Tree Fingers by Augusta Li Read Free Book Online

commonplace aches or itches bothered him, and their absence felt profound. He wasn’t breathing. When he tried to inhale, he found he couldn’t, and not because of any ailment or injury. He just no longer had lungs. It was dark. Not just dark, but empty, void. Alan felt the fabric of his being tugged in different directions, his energy and molecules dispersing.
    He had to remember what he looked like. It ended up being harder than it sounded. He could picture his body: thin limbs, long fingers and toes, straight, slender torso dotted with sparse hair. For his facial features, he had to draw upon Graham’s many depictions of him in charcoal, paint, or ink. He had to will the swirling, raw energy into the shapes Graham had rendered: slim nose with a bump on the bridge, deep-set, over-large eyes and defined lips. He had to hurry; the universe was about to recycle his matter into new forms. He remembered his favorite piece, a pen drawing of himself nude on the couch, elbow leaning on the arm. He could see the twisting muscles on his waist and the length of his neck. He felt them solidifying. The angle of his cheeks, jaw, and chin took shape. Dark hair grazed his shoulders.
    Looking down at his hands, transparent, shifting and prismatic, like oil on wet cement, Alan realized what must have happened. That other wizard had knocked his astral body loose of his physical form, and, apparently, hurled it into some other realm. At least he wasn’t dead. But if he didn’t find his way back, his body would lie comatose until he starved or languished.
    Even if he found the thin spot where he could cross, he might very well return a hundred or a thousand years too late. Time passed differently in different dimensions. He looked around. It took some effort, as he needed to get used to scanning with his consciousness instead of moving his head or eyes.
    He stood in the middle of a forest. Trees as fat as skyscrapers, as whole city blocks, surrounded him. Their broad leaves produced a gloomy, perpetual dusk. He could hear the creak of their growth, hear their roots tunneling down. As he watched, hairy vines as thick as his hips twined around the trunks, burrowing into the bark, only to blossom, wither and putrefy moments later. Leaves dropped constantly, disintegrating instantly into a strong-smelling muck. From it, new plants sprung in an ongoing cycle of death and regeneration. Alan took a step and sunk to his calf in the muck. Everything reeked of decay. He felt it soaking into him rather than detecting it with his nose. Trudging a little further, he looked for anything that might be a door: an archway formed by branches, a circle of mushrooms, or a knothole in one of the great trees. But in the ever-changing wood, it was almost impossible. Alan struggled forward two feet only to look back and find the place where he’d stood completely transformed.
    Up ahead he saw a corridor, the first thing that resembled any kind of a path. It was a tunnel formed by a tangled lattice of branches. Some sort of large pods seemed to be hanging down.
    Motivated, Alan pushed on and finally reached the opening, though it felt like it had taken both arduous years and mere seconds. He realized instantly that the dangling clumps weren’t any type of seed but human bodies wrapped in vine. The tendrils burrowed into their flesh, into their eye sockets and mouths, under their skin. Chunks of putrefied skin and meat rained down, coating the ground in stinking gore. More bodies lined the walls of the chamber, bound by roots and impaled by branches, blood pooling below them. A few writhed and groaned as Alan hurried past. Regretfully, he had no way to help them. They weren’t astral beings like himself but flesh and bone. Alan had no idea how they’d come to this place or why.
    Many, many times Alan considered stopping. It didn’t seem worth going on. He felt compelled to lie down, sink under the muck. Sleep. Give in to the crushing despair. But if he got