by E.T. Gulock

Along the crest of Lorden Range, below the timberline to the east of Fang’s Head National Park and Nature Reserve, a crew of loggers was sent to clear the old growth and level the ancient forest flat. Eighty phone calls, thirty town halls, ten protests, and seven years of corporate lobbying (and at least one threat to a notable senator with an obscene fetish), and the Transcontinental Dante-Roeker Logging Company won the permit to reap vast swaths of the oldest yellow cedars in western Canada, if not the oldest in all of North America.

“Telephone poles, I heard,” Rangel said from the passenger seat, unlit cigarette fixed to his lip. “Line the U.S. interstates with ‘em.”

“Thought I heard paper,” Tuck called through the cracked back window, from his perch on the cargo bed. The loggers rode in a jerking pickup truck, trailed by another and a series of lumbering lorries, down a thin dirt strip meandering snake-like through the mountainside.

“You don’t make paper outta cedar, idiot,” Ange muttered. Her eyes rarely strayed from the road, hands at ten and two. “I mean, you can turn anything into paper with the right technique.”

“Like human skin.” Daniel shucked dirt from his fingernail with a small knife.

“Don’t say gross things, Danny.”

“Okay.”

The procession reached an incline, tires fretting over dead foliage and well-trod soil.

“Point is, it’ll be boats. Saunas, decks, water tanks.” Ange adjusted in her seat. “Rich people shit.”

Eon Anders, the eldest of the ensemble—finding middle age, uncomplaining, through years of honest work and earnest living—listened quietly from his spot next to Daniel in the backseat. He worried the shoulder strap of his day satchel between his thumbs and watched the dense canopy, in its complex puzzle of fog-shrouded branches, pass overhead. In twenty years of logging, mostly pines and firs to the far west, he’d never been anywhere like this. There was something different about the air, thick with age and earth and sweet decay. This part of the forest had been all but untouched, with the exception of hikers and the odd ecologist, for its entire history, predating archive, predating man. It was here and always here, and would continue, until the end of the next thirty to forty business days.

Dawn, in its cold, muted grayness, was barely breaking by the time they came to the stand of cedars and hemlocks where they would begin their work, while the second truck rumbled onward with an accompanying lorry to a site further up the wild slope. Eon and his cohorts would see very little of the other team in the month to come, save for their early morning commutes from the town where they were lodging until the project was complete. There was much ground to cover.

They’d start with smaller trees, trim, buck, and load them onto the lorry in a well-choreographed flow of loggers darting like busied ants, paving the way for the felling of the older behemoths.

Eon had always been a faller, decided by his patience and balanced hands and ability to feel the minute sways of a trunk beneath his fingers. Wind, gravity, entropy, like a second language vibrating under his skin. He knew how to make a tree land exactly where he wanted it to.

Daniel spotted him as he made his first incision in a mountain hemlock. Daniel was a creep (Eon saw him eat a worm once; it’s one thing to do it for attention, another to do it when no one seems to be watching), but he was focused and reliable, and Eon preferred him over Tuck, who he wouldn’t trust with anything sharper than a brick or more demanding than sorting and scaling logs. The only person he really had any confidence in was Ange, the headfeller. She showed up, did her job and did it right, careful and efficient. He respected that.

The hemlock wavered, slightly, not in any way most people could tell. Eon paused, evaluated his progress, watched its natural lean.

“You’re good,” Daniel said. Eon knew, but never minded the reassurance. He continued. Wood spit to dust as he eased his chainsaw a quarter into the trunk. 

As he adjusted his position, he felt a pang somewhere to the left of his abdomen. A burn, a nag, a snag. He stiffened, but kept his hands firm. He tried to ignore it, focus on the work. The weight of the wood, the advance of the blade. The bark was damp with morning dew, painted vibrant with green lichen. His eyes traced the creeping pattern of fungal blooms. Its organic swirls. Its slow, certain hunger for growth. The lichen grew, mindless but aware, feeding from dead and living things alike and turning it into more of itself. Rampant need, ever seeking.

Lichen like the kind on his childhood home, left to rot. Lichen like the kind on his father’s grave.

Daniel was yelling something, but Eon didn’t hear.

It won’t be much longer now, Eon thought. A decades-long career coming to a close. One month, give or take. One month, and he’d fulfill his contract, do his job and do it right, and then he’d go somewhere farther up the mountain with his 9mm and blow his brains out in a garden of moss on Lorden Range.

Polyps. Such a mild, delicate word for something that could kill you. Near whimsical, in the company of pollen and pixie and psychopomp. Eon caught them late. He didn’t care for doctors, always felt like he had more important things to do, only went because Anthony begged him.

“We aren’t twenty anymore, honey,” he’d said. “Things don’t stop existing when we ignore them.”

Eon sat on the exam table and thumbed through black-and-white guerrilla photos of his insides, not thinking of much. Just staring till he could see the images when he closed his eyes. There were a dozen of them—teethy-white mounds gnawing through the warm, womb-like landscape of his colon. Maybe a year ago they could have been easily removed. Now they were turning malignant, and starting to spread. Paper crinkled under his butt as he shifted in his seat, as though maybe he could knock them loose.

“It’s not great, but it’s not hopeless.” The doctor nodded in a way that was probably meant to be encouraging but felt more like a business transaction. The doctor was tall, slim, and grim, a sunken, plastered face stretched loosely like waxen rubber over a mannequin’s skull, and Eon thought he might as well have been the specter of Death himself.

“There’s still time,” the doctor said. But not much. A window softly closing.

Eon was miles and years away as the doctor explained the diagnosis, in a zoetrope of his curdled past and imagined future. Flashes of his father’s starved body in a dark room, the door cracked; flashes of his daughter at a loss and losing him, his husband taking care of him and only crying in the backyard.

His family. He didn’t say a word to Anthony when he got home. Certainly not to Cynthia. He stood in front of the mirror, brushing his teeth for longer than necessary. Polyps. He’d convinced himself that he could feel each and every one of them. He thought of them often, the shape of them, imagined kneading them between his fingers and plucking them like clammy weeds, like enoki mushrooms, stubborn heads with needle roots. Amniotic slick, sick for harvest.

