When a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
I used to wonder what that question meant. Now I don’t, not that much anymore, but we’ll get to that.
I grew up in a small town. I knew nothing about the city life; my life revolved around the vast forest that I lovingly dubbed as my backyard. I could be out of bed and in the forest in two minutes, if I took my time. I knew everything about that forest - the wildlife, the hidden lakes, the underground tunnels.
It was a small town. A quiet one. We liked it that way. So when the bikers showed up one day, materialising from the dusty highway in their noisy motorbikes, music pumping out from their radios, I hope you understand when I say that we were less than pleased. Downright outraged, in fact, when they rode into the forest, our forest, and set up camp.
They stayed for the night. Burning bits of the forest to keep themselves warm. Inundating the usual crisp fresh air with their cigarette smoke. The forest was too loud and yet too quiet at the same time. I hated every minute of it.
I didn’t hear the bikes leave. But when the sun rose the next day, it was silent.
I went about my usual routine - a morning jog around the forest. There was a trail of stray cigarette butts lying to the side of the track and I followed it, filling my pockets with the trash the bikers had left behind.
Nothing was out of the ordinary, and then all of a sudden, everything was.
The first thing I noticed were the tracks. Leading down one way, but not the other. A glint of dull metal, peeking at me from below a clump of dried leaves. And the drag marks, clawing its way through the dirt, round to one of the underground tunnels.
I stood there, trying to make sense of it all.
And then, a moan. From the tunnel. A moan, and then a grunt, and then a bump. Noises that both belonged and did not belong to a forest, its significance depending on which side you were on.
I followed the noise. Cleared a way through the haphazard pile of leaves and twigs at the tunnel’s mouth, letting a sliver of light into the darkness.
It was only a sliver, but it was all I needed to see what was in the tunnel. What was making the moans and the grunts and the bumps.
Body parts lined the sides of the tunnel. It was hard to see where one ended and the other one began. Every surface, still sleek with juice, glistened a copperish red. Some of the parts were still moving, I realised with a shock. Pulsating and shaking with a strength that slowly drained away. Fingers and toes, scrabbling helplessly at the walls but finding no purchase. It was as if the tunnel was alive, yet everything inside was dead.
Well, almost everything.
It took me a while to register that the shape ahead of me was more than a shadow. I’d attributed its jerky movements as part of the others, but soon realised that the shape was moving with a purpose.
It was moving towards me.
I remember bits and pieces of the chase. That I’d yelled and stumbled backwards. That my jacket had hooked onto a stray twig at the tunnel mouth, sending my pocket’s contents flying everywhere. The creature, stopping dead in its tracks, its attention alternating between myself and the litter that I had collected.
Then, as abruptly as the chase had started, it ended. The creature retreated back into the darkness of the tunnel.
It was only after I’d raced out of the forest and threw myself into my house that I realised that the creature hadn’t uttered a single sound at all.
The police came round to town the next day. They were from a city just down the highway, and were looking for the missing bikers.
The policemen were thorough in their checks and questioned everyone they could find. Among these were three people of importance.
The first was the local junkyard owner, whose most recent addition was a pile of broken motorbike parts, glinting dully under the sun. The second was an elderly man who’d “just returned from a walk in the woods”. In his hands were two bags full of cigarette butts and empty food wrappers. The third was a little boy sitting on the pavement outside his house, enjoying music from his new radio.
The policemen were thorough in their checks but they weren’t thorough enough. They eventually left with no more information than they had arrived with.
I don’t visit the forest that much anymore. And when I do, I move around a lot more cautiously that I had before - burdened with the realisation that didn’t know everything about the forest after all. Not about the wildlife, at least. And not about that one underground tunnel.
But it was not the forest and its inhabitants that I feared the most. It was the town, and its silence.
When a tree falls in the forest, and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?
I no longer wonder what that question meant, because I know that the answer is “no”.
It does not make a sound.