He was watching the crow—once again reduced to a tiny white beetle—scuttle away from the expanding mass of his left foot, when he suddenly decelerated. He stumbled, but kept his balance, and was finally still.
He was standing in what appeared to be a field, next to a high hedge of unclipped hawthorn, snow-spattered with luminous May blossom, punctuated by sporadic oak and ash. The grass at his feet had been flattened, as if by the passionate rollings of a pair of bucolic lovers. Ankle-high grass, an eight foot hedge, two storey trees: it looked as though he wasn't going to need the last mouthful of squashed Twix, which was still smearing itself over his palm. As he went to drop the unwanted confectionary onto the grass, however, he hesitated and instead popped it into his jacket pocket.
Restored to normality at last—Loofah sighed deeply and filled his lungs with heady scent of May blossom, then he turned to let the sun warm his face. From the hedge the ground sloped upwards into a steep slope of flowing emerald, splashed with buttercups like drops of molten sun. It was only then that he noticed the figure near the top the hill, a dark haired girl with her dazzling gown streaming from her shoulders like angel's wings as she ran. When she reached the top she turned and waved, and as she disappeared over the brow the last billow of white satin caught the sun and beamed it down to him. With a shout of joy he was after her.
Breakers of foaming green rolled down the hill, tossing and pitching wild flowers of purple, yellow and white from crest to trough as they passed. Loofah leapt each wave as it reached him, clearing the breaking crests like a leaping salmon, with the golden sun shattering into a million tiny shards against his silver mirrored scales. His uphill swim was brief, and soon he was over the brow of the hill on a rising shoulder of grass.
Ahead was another hedge, with a massed bank of oak foliage behind it—a copse covering the top of the gentle summit. There was no sign of the girl. But to his left the hedge extended beyond the woods and, at the point at which it plunged away down the hill, there was a gap in the green wall, bridged by a wooden stile. This was the way she had gone, he was sure of it.
Powered by spring loaded legs, Loofah sailed over the stile like an Olympian. Indeed, as he swung himself over the cross-piece, he even managed to execute an elastic midair twist to bring his feet round for a perfect landing, his athletic insouciance mocking the predictable efforts of the rubbery wood to unbalance him.
The field in which he now found himself was very similar to that he had left, covering as it did the next sloping segment of the hill. His nymph was nowhere to be seen; despite this, however, Loofah's spirits soared, flying up into the blue sky to chase sunbeams and play tag with the white fluffy clouds. The fresh breeze cleansed his soul and chased a thousand million ripples up the hill to swirl and play around his feet with unalloyed delight.
Spread out before him was a glorious vista of rolling hills and fields held together by network tracery of hedgerows. Here and there were patches of dark woodland and occasional clumps of red brick houses nestled between the hills; far away to his right a grey stone church tower jutted cosily from a clump of trees. It was all his: spread over miles and yet so close he could have held the whole panorama in the cupped palm of his hand. He inhaled deeply, sucking in the blue skies, the yellow sun, the fields and the woods, and then exhaled, blowing out the stale miasmas, the putrid excrescences from the sore years of his life that until now had been pooled inside him, like pus in a boil. He grinned like a happy schoolboy and his soul soared higher still, a white-winged albatross sailing on the wind.
'Hello,' said a voice like warm patchouli oil, massaged into his temples. Loofah was strangely unsurprised by her suddenly being there, standing quietly in the grass behind him.
Hair of Celtic red flowed over her shoulders in a cascade of spun copper, woven with flowers of blue and violet, and crowned with a wreath of ivy and yew. Her skin was as pale as the moonlight on a galleon's sails and her eyes were feline green. She wore a gown of green gossamer, spun by spiderlings and dyed with the leaves of celandine and cuckoo-flower. Her ivory feet were unshod, green-sheened by the moist, spring grass.
'Hello,' replied Loofah. She smiled; it was a smile of infinite natural harmony, of ancient oak woods, and of the deep dark earth. Her calm reached out to his euphoria and tamed it, grounding it in the earth where it sprang roots and became a sturdy sapling of quiet peace. Loofah felt himself sinking, but into a quiet solid happiness, deep as the ocean. She stepped forward and took his hand; hers was cool and firm, with the freshness of a newly opened shoot.
