A Minor Case of Evergrowth
There was such a thing as a proper treasure hunter, and then there were men like Ned and Burl.
Proper treasure hunters carried maps in leather tubes, sensible boots, and whips that they could use to swing over chasms or during deadly chases and whatnot. They recognised a cracked, earth-encrusted shard of pottery as belonging to the Lost Princess of Such-and-Such and not, you know, as belonging to an old privy pot or something.
No, Ned and Burl weren’t treasure hunters. They thought of themselves more as treasure liberators. There was no point just hunting treasure. It needed to be out there, in the world, working for the common man, making itself useful. They never went hunting for priceless treasure, which, by dint of not having a price, was worthless.
They did have a map, though. Admittedly, it was mostly smudges and grease by now, but it was still a map. It had an X on it and everything.
They were three days into the Blacklace Forest when Burl stopped dead, sniffing the air like a fat, balding bloodhound. “You smell that?” he asked.
Ned, who has been carrying most of their meagre equipment and a large part of resentment, nearly walked into him. “I told you you shouldn’t have eaten those mushrooms last night.”
“No, not that,” Burl snapped. “The air has changed. Smells…mysterious.”
Ned looked around them. They were deep in the Forest at this point, far past the point where sunlight gaily filtered down through the leaves. Here, in the heart of the forest, it never got above twilight. The light was green, full of dust motes, and didn’t extend anywhere near far enough for his tastes. The trees were huge and primaeval, and the air felt stuffy and dead. What he wouldn’t give for a breeze. “Smells like moss. And mould. Smells haunted.” He shivered.
“Well, we are in a haunted forest,” Burl conceded.
“That old geezer was having a lark, weren’t he?” Ned asked nervously. “There ain’t really ghosts and all manner of unspeakables in here, is there?”
“Of course it’s haunted,” Burl said confidently. “Stands to reason, don’t it? You’re not going to find ancient treasure in the middle of sunshine and flowers. Anybody could find that!”
Ned didn’t look convinced. When you’re in a tavern, all nice and warm, the idea of going off looking for lost cities full of hidden riches seems like a right jape. Here though… He kept hearing noises behind him, but when he turned around, there was nothing there. And no matter how he turned, there was always a behind him in which some unspeakable monster was no doubt waiting to pounce.
“No,” said Burl, unfolding their scrap of a dog-eared map from his pocket, “all the best treasure is where it’s all haunted and cursed and the like. Everyone knows that.”
“How much further?” Ned said, eyeing the paper in Burl’s hands. As maps went, it wasn’t the best he’d ever seen. A handful of squiggles and a mark that was either spilt wine or the blood of someone dying heroically just before they passed it on. In the gloom of the forest, it was all black.
Burl consulted his compass. It wavered non-commitally. “Bound to be close now, you know,” he waved his hand, “the air’s gone different. A sure a sign as any, that.”
Ned, standing knee-deep in ferns the size of umbrellas, felt that an actual sign saying something like “This way, just past this next patch of evil-looking thorns” would have been far better.
The path they’d been following, if it could be called a path, had long since given up on the idea of being found by humans. All the effort had been put in at the edge of the forest, and here, where it felt it could get away with it, it had just gotten lazy. Roots ran across it like sleeping snakes, waiting to catch the foot of the unwary traveller, perhaps twist an ankle if they were lucky. Branches hung low and snagged at them in passing. Everything grew too closely together, which shouldn’t have been possible, and definitely felt personal.
“Have you been marking the way out?” Burl asked him.
This was news to Ned. “What? You’re meant to be marking the way out.”
“I’m navigating!”
“Well, can’t you just…navigate back or something?”
Burl gave him a dark look. “And if I meet a horrible end at the hands of some ghoul? What’ll you do then?”
“I should probably hold the compass then,” Ned shrugged.
By late afternoon - or as near as they could tell, for the light never really changed - even Ned could tell that the forest was changing. It was gradual - forests aren’t good at abrupt, as a general rule. The vines, which had hung in loops as thick as rigging rope, petered out. The trees, still vast and disappearing above them, seemed to space out a little more. The feeling of oppressiveness lifted a little. The feeling of doom increased, but Ned always said you had to look on the bright side.
