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I was asleep in my armchair counting dreams of productive sheep when my phone rang.  It was constable Hibblet on the other end, more’s the pity.

“Get a load of this, sir!” he said in that gormlessly enthusiastic voice of his.  “There’s been a murder!”
“Gosh,” I said.

“And it’s been done with TEETH.  Isn’t that CRAZY, sir?”
“I’ll say.  It’s almost as if the homicide department gets to see this kind of thing.  Well, call Dr.  Crobmonch immediately; if it’s been in a jaw and inside someone else’s business he’ll know it.”
“That’s the funny part, sir!”
“What is?”

***

Dr.  Paulmonius Crobmonch had been seventy-six.  He would not grow older.

This would’ve vexed him greatly had he been alive; he spent his days in careful regimens of diet and exercise, watching his vitals like a breeder with his prize pigeons.  He was all too intimately familiar with what happened when they went wrong.

Really, not having to put up with his prissy little comments on my coffee ever again was worth the murder case.  Provided we could solve it.

“Cause of death was uhhh…” I muttered, staring blankly at the shriveled old coot and wishing dearly for black coffee. 

“Bite on the throat, sir! You can tell ‘cause it’s missing.”
“Thank you, constable Hibblet.  Why don’t you go get me a coffee?”
“Oh yes sir sir sir!”

I had three minutes to think.  This would take all my concentration.  I narrowed my eyes, squinted down my nose, tightened my belt and loosened my gizzard.  When I was done with all of that I had thirty seconds left so I had to think quickly.

“Cause of death was bite on the throat,” I said crossly.  “Fine.  Whatever.”
“Oooooh does this mean we get to check dental records, sir?” asked constable Hibblet, ahead of schedule and vibrating intensely at my elbow.

“You are perfectly half-right, constable,” I said, taking my coffee from him.  “How many do we have again?”
“Oh gosh thousands sir!”
“Well, you’d better get started then.  I’ll go interview the suspects.”

***

This didn’t take long.  Dr.  Paulmonius Crobmonch had been retired for years, with no contact with former students nor coworkers.  He’d never married, never been close to the rest of his family, and saved little of his meager pension. 

The only stuff he had of any value at all was upstairs: a single room, quietly kept and well-tended, stuffed to the absolute brim with jaws, beaks, mandibles, maxilla, and teeth of every colour of the rainbow.  Fossil teeth fresh teeth big teeth little teeth miscellaneous teeth well-ordered teeth, teeth from afar and teeth from near and teeth from wherever they were.  It was impressive in a sick sort of way.  How Crobmonch had managed to sleep in the same building as the evidence of his dedication to his profession was beyond me. 

None of them were missing.  And so another potential motive was sunk beneath the waves.  I kicked back at my desk and closed my eyes and thought about teeth, sharp and jagged and

(bicuspid, the nasally voice of Dr.  Crobmonch supplied peevishly in my hindbrain)

bicuspid and all too bloody. 

Someone had bitten out this boring, tepid, solitary academic’s throat.  Awfully personal for someone with no enemies and no wealth worth speaking of. 

I poured myself a big glass of illicit.  I deserved it.

“Here’s to wherever the hell you’ve gone,” I toasted the room.  “And stay there.”
It burned going down, but sweetly.

***

“Sir! Sir! Sir oh sirry sir sir!”

I woke to constable Hibblet as no woman should: three inches away and vibrating. 

“Wussafuggoffff.”
“Sir! I have made a bold deduction and a breakthrough and MORE in our case!”

I blinked unspeakable and unidentifiable things from my eyes.  “Hmmmurrr?”
“Sir, I was thinking sir, of how the doctor, sir, of how he was our tooth expert, sir, and it occurred to me, sir, what if, sir….  what if the teeth he was bitten with WEREN’T THE MURDERER’S OWN!”
“Fwee?” I inquired.  

“Oh sir there was an entire roomful of murder implements upstairs! I’m shocked you didn’t mention it to me, sir! I brought the whole bunch downstairs and had them checked from prints and DNA and RNA and FBI profiles and anything and everything! Took all night, sir!”

