The Grove by Mac Clevinger, March 17, 2017
“Well I don’t need this, and I don’t need you!”
The screen door slammed behind her as she disappeared into the night, the latch coming undone moments later as a trembling voice called out into the cloying darkness for the little angel to come back, that they were sorry and just wanted to talk, but from the dark no comforting sight came and in the light of day there would return the girl, no longer an angel and not long for this world.
It was a common sight for the girl to take off into the woods that sat upon her family’s property line, disappearing rapidly amongst the densely-grown trees along paths that welcomed and invited her to go deeper, but no one else could follow. Often, she fled along these paths, escaping the voices of family and authority which overwhelmed her, coming to a stop deep within the forest where no light filtered down into the murky greenery of old growth and forgotten places.
She would sit atop toppled stone columns, run along the low, overgrown walls that ended suddenly and drew invisible lines throughout the forest, lines that she never thought to connect to see the structures, now long-fallen, that had once stood where she often stood. It was her place that no one else could ever find, and it provided her the escape she sought.
For a time, that is; it was a haven for only so long before she began to hear different voices from those that drove her away. Not threatening, not accusatory; friendly voices, speaking in a language she didn’t need to understand to know what they were saying. They were welcoming, soft whispers that drew her to go to certain places and invited her to do things for them.
She wasn’t young, but it was widely agreed that she would never be old, a fact held by both her family and the doctors with their books on the workings of the mind and their simple truths, which refuted that a forest one could walk around in less than an hour could take her half a day to escape from. They would look at her family and point at entries in the molding leather books, shaking their heads and shrugging.
It wasn’t a whisper that drove her to escape to the forest so often, but the pressure that surrounded her everywhere but within that immense copse of trees. Hundreds of identical houses with the same lights shining and the same people inside surrounding her everywhere she went except for within the grove, where the presence of humanity disappeared and she could feel alone.
So it was that she fled to this place, as she had the previous day and the morning before and every other time that life became too much for her to handle. The night was dark, a closing wall of shadows following closely behind her while, ahead, a gentle light seemed to spawn from the moss that covered the forest floor, motes of light that danced ahead of her being devoured mere feet behind her.
At last she arrived at the first stone column, and as she passed it the darkness following her heels dissipated, a shock running through her. She gasped, a tether she had never felt before being released and freeing her from the last vestiges of the pressure she had so desperately wanted to escape. She laughed, leaning against the column and looking at the shining motes of light that gathered around her.
There were two unspoken deals within this place, one she was vaguely aware of and one she was made to forget. First: the grove gave her peace, and she gave the grove her service. Second: she took herself away from the grove, and the grove took her memory. It liked the first deal, pleased at having found a creature to tend to it as it had once been tended to by millions, but the second deal was an act of impudence it would not tolerate.
She explored, and the motes of light followed, watching. She came across overgrown walls, crumbling arches, fallen pillars among the rubble of collapsed roofs; all untouched and left to decay for a time longer than she could fathom, the significance of an act as simple as replacing a stone that had fallen from a wall equally unknown to her. She felt compelled to rebuild the structures, the act a natural one that fulfilled an ancient, forgotten urge that lurked in the recesses of her mind.
The last trace of the tenders of the grove had nearly passed out of its grasp, but the last sheep had returned to the fold without even realizing that the shepherd had called it, with no inkling of the service it was to provide for its master, and no clue that the gate had been shut behind it. The ultimate escape from a painful reality: a gift the original tenders had desired, as oblivious to the strings attached to it as the girl now was.
The grove spoke to the girl in whispers, directing her to a fallen monument and compelling her to rebuild it. She complied; a part of her passed on by her father leaping at the chance to serve, to fall into a subservience that had become engrained into the very nature of her bloodline. It made her able to hear the voice, able to pass into the grove where others passed harmlessly through a thin forest, and it made her susceptible to the will of the grove.
Once there had been millions like her, living in the grove to tend to it; now there was just her, a fluttering leaf on the family tree ready to be whisked away by the wind and lock the grove away to finally die at the hands of entropy. The bloodline could not be allowed to end. Releasing the tenders from the grove had led to its abandonment millennia ago, but had now brought it salvation.
It had learned its mistake, though. Keep the gate closed.
She jerked, perhaps another learned trait alongside serving the grove, and became panicked, dropping the stone she had been about to place on the growing monument. Voices in her head were not normal, she shouldn’t be hearing them and, where was she? She had to leave, she had to ignore the orders and run home before she hurt herself or worse.
The girl ran. The paths remained open, allowing her to easily run through the dense woods and pass an endless stream of ruins, once gleaming and proud, now fallen apart. Hours passed, and she was confident she wasn’t running in circles and beginning to feel dread as the voices kept speaking to her. They spoke of servitude and reward, of her ‘returning to the fold at last’.
