a good space boy from a good space family (pethdorn) wrote in incompletedata, @ 2017-11-03 20:28:00 |
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The darkness of the woods was permanent. At noon as at midnight, the light from the sun or moon or any man’s lantern seemed to penetrate no further than the edges of the shadows cast by the old and massive trees that populated his grounds in impossible numbers. Some of those stood proud and hale, barely swaying in the wind; others appeared to have been bitten in places by an axe, and others still were blown almost to splinters, ready to fall in the next puff of a storm. It was a gloomy sight, the white of living wood shining out into the darkness like uncovered bone, the damage unsettling, perhaps, in its apparent randomness. No animal, no wind, no woodsman would have done such senseless and arbitrary injury. (And no animal, no wind, no woodsman would have carved names - just visible on close inspection - into every one of the dizzying infinity of trees stretching back into the night.) But it was not random. It was not arbitrary. And he hadn’t done it, not really, the man seated on the stump of a tree in the few weak beams of moonlight that struggled through the newly corresponding crevice in the canopy. He toyed with his watch and gazed out into the dim by turns, surveying it all with a sort of affection. He loved trees, the higher the better; he loved these trees, he thought, albeit with a possessive, jealous, furious sort of heat that gnawed at him somewhere deep behind his ribs, a poor fit, somehow, for the heart that beat there. The stump on which he sat caused him both satisfaction and grief, and from moment to moment he could hardly say whether he wished to chop down the entire forest, or raise every long-fallen tree from the very mulch in the ground to stand again forever. The choice, in the end, was not his. If the splintered core of a cypress made him ache as though he himself had been twisted open, well - he could do nothing. It was only what was right and just. He hadn’t the power to say what had been earned, no more than any man. He was merely the curator. And so when he heard footfalls and the crunch of dead leaves, something stirred in him, dread and excitement both - and he rose to stand on his tree stump, peering forward toward the source of that sound, teetering so far forward in his restlessness that he almost fell right over. “What are you doing here?” he snapped out, eager and sharp. “Who are you?” Which one are you, he might have rightly said; his name surely was here somewhere. “What do you want?” |