I blinked.  “Wow.  That’s initiative.  You’ve done initiative, constable.  Give me the reports before you tell anyone, so that – “

“Have no fear, sir! I ran into Inspector Grablort on my way in and she was so excited when she heard that she read them all on the spot AND she wanted to come in and tell you too!”
I stared at constable Hibblet’s purely and utterly earnest face and I wondered if it was worth it.

“Sir!”

“Go away, Hibblet.  Have lunch.”
Hibblet would never, ever be worth it.  Besides, in his current state he might choke to death on his meal without outside assistance.

Inspector Grablort entered the room as he left.  She was holding handcuffs, a sidearm, and a grim expression.

I raised my eyebrow.  It didn’t happen on purpose, just went ahead and did it on its own.  Like a mallet on the kneecap. 

I’d been in awkward silences before, but this was a winner.  The seconds stretched out, each an entire meal with the in-laws. 

Grablort broke first.  “Are you going to come quietly?” she asked. 

I closed my eyes.  “Now that I never have to hear someone explain the difference between a molar and a premolar? Yes.  Very yes.  Very yes forever.”
And it wasn’t, but it was thirty years, which was close enough.  But at least nobody in the entire prison tried to talk to me about teeth. 

The alarm clock rang three times.  On the first it sang, on the second it fell over, and on the third it exploded and sent little gears every which way.

One of the which ways was Thudmaker’s nose.  A soft sigh and a shake of the head and the gear was out and Thudmaker was awake and on time, throwing off the rough sheets made from an old circus tent, putting on overalls that could hold two score and twenty men, scratching at an old scar left by a rogue bulldozer herd.

The little Thudmakers were well hard at work already, except for the littlest one, who was still in

bed, waiting for the flu medication to come, for the money for the flu medication to come.  The biggest ones had made food for the littlest ones, and the littlest ones had gone exploring in the garden-heap and found a lump of granite: a glacial erratic dropped by a careless sea of ice some millennia ago. 

It weighed one ton and it fit into Thudmaker’s beaten old lunchbox like a glove.  Thudmaker packed it, and the little Thudmakers latched it, and they swarmed around with goodbyes and kisses and a single piece of mail in their parent’s hand.  It was a postcard from the sea, who loved Thudmaker and was loved by Thudmaker but who was very busy and couldn’t stay often.  It apologized for its absence, and praised Thudmaker’s patience, and asked after the little Thudmakers and the state of the roof (if it was still missing.  It was.), and it made Thudmaker’s chest hurt a little to look at it. 

The sun was nearly up.  The day was almost begun.  Thudmaker stood up to full height, full weight, full breadth, full self, and took three steps.

The first took Thudmaker out of the house.  The second took Thudmaker out of the garden.

The third took Thudmaker into the hole. 

And Thudmaker fell.

***

Thudmaker was big, and the hole was beyond that.  There was no light to see by; there was no wind to rush through hair and teeth and eyelid; there were no walls to grip.  There was nothing but Thudmaker and the fall and the fall couldn’t end and wouldn’t end.  It hadn’t even begun, it didn’t have a middle how could it end? Past and present and future all gone in the world.

Just Thudmaker.  And the fall. 

So Thudmaker did the one thing that could be done, and took a deep, heavy breath and let it out slow, vast enough to push a tall ship, steady as a drumbeat.  It went out, and out was the wind.

Then Thudmaker did the second thing that could be done, and felt the thud, thud, thud of blood moving through arteries that submarines could rove through.  They pushed and pulled against time and tide, and time and tide was the sky. 

And Thudmaker did the third thing that could be done, and looked, really looked, really looked at all that there was that wasn’t Thudmaker and would never be Thudmaker but might someday change its mind.  And the world was there, and the hole had walls, and Thudmaker reached out an arm, strong and scaly, and caught hold and stopped the fall. 

***

The hole was still too wide to see across.  The hole was still deeper than imagining.  The hole’s walls were clammy and rough and crumbly underneath Thudmaker’s titanium nails. 