He laid in bed, Anthony curled next to him in his absurd, neck-kinking way, and watched late-night headlights refract off the ceiling. Maybe he’d be seeing a lot more of this ceiling. 

He could get treatment, of course. Lord knows where they’d get the money. They weren’t even sure how they were going to get Cynthia through college. Still, he could get treatment, catch a few years if he was lucky, catch a lifetime if he was luckier still. His father did that.

His father died anyway, and took everything and everyone down with him.

A man had a duty to keep his word and protect his family. His father had failed on both accounts, in his mind. Maybe there was more than one way to protect your family, especially when it came to protecting them from yourself and the person you become when you’re dying. Maybe.

“Christ, Anders!” Daniel was running, and for a moment, Eon was irritated. Lousy creep, messing around on the job. A monolithic shadow peeled across his face and fixed him back to reality. The hemlock was falling. And it was falling in the wrong direction.

“Timber!”

“Timber!”

“Timber!”

The loggers echoed one another like birds warning the flock, and they scattered just the same. The hemlock splintered and slammed into another hemlock, which in turn toppled over, likely from dead roots, crashing down on their pickup truck and narrowly missing the lorry.

“What the fuck?” Rangel ran to the truck.

“Is everyone okay?” Ange took stock of her crew.

“What’s going on?” Tuck.

“That was my truck!” Rangel.

"No, it’s not. You didn’t even drive it here.” Ange.

“Where’s your head, old man?” Daniel shoved Eon, two hands on his chest, as Eon stared dumbly at the crumpled remains of their pickup. “You tryna kill somebody?” Another shove.

“Hey!” Ange stormed over, pushing Daniel away and taking the chainsaw from Eon’s hands. “You good?”

Eon tried to speak, but his tongue wouldn’t budge.

“I said, you good, Anders?” 

He blinked, came to. “I’m good,” he said, perhaps a little too casually.

“‘Cause it don’t look it. What happened?”

“Misjudged is all.”

“Misjudged? No shit.” Rangel joined the others. “What’d I say, Ange? I want sharp loggers on my team.”

“Your team?” Ange glared at Rangel, sizing him up. “I’ll be the one to make that call. Eon’s always consistent. More than I can say for you."

Rangel scowled, but said nothing. Eon remained quiet, still scanning the last few minutes in his mind, trying to determine the moment he lost his grip. Ange studied him.

“Sit the morning out, Anders. Come back when you can be present.”

Eon didn’t like sitting out. He’d never done it before, come to think of it. He’d always been in the action. Now, watching from the sidelines, nursing a travel mug of lukewarm coffee, he felt itchy, restless. Ange tried to get ahold of the other team on her walkie to let them know about the incident, though no one seemed to be around to answer. No signal for calls to Dante-Roeker—that would have to come later. Rangel and Tuck made quick work of breaking the fallen hemlocks into smaller logs, while Josie, who drove the lorry, prepped the flatbed for loading. Daniel moved on to assess which trees needed to be felled next. They were an organized crew, even without Eon. He felt like he was already a ghost.

Soon enough.

It was at this distance that he also got a proper view of the elder tree they were cutting around. It was massive, clearly old, not much taller than the surrounding evergreens but easily seven or eight feet across. They would need to clear a wide path in order to fell it safely. At a glance, Eon had thought it was a cedar, with its slender leaves and drooping branches. But there was something odd about it, something that defied categorization. Maybe it was in the way its roots snaked from the ground in thick, gnarled coils, or how all the other trees seemed to bend toward it as though it had a greater center of gravity. It didn’t look unhealthy or blighted, but its bark was black as coal, bulging in places, and its crown bifurcated web-like in strange configurations that imposed on the growth of its neighbors.

When they arrived, under the cover of pervasive fog, it was just another tree to Eon. Now, as stark sunlight burned away the veil, leaving nothing but reality, it made his blood run cold.

At lunch, Daniel and Tuck ate together, cross-legged in quiet camaraderie, like they always did. They rarely said much to each other, but a deep friendship had formed between the two over the past year, like shy school children finding kindred spirits. Josie chatted up Rangel, who listened begrudgingly to her stories about her endless roster of nieces and nephews. 

“…and then there’s Jessica, she’s a vegan, you know. At twelve! A vegan!” She didn’t seem to notice or care if he was paying attention.

This left Eon as the day’s pariah, until Ange joined him on a nearby stump. He took a bite of his sandwich. She took a bite of hers. He took a swig of water. She cleared her throat. “You wanna tell me what happened?”

Eon shook his head slightly. He didn’t know what he could possibly bring himself to say. Ange nodded, took another bite of her soggy turkey-on-rye. For a moment, it seemed like she wasn’t going to press the issue further.

“Before I was a logger, I was a dancer,” she said. "You know that?”

Eon shook his head again. Normally a reserved, direct woman, her eyes twinkled at the memory. “It was second nature to me, even when I was a kid. I didn’t have to think about it. I just did it. Knew where to place my foot, how to curve my body.” Ange picked at the crusts of her sandwich, flicked them to the leaves. “And then one day,” she continued, “I was assaulted, on a street I’d walked a hundred times. Beat within an inch of my life. Broke my hip, fractured my ankle. Never even saw the man’s face. I always wondered what would’ve happened if someone had been around to help me, or if I’d had something to defend myself…” She paused, collected herself. “I had to take a year off dancing—physical therapy, the whole thing. But when I came back, it was all different. It was like I’d forgotten everything. When I moved my body, all I felt was pain, even if it wasn’t there, and I was back on that street, on that night in June, petrified. I had to leave what happened at the door to dance again. But I couldn’t. So I stopped. And ended up here the way any of us ends up here.”

Eon’s colon burned as his lunch pushed his digestive tract along. Ange felt so far away. He valued her words, but they were just out of reach. His pain was now, now, now. This was his present, and his future, until the end.

“My point is,” Ange said, at once gentle and severe, “if something is haunting you, and I can tell that there is, leave it at the door. You have more than yourself to think about when you’re on this crew. Suck it up and show up.” She winked, and managed to crack a smile out of him.