As she led him into the woods, her white feet slid through the grass and leaves, melting into them as she passed. Loofah drifted behind her, pulled along in the gentle slipstream of her peace, mesmerised by the flower-strewn copper river of her hair and the floating green cloud of her gown. They glided through the dappled trees in an envelope of birdsong, sunlight and butterflies.
Bright broken light, the caress of the green foliage, and the friendly reassurance of the ancient gnarled oak trunks, solid and eternal: it was a journey into calm, a journey into infinite peace and forgetfulness. And as they walked small pieces of himself—memories and feelings—flaked off and drifted to the ground like autumn leaves, to be sucked into the earth and digested to nothing.
She led him into a blaze of sunshine. They were in a clearing, a placid lake of high rich grass, with purple willow herb, sun-splashes of ragwort, and dazzling white daisies that opened and closed like sea-anemones. All around were the gentle buzz of bumble bees and the lazy flutter of black and red cinnabar moths and turquoise butterflies.
The girl released his hand and swung into the sunlight, opening her arms and turning her face to the sun to drink in its life-giving warmth. Then she pulled open the front of her gown; the green gossamer slid over her shoulders, floated down her back and dissolved into the air, leaving her naked. Her body was carved from polished alabaster. Hair spilled down over hard breasts and tiny purple forget-me-nots were woven into the light copper fuzz at the base of her belly. Again she threw open her arms, drinking the sun with her entire body.
'Come,' she said, 'join me.'
Loofah stepped up to her and laid a tentative hand on a cool breast. But with a laugh, she gently pushed him away.
'Silly boy!' she said, and lifted her face again to the sky, 'The sun is your lover now—let her see you, show yourself to her.'
Loofah dropped his last sock beside a discarded shoe. The girl was standing a few feet away from him with her arms open and raised to the sky, her face lifted and smiling into the sun. She was a true statue now, a naked dryad worshipping her god. Her body was no longer the colour of Devon cream, but was already tanning to a nutty, silvery grey. The leaves in her hair seemed to have found new life and were growing, their green tendrils weaving through the copper and delicately creeping over her temples and neck. At her fingertips, the pale nails became buds, beginning to swell with green verdant life.
She saw he was naked and smiled again.
'Open yourself to her,' she whispered in a voice drawling with sleep, 'Let her love you.'
And so Loofah mimicked the girl's stance, closing his eyes and lifting his arms and face in worship to the loving ball of fire in the sky. And indeed the sun loved him back, her warmth caressing his nakedness and flooding through him, penetrating every last cranny of his being. Slowly, as he felt himself drifting into her, he let her vast serenity fill him and soak away his cares and worries. A warm haze enveloped him, wrapping him in cosy blankets of careless, endless peace.
After an eon of drifting, Loofah opened sleep-heavy lids. His companion still faced him, lost in her own dream. The foliage around her face was luxuriant now, with thin branches reaching upwards from her hair and tendrils growing from her forehead, and her fingers were slim green shoots, each sprouting its own cluster of emerald leaves. Her skin had thickened and her limbs and trunk were wrapped in a smooth grey bark.
Turning his head with some difficulty, Loofah saw that his own fingers were turning green and beginning to sprout. Along his arms the skin had darkened and roughened, and here and there hair follicles were swelling into buds. He wriggled his feet into the damp earth beneath the grass and felt tiny rootlets grow out from under his toenails to seek the life-giving moisture of the soil.
Lulled by the sun, his eyelids sank closed and he drifted again into an orange void, washed by wave after gentle wave of peace and emptiness. The activity of his mind was unnecessary now, a useless buzzing in his skull. As the vestigial remains of his brain, atrophied through lack of use, fused into the heartwood of his body, his thoughts slowed, then became intermittent—tiny flickerings in the void—and finally ceased.
In emptiness there is only being: no body, no feeling, no thought, volition or awareness. So in emptiness there is nothing, in being there is nothing. Emptiness is being, being is emptiness, and both are the endless void, both are nothing.
And in nothing?—peace, eternal and infinite.
Time passes, or perhaps it doesn't. Nevertheless, eventually—in the midst of all the nothing—there is something. It is no more than a tiny faint sensation, hardly a sensation at all.
But a prerequisite of any sensation, however faint, is nervous tissue. And indeed, an observant histologist would now have been able to make out, creeping like a fungal mycelium through the woody xylem of his trunk and branches, an extending network of neural axons, stimulated into growth.
