The Bloom of Broadfen

The Bloom of Broadfen

The frost of January did not merely descend upon the parish of Broadfen; it paralysed the landscape, blanching the thatch of the cottages and hardening the deep ruts of the sheep lanes into unyielding ridges. It had been a season of unbroken misery. A spiteful summer had ruined the wheat, leaving the ears bitter and sour. Now the grim hold of winter was stealing the last gristle of life from the village. The cold had cut slowly, like the paring iron Old Creech used to shave the leather when the parish had had cattle. It did not merely chill; it altered the framework of the flesh. It froze the breath in the throat until the lungs felt still as wicker and locked the joints of the labourers into rigid, unnatural angles that no fire could warm. When the frail, or elderly, succumbed in their beds, they bypassed the ease of sleep, hardening instantly into the likeness of grey stone. 

Thomas Calder knew exactly how much a man could do without. In their small rooms the hunger lived like a silent guest. He saw it in the ash-grey ring that had bled into his mother’s irises, the very shade of the salted mutton they could no longer afford to buy.

With his hands thrust deep into the fraying sleeves of his corduroy smock, he walked the boundary of the parson’s glebe. His boots crunched rhythmically against the frozen ground. His errand was to seek out dead limbs of ash or withered thorn, any wood brittle enough to snap for the cottage hearth.

Thomas stopped where the dry-stone wall had collapsed during the November rains and noticed the old fig tree. Since he’d been a boy Thomas had known it only as a stunted, gnarled thing, half strangled by ivy, which even in the height of August produced nothing but a few, acrid marbles.

Now, beneath a sky the colour of cold slate, it stood clad in a dense, exuberant shroud of leathery leaves. The branches were choked with monstrous figs. Any natural gratitude Thomas might have felt for a winter harvest was immediately killed. The spectacle filled him with nausea. The purple-brown globes were distended, bursting like tumors from the bark. They shone with a greasy, unnatural sweat, exhaling a suffocating stench of cloying honey and crushed, bleeding leaves.

Thomas stepped into the ditch, his breath steaming into the scathing air as he neared the trunk. An upper twig let go of a single fig. It fell straight and dead as a stone, hitting the frozen mud with a heavy slap.

He knelt to examine it.

The thing was warm. It did not crush under his fingers, but nor did it have a brittle stiffness. It felt unnaturally like the velvet underside of a newborn calf’s ear. When his thumb pressed the skin, a drop of clear slime oozed from it making him drop the fruit, leaving his palm stinging with a sudden heat that had no business in the freezing weather,

“A sign,” Silas wheezed, having stolen up behind him.

The blacksmith’s face was a knot of purple veins and dry skin. He carried an empty grain sack over his shoulder and stared at the fig tree with wide eyes.

"It is no sign of good, Silas," Thomas said, rising and shaking the dampness from his fingers. "The ground is as hard as stone. Look to the root."

The dirt right around the trunk was clean of frost. It lay black, greasy, and steaming softly, the wet clods shifting against one another. The roots did not burrow decently beneath the sod; they had bloated into pale green, bald knots that burst through the soil, heaving up and down as though a heavy breathing went on beneath the clay.

"It is bloom," Silas whispered, unheeding. He reached out a hand, cracked and blackened by the forge, and tore a cluster from the lowest bough. The wood did not snap with a healthy splintering; it parted with a wet, fibrous tear, like gristle being severed from a joint.

"Do not meddle with it," Thomas cautioned, but the blacksmith had already pocketed six of the fruit and had turned back toward the village with the furtive haste of a poacher.

By the hour of the evening meal, the intelligence had passed through Broadfen. In a parish where children chewed upon strips of dried leather to cheat their bellies, an unseasonable phenomenon was not viewed as a portent to be feared, but as a harvest to be gathered. They came with lanterns. The tired, pale weavers from their redundant looms, the dairymaids whose knuckles were split by the northern blast, and the old village men who had not left their pitiful fire places since the start of November.

Mr. Bleakwell the curate, stood before the spectacle with his prayer-book clutched against his ribs, though he made no motion to open it. His eyes shifted with an anxiety from the bountiful branches, to the hollow faces of his parishioners.