“Let’s get back to it, people!” Rangel clapped his hands once. Ange rolled her eyes and got to her feet, dusting crumbs from her hands.

“Let’s get Eon and Daniel back on the left, Rangel and I on the right,” she said. “Should be enough space for us both to fell. Josie and Tuck on bucking. Let’s try to speed this process up.”

As Eon rose, he felt a prick in his heel. It was faint and hardly worth noting, but since his diagnosis, Eon had grown increasingly aware of his body and its discomforts in a way he’d never paid attention to before. He reached down, lifted his pant-leg. A thin, black root, the width of a spider’s leg, protruded from the back of his ankle. He plucked it, and the sting was surprisingly sharp. A bead of blood ballooned from the speck left in its place. It must’ve gotten lodged in his skin somehow, perhaps in the chaos of the morning. He shrugged it off when he spotted Daniel.

He approached him as everyone assumed their positions. “Listen, Daniel, I’m sorry about earlier—” Daniel brushed past him without a word.

Right then. That’s how it’s gonna be today.

Despite the tension, things got better, for a time. Eon felt more focused. Daniel remained professional. Their chainsaws split the air like a swarm of angry cicadas. There were some uncommon calculations and improvisations required due to the unusual inward lean of the younger trees, but they adapted. The team settled into their rhythm, and four or five trees in, the morning’s incident seemed distant and back-of-mind.

Before long, it was time to address the elder tree. Eon found himself flushed with a dull ache of dread; he wanted to put it off till tomorrow, till the end of the month, though he couldn’t pinpoint why. He retrieved his tools and made some measurements, then made them again. He was being excessively careful. He could tell this tree wasn’t going to be simple. There was only one way to truly find out—he picked up his Rancher.

“Daniel, let’s get started.” Eon looked around, but Daniel wasn’t where he’d left him. No one else was paying attention, each absorbed in their respective tasks. He had to perch on a stump before locating him. Daniel was standing at the far edge of their man-made clearing, gawking at the woods. Eon caught up to him.

“Daniel.”

Daniel didn’t respond. He continued staring out upon the innumerable pines that taunted their meager progress. He was absently, but compulsively, shucking dirt from beneath his fingernails with his switchblade, digging deeper and deeper. In fact, he was bleeding, as the knife punctured the quick and smeared blood around his thumb. With a sickening click, he leveraged the knife until the nail sprang free entirely. Alarmed, Eon almost said something—but then he noticed what Daniel was staring at.

Amongst the snarl of trees and brush was an elk. A starveling: it appeared malnourished, even diseased, skin over bone, fur patchy and eyes as white as milk. Eon could see its ribs, and something squirmed in its swollen belly, which was the only substance to its skeletal frame.

A twig snapped, and the starveling elk bolted. Daniel suddenly mirrored its action, and snatched Eon’s Rancher from his hands before stalking off toward the elder tree.

“Hey—” Eon started before taking off after him. All heads turned as Daniel whipped the ignition and approached the trunk.

“What’s going on here?” Ange said.

“Old man’s going senile,” Daniel grumbled. “I don’t trust him with this tree and it’s bullshit I’m not taking the lead on this.”

He positioned himself, straightening his shoulders, and brought the humming blade forward, making a foot-long incision in the bark—

A foot-long incision that was reflected on his abdomen. Everyone jumped as Daniel yelped and dropped the Rancher, stumbling onto his back. A dark red stain spread rapidly across his white t-shirt. Tuck flew to his side. Rangel switched off the chainsaw. Josie was stock-still, hand to her mouth.

Tuck ripped open Daniel’s shirt to reveal a severe gash spewing blood, his intestines exposed and threatening to spill out at any moment. He was growing weaker by the second, eyes wide with confusion and terror, and he howled as Eon tore off a length of his shirt and applied pressure to the gaping wound.

“You’re gonna be okay, alright son?” Eon said, tying the fabric into a knot, dumbfounded but trying to concentrate. “Stay with me.”

Ange fumbled for her walkie.

Blip. “Krovac, do you copy?” Blip. “I said, do you copy?” Static. “We have an emergency on our hands, please respond. Logger critically injured. Please advise.” Nothing. 

Ange checked her phone: still no reception. She ushered back to the rest of the team. “Alright, I’ll take the lorry and drive him into town, try to get him to a hospital.”

“Rafferson,” Rangel said, looking at her grimly.

“We’ll get him the help he needs.”

“Ange,” he said in a more hushed tone, a finger pressed firmly to Daniel’s pulse. Ange froze. Rangel shook his head. “He’s gone.” Daniel’s eyes were lax and unblinking. Tuck held his limp hand, moaning, tears streaming down his cheeks. Eon released his pressure on the wound and it dribbled to a stop. Daniel was dead.

“Did anyone see what happened?” he asked.

“He musta cut himself.” Ange paced, mind racing.

“He wouldn’t do that,” Tuck blubbered. “He knew what he was doing.”

“The blade came nowhere near him,” Rangel confirmed.

“That makes no sense.” Ange.

“Nothing else would explain it.” Eon.

“It was the tree.” Everyone looked at Josie, who was still ogling at the impossible scene. It took a moment for her words to sink in. Ange scoffed. “What do you mean, it was the tree.”

Josie shook her head. “I saw it. The Rancher cut the tree. The wound appeared out of nowhere. The cut and the wound were the same.”

Rangel folded his arms, unamused. “Giant wounds don’t just appear out of nowhere.”

“What are you saying?” Ange said. “Be serious, a man just died. Our man.”

Josie shook her head again. “I know what I saw.”

An argument broke out, everyone talking over one another, each of them saying something and knowing nothing. Indignant, Josie snatched a hookaroon and marched over to the elder tree. The loggers went quiet. She stabbed the trunk, lightly, with the point of its hook, and immediately flinched. Ange rolled her eyes until Josie pulled back her shirt collar to uncover a small prick in her skin, blood trickling down her upper chest. Josie struck the trunk again, careful not to spike it too hard. More beads of blood manifested on her chest. Blood was emerging from the cuts in the tree as well, they realized—an oily amber-red substance, shimmering in the cold midday sun.

