Read an extract of Arborescence by Rhett Davis

Start reading Arborescence, the new novel from award-winning author Rhett Davis.

We put our backpacks in the car and drive. It takes a long time to reach the far side of the outer suburbs. When we do, the highway cuts through a wide plain. I curate a playlist that would last for a thousand kilometres, or a round-the-world flight. But I keep adding to it anyway. The day is warm and bright, and Caelyn drives with the window down. I look up from the phone and feel, for a moment, something like possibility.

‘What do you think makes a person believe they’re a tree?’ she says.

‘Mental illness,’ I say.

She shakes her head. ‘I don’t think a collective delusion like this would exist without a sociopathic figurehead. I bet there’s a wanker with a manifesto.’

The plains are wide and treeless with occasional stone walls dividing paddocks from the highway. ‘It’s hard to believe we’ll ever see trees again, looking around here.’

As if I hadn’t spoken, she says, ‘Yeah. Or maybe they’re tired of being mammals, you know? Like they’ve been on some forum about society needing to slow down or whatever, and they’ve taken it to a ridiculous level.’

‘It’s exhausting having muscles and blood and stuff,’ I say. ‘Being still and peaceful and not having to twitch, fuck and eat sounds nice.’

She frowns. ‘I like fucking and eating,’ she says.

We pass a lone tree in a field, an old eucalyptus that has been left to grow, farmed around for years.

‘I wonder what it’d be like,’ I say. ‘Being a tree.’

She looks at the road. The highway ahead snakes up through beckoning hills and green rocky fields. Beyond that, according to the map, is the forest. ‘When we get there, you should stand next to them for a bit,’ she says. ‘See how it feels. See if it takes.’

I ask if she’s going to steal plants from the cult.

‘Don’t be a dick,’ she says.

I say I’m not being a dick.

‘You’re being a dick,’ she says, and I say, ‘Nah,’ even though I probably am.

We move into that sulky phase that sometimes afflicts us these days. It is something more than silence; a weight, a tiredness, a burden, an alone-together.

—

Into the hills. At first, pockets of trees, then we plunge into the forest. The late spring sun flickers between tall white trunks of mountain ash. Its ghostly light falls gently over walls of enormous tree ferns. Despite the warmth of the day, a mist embraces us briefly, releasing us a few seconds later. I lower my window. The air is heavy and smells like the freshest, cleanest dirt and the sharp-clear sting of eucalyptus. Something old there too. Ancient, angry.

I say that I’m sorry, and she says for what, and I say, for being a dick and, look, probably everything up to this point, and she says, just breathe, Bren.

She smiles and lowers all the windows and screams.

—

Following the route she meticulously prepared, we turn at an old dirt track that looks as though it hasn’t been used for some time. It’s full of ruts and small canyons, and seems more like a riverbed than a road. Caelyn turns on the four-wheel drive. I didn’t realise our car had four-wheel drive. She drives expertly, navigating each bump carefully.

‘Dad used to drive us for hours on these tracks to get to some clearing by a waterfall, or a big rock overlooking a valley.’

I say, ‘Uh-huh,’ and bounce with the car.

‘You nervous?’ she says.

‘Not at all,’ I say. I consider my body for a moment. I appear to be holding the seat tightly. ‘I am fairly certain we’re going to end up on the news, either murdered or scammed,’ I say. ‘I packed a cricket bat.’

She laughs and says, ‘Hey, the road ends here. There’s an old walking track that’ll take us the rest of the way.’

She parks the car then gets out, grabs her pack and makes for a barely noticeable trail through the ferns. There’s a gentle wind brushing the dizzyingly high treetops, and from somewhere the rushing of water. There are shadows everywhere.

‘I’m not sure I like forests,’ I call out as I put my pack on. ‘I don’t like that part of The Lord of the Rings at all. It’s really terrifying.’

It would be so easy to become lost here. It’s an enormous, hostile labyrinth. There’s beauty, sure, but also something darker, a drowsy malevolence.

Caelyn, already well ahead of me, doesn’t respond.

She always races ahead when we go for hikes. She doesn’t look back. She never looks back. Eventually I’ll find her perched on a rock, drinking, snacking, or basking in the sun with her eyes closed. She’ll spring to life when she sees me, shoulder her pack again, and set off before I’ve had time to sit and rest. She says she gets energy in bursts, like a cat, and that I’m more of a lumbering beast, like a cow, or an easily startled jumping creature, like an antelope or a rabbit. Prey, in other words. Sometimes she hides in the bushes, waiting for me to approach. Sometimes she waits for me to pass and attacks from behind. Often, she bites.

—

The sound of water flowing, louder now, but from where? Tree ferns the height of two people tower over the path and form a canopy within the canopy. Branches and roots and moss and leaves and peat (or something like peat). The trail keeps winding through it all, climbing and falling. The forest grows even darker, the scent of decay riper. The sunlight barely reaches the ground.

