Chapter IV
The old man’s charcoal eyes were set fastidiously upon Pence’s mouth, willing him to move or form words. He wrung his grip on the handle of the whittling knife as though it was a wet towel. “Pence? Pence! Don’t hold back, boy. What do you think? Feeling a bit self-conscious? Not the man you thought you’d turn out to be? Need another grain of rice somewhere, is that it?”
The boy’s mouth hung open in a wide-angled wedge of negative space. His eyes reflected the stars above as lifelessly as diamonds underground glittering in torchlight.
“The strong, silent type, eh? Nod again, then, if that’s your way. Nod your head as you were before.”
No reply, no movement.
The old man slapped the top of the stump. “Pence! Pence!”
But the silence was definitive.
“Naturally,” the gardener sighed. “Did I expect anything else? And yet you did move… You see… You plainly study me… Say anything,” the old man pleaded, exaggerating the act of speech as he spoke, “make any sound. Nod your head,” he begged as he nodded his own. “Anything…”
The boy betrayed no spark of selfhood.
The old man’s shoulders sloped as he turned his gaze from Pence and studied the ruination of his own left hand, its lifeless musculature sapped of human spirit. The colorless necrosis had spread to his fingers, his wrist, and most of his forearm. Even as he looked on, it enveloped his elbow and beyond with the silent industry of snow falling through the night.
The corresponding change in Pence was unmistakable–in the short span since the gardener had pushed the seed into the boy’s body, his opulent flesh had developed a faint but discernable luminosity. His chest ticked up and down, up and down, until it seemed the small boy genuinely breathed even with no windpipe, no lungs, no circulating blood. He grew a shade brighter with every heartbeat that ebbed into the air.
Then the gardener’s eyes flared. “No! Not yet!”
He reached for Pence.
The instant the old man’s fingertip contacted Pence’s chest the boy jerked backwards to form a rigid, impossible arch–his body crackled and transparent blazed–and the white bark lining the perimeter of the stump began to glow. The gardener’s wrist, where it passed a hand’s length above the circumference of the stump, smoldered and turned pink but he could not detach his fingertip from the boy’s chest or otherwise pull away–in his brilliance Pence had become as unmovable as a tree with a thousand roots.
The old man’s eyes ricocheted back and forth between Pence’s simmering skin and his own white hand, then the stump blasted a thick beam of pure light into the sky where it splintered into infinite branches in the moonless night. A cacophony of screeches erupted from flocks of startled birds in the far distance. The gardener could only fling his left arm over his face to cover his eyes and pray his arm would be whole when the beam of light abated.
Pence opened his mouth under his own power for the first time and with the raw intensity of a most literally hot potato he funneled out yellow jets of steam as he screamed a shrill, inhuman scream.
The gardener twisted his body away, but his right forefinger was still fused with the boy and he could not rip free.
The furious din of the screeching birds came to a peak, threatening to shatter a kingdom’s worth of windows and wine glasses, and then there was peace.
The searing white beam was gone. The old man prised an eyelid open: Pence was on his knees, swaying not unlike the gardener himself. The boy’s luster had relinquished to a pallid, wraithlike diffusion, but from his mouth a tendril of glowing, grass-green fog spiraled up with the otherworldly beauty of a hypnotized serpent rising from its coil.
The tendril soon revealed itself to be a sapling, sprouted from the heartseed up and out through Pence’s mouth. At its tip a pair of symmetrical white petals spontaneously diverged.
The old man froze. To breathe he was not set upon. He no longer felt the encroachment of death. Attached to the boy, reunited with the forfeit heartseed, he felt as young as when he was a boy himself first wandering into the garden.
“May I live on?” he mouthed breathlessly. He could not conceal a ruminating smile.
To keep his time alive, after all… forever trussed to the white stump. Or until the phantom seedling wilted and Pence shriveled to nothing, an epilogue in line with the old man’s own.
He grinned and wiggled his forefinger, testing the connection. He leaned in closer to the middle of the stump, bringing the full brunt of his concentration upon the sapling’s unfolding leaves and the mindless thing that was almost a boy and the mysterious bond between these two and himself.
The sapling snaked skyward with mesmerizing grace and soon was twice as tall as Pence. Its stalk was greener than fairytale pastures and the white light of the first twin leaves made Pence’s own flesh appear misty and translucent, like a potato grown on the moon.
It was then that the gardener grew alert to an oozing sensation within his right arm. It was not blood or water or sweat, but something inside his arm seeping from his chest up to his shoulder, down the length of his limb, and exiting through his outstretched finger where he was quite sure it oozed right on into Pence, though no such evidence was given to the naked eye. He considered whether this siphon was providing for the phantom sapling’s impressive growth surge.
With all his strength the gardener reared back, trying again to tear his finger from the boy.
The bond redoubled its pull, vengeful he should try to free himself with such a common ploy as brute force.
By now the sapling had multiplied in size twice over again. Ghostly tendrils twisted and turned under the surface of Pence’s skin like a filigree of fine nerves. Thin fibers slipped out the ends of his blocky feet and into the stump; the white wood of the fallen tree was hard as stone, but the sapling’s furtive roots sunk into its surface like oars cutting still water.
The gardener picked up his knife clumsily with his left hand. He set the razor sharp blade ever-so-gently to Pence’s waist. The boy moved no more than ever.
The old man screwed his eyes shut and clenched his jaw and then shifted the blade to his own finger, a knuckle away from his hand.
He raised the knife, paused for one savored breath, then swung it down on his extended forefinger.
There was a bright crack and a black shattering and underneath it all an old man’s savage roar reverberated throughout the hills. The gardener flew backwards and landed with a thud.
The sapling flashed and shimmered, petals curling back like burning paper. It writhed along its entire spine; below, Pence’s body was whipped mercilessly this way and that, slammed repeatedly against the stump. Then, roots to leaves, the phantom shoot unceremoniously evaporated into nothingness and Pence went sailing off the stump into the night without a sound.
With his last strength of the day, the old man crumpled forward and leaned against the stump. His breathing was scathed, like a crow pecking in the dirt. The last thing he noticed was that the glowflies had all gone away.