11. The Plant That Made A Chair
The Perpetual Forest, Somerset, 2025
Part Two
Chapter 11
The Plant That Made A Chair
The wave broke sending thunderous white crests into the cavern. She watched them smash their way against sharp edges of rock until they regrouped into shallow pools, their tops filling with sea froth. The chair was tied securely so on some occasions she was tempted to lean down and scoop them out. But today the wind whipped it all to a frenzy coating the interior with airborne streams, which clung to the hairs on her arms leaving them smelling of brine and her skin prickling from the salt left behind.
It made her feel alive being so close to the waves. She could see how the cavern was their creation. They carved out the rock but in so doing they also contributed to the shape of this coastal region. If there were no waves of this kind then the terrain would not have supported the arboreal existence she enjoyed. She had the waves to thank for this. They brought with them fresh invigorating air, she missed that in the city.
It got into her blood. It was the planet’s tonic, providing nourishment, feeding the body and the mind. The forest’s air she found to be thick and humid, it pressed down onto every pore. She preferred the coastal climate for this reason with its natural purified system of circulated currents. And from her front row seat she could see this in action from the swirls of cloud migrating over an archipelago just ahead.
This spiral chain of interlinked islands was next on her to do list. For now there was the excavation to finish. It had taken several weeks of exploring the coastline before she decided to venture inland and into the forest. She had to admit there was some hesitation, was it due to some buried primeval instinct not to go or was it the ghostly noises? Yes, probably it was the latter. It was certainly not animal calls she could hear coming from the forest.
She recalled the first time she heard it, a series of humming chords, sometimes discordant or at other periods it built to a harmonious peak before fading away. She imagined an orchestra of wind instruments left hanging in trees like ornaments, awaiting the arrival of a passing breeze to get them all going.
The answer to the origin of this sound was not what she had expected, solved mysteries generally lead to further mysteries and this one certainly did. It led her to the cavern and to the chair.
If Pages knew of its existence, she would no doubt consider it to be one of her anomalies. She had other ideas though. If it were an anomaly, it was very old, its age would be millions of years if not more.
Knowing there had been others well before, just like herself, was a comforting thought. Except she had come to a radically different conclusion. The discovery in the forest, the excavation she was carrying out, that was the source of the odd noise, it had brought her to the cavern, and to the chair, and to the realisation that it was made by someone or something who probably had no use for chairs. It was a fossil and therefore predated the arrival of her species, the hominids. It would be like digging up a chair from the Cretaceous era. A gold plated anomaly that would have Pages scrambling about in shock. How far back have their kind been?
The chair was in no hurry to give her its secrets. Although whoever made it did not need it for their personal use anyway. This concept had haunted her because it pointed to another troubling thought. She resisted the temptation to follow that particular theory up until she had more information to go on. The answer to her questions will lie somewhere in the excavation, she was sure; under the earth, buried, waiting to be uncovered by trowel.
The chair was constructed, that was true, a fossil entwined within a complex web of roots hanging from the ceiling of the cavern. These roots penetrated the rock, but had they tunnelled through or were they separate strata from a period when this was all soft sediment?
If that was the case then the chair and everything attached to it could be tens of millions of years old. Now she realises a fundamental truth, people are very good at recognising patterns in nature and labelling it accordingly. The chair-that-wasn’t-a-chair could very well be just a freak series of coincidences to form a particular unity of shapes that share a set of characteristics generally accepted as being chair like.
If you believe that then a lot of natural phenomena begins to lose its mythical allure. We look for meaning in everything we see, and if we don’t see meaning we end up looking between the lines until we do. There was also the subject of the chair’s location which was of interest. The site of the excavation was a two-kilometre hike inland, it and the chair were linked.
That was a fact determined from the position of a straight two kilometre raised ridge running from the excavation to the cavern. She named this the root as it appeared to correspond with what had been uncovered at the excavation. Furthermore, she surmised that the chair positioned in the cavern was a location of geologically hard rock. The view, noted from the chair, was in direct alignment with the spiral collection of archipelagos islands offshore.
