The tree and the lake

One

Elias thrashed in the dirt. He lifted fistfuls of wet moss to his mouth and sucked at it. Wind blew dirt into his eyes, mud clogged his ears. Groping blindly, he seized on a root of the great oak that clenched the stone slab above Jutta's shallow grave. The root spasmed under his hand, but he grabbed it with both hands and strained to lift it, craning his head down to bite. Tasting bitter sap he bit deep, but the root ripped away, wrenching teeth from his jaws. Elias wailed and fell back, trying to wipe the dirt from his eyes with wet and muddy forearms. He caught glimpses of his teeth dropping from the root as the bite marks closed up. He reached up to his mouth to touch his gums, but his hand was not there.

'We have no need of your gold' said the tree.

Elias awoke, and immediately ran his tongue over his teeth. All there, thank God, but his tongue bristled with pain, and his heart thumped. His mouth, eyes and nose were crusted with dried mucus, and a rank stench burned his nostrils. Touching his nose and mouth gingerly, Elias winced at the rawness there. When trying to sit up, his heart rate accelerated and his stomach clenched and flapped, sending sharp acid up into his throat. He lay for a while until his fluttering heart subsided.

How much time had passed? Elias could barely make out the face of his mechanical wristwatch. He brought it up close to his eyes until the small figures marking the date resolved. The 15th. That meant - three days? A fever. He remembered making it to the kitchen sink a few times, drinking water from the tap. That was all.

He was starving. Really starving. But too weak to do anything about it. He pulled the covers back up and slid into sleep again.

'Hey!'

Elias tensed, expecting someone to shake him.

'Hey! Wake up!'

Elias rolled onto his back, rubbing his eyes. The light in the room was dim. He put out one hand to grope for his glasses.

'You won't need those. You can see me' the voice said.

Elias looked. There, on his bed, sat a rat. On its haunches, regarding him calmly. He could indeed see it quite clearly.

'You remember, huh?' it said.

Elias blinked, tried to swallow and finally croaked out 'remember what?'

The rat made a sideways gesture with one of its paws. Under its scrawny chest and shoulders hung a distended round gut, sagging over the rounded hips and rear thighs it sat on like a cushion.

'The ring, ‘course. What you was dreaming about'

Elias tried to remember. Nothing came. ‘This...dream...now?’

The rat leaned forwards, and Elias could see crooked and yellow teeth as it opened its mouth to speak

‘This ain’t no dream'

Elias looked around carefully, wary of disturbing the rat in case it leapt at his face. True, it didn't feel like a dream. The room was cold, and under the blankets clothes were grimy on his skin. He stared off towards the kitchen window for a while, not wanting to look at the rat. Maybe it would go away.

'Hey, buddy. Hey!'

Elias turned back to face it. The rat’s sharp black eyes shined with belligerence.

'He wants you to get that ring. It's not where it should be. You better get it.'

'He?'

'Yeah, he. You know who. Don't make him wait' The rat wiggled and dropped down onto all fours. It regarded him for a moment. 'Or maybe you don't. It doesn't matter. Just get it.'

Elias watched it turn, drag its fat gut towards the edge of the bed, and slide off. Out of sight. Something came to him.

'Wait...he said he didn't want my...'

But the rat was gone.

Elias knew what the rat was talking about. His wife's ring - she had lost it, two years or more ago now, in the water.

In the beginning, they both removed their wedding rings in the mornings, and put them back on in the evenings. It became a habit. The rings could easily catch on tools and injure fingers or pick up scratches, in this new life of theirs.

Why she had been wearing it when they pushed the boat out onto the pond, during the last thaw, Elias couldn't have said. As she reached to take hold of a fish struggling on the end of the line, her fingers shrivelled with cold, the ring fell.

In memory, Elias watched as the ring descended, slowly fading from sight, like some reverse Excalibur. In reality, there had been a brief plop and it was gone, he didn’t even know what had fallen until Jutta called out,

'Oh! Oh Elias, my ring!'

More than her words was the fact that she had spoken to him so directly and clearly. For the first time in months. She had long since taken to spending most of her time in her studio, painting that infernal scene over and over. Elias looked at her, unable to speak past the pain in his heart, as she looked down into the dark water. Both of them knew it was hopeless to think of getting it back.

Or was it?

Two

When he found his wife dead one morning in her studio, cold and stiff, a rough and spiky paintbrush still grasped in one hand, a voice cried out from some dark place, like someone calling from the bottom of a deep well. Elias could no longer quite connect that voice with himself, but he was aware of it. It set up a struggle between what he felt he ought to have done differently, and what he felt was the impossibility of resolving such thoughts. It was easier to let these ideas go.