Josie’s eyes grew dark. “You were saying?”

“That’s it, we’re leaving,” Ange said, backing away. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’ve already lost one member of my team and I’m sure as hell not going to put the rest of you in danger.”

Just as she turned on her heels, the loggers noticed Tuck, clenching, white-knuckled, Daniel’s switchblade in his fist—stabbing the tires of the lorry.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Ange cried, storming over to him. She’d had enough stupidity for one morning.

“If what she’s saying is true,” Tuck panted, “then we’re not leaving until I understand what killed my friend.” He struck the final tire, letting the air hiss out, leaving the loggers with no transportation back to town. No one had ever seen such delirious fury in Tuck’s eyes. “And then I’ll kill it, too.”

The forest suddenly felt very vast, and the miles and miles separating them from civilization stretched wider and wider.

“Has everyone lost their minds?” Ange looked around, searching the faces of her team like she no longer recognized them.

Rangel picked up Daniel’s chainsaw and approached Ange. He carried himself with a stony resolve, but a smug glint danced somewhere in the corner of his lip. “I’m with Tuck. I want to see that tree on the ground.”

“You arrogant piece of—”

“Careful,” Rangel said. “Wouldn’t want to speak ill of your crew.” He walked closer, standing over her, chainsaw at his side. “You know, I never liked how you ran this team.”

“You just hate that a woman has the job you always wanted.”

“I don’t like that an incompetent woman has the job I deserve. And when you abandon your post, and I figure out how to fell this tree…we’ll see what Dante-Roeker has to say about that.”

Ange met his gaze. “If there really is something sinister going on here, you’ll get yourself killed.”

Rangel nodded, maddeningly certain of himself. “We’ll see.” He turned to face the rest of the team. “We’re staying. And I’m in charge now. We’re gonna figure out what makes this tree tick. You can make anything fall if you push it hard enough.”

Eon caught Ange’s eye, and an uneasy understanding passed between them. Nothing good would come of this.

The theories commenced. The loggers quickly realized that speculation as to the origins of the tree was arbitrary at best, downright absurd at worst. The mere mention of aliens, monsters, and gods made them feel silly, despite the circumstances. It didn’t matter where the elder tree came from. Only how it worked.

Tuck and Rangel were possessed. There would be no rest until the elder tree was felled. Josie, strangely, lit up during this process as well; what at first was fear turned to morbid curiosity, and soon she was more engaged than Eon had ever seen her. This left Eon and Ange, wary and alert, caught in a waking nightmare.

They began with a series of simple, cautious tests. Did the tree respond to different materials? Clearly metal was out of the question. Makeshift tools of glass and plastic yielded the same harmful results; a wooden blade fashioned from a discarded branch branded blistering rashes along Tuck’s forearms as he sawed the trunk.

Was it sensitive to other methods? The idea of burning it down was dismissed after Rangel brought a flaming stick close to the base and felt an intense heat on his own skin. Josie’s attempt at placing the cross hanging around her neck to the wood ended in an embarrassing silence.

Could it be taken apart, bit by bit, by hand? This began encouragingly. Ange picked strips of bark away without getting hurt. They expanded to snapping small branches off and were emboldened. But this was, ultimately, unrealistic, and they were at square one once more.

“What if we uproot it?” Eon proposed, after hours of toiling trial and error. The team was surprised to hear him speak up after getting very little from him for most of the day. “If we remove it, keep it intact, rather than destroy it, maybe it won’t retaliate.”

“How do you propose we do that?” Ange asked, fearing the answer.

“We dig,” he replied. “Loosen the roots.”

Rangel scratched his beard, contemplating. “And then we can bind the trunk with rope and use the lorry to coax it out.”

“Tires are blown, thanks to the little shit over here, in case you forgot,” Ange said.

“We can put wood under the tires to help with traction,” Josie suggested. “We don’t need it to drive far, we just need leverage.”

“And when an eighty-foot tree comes crashing down on top of you?” Ange was losing patience.

“If we time things right, no one will get hurt,” Rangel said. “We can wreck the truck if we have to. We just need to win.”

Josie set to work prepping the lorry, while Eon, Rangel, and Tuck began digging around the base of the elder tree. Nothing happened, and so they continued. They were making good progress.

While the rest were distracted, Eon crept over to Ange, who busied herself with a series of thick ropes from their equipment haul, conjoining them with unbreakable knots. She barely glanced up as she heard him approach. “You really think this could work?” she asked.

Eon squatted and started helping her with the rope. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “That was just to keep them busy.”

Ange flashed him a hopeful look, intrigued, almost impressed, then expertly erased all emotion from her face. “What are you thinking?”

“How far is the other team?”

“Could be two or three miles,” she muttered.

“I’m thinking eight against three is better than two against three. They can help us convince them to abandon this.”

Ange nodded, looping, tying, tucking.

“And if all else fails,” he continued, “they have a truck. Ideally with all four wheels. We can get out of here, at least.”

Ange finished her knot. “And if they try to stop us?”

Eon shrugged. “We keep running.”

They both stole glances at their team. Eon eyed the smashed pickup truck and thought of his satchel, still somewhere under the backseat. Its contents would help them right about now. But there was no way for him to retrieve it without drawing suspicion.

Ange set down the rope. “Now?”

By the time Rangel realized they were missing, Eon and Ange were long gone, and his voice was the only thing that could find them as it bellowed through the woods, calling after them.

They didn’t slow down until they were at least half a mile away, gasping for breath as they reached the winding dirt road. They walked in sweat-drenched silence. At least the silence was comfortable between them. Eon felt he could trust Ange, more than most of the people he had met in his life, and he was grateful for her company.

Evening was approaching, sooner than either of them cared for. The reddening sun pressed the horizon. The crooked pines were fading to silhouettes. And the road stretched on before them…

…Like the road Eon used to take home from school as a boy, when he was still small and wondering, when he was hardly anything at all. He’d take the long way home, through the lush fields and tucked neighborhoods of a mountain-held town in British Columbia—kicking rocks, chasing squirrels, anything to make the trip last a little longer, hoping his mother would get home first. Twelve years old, just a few years younger than his daughter was now, and already afraid of the place where he slept.

