Remi knelt in the garden.
The grass reached his knees. Sunlight moved across the bark as he carved the date—nothing ceremonial, just a line to remember the day he met Antoine. The knife slipped. He hissed, sucked the blood from his finger, and noticed something under the bark.
Not bark.
A surface—smooth, pale. He cleared it with his thumb.
A skull, small and set into the wood like it had grown there. Amber pooled around it, hard and translucent. Remi leaned closer. The teeth were intact. The eye sockets clear.
He looked down. At the roots, bone showed again. A hand, partially encased in hardened sap.
Inside the fist: a pocket watch.
He didn’t try to remove it yet. The bark was dense. Resinous. He worked slowly, using the blade his mother gave him on his birthday. He exposed the watch just enough to see the name:
Ed, engraved on the casing.
He didn’t tell anyone.
At home, he kept the watch in a shoebox.
It didn’t tell the time. The hands moved—sometimes—but without pattern. No tick. No resistance.
That night, he started searching. The town’s records were incomplete. Most of the land around them had been cleared or resold. The Dubois name came up in older maps, tied to the property where they lived now. Edouard Dubois. Professor. No obituary.
Weeks passed. Remi stopped going to the garden. He spent afternoons at the archive, evenings in the attic, pulling apart family papers. No one asked why.
One afternoon, in a folded folder under “Private Holdings,” he found it: a map showing the forest behind the house. On the far end, a faded stamp:
VerteFleur Industries. Eloise Dubois, Director.
He waited until the weekend.
There were no classes. His parents were out. He crossed the garden, passed the stream, and followed the old fence line into the woods.
At the edge of the property, the air changed. He noticed it because the temperature dropped slightly, and the sound of insects stopped. He kept walking.
He found the stones by accident. Old slabs, sunk sideways into the soil. No names, just patterns. Not crosses. Symbols he couldn’t place. A few had been lifted by roots, some cracked in half. Around them: pieces of copper, small vials with black sediment, lengths of tubing.
He knelt by one of the larger roots. A shape jutted from the bark—metal, dull with age. He scraped around it carefully. A pair of glasses, mostly intact. The frame was marked on the inside.
Ed.
He sat back. No wind. No birds. No movement. The forest wasn’t quiet. It was listening.
That night, the watch changed.
He hadn’t touched it. Hadn’t wound it. But when he opened the shoebox, the hands were moving—slow, uneven. One jumped. One spun.
He recorded the motion on paper. Ten minutes later, it stopped.
He didn’t sleep. He laid out everything he’d found: the name, the map, the tombs, the factory. A line started forming. Not answers. A structure.
He went back into the woods the next day.
The forest had shifted.
He couldn’t retrace his path exactly. The stones were further in. Some of the vials were gone. A few trees had exposed roots, twisted in angles that hadn’t been there before.
Near the same spot, a new object surfaced—a pipe, no longer buried. He followed its length to the base of a tree where fresh amber was leaking out.
Something beneath was moving.
He didn’t dig this time.
Back in town, the VerteFleur name kept appearing. On building permits. On closed business filings. On aerial photographs.
But never on obituaries.
He walked past the square again. Place Dubois. The name had always been there. He had just never looked at it.
He asked around. Nobody remembered Eloise. No photo. No grave.
Only the company. Only the trees they hadn’t touched.
His parents signed the contract on a Tuesday.
VerteFleur would modernize the house, install a heat pump, reinforce the roof. It came with a forest-clearing clause. “Non-productive acreage,” the company rep called it. “Zero ecological value.”
Remi found the paperwork on the kitchen table.
He didn’t argue. He already knew what was coming.
The machines arrived two days later.
He woke to the sound of teeth grinding through wood. Not chainsaws—grapples and splitters, heavy industrial equipment. The air smelled like burnt sap.
He ran out barefoot.
By the time he reached the edge of the garden, six trees were down. The old oak was already gone. The roots had been split. The stump left open like a wound.
His mother waved from near the trucks.
“We asked them to leave the front row,” she said. “You always liked those.”
Remi couldn’t answer.
In his pocket, the watch began to shake.
The collapse started that night.
No storm. No warning.
It began with a low vibration. The floorboards shifted. The cupboards rattled. His father blamed an old water main. Went to the cellar.
Then the ground cracked.
The house didn’t explode. It folded.
Stone first. Then timber.
The foundation gave way, the soil pulling in like a draining sink.
The chimney was last. It stood for one second longer than it should have. Then it dropped out of sight.
The garden was a pit.
The forest had taken it back—roots exposed, soil turned, amber leaking from broken roots like oil. His parents stood at the edge, speechless.
The watch in Remi’s hand stopped shaking. The face went black.
He understood the message. It hadn’t been a warning. It had been a timestamp. A marker.
Not for the event.
For the end of patience.
Remi never explained.
Not to the insurance adjusters, not to his parents, not to the neighbors who stopped by with casseroles and shallow sympathy. He said it was a sinkhole. Geological instability. “We’re lucky we weren’t inside,” his mother kept repeating, as if rehearsing it would make it true.
They moved in with relatives. Remi stayed quiet.
At night, he studied the watch. It never ticked again. But it stayed warm.
He became a journalist.
Local paper, then regional. He pitched stories on zoning corruption, land buys, disappearances near protected groves. Most of it was buried by editors.
He kept writing anyway. Changed names. Reframed facts. Called it fiction.
The stories gained traction online. Comments rolled in from other towns—other places where companies like VerteFleur had cleared land, where wildlife had disappeared in clusters, where foundations cracked in perfect concentric circles.
The patterns weren’t random.
He wasn’t alone.
One night, years later, he got a package. No return address.
Inside: a photo. A forest clearing he didn’t recognize. At the center—roots pulled up, amber exposed.
Another watch. Same design.
In the corner of the photo, someone had scrawled:
“Eloise was right. But late.”
He stared at it for hours. The mechanism inside his own watch vibrated once—then settled.
He closed the box. Left the light on.
The trees haven’t stopped.
But they don’t move fast. They never did.
They wait.
Each time a grove is cleared, a name resurfaces. Sometimes a sinkhole follows. Sometimes a child finds something in the roots: a tool, a lens, a watch.
Not everyone understands what they’re looking at. Most throw it away.
Some don’t.
Remi keeps a folder.
Not on his computer. A real one. Printed pages, topographic maps, incident reports. He updates it by hand.
And each year, on the day the house fell, he walks back to the old property line. No one rebuilt. Nothing grows there now.
He places the watch—still silent—on the ground.
And listens.
It all started in the now silent garden.
And it hasn’t ended.
Not yet.