Chapter 7 The Library Tree #2
“Tell me, Mr. Green. Based on your observations, do you think it possible that the corpse was full of eggs? Not unheard-of in nature. The offspring hatching and eating the corpse from within? A funerary banquet? Like parasitoid wasp offspring devouring a caterpillar?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Why?”
“All the caterpillars emerged from a central point and they filed out one by one. I guess I’d think hatching eggs would be less uniform. Also…it wasn’t like the corpse was being eaten. It just disintegrated. It became dust.”
“Good. Do you have any ideas about how such a thing could happen?”
“I really don’t.”
“Neither do I,” she said. “Isn’t that just lovely?”
“Is it?”
“Adjust your perspective, modern man. There are uncharted worlds within your reach. In fact, you are on their shores now. The information age is puttering somewhere back there in the lands you left behind. Whatever information is here you will sow and harvest yourself. How does that sound?”
“I don’t know. Worryingly colonialist?”
Her expression darkened.
“They are metaphorical lands. And I can’t decide if you are joking or missing my point intentionally.”
“I hear you. You’re trying to make this a lesson about becoming comfortable with the unknown?”
Valentina set aside her coffee cup.
“That lesson arrives most days whether or not we invite it. But we are not in the business of passively noting our own ignorance. We are in the business of finding out.”
She stood up abruptly.
“Come along, Mr. Green. To the library.”
He nodded to the ceiling as they went out.
“Bye, Blobert.”
Blobert blinked wetly.
At the foot of the ancient oak to the rear of camp, they climbed a spiral staircase built of halved logs leading to a massive tree house twenty feet above the ground. The stairs ended at a hatch. Valentina threw it open and climbed in with the thoughtless agility of a twelve-year-old.
“Cool, the tree fort,” Green said as they entered. “I’ve been excited to see inside.”
“Tree fort? My apprentice, we aren’t here to play Tarzan. This is a place of study.”
He didn’t argue, but he knew there was no way he would ever surrender the fun of that place.
Entering, he saw that, most of all, it was a temple dedicated to books.
The living trunk of the oak, gray as a mourning dove, grew through the center of a broad circular space carpeted with a dozen mismatched rugs and walled with shoulder-to-shoulder bookshelves.
Several round windows and one massive skylight brought the morning sun into the room.
A hanging rope ladder led to a hatch in the library roof, one of Valentina’s explicit off-limits spaces.
A few desks, small tables, and reading chairs crowded around the trunk.
“This is…amazing.”
“Fire and flood. The two perennial enemies of books. I wanted this room set apart from the other structures.”
Green shook his head.
“No. No, this isn’t just practical.”
Valentina raised an eyebrow.
“This feels like, I don’t know the right word. A holy place?”
She paused and looked around her. The living tree. The pooled sunlight. A book collection multiple lifetimes in the making.
“I take your point. With or without intention, some places are simply sacred. They accrete and concentrate meaning.”
In that moment. Looking at that room. Green had never felt more certain that he had made the correct decision in coming to the mountains.
For weeks, he felt that his life had been building to a crescendo of chaos and dread.
Standing in the library tree, he began to feel a new hope that all his doubt and terror had been paying for something worth having, something he might actually cherish in an earnest, unforced way.
He had a moment of déjà vu.
Not that he had ever stood in a library tree before.
But there was something familiar in it, an echo from childhood.
It was akin to the experience of a long, dull hardship in some joyless stretch of life’s journey, becoming numb with sameness, only to be ambushed by a patch of golden splendor and think, Oh, that’s right isn’t it, there is good to be found here as well as the trials we endure?
Goodness so simple and potent it threatens you with a kind of headlong love for the world that seems a dangerous cousin to mania.
He pulled the hat from his head and turned in slow circles.
The books. The papers. The shelves full of natural odds and ends that each seemed to whisper an invitation.
Green wandered the room, fascinated. Here, a cat’s skull made of blue glass.
There, a potted fern that rippled and swayed like an undersea grotto.
A small bell jar over a speckled silver egg that hovered an inch above its shelf.
A long-fingered glove that, upon closer inspection, appeared to be a seamless piece of cast-off skin with heart-shaped scales.
Fifty such wonders alongside the orderly ranks of mismatched books.
“Is this where I’ll do my reading? My…cryptonaturalist studying?”