His house was cold and dry. Everything had its place, and he was never quite sure that he had one. His mother was a good Christian woman who loved ducks, who baked pies, who was as quick with the back of her hand as she was with a soothing word and a bag of frozen peas. From an early age, she seemed convinced, even if she would never admit it aloud, that Eon was a harbinger of all the misfortunes that had befallen the Anders family since he was born—the finances, the move, and certainly his father’s illness. She needed to do everything she could to purify him, to set things right.

His father’s illness. That was the worst of it, of course. Eon couldn’t stand the wheezing. In his prime, which he remembered mostly through the suggestion of old photographs, his father was an army man. Proud, stolid, a beer at night and a coffee in the morning, thank you, dear. Eon recalled the electric promise of a great, wicked violence humming just below the surface of his father’s skin, something he wouldn’t see from him until he was on his deathbed.

The wheezing, his father’s lungs revolting against the very air he breathed, filled the house like a malevolent specter. It followed you, down the hall, to the bathroom, while you were laying in bed. The door to his parents' bedroom (his mother insisted on taking care of her husband herself) was always cracked, and the room was dark and reeked of encroaching death. Eon avoided it as much as possible. He couldn’t’ve said more than a handful of words to his father in years.

On a Wednesday in early winter, after school, after taking as long as he could to get home, Eon found the house still empty, save for his father’s wheeze. His mother must have been working late, picking up extra shifts at the local nursing home to keep them afloat.

“Eon.”

His father’s voice slithered down the stairs. Eon froze, hoping he’d misheard.

“Eon.”

He crept up the steps to the second floor, to the cracked door, to the dark room, and shuffled inside, twelve years old. An IV stand hung by the nightstand, which was littered with pill bottles and herbal tinctures. His father looked twice his actual age, hollow-cheeked and slender as a corpse. Eon hovered in the doorway, twelve years old, until his father gave him a quick wave of his bony hand. He came to his bedside, kneeled to better face his old man.

“Hold out your hand,” his father said, between wheezes. Eon did. He felt something cold and heavy rest in the cup of his palms. The shape confounded him. It was like nothing he’d felt before. 

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized it was a gun. A 9mm. His father looked him in the eyes.

“Kill me.”

Eon shot to his feet, breathing sharply.

“You must,” his father rasped. “I need to die.”

His father grabbed his hand, with a strength he didn’t know he still had.

“Like this.”

His father unlocked the chamber to reveal the gun only contained a single bullet. He reloaded it, turned off the safety, and with Eon’s shaking hand still attached, shoved the pistol into his mouth. Eon pulled away, but his father held his grip firm.

“No!” Eon cried, pulling again and freeing himself.

“You ungrateful little shit,” his father said. “Do this for a dying man.”

Eon backed away, shaking his head over and over like he was denying the reality of a bad dream. And that’s when he noticed his mother, on the other side of the bed, on the hardwood floor: eyes unblinking and blood spilling from a hole between her clavicles. Eon screamed and ran from the room, his father’s belabored cries following him down the stairs and out the front door, into the bitter December air and the pistol still clutched to his chest.

The same pistol that was now in Eon’s satchel, under the backseat of a pickup truck, somewhere in Fang's Head National Park, with a single bullet, meant for his father, and now meant for him. He was going to bring it to work, every day, as a small, awful secret, as a reminder of what he came here to do, what awaited him at the end of this job.

Years later, when the broken boy became a reserved young man, Eon tried everything he could to reduce the harm he inflicted on the world. He was careful, calculated, kept to himself. If he stayed alone, he would never hurt anyone, and he would never be hurt.

And then he met Anthony. Sweet Anthony. Soft Anthony. They grew old together, and Anthony showed him love he never knew existed, built him a home with his bare hands—a farmhouse on a plot of land left from Anthony’s father, a farmer himself, and his grandfather before him, and it was there they would bring home a child, a baby girl, and make her feel safe, and make her feel loved, raised under a roof where mistakes were met with tenderness and nothing bad ever happened. It was the only true home Eon ever knew. He couldn’t imagine losing that. He couldn’t imagine it—

“Gone.”

Eon blinked away the past, hazy from memory, and realized they had reached the other team’s worksite.

“They’re all gone,” Ange repeated.

The loggers were nowhere to be found. Their pickup truck and lorry remained, abandoned, but there wasn’t a person in sight. A few trees were felled but left uncut, and the team’s equipment was missing. An eerie quiet resided in the small clearing. Eon scanned the obscured horizon.

“It’s like they all just…”

“Walked into the woods and didn’t come back?” Ange raised a pointed eyebrow, like they were amateur detectives on a confounding case. The familiar was feeling increasingly foreign, and the strange was becoming commonplace, leaving them with nothing but questions whose answers Eon wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

Now wasn’t the time to solve mysteries. Now wasn’t the time to be curious. They both knew something was deeply, deeply wrong here, and they needed to get to town as quickly as possible. They wouldn’t be able to help anyone if they were dead. The other team’s pickup revved to life without protest, and together they drove back down the rutted dirt road toward their crew, toward the elder tree, toward their escape.

The mist returned with nightfall, and Ange had to run the windshield wipers as the truck lurched onward. She was driving as carefully as she could, but an urgency weighted her foot against the gas. Eon gripped the passenger door. There had been a moment, as he eased into his seat, that he’d felt a wave of relief wash over him—all they had to do was drive; this would be over soon. But the closer they drew to the elder tree, the slicker his palms became, the faster his heart pounded in his temple. Their worksite couldn’t be much farther now.

“I want you to do me a favor,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” Ange said, eyes fixed on the road.

“No matter what happens, keep driving.” Ange hesitated. He continued. “When we pass the site, don’t look. I’ll look for us, but it doesn’t matter what I see. We’re better off coming back with help.”

After a deep breath, Ange nodded. Eon patted her arm. “We’re gonna be fine. Hell, I’ll take you dancing after this.” 