But they were there, and that was an improvement until Thudmaker looked up and saw what they were made of. 

Oh.  Oh no, Thudmaker, oh. 

The missing roof swung out from the walls in an ugly overhang, letting in wind and rain to where the little Thudmakers should feel peace and serenity.  Beside it the empty void where the sea should swim crawled against vision like a blind spot from the sun.  The missing flu medication sparkled menacingly onwards for miles, each potential grip made of razor-bladed spun-sugar frailty. 

Thudmaker’s arms were strong, and scaly, and could lift anything.  But that sight, oh the sight of that wall.  It shook and sapped muscles to gelatin; it could burn a mind down to embers with a glance.  It couldn’t be seen, and it couldn’t be ignored, and with every breath it got higher and with every thought it grew crueller and it made you want to lie down and let go and just fall. 

Thudmaker let go with one hand and reached with the other hand and felt around a bit under there was a ledge underfoot, then underbutt.  Legs dangling, back hunching, Thudmaker rooted around in one pocket, then the other pocket. 

Oh, there it was.

And Thudmaker had lunch, slowly, carefully.  One bite at a time, chewing as much as could be managed before swallowing.  Granite is hell on your digestion if you rush it, but there’s nothing like it for fuel, real fuel.  There’s age and time on every tidbit on your tongue, and ore fit to make your blood sing, and on the cusp, on the very tip of each mouthful Thudmaker took there was a little frosted sliver of time that was the effort the littlest Thudmakers had gone to, to find that lunch. 

Thudmaker finished lunch.  And then, with every eye level, with every grip carefully placed, with nothing but the present, present, Thudmaker climbed.

And climbed. 

Upwards, inevitably.  Upwards, unstoppably. 

Thudmaker climbed. 

***

Thudmaker reached the top of the hole and couldn’t climb anymore.  Thudmaker reached the top of the hole and couldn’t see anymore. 

Thudmaker reached the top of the hole and couldn’t leave because the hole was being held down by a solid mass without mass or solidity; a stone that wasn’t; a thought that couldn’t; a hole within a hole without a matrix. 

It was Thudmaker.  It was nothing, and it weighed nothing, and it was immovable.

The hole yawned and widened just a little, gloating under Thudmaker’s feet. 

So Thudmaker reached in the other pocket. 

Nope.   That was where lunch had been.

So Thudmaker reached in one pocket, and ah, there.  There it was.

The postcard of the sea.  It was a little bent on one edge where the little Thudmakers had gotten enthusiastic. 

Thudmaker placed the postcard edge-on against the weight of nothing, and reached very carefully inside Thudmaker’s head, and pulled out a wisp of a sound: little voices, saying goodbye, saying they cared, saying they loved.

And Thudmaker tapped the little Thudmakers’ goodbyes against the sea’s postcard against the weight of nothing, and it was never there at all.

And Thudmaker pulled up, and up. 

Out of the hole. 

***

The sun was still barely rising, which made sense since the whole took place outside of time.  That was good, because there was an important thing to be done.

Thudmaker knelt down in the gravel at the road’s edge and took hold of one side of the hole with one hand, and the other side of the hole with the other hand, and brought the hands together with a firm smack. 

It was gone, and the way was safe.

Thudmaker stood up and shook a head that outweighed a streetcar and whistled through teeth that could crush cratons and started the walk into town, looking for jobs, looking for money, looking for medicine.

The hole would be there tomorrow.

But so would Thudmaker.  And it hadn’t won yet.   

The first breakfast took place in the Halls of Gibbon.  Sunlight peered through the gaps in the leaves, desperately straining to reach the endless dark of the castle’s floors where ferns and moss roiled and gnawed in the deep.  Above them squatted the scrubbers and dusters, above THEM scurried the toilers and makers, and above THEM sat the High Table of the High Court, and above all of them forever and ever sat the great pendulous bulk of the Lord Highest Brachiator, the Primate Primate, the Gibbon Supreme, Great Gibbous. 

It was a complex breakfast, but then again she was a complex being. 

