Close your eyes and listen. The snap, drip, and the odd thump of rain against the pines. Bulging water gurgles over a drainpipe choked on moss. The dribble that clicks between the rotten rafters. Tap, tap, tap of droplets on the wood floor, slick with damp and mold. You can hear this place is ruined. Water saturates the plaster. The pines lean in. One has grown up and through the house, the roof buckled around it. A small stream runs down the tiles and falls down across the bark.
Pull that damp blanket over you. There’s scant else to keep you warm. A fire would not set here, even if you had dry wood to burn. The forest floor is nothing but needles, mulch, and weedy sticks, drenched as much as anything else. The trees are all fat with sap and water. Their swollen bulks block all sense of direction in the choking forest. Their tops block all light from filtering down through the gravel sky. Dense evergreen that has only known the constant batter of rainfall.
Endless. Pathless. You are assailed on all sides by monotony. The forest is larger than your mind can stretch. An infinity, perhaps. There is only this house. The sole uniqueness. But by inches, it becomes much like the rest. Damp. Wood. Irritated down into mulch by slow, unrelenting forces. The drip of rain. The creak of pine.
Food is easy. You dredge your fingers through the humus and it comes back writhing with worms. The whole forest floor seethes with them, coming up to answer the constant drumbeat of the rain. Cold, raw worms. A feast of them. Keeps you going. Keeps this delirium stretched thin across hours and days and years. And water? You but turn your head to the sky. Place it under the stream falling by the tree. Suckle the damp from the floorboards.
Daylight hours are much the same as the night. Perhaps a little less cold. The light is no issue. You can fumble in the dark for worms just as easy as in the day. You’ve tracked around this house so many times that you can do it with your eyes closed. Often you do, just to experience something a little different. Besides, be it night or day, what is there to see? Pine upon pine upon pine. The static of rain. The slow drops sinking into the wood.
You almost wish there was some great beast out there, stalking between the tall trunks. Something to get the blood up. Something that might end this limbo. But no. Nothing could survive out in that deluge. Withered away to mud, piece by piece, each step staggering more than the last until it is dragged down into the mulch to feed the worms.
That’s where you’ll end up, sooner or later. For as long as you have fed on the forest, it has also fed on you. Almost. A meal in waiting. An investment. Each raindrop dragging a few molecules of skin down into the murk, teasing the worms with the feast to come. Sluice a hand through your hair and feel the grease and the water bulge between your fingers. That’s all you’ll become. Water and meat, for a hungry forest.
Paddy Dobson
2nd October 2020