None of us believed him; how could we?
It was just so odd that it couldn’t be true.
“I swear to you that it happened. I can’t prove it, but I swear to you it happened.”
We all just kind of shook our heads, but the look on Rogers’s face should have been proof enough that he was serious.
He looked almost haunted, like the sight would never leave him.
Roger is a habitual drunk. He manages it well for work, but he’s been a drunk since I met him in college. Not a social drinker or a fun drunk either, but a hardcore alcoholic. Like I said, he keeps it under control so he can hold a job down, but from quitting time till he passes out, Roger is drunk and in his own world.
The story he told us happened in the park last night, and the way he told it made me think he might be stone sober while he told it.
Roger had been off that day, so, of course, he’d headed down to McGradys at eleven just as the other day-drinkers were starting to sober up. He’d drank his lunch, met us for shots after Ryan and I had gotten off, and then left about eight when the bartender told him to stop smacking the jukebox or get the hell out. Roger, very drunk at that point, had staggered out and gone to the park across the way. He intended to sit for a minute and wait for his head to stop spinning long enough to pick up a fresh bottle and start drinking at home.
“I was sitting on the bench near the little pond. You know the one across from the hollow oak tree.”
I had nodded, knowing just what he was talking about. The Hollow Oak is kind of a landmark in our town. Guys from the Agricultural College had tested it a few years ago and determined that it was 80% hollow inside. They were at a loss to say how it stayed up or in the ground, but it did, and people sometimes came to take pictures. The city had set up a little chain perimeter around it, and you weren’t supposed to touch it or disturb it in any way.
“So I’m sitting there, watching the sun go down and night begins to settle when I see this guy come out of the tree.”
We had asked if he meant someone was sleeping at the top of the tree or at the base of the tree, but Roger just shook his head and repeated that the guys had been INSIDE the tree.
“It’s like,” he had floundered for the words, “remember when you were a kid, and you played with Playdough? You had that thing that would squeeze the clay through a little hole and make, like, spaghetti? Well, it was kinda like that, except so much worse.”
He said it had started with an arm. At first, Roger had just thought it might be a squirrel or a bird, but when the fingers gripped the bark, he began to think he might be hallucinating. The arm pulled itself out of a knothole, and pretty soon, a pale shoulder was sticking out too. The shoulder stretched and turned, and when a head followed, Roger said he almost screamed. He was certain he was hallucinating now, sure that the sauce had finally cooked his brain, but he doubted even his mind could create something like this. The tree pushed the person out, head and shoulders and knees and toes, and the man had hit the grass on all fours like some kind of spider.
“He scuttled across the grass, under the chain, and when he got to the edge of the barrier, he started making gagging noises.”
As Roger watched, the man had thrown up a dozen small somethings and then scuttled to the other corner of the barricade to do it again. He had done this three more times, upchucking into each, and when he looked up from the fourth round of this, he had made eye contact with Roger. The man’s face, he said, had been confused but not afraid. He was looking at something unfamiliar, and when he smiled, Roger felt his breath catch in his throat.
The man’s teeth were pointed like a bunch of sewing needles, and the look had been far bigger than Roger’s pickled brain could understand.
“The smile looked painful, too big like he could have swallowed me whole.”
Roger had run then, ran all the way home.
That’s where we’d found him last night, passed out on the floor and mumbling in his sleep.
I finished my coffee and told Roger that he better get ready if he wanted a ride to work, but Roger said he wasn’t going today. He told me to tell the boss he didn’t feel well, and I told him I’d meet him at McGrady’s after work. He had shaken his head at me then, mumbling about how he’d never be back at the bar again.
“I think,” he said, his voice shaking like a leaf, “I think I might be done with the sauce for a while.”
I rolled my eyes and left for work, expecting I’d find him drunk when I got to the bar that night.
When I got to the bar at six o’clock, however, he was nowhere to be seen. The bartender said he hadn’t seen him all day but asked me to remind him that his tab still needed settling. I asked a few of the regulars, and they said they hadn’t seen him either, so I stepped out of McGradys and found a familiar shape sitting in the park.
I walked up to him and found him stone sober as he sat on the same bench he had told me about in his story.
“Have you been here all day?” I asked, Roger just nodding as he stared at the tree.
I had never seen Roger this way, and it kind of scared me. I had seen him sober before, and I had seen him drunk plenty of times, but this was different. He was like a different person, someone who’s seen something he can’t comprehend, and I felt sorry for the tumult that must be going on inside his head.
“You were serious about that creature, weren’t you?” I asked.
Roger nodded, his eyes boring into the tree like they meant to melt it.
I wanted to walk away, but I found myself sitting beside him instead.
My morbid curiosity had gotten the better of me, and if this creature was real, then I wanted to see it myself.
We sat like watchers in a theater, waiting for the show to begin.
It wasn’t a short sit either. Six became seven, seven became eight, and as eight became eight-thirty, we watched the sun sink lower and lower. It was high summer, and the days were long. Just before eight-thirty, the sun became a burning coal on the horizon, and the two of us tensed for what might or might not be about to happen.
