The Cat Tree (warning - Body Horror genre)

The Cat Tree

by Mary Ann O’Rourke

Mara hadn’t meant to leave the trail.

Hiking was her way of reconnecting with herself, with the land, remembering what it was to be silent, one with nature. She had her topo map with her of course, and her compass. But she wasn’t afraid. She felt at home in the forest.

She had come for the ordinary beauties. She loved the October sun scraping the granite ledges, the high, thready wind above the lodgepole pines, the glitter of mica in the dust. Fool’s gold.

The morning broke clear over the Front Range. Elk had been in the meadow at dawn, dark bodies steaming as they moved through oat-colored grass. She loved to watch them but kept a safe distance, scoffing at the foolish selfie takers who ended up gored or trampled. Mara was here for the quiet, the quiet a forest keeps even when people pass through it. She craved the solitude and peace that would allow her to stay absorbed in whatever adventure she came across.

For the first hour of her hike, she kept her feet in the boot-beaten groove like everyone else. Leaving the trail led to unnecessary erosion. She didn’t want to be that person. Then a stand of aspen drew her — light pouring through coin colored leaves, trunks pale and smooth as wrists. She didn’t plan the step that carried her sideways into the trees, drawn by an oddly sweet scent she’d never noticed in the forest before. She only noticed afterward that the trail behind her had vanished. She was not far from the trail. She couldn’t be far. She paused, checked her compass. The needle settled where it ought to. East was still east. She told herself not to be a baby. She was a competent hiker in a crowded national park on a blue-sky day. The worst that would happen was a damp sock. She turned around and started to retrace her path back to the trail.

The aspens thinned and lodgepoles took over, straighter, darker, their bark like old piano keys. The ground was a layered thing—duff, granite, fallen twigs—elastic underfoot, and the air smelled of sap and pine needles heated by the high-altitude sun. Somewhere above, ravens cawed loudly, working together to chase an errant hawk from their territory.

After a while, the trail that wasn’t a trail failed her. She paused again, not out of alarm but out of practical respect, and pulled the compass. She’d made a dumb mistake somewhere, but she could fix it. The needle twitched, rolled, wobbled, and then simply lay down. She frowned, lifted it to ensure the case wasn’t tilted. The needle bounced around from point to point. “Like the freaking Bermuda Triangle,” she muttered. She had not seen a magnet today, had not been anywhere near a power line. She shook the compass once, gently, and the needle vibrated as if annoyed, but refused to cooperate.

She turned slowly, looking for the most likely way back to the trail head. Downhill, she knew, would find water, water would find a trail or a road. It was while she stood there looking for the path that should be there, but wasn’t, that she heard it, thin and certain, pleading.

A cat. A high cry, two notes, the second more ragged than the first. “Meow...meow.”

Mara stood very still. What the heck was a cat doing way out here? It must be lost, or some jerk had dumped it rather than bringing it to a shelter. People could be so cruel. The sound came again, breathy but insistent. The cry wasn’t near the ground. It seemed to fall from a point above, filtered through sunlight and sifted through needles. She turned her head, triangulating like she would if she needed to find a singing warbler, and saw—nothing. But clearly, it was here. She couldn’t leave it here. She volunteered with an animal shelter, had always had a soft heart for helpless creatures. She tried again to pinpoint which tree the cat was in.

“Pssp pssp pssp?” she called. “Kitty, kitty, kitty?”

The cry answered, nearer now. Mara walked toward it, placing her feet carefully, eyes up, trying to peer through thick tree branches. The tree that stood in front of her wasn’t one she knew. Its bark was the wrong color—warm as bread crust where lodgepole bark went gray—and it held its branches oddly, in a rotation that made her think of a hand twisting to show its palm, but that looked very easy to climb. Almost like it was inviting her.  “Meow! Meow!” This was clearly the right tree. It sounded like a young kitten. She had to help it.

She stopped an arm’s length away. The trunk was wider than it had first appeared.

The cry sounded again, and this time she could place it: it was above her. High up in the branches where she couldn’t see it.