Ange chuckled. “Suddenly being a dancer doesn’t sound so bad.”

Eon cracked a smile. There was comfort in her presence. He felt braver with her here. Eon, who was never shaken, Eon, who was always there in times of need, needed a friend tonight. And tonight, Ange truly felt like his friend.

His smile faded as his attention returned to the ever-present ache in his side, briefly masked by adrenaline. Here he was, making plans. As if he wasn’t dying, as if he wasn’t planning on dying. He imagined becoming closer with Ange, introducing her to his husband, having her over for dinner, taking swing classes. His gut soured with guilt and grief; he mourned a future denied of him. Maybe he could save the lives of his team. That didn’t mean he could save his own. But he could pretend, for a moment—

“Shit!” Ange slammed on the brakes.

A staggering figure, washed pale by blinding headlights, struck the truck’s hood with its full body. It writhed against the metal, amorphous and liquid, as though a body without bones. Then it stiffened, its solidity restored, and bolted upright, staring at them with swollen eyes.

It was Josie.

Any jovial, next-door-neighbor charm to her character was gone. She stared at them like a nocturnal animal, frozen by instinct. A bruise bloomed lichen-green across her cheek. Blood pooled along her bottom lip. She swayed, unsteady, in rhythm with some invisible wind. Ange rolled down her window and leaned out tentatively.

“Josie?”

Josie didn’t budge. She stared, she swayed. Her throat pulsed like she might cry or puke or scream. Ange unbuckled her seatbelt. “I have to check on her.”

Eon felt his stomach sink. They were so close. Only Josie and a few silent miles to town stood in their way. Any wrong move could be their last. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Look at her, Anders, we can’t leave her like this.”

Ange unlocked her door. Eon’s hand flew to her shoulder. “Ange, don’t—”

BANG. Josie threw her head hard against the hood. The truck rocked. BANG. Josie hit her head again. BANG. Again. Eon swore he could hear her skull cracking, if he could hear anything over the violent rush of his own blood in his ears. Brown fluid leaked freely from a widening gash along her hairline, coating her face in a glistening mask. In a frenzied flash of white and red, diodic light and viscera, Eon thought he caught a glimpse of the Josie he knew—scared, fighting, begging for help—before it was overridden once more by something primal and inhuman.

Ange was out of her seat before he could say another word. He watched her through the opaque grime of the windshield as she rushed to Josie, pressing her hand against her chest to stop her. Josie went blank and still once more, slack-jawed. Ange threw a glance at Eon, urging him to help her.

He released his seatbelt and opened his door. Dead leaves crunched beneath his boots. His legs felt like they were encased in lead. It took great effort to put one foot in front of the other and make his orbit to the front of the truck. He felt as though any sudden movement would provoke What Used To Be Josie, stir the devil inside her, prompt her to attack or flee or split her head open. Soon, too soon, he was at her side.

“Josie.”

She reacted. Eon hadn’t expected her to. She turned to look at him, with eyes of glass and muscles that twitched as if she couldn’t remember how to use them. An aching desire to comfort her hit Eon’s system. She seemed so sad just then. He wanted to reach out, put his arm around her like she was Cynthia after a bad day at school.

“Remember who you are,” he said gently. “You’re going to be okay.”

There was a moment, fleeting, that she seemed to be pushing back against whatever was inside her.

“Let’s get you home, okay?”

Josie’s brow furrowed, like she was trying to piece together what he had said; like she was making sense of a dream; like the idea of home was a distant, forlorn memory. “Home?”

“Yes.” Eon nodded encouragingly.

“Home where you buried your father? Home where you buried your mother?”

Eon took a step back, as though struck. Josie took a step toward him.

“Home with the dark room? Home with the smell of sick?”

Eon shuffled out of the halo of the pickup’s headlights. “Ange, we need to go.”

“Home where the son became the father, and the father became the spirit?”

“Ange, we need to go now.”

Before Ange could move, Josie grabbed Eon’s shoulder—more for support, it seemed, than to assault. Her gut spasmed inward. Something crackled deep inside her. Her left eye burst like a punctured membrane, its white meat dribbling down her cheek. Eon tried to jerk away but her grasp held firm. From her collapsing iris, a flower bloomed. It started as a needle-fine stem, inching its way out like hatching larvae. Then it erupted into crimson petals, a beautiful, hypnotic growth shimmering with ichor. Josie flinched and her jaw fell open, detaching from the skull with a sickening crack and hanging loose by flesh alone. Her throat bulged, and a tangle of twigs emerged from within, writhing of their own accord, stretching out toward Eon.

Suddenly, Josie was torn from him. He blinked and she was gone, sprawled a few feet away. In her place was Ange, panting and dumbfounded in the truck, clearly wondering what she’d just done, and if it had been the right decision. Eon could see her unraveling, bit by bit, the day’s events undermining her footing on reality. For every ounce that he cared for his fellow loggers, he knew she cared more. This was her team, her responsibility, and every scratch that came to their flesh was a scar beneath her own she’d carry for the rest of her life.

Ange put the truck in park and raced back to Josie’s side. She was limp and crumpled like a dropped doll. Ange’s hand flew to her mouth. “What have I done?”

Josie shot up, wild-rapt. She seized, convulsing in fits and starts, before righting herself and bounding back into the woods on all fours.

"Josie!” Ange ran after her without another thought, vanishing into the bramble and the haze and the dark.

“Ange!” Eon called after her but it was too late. She was gone, her frantic movements swallowed by the night. He was left alone and with a choice. His eyes darted from the forest to the road to the truck. The keys were still in the ignition. He could do it. He could drive to town, return with reinforcements. Anyone who walked Lorden Range alone did not seem to fare well. But a scream from the dark woods, raw and unbridled, sent him running after Ange, regardless of what awaited him in its ring of shadows.

The understory was clothed in cotton fog, thicker than ever, and everything had grown silent and rarefied with grim potential. Eon hurried blindly amongst the ghosts of trees. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do when he found Ange, especially if she was in trouble. Forces were at work here he couldn’t begin to fathom, and the edge of the forest had already become unclear; his way out could just as easily have been in one direction as another. All he knew was that he had to do something.