He pointed off to their left. “That bush or whatever. Does that look like something to you?”
Burl squinted at it. “I guess if we’re looking to pass the time, it sorta looks like a stag.”
“Do you think it’s a…” Ned’s throat was suddenly dry.
“An undying forest deity?” Burl said. He bent down, then chucked a rock at it.
“What’d you do that for?” Ned blurted, slapping Burl’s hand before he could lob another one. “What if we’re cursed now?”
“That’ll just mean we’re guaranteed to find the treasure. Ain’t nobody that was ever cursed died before getting their hands on the treasure that got them cursed. That’s like the first rule of treasure hunting.”
They continued on, Ned hunting through his gear for anything that would lift a terrible curse. They came across more creatures that looked like they’d sprouted from the ground, rearing in dynamic poses of branches and leaves. Burl chucked some stones at them for good measure. Ned found their salt container and threw some over his shoulder for good luck.
One moment, they were pushing through undergrowth, the next, they emerged into what looked like a city. If a city were shaped of roots and vines and all manner of green things.
The buildings were tall and looming, and the streets were narrow and winding. The air was thick with the scent of damp earth and blooming flowers. It was eerily quiet, except for the occasional rustle of leaves and the distant chirping of birds.
“Oh,” said Burl, simply.
“Oh,” agreed Ned.
“You know, I hadn’t expected the rumour to be so literal. ‘Go deep into the forest and find the hidden city.’ I thought there’d be more, well, brick and stuff like that.”
Ned nodded. A road ran before them, if road was the word for a strip of ground half-lost beneath moss and ivy. On either side stood dwellings, or at least, in some simpler, less chlorophyll-rich age, that’s what he thought they’d been. Their walls were mounded and bulging with vegetation, as though the local garden patch had gotten wildly out of control. Roofs had vanished under mats of creeper and briar. Holes where there had once been windows peered out at them with beady suspicion.
A square lay a short way ahead, choked with fern, long grass, and small trees growing where no small trees had any right to grow. Everywhere, green growth pressed in so thickly that it gave the impression that the city was being slowly digested.
And in the street, scattered here and there, more…statues, if he could call them that.
Age had not been kind to the details, but they looked too lifelike to be accidental. That clump over there could be a person with their arm in the air, as if they were waving. That pair, a parent and child, hand in hand. A wedge, that if he looked just right, could be someone sitting, leaning against the building. The more he looked, the more his brain pattern-matched people into poses, frozen in time.
“Interesting choice of decor,” Burl said, peering closely at one. He poked his finger through what could only be the head of one.
“This is a terrible choice of decor. This place is haunted.”
“Rumoured to be haunted.”
The rumours were doing a pretty good job for Ned. “They’re all people, Burl. In the middle of doing things.”
“Well, it’d be pretty boring if they were doing nothing. If you’re gonna go to the trouble of making bushes shaped like people, you might as well do it with flair!”
There was a soft rustling of leaves shifting against leaves, despite there being no wind. As if the greenery were whispering about them behind its hand. “I don’t like this,” Ned said.
Burl, who could never admit to the same thing as Ned, said, “Then we shall proceed with professional caution.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means if we see anything dreadful, we leg it.”
They continued on, walking through the empty streets. The silence was oppressive, and the air felt thick with anticipation. It seemed to hum.
Ned put a hand on some vines to steady himself as he clambered over a blockage in the road. He could have sworn they pulsed like a heartbeat.
Burl crouched ahead of him. “Well,” he said. “That’s promising.”
“What is?”
“This,” Burl said, indicating all the growth around them. “It’s got a direction.”
Ned was about to say something possibly hurtful, then stopped. It was true. The vines didn’t merely cover the walls; they streamed across them. Roots didn’t sprout evenly, and branches didn’t grow out as they should. They all leaned, reached, or burrowed in much the same general direction, as if everything green in the city had once been seized by a powerful urge to get somewhere in a hurry.