Jutta had wanted to be buried, to go back to the earth. Elias didn't want to move her body, but dreaded even more what would happen if he didn't.

Jutta - the rebel against the rebellious. Counterculture parents, both artists, and good artists at that. With them Jutta had spent much of her childhood in a commune, and did two years of art school, before dropping out and becoming what she had always wanted to be, a biologist. She could not deny her love of order, and control, and hard facts. Getting under the skin of the world, seeing how it worked. Her skills with a pencil or brush were relegated to second place, to a handiness in diagraming the anatomy of some animal or plant.

Like the plants that had grown up the sides of the house. Even now, in this permanent winter, grasping at the walls and roof, pushing under tiles, pulling at the eaves, and like the rarely seen animals that scuttled through the house at night, biting and gnawing.

One morning Elias wolfed down as much food as he could stomach, took a pickaxe and spade from the woodshed, and went out to find a burial site. He considered digging a hole in the greenhouse - the earth was warmer and softer. But the idea...the idea of Jutta's remains finding their way up through the veins of plants, or worse still of the chickens pecking up bits of his wife brought to the surface by worms. No.

He wandered around the pond. He could knock chips off the surface, but that was it. Frozen solid. Into the woods then. Eventually, he found a spot in the lee of an overhanging mound of rock and earth on which a great oak grew. Its branches loomed, spreading above the clearing, and its roots snaked like thick veins, grasping the rocky outcrop.

The ground there was free of snow and covered with a mulch of rotted leaves. Underneath this the earth was soft and damp. Elias scraped away the dead leaves with the flat end of the pickaxe, blinking at the acrid whiff this stirred up, and began to dig.

The shadows were long by the time he finished. He'd dug a pit about a metre deep, with sloping sides, and about two metres in length. At that depth the spade hit what were either flat slabs of stone, or actual bedrock. In any case he couldn't dig any further down. His shirt was soaked with sweat and his limbs and back muscles spasmed uncontrollably.

Elias stumbled back to the house and stood over his wife's corpse. She looked so tiny, barely a bump under the blanket she had taken to wrapping around herself, her face grey, empty, and shrunken. Eventually Elias took up her body and hoisted her, as gently as he could, over his shoulder. He carried her, the muscle spasms in his legs and back threatening a collapse of his own body that never came, and laid her in the shallow grave. Finally, he shovelled and scraped earth over her, returned to the house and collapsed into bed. That was when the fever took him.

Three

The rat must have been part of that. A fever dream.

Elias stood in the kitchen, sipping tea and staring out of the window over the sink. His thin grey hair was long and unkempt. He'd shaved the day before, with freezing water, but now thick white bristles covered his jaw. Two days since the fever broke.

Outside, nothing moved. The frozen pond, big enough perhaps to be called a small lake, stretched out in front of the house. Elias stared across it as he took sips of tea. For three years they had lived here in the silence. For months now he had lived here alone.

Elias started his chores late. Feeding the chickens, checking the plants, chopping wood. It was easier to do these things when the sun burned in the sky. There was more life and movement then; trickles of water where the sun touched icicles, a sense that somewhere living things were going about their business, a light breeze rustling through the trees. Movement and life.

Jobs finished, Elias ate some porridge, made more tea and sat for a long while as he drank it. At 85, he found he could manage these physical chores without much difficulty. So long as he didn't rush, he was okay. He was doing a poorer job of keeping the inside of the house clean. Dust lay on every surface and dark stains had accumulated where floor met cupboard. Moss had begun to grow along the inside edges of the windows.

Something was on his mind, something he needed to check - but it meant going into the studio.

Four

Apathy had been the worst of it. Worse than the collapse of the Gulf Stream and the following cold. In the early months, before they had fled to his uncle’s old lakeside home, Elias, then a lecturer but always a photographer, had gone out to try and document what was happening, becoming bolder when his natural immunity, and Jutta's, were confirmed, speaking to the sick as they wandered the streets and visiting hospitals. The sick never spoke back.

A form of psychosis, a side effect of the virus. Lesions on the brain. That was what was said while it was still being discussed on TV, when there still was TV. A passive delusional state, total detachment. But if the majority become delusional, whose reality is real?

When the trains stopped running, he drove into the city, where the usual rows of neatly parked cars were absent, and people in filthy clothing wandered aimlessly across the streets and squares. Soon there were no more hospital staff, no more police, no more workers in the shops. Another world was forming before his eyes. For the first time in his personal and professional life, Elias could no longer bring himself to take pictures. He just wandered and gaped, speechless.

