Outside the trailer, Lelani had painted two white concentric circles around the base of the tree. They were perfect circles, stark white on a green mass that reminded one of the boundaries of fair play at ball games. Viewed from the sky, Rosencrantz marked the green center of a bull’s-eye. The four-foot-wide ring of grass between the two circles was painted with evenly spaced runes around the tree. Her brass compact was placed on Ben’s propane grill, also within the circles, and she surrounded it with leaves, bark, soil, sap-coated twigs, and a plastic container of water. The lights of the device flickered brightly, casting a web of multicolored lasers on the smooth glassy surface of its inner lid. The compact hissed a steady stream of white noise. Lelani played with the controls, like tuning a radio station.
“Progress?” Cal asked.
“I’m about to contact Rosencrantz.”
“So, the tree’s going to talk?” Seth asked.
“In a manner. Sentient flora communicate through scent,” Lelani explained. “Pheromones, sap, water, chlorophyll, nitrates-these are the components of their language. But they operate on a much slower plane than we do. To communicate in real time, I have to generate a time warp around Rosencrantz.”
“If you speed time around him, won’t the tree age rapidly?” Seth asked.
Lelani regarded Seth with pleasant surprise, as though such an observation was thought beyond his comprehension. Seth half expected her to award him a gold star.
“Yes,” she said, in an encouraging tone. “Fortunately, trees have very long life spans. I’ve heard they rather enjoy the experience. It gives them a rush. Still, we should try and conclude our business as fast as possible. This device will utilize the elements I’ve placed around it to pose our questions and translate the tree’s responses. Time within the inner ring will move rapidly. The buffer between the two circles is the event horizon. That’s where we’ll stand. Outside the outer ring is normal time. Don’t move outside the buffer while the spell is in progress.”
“Can I just wait in the trailer?” Seth whined.
Lelani touched a jewel on the compact. The sky beyond the tree danced like the aurora borealis. Strings of energy stirred around them, a proto-hurricane of photonic vibration. The tree shifted rapidly, like still shots taken on a windy day and flapped in succession.
“My God,” Cal said, over the din of increasing white noise. “The power.”
“Yes,” Lelani agreed. “We could not attempt this away from the lay line.”
“Hey, tree… are you there?” Seth asked.
The device squawked a raspy, rapturous, “Yes.”
Seth was dumbfounded. Reality deteriorated every moment he spent with these people. He wanted his life back-the drugs, the raunch, the cheap sex, even the nagging roommate. Imperfect as it was, it was his; he could make sense of it, and it was safe.
“Tell these people I have nothing to do with them so I can go home,” he said.
“Proust seed watered,” came the reply. “Remember you. Great feast of the waning joy, cycle of Zcqxbvxq.” A pit formed in Seth’s belly.
“Do you remember me?” Cal asked.
“Great feast… waning joy. The wide trunk gives strength to its arms in the deluge.”
“What does that mean?” Cal asked.
“‘Joy’ is also the word for ‘sun’ in flora speak,” Lelani translated. “‘Feast’ is its word for ‘rain.’ Waning joy is autumn-large transdimensional crossings would have aggravated weather patterns. You probably arrived in a torrential rainstorm. ‘Seed’ is the flora word for both promise and potential. Perhaps it’s referring to a debt to Proust. ‘Wide trunk,’ I believe, literally translates into ‘something big on which smaller things depend on for prosperity.’ My guess is it means leader. That would be you.”
A shudder ran through Seth, the ghost of an old memory. He stepped back to the edge of the outer line. A sparrow chick caught in the event horizon with them hopped over the inner circle toward the tree. It aged like the subject of a time-lapse film.
“Remember.”
“He knows why we’re here,” Lelani continued. “He’s followed my progress since I arrived. Rosencrantz’s consciousness can reach around the world through a green network, so long as there’s a plant or a flower to tap into.”
A surge of pressure poured into Seth’s mind, as though all his sinus cavities were filled with fluid past their capacity. He grabbed his head and fell to the ground. The onslaught rushed in too quickly, too forcefully. His head was already on the brink of bursting when it was forced to take on more. He turned to Cal for help, but the cop was on the ground, too. Lelani was holding her own but looked like she’d succumb any second.
“Make it stop! Make it stop!” Seth shouted.
“What is it?” Cal screamed.
A ripple of air emanated outward from the tree accompanied by a deep bass vibration, which reverberated to the marrow.
The world changed. The wind-lashed forest was wrapped in a torrential downpour. Lightning stamped fleeting silhouettes of the surrounding tree line. A shimmer in the air preceded a vertical tear in open space, birthing a gaggle of weary travelers. There was a translucent quality to the beings. These were phantoms of another time. Men and women dressed in cloaks. A bearded man with the body of a horse. A crying infant cradled in one traveler’s arm. And there, for the second time in a long age, Seth’s parents Parham and Lita. He forced back his emotions, reminding himself it was all a lie. They were not his true parents. Yet the urge to throw his arms around them was overwhelming.
The phantoms took shelter under Rosencrantz. Seth recognized his own eyes in a boy on the cusp of manhood; frightened, confused. In his hand the boy held a rolled parchment. He broke the wax seal.
And then, it was Seth himself under that tree looking down on the scroll instead of his doppelganger. As long as the spells remained uncast, they’d be vulnerable, said a voice in his head. His voice. Foreigners in a foreign land. His orders were to delay for nothing. He unrolled the scroll, fighting the wind for its possession, and even as he did this, grown-up Seth struggled with inevitable history. Even without a conscious recollection of these events, he knew what was about to transpire, as though it were some late-night movie he’d once watched years ago. He couldn’t stop. It was the past; it was done. He acted out the spellbound part in an enchanted script. The wind and rain took their toll on the parchment. The paper was saturated, the ink began to run. He would have to be quick or lose all the directives. He read the first line thirteen times, once for each member of the party. Then he recited their names, and then read the activation word, almost dissipated, at the bottom of the scroll.
A searing hot line of pain cleaved through his head. All the blood in his brain boiled like magma. Cal-both of them, old and young-screamed, too. Seth was again within the event horizon on his knees, holding his head. The cloaked travelers were once again third-party players in the drama. The phantoms staggered, dazed and confused, from their arborescent shelter in various directions, some standing, others crawling on their knees. They broke off into separate groups, some trailed off alone, with no regard for each other. The storm subsided. The phantoms faded from the world. Seth vomited.
“Oh God. What was that?” he said, gagging and spitting.
“Thirteen years ago,” Lelani said. “Your repressed memories, or maybe Rosencrantz’s own recollection of the events.”
“Proust seed watered. The keeper, a cloud in the drought. The keeper’s saplings will know fortune,” said the tree. “Water my seed.” And then it discontinued the time warp.
Seth passed out.