Mara laughed once, lightly. “Okay,” she said again, and because she was kind in the ordinary way of a person who carried dog biscuits in her car and moved worms off sidewalks after storms, she set down her pack. She would rescue this kitten and then, taking it with her,  begin the trek downhill to find her car.

The lowest branches were just at head height. She tested one with her weight and felt it give, not brittle. The bark wasn’t flaky like a pine and not armored like spruce. As she climbed, the smell she had noticed earlier rose up, warm and brown-sugar sweet. Like a cinnamon donut, her personal favorite.

She climbed easily at first. She had spent childhood summers in cottonwoods along irrigation ditches, fearless and sure of herself. Her body remembered the angles. Five branches up, she could see much farther into the forest: a shallow bowl of land, a thin ribbon of water glinting where the sun got in, the gray stairs of the range beyond. She looked for other people and saw no one. The wind had gone thin. The ravens had gone. The forest was making a different kind of quiet, the kind that is actively listening, or, perhaps, anticipating. But she was almost sure she could see the trail she had lost. Climbing high had been a good idea. She’d find her way back to the car easily now.

The meow came again, just off to the side of the trunk. Pulling herself up just a bit further, she reached around to grab a new branch, and saw, like a trick of light resolving into a thing, a strip of flesh the size of her arm, pale and moist as the underside of a mushroom protruding from the tree. It quivered and writhed. It was not a cat’s ear or paw or tail, or anything catlike at all. Yet the meow came from it, the membrane fluttering as the notes shook through, like a reed in an instrument. It was absurd to think of a tree with a tongue, but that was what it looked like. It was more absurd to hear it meow.

She lifted her hand without thinking and laid one fingertip against the tongue-like thing, curious. Was it a new kind of tree fungus?

It moved.

Not a convulsion; no sudden clench. It turned toward her the way a plant turns toward light. The surface gently cupped her fingertip, then her finger, then her hand. It was not cold. It was her temperature, maybe warmer. The membrane made a small sound, the cat cry again. She tried to jerk her hand back, feeling suddenly repulsed by the touch. It resisted, gently, but firmly. It would not release her hand. She told herself to stop and take a breath. The beginning of emergency backwoods procedures.

“Okay,” she said, and the word came back to her from the trunk, tenderly. “Ooooohkaaaaay”

Fuck the next step - observing. She panicked.

She shook her hand violently, trying to break free from the thing that had enfolded it. She felt nothing but pins and needles in her hand. It was as if it was asleep and had gone numb, a slightly fat feeling, like it had been injected with Novocain. She braced herself against the tree to balance herself and reached with her other hand to try to peel back the membrane from her numb hand. Now both hands were trapped. The membrane oozed a kind of sap that kept flowing forwards, slowly crawling its way up her arms. She did not like the smell anymore. It was wrong now, rubbery —like nitrous oxide when you're getting a filling at the dentist.

Her skin prickled. She fought with all she had, but the tree engulfed her slowly and inexorably, and eventually she stopped struggling, leaning against the trunk in exhaustion as the membrane oozed its warm and moist way around her shoulders and down her back. Almost, it was pleasant, like a soothing back rub, until the pins and needles set in, and she was numbed.

“Help me! Someone help me! I’m stuck in the tree!” she called, helplessly.

The cat’s cry came again, sounding closer to a voice now. Her voice. “Help me,” it said, imitating her, and then, a breath later, “Someone help me! I’m stuck in the tree!”

Mara looked up into the green. A leaf quivered, and beyond it, sky. She thought, absurdly, of the line of cars driving up into the mountains this morning, a boy she’d seen in a National Park t-shirt licking an ice cream, the unremarkable day that had been waiting for her. How had she wandered so far from that path?

Her arms tingled and then hummed, as they do when you’ve been carrying a heavy bag too long. Surely she could pull free if she wanted to. She told herself that and tried to want it enough.

