leaked a reluctant smile. “It tickles,” he said. He brushed it away and it buzzed off over to Chris. Chris laughed. Then it buzzed away from him too. It landed on Heroth’s pate and Heroth laughed and tried to catch it, but it slipped through his fingers and he only laughed harder.
He dallied behind them. Pursuing that alien bee, then lingering on some pattern in the ground or among the fauna, then pursuing the bee again when it teased him. He moved as fast as his stiff bones allowed yet progressed very little along the path. His grunts and laughs carried on behind them. His ooh’s and aah’s. Blending with the forest’s hisses and buzzes. The chirps and clinks. Brought a smile out of both Chris and Kevin.
“So what have you been up to?” asked Kevin.
“Me?”
“Yeah.”
“Well.” Chris sighed. He looked at the stars. They did not shine over this forest. “Not much, I suppose.”
“You still play the guitar?”
“The guitar.” Chris smiled as though as though at a distant memory.
“What?”
“No, yeah, I do. I guess I haven’t played in a long time.”
“Yeah? What happened?”
He frowned thoughtfully. The coldness of her hand. Wasn’t normal coldness. It missed something to be even that. “Life, I guess,” he said.
“You were real good. Remember those little shows we put up? You’d play those pieces you wrote and me and Gwen would act up all these stories to fit your music. I think we got the whole town watching at some point.”
“I think it was you and Gwen who came up with the stories. I just played along to them.”
Kevin waved it off. “Ah don’t know. All I remember is you were so good I was afraid you’d set off to play in the halls of kings and leave me alone with One-Foot Harpie and Three-Eyed Bolard -“
Chris laughed covering his eyes with his palm. “Those two idiots -“
“Exactly, yeah. I remember you even got Old Babi dancing. And how Gwen used to look at you. How is she by the way? Did anything ever happen between you two, or…”
Chris’s smile faded. “Gwen. Well.” He grimaced, sticking out a folded tongue between his teeth. He tried to smile but it was more of an apology. “She died.”
Kevin stopped dead in his tracks. “No.”
Chris nodded, biting his lip.
“No,” said Kevin.
“Yeah.”
“H-how? When?”
“Well. The river overflowed. I was actually gonna meet her there. On the jetty, where we used to play. I mean, she asked me to. She said to meet her by the jetty when the sun sets because there was a secret she wanted to tell me. So I guess maybe something did happen between us, if you count that. Anyway the rains started and they were fierce, even Babi stayed inside. It was just pelting. A piece of hail smashed through Gabril’s window. So my mom wouldn’t let me outside and I guess Gwen’s mom probably didn’t either but she snuck out. I mean, it’s anybody’s guess, but… Anyway we looked for her. We looked her for days.”
“You never found her.”
“No.” Chris nodded. “No, we did. We found her.” He swallowed, kicking up dust. “Though I suppose I wish we didn’t.”
Kevin blinked. He shook his head, reeling. His eyes squeezed shut as though if he could deny this strongly enough it might become false. He had many questions to ask, but at the same time he knew of their futility and he was also too dizzy to properly articulate them. It didn’t occur to him to ask how Chris felt. Then he noticed the sudden silence. He looked behind him.
Heroth was gone.
When he looked back at Chris he saw Chris had noticed also. Instead of the old man was a hole in the ground, a perfect circle. They ran over.
The hole led into a corrugated tunnel of marble snaking into darkness. “Heroth?” each of them cried.
They looked at each other. Lost. Like children who couldn’t find their parents and were still too shocked to cry.
“What do you think we should do?” asked Chris.
“What do you mean,” said Kevin.
“You think we should go get him?”
“What, do you wanna leave him there?”
“Maybe we should get help.”
“Help?”
“Yeah.”
“From who?”
“Yeah you’re right.”
“Besides by the time we’ll get to town and get somebody to come up Heroth might be dead.”
Chris was chewing on his lip. “You think he’s dead?”
“I don’t know.” Kevin frowned. “Do you?”
“I don’t know.”
They called his name again. Their voices echoed down the tunnel as if it was they who had fallen and were crying for his help. They stood muted.
Then Kevin marched over to the sea of branches. He buried his hand in his sleeve and grabbed at one of the furry fruit glowing gold. He tried to pull it out and the branches rustled, all of them, the entire blended sea shaking like a rising and crashing wave.
Chris tensed. Kevin struggled against it.
At last the fruit came free, but its fur fell away one by one in a shower of golden strands like tiny sailors abandoning ship. Kevin pealed it open. He had to look away from the light inside. Then he tossed it down the tunnel. It bumped against its walls below and disappeared around a bend. Silence. Then it reappeared, a dot of light amidst the black. Like a lost coin.
He looked up at Chris to gauge by his expression the success of this test, for he couldn’t tell himself.
Chris couldn’t either. Though he nodded confidently because he thought Kevin could. Then his eyes lit up.
“What,” said Kevin.
Chris walked over to one of the mushroom trees where a vine coiled around its stem, blinking blue and green. He grabbed at it, tried to pull. The mushroom cap above him popped and he flinched. Then he saw in its absence that the vine slithered out from inside the stem where the cap apparently grew around it. He pulled and more of the vine slithered out. The more he pulled, the more the color drained from it until it was as pale and lifeless as a rope. But still tethered to the stem. He walked it back to the hole. That particular tree did not grow another cap.
“Do you think it’ll hold us?” asked Kevin.
“I don’t know. It feels pretty strong. I don’t know how much vine is in there though.”
Kevin nodded. “Want me to go first?”
Chris did. But once asked he couldn’t admit it. “No, I got it.”
They set to tying a makeshift harness around his waist. After a couple of loops the vine cinched tight around him like it was around the tree and resumed its colorful glow. As if it needed to hold something. Chris shuddered. The glow pulsed through his skin, like formless beings traveling along his veins.
Kevin seemed worried. “You alright?”
“It’s kinda warm,” said Chris. “It tickles.”
There was plenty of vine left for Kevin still so they harnessed him as well. It seemed like the vine was endless inside the stem. It could’ve as well reached the bedrock for all they knew. They looked at each other.
“You sure about this?” asked Kevin.
“Are you?” asked Chris.
“Well.”
“Yeah.”
They sat on the rim and turned on their bellies and pushed off the edge carefully like they would enter a pool of freezing water. Their feet scampered against the tunnel wall, and every bodily instinct urged them to stop this nonsense at once but neither of them could prove the coward. Then they slipped and they held on to nothing yet they did not fall. The vine held true. Both of them. They nodded at each other, panting. Then they descended into the darkness.
Following the golden light.
Part VI — Coming Soon…
Part I — The Town That Forgot Itself: https://madwriter27.substack.com/p/chris-and-kevin-part-i-the-town-that
Part II — Lakeside House: https://madwriter27.substack.com/p/chris-and-kevin-part-ii-lakeside
Part III - The Old Man’s Story: https://madwriter27.substack.com/p/chris-and-kevin-part-iii-the-old
Part IV: "We Dyed It Red": https://madwriter27.substack.com/p/chris-and-kevin-part-iv-we-dyed-it