The sick began to gather in groups. He passed crowds of them in a supermarket, soiled and rank, eating stale bread and whatever else could be chewed and swallowed. He offered a bottle of water to one that was choking on dry bread, once, but it paid no attention to him. It coughed hard and soiled itself, then just wandered off. Soon, available food ran out, and the wandering transitioned to consuming each other.

Corpses multiplied, torn apart or ignored and slowly rotting wherever they fell. Death by apathy.

Five

Elias knew where the ring had been dropped. It was easy enough to walk out onto the lake's frozen surface and pinpoint that spot. Easier than returning to his wife's shallow grave, where she lay barely covered. Perhaps some creature had dug her up already. That thought, whenever it returned, as it frequently did, sent Elias into a panic. It drove him to do something, anything. He chopped wood, took greater care of the chickens and growing brassica than he ever had, he even spent several days cleaning the house, from top to bottom. And he went out on the lake, trying to gauge the thickness of the ice.

He began to feel the toll. He slept longer and woke up with sharp pains in his hips and back. The shadows troubled him. They were often there when he awoke.

Six

Elias felt down through his feet into the floor. It seemed solid enough. The weight of the mug of tea in his right hand was another anchor point. He didn't remember making the tea, but there he was, outside the door to his wife's studio, delivering tea.

He frowned at the painful slowness with which the door opened, frowned hard and long until his head began to hurt.

A dim crack of light appeared along one edge of the door. As it opened, the door rapidly grew in size and Elias grew with it. He looked down at his tiny feet, then stumbled forward on spindly legs, vaguely aware again of the mug of tea in his hand, and was inside the room.

Warm sunlight poured in through the South-facing windows. A scratching sound caught his attention.

'Put it down over there'

The voice crackled like burning twigs, hoarse and brittle, but still he knew it as Jutta's. He stood behind her, apparently normal sized again, looking over the paint-flecked armchair in which she sat, wrapped in a dirty blanket. Jutta worked on a canvas with quick, darting movements of one hand, the source of the scratching sound. Elias tried to see the canvas, but could not.

He looked to where he thought she meant and saw dozens of canvases stacked against each other, overlapping. There, on each surface, was the same scene - the clearing, the bone white trees, the shadow figures between them. Left to right, from one painting to the next, a looming, darker tree took shape at one end of the clearing, hanging over a rectangular space that became darker on each canvas until on the latest it was pure black. Small lights, like will o wisps, swirled around it.

Elias's eyes were drawn to it. He couldn't look away.

Elias woke up. The darkness was total. He listened to the scuttling and scraping of the creatures that shared his living space. Lay still until a faint light began to filter through the windows. The dream remained clear in his mind.

He knew that place now. No need to check. He must have known already - hadn't he? The clearing, the looming white trees, that fat, squat oak grasping the boulder above the grave and spreading out over Jutta’s grave. Had it, he, called her there?

'Now you remember'

Something detached inside Elias, and he giggled. There’s that rat again, he thought.

The rat wasn't smiling. It was perched on its hind feet, leaning towards him with its skinny shoulders and oversized head.

'Go - and - get - that - fucking - ring. Capeesh? Do you want the house ripped apart with you in it? If that was my wife's ring down there, you think I'd be lying in bed?'

The rat sat back and began nibbling at one of its paws

'Besides, HE wants it in the proper place' It said.

Elias closed his eyes for a while, and when he opened them, the thing had slinked off.

He played music that day, for the first time in months. He even left the door open so he could hear it while he used the borer and saw to cut a hole in the ice.

Exhausted, he then went back inside and waited for the house to warm up before he rooted out some of his nicer clothes from the bags stuffed in the back of the wardrobe. The clothes that Jutta had liked. The rat sat on the kitchen table and watched him, but didn't say anything.

'I can make my own mind up, you...you...fucker!' Elias screamed at it, in a sudden rage, then howled at it some more. He couldn't remember the last time he had sworn like that, and it didn't make him feel any better. Although the house was quite hot by this time, sweat stood out cold on his body. Perhaps when he brought the ring back from the lake bed, things would make more sense.

They came that evening, as he had sensed they would. The will o wisps from his wife's paintings, whimsical flashes of moving light. Elias followed them happily out onto the lake. He paused at the hole, breaking the thin film of ice that had formed with the toe of his boot, and looked back at the house. He frowned - the covering of plants that had been there for months was gone, vanished. The walls and roof were bare, and he could see the glow of lamplight through the kitchen window. He opened his eyes wide, and blinked several times. Ah! - There it was, the thick foliage was back, growing up out of the frozen ground over the whole building.

Strange! He thought. Perhaps I am tired. Seeing things. Not seeing things.

Elias turned, pinched his nose shut with one hand and jumped feet-first into the lake.