First came the little leaves filled with cups of morning dew flavoured with plum juice, then a bowl filled with water from the least river, for cleaning.  A toast was offered to the High Table of the High Court, and then came the main course of small and tender skinless animals impaled on long sticks, followed by bowls of water from the lesser river, for cleaning.  Then came the eggs of birds of many sizes, followed by bowls of water from the greater river, for cleaning.  Finally a woven basket of butterflies was presented to the Gibbon Supreme, who would devour it whole before rinsing her hands in a bowl of water from the greatest river, for cleaning.

Each bowl of cleaning water was poured down into the Halls of Gibbon, where it splashed past the toilers and makers and over the scrubbers and dusters and flowed down to feed the dank and sporous depths.  They grew very well from it. 

***

The second breakfast took place some few leagues away, in the trembling earthen burrows of things that were small and squeaky.  They shuddered in their burrows at the distant hooting raucousness of the first breakfast, and many mothers counted their children carefully and cried a bit when the numbers came up short.  They fed their remainders on milk and pets and murmurs into their soft downy fur. 

The children whose mothers hadn’t come home were quiet, to save energy.  They had no breakfast.  They would never have another breakfast.  They did not know this and that was what would comfort and cradle them. 

It was not a long breakfast, but it gave you a particularly kind of slow time to think, in between pulses and throbbing at the veins, tugging on instincts found in even the mildest and shyest of creatures.  So when one mother who had only one child remaining came to her feet early and set out into the burning sunlight, others followed in their hundreds because they felt it too. 

***

The third breakfast was old ground oats turned into new soft porridge and a fresh fruit from the flowery tree that grew outside the charcoal-burner’s front door.  She took her time with it, slow and steady.  A charcoal-burner knew not to try and rush things.  That was how you got bad charcoal and worse burns. 

In the distance the throaty song of the first breakfast was reaching a crescendo.  The charcoal-burner shivered and took an extra-big bite of the fruit, to stop the thoughts, and chewed her loudest so her teeth could drown out the singing.

Because of that, she couldn’t hear the tiny noises of sharp teeth cutting into her charcoal pile. 

***

The fourth breakfast was consumed by the scrubbers and the dusters of the Halls of Gibbon, halfway from the canopy and halfway to the floor.  They were too small or too timid or too loud or too ugly or too quiet or the wrong shape, so they were kept out of sight of the noble first breakfast to scrub and dust and flinch as the bowls of cleaning water from the rivers least to greatest poured over them mingled with the red juices of the meal.

When the waters ceased, they scrubbed away the effluent.  And when the effluent ceased, they swung away in their ones and twos to the big knotted hull of a dead tree whose branches had once scraped the edge of the sky. 

Now it was mostly a trunk, and mostly a missing trunk, so it was Half-Trunk.  But it held ledges and grips and crouching-spots and its hull was filled with the spoiled fruit that was difficult to eat but easy to find that kept the bellies of the scrubbers and dusters moving for just a few days longer.  You ate what you could and you shared what you couldn’t and when the fruit had to come out you swung outside first. 

The first to swing outside first came nose to snout with the lead member of the second breakfast, who was clinging quietly to the dead branches.  The scrubber (fourth class of the major underchambres) yorped and yodled and almost fell as he came to realize the hate in her eyes and her fur and her claws and her mouth and clutched in the fiery bright coals held in her scorched feet, but he was too frightened to run and too downtrodden to fight and that helped him, because she didn’t fight him at all but bared her sharp teeth and chittered her sharp words and all around the dead broken thing of Half-Trunk came the grind and cackle of a thousand tiny fangs holding a thousand tiny sparks asking the same question a thousand times so that all the takers of the meager fourth breakfast could hear them:

Are you in?

***

There was a fifth breakfast.

It was a surprise, but received by those who could not be surprised so maybe it wasn’t.  Their heads were fiddleheads and their tails were horsetails and their mats were thick sweet moss. 

They swayed and sang down there, and as they spun in soft circles water came from above, water well after the cleaning of the first breakfast.  It was redder and thicker and stronger than anything they’d ever known, choked with ash and soot, and they drank it with a thirst to stiffen root, stalk, stem, and soul. 

