Tree Fingers by Augusta Li Read Free Book Online Page A

home, even a century late, he could at least die and pass on. Otherwise, he’d spend eternity here. That possibility horrified him more than the most gruesome and painful demise. He told himself to take one more step as he felt his identity sapped. Frantically he tried to remember the details of his life. What kind of car did he drive? What did his apartment look like? What did food taste like? Did he have a family? Friends? A partner?
    What did it matter?
    Everything urged him to succumb: the mindless muttering of the tortured, the sickly squish of his steps, the rasp of the vines reaching out. He walked over bodies now. His steps broke their desiccated ribs, evoking clouds of dust. They paved the ground as far as he could see, but the plants pushed their way through the graying skin to bloom from their navels.
    “Your name is Alan,” he told himself, repeating it even though the syllables sounded like nonsense. “Your name is Alan. You have to get home. Find the door.”
    Finally he emerged from the channel. To his horror, he found himself in the exact spot where he’d awoken. Panic-stricken, he ran. So much time had passed. Halloween would end, and the gate would seal for who knew how long. He ran harder, flailing his arms at the bracken and twisted human limbs.
    There was a tunnel up ahead. It looked like it could be a path—
    Death hung from the ceiling, showering him in rot. Death crunched beneath his feet.
    “Your name is Alan—”
    What were these noises that he made? Why was he making them? How stupid, he thought, sniggering as he ran toward the corridor’s end. Just ridiculous. It was so absurd that he threw his head back and laughed as he ran through the trees.
    Miles and miles of trees stretched in every direction, infinite, growing and dying, decomposing, and then pushing their way through the compost anew. Alan darted from one to the next, circling them, running his hands over the gouged bark.
    How many centuries had he been running in circles? How many millennia remained of wandering, the only sentient being in this world? He’d been looking for something. What? What did it matter?
    There was a tunnel up ahead—it could be a path...
    Dozens of times Alan ran the circuit. Tormented mutterings resounded all around, coming from those hanging above and those interred beneath his feet. They grew louder and mixed with the sounds of emerging and expiring plant life, forming a maddening cacophony. There was no wind. The air felt moist and heavy. It stunk. A ghastly mixture of mud, rotted leaves, blood and fluids splashed up and coated Alan’s legs as he ran and ran and ran. Everything looked identical. Olive and sienna swirled around him. He ran harder, fighting his way through the thickening gunk.
    He covered miles, but everything looked the same. Why was he running like this?
    Then he noticed an opening, some sort of channel. Again he struggled through the gloom, wading through the awful stuff that almost reached his knees now. Things moved in the fluid, brushed his legs. A few times something grabbed at his ankle.
    Leaves fell, floated for a moment, then decomposed and joined the mixture. Alan tried to look away from the greenish corpses rising from the swamp. He tried to concentrate on reaching the tunnel. I looked like it could be a path, though he couldn’t recall where he wanted to go.
    At the entrance, Alan felt compelled to look left. Something glimmered faintly in the distance, almost drowned by the haze.
    Though he didn’t know why, he went in that direction, winding in and out the massive trunks. Bones jutted from the ground and hung from the vines like morbid decorations. The trees grew thinner, greyer. The ground felt drier. Skeletons hung impaled from the saplings that had grown up through them. Moss and mushrooms covered them like skin.
    He had to reach that light. Something about it felt different from the rest of this place. Looking at it even allowed him to regain some clarity. He’d