With embryonic nerves to carry it, the faint feeling can now spread through his heartwood, gradually becoming solid, definite. Indeed it now seems to have an identity: a slight queasiness. And soon after there is a second sensation, coming up from his roots: could it be… pain?
The nausea and the pain meet and mix, and then—gaining strength in his rapidly developing neural network—spread out across his body, pulsing down his trunk and along his branches.
Suddenly, a wave of agony surges through his nascent nervous system. He cries out—but has no mouth—and he convulses—but has no muscles.
The surge was too massive and overloaded his circuits. But it seems to spur even more rapid development; the axons multiple and myelinate in order to carry the pain more effectively, and the foetal nematode ganglion—to where each of the nerve fibres transports its baleful cargo of hideous sensation—goes into overdrive, expanding and lobulating, increasing its capacity two-fold, four-fold, eight-fold.
And so, when the next bolt of agony fires through the steady throbbing background of nausea, his nervous system can handle it and he feels every last tingling spark. This time when he cries he hears something—a rough grunt—and when he convulses, his branches twitch. Red star-bursts of pain flicker faintly in the darkness and something tears at his ears: an ululating, screeching howl.
With the steady rhythm of an artillery barrage, explosions of pain now follow one after the other, each felt more exquisitely than the one before in his rapidly developing grey matter. He bellows like a tortured ox and the heavy shutters of his eyelids are blown open: an atomic blast of grey light burns into his embryonic retinas.
Throbbing pain, searing light, screeching noise, writhing sickness: an unholy alliance of sensation that goads him back to consciousness, that forces his neonatal brain to expand and reactivate—and that drags him further and further away from peace, from quiet, from the empty joy of nothing.
As his baby eyes strengthen, the light dims to a mere dazzle. Something moves upwards across his field of vision, pausing briefly before accelerating down towards his roots. The newly wired circuits form a single word—'axe'—before a titanic bolt of white heat obliterates all else.
His scream fades as the pain-bolt fires along his branches and sizzles out in his wilting foliage. Then there is a new sensation, a moment of accelerating weightlessness as the grey sky whirls over his head, followed by a crashing of branches as the earth thuds into him.
He lies dazed, staring at the drifting sky, wanting to vomit. A figure looms across the greyness—a white alien with a single black eye filling most of its face—and from a black metal hose sprays sickness into his face and across his arms. He coughs and gags and cries out. Then the spraying stops and he is left spluttering, snorting the poison out of his newly formed nostrils.
The alien leans over him, a half-focussed blur across his blinking vision.
'Ah lurv the smell of Agent Orange in the morning,' comes a muffled voice from behind the mask, 'It is smelling like—how you say?—la victoire.'
Then, as nausea convulses him, Loofah vomits half digested chocolate in its face.
'Oh, hello. It is lovely to see you again. I do hope you're keeping well and that—.'
As Loofah nodded weakly, Dentressangle's fist closed over the polite little tin of polish and he pushed it back into his pocket. Kneeling down, the Frenchman then started stripping twigs and withered foliage from Loofah's arms and body. He had removed his respirator hood, but still wore the white protective body-suit, with an elegant biohazard triangle embroidered across his chest. Stretched out flat on his back, Loofah stared up at the sky, now grey and heavy with thick cloud that obscured his solar lover. A strange whining registered in his neonatal ears, as if a squadron of oversize mosquitoes was cruising the clearing.
When Loofah was at last able to sit, reeling with nausea, the flexing of his body cracked sheets of bark away from his belly and thighs. The defoliant still filled his mouth and nose with the reek of industrial waste, but it had worked; all his leaves and shoots were dead and shrivelled. He retched again, spewing strings of white foam onto the dying grass.
'Ah, my friend, the killer of the weeds she is very powerful,' said Dentressangle, 'But soon all the plant in you is mort and you are feeling the OK-ness once encore.'
As the wave of nausea abated a little, Loofah was able to look up—but what he saw sent a sword-thrust of naked grief through his soul. White-suited figures filled the glade; some wore back-packs with plastic flagons from which they sprayed the orange poison onto the flowers and low bushes, while others carried howling chainsaws and were carving into the solid trunks of the saplings and larger trees. At the edge of the clearing, a jet of fire tore out from behind a bank of undergrowth and the crown of an infant ash exploded in flames.
'Norbert, I don't understand,' croaked Loofah, weakly, 'What's going on? What are they doing?'