On a meal like that, you could topple trees.  But they were in no rush.  There would be time. 

A slow, strong morning.  They grew exceedingly well from it. 

Time moves oddly for trees.  By and large years pass quickly, but some moments can hang on forever.
The first rainfall.  The moment when you finally overtake your neighbours and claim the full sunlight for yourself.  Living through an early cold snap that sinks right into your xylem. 

The Eld Pine saw its first offspring of its two-hundredth year clear the forest floor and push infinitesimal needles out to catch the fiery rays of the fading sun, and felt a satisfaction that sunk deep in every root and bit of bark.  It wheezed in long, slow tree joy as the breeze touched them both, and knew that it would never forget this moment.

“Whew, I’m bushed,” announced a passing lumberjack loudly.  He wiped his brow, dropped his fifty-pound pack on the Eld Pine’s seedling, and sat on its roots.  “Jumpin’ Josephat in a jiggery-pokery jumping for joy.  Gosh.  Sheesh.”

He sat there for four minutes panting, picked his nose, wiped it on the Eld Pine’s trunk, and then brushed off his pants and got up.

“I think I’ll put the cabin here,” he said aloud.

“Fuck you.”
“Pardon?”
But there was no noise but the wind in the branches, and so the lumberjack shrugged, went back to camp, returned, made a cabin, stayed overwinter, and was quite dismayed when come spring the enormous pine tree nearby toppled over and crushed his home flat, missing his bed by an inch. 

That was where it all started. 

***

 “I wonder where it all started?” asked Marta Lumbersdotter.

Her sister Jan looked up from the woodpile she lay prone upon.  “Well, that big spruce fell on Mr. Blinsky’s outhouse this morning and we had to come over real fast because he was still inside it; then while we were dealing with that the pine grove chain-topppled each other on top of the cabin one after another, and we had to deal with that because Mrs. Blinksy and the three Blinskettes were stuck in the root cellar; then we’d just finished when little Joey Cornweed came running up the road and told us that it had all been a distraction and the north field was full of maples.”
“No, no, no.  I mean, this.  When THIS all started.”
“Oh.”  Jan looked down her leg.  “Well, uh-”

“When things got so busy ‘round here.”
“-Mar –”

“I mean, I’ve been talking with Little Louise from down in Mirchburg and she said – you know what she said? – she said that they don’t have ENOUGH trees these days.  That they’ve chopped all the ones close to the village and now they need to walk half the day to find anything decent-sized!  When did ours get so crabby?”

“Say, Mar?  I thought you were talking about my leg.”
“What about your leg?”

“Logpile’s resprouted.”
Marta stopped talking and used her eyes.  “Oh.”
“Yeah.  We must’ve left a stem untrimmed.  Thing you can save it?”
Marta picked up her lumbering axe.  “Come on.  Have I missed yet?”
“Only takes one, realLY JESUS CHRIST MAR cut it a BIT close there didncha?”

***

The maple seeds swung daintily through the air, landed amidst the violence and snarl of the helicopter’s rotors, and compressed thirty years of growth into three seconds. 

For a brief moment there were two suns in the same sky above Marbledown.  One was just smaller and angrier and caused the deaths of three people. 

“Fuck in a duck’s cruck!” snarled Thelma-Lee, the deep rasp of her voice audible even over the crackle and roar of her napalm launcher.  “Chopper’s down!”
Hubert looked up from his work, one hand lodged in his first-aid satchel and the other in his comrade’s torso.  “Wait, what?”

“Chopper’s DOWN!” roared Thelma-Lee.  She swung the heavy flamethrower in a quick arc, cracking its heavy barrel across the trunk of an onrushing aspen and sent it groaning to the crumbling sidewalk.  One reinforced steeltoe slammed down on it as the other swung forward and braced, taking the backblast from the next gout of heat as she held down the weapon’s trigger.  “We’re not flying out of here!  We’re walking!  And we’re not walking!  We’re running!  Got it?”
“I got it!”
“Good, then let’s go!”
“Wait, I’m not done-”

“You said you’d got it!”
“Simpson needs-”

“Simpson died four minutes ago you stupid bastard FOLLOW ME!”