Was the position of the chair in relation to the islands significant? She would have thought so, if it had been placed there by hands, but in the case of this chair that did not apply, because it was, to put it bluntly, a fossilised root tip.
Plants generally don’t have a habit of picking plum spots based on the scenery around them. The plant, its full title hadn’t yet been decided, made a beeline for this part of the coastline, there was obviously something here that attracted it. The circular perimeter of the excavation indicated that whatever stood there had been colossal in scale. It’s footprint left behind a crater approximately a hundred and forty-seven metres in diameter.
She had previously considered referring to it as the ‘Tree’, but as further pieces were uncovered, she thought it deserved another class of nomenclature. The ‘Plant’ would suffice for now. There were no others of its kind as far as she could tell, the forest was a tree haven, untouched by humans, but the trees that populated the area were not of the mega flora variety.
Whatever lineage brought about this giant; it had appeared to have come to an end several epochs ago. But the traces of its existence were tantalising. The sound she had playfully imagined belonging to a woodwind orchestra had in fact been made by the buried root system. The calcified stems of hollowed tubular roots sung as they caught the wind.
The coastal air which blew into the cavern, bringing with it the waves also brought the voice of the Plant. Perhaps it was this that had brought about the position of the chair? There could be air borne nutrients, some element in the sea froth or even the cavern itself, a stratum of sediment which was of interest to the Plant? Whatever it had been she may possibly never know for certain, but it didn’t stop her theorising.
She could see clues wherever she looked. This kind of organism was so unlike any other. There were no books, no previously documented studies to decipher them by. Her own field of interest, a degree in art history, had led her to becoming a curator of museum collection; but if the Plant was to be the next research subject, then she’d better get the work done, keep digging to find answers, and stop endlessly theorising like this. The chair sighed as if in agreement, its little voice coming from its tiny woven stone threads of honeycomb like texture. If she ever needed some encouragement, this was it. There was a box waiting for her. A box of delights where a discovery lay, or perhaps it will be a Pandora’s box?
Whatever box it proves to be it will have another piece of the jigsaw within, she was certain of that. Her team would be waiting, they’ll be getting impatient, tired and hot in the humidity, so she’d better get back to prop up their moral. Always work from boxes was her motto. Excavating was a slow methodical process, each area uncovered was first marked out in squares, a space to accommodate one individual with a trowel. The boxes were her idea so therefore it was fitting she had received an appropriate nickname. She didn’t mind, the team were grateful for the supervision she provided. Without the boxes they’d soon be working in a haphazard way. So once the idea of Shoes and her boxes was jokingly suggested it stuck. Her real name wasn’t as memorable, or was linked, in the most round-a-bout sort of way, to her work method as this name was anyway. Adopting the title of Shoes made perfect sense.
She moved off the chair and onto a plateau of roots, twisted like giant spaghetti strands, crossing it and over onto a rock where she climbed up into sunlight. The moon waned in the east; a greyish blue transparent button pinned to the sky. Before her was the ridge, an elongated raised pathway, partially collapsed and covered in a wealth of ecosystems.
Meadows gave way to trees which nurtured thick lichen carpets dotted with butterflies. Leaving the ocean behind she follows the path skirting through long grass where a natural set of stepping stones await.
Sometimes she imagines this ancient path had always been here, waiting for someone like her to find it and lead her to the chair like a fish to a hook. Where had that thought come from?
If nothing else it was still a beautifully scenic route. A picture book avenue lined with arching trees over a ground cast with fleeting shadow shapes. These sensory delights for the imagination to feed on always made her journey along the path a pleasant one.
Like a bridge hung above a maze, it took her straight and in safety to the heart of the forest. She had covered this ground on many occasions. Her footprints were there etched in the dust, the shape and size of her shoes clearly outlined in both directions. Back and forth and over