Nostalgia

© Philip Roberts

The goal was to find a good place to drink. Walter trudged through the thick grass concealing booby traps composed of tree roots, ready and willing to snare his foot should he get careless. His shoulder ached from a half hour lugging around the twelve-pack.

Behind him Brian assured Walter he knew exactly where they were. Why wasn't Brian leading this expedition if he was so confident in his surroundings, Walter mused, but didn't feel like forcing his friend to the front enough to speak his thoughts aloud.

Thankfully the spring day wasn't yet tainted with the heat of summer, the faint breeze of a dying winter still noticeable and more than welcome.

“Up ahead,” Brian said, pointed his scrawny hand. Recent growth spurts had only accentuated Brian's frail form to a ridiculous degree. Walter, who had been held back a year—in kindergarten of all grades—had already been through and finished the worst of what puberty had to offer.

“Wait,” Walter said.

“It's just up there,” Brian whined.

Ignoring Brian, Walter started for a shape coming into view. Rather than protest Brian followed, until both stood almost directly in front of the old tree house built onto a massive oak tree.

The wooden structure had been there for years, wood faded through countless seasons, but still Walter could see the strength of the structure, and the thick branches twisting throughout it, giving it added support. Whoever had built the thing had done a good job of integrating the tree into the design.

“Who would've thought their would be something like that this far out,” Brian said, and Walter agreed. Along the trunk wood planks were nailed down, the nails rusted and brown. The wood held firmly under Walter's grip. “You going up?” Brian asked with a hint of uncertainty.

Walter set down his twelve-pack. “Why not? Thing looks sturdy enough to me, and it isn't very far off the ground if it does fall apart around us. Besides, I haven't seen a tree house since the one a friend of mine had, hell, back when I was in preschool. Coolest damn thing I'd ever seen back then.”

The roof to the thing was surprisingly tall for a tree house. Even Brian, who was pushing six foot two, barely had to kneel down to get around. Both of them stopped right inside the door. Across from them a window showed green leaves, while to their left there was actually a little door leading into another room, and to their right, yet another door.

Walter knelt to touch a chair discarded on the floor, its leg broken, the tiny thing meant only for a kid around ten at most.

Brian was forced to duck in order to go through the door on the right side, while Walter turned his attention to the left. He knelt down and peered into the darkness of a little room lacking windows. Forced to almost crawl through the door, Walter found his vision immediately diminished by the dark, made worse by his body blocking the only source of light.

Absently he felt through his pocket for his key ring and the tiny light attached to it while crawling further into the room, its ceiling clearly meant for the same age as the empty chair out in the main room.

Tiny objects cluttered the dirty floor. Walter's fingers brushed across little shapes, sent them rolling, but the light wasn't enough to let him see what. He couldn't even see the far wall to the room, but of course, it couldn't be too big, given the limitations of the tree.

His keys jingled in his grip just as his right hand found an object a lot bigger than the little things he'd been brushing around before. He sat back, in order to better aim the small light, and turned it on.

As strong as his momentary tension had been, the over all feel of remembrance had dominated all else. The structure itself, faded from so many years, certainly infested with something given its age, had never really crossed Walter's mind, because the memories of his youth had simply been too overwhelming. The unexpected surprise of this find had excited him, brought him back to a youth he had thoroughly enjoyed, and hadn't much cared to let go of when high school first loomed. And now, his penlight showing him the bones, most picked completely clean, dusty and dirty and stretching back into darkness too deep to be possible, he almost felt as if reality had betrayed him, taunted him with memories to make the shock all the more powerful.

He didn't scream, however, probably because of the obvious age to the bones—human bones, something in him said. But what seemed more important than the bones was the darkness the bones stretched back into. Death was a fact Walter understood, even if he had never dealt with it first hand. This structure felt like something else to him, something he didn't understand, didn't want to understand.

“Brian,” he shouted, turning from the bones, only to realize the entire place had been bathed in black. His light showed him the door he had entered through, but no light spilled in from beyond it. “Where are you Brian?” he screamed even louder, voice cracking with fear and a lingering puberty.

There was no Brian to answer him. Reality had changed, Walter accepted more readily than he thought was normal, and in this new reality, where tree houses are filled with human bones, stretch on forever, block out all light, friends also can disappear.

Walter scrambled across the floor. His hands rubbed across what he could now see were teeth. He practically dove through the door into a now enclosed area. There was no door, no window, and no door across the way from him. The only door was the one he had just pushed himself through.

His fist slammed into the wood on the other side of the room. “Are you in there Brian?” he screamed, clawing at the wood, feeling the splinters digging into his skin. A deep groan rocked the structure. Wood creaked, shifted, came to life, the knots in the old wood like eyes watching him, the lines in the wood grain smiling mouths.