She smiled.
“It can get cold up here in the winter. I do not allow flame in this room, but there is a radiant heater wired into the solar batteries and electric lights. It was not built as a school but, yes, this is the most sensible place for your instruction. I also prefer reading materials to stay in this room, when possible. And I will ask you to humor an old tradition and call me Teacher.”
“Thank you. Teacher. Thank you.”
Valentina scrutinized Green’s face.
“Welcome to the profession I treasure. Please respect it in what ways seem best to you.”
“I’ll do my best.”
She walked over to a narrow walnut bookcase and patted it fondly.
“This shelf is your scholarly home for the present. It is general practices and fundamentals for the study of hidden nature.”
“Are we here to read about the rag moth?”
“A fair guess, but no. I know the existing literature on the rag moth. Perhaps I’ll show you some of the entries written in English later, but your observations last night constitute a new discovery worth sharing.”
“Sharing?”
“Oh, indeed. Like most worthy disciplines, our trade is the work of a community. Many minds exploring questions from many angles and diverse perspectives. We share data whenever possible. It is amazing the cooperation you can foster when you are not working toward selling something. Though…I won’t pretend we do not all have our own egos and priorities.
All that said, you, Mr. Green, have discovered something that, in the interest of scholarship and safety, should be known by cryptonaturalists globally. So, we will share it.”
Valentina reconsidered.
“Actually, you have discovered several things worth sharing.”
Green scanned the room for a computer. He found none.
“Share it…how? Do you have a satellite phone or something?”
She walked to an upholstered reading chair next to a small desk. She sat and placed Green’s notes on her lap. A hinged wooden box rested on the desktop. A brown cord ran from the box to the trunk of the oak, snaking down along valleys in the gray bark, then down below the floorboards.
“Hold out your hand, Mr. Green.”
Valentina opened a desk drawer and plucked out a large sugar cube. She placed it on Green’s open palm.
“For the network administrator. I suspect they are due a payment.”
“Uh. Okay…”
“When I begin the broadcast, just listen and observe. I will, of course, credit the work you have done, but we will keep you anonymous for now to shield you from the more…intense…personalities within the cryptonaturalist community. Agreed?”
He nodded, not at all certain to what he was agreeing.
Valentina opened the box. Inside was a copper panel with a mesh speaker, a dial, and a toggle switch. A single yellow bulb faded on and off at the pace of a sleeper’s breath. She checked the dial, then rested a finger on the switch.
“Silence, please.”
Green leaned in to watch.
She clicked the switch. A distant crackle like tearing linen purred from the speaker.
There was a smell like a freshly tilled field.
Valentina pointed to the sugar cube in Green’s hand, then to the floor.
At the thin gap where the library floor met the trunk of the great oak, near where the cord disappeared below the deck, a hedge of trumpet-shaped mushrooms were rising like a city skyline in miniature, towers as soft and pale as salamander bellies.
The fungal thicket leaned toward a central point, became a column, a platform, an open palm sprouting long, curving fingers.
The fingers opened. The hand looked both too human and not human enough, a fruiting body from the uncanny valley.
He placed his offering on the palm. The sugar cube sank beneath the yielding flesh and the hand divided back into fungal shapes that quickly receded beneath the floorboards, leaving only a pale dusting of spores in their wake.
Valentina spoke to the box.
“This is Valentina Blackwood transmitting on cryptonaturalist frequency 11-58-1. I have taken on a new apprentice at my camp in the Catskill Mountains. He is an absolute novice, yet he has made a number of discoveries that are worth your attention.
“Firstly, for the past seventy-two hours I have possessed the corpse of a rag moth obtained near the shores of Lake Michigan. Last night, my apprentice observed the spontaneous decay of the corpse. The decay coincided with the emergence of no fewer than one hundred caterpillars.”
She continued to relay the details of Green’s observations, then shifted subjects.
“Unlikely as it may sound, this is the second noteworthy discovery my apprentice has made in as many nights. The night before last, he spotted the glass fawn here near my camp.
“This was his first sighting of cryptonature and a local resident advised him to seek me out as a result.”
Green squirmed at “first sighting of cryptonature.” He stuffed a hand in his pocket and said nothing.
Valentina continued.
“His description of the fawn matches the known records. Translucent body. Visible organs. Pale bioluminescence.”