Index:
Chapter I
The gaslight fell full on the time-stained wood of the secretary. The desk had belonged to Edwin’s father who had been the vicar of the century-old village parish church. Now, Edwin was the vicar, and he was finally putting the past behind him. A year ago he would have gone over his father’s old things with sentiment directing his hands, his thoughts filled with a gloomy, heady nostalgia.
Now, since he’d determined to grow past his old grief for his father, looking through his things felt distasteful. Indeed, Edwin wouldn’t be searching through his father’s secretary at all, unless he was sure Lidia had likely hidden his sermon notes somewhere inside one of its many drawers.
Edwin breathed a sigh of frustration through a half-smile, after he opened yet another empty drawer. He had to remind himself to stay patient with the girl, after all she was only a child. He had to have done similar mischief to his own father when he was her age. Even still, Edwin couldn’t bring himself to see the funny side of the prank. Those notes were important, and he didn’t have time to go rummaging through the whole house to find them.
Opening a small compartment in the face of the secretary, he uncovered something he had been half expecting, and half dreading. A small pile of dried rose petals beneath the end of a withered stem, and tied to it by an old ribbon, was a card. Edwin had a strong impulse to close the compartment and keep searching as if he hadn’t seen it. But, driven by some phantom impulse, he reached for the card and pulled it out.
On it was written a scripture verse in his father’s hand. It read,
“For thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive; and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon thee. ~Psalm 86:5”
Edwin turned the card over, and the other side read,
“Remember, my love, the goodness of God, and that the force which knit you, and our world, together is Love itself.”
Edwin felt a hot bubbling in his chest which he identified as contempt. He tossed the card back into the compartment and closed the little door, pretending to continue searching, though his head was now buzzing with unwelcome thoughts.
Edwin had always loved his father, but as childhood began to harden into adulthood, he realized how a soft upbringing and a chronically optimistic disposition had made his father naive. Edwin wondered for a moment what really bothered him so much about what he’d just read. Did he doubt God’s goodness? No, it wasn’t that. It was just how irreverently and casually his father spoke of the love of God, as if it were as trivial a topic as the weather.
Edwin reflected for a moment, then decided this couldn’t be the reason either. He determined what bothered him was how his father spoke of the love of God as if it filled the whole world, as if everything were alive, moving, and cared for by the love of God. Edwin knew this couldn’t be true. His father hadn’t seen some of the things Edwin had.
Almost without his noticing it, his sermon notes were in his hand, having been concealed in the lowest drawer. The recovery of his notes served little to calm his nerves, now that his mind had been kindled into a fury of self-debate. It was the kind of train of thought he liked to think he’d left behind him a year ago. He took the bundle of papers and his oil lamp and promptly left the dark, shuttered bedroom. Stepping into the lighted hall, he hesitated, feeling more than thinking about some of his father’s upsetting simplicities. His smiling arrogance about the certainty of God’s grace, and inherent compassion. Edwin prefered stories like Ananias and Sapphira, things which call to mind human wrongness and leave no room for ambiguity. He enjoyed the down-to-earth nature of the wrath of God; it was simple and just. If there was absolute evil in man, then that evil necessitated the absolute price. A life of total devotion, or no life at all; which would be the ultimate price. Naturally Edwin had chosen the route of total life devotion. Any other path to him would be nonsense.
He turned and shut the door, being sure to lock it as he left. He returned to the sitting room, where he had been writing the last of his sermon at the writing desk. He sat down again, setting the bundle of papers down with a slap on the polished wood. He sat down in the old, hard chair and leaned back, allowing it to creak under his weight. The desk was set against a windowed wall, which faced the garden, and over the garden was the neighbor’s barley field. It was beren after the harvest. The village was on the threshold of winter. The sky was streaked with tattered, white shreds of cloud, their foundations red against the horizon. The field terminated in a stone wall; and just beyond this, lay the expansive churchyard, populated by warped regiments of tombstones, and one ancient, towering husk of an Alder tree. Beyond this lay the hunched figure of the parish church.
Edwin’s thoughts turned to his daughter, and he smiled. Not only had he himself decided to live a life of complete devotion, but he had also determined it would be the path of his only child, Lidia. It gave him great comfort to know that somewhere in the house, Mrs. Hernatcher was tutoring Lidia in Greek phonics. He could see Lidia following in the vein of her mother, a keen, strong, well educated woman.
Edwin had taken up his quil and was about to return his gaze to the work before him, when he caught sight of something out the window, near the Alder tree. He looked closer, then slammed his palms against the desk, erupting to his feet. His patience was at its end.
“Hernatcher!” Edwin roared, “Can you not keep the girl indoors for more than one minute?”
The elderly Mrs. Hernatcher stammered to make a reply, but by the time she had, Edwin had already burst out the back door of his the rural cottage. He stormed over the cabbage bed and vaulted the low fence which divided their garden from the rutted field. Planting his feet on the other side, he advanced, holding his furious course toward the Alder. He marched through the dirt, his eyes fixed on that spot of bright white in the nearing dusk. He could hear the children laughing as they played around the projecting roots of the Alder tree, Lidia wearing a white gown her mother had given her. Doubtless it had been ripped and stained by the grass at this point.
‘How could she be so careless?’ Edwin wondered.
“Lidia!” He barked, pleased at the way the children’s game immediately ceased at the sound of his voice. Without much delay, the other children withdrew, back over the churchyard and toward the village. Lidia stood alone beneath the dead, blackened branches of the Alder.
“You’re meant to be inside practicing your Greek! Insolent girl!” Edwin cried, “And God knows how many times I’ve told you not to play outside with that gown on.” He continued, nearing the old stone wall which divided the churchyard from the field, “Especially around that tree!” He added extra emphasis on this final remark.
Lidia said nothing, standing tall and stark against the ruddy sky at her back, her figure already showed the adolescent buddings of womanhood. She keenly resembled her mother, and in that light, it gave fuel to Edwin’s bad temper. Edwin had reached the wall and was not going to vault this to fetch his daughter. Instead he said, in a commanding voice,
“Come here, right away!”
Lidia first looked away from him, then turned entirely and began to walk toward the village like the others. Edwin was enraged. In outrage, Edwin leapt over the wall and pursued his daughter, saying with that same commanding tone which had served him well,
“You dare to turn your back to your father! Come here at once!”
She hesitated, standing between two tombstones.
In his outrage, Edwin hadn’t realized where they were. He glanced down at the tombstone to Lidia’s left with the eyes of a man who’d seen a snake cross his path. Then he looked back at his daughter, confounded. The expression on Lidia’s face puzzled him more than anything else. A bold look of defiance, mingled with fear, and all under a canopy of a sadness which made her eyes moist and her lips quiver. The conflict in her face was enough to cow Edwin’s outrage for a moment, but then the facts rushed back over him. Regardless what she was thinking, she was being heinously disobedient.