'Do not be trying to speak, my friend. The throat, she has not yet the readiness.'
One of the figures stepped towards the lithe young beech that stood a few paces from where Loofah sat choking on anguish and herbicide; a massive red cylinder on his back fed through a rubber umbilicus to a black weapon in his white-gloved hands—its nozzle dripped sizzling drops of fire onto the grass.
'No! Not her! Not my sister!' cried Loofah. He struggled to get up, but his feet were gnarled severed roots and he fell forward into the earth pit from which Dentressangle had dug him. The weapon spewed flame and Loofah screamed. The blazing tree twisted in agony as she fell, the ivory skin of her belly and thighs blistering in the heat.
Loofah winced as Dentressangle pulled the last piece of rotting root from his left foot. He wiggled his toes, relieved to find that the axe had not reduced his quota, and brushed his hands over his naked belly and thighs to remove the last flakes of bark. Then, with Dentressangle's help, he struggled unsteadily to his feet.
The glade was now a massacre. The fallen and mutilated bodies of trees littered the withered grass, while those that still stood were now smouldering, charred skeletons. Even the young were not spared; one of the Frenchman's confederates was cutting down the last few whimpering saplings with a chainsaw, while another finished off the wounded, lopping off branches and carving twitching trunks into logs. Dying foliage and wilting flowers were everywhere and the stench of poison and death filled the air.
'Stop them, Norbert,' pleaded Loofah quietly, 'please stop them.'
'C'est terrible, mais nécessaire,' said Dentressangle, with appropriate solemnity, 'When les plantes are interfering in the affairs of men, then they must be teached of a lesson.'
'But—all this?'
'It is—how you say?—the only language they are understanding.'
Loofah looked down and saw the charred body at his feet, half girl, half tree. He sobbed and turned away.
'The leader of the ring,' said Dentressangle, 'No mercy could be considered.'
'She was harmless, Norbert, just a nature lover. She showed me peace, that's all, the peace of nature. There's no need for all this… senseless murder.'
'You are an étranger here,' snapped the Frenchman, 'and you comprends très little of our ways. Tell to me this: what would have happened if we had not been finding of you?'
Loofah pondered for a moment, remembering the bliss of nothingness he had so briefly enjoyed. 'I would have been, well, happy,' he said.
'You would have been a tree, a stupid wooden arbre, standing in the rain, being shitted upon by every oiseau in the sky. Is this what you are wanting?'
'But… it was so peaceful.'
'My friend, you are un homme and you are having the duties of un homme. When you are mort perhaps you can be "peaceful"—until then, you must be struggling and fighting like the rest of us.'
'But—.'
'What would happen if we were all turning into arbres? Who would be driving the buses? Who would be collecting of the taxes and selling of the toothpaste and mending of the hair-dryers?—tell to me this.'
A double-decker bus rumbled across Loofah's mind, being driven by a small rowan while on the top deck a stately field maple prodded around its trunk with a toothbrush, searching in vain for a mouth.
'And do not be forgetting that you are not an ordinary homme. You are Le Seeker, you are having of the special duties. What is it that you would do? Let that the evil one finds L'Une Qui Est Deux? Allow the bad to be triumphing over the good? Is this what you are wanting?'
'No, of course I don't, but—.'
'And for you to be stranded here forever, never to be going home? Are you not wanting to see your own home again?'
'Yes, I do, but—but—not this,' stammered Loofah, waving a bare arm over the scene of unremitting murder and destruction.
Dentressangle threw up his hands in disgust.
'So—the next temps you are in the great danger, you want that I should just be walking away?' he cried, 'Perhaps I should have left you with the insect mère, or in the hungry toilet. Is this what you are wishing I had done?'
With a shudder of horror Loofah remembered the termite queen and the gurgling regression of his second babyhood, and the carnivorous porcelain bowl. He sighed and slowly shook his head.
'No, Norbert, of course I don't,' he said, 'I'm very grateful, you know I am.' He turned his back on the devastation, struggling against a rising tide of misery. 'Do you mind if we go somewhere else now? The smoke is getting in my eyes.'
'Of course, my friend, let us be getting upon our way.' Then, with a lewd grin, Dentressangle glanced down at Loofah's groin. 'But perhaps it is best to put on the clothes first, yes? We do not want that every branch is falling to the chainsaw men, I think?'