W. M. Gee is a writer who specialises in teen, horror, fantasy and sci-fi stories. His works often explore real world problems from adolescent perspectives, because — hey — we’ve all been there, right? In his free time, he loves writing poetry, reading sci-fi and painting minis. In 2021 he was awarded the people’s choice Golden Comma Award for his teen novella, "The List." He published his first teen-horror novella (ebook and print), "The Woodcutter's Daughter" in 2023. He lives in London but longs to own a lighthouse and listen to the sounds of the sea.
Read more by W.M. Gee right HERE.
EPIPHANY TREE
By
W.M. Gee
Ashwin peeled back the flaking bark of the bone-colored tree so delicately that his movements were almost imperceptible. Its twisted trunk had been broken in half more than once, then knitted back together, creating fine, jagged strata that looked more like teeth than tree. Its gnarled fingers had long-since given up their clutch on leaves or fruit. To the untrained eye, the potted-tree in Ashwin’s locked conservatory looked dead. But Ashwin’s eye was not untrained. And the Epiphany Tree swelled with life.
Ashwin teased the bark another quarter-inch and fought to contain the exhilarating upswell of anticipation. The sudden tumescence of an addict’s rush. Beneath the desiccated skin, the tree’s true prize — the only thing sustaining it — a colony of iridescent fungi carpeting the thin trunk. The secret of emperors; the plaything of pharaohs. His for just $400 and an old man’s warning that epiphany comes at a “terrible price”. $400 to commune with gods? Ashwin agreed. But communion on this holy night would have to wait until after a more earthly tête-à-tête.
***
“Papa, wanna stowy!” the little girl cooed, her fingers clutching for Ashwin as he entered the bedroom.
Ashwin picked his daughter up and pocketed her inside the bed in one well-practiced movement. He reached for the book shelf and the myriad stories of warrior-girls his partner had bought before she found her own warrior-girl and left them both.
“No!” the girl declared precociously. “Want thwee kings!”
She pointed to the story of Epiphany lying face down on the floor. Ashwin grinned. He could do irony.
Ashwin kissed the blonde girl’s forehead, picked up the book and began to read. He read of the star and the stable, the baby and the magi, but his mind was elsewhere. The Epiphany Tree ‘fruited’ on only one night of the year, regular as the stellar-cycle. Soon enough he could ask if any of it was real. The dogma? The fables? But no! He wouldn’t waste his first taste of epiphany on children’s stories. There were other origins, older dreams to share: more important questions to ask.
The girl fell asleep, as usual, between the gifts of Melchior and Balthasar. Desire gnawed at Ashwin’s patience for the five torturous minutes his daughter’s breathing took to fall into steady rhythms. Then, placing the book silently on the bedside, he tiptoed out of the room, fumbled with his waistcoat-pocket keys, and — hands trembling — flung the conservatory door wide open.
Ashwin harvested the tree’s fungus with the precision of an expert-rationer. In his youth he’d tried all the drugs he could get his hands on. Morphine had been a particular favorite, and particularly difficult to kick. He gave all that up, of course, before his girl was born. But there beats inside the heart of all addicts a drum to whose inexorable rhythm we must march, even if it means over a cliff.
He scraped the first serving of fungus onto a small chocolate coin (for the man who sold him the tree had warned of its bitter taste). Then he scraped a second and a third and lay them like caviar beside the bench on which he reclined, sanguine at that irrevocable madness awaiting all the fungus-eaters.
Light closed on the world and Ashwin felt the powerful, narcotic pull of dream. The worldwake lowered him through warm, viscous tar where half-formed fractals played at the edges of definition. There were forms in the tar, just like the tree-seller had promised. But they were far beyond the pulsing swell of psilocybin-induced mushroom fantasy. Each form rose like some seeding-pod, before drooping down under the weight of its bulbous tip. And from each, the midnight clay shrinking back and pulling it into shape, a person was defined.
The first that formed was the tree’s last owner, cursing unjust fate and warning again of the “terrible price” that knowledge exacts. Ashwin dismissed him with a wave of his hand then let the wake of that motion cast himself off through the ether of lucidity.
The eons the tree had lived stretched like a street down which Ashwin strode. The sidewalks were flanked by men and women. All former owners of the tree. All former eaters of that iridescent fungus. Ashwin might stop beside George III of England, or Joanna of Castile, to ask them of their reveries. He might speak with Juana Khan of Delhi or Yōzei, the child-Emperor of Japan, to ask the speed at which their sanity was sieved to fill these gestalt, nightmare intelligences.
Ashwin sauntered on. Past decadent and epicure and pervert; past palace and villa and mud-hut; beyond where road became track and track became grasslands, desert, cooling rock. Back to the fungus’ origins — beyond this world, certainly — there to question gods.
Ashwin could hardly contain his excitement when he saw the origin-world, and barely express his irritation as he felt the quick of his dream-lucidity fade. He forced his body back to the bench-arm, fingers fumbling for the only remaining chocolate-dose. The breeze of the open doorway fanned his sails along again to a world long-since ruined; long-since reduced to drifting rock. Upon this cadaver-world, he would ask his questions, even knowing that madness and slow-death would surely answer.
The second fungus-wave broke like orgasm upon him. His mind followed fractalized geometry down to a forest of formless grays. Disquieting barks vacillated like lungs, breathing themselves away from dark, Stygian trunks. And where they expanded, iridescent universes exhaled beneath.
Then, between the barks, a flash of color — almost imperceptible — that looked like it might be human. But small. Or distant. Surely this was the being he sought, after whose image all life was reverent facsimile? This sentience would answer his questions.
Only then, as the strange tree-analogs of that alien forest receded before him, Ashwin felt that colorful shape pierce him more completely than any blade. Not just with madness but with words, escaping from a kissed-head of blonde hair, exploding from lips stained with chocolate-caviar.
“Papa, wanna stowy!”