A shape moved in the fog, as fluid and fleeting as the fog itself. A hint, a tendril, then nothing but smoke and suggestion. Eon skidded to a stop. Stillness held the scene.

Then—a whimper. Eon strained to listen, inching forward. Fading to the fore, mere feet away, was a man kneeling, as though in prayer or surrender. His hands clutched his stomach, and there came the sickening sound of thick, roiling molasses. Just beyond him, looming like some ancient deity, was the elder tree. Its strange, magnetic gravity seemed stronger, and Eon felt himself compelled to it as though his gut was filled with metal filings.

As he drew near, the man came into focus: Tuck, pale and rawboned, spattered with fresh wounds. That guileless young man, who used to pretend sticks were swords instead of doing his work, now looked like a boy who had only ever known war, mortified and numb and ravaged by grief. His skin burgeoned with living rot, a sap-like substance seeping from scratches down his arms and chest, which were exposed from beneath a tattered shirt. He yanked something from his abdomen, moaning, and Eon realized that Tuck was not clutching his stomach, but digging inside himself, his belly parted into a gaping hole, as though two thumbs had been pressed into the bruised fruit of his flesh to pluck a maggot.

In one hand was Daniel’s old switchblade, shimmering burgundy in the stifled moonlight. In the other was a tangle of roots which led deep inside his body. 

“It’s a little stuck,” Tuck said. “A little stuck.” He looked at Eon like a child struggling to button his coat, lifting the roots. “Can you fix it? It’s a little stuck.”

As he tugged, Eon could see the roots beneath Tuck’s skin, burrowed through arteries and coiled around muscle, like a tapeworm colonizing the space between the things keeping him alive. They dug their way up his spine, into his neck, ending somewhere in the yolk of his skull. Eon traced them with his eyes along their labyrinthine path through the rest of his body, ending at his ankles, and it called his attention to his own body, his own pain. There was the dull ache of the cancer, the vicious tightening of his chest—and a pinch in his heels.

He looked down to discover roots planting themselves inside his feet and lower calves—just like the root he found lodged in his ankle that morning. Alarmed, he pulled at them, feeling them slide free from his legs like long, elastic syringes. He tossed them as far away as he could, disturbed but grateful they hadn’t bore themselves further than they already had. The roots, slick with ripe blood, slithered away, retreating to the elder tree—into the hole the crew had dug, which circumscribed the trunk in a semicircle. The hole was deep, far deeper than should’ve been possible. He saw roots writhing in the darkness, down, down, down…

Beside it, a few feet away: a chainsaw. Eon ushered to it.

“It’s time to end this,” he muttered, whipping the ignition. He assumed as long as he wasn’t connected to the tree, he should be safe from mirroring wounds. He would find out soon enough. He walked around the hole and lifted the roaring blade inches from the trunk.

A groan reverberated from the heart of the woods. The cedars swayed. Night birds shrieked, invisible fluttering from above. The starveling elk galloped through the dark, wailing like a prehistoric banshee. Lorden Range was waking up.

Tuck rose like a marionette and hurtled toward Eon, strong-arming the chainsaw from his hands with unnatural strength. The chainsaw hit the ground and spun like a serrated top, aggravating the air with its grating whine. Tuck brandished his knife, and Eon caught the blade, slicing his hand but wrestling it away in the process, before bolting as fast as he could.

From the darkness, hands wrapped around his chest and pulled him away.

He landed hard against the trunk of a twisted cedar. He brought the switchblade to his assailant’s throat, before realizing it was Ange. She was panting in quick, halted breaths, bringing a finger to her lips. He yielded, pocketing the knife. The rustle and snap of bark and bone came from an approaching Tuck. Without saying a word, Eon checked Ange’s heels, plucking roots from her veins. He wondered if she had caught them earlier, just as he had, not realizing what was happening at the time; if she knew pain as intimately as he did, noticed things in her body others did not. She gave him a bewildered look, but there was no time to explain.

Ange pointed to a path through the trees, shifting like a mirage. She counted down with her fingers.

Three.

Two.

One.

They took off, stumbling over uneven terrain. Eon didn’t know where they were going, wasn’t sure Ange knew either, only that they needed to get away, and fast. In his periphery, he caught a glimpse of Tuck disappearing into the brume.

Pain shot through Eon’s colon, and he faltered. The pain was sharp and blinding, his head throbbing, his vision tunneling. He’d been ignoring his health for too long, and the stress of the day was pushing him to the edge. Ange glanced over her shoulder and slowed. Eon shook his head, acid rising in his throat. “Keep running.”

“What’s wrong?” she whispered.

Rangel lunged from the shadows, tackling her to the ground. He was in better shape than Tuck, but not by much—hunched and feral, fungus protruding from his head in grisly sprouts. He wrapped his hands around Ange’s neck as she struggled against him.

“You fucking bitch. You ready corpse.”

She nailed him with a free knee to the gut, and he toppled over. Eon called out, only managing a muted cry. He hobbled toward them, teetering as his insides sizzled with nuclear heat.

The fog drifted and he spotted their crushed pickup truck, still concave from the unforgiving weight of the morning’s fallen hemlock.

His gun. It was somewhere hidden beneath the backseat, in his satchel. He could make it if he moved swiftly. He took a breath, willing the pain to shrink. As Ange and Rangel struggled, he made his break for it. It was only several good strides away. He gave the back door a yank, then another, but it was molded shut and wouldn’t budge.

vrrr-vrrr-VRRRRR! A vicious, mechanical growl. Tuck came careening from Eon’s left, held together by flora and sinew, manically swinging the chainsaw. Eon dodged, and the chainsaw lodged itself into the truck’s roof. In the seconds that it took for Tuck to remove it, Eon shuffled to the cargo bed, where the back window was shattered open with just enough room for him to crawl inside.

Things would’ve been easier if I’d killed myself by now, he thought.