Edwin shook off the impression as best he could and took another forceful step forward, not heeding the tombstone as he said,
“Don’t be ridiculous, come…” Lidia suddenly let out such a staggering cry of exasperation it stopped Edwin where he stood. She cried,
“Papa, just listen!” A tear ran freely down her small, troubled face. Edwin stopped, dazed, and listened. Lidia’s eyes dropped down to the tombstone as she continued,
“Mama loved me…but you don’t.”
The ludicrous exaggeration of the girl’s opening statement was enough to rekindle Edwin’s rage into full blaze. Any tender shoot of consideration about her statement was trampled by its obvious ingratitude, disobedience, and total unfairness. Edwin blustered, but could not form words to retaliate. Her tears freely flowing now, Lidia continued,
“You used to read to me at night…and bring home kittens sometimes, and play with me around that tree.” She pointed to the Alder. Edwin did not look, he only fumed. “Now all you do is read, and when you’re not reading you won’t talk to me…and you’re so mean and rude to everyone!” She was clenching her little fists so tight they shook as she went on, “You hardly let me see my friends, all you want me to do is learn books, and you won’t let me play at our old tree…” Her shoulders began to shake with sobs, and she couldn’t continue.
The fact that what she had said resonated with Edwin’s conscience only served to fuel his wrath, as he boomed,
“I’ve had enough of this!” He stormed up to the shaking figure of his daughter and gripped her forcibly by the arm, and began to tow her back toward the cottage. “You are going to finish your lesson and go to bed without supper. I want you to think about what you’ve done.”
Suddenly, Edwin began to feel little thuds against his forearm as he dragged Lidia along, accompanied by the repeated, sharp words,
“I hate you! I hate you!”
This made him stop and turn back to the little girl. He towered over her and looked into her red, tear-streaked face. Edwin’s demeanor became suddenly calmer and more collected, as he replied,
“No, you don’t. You can’t.” She stopped hitting and just looked up at him with anger and injustice in her face, as he went on, crouching lower to face her at eye-level, “It’s the same with you and I as it is with me and God; you have no choice but to love me.”
Lidia looked her father full in the face, then dropped her eyes and said in a low, painful tone,
“I don’t love you.”
Though Edwin had half expected the ignorant, childish words, when they actually came it stole his breath like a knife through his chest. His hand released its grip on Lidia and she immediately ran back toward the cottage, leaving Edwin in the collecting darkness of dusk, amid the desolate gusts of wind over the baren barley field.
It took him over a minute to recover from the almost physical onslaught on his nerves which resulted from those few words. He knew it couldn’t be true; he defied it to be true. It was irrational, nonsensical, unnatural that a daughter should not love her father in return for all he did for her. Why couldn’t she love him the same way he loved God? With complete devotion and obedience? Hadn’t she learned after all his lecturing that God only allowed his creatures two options, obedience or wrath? He knew what Lidia was doing, it was the unthinkable for Edwin, and now he knew it was his place to deal out the wrath.
As he stood recovering, he heard a distinct sound nearby, close to the tree which stood only yards away; it sounded like a foot scraping over the dry, dead bark of a root.
Edwin turned and looked and saw nothing, but had the acute impression of someone’s presence nearby. He was certain it was one of the children Lidia had been playing with, one who had overheard the whole quarrel. Edwin restored himself entirely and faced the tree, puffing out his chest as he spoke to whoever might be hiding there,
“I know you’re there. It’s very rude to eavesdrop. Now…go home to your mother and father.” Edwin was about to turn from the tree, when a bitter thought struck him. If that child spoke to its parents about what it heard, about how the vicar lost his temper and about Lidia’s sharp words—it would be such an embarrassment. He turned to the tree again, hardly thinking as he hastily added, in something like a chastened tone,
“And…I implore you not to say a word of what you heard to your parents.” Immediately, another sound met his ears, which made him feel like a fool. The low, throaty hoot of an owl, somewhere amid the Alder. Edwin stood erect again and almost laughed with the relief. Rumors like what he’d imagined a child spreading through the village about the vicar were the kinds of things which ended careers. If he didn’t have the trust of his congregation, he had nothing to stand on. Still, he didn’t really understand why anything like what he said should ruin a godly man’s reputation.
Chapter II
The cool dark of his bedroom and the warm softness of his sheets were comfortless to Edwin as he lay awake. He’d been lying on his back for what felt hours of thought-flooded sleeplessness after he’d gone to Lidia’s room and found the door locked. He’d meant to go get the key and open the door, but standing there, before the shut door, with her words still wreaking destruction to his resolve, he ran against a strong reluctance. Instead of following through, he left Lidia to her locked room, sent Mrs. Hernatcher home, and finally went to go to bed.
It was at some untold hour of the night that he woke out of a deep thought which had begun to resemble dreaming sleep. He’d heard a sound, but could not be sure what kind of sound. Something, like a dim echo in his head, told him it had been the hoot of an owl; but he felt it had been a more domestic sound than that. Something like the opening of a door.
Edwin threw off his sheets, swung his legs out of the bed and sat up, listening. He heard nothing, but was consumed with a suspicion. He rose, puttin on a pair of trousers and keeping his pajama shirt, and opened the door from his room into the hall. In the inky darkness of the midnight cottage, he fixed his gaze on where he knew Lidia’s door was. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought the door frame was darker than it ought to be, as if it were open and was looking into a darker room. He stepped into the hall and moved toward Lidia’s door. Moving his hand toward the darkness where her door was, he anticipated the hard, cold surface of the door, but his hand met no resistance. He stepped inside, and looked around in vain, saying,
“Lidia? Are you here?” The darkness threw a cannon-blast of silence back at Edwin, as he stood dumbfounded in the door. He immediately reached for the side table he knew lay near the door, which was where was often kept a kerosene lamp and matchbox. Nothing was there.
To Edwin’s own surprise he hissed a curse and rushed out of the room, toward the sitting room, feeling the walls as he rushed. Through the drawn windows of the sitting room, a soft shower of moonlight fell on the turkish rug and slightly illuminated the walls. He could see another kerosene lamp sitting on his desk in front of the window. He went to his desk and looked out again, toward the tree by the churchyard. Out there he could see, between the slate blue sky and coal black earth, a pinprick of orange light bobbing up and down, moving toward the gnarled silhouette of the Alder tree.