As the darkness settled over us, I sighed.
“Good one, Roger. Got me to waste my whole afternoon on this nonsense. Come on, I’ll buy you a drink, and you can have a good laugh at how you,” but he grabbed my arm then, pointing at the tree with a shaky hand.
I looked back, and a long, pink worm squirming its way out of the knot hole.
“It’s just a worm, Roger. You got drunk and hallucinated something that scared you. I’m glad your using it as an excuse to get sober, but don’t ask me to buy into your delusion.”
“Does that look like a worm to you?” he asked, his voice shaking.
I glanced back and saw that it, indeed, no longer resembled a worm.
The worm had become five, and they were attached to a pale pink hand. The hand had unfurled from the hole like some alien flower, and as the wrist made its way out, I realized that the show had begun. The wrist emerged, and behind it came an arm and an elbow. The shoulder was next, and as the tree sprouted a man, I found myself unable to look away.
He came slithering from the knot hole, this boneless creature in human flesh. It was like watching dough being pushed through a press, and I wondered how it could possibly do this?
When the head came free, it looked like nothing so much as a helium balloon being inflated.
“How?” I gibbered, my mind refusing to understand what it was seeing, “How can this be?”
If Roger knew, he never answered.
The two of us sat mesmerized as we watched this fully grown man come slighting from a gnarled opening too small for a squirrel to fit into.
He hung from the opening when it was down to his legs, a caterpillar ready to slide from his cocoon, and he hit the ground on his back before flipping over gracefully and scuttling on all fours towards the little chain fence.
When he opened his mouth, a spray of small somethings came spilling out onto the ground. They were black, looking like the smooth river stones you sometimes buy at the hobby store. He threw up about twenty of them before scuttling to the other corner. He repeated this operation four times, and as he opened his mouth for the fourth time, I saw the double row of pointed teeth in his oddly large mouth.
He looked up after seeing us, and, just as Roger had said, he smiled before scuttling back to his tree and pressing himself back into the hole.
It was like watching a blowup doll deflate in slow motion. First, his arms, then his shoulders, then his head, then his legs, and before long, his feet were disappearing grotesquely back into the cramped little opening.
By the time he was done, it was almost nine, and I felt as though my brain had been awake for days. That probably sounds weird, but when you see something like that, something that just doesn’t make sense, your brain tries its best to make it fit into the picture of the world you know. Birds fly, fish swim, and this man compresses himself in and out of trees so he can throw up…
I stood up then, and Roger grabbed my arm.
“Don’t do it. If you look, you won’t be able to stop yourself.”
I pulled myself away from him, wanting to see what it was. I needed to know. Why did he come out to throw them up? Were they bugs that were killing his tree? Were they some kind of sickness that he had to keep purging? Why did this thing that defied logic come out of his tree just to throw up these, whatever they weres?
I bent down, taking out my phone as I shone a light on the pile closest to us.
I gasped; I couldn’t help myself.
They were acorns.
Solid black acorns that were about twice the size of a normal acorn.
I reached down to pick one up, but my hand froze before it could touch it.
I stood up, wiping my hand despite it having touched nothing, and offered to buy Roger a drink anyway.
After what we had seen, I thought we both probably needed one.
“No thanks,” he said, getting up to go, “I think I’m done drinking for a while. Maybe, you oughta come home too.”
We ended up heading home and just watching TV for the rest of the night.
Roger hasn’t had a drop of alcohol in a month, and I still find myself dreaming about that strange creature once or twice a week. It will fade in time, but I want to get it down here so other people know. Given what happened yesterday, it’s information that people might need.
You see, the news reported that the Hollow Oak was gone. No one had seen it go, but the patrons of McGradys had speculated that it must have been between midnight and five am when the bar closed. Many of them had seen that old tree when they came inside but reported that it was gone when they left at five am, the ones who could remember it.
“But never fear. Local botanists have reported that a small sapling has already sprouted in the spot its predecessor occupied. There is no evidence to suggest that it might also be a Hollow Oak, but this reporter certainly hopes so.”
I’d like to say that this was where it ends, but, unfortunately, there’s a little more.
You see, I couldn’t get those strange acorns out of my head. I kept thinking about them, wondering about them, so the night before the Hollow Oak left, I went and watched the man as he went about his strange and disgusting ritual. Once he had gone back inside his tree, I went to the pile and took one. I put it in my jacket pocket, and now it’s sitting on my desk. It seemed to draw my eye, the little acorn almost appearing to beat like an infected heart, and my mind tells me to plant it in the ground.
Roger told me that if I touched it, I wouldn’t be able to help myself, and I guess he was right.
I don’t know how much longer I can stop myself from planting it, but I fear what might come tumbling out of it one night if it grows.
So, if the Hollow Oak lands in your town, don’t touch its strange occupant’s acorns when he comes to deposit them.
I wouldn’t interrupt his strange ritual either, not if I were you.
The occupant seems harmless, but all those teeth must be for eating something.