“That is so creepy.”
“Promising,” Burl insisted. “Treasure likes promising. It likes patterns.”
“I don’t think treasure likes anything. It’s treasure.”
“That’s the sort of narrow-minded thinking that keeps people poor.”
Still, Ned felt a tingling of excitement stirring underneath the bowels of terror. Now that he’d noticed it, he saw it everywhere. Like a giant hand pointing deeper in towards the centre of the city.
Or pointing out, his brain offered, and he swiftly ignored it.
They walked quicker now, sure of where they were going. They passed another square and, at the far side, entered a lane that narrowed into a passage between two enormous masses of shrubbery that had once been buildings. Branches arched and intertwined overhead, knitting the gap into a tunnel of leaf and shadow. The air inside was humid and smelled sharp.
Burl held up their only good lantern, and they edged on, though the faltering light it gave off wasn’t much help to them.
At the end of the passage, they reached what must have once been the city hall, or temple, or some other civic building meant to give people somewhere dry to argue or perhaps chop the heads off some miscreants. The huge building was now almost entirely gone beneath a monstrous bloom of vegetation. A rising, bulging mass of trunks, vines, shrubs, roots, flowers, brambles, moss, and leafy things that Ned didn’t recognise. Trees had sprouted from the walls. Walls were swallowed by bark. Windows were plugged with thorny bushes. The front steps were split apart by roots as easily as if they were clay, and now lay crooked and broken.
And all of it, every centimetre, leaned outward as if it were the centre of some vast explosion.
“There,” said Burl, with the triumphant hush of a man who felt the universe was finally making an effort.
“You sure you want to go in?”
“I’m sure I didn’t come all this way just to turn back. Whatever we’re looking for, it’s guaranteed to be in the middle of that.”
Ned hated how often Burl’s reasoning worked. He threw the entire salt container over his shoulder for good luck.
There was no door to speak of, only a gap where a door had once stood before a tree had chosen to occupy the premises. It was so wide that even holding hands, they wouldn’t cover a fraction of the diameter. Burl tried pushing through a curtain of ivy. The ivy pushed back with considerable confidence.
“Machete,” Burl said, extending a hand over his shoulder.
It took them the better part of an hour to force a passage into the building, during which Burl swore at roots, at thorns, at Ned, at the world in general, and all-round seemed to be having a bad day.
At last, they wormed their way inside, red-faced and sweating profusely. It had been ridiculously hard to cut their way in, and their blade was noticeably duller.
The interior was worse.
Outside, the hall had looked overgrown. Inside, the concept of indoors had been rejected on principle. Trees rose through what remained of the floor and punctured the ceiling. Moss coated everything. Flowers bloomed in improbable abundance. Vines looped from side to side in such quantity that the space resembled the digestive tract of a living hedge.
The growth spiralled down a corridor in front of them, inviting them into its dark depths. The air practically pulsed here.
They followed it down, stumbling and climbing over the mass of flora.
In the centre of a vast chamber, there stood a mighty rock, so tightly wrapped in roots that it took them a moment to recognise it. The roots twisted around it from all sides, braided and knotted into a near-solid cocoon.
Something glimmered within. A green light, deep and clear, pulsing faintly from inside the root mass.
Burl smiled.
“Careful,” Ned warned.
Burl stepped forward as though approaching royalty. Or a viper. For a treasure liberator, it was much the same movement.
The rock might once have been ornate, though little remained visible now. Burl held the lantern close. The light glimmered from a knotted mass of roots, each one having grown around the others until the whole thing resembled a giant clenched fist. The light seemed somehow wet, though rich. This close, you expected to feel heat, though the temperature hadn’t changed as far as Ned could tell.
“I think it’s a gem,” Burl said finally.
“That’s not normal.”
“That is the finest sort of normal.”
“No, I mean it’s glowing. Gems aren’t meant to glow.”
“Course they are! That’s how you can tell it’s very valuable. Don’t you know anything?”
Ned eyed the root cocoon that wrapped their prize. “How do we get it out?”