Edwin hissed a second curse as he pulled open the drawer of his desk to look for matches. Finding some, he tried twice to light one, but it wasn’t till the third try that he managed to light the lamp. He quickly threw on a long coat which lay draped over a chair, then grabbed the tin handle of the lamp, and headed for the back door.
Rushing out into the nocturnal garden, he looked again toward the looming, black shape of the Alder tree. The light was up against the trunk of the tree now, and he could clearly see Lidia’s white gown, glowing blue at her back where the moon caught it, and orange in the front where the lamplight fell on it. But what stole Edwin’s attention was that Lidia was accompanied. A second figure, lean and dark, rose over her little form, seeming to be a man wearing a long, black coat. They were rounding the tree, appearing to be going to the other side for some reason.
The added fear that his daughter was not only trying to escape, but was also escaping with a strange man gave speed to Edwin’s feet. He rushed over the garden and this time out the open gate, then clumsily over the rutted field he made his way toward the tree.
Glancing up again at the two figures at the Alder, he just saw the light vanish around the other side, and was flummoxed to see something he could not explain. It may have been a trick of the eyes, but he thought Lidia’s tall companion had two horn-like protrusions jetting from his head, like tall fox ears, or those of a horned owl. It was too ridiculous to let his imagination dally with, but somehow a new dimension of dread sprang from this trick of the light.
“Lidia!” Edwin cried out, with a desperation which cowed his own heart. The light had completely disappeared now around the tree. Edwin was now moving toward nothing but the monolithic, black tangle of dead wood, which had stood there, silent for centuries. The tree’s only definition was where the bleaching moonlight caught its extremities, highlighting them steely blue.
Arriving at the tree, Edwin almost tripped over the spanning roots which weaved like serpents over and through the soil. He braced himself against the ragged bark of the ancient tree as he rounded to the other side, blurting out as he did,
“Lidia! Darling!” But there was no one there, and indeed they could not have run off. He could see nothing but fields and tombstones, and in the distance his little chapel. Stepping over another root, however, Edwin found himself nearly falling into a sinkhole. Staggering back and recovering from his near fall, Edwin regarded the sinkhole with the light from his lamp. He had never seen it before, and he certainly could not have overlooked it all these years; he’d known this tree from his childhood, almost his whole life. It appeared a space had rotten away from the trunk and admitted an amount of soil to fall through into a hollow beneath the Alder. This left a narrow hole just large enough for a man to fit through.
‘But they couldn’t have gone through there!’ Edwin exclaimed internally. But looking around told him there really was no other place for them to go. He scouted around the tree for several minutes, searching the ground for any sign of clue, listening to the night for voices or footsteps, but nothing came of it. He returned to the hollow to examine it in fuller detail. It went down about three feet, and from his point of view, it terminated in a concave wall of wood. But upon closer investigation, Edwin found this was not the end of the hollow, but it corkscrewed to the left like a snail’s shell, deeper into the earth beneath the tree.
The absurd horror of the situation made Edwin shudder. Imagining that dark, tall stranger leading his daughter into an underground tunnel; it was ridiculous! But, nevertheless, he knew he had to look deeper if he wanted to get Lidia back. Edwin stepped inside.
Within the dry, soily, wood cavity, Edwin found it increasingly hard to imagine a child, let alone a man, crawling deeper into the tree. By all appearances it only became narrower as one followed the spiral downward. Still, Edwin was determined and would not give up by mere appearance. He pressed himself against the narrow passage, and found his body somewhat fit, but the fit was so uncertain that it made him wonder if he would get stuck. But as he slipped in further, his confidence grew; he was sure he could make it all the way through. His buttons snapped against the rough wood of the miniscule passage, and bits of his hair caught in tiny crevices, but he could tell it was beginning to open up a little on the other side.
Wriggling through the passage, Edwin was astonished at how deep it ran, going downward at steep but steady degree. Suddenly, an electric thrill ran through him as he realized his next footstep had not met the resistance of the floor, and he was falling. His body slipped out of the narrow passage like a coin through a slot, and for a moment all he could feel and hear was the roar of the air he was falling through.
A second later he felt the his body strike against a surprisingly cushiony surface. If he had anticipated the soft floor he had met, he would not have landed in the awkward manner he had, which was now causing him some pain in his joints. He groaned and glanced over at the lamp, which he’d heard break upon its landing, though it was still admitting a glow of warm light. He saw the flame just in time to watch it die, and plunge him into seamless blackness. But what he had glimpsed of the place before all had gone dark, was a cavernous space, near the size of his sitting room, made entirely of entangling arches of age-polished roots. The floor, from what he could see for that moment, and what he could feel as he lay on it, was of some kind of spongiform matter. Something porous and pliable, from the fleshy touch of it, and its fungoid smell.
‘Like the cap of a huge mushroom…’ Edwin thought. But his idle thoughts did not last against the sudden terror of the impression that he was not alone in the darkness. A faint scratching above his head indicated some kind of presence. Maybe rats, maybe any number of subterranean creatures. Edwin’s imagination began to play terrible games with his mind at the sorts of creatures which might be lurking around him the deep blackness.
He put his palms to the spongy floor, and pushed up slowly, trying not to make any noise as he did. But, rising only a few feet off the ground, he felt his head immediately collide with the ceiling with a dull thump. Falling flat on the ground again, Edwin was terrified by two things he’d noticed about the low ceiling, first that it was of a similar fleshy substance to the floor, and second that it spoke.
“Oh! Oooh! My head…”
Said a nasally, shrill voice out of the dark. Edwin lay on the ground, perfectly still and perfectly confused at the situation. From what he could understand, there was a man hanging upside down from the ceiling, and he’d bumped heads with him as he rose. But why was his voice so strange, and what made the scratching? The voice said nothing audible for a time, only groaned a little and muttered. Then it said,
“Why vicar! What are you doing up here in my house?” Edwin was stunned, and again completely dumbfounded as to who the voice belonged to. Feeling slightly encouraged by the stranger’s pleasant, though unfamiliar, tone of voice, he sat up carefully and said into the blackness.
“I-I’m sorry…to whom am I speaking?”
The stranger suddenly let out a whistling laugh, then replied through gasps,
“You don’t remember me! It only stands to reason, I suppose. You’ve never seen me right-side-up.”
Edwin’s eyes were drawn to a spark, then a flicker only feet in front of him, as the stranger lit a candle; and the sight Edwin saw made him cry out with uncontrollable horror. Before him, not three feet off, was the rigged, fur-collared, ebony face of an enormous bat.