Glass teethed his ribs as he folded himself into the backseat, grappling wildly for his satchel. All he felt was fabric, metal, shards of tempered glass—there. His hand latched onto the shoulder strap. He tugged, then tugged again, whipping it free—

He screamed as Tuck’s chainsaw hacked into his right leg. He kicked frantically, trying and failing to knock him loose. His fibula snapped just as he tumbled into the cargo bed, whacking Tuck with his satchel. The blade dislodged and Tuck fell to the side, giving Eon just enough time for his feet to hit the ground. He howled through gritted teeth as his leg gave out from under him, barely attached.

Tuck righted himself, staggering forward to finish him off. The satchel had rolled just out of reach. Eon closed his eyes tight, bracing himself.

The headlights of the lorry flashed on, and the engine roared to life. Tuck paused, turning. Eon squinted.

Josie was in the driver’s seat. She gripped the wheel, a flurry of emotions competing for control of her face. She was clearly fighting the elder tree’s influence with every fiber of her being. And for a moment, if only a moment, she was winning.

She floored the gas.

The flat tires scrabbled for purchase, then found it along the wooden ramp she had built earlier. The lorry trampled Tuck, chainsaw and all, and Eon rolled out of the way just in time. The lorry picked up speed—rocketing toward the elder tree. She was going to knock it down.

It crashed, full force, into the trunk, and erupted in towering flames. Eon could feel the intense heat flare against his skin as it illuminated the gloomy night like the Fourth of July. Josie’s desperate screams curdled his stomach as she was consumed by fire.

The elder tree didn’t budge. It didn’t even sway. It was as tall as ever, as though a twenty-five-thousand-pound semi-truck had been a speck of dust. A sudden gust of wind extinguished the flames of the lorry, Josie’s screams along with it.

Eon scrambled for his satchel—the 9mm was inside. It felt heavy in his mud-caked hands. He checked the chamber: one bullet, dull from decades, meant for himself. A part of him still yearned for it, to be released from his responsibilities, to be relieved of his pain. He could do it. He could do it now, even.

Click. He closed the chamber and turned the safety off. Orienting himself, he realized Ange and Rangel were nowhere to be found. He almost called out but thought better of it. The starveling elk watched him from a distance with ghastly, opal eyes. Roots snaked from its hind legs.

“Don’t move.” 

Rangel stood behind Eon. His bulky arm was fastened tightly around Ange’s throat, holding her aloft like a shield. 

“Go,” she rasped. Eon was paralyzed. He aimed his gun, but didn’t want to risk hitting her. Rangel flashed a wicked grin as worms tunneled through his gums.

“There’s something inside me,” he growled. “And it wants. It wants more and more and more.”

As Rangel spoke, Ange opened a free hand, twitching her fingers. Eon was puzzled at first, until he noticed her glancing at his coat pocket. He understood, but he had to be careful. One wrong move, and his friend was as good as dead.

“I understand its hunger. I, too, want more.” Rangel licked her cheek with a sap-sticky tongue. “I think I’ll start with her.”

“Enough,” Eon said. In one quick, fluid motion, he tossed Daniel’s switchblade into Ange’s waiting hand, and she stabbed Rangel in the thigh. He grunted, loosening his grip just enough for her to break free before Eon pulled the trigger and shot him in the mouth. The bullet tore out the other side in a blur of fractured teeth, and he dropped to the forest floor with a hulking thud.

He choked, miraculously alive, and grabbed at Ange’s leg, digging his nails into her, trying to drag her down. Something flashed behind Ange’s eyes, a fire surging. She straddled him and brought the switchblade down hard onto Rangel’s contorted body, unleashing a series of furious blows to his chest, a scream emerging from deep within her own, an anger long contained, finally released. Rangel shuddered before sagging motionless, fried nerves firing and finding nothing but a stopped heart.

The forest settled. Not the call of a murrelet or the scampering of an unseen critter. A velvet breeze blew through, and the mist began to dissipate, slightly, revealing their surroundings and making mild what once seemed baleful and infected with nightmares. For all the world it seemed like any other provincial park in Canada—peaceful, balanced, asleep for the night.

The gun felt lighter in Eon’s hand. It was empty. His father’s gun was empty.

“Nice move,” Eon said.

“You too,” Ange replied. “What now?”

“Look.”

Vines had emerged to claim the broken bodies of Josie, Tuck, and Rangel, towing them to the base of the elder tree, into the hole, into the hungry earth. Eon and Ange followed and watched them off, like departing soldiers, like setting suns, like the funeral they would never be able to give to them, until all that remained were themselves and the elder tree and the endless acres of Lorden Range.

“Right then,” Ange said, and started stalking the worksite, sifting through blood-soaked foliage.

“What are you doing?” Eon asked.

“Looking for something to cut that godforsaken tree down.”

Eon peered up at the elder tree’s maze of spidery branches, its tremendous, imposing mass. He was struck by its resoluteness. It felt inevitable—it was here and always here, and would continue. The world would crumble long before this tree would fall. Thousands, millions of people would die; empires would rise and cannibalize themselves; time would give and take as it pleased, and this tree would bear witness to a future Eon would never see, that no one may ever see.

Eon came to Ange and rested his hand between her shoulders. She paused.

“Leave it,” he said gently. “Leave it be.”

She shook, tightly, and began to cry, quivering with tears that could no longer wait. Eon dropped his gun to the ground—and there it would stay—and folded her into his arms, and she folded him into hers, and he wept as well.

“Let’s get you home,” he said. Ange nodded, unable to say more. They started to limp away, supporting each other’s weight. “Let’s get us home,” he amended.

“I don’t think I want to be a logger anymore,” Ange said dryly.

Eon laughed, and his body burned with pain; he winced—then laughed again, in spite of it. The thought of carrying this pain indefinitely was almost unfathomable to him. It was a life haunted by unanswered questions, unbearable grief, and the immense, abiding weight of being, here, now, no matter how much it hurts. How could anyone choose it? 

But god, he felt the cold air in his lungs, his throat raw with ice, and he was alive. As dawn broke once more, and the path out of the forest was illuminated gradually before them, Eon stood a little taller, held his friend a little closer, and walked in the direction of the only home he’d ever known.