This is Part 17 of What Happened to Trunkin. If you missed the beginning, start here:
Stuart nodded slowly, not buying the excuse, but not sure what to make of it either. He decided not to press. Sliding into his seat, he held out the latest of his notebooks. His father accepted it with a quizzical look. Mrs. Jenkins craned her neck to see as he flipped to pages at random.
“These drawings are very good. You did them?”
“There are icons.” Stuart pointed to a series of small circles drawn in the upper right hand corner of one entry. “This S means it was in Sky. A is for anima, and this snowflake denotes the type, though I’ve generalized… I don’t suppose you’ve ever looked into Shintoism?”
The blank look on his father’s face served as answer.
“No, I suppose not. Animae are spirits. That’s how I think of them, anyway, though I don’t think I’ve heard the word explicitly used. In Sky, they’re as varied and plentiful as fish in the sea, if you count oysters and octopuses. This is one I came across a few months back.”
Below the icons, a date, and a heading that Mr. Jenkins couldn’t read, were two sketches in watercolor and pencil. The first was of a bent-backed little man in baggy, cloud-colored woolens. In one thick-knuckled hand he held aloft a pick, in the other a pile of snow. Between his bulbous nose, his long white whiskers, and his pointed cap, he looked like the northern cousin of a garden gnome. In the second drawing, the same man was a blue-grey scribble clinging by his pick to the head of an icicle. There was a bar for scale—a straight slash hemmed in by small dashes—and if it was to be believed, he measured no more than three inches from the tip of his hat to the soles of his snowy shoes. The entry concluded with several paragraphs of illegible notes in Stuart’s hurried scrawl.
“Came across?” Stuart’s father quirked an eyebrow. “You mean you—”
“Found him building icicles. Yes.”
“Building icicles?”
“I’m fairly confident that’s what he was doing. I watched him at if for a solid thirty minutes. I have a theory that animae are all tied up with people. Living manifestations of natural phenomena. That what they are is explanations…” He shook his head. “And this explanation is going to take far too long. I’m sorry, I’ve lost the thread again. May I?”
He held out his hand, and after a moment’s hesitation, his father handed the notebook back to him. Stuart held it under his nose and set to flipping pages, licking the tip of his thumb now and then for purchase. “No, no…not this, n—ah! Here. This is a fine example.”
When he returned the book, the drawings he indicated were far less obviously fantastical: botanical illustrations of a small flowering plant. The leaves were sharp and diamond-shaped, and gathered in clusters along slender shoots. The flowers were seven-petaled and white. Red berries stood out brightly here and there in groups of two or three.
“We found this north of Perth, along the River Tummel.”
“It isn’t hawthorn.” His mother tilted her head, frowning. “It isn’t holly…”
“What is it?” asked his father, and Stuart smiled.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“To date, Henwen has foraged over three hundred distinct plants and fungi. And do you know how many I’ve successfully identified?”
His parents waited.
Stuart made rabbit ears of his fingers. “Two.”
“Two?”
“Two.” Stuart tapped the page. “Whatever this is, whatever she’s finding, is entirely unknown. Either that, or I’m a terrible botanist, but I like to think after twenty years I know a thing or two. Truth be told, I’ve shown a handful of Henwen’s finds to real experts—professors, mostly—and in each and every case I stumped them. I can’t visit the same one twice lest they grow suspicious. And I suspect, though I’ve yet to confirm it, that all of them have magical properties.”
“All?” said his mother.
“Yes. That’s what I think. Some of them, like stonyburbles—”
“Say again?”
“Stonyburbles,” Stuart repeated with emphasis. “It’s a name of my own devising. Like these I call merry berries, because they’re so festive, and in Merry’s memory, you know. But stonyburbles are very obviously weird. They aren’t in this notebook, but what they are is…picture moss on a stone, and above it are little fluff balls of light, just sitting in the air above the moss, with smaller bits of light sort of falling off them. And I don’t know what they do, but they clearly aren’t normal. And then you have the golden lampshades—”
“The glowing mushrooms,” Stuart’s mother said, in answer to her husband’s baffled look.
“Ah…”
“—they get you to Sky. And it just seems right, doesn’t it? That with Henwen finding all these things that nobody has seen before, they must be magical. Of course I can’t go around just putting them in my mouth for the sake of experimentation. Sooner or later one of them is bound to be poisonous. It was pure luck that Trunkin didn’t die when he ate his first mushroom, though I thought he had for far longer than I liked. I left one in the kitchen to dry—bloody foolish, I know, but I wasn’t thinking—and I came home and found him without a pulse. What a night that was. I made a terrible mess in the tub trying to dispose of the evidence before he woke up and started raving about the vividest dream he’d ever had, which turned out not to be a dream at all.”
Mr. Jenkins massaged his forehead. It was by now nearing midnight, and between the food, the drink, the shouting, and now this deluge of information, he was fraying round the edges. “And what again is Sky?”
“That’s the otherworld I was speaking of. Sky is what we call it.”
“And you get there by eating these…golden lampshade mushrooms.”
“Yes.”
“Except you don’t actually go there. You said you came home and found your friend without a pulse. That he thought he’d been dreaming.”
“That’s right. It’s something akin astral projection. The soul—or whatever you’d like to call it—leaves the body and travels to Sky, and in the interval the body…well, it shuts down, I suppose. Goes into a kind of stasis, much deeper than sleep.”
“And in Sky you float around as some sort of ghost, is that it?”
“No, you get a body, right enough. Constituted. Like so much in Sky, a physical manifestation of an abstract thing.”
“That thing being…”
“Your self!”
Emrys Jenkins’ fingers drummed upon the table. He knew he oughtn’t say it, but what it sounded like to him was a load of claptrap. Magic mushrooms. Fantastical dreams. Manifestations of the self. It sounded like drugs. The word itched to come out of him. The answer was right there, if only they could name it. Stuart looked, sounded, and smelt like a hippie. He lived in a bus…
There’s only one problem with your theory, a voice inside him said. The sea serpent dozing under your dining table.
But there were answers for that. There was no denying Stuart had encountered something strange and remarkable in his youth. That didn’t mean every wild story he told was gospel. His trauma was serious and deep. He’d seen things no sane man would believe. Was he really the best judge of what was real and tangible and true?
And you, old man? Are you?
Emrys Jenkins’ eyes were closed. His breath deliberate and measured. He chose his words with care. “There are parts of your story I have trouble crediting. But for now, let’s say I believe you. That you found your friend not-quite-dead on the floor because his soul was off in another world.” His eyes opened. “What then? What happened next?”
Stuart blinked. No argument. No grief. It was a side of his father he was thoroughly unused to seeing, and for a while he was lost for words. He started and stopped several times before he found the right ones.
“I—that is…a great deal. Far too much to tell in one night. But I think where our story ought to pick up is after I left Nethermoor Lake, on my way, for the first time in ten years, to Trunkin’s.”
Thanks for reading.
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