I can feel centuries of earth, of air, of light. A city, a country, a world.

—

I jump across a puddle of black water. This forest is drawing me in to confuse me, to confound me. My heart races. The trail descends further, the shadows bearing their own shadows. It’s not too late to turn around.

—

As I cross a small creek, sunlight bursts through the canopy. On the other side I stop. The water is tea-stained but clear, and I run my hands through it. It’s colder than I’d anticipated. I dry my hands on my jacket and try to warm them up with my breath. I feel the hair rising on the back of my neck. I freeze. I can’t hear anything other than the water. All prey needs water. The predator waits patiently as their prey follows its predictable paths. The only question is from where –

Something slams into me, pins me to the ground and bites my neck, hard. She continues growling, thrashing and biting until she’s had enough, then she stands and says, ‘Took you long enough.’

I sit up. ‘The forest is like you,’ I say. ‘A predator. A very patient one.’

‘People are the only real predators left,’ she says.

—

‘That documentary we watched,’ she says, as we approach the crest of a hill. More sunlight is seeping through, and the tree ferns have given way to grasses. ‘About the guy who made clockwork toys. What was the point of that? Were they being serious and saying this guy was amazing, or was it demonstrating the futility of human endeavours? Because those toys he made were not good. At all.’

‘It could have been a satire.’

She turns around and says, ‘Yes! But it could have been completely serious. I couldn’t work out what I was supposed to do with it.’

‘What are you supposed to do with any piece of art?’

‘Understand it?’

‘That’s not the point of art.’

She’s about to continue arguing, but instead stops at the top of the hill and gasps.

‘What is it?’ I say.

She reaches for my shoulder, but it’s not there yet. I hurry forward. Her hand finds my shoulder and squeezes.

I follow her gaze. We’ve arrived at the edge of the forest. Kilometres of grassy fields stretch into the distance, with rolling hills and the remnants of old tree trunks, likely cut down decades ago. The sunlight is suddenly blinding, the feeling of shadowy dread lifted, only to be replaced by another kind: a dread that is desiccated, formless and shapeless.

‘Look,’ she whispers, ‘over there.’

She points to a hill not far away, where around thirty people stand quietly, arms at their sides, several metres apart from each other. They don’t move. It is as silent now as it has been the entire journey. A light breeze brushes the grass that covers the otherwise naked hills, a breeze the forest had sheltered us from.

‘Is it a protest?’ I whisper.

She looks at me blankly. ‘A protest,’ she says. ‘Here. Where no-one can see it.’

‘Group meditation?’

‘They’re trying to become trees, Bren.’

We stare at the people a little while longer. There’s no movement at all, just the wind blowing their hair. They face the same direction, their heads slightly tilted upward, to the sky. I’m not sure how they’re able to stay still for so long. I can’t hold a yoga pose for more than five seconds.

‘Maybe they’re dead,’ I say, ‘and they’re being held up by stakes. Like Jesus.’

Caelyn says, ‘Well, there’s one way of finding out.’

She moves toward them, but I grab her arm.

‘Wait,’ I say.

She considers this briefly before walking off, ignoring my silent, frantic waving. I give up and follow. My skin crawls as we get closer.

We pause a couple of metres from the group. There is no reaction. They continue to stand immobile, closed eyes, weathered skin. Breathing, but barely. The smell of piss and stale body odour hits me and I cover my nose.

Caelyn creeps closer, until she’s less than a metre away from one of them: an old woman with long, grey hair.

I can’t bear to watch. There’s something so unnatural about these people that I want to be far, far away. ‘This is so fucked,’ I hiss at her. At any moment their eyes are going to open and they’ll come after us like zombies. ‘Come on,’ I say, ‘let’s go. We’re in a horror movie and we’re the dumbarses who are going to be killed.’

Caelyn shushes me. She inspects the woman in front of her. The woman wears a long, tattered floral dress. Her sunken eyes are closed and her mouth is open, just a little. Her lips are dry and cracked. Her skin is dirty and sunburned.

‘Hey,’ Caelyn says, but the woman doesn’t respond.

Caelyn leans down and picks a long blade of grass. She’s about to run it along the woman’s face when we hear a voice, and my heart jumps out of my chest.

‘Young wanderers,’ the man says, ‘please leave our seedlings to make the most of Sol’s Total Light.’

I look over to see a tall, white, bearded man with shoulder-length hair, overalls and a red plaid shirt. Good-looking, with a broad smile. The sort of man you’d expect might lead a cult of people pretending to be trees.

‘Cult leader,’ I whisper.

Caelyn ignores me. ‘Total light?’ she says, dropping the blade of grass and backing away.

He waves at the sky, blue and cloudless.

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘that.’

He says, ‘Now, if you could just give our seedlings some space so that their earth and air is less disturbed by your animal exuberances. Come over here.’ He beckons. He’s polite, but it is an order.

We move toward him.

‘Now,’ he says, smiling beautifully, ‘who are you and what are you doing here?’