Child of the Old Growth

By Victor Julian-Henry Roberts

The dirt road ended, leaving you face-to-face with the forest. With nowhere else to go, you opened the car door and stepped out into the light of dusk. The red sun hung lazily on the horizon like a tired eye struggling to hold itself open. The singing of a whip-poor-will announced the coming of night, with the only other sound out here being the breeze whistling through the branches.

You felt the outline of the gun in your pocket. Tonight was the perfect night for what you were about to do.

Your life was not one of dignity, nor one that held any sense of hope for the future. You had been destitute for months on end, living out of your car and eating whatever it was you could shoplift or beg for. Every night you went to bed all alone in the back of your car, hidden somewhere no one would find you, mind clouded by booze and regret, ribs showing a little more with every passing night. When every morning meant another fight to survive, eventually, you stopped wanting to wake up.

So, you drove away from everything. You drove until you could no longer see buildings, cars, concrete roads, or any other sign of mankind or its woes – all the way up north to one of the last bastions of nature’s old growth. Here, you would have the peace of knowing that you could die somewhere far from the world of concrete and steel you had suffered in – as well as the peace of knowing that no one lived far enough out here to find your corpse.

You took your first steps into the forest. The scraggly brush which served to guard the edge of the woods scraped against your skin. After you passed through the thorny gate, you were shrouded under the shadows of the old pines, their verdant cloak only allowing a scant amount of fading light from the sky to guide your way. The tree trunks were thick enough to tell they had been standing for hundreds of years. It stood as an ancient wilderness that had remained unchanged for eons – untouched by time, untouched by man.

Night crept in with each second you walked, the encroaching darkness snuffing out any remaining ray of dusk light into submission. The only sounds were the continuous whispering of the wind in your ear, the crunch of twigs beneath your feet, and the occasional crawl or slither of some nocturnal animal nearby.

Before long, you began to see light in the distance, and you found yourself at a great clearing. Sedge and bluegrass blanketed the ground, peppered with wildflowers. The icy glare of the moon hung in the black sky, staring down like a voiceless sentinel. In the center of it all was a massive white pine – standing all alone, taller than any tree in the forest, as if it were the primordial mother from which all the life in this forest radiated out from.

You walked up to the great, ancient tree. This was where you wanted to do it.

As you reached into your pocket and held the cold steel grip of your gun, anticipation rushed through your veins. You pulled it out. A single bullet was already in the chamber – one shot to end it all. You turned off the safety, positioning the muzzle right at the roof of your mouth. Your hand shaking, you put your finger on the trigger, and when you pulled it –

BANG.

A moment of pain, and then nothing.

You didn’t know how long you were out. All you knew is that when your previous existence ended, a new one began. Life started to seep into your body once again, and you slowly opened your eyes as if waking from a long sleep. Yet, this new life-force which coursed through your veins was not your own.

Indeed, you had killed the person you once were, but the old growth still had use for your flesh.

You felt a searing pain rip through your whole body – muscles and tendons tearing, every bone breaking and rearranging. You tried to scream, but the howl that bellowed forth from your throat was no longer that of a human being’s.

The hot, metallic taste of blood filled your mouth as all your teeth were forcibly pushed out of your gums and fell out onto the ground before you, making way for fangs. Your nails were ripped out from the inside, and from the bloody stumps grew yellowed claws. Your skull split open, and two horns curled grotesquely out of your head like hellish corkscrews. Green growth ruptured out of your stomach, your chest, and your throat in a violent marriage of flora and bodily tissue.

The pain tore your mind apart, your consciousness degrading piece by piece. You began to forget everything – your knowledge, your past, your own face. Digging through the vestiges of your memory felt like scooping through handfuls through mud, only to meet obscured half-shapes of which you could no longer decipher meaning. As the last sliver of humanity was swallowed by the animal that overtook your consciousness, everything that you could fundamentally call yourself ceased to exist. In its stead was something primal, something demonic, something utterly bestial.

I stood up on cloven hooves, my body a mess of fur, feathers, vines and bark. I opened my eyes, my slit pupils adjusting to the darkness.

You had died, and in your place, I was born.