And the Trees Crept In(69)

I am crying.

“I’m so sorry,” I tell him, my tears still coming from a well of sadness deep inside me. “I forgive you.”

He begins to peel away, like some awful wallpaper, like a suit he was wearing—a veneer—fading into a crumpled nothing at the feet of what was inside all along.

Me.

I stare at myself, holding the berries.

“You…” I whisper. “You’re me. I was fighting… myself. This whole time, I was fighting myself?”

The me that was the Creeper Man all along collapses onto her knees and devours the berries, all the while sobbing. I cry with her. I watch myself laughing through my tears. The other Silla nods at me, and fades away, back into myself.

Gowan walks over to where she knelt and turns to smile at me.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask him.

“You wouldn’t have believed. Not then. You’d have pulled away and I’d lose you forever.”

I nod. “I… I feel—different.” I feel whole. Full. Healed. I feel… like myself again. “This whole thing”—I gesture at the manor, the woods, the trees, where the Creeper Man used to be—“was all my doing, wasn’t it? I was trapped… wasn’t I?”

Gowan nods. “You’ve kept yourself locked in your own purgatory—one of your own making—since you died.”

I see it. I see it all. The truth of everything. Like all the blank pieces I once turned into darkness and shadow are suddenly there, bright and urgent. “I turned myself into my own tormentor,” I whisper. “And I used Cath’s story to do it.”

Gowan grins. “Not anymore.”

There is so much to process… to take in. But I don’t have time, because the trees begin to glow like lightbulbs. Pulsing like they each contain a heart of fire. The light grows, and grows, encompassing everything around it.

I am blinded by the light. Again.

When it fades, I am standing in front of La Baume. It is such a sad, old building. It is covered in vines—not the strange roots and vines of before, but real vines, still and old, tinged red with autumn. Spiderwebs hang from the gutters and windows and the house is utterly still under a gray autumn sky. Through the few gaps in the overgrowth, I spot red paint, peeling away, revealing blue, then green—so many colors.

La Baume is warped and sunken. Derelict and forgotten.

We are inside then, walking through the halls. All the furniture is covered up, dusty with time passing, lonely and sad.

“This is where I’ve been.”

“Yes. This is what the manor has become,” Gowan says. He is beside me. I can’t tell if he was always or only just now. “You’ve been here for a long time.”

He nods at a shelf along the wall in my bedroom. It is covered with seemingly endless copies of my broken book. The one with the omega symbol, and the gash in its cover.

“My journal…”

“That’s how many times you’ve done this,” he says.

I touch the row of them, unthinking, not really processing. “So many…”

“At least seventy-four.”

“So many times…”

“This symbol wasn’t in the real thing,” Gowan observes, taking out one of the broken books. “Nor was this gash. You put them both here. Why?”

I close my eyes. Try to find the answer. “Omega… meaning the ultimate end. Death. I read up about eschatology in the library when I was… before. It means the end of everything. Omega—the end of it all. And the gash… I guess I was just… broken.”

He nods. “I understand.”

We walk to the kitchen and then I open the kitchen door. I’m expecting to be in La Baume’s overgrown garden. Instead…

A garden bigger than any I have seen. So green, so lush, and flowers of all colors and sizes. Mountains in the distance promise snow, but down here… even the bees are happy.

And Nori…

She is playing and dancing with Cath—the Cath who used to be, the Cath lost so long ago—and I can’t stop sobbing. I watch her, spilling over with gratitude. These tears are different, and I’m laughing.

“Nori,” I say, the word choked by my happiness and relief.

Nori turns to me. “Silla!”

And her voice! Her voice is so clear and bright and real. She smiles at me, and then she turns away, and she and Cath dance toward the mountains.

“Wait—”

But she is going.

“Auntie Cath…”

But she is going, too.

“She had her own journey to go on,” Gowan says, coming to sit beside me in the grass.

“But she was in the attic.”

“In the beginning. Only you were in the attic by the end.”

I pull at the grass and run it through my fingers.

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“A lot of what happened won’t make sense, even though you’re the one who created it all.”

“I created that? The trees coming closer? The manor sinking, the Creeper Man torturing me at night? All of that?”

Gowan nods. “You had some pretty bad self-hate issues.”

“And anger,” I whisper. “I had rage. For everything. Myself. Nori. Cath.” I hesitate. “You.”