Story - Autumn Fall

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This story was created at a writing workshop I attended this afternoon at Preston’s lovely Ham & Jam Café, with the Just Write writing group. I have edited the version read out slightly but the overall text is essentially the same. A homework exercise set on us was to rewrite the work in a shorter version, so I translated it into a poem which I’ll add as the next feature I post on Mylot. Autumn Fall Did you ever go astray going somewhere you have been many times before? That is what just happened to me. I feel I should know this gentle woodland copse like the back of my hand, but I seem to have lost the familiar paths. I never knew these woods were so big. This is more like a forest and though the old saying goes that you can’t see the wood for the trees, I see nothing but the tall wooden trunks of trees. This is no enchanted Dantesque witch-wood or fairy dell, not judging from what I just stepped in. It’s just a wood, just a forest – a big dark and darkening forest. Starlings have given up the skies to owls and bats. The trees seem to be closer together on all sides. I can barely slip through the gaps between the lower trunks. This is so disorientating. I can’t even tell which way I came from to be able to retrace my steps. I try not to use the L word, but inevitably it comes to me – Lost! I just found a concealed entrance to some underground chamber. I can tell it is a hatchway because it is metallic, silver and shiny. My boots hit it with an echoing clang that seem to have silenced the owls for a moment or two. I inspect it closely. Smooth, and warm despite the October chill in the air. I speculate as to its purpose. Fallout shelter bunker springs to mind, and I expect the hatch will be either locked or only open with effort, creaking as it goes, to reveal dank, damp cold stone steps to a spider infested cellar. The hatch opens with pathetic and silent ease. I notice how few dead brown leaves have landed on or around it despite the many on the overall forest floor. Someone has visited this cellar-world recently. I wonder who owns it. There are no signs to warn against trespass, no fences, no keep out signs. There are steps, but they are neither stone or leading downwards. They are bright dazzling gold and point absurdly upwards despite me looking down towards them from what should be the top. My sense of perspective swims drunkenly. This is impossible, especially in mid-Lancashire. I feel as if I’m a speck of paint in an Esher print. It smells like fresh mint and lavender. I ‘m at the tip or base of some inverted Jacob’s Ladder leading to Paradise. I realize I must be dead. Maybe I hit my head on a tree or blundered into some sort of bog and drowned. It must be Heaven awaiting me or surely I would smell death, decomposition and brimstone rather than lavender. I step onto the steps, heading what I take for up, though it feels like up, down and sideways all at the same time. Within minutes I reach the top, or base, and I’m surrounded by clouds as if high in the sky, far higher than my steps ought to have elevated me. Something pokes through the clouds, and it is tree roots, as if the very Earth below, above and around me was made of cotton wool, but still a base for the forest fauna. I set a foot gingerly onto a cloud, expecting to see my toes slip through the water vapour, but the ground, if ground it is, takes my weight though it feels springy, like fresh wet peat-soil. Before me a long clear corridor is illuminated in blue, and I wonder if I will soon see the light at the end of the tunnel described in near death experience narrations. I see no such light, or God or angels playing harps. What I do see is what appears to be a house brick on little human legs bearing a friendly yet troubled expression and melancholy demeanour. It asks me the questions I was about to ask of it. Where are we? How do we get out? Who or what are you? The voice frightens me, for it is clearly my voice, and I see my wrinkles in its brow along with traces of my receding hairline and double chin. It makes the same recognition in my face. We back away from one another, but I see he, or I means me no harm. He tells me he is not alone and invites me to meet his friends by the camp fire I now see just before the horizon. We go to them and I grow more afraid, for there are hundreds of me there, gathered round a fire that is also me. Tiny elephants, large ants, pebbles, grass blades, a fading photo of Marilyn Monroe, all reflect my countenance and speak in my voice. A me hands me a slice of cooked steak bearing my visage. I close my eyes and bite into it, only to feel the pain as if I bit my own arm. The dropped steak turns to ash, while my arm bleeds what looks like tree sap. I’m in some bizarre hall of mirrors, surrounded by freakish dopplegangers, a myriad of reincarnations of myself, with everything but an identifiable human body version of me present – the zombie me does not count, nor the living scarecrow. I seem to have come from countless parallel worlds. There are as many of me as there are leaves on the trees – leaves! Trees! I see them now, the branches holding forth these cruel effigies of me, which brown and wither and fall round me like fluttering dark snow. I feel faint. I find myself lifted to a bed made of more me. I plunge into a deep sleep where I dream-see myself in the familiar old safe forest I remember. I see the silver hatch, but wisely talk myself out of the temptation to open it. I seem to be working on something – yes, raking up leaves to heap them together for a bonfire. I light it, and I wake, feeling the flames killing my brothers and sisters – the other mes reduced to helpless blazing martyrs – my turn any time now. I can’t cry out for I have no mouth, and though I have no eyes I can see, though the smoke means I no longer see the trees for the burning wood and leaves. Arthur Chappell