Edwin scrambled back and hands and knees to the slope of a wood wall, only providing him a few yards’ distance from the grotesque creature. Looking back on it, he was stricken by the full vision of it. A huge black thing, wrapped in the leathery folds of its tremendous wings, it dangled upside-down from a root on the ceiling, where it’s clawed toes scritched against the wood. In the bony hand of one of its wings, it held a candle, which illumined the monster’s face. With a hog’s nose, and rodent-like features, it reminded Edwin exactly of an ordinary bat, only on the scale of a human being. Its long, pointed ears slumped forward as its red-lit eyes narrowed at Edwin, with real human expression.
“I didn’t scare you did I? I often do that with your sort.” The bat spoke.
Edwin could barely begin to think rational thoughts, let alone form a mental position from which to answer the talking monster. He could only reply with in articulate babblings,
“How, how are you…here? I mean…what are…”
The bat cocked his head at Edwin with an awkward expression, as if the vicar’s response to finding a gigantic talking bat under a tree was completely strange and inappropriate. Waiting a moment until Edwin’s babble died into a murmur, he spoke with strong tone,
“I’d find it hard to believe you came all the way up here to find me, so I have to ask, are you here for Lidia?” All the chaotic riot of Edwin’s rampant thoughts narrowed into a sharp spike of reason as he heard this.
“Yes, I’m here for my daughter. Do you have her?” Immediately Edwin remembered the man-like figure walking with Lidia near the tree, and he remembered the enormous, pointed ears on his head.
“You have her, don’t you! I saw you across the field!”
The bat pursed his lips at this accusation and lifted his eyes downward, which was up for him, in the manner of a man carefully selecting the words for his reply.
“The one who you saw was the Owl. The one you see before you is the Bat. The Owl is with your daughter now.”
“So you know where she is!” Edwin said in desperation, leaping to his feet.
The Bat gave the eager young vicar a curious glare, with something of suspicion in it.
“What is that to you? Would it comfort you much to know Lidia may be happier with the Owl than in your house?”
Edwin ignored this, and continued,
“So you do know! I demand you take me to her at once, or tell me where she is.”
The Bat’s eyes suddenly widened and brightened, and something like a cheerful smile spread over its misshapen face.
“I can tell you she’s gone to the Root, and I can also tell you only I know the way.”
“Then you must take me to her.” Edwin demanded, pushing his chest forward, a habit of his he had not yet realized was so frequent. The Bat’s smile widened further, a keen, knowing smile which Edwin took for impish defiance. “So you refuse? You can at least tell me in which direction to go.” Edwin added, which in his own ears sounded more pathetically sulky than he intended.
“Oh no, I don’t refuse. I just find your kind so funny, I sometimes can’t help but smile.”
Chapter III
The Bat had begun to lead the way, guiding Edwin first through a narrow gap made of two wooden tendrils of roots, then through more narrow, downward passages. Only the Bat never came down from the ceiling. He continued as he had been, hanging upside-down yet miraculously able to cling to the ceiling with each step; and all the while moving so naturally Edwin almost wondered if he were the one hanging upside-down.
This thought lead Edwin to notice more subtle, unsettling characteristics to his environment. How the organic shapes and proportions of the subterranean passages seemed to regard the floor very little as a space for walking, but was interrupted and entangled with projecting roots, while the ceiling looked to made of packed, cracking soil, the way a floor ought to. Also, the appearance of various fungi growing as naturally on the floor as the ceiling, gave him a strangely dizzying impression.
Often the Bat would walk through high gaps in the roots, which for him were like archways and which for Edwin were huge, tangled obstacles. Climbing over one of these, Edwin couldn’t help but grumble at the Bat. Why’d that unnatural creature have to go out of his way to make traversing those tunnels more strange than it already was? Worst of all, why’d it have to make it look so easy, moving through the tangled networks of roots, and then casting him those impish glances.
“It’s not like I can walk on the ceiling.” Edwin muttered, trying hard not to fall as he carefully descended the other side of a wall of roots.
“But you’re doing it right now! The trick would be for you to walk on the floor.” The Bat boisterously replied to Edwin’s embittered comment, which really had been only intended for his own ears. Edwin was so put off by the Bat’s aggravating glances and comments, he tried to shoot the creature an icy glare, but looking at the creature again, he noticed something he hadn’t before, which nearly froze his heart.
The Bat held a candle, with which it had been leading the way, but what Edwin hadn’t realized was how the flame of the candle reached downwards. The thought flashed through Edwin’s head like lightning, ‘how’d he made the flame do that?’, then like the clap of thunder that follows, the reality of the thing fell on his mind. He was in fact the one who was upside-down.
Edwin’s entire countenance changed as this realization swept over him. He turned pale and looked at, what had been the ground, like an alien thing. Then, he got lower and lower to, what was really the ceiling, until he was able to grip one of its roots, overcome with a kind of vertigo.
“How did I become like this?!” Edwin cried, in a low shriek. The Bat did not reply, but almost fell rolling in a riot of shrill laughter at the crouched, sheet-white vicar, clinging upside-down to the ceiling, but in now way inclined to fall.
“I wonder the same thing!” The Bat laughed, “It’s always best when your sort realize the truth! You make such a show of it!”
Edwin lifted his face back to the Bat, overcome with vexation at his laughter.
“You think this is a joke?! What if I step outside? I’ll fall into the sky and never stop. Oh, this must be a nightmare.” Edwin ended on another sulky note which filled him with self-contempt.
The Bat’s laughter finally died down enough for him to speak, rubbing the tears from his big, bulbous eyes,
“No, no, it doesn’t work quite like that. But you’re a more upside-down man than you knew. As for me, I’ve never been upside-down for more than a little while, and that was always to help people like you.”
Edwin could feel his heart-rate pick up as he looked fixedly at the floor above him, the way men do before descending from the top of a huge cliff.
“Well…” Edwin began, continuing to look up, his tone chastened and small, “is there any way you can help me get right-side-up again?”
The Bat grinned ear to pointed ear, and replied graciously,
“I only waited for you to ask.” Immediately the huge, black creature bent over and, first planting the candle in the ground, gripped the floor at its feet with its long, gnarled fingers, and let its body fall up toward Edwin like an acrobat. Then, as if it had control of gravity, it let itself fall to Edwin’s floor, on the ceiling. Edwin looked up at the creature towering over him, somehow appearing bigger than it had hanging from the ceiling. It grinned again at Edwin’s ridiculous posture, hunched on the floor and clinging to the roots.
“Now, if you want to get upright again, you’ll have to do as I do.” The Bat said, matter-of-factly and, to Edwin’s ears, not a little condescendingly. It proceeded to do as it had before, gripping the ground and this time lifting its body into a full handstand, its fury body and extended wings appearing more strange and grotesque than anything Edwin had ever seen.
“Do as I do.” The Bat repeated, a note of strain in its high voice.
