Tremble: Erotic Tales of the Mystical and Sinister

Distressed by this new train of thought, Gavin opened his eyes. A large daddy longlegs was tentatively making its way across the wooden floorboards. He stared at the tiny body swaying precariously on its spindly legs, as if amazed at its own gravity-defying design.

Gavin hated spiders, their hairy legs, the way their silk spilled so effortlessly out of their rears like slippery excrement. But as he watched the insect daintily tiptoeing across the floor he realized that at this moment he loved this particular arachnid. In a sudden epiphany he saw the spider as it viewed itself: a fearless hunter perched high over its terrain; the lion-king of a microscopic world that existed as a constant invisible below human eyes. It was then Gavin realized that he knew exactly how to solve the riddle.

His meditation was rudely interrupted by a large tabby who pounced on the defenseless creature and carried it off in its mouth, eight threadlike legs whirling madly, fringing the cat’s jaw like a demented beard.

“Saturday, I need to blow up an image. Can you do that here?”

Excited, Gavin strolled naked around the kitchen, his penis lolling against his thighs. Saturday, wrapped in a purple tablecloth and smoking a beedie, speculated whether his behavior might be the onset of a bipolar disorder, then less reverently wondered if Gavin’d be up for another bonk. She finally decided that the best action would be to humor him. She stubbed the beedie out. “I have a scanner that can do the job, assuming it’s a photographic image.”

“Perfect.”

Gavin found his jacket and pulled a pile of photos from the pocket. He laid them out carefully on the scarred wooden table and waited while Saturday looked.

“Jesus! It’s a corpse! Where did you get these, Gav?” A new tone of fear ran through her voice. To reassure her, Gavin put his arm around her waist. She pulled away.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t kill him. Nature did—or whatever it is that’s after me.”

“What do you mean, Nature? Where’s the photo from? Some morgue?”

“I found him, on one of my sites, but that’s irrelevant. I want you to look at the face. Recognize it?”

She peered closer. The features looked barely human under the thick velvety covering of moss and gray lichen. Dispassionately she wondered how the lichen could have sprouted so quickly on a decaying body; under normal circumstances it would take decades to get such thick growth.

“It’s your Green Man, Sat, that German critter in the garden.”

“Personally I can’t see the resemblance,” Saturday murmured, although she noticed that if you tilted the photo at a certain angle there were some similarities. He was obsessed she concluded; perhaps it was cumulative guilt, some kind of subconscious remorse. But she couldn’t imagine Gavin regretting anything.

“But what about that strange vegetation sprouting over his face, what do you think that represents?”

“Some kind of unusual decay. It would have needed very bizarre weather to produce that.”

“Blow it up.”

“What?”

“Magnify a section…. I have an idea about something.”

The photo filled the whole of the computer screen. Saturday highlighted a portion and pulled it away as a separate window.

“How far can you magnify before you lose detail?”

“About 400 percent. It’s not quite state of the art but it’s close.”

Her fingers raced across the keyboard as she spoke, magnifying the image again and again, until all that was visible was the moss itself, magnified four hundred times. It looked like a forest.

The few hairs left on his body rose with the chill of recognition. “That’s it,” he whispered.

“There must be something wrong—moss doesn’t normally look like that close up. It doesn’t have—”

“Branches? Trunks? Leaves?” Gavin’s voice grew shrill with hysteria. “Can’t you see that it isn’t moss—it’s a forest, the forest…that horrible parallel world I’ve been trapped in.”

“Will you calm down?”

“Saturday! Don’t you see? He’s been murdered, and it was he who warned me at the beginning….”

Saturday peered closer. The magnification did look like a forest, but not any forest that she knew of.

“Okay, say we do work from the premise that it is a forest—I don’t recognize the vegetation. It’s neither prehistoric nor contemporary, although it probably looks vaguely more contemporary.”