Behind her eyes, instead, a softness spread. She had eaten before she left the car; she was not faint. She was not tired. And yet a fine, cotton mist drifted through her thoughts. The trunk’s warmth met her skin in a way that suggested shelter and safety. The sweet smell came and went with her breath. The tree hummed to her, gently, like a lullaby in a language she didn't know, but could understand. It pulled her thoughts toward it, and she was comforted, no longer afraid.

She turned her head and set her cheek against the bark of the tree, the way you might lay your face against a pillow. Just for a moment. Just to rest. The wood was not smooth; it pressed its little truths into her—seams, resin beads, a burr that should have scratched but did not. None of it mattered. Something soft nudged her lips, and she opened them obligingly, reflexively, her tongue going numb, then her throat. She almost gagged, but the urge passed. A sharp cramp in her stomach subsided quickly. She felt a tickle in her nostrils and her body rallied, sneezed it out, but it returned, and warmth slowly filled her sinuses and began to warm her face and forehead. Something tickled her ear, pressed hard on her eardrum, broke through with a sharp pain that resolved into a dull static. A cry traveled up through the tree’s trunk and sounded as if she had put a shell to her ear to hear the sea. In the shell, a voice was practicing.

"Help me," it said, and then, with the next breath, "Someone help me, I’m stuck in the tree!"

Her eyes burned with tears for a moment. She felt that she was dying, and was sad for a while.  She closed her eyes and then could no longer open them.

It wasn’t surrender, not really. Or maybe it was. The tree took on the work of holding her up. The day moved forward. Mara simply let go. She was scared at times, puzzled at others. When the tree hurt her, it numbed her quickly, so that was ok. She was vaguely surprised to find she didn’t mind. She just wanted to dream, and listen to the tree's lullaby, absorbed, as she was, in the moment of being fully absorbed. In becoming.

Days later—three or five or some number that doesn’t change the shape of a story—a man came into the glade. Strong, unafraid, familiar with the forest. He was not reckless, only curious in the ordinary way of people who step off paths when the paths don’t seem to go where they thought that they wanted to go. He was looking for a better view of a mountain peak, or maybe simply for a place to sit and rest. He had a small first-aid kit in his pack because he was the kind of man who liked to be helpful at need.

He noticed the quiet first, as he sat down on an old log. It was the right quiet for a forest and yet it felt placed, as if a hand had smoothed the air, had smoothed the light and the sound and the birds. Had smoothed time, and, perhaps, had smoothed thought.

Then he noticed the smell. It was salty and warm, odd here among pine needles and stone. He could not name it, though he puzzled over it a while. It was enticing. If he had been a child, he might have said cotton candy. Young man that he was, had he not been slightly befuddled, he might have thought it smelled something like the scent between a woman’s legs, on a hot summer day, when she desired you.

He noticed the tree then. It stood a little apart, the way a shy person at a party stands a little apart without meaning to.

“Help!” someone called, and he looked up, startled. “Help Me!” the voice said, a young woman’s voice, higher this time, sounding panicked. “I’m stuck in the tree!”

“Okay,” he yelled, jumping to his feet. “I’ll help you! Where are you?”

“Help!” the voice said, and now it was something just for him—a woman who needed his help, perhaps his first aid kit. A bandage. He stepped closer to the tree and saw that there was a small daypack lying at the bottom. This must be the tree! No problem with climbing it – it looked easy enough.

As he reached up and grabbed the lowest branch, testing its strength, he noticed that his palm sank a little into the bark, as if the wood was padded. It was—pleasant. Unexpectedly pleasant, like shaking hands with someone whose grip fits yours exactly. The warm, slightly erotic scent rose up, stronger.

“Hold on,” he yelled. “I’m coming up. I’ll help you! Are you hurt?”

He set his hand to the trunk again to balance himself, then looked up into the green, anxious to help, still unable to see the woman calling, and began to climb. "Help me! I'm stuck in the tree!" he heard again, and then, oddly, a faint meow, as if from a young kitten. Perhaps the woman had gotten stuck in the tree, trying to help the cat. "I'm coming!" he called. "Hang on! I'll be right there!"