"The Almighty works His wonders in His own appointed seasons," the curate muttered, though his teeth chattered visibly in the gloom. "We must... we must account it as an uncovenanted mercy.” Looking at the confused faces around him he continued, “ I mean a moment of grace from Him...It is a mercy we have not expected but have prayed for,”

"It has the reek of something unholy sir," Thomas called out from the far edge of the crowd. He stood by his mother,whose eyes were glued to the tree with a terrible, empty greed. "Look at the gloss on it, Parson. There hasn't been a sun hot enough to paint a skin that dark since August. The ground is iron and the birds are freezing on the boughs, yet these are ripe as harvest-time."

"Hold thy peace, lad," spat Old Joan, her mouth a cavern in the lantern-light. " If the earth chooses to open its hand, we are fools to spit in it."

They did not wait for further arguments. A hungry restlessness broke through the crowd, and the villagers lunged. Hands thrust into the branches, fingers tearing at the wood to pluck the heavy, purple-brown fruit. They shoved and scrambled in the mud, stuffing the smooth figs into their pockets and the folds of their smocks.

Thomas watched from his small latched window as the valley grew quiet under a hard moon. The ice grew thicker upon the leaded panes, yet when he looked toward the glebe, he could see the stark outline of the fig tree shining with a low, curdled glow that seemed to defy the darkness. It was wrenching itself out of shape even as he looked. Even from a quarter-mile distance, the branches appeared to be thrusting outward, pushing like pale, blind limbs into the starry void.

Through the closed glass, a groan rolled across the silent valley, the sound of wet wood tearing itself apart like cracking bone. Thomas flinched. His palm was burning again. When he turned it to the moonlight, the flesh beneath his thumb was twitching, a small, pulsing lump shifting under the skin in perfect time with the wrenching boughs out in the dark.

Then came the screams. They began down by the common lane and rolled up through the glebe, ragged shrieks cutting through the air. Yellow lantern lights flickered to life behind the dark windows of the cottages, and Thomas could not tell if the sounds came from the tree itself, or if it was the muffled wailing of men and women trapped within their own walls.

When Thomas came to himself, the sun had already climbed casting a thin, brightness through the panes. He had no memory of the hours that had passed, but realised that he must have fallen into an unrefreshing torment akin to sleep. A strange quiet had settled over the valley.

Lifting his hand to the pale light, he saw that the pulsing beneath his skin had subsided. The angry, shifting nodule was gone; in its place remained only a dark, yellowish contusion, like a bruise left by a heavy blow. With a sudden, desperate surge of hope, he stumbled across the floorboards and flung himself down the narrow stairs to his mother’s chamber.

He pushed the door open. The familiar geography of the room was gone. Where the low bed had stood, the floor was choked by a mass of those same bald, pale-green knots that had burst through the glebe. The air was thick with the suffocating reek of hot, curdled honey.

The sound of heavy, even breathing reached Thomas’s ears. It sounded like the low, rattling of someone deep asleep. He froze, his boots glued. He listened to the shuddering rise and fall , waiting for his mother’s voice to break the rhythm, until the horrible truth forced its way into his understanding. The mound was not covering her. The breathing mound was her.

He fled the cottage, driven by a wild terror into the open air. The bitter frost of the previous evening had vanished. The entity had fully broken the crust of the earth, heaving the parish out of its ancient winter and replacing the cold with a sprawling, unnatural summer that seemed to sweat from the very soil. Broadfen was being swallowed whole by monstrous vitality.

Exhausted, Thomas collapsed beneath the shadow of the great, overarching boughs. Above him hung a fresh, bursting crop of the purple-brown fruit, wet with a greasy dew. The warmth of the tree radiated down upon his shivering frame, seductively tender. Worn down by months of unbroken misery and the sudden grief of his loss, a terrible temptation crept into his mind. He looked back toward the cottage, wondering if it would not be simpler to return to what remained of his mother and allow his own blood to be turned into the sweet sap of the bloom.

As he lay in the warmth of his despair, a low rumble shook the earth. It was the frantic, rhythmic pounding of feet, hundreds of them, hurrying over the softened sheep lanes. From quarters more distant than the parish, they appeared. Men, women, and children, their hollowed eyes fixed upon the lustrous harvest with terrible, vacant hunger. Their empty bellies called out to the entity, and the tree responded, its monstrous limbs swaying and dipping toward them, beckoning them faster into its embrace.

“No! No!” Thomas screamed, his voice a solitary cry against the madness. “’Tis rot! ’Tis rot!”

But the hungry tide did not try to hear him. Desolate and broken, Thomas turned his back upon them and fled into the wider waste.