It took Edwin a moment to look away from the strangeness of the Bat’s figure, and to focus on what he was about to do. He hadn’t done a handstand in years, but was fairly confident he could achieve it, his only reluctance was the sheer ridiculousness of it; and what if the nonsensical creature was only playing a trick on him?
“I say, is this the only way?”
“That doesn’t matter,” The Bat quickly retorted, “I said to do as I do, so do it if you want to stand upright.”
Edwin heaved a sigh and looked at the ground again. Adjusting his hands, he angled his waist and straightened his legs, then kicking them upright. The first attempt he over compensated and fell on his back, which hurt dreadfully against all the roots. But, determined, he tried a second time and this time managed achieve a handstand. Looking into the Bat’s face now from a matching perspective, he heard the Bat say, with a playful flourish,
“Now, let go!” Immediately the creature fell back to the true floor, leaving Edwin, from all appearances, clinging to the ceiling. But to Edwin, he still felt the earth pulling him toward, what he knew to be the ceiling. How could he let go? His palms were flat on the ground. The absurdity of it all frustrated him. Why couldn’t it be easy? Why couldn’t things just fit into the world he saw at first? Why’d everything always have to be different in reality?
“You want to find your daughter again, don’t you?” The Bat said, not in any antagonistic manner, but in a way Edwin knew was meant to inspire him; and it did. Edwin lifted his eyes to the earth he’d been walking on, and let his mind part from it. He imagined himself falling, like the Bat, and suddenly he really was. With a startled cry, he collapsed onto the true floor at the feet of the bat.
Looking up and around at his new surroundings, Edwin’s head swam and he began to feel a little nauseous. The Bat said nothing for a long minute, keeping its eyes on Edwin and slanting its head at an angle, as if trying to anticipate what the bewildered vicar would do next.
Finally, Edwin rose to his feet and looked up into the Bat’s face. He was stricken again by the animal’s appearance, but this time not by its hideousness, but by something new, or something he had overlooked. It had blue irises, the realization of which almost completely humanized it’s face. To add to this, its expression could not be taken for anything but kind.
“T-thank you.” Edwin stammered awkwardly.
“Never to worry!” The Bat suddenly blared with a humorous emphasis. It immediately turned on its boney heel and continued down the woody corredor was a bounce in its step. Edwin raised an eyebrow and smiled slightly at the oddity of the creature, then followed after.
~
Edwin had trained his eyes, in spite of the low light, to follow the Bat by its huge, shadowy shape, silhouetted by the dim light of its candle. As they walked, Edwin would catch glimpses of divulging passages here and there, as if they had shrunk and were traversing an ant mound. But clearly all these tunnels had not been dug, but were formed by arches and colonnades of roots. Now with more freedom of mind to think about his surroundings, Edwin decided to ask,
“All these roots cannot be of the same tree? The tree would have to be enormous on the surface!”
“And why should something which is small on the surface not be enormous underneath?” The Bat parried. Edwin fell silent for a moment, listening to the long, deep silence which seemed to radiate from the mouth of an adjacent passage.
“So, you mean to say, this is all from the Alder tree in the churchyard?”
“I mean the Alder tree is from all this.” The Bat quipped, clearly taking pleasure in offering short, dissatisfying replies. Edwin immediately had the impulse that this creature was so backward in its thinking. Then he remembered with a musing grin that the Bat was actually upside-down, which reminded him further that he had been the one who was ‘backward’ or, in fact, upside-down.
“I’d be frustrated at your riddles if you hadn’t already proved me wrong once tonight.” Edwin said, reflectively.
“There’s no riddle about it!” The Bat replied, glancing back at Edwin with a sincere expression, “The Alder, the church yard, your chapel, your garden, everything comes from, and is held together by, the Root. It offers life to everything.”
Edwin found himself a little irritated by the way the Bat was explaining the Root, though he couldn’t point to a specific source of the irritation.
“Well, how’s it do that?” Edwin asked, his tone not hiding much of his frustration.
“By giving choices.” The Bat replied directly, “You might have noticed just how many different passages there are down here; that’s just a small example of what I mean.”
For the first time, Edwin noticed just how rotten the wood walls were, and how little there was of anything which could rightly be called ‘life’ in the whole place. The irony of the fact opposed to the Bat’s words fell on Ewin with a sour pleasure, and he said,
“If choice is really the source of life, then these choices aren’t doing the tree very much good. Have you seen the Alder from outside? Rotten to the core; it’s been dead for decades.”
Immediately the Bat whirled around with something like indignation on his face, and replied to Edwin’s jab,
“I did not say choice was the source of life.” He began, with great sternness on his face, which gradually softened into something sad, “Life is offered by choice, but those who dwell here so seldomly choose to choose it. I’m afraid if you’re ever going to reach the Root, you’re going to need to follow me very closely. There’s so much you don’t understand.”
Edwin was put on his dignity by this last statement and thrust his hands into his pockets, saying with a note of offense,
“I see.”
The Bat seemed a little tickled by Edwin’s pouty response, but withheld his laughter as he said, assuringly,
“It’s not because you’re not intelligent enough to understand. It’s because you’ve spent most your life blinding yourself to obvious truths to cultivate obscure ones.” At the end of this statement, the Bat hastily added, “And watch your step here.”
It had been too late, however, and Edwin had suddenly found himself falling headlong into a deep, black hole. He turned over once as he fell, too startled to scream, then felt his body strike the floor, which again to his relief, was soft. For a moment he thought he might be lying in his own bed again. He felt the silky sheets under his palms, the cool air on his face, and the dreary blackness all around him, like in his room. He would have supposed himself to have woken up from a nightmare in the comfort of his own bedroom, if it hadn’t been for the awful stench which surrounded him. The sharp, pungent, rancid odor of decaying flesh.
It was to Edwin’s disgust that he realized he had fallen into an open and empty coffin.
Chapter IV
Edwin lay where he fell for some time, unwilling to stand or even move. His only conscious concern was for his own health as he lay there, worrying about the condition of his bones, though he knew he was not hurt.
The face of the Bat appeared over the hole as Edwin gazed upward. The Bat clicked his tongue and gaze another one of those ambiguous smiles as he said,
“Didn’t I say to look out?”
Edwin said nothing, only continued gazing up at the Bat, his head a stew of various, unidentifiable emotions. The first he could identify was, to his own surprise, anger, as if it were the Bat’s fault he’d fallen into that grave. The second was objective bewilderment. He had to think it through articulately in his head; if his idea of right-side-up had really been upside-down, that meant the floor was now the other side of the churchyard, which meant if he were to fall, it would be falling toward the sky of his world. So the grave he lay in was reversed, he was laying on the lid of a coffin, and the bottom of it had been dug out.