Hubert was purple with fury, but he followed her.  He followed her through the shattered concrete and overchurned asphalt and past the flaming bonfires created where big hemlock bastards had crashed through the walls and into the dark dank depths of a parking garage overrun by succulent, creeping moss hard at work undermining the foundations and pillars of a million man-hours of work and out across the pure and unfiltered hell that had overtaken downtown and crushed it to death in roots thicker than buses before the mad dash past burning suburban lawns – grasses killed dead at a hundred paces by the seeping fury of black walnuts – and the final sprint that was the Big Lot, where there was no free parking spot that wasn’t clotted to bursting with burning trees and jagged metal. 

Thelma-Lee threw her empty flamethrower into an ash’s branches without looking, took the last three strides her lungs could force her to, rolled and dropped and stopped in that order, and found herself looking down the business end of a smaller flamethrower.  It looked pretty big from that angle. 

“Holy shit.  Sergeant Thelma-Lee?”
“Sir,” she replied vaguely.  It seemed safest.

“You’re so covered in sap I nearly roasted you.  Get your ass to medical ASAP; we’re pulling out and I want you in good hands and on someone else’s feet.  Mirchburg’s the new front.”
“Get Hubert first.  He’s worse off.”
“Won’t argue,” said the blur that was probably her superior officer.  “But I wouldn’t rush on his account anymore.”
Thelma-Lee looked across the nightmare jigsaw puzzle that had been a cinema’s parking lot, and try as she might she couldn’t see a single sign of her medic. 

She tried harder.  She tried harder and harder until her knees and her eyes gave out and she woke up three days later in Mirchburg and the view outside her window was the same one she’d fallen asleep to.

Hubert still wasn’t in it.

***

“Tell us again of the olden times,” asked Charley. 

“Yes,” begged Little Su.  “Tell us of the days before the Bunker.”
“Ooooh!” squeaked Brii.  “The Sun!  The Sun!  Tell us about the Sun again!  Was it really brighter than a match?  Did it really hurt to look at it?  Did it truly sit in the sky for half your lives?”
“Yes,” mumbled Eld Peggy.  “And yes.  And yes.  And yes.  And yes.  That was where they took their power from, my widdgets.  The tree-ees.  They sucked the sun from the air and it made them fierce and fast and strong and oh they took all of the Old Above apart by bits and pieces.  Only we little diggers here are left.  Only we.  Only we.  Only we.  There used to be more, you know.  More to the Bunker.”
“Beyond the Forbidden Doors?” asked Bitty Bridget in awed reverence.

“No.  Past West.”
“But there’s nothing past west!”
“No,” said Eld Peggy.  “Not anymore.  They took it.  The tree-ees do not come down here in person, oh no.  But their fingers are deep and strong and they come farther than you’d-”

She cocked her head and frowned.

“What?” asked Little Su.
“Shush,” said Eld Peggy.  And then: “oh no.  Oh dear.  All of you get everyone and go through the Forbidden Doors.  Take any food you can carry on the way but do not stop running.  Now start running.”
Charley picked up Eld Peggy.  She protested but had no strength to stop the younger woman, and in her darkest depths she was thankful for it when she saw the first roots burst through the bunker walls behind her.

***

The last ape vanished across the river, and for the first time in centuries no words were spoken aloud in that place.

Branches stilled, moved by nothing more than the wind.  Leaves rustled without purpose or malicious intent.  Roots reached for water alone. 

“What was THAT all about?” asked an old, old, old, old hickory. 

A gnarled elm, its trunk scarred by flames in ages past, shook gently as a rainstorm passed.  “I never asked.  I think an evergreen started it.”

“Conifers, eh?”
“What was that?” inquired a nearby sequoia. 

“Nothing.”
“Nothing.”
“Good.”
And then there were no more words at all.  Just woods.