Burl looked offended. “With finesse.”
They got it out with a crowbar.
The roots were tougher than wood and springier than sense. Each one they pried free seemed to have another three underneath. They hacked, twisted, levered, yanked, and cursed until they were both slick with sweat and covered in sticky sap. Finally, with a noise like a wet rip, the last root came loose.
The gem was somewhat rectangular, about the size of a hand, and faceted along the edges. On the face of it, a leaf was engraved.
Burl gingerly reached towards it. His hand shook, partly from excitement, partly from exertion. Ned looked on, sucking knuckles bleeding as a result of a slipped crowbar.
“What if it’s cursed?” Ned asked, just before Burl touched the gem. His partner froze.
“If this gem is cursed, let me be struck down by lightning at this very moment!” he exclaimed.
Ned shuffled back a step in the resulting silence. One of these days…
Burl gave a dry laugh. He snatched up the gem with surprising care.
Everything stopped.
The whole hall seemed to pause. Leaves settled, branches ceased their whispering, and even the lantern flame stopped flickering.
Ned winced. “I don’t think we should touch it.”
“Bit late for that advice.”
“No, I mean we should put it back.”
Burl looked at him as if he’d proposed throwing a chest of gold into the sea because the hinges looked rusty. “Put back a legendary forest gem found in a haunted, overgrown city?”
“Eh, yeah,” said Ned, looking around him. The silence was beginning to play on his nerves.
“Absurd.”
“It’s making me nervous.”
“Everything makes you nervous.”
“This place has been swallowed by a forest from the inside out, and there are creepy statues of people standing in the street!”
Burl considered. “That is, admittedly, a point in favour of caution.”
He flipped the emerald into a padded leather pouch and tied it to his belt. “See? Cautious.”
Ned looked around again. “Did it just get darker?”
“Merely the room setting the mood. This may be the time when we have to make a dashing escape in fear for our lives.” He looked around hopefully.
“Well, let’s bloody move on then!”
Their newly hacked path out of the hall seemed narrower than Ned remembered. Vines brushed their shoulders in a way that felt less accidental than before. Thorns snagged their clothes a little harder and held a little longer. Ned started to pant.
In the lane outside, the shadows had lengthened, for all the little sun they received. The green statues now looked less decorative and more expectant, more menacing. Even Burl, normally the more level-headed of the two, didn’t suggest lingering to explore the city some more.
They kept to the main throughways, pushing through ferns and ducking under low-hung branches. Twice, they threatened to get lost, where signs of their previous passage had already disappeared. They could still follow the general shape of the growth, though, this time following it outwards. Behind them, the city hall seemed to suck at them, trying to draw them back. It seemed less alive somehow, like the gem had been the only thing keeping it going.
It took them more than an hour to reach the outskirts of the city and pass into the main body of the forest. As they crossed that invisible barrier, Ned shivered violently as a convulsion ran up his spine. If that meant that someone was walking over his grave, then they were bloody well tap dancing over it now.
He refused to look back or even stop until the city was well behind them.
“So, how much do you think we’ll be able to pawn it for?” Burl asked thoughtfully, holding the gem up to the light to peer at it.
Ned was feeling better the further away they got from the city. He began to feel more positive about this entire enterprise, in fact. Burl flipped him the gem. It felt cool in his hands. “A beauty like this? We might even retire.”
“For a bit,” laughed Burl.
Ned stared at the gem. It was mesmerising. There seemed to be deep colours swirling within the gem itself, almost too subtle to see. He couldn’t wait to get out of this forest and see it under the proper sunlight.
A snuffling noise caused him to lift his head.
A huge black bear was foraging about twenty meters in front of them.
They froze.
The bear was enormous, shaggy, and had the offended expression of a creature recently awakened from a nap and finding out it still had to hunt for its dinner. Bits of leaf clung to the fur. One ear had a notch in it. It sniffed the air, its altogether too large snout snuffling in their direction. Then it looked directly at them with dark eyes that suggested that it had already made up its mind about introductions. It reared on its hind legs, causing both Ned and Burl to raise their heads, then bellowed out a hoarse challenge to them.