This realization filled him with such sudden fear he leapt to his feet and began to scramble up the dirt walls of the shaft.
“Now settle down!” The Bat called down to Edwin, “There’s no sense in going into a frenzy. You’re in no danger.”
“What sort of horrible place have you lead me into!”
The Bat lifted its head, regarding Edwin’s words reflectively.
“Horrible, yes. Indeed, more horrible than you know.”
Edwin’s desperate hands shot over the lip of the grave, clawing at the ground. But the Bat did nothing to aid him, only continued to speak to the vicar while gazing up at the ceiling.
“In fact, I don’t believe you have any horror in you.”
“Oh, what is that supposed to mean!?” Edwin blustered, standing up and trying to brush the muddy streaks off his trousers.
“Are you afraid to die?” The Bat asked, his tone so subtle and nonchalant that Edwin did not immediately register the meaning. Edwin replied first with a look of incredulity.
“Me? Afraid to die? I think your question has no meaning.”
The Bat lifted its chin and eyed the little man, allowing him to continue.
“Death is nothing, it is only a doorway, a means of getting from one place to the next. I shouldn’t fear it more than the sunset.” Edwin’s words were planned and well articulated. He believed what he said.
“And yet you do fear it.” The replied. The words sent a blunt shock through Edwin as he realized he really did fear death. Edwin dropped his eyes, and was silent for a long, agonizing minute. Then he lifted his head again and implored,
“Well, if I do fear death, it is for the sake of Lidia. If I were to die…”
“Do not lie to me, creature!” The Bat boomed, its shrill voice strangely deepening. In fact, to Edwin’s eyes, the Bat appeared more to him like a beast then before; no brutish animal, but mighty and unpredictable, like something in a myth. “Do not make yourself out to be a more just and noble man than you are. You fear death, your own death! But in the face of it you have not the true-heartedness to be horrified. I’d imagine your image of self-sacrifice is no more noble than his was.”
The Bat lifted a boney finger to the ceiling, directing Edwin’s disturbed eyes to a hole above them, adjacent to the mouth of the grave. It was roughly the same dimensions as the grave, only around this hole were mounds of displaced earth, as if something had been burrowing into the ceiling.
With the silence, Edwin could faintly hear the sound of scratching somewhere high up, and looking straight up into the hole, could see somewhere at the top, something glittering, like a little window looking out onto a sky full of stars. Then he realized the glittering things were coming nearer towards the entrance of the hole, and a dread began to creep over Edwin’s body.
“Oh, what is it?” Edwin begged in consternation, “I don’t want to be here any more. Just tell me your lessons somewhere else.”
“Be quiet and watch.” The Bat demanded, his tone becoming consistently forceful now, far distant from the almost flippant attitude it had taken earlier.
Reluctantly, Edwin lifted his eyes again to the hole in the ceiling. What finally emerged was something Edwin could never have guessed, but filled him with something he could only begin to describe as horror.
A skeletal figure emerged from the blackness into the surrounding glow of the Bat’s candle. But it was not the sort of skeleton one sees in anatomy diagrams, indeed there wasn’t an inch of white on its whole structure. Instead, its frame was seemingly made out of diamonds in a spectrum of every color, like some extravagant, cleverly cut statue. Though the appearance should have been beautiful, it made horrible by it movement. Jerky, mechanical, ravenous movement, its skull pivoting here and there to allow its eyeless sockets to see its surroundings, if it saw at all. As it scrambled onto the ceiling just above the two, it seemed not to notice them, but behaved as if it were afraid of being watched. Then, lifting a large, leather bag out of the hole, it lowered it to the ground and crouched over it.
Edwin tried to find an angle from which to see what was inside, and when he did he saw the bag was filled with gems. Then, as if mechanically fulfilling a purpose without relish, the skeleton began to consume the gems one after another, like they were walnuts.
Edwin was at a complete loss to make sense of the sight before him, but this did not stop his heart from filling his mind with the haunting suspicion that he was looking in a mirror. The unhappy, living death before him, hardening itself with the gems dug up by its own lifeless fingers, sickened him, then filled him with an overwhelming pity. This fiend was not a monster, but had once been a man or woman, buried in his own church yard. It could be someone he’d known, who had passed a quiet and peaceable life in the village.
A dreaded and infamous lump formed in the vicar’s throat and the backs of his eyes began to warm. The very reason he’d chosen to disregard death as anything of meaning was manifesting itself. Edwin whirled around to the Bat, the desperate tears beginning to form in his eyes as he said,
“Tell me my wife is not one of those!”
The Bat eyed him skeptically,
“Is it for her sake, or for yours that you ask?”
Indignant rage filled the vicar’s face as he shouted back,
“For hers, you devil!”
The Bat narrowed his large, round eyes and sighed,
“She is at the Root, same as your daughter.”
An incomplete relief washed out Edwin’s rage, though his hands remained tightened into fists.
“…Thank you.” Edwin said, weakly.
The Bat payed this no mind, but looked up at the skeleton again, saying,
“What does that thing make you feel.”
Edwin bowed his head, finding he could not look at it a second time,
“Horror, as you say.” Edwin said, flatly. Then looking up at the Bat again he said, “But why? I am ashamed to be horrified. Is it really essential to true-heartedness?”
The Bat looked down on Edwin again, that human gentleness filling its eyes again as it said,
“To fear death is meaningless, but to say death itself is meaningless is another of your upside-down thoughts.” The Bat began walking again, and Edwin eagerly followed. The Bat continued, “You are right in saying death is a passage, but you can never call it one thing. It is a horrible thing for a human to die, therefore it would make you less than human not to be horrified at the sight of it. There is great good in it, in fact the greatest good. It is only through it that one can come to the Root.”
Edwin froze in his tracks, his heart beginning to race again as he asked.
“You mean, for me to reach my daughter, I have to die?” Then the more disconcerting of the realizations struck him, “And does that mean she already…” Edwin could not finish his words.
The Bat glanced back at Edwin with another curious grin, saying,
“For a vicar you certainly have some funny ideas of death. But I can’t blame you, you’re still coming right-side-up.” The Bat continued walking, and Edwin followed.
Chapter V
The visage of the crystalline skeleton haunted Edwin’s conscious thought and flashed with every blink of his eyelids. Edwin tried hard to avoid the grave pits in the ground at his feet, and to ignore the scraping sounds coming from the holes above his head. It was all so horrible, too horrible to ignore or rationalize.
‘If I would have known death to be like this,’ Edwin thought to himself, ‘I would have wept more at funerals’. He could be imagining it, but he thought all this had also affected the Bat. Edwin believed he had seen traces of a tear running along the creature’s furry cheek.