The girl ran. It told her of her blood, of the tenders that had built the ruins from a single point, expanding the grove to encompass all that she saw and more. At its height, it had been a gleaming temple to a benevolent god, and that had been its downfall. Her ancestors had been greedy, had abandoned the grove for a world of pain and change where the grove could not help them.
The girl ran. But she had returned to it, had come to restore the grove and honor her ancestry. She would be rewarded, treated as a queen and kept safe – wasn’t that what she wanted? To be safe from that which first sent her here, to feel free of the people that hurt her and the life that crushes her every day? There is a reason that world was not for her: she belonged in the grove, and the grove could be a kind god if she served it.
The girl ran. The monuments were the key, their destruction the grove’s weakness and their reconstruction its salvation. The ruins could be reassembled with ease; it’s what she was always destined for. Her entire life an ill-fitting joke, waiting for the grove to give it true purpose. Why fight it? She could live forever, here; all she had to do was serve the grove.
The girl ran. What other options did she have? Did she really think the grove would let her go after all this time? The gate had been left open for far too long, and the girl had done an excellent service in repairing it. She would make for a fine tender – the word muddled in her brain; the grove didn’t speak to her, it forced ideas into her mind that she understood, but a ‘tender’ of the grove was hard to hold on to. It shifted into another word: slave.
The girl stopped. The grove continued to whisper to her, and she spoke back. “I want to live forever. Do that, and I will honor my ancestors.”
She passed countless ruined monuments, walls, temples, gardens; entire cities, fallen to disarray disappeared beneath her feet as she traveled in the half-light of a world with no sun nor sky, only a ceiling made of the vast trees that stretched far beyond the limits of the gentle light supplied by the floor of ancient moss.
Time lost its meaning here, with no celestial bodies to count the days, but the girl followed the grove’s directions and came upon a shrine separated far from the rest of the ruins, stunned by the sheer size of the grove. Perhaps years had passed in this realm during her travels, perhaps she had lost what little senses she had already had, but she knew the task ahead of her was impossible.
The grove told her how to rebuild the shrine, compelling her in the way she was familiar with when she would casually reconstruct a wall or archway. Power slowly flooded into the girl and into the grove as the shrine was built completely, a bonfire bursting to life in its stone enclosure that promised her eternal life so long as the flame continued to burn.
She had made a deal, and would now honor it as the grove had done for her. To honor her ancestors, the original tenders of the grove that had tainted her blood and brought her here in the first place, to this enslavement they had suffered for an eternity before making their escape and leaving the grove to decay and die.
The grove directed her to a city, encapsulated by the forest and massive in its size. More people had lived there than the girl could imagine, taking longer than she had lived to build the city and taking longer than human history, perhaps, to fall apart. She lifted a stone by the collapsed gates, feeling the tug that told her where to place it and begin the process of rebuilding.
She heaved the stone and shattered it against the ground, the perfect shape that would fit into the architecture ruined. The grove screamed as she broke the next one, unleashing a cacophony of threats it was too weak to deliver as she painstakingly destroyed the city stone by stone. Time had no meaning in the grove, only in the girl’s mind.
The woman was older, now, though she looked the same. The city was rubble, and she could feel her blood dragging her to serve the grove in rebuilding another broken structure. She followed it, the grove long grown silent in her mind as she resolutely found every stone of the gargantuan city and destroyed it.
The grove would call it foolishness, her family resolve. Her doctors would point at their books, sure they knew all, but she didn’t need to call it anything. It just was, and for the eternal life of the immortal woman she destroyed the grove stone-by-stone, one at a time, never ceasing in honoring the deal she had struck. Immortality in exchange for doing right by her ancestors.
There came a time when only one structure was left to destroy, the grove a sickly world of dying trees and rotting moss. It spoke, but only as it must have to the first tenders: guttural emotions and base needs the woman had long left behind. She looked the same, but as she looked in to the roaring flame of the shrine she had built her eyes showed the strain.
Even for her, this had been too much, but it was over. She removed a stone from the shrine, and the grove was gone. Her mind was quiet, light from the morning sun shone on her, and she was standing in a thin copse of trees behind a house she hadn’t seen in an immeasurable amount of time, better measured in millennia than in years.
She still held the last stone in her hands, and she let it drop to the ground as her body shuddered. The woman staggered towards the house, remembering a voice calling her an angel and asking her to return. She had lived a life longer than any but the grove’s; there had to be time for this, at least.
The woman knocked and entered the home. Numbness was spreading through her, pent-up time taking its toll on her body to match the suffering of her mind. Footsteps shuddered on stairs, and arms enfolded the woman in a hug as two sets of tears began to pour. The woman collapsed, smiling into eyes that recognized a change but would never understand what had happened to take their little angel away.
She wasn’t young, but it was widely agreed that she would never be old.