Paradise and Elsewhere by Kathy Page Page A

tree to the next, and then in the wake of their passing the silence would gather itself back together. The light between the trees remained dim, uneven. The trail ran on thinly ahead, marked, as the map had promised, with little knots of fluorescent tape. The trees were second growth, but maturing, and densely planted: spruce, mainly, and red cedar. Beneath a thick layer of decomposing needles, the ground was tense with their roots. She came to a sharp downwards left turn, and had to scramble down a rocky channel that in worse weather would have been a creek. Now the trees grew bigger, mossier. The ground levelled out a little. A fall ahead created a slash of light, and she paused there to drink from her bottle and get her breath. She could hear running water nearby, which she took as confirmation that she had more or less arrived. This was the oldest part of the forest. There was a damp, fungal tang to the air now, an almost tangible odour. And next to her, a family of saplings grew out of a vast, rotting trunk. The mosses were extraordinarily green. This must, she thought, be the place in the photograph of Joshua that Alex had shown her, and she extracted her own camera from her pack and took a couple of shots of a vast tree to her right. She felt sure that Joshua had been here, and perhaps still was. But when she called out her voice was baffled by the trees and there was no reply, and no way other than on, deeper into the grove. Soon, the trail broke down and become many smaller, fainter paths winding through a stand of enormous trees.
    â€œJosh?” she called again, standing still now. “Josh?”
    And there, in the darkest part of the forest, she smelled his death. Her throat closed against a rush of bile, and a moment later she saw what remained of him: he was in a half-sitting position, his back propped awkwardly against the trunk of the vast, gnarled spruce. His legs were buried thigh-deep, as if he too had roots. She was sure it was him—though his face, with its awful bulging eyes, had swollen, and like the rest of him, darkened to the colour of a bruise. With the greatest effort she controlled the urge to vomit and noted that all around the body was a scatter of detritus—water bottles, a garbage bag, pillboxes, a blanket, some phials and syringes; his boots and socks, the shovel and pick used to dig the hole… Her heart thudded as she took a photograph, the flash bringing the scene into a sickly clarity. A box of some kind rested on Joshua’s lap and it was, she knew, meant for her. Flies rose in a seething cloud as she drew closer: it was a plastic container, watertight, the kind made for camping. She should not open it: what would the police say? And yet how could she not? Forgetting the gloves in her pocket, Paula reached quickly for the box; his dead arm shifted as she took it and she half-ran, half-stumbled away from him, terrified—of death itself, of the silent trees with their huge trunks, their subtly connected roots.
    She reached the mossy deadfall and stopped there, gasping, to empty her stomach. Afterwards, she pried the box open. Inside was a sachet of silica gel and a single sheet of paper, hand-written:
    Â 
    We, the Trees
    Fair exchange. Leave us to stand.
    We care not about one or even several what matters is the sum of us and what matters is what passes between the sum of us and what passes between the sum of us and the sum of you. And in time all of you will become us and without us there is none of it.
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    The rain began, fat drops pattering on the leaves, and she was crying too. She looked up, wet-faced, at the patches of grey sky visible between the branches. Joshua was dead. A network of other people were involved. When it was released to the public, his message from the trees would, handled correctly, go viral in hours. This was Joshua’s story: how he had sat there with his legs half-buried, trying to communicate, even to the point of self-sacrifice,