Edwin decided the best way to eradicate the troubling image of the skeleton from his mind was to continue making conversation with the Bat; though even this he was beginning to find little comfort in.
“So, to be clear, this part of the tree is dead because it’s being dug up by…well, people like that.”
“You misunderstand again.” The Bat sighed, “The diamond skeletons here are not people; not any more. They gave up what made them people to harden themselves into rocks which have the appearance of worth. That is why the wood here is dead. If for one moment these rock-people chose to really die, they would soften and sink to the root. Then they would know what it means to have new life, and the wood here would grow again.”
“I think I begin to see.” Edwin said, stepping around another black grave, unable to keep a shudder out of his voice, “There are two kinds of death. This horrible kind which makes men into monsters, and then the kind that allows them to go to the ‘Root’, as you say. I suppose you can call that the death of holy, or humble men.” A flourish of the voice went into these last few syllables, as Edwin inadvertently adopted his preaching tone.
“Closer, but still not quite there.” The Bat laughed. Edwin only then realized how the creature’s voice had deepened into a tone more like his own. Was he mimicking Edwin’s voice, or was he beginning to sound more human? The Bat continued, “There is one death with two halves, I guess you could say. Every man goes through one, but the other half only a few do.”
“You’ve gone over my head again.” Edwin grumbled.
The Bat turned to Edwin suddenly, that mischievous look lighting up his large, blue eyes, as he said,
“It’s best not to say, but to show you.” He lifted his right arm, fanning his huge, leathery wing as he did, pointing down a corredor just to Edwin’s left. Edwin looked at the Bat, then down the corridor, expecting to see nothing but blackness. But there was light, allowing him to see a large, round room, whose walls were made of long, thin, uprights of roots so it gave the impression of a clearing in a forest. In the center of the room, appearing to be the nucleus from which many roots radiated along the floor, was a stone cylinder, reminding Edwin of a well.
The Bat lowered his arm and entered first, leaving Edwin for a moment in the dark. His reluctance to enter the foreboding chamber was overcome by his dread of the dark, and suddenly Edwin found himself in the light of the chamber. The light reminded him of an overcast afternoon, though he could not place where it came from. Then he saw there was a hole in the ceiling, opposite the mouth of the well. The hole in the ceiling was walled with roots, seemingly grown in such a way that they wove together. But what really captured Edwin’s attention were the fresh leaves which sprung from these roots in clusters. The light shown through these and cast forest-like, leafy shadows on the root-floor.
The beauty of the place was immediately shadowed by the Bat’s next words,
“This is where you have to die.”
A cartiactric rush seized Edwin’s muscles, allowing his feet to not approach the well another step. The creeping, visceral fear of bodily harm flooded his nerves, his eyes instinctively scouring the room for dangers. The apparent lack of active danger made the situation only more menacing.
Edwin’s eyes landed back on the Bat, his apprehension to trust now replaced with active doubt. He knew he had to decide at once whether this was a real friend or a mortal danger. But the Bat did not move, his boney hand pointing like a statue to the well.
“What do you mean, die?”
“You wanted to get to the Root, didn’t you?” The Bat rebutted, raising his furry eyebrows.
Edwin stepped back, blustering,
“Well, yes…but I didn’t think that would mean suicide!”
The Bat winced slightly as the vicar said this, the proceeded to say, as if it were a burden to have to explain it,
“No, this is the opposite of suicide. In suicide, you extinguish the world and harden yourself like the skeletons. In the well, you extinguish yourself and soften to the point that you can finally slip through to the Root.”
There was a heavy silence as the Bat stared at Edwin, and Edwin stared at the well.
“And you say Lidia is there?” Edwin said, not lifting his eyes from well.
The Bat nodded.
Edwin took gulped a deep breath and began to shakily move toward the well. He found it hard to keep his balance on the roots as he approached the wall of the well. Touching the cold stones with trembling fingers, Edwin leaned over. To his horror, the light from above him revealed that it was not water in the well, but a red, viscous fluid. The smell immediately confirmed Edwin’s darkest suspicions.
Edwin immediately looked up at the Bat with shock and disgust on his pale face. But the Bat returned no such expression, instead, there was something somber, almost peaceful in his eyes. He placed a hand on Edwin’s shoulder and spoke. If Edwin had not been so absorbed with emotion, he would have been rather surprised to feel that the hand did not feel boney, or cold, but had the warmth and fullness of a man’s hand.
“Your body does not die here. This is one side of the death every man needs but few seek, and even fewer find.”
Edwin stammered and looked back at the red bottom of the well, which was full enough to almost overflow.
“Then…w-why is there so much…blood?”
The Bat did not answer immediately, but smiled a knowing smile, saying,
“It is the life of the tree. My body died here, once.”
Edwin looked up at the Bat again, with something of incredulity in his face now. There was no lie in the Bat’s eyes, rather something even more uncanny now possessed the face. The hue of human flesh filled his exposed skin, his eyes had become more normally proportioned, and what hair still remained on his creaturely face now took on the appearance of an unkempt beard. Edwin’s incredulity turned to horror, then to shame. It dawned on him that this man had died so that Edwin would benefit from his blood.
Edwin took a step back, ready in the moment to flee the place entirely, but felt his heel press against something painfully hard and sharp on the ground. He looked and saw one of the gemes laying there, the kind of things the skeletons would eat. Edwin had never been a wealthy man, and so had never had the privilege to touch such a precious stone.
He reached down and picked it up. Holding it in the palm of his hand, he was astonished at how impenetrably, unyieldingly hard the bright stone was in the soft, pliable flesh of his hand. The contrast struck him with a profound shudder.
Looking up into the lighted portal in the ceiling, the abundant presence of lush vegetation gave him pause. His mind was awaking out of a world which was indifferently solid and grey, into a huge, dynamic conflicted reality. The very places which his mind had affirmed as safe and harmless were uncovered to be a battlefield of giants which had been thundering around him all his life, in spite of his deafness.
A clatter of bones stirred Edwin from his revelation. He whirled around to face the mouth of the passage they had just left. The sound of animated bones, clicking with shrill tones like glass, was coming nearer to the well’s chamber.
“You don’t have long to decide.” The Bat said in low and calm voice. “Death comes, but is never final. You may have put it off your whole life but there is always the choice. Will you take the blood and return to the Root, or will you eat the gems?”
Edwin turned back to the Bat, clutching at his hair in frustration, saying,
“I still don’t understand! How can death be anything but evil! If I go your way, won’t I die also?”
“It will only seem that way to you in so far as you’ve already died to the Root. But you must step into the well.”
Edwin looked back at the well with dread, and then to the hall again. The clatter was getting nearer, but his feet seemed cemented to the ground. With another desperate effort, Edwin spoke up again with wavering voice,
“B-but…if the Root holds everything together, why do I need to make this choice? Shouldn’t I slip into the Root either way? Don’t make me go into that well.”
The Bat stamped his foot with impatience and looked Edwin in the eyes with such a full passion Edwin felt forced to look away.
“Have you learned anything at all?! Have you not seen what this tree is? Do you think you have had no decisions to make? What inspired you to follow me in the first place when you could have taken any passage in this tree?”
Edwin replied matter-of-factly,
“Because you knew where my daughter was.”
“Deeper than that.” The But urged, stepping forcefully toward the frightened vicar, “Why did you want to find your daughter?”
Edwin looked nervously over his shoulder, and replied after a very short pause,
“Well, because I love her.”
The Bat’s expression softened, as he replied,
“That is it. You came here, followed me, and made all these choices, out of love. Why do you think your love has lead you to the Root?”
Finally, Edwin pieced together the puzzle, as all his troubled thoughts came right-side-up.
“Because the Root is love.”
The Bat smiled, a very warm and human smile, adding,
“It is the love which holds the world together, the love which turns the stars, and the love which brought you here. And love is defined by the choice to love. Come die, and see love for yourself.”
Edwin shot another glance over his shoulder as his feet began to move again, just in time to see the glint of jeweled bones come into view.
His feet carried him directly to the well, where his thoughts had no other direction than to plunge himself into the blood and trust the Bat was giving him the truth. Throwing himself over the side of the well, he felt the impact of the blood against his body, then felt the warmth as it enveloped him entirely.
Chapter VI
Sound and sensation disappeared like a puff of smoke as his head slipped beneath the blood, a muffled, bubbling sound filling his ears.
He floated, suspended in the blood for a long moment, astonished at the huge peace which stole his heart. Then, in the midst of the blood, his fingers felt something like tendrils of ivy against the walls of the well. His hands gripped these as the blood seemed to be draining away. In a moment he found himself clinging dry to a sheer wall of ivy.
Everything around him was just as silent as if he had not left the blood. The air was cool and still, and everything was lit with a pale, moon-like, azule light. Looking up, he could see he was in a deep shaft, like the hollow of a tree. Above the shaft, he could see a canopy of glittering stars, more alive and colorful than any night sky he had ever seen. Without thinking twice, he began to ascend the vines toward the stars, knowing there, above him, was what the Bat had always called, the ‘Root’.
As Edwin reached the top of the shaft, he found himself at the top of what appeared to be a tree top. Though it must have been a very odd treetop as the branches were all level, shooting out from where the shaft ended in every direction, and all so close together that the branches made a sort of level table-top, which terminated in billowy hedges of leaves and fruit.
Coming to his feet to stand on this floor of branches, Edwin took a deep breath. He could not help but breathe deeply, the air was so delicious and full of life. He felt his heart harmoniously thumping in his chest, intoxicated with, not a rapturous pleasure, but the tranquil, contented pleasure of a heart long and happily in love.
His eyes scanned the table-top of living branches until they landed on two figures, facing away from him, sitting near what appeared to be a little pond of water, collected in a hollow of the wood. The two seemed to be in hushed conversation with one another, the one clearly being Edwin’s daughter, the second being the tall, dark figure of the Owl, whom the Bat had told Edwin about.
The Owl lifted its head as Edwin took a step toward the two. The roundness of its white face fixing on Edwin, and appearing for a moment to be very animal.
It lifted a large, black wing and rested it on Lidia’s shoulder, then rose to its feet and approached Edwin, walking with the gaunt air of a man in a cassock.
“He’s glad you’ve come to the Root.” Said a familiar voice at Edwin’s side. Edwin looked, to see a familiar face, but no longer the Bat. A man stood at his side, wholly one of his own kind, but undoubtedly the same person which had lead him through the tree. His eyes were the same blue eyes, his face wore the same unkempt beard, and in his hands he carried the same candle.
Edwin smiled, unable to withhold a laugh as he looked on his friend, saying,
“Why, what happened to you? You look just like a person!”
The man looked down at himself with a start, as if to see that he had transformed into something other than a bat. Then he looked back up at Edwin and replied with that same grin,
“Funny, to me you look just like a bat.”
Edwin furrowed his brows and smiled at the remark, looking back toward the Owl. But it was no longer an owl which approached them, but a woman in a black cassock, her face keen but not hard.
Edwin looked at her, and back at the man beside him in bewilderment, saying,
“How is it you both look so human all of a sudden?”
“Because,” The woman spoke, “you’ve come to love us at last. You have come to the Root.”
Edwin turned his full attention to the woman as she came to stand beside him, looking toward Lidia, still facing away from them, playing with a stick in the pool of water.
“You took my daughter away; why?” Edwin said, though there was nothing very accusatory in his tone.
The woman did not take her eyes off Lidia as she replied,
“I never did, she followed me up here. It wasn’t as hard as it was for you however; her heart was never very far from the Root.”
Edwin was silent, dropping his eyes, then returning them to Lidia, all of them now looking toward the girl.
“Why doesn’t she love me?” Edwin said, sulkily.
“You should know that by now.” The man reprimanded, “She didn’t love you because she couldn’t. You gave her no choice, which is the heart of love.”
Edwin nodded, keeping his eyes on his daughter.
“Can I truly love her?” He asked,
“If you can love from the Root, you can love like the grass is green.” The woman laughed, “You’ve let yourself die and come to the Root. From here, you love from the source of all love and life.”
“Go and see her.” The man urged. Edwin looked at the two of them with such a love and gratitude in his heart for both of them he could not express with words. But he could tell in their faces, they already knew his what he felt. Edwin turned to face his daughter again, and walked toward her.
Coming to the place where she sat, he noticed her white gown again, given to her by her mother. He noticed her hair, caught silvery in the blue light. He sighed heavily, his heart nearly bursting with a new affection for her.
Placing one hand on her little shoulder, the world around him melted into another place again. He found himself kneeling beside Lidia, who sat on one of the roots of the Alder tree, under the light of a high moon. The silence and the cold wind assured Edwin that they were home again, though he still felt the tranquility of the Root in his blood.
Immediately as his warm hand rested on Lidia’s shoulder, her head snapped around to look at him with a start. Her little, round face was streaked with tears and her eyes were completely changed from those Edwin had seen in their last encounter. Remorse and a sudden relief filled them as she leapt to her feet, throwing her arms around her father.
Somewhere above in the branches of the Alder tree, resonated the hooting of an owl, as father and daughter embraced below, each loving for the first time from the Root.