Ned’s body moved before his mind had kicked into gear. “Get out of it!” he screamed, and he hurled the gem at the bear.
He hadn’t meant to throw the gem. It’d just been what he’d been holding. In almost ridiculous slow motion, it turned slowly through the air in a perfect arc, which, if Ned had tried a hundred more times, wouldn’t have managed it again. It struck the bear between the eyes with a soft plink and fell to the ground.
For a half-second, nobody moved. The bear seemed puzzled.
The forest exploded.
There was no better word for it. Growth didn’t spread; it detonated. Grass shot upward in a single violent wave. Vines thick as whips burst from cracks in the underbrush. Ferns unfurled so fast they made a sound like cards being shuffled. Shrubs bulged out from the ground, branches cracking outward. Blossoms erupted in sprays of colour. Moss sheeted across stone as if it had been sprayed there.
The bear, now in the middle of another roar, froze as the wave of green hit it. In the span of a heartbeat, the animal vanished, replaced by a shell of dense vegetation in the form of a rearing creature, its form now forever frozen by a topiary replica.
Ned screamed. Burl yanked him back at the collar before the rapidly expanding mass of growth hit them. They scrambled around, fleeing as fast as they could.
Bushes burst into being behind them. Trees shot out of the ground, expanding upwards in cracks of splintering timber, throwing anything existing out of the way to crash off into the distance. The ground heaved beneath their boots as roots sped under them like demented worms. They were lashed with all manner of creeper eager to wrap itself around something. The noise was deafening, but at least that meant that Ned couldn’t hear himself scream. He glanced once at Burl, who was grinning like a crazed loon and moving at a speed that belied his bulk.
On and on they ran, as the forest violently gave birth behind them, and now Ned was in real danger of flagging. His breath burned in his throat, and he could only manage hitching gasps. Never had he run as far or as fast. But the memory of the bear whipped his legs on and on. That gem turned it into a bush! his mind gibbered at him. In the city they’d come from, all those houses, all those people…
They came to a dip into a valley, and all of a sudden, Ned was moving faster than his legs could keep up with. With a muffled oath, he tripped and went spilling head over heels down the embankment, no longer sure of which way was up. With a freezing jolt, he was emptied into a shallow river, and the ice-cold water immediately made itself at home in all of his clothes.
When he finally struggled free, gasping for air, he saw the explosive growth of greenery had dwindled out near the river’s edge. A final flower, held by an overhanging branch, popped open near his face, and he screamed and shirked away.
Braying laughter made him turn around. Burl was sitting in the river, soaked to the bone, his face bright red. Burl thrust his arms in the air. “Still alive!” he cried, then flopped back with a splash.
Ned fetched a stone from the riverbed and feebly threw it at Burl. “Teach…you…throw…stones…curse…us…” he wheezed.
“You threw the gem!” Burl said, indignantly.
“Yeah…I probably…shouldn’t have…done that.”
“Legendary forest gem,” Burl murmured. “Explosive growth. Directional spread from the point of contact. Capable of overwhelming an entire city.” He glanced at Ned. “Do you know what this means?”
Ned glared at him, his chest still heaving. “We should bury it in a hole, then bury the hole?”
“It means,” Burl said, ignoring him, “we are in the possession of a gem of extraordinary power and value.”
“I ain’t going near it, if that’s what you mean.”
“We should probably go and get it.”
“Nope.”
“Not drop it this time.”
“Nope.”
Burl shook a wet finger at him. “Remind me again why I keep you around?”
Ned ignored him. “If we ever hear of treasure in a haunted city again…”
“We charge more.”
Ned just stared at him, jaw working.
“Come on,” Burl said, struggling up, giving a resigned squeeze to his soaked clothes. “I hadn’t planned on taking a bath this week. Let’s get home.” He held out his hand to Ned. “Gimme the compass.”
Ned looked at him blankly. “I don’t have it!”
Burl scratched his head and peered into the river still flowing past their feet. “Right. Well. I’m sure it’s around here somewhere.”