He braced himself against the far side of the small room, pulled his feet back, and hammered both of them into where a door had once been. The wood didn't give. Brian didn't answer.

Faintly at first, but increasing in strength, Walter could smell decaying flesh. He had entered the holding area for the remains, so had Brian entered the killing grounds?

His source of light faltered. Walter shook the little penlight to get it going again. He had never actually felt the blood drain from his face before. He actually smiled, almost laughed, before the expression shifted into a tight, white-lipped frown. Without the breeze from before the heat seeped its way into the wooden structure, or was it the heat of the tree house's life, whatever kind of life that was?

Escape. Brian was all but forgotten now that the danger came to the forefront. He had known Brian for two years, been good friends with him for those two years, in fact, but Walter had known himself for seventeen years, and felt a stronger need to see himself make it through than Brian.

Vainly he struck the wood where the entrance had been. His penlight faltered again, struggled to come back on when he shook it.

His matches. The idea of matches was so strongly connected to smoking Walter simply hadn't thought to use them as a source of light before, and now, light wasn't the chief idea dawning on him.

The penlight, still on, struck the floor with his keys attached to them. Walter was too busy grabbing at his pocket to pay any attention. Just as his matches became dislodged, something caught Walter's eye.

Red slowly soaked into the wood from behind the wall Brian had vanished through, spreading, starting from a point about five inches up from the wall. The image of Brian's bloody corpse lying against the wall on the other side flashed through Walter's mind as he struck his first match and shoved the burning end against the wooden wall.

Immediately the wood began to change color, shape, a living entity attempting to escape the pain of the fires licking at its flesh. Beneath him the floor bucked. Walter landed on what he knew wasn't wood, staring at the spot on the wall where the wood had grown raw, almost bloody from the flame.

Thin lines pushed up from the ground, from the walls, the ceiling, pulsing rhythmically. Veins pumped blood through the body of whatever had devoured Walter and Brian whole. The color of old wood faded into something closer to wet flesh, soft beneath his touch. He jumped to his feet even as the thing continued to move about. His fist did just as little to the fleshy substance as it had when the walls had still looked like wood.

Another match sent a shudder of fiery pain through the creature. Even as the first match was going out another was lit, shoved forward, and Walter knelt to scoop up his keys while the flame did its job.

Pain spiked through the base of his feet. Tendrils of skin started slipping their way up his legs, and the fire wasn't doing enough damage. From the wall in front of him the image of a face began to take shape, formed from the entire wall, eye sockets pulling back even as the line for a mouth stretched forward.

Walter turned from the forming face, thoughtless, his keys held tightly in his hand, their tips pushed through the space between his fingers just above the knuckles. Four keys gouged into the surface of the wall opposite the forming face. He almost heard a voice screaming in pain. The keys pierced the wall again just as something scratched along his ankles.

He didn't stop punching. Tattered strips of flesh ripped from the wall amidst a spray of brownish liquid. Behind him he could feel the presence of the face, felt what he swore was hot breath against his back, heard what might've been forming teeth grinding together. And then the wall suddenly tore apart, reformed what looked like a door.

Nothing held his feet anymore when he stumbled forward. All of the excitement had driven the notion of how far off the ground he was from his mind. The ground at the base of the tree was dry from weeks without rain, and provided a harsh landing. Walter's shoulder took the brunt of the impact and left him writhing, his back on fire, his ankles needled with pain.

Panic made him push himself back, away from the tree, stopping only briefly to latch a hand onto one of the twelve-packs left discarded by the base. He didn't stop until he was a good ten feet away. The door remained in the tree house along with the wooden steps leading up. But now the wood grain beside the door seemed to glare down at him with knots for eyes. A deep frown formed from the lines between wooden planks. Brian was still up there. Brian was dead.

Walter let go of the keys, stared indifferently at the dots of blood on his palms from where they had dug in. He wrapped his shirt around the cap of a bottle to get it open, eagerly accepted its contents. Two more emptied into him before his mind caught up with him. Pain started to fade into a dull throb.

Drinking wasn't going to help but he still found himself opening another beer. Here he sat, sealing his fate with alcohol, assuring himself no one would believe anything he said, probably even making sure he wouldn't remember how to get back after a drunken return to his car. But all these facts couldn't actually stop him from bringing the bottle to his lips.

Absently he looked down at the bottle, and then the tree, before flinging the bottle at it. The glass shattered, drenched the trunk with beer, just as it would any other tree. What if he stabbed it with his keys again? Was he willing to get that close in order to see?

So he pulled himself to his feet and started away from Brian's grave. He'd drive into town and get himself some gasoline. He'd find the tree. It didn't matter how long it took, Walter would find the tree again, and when he did, he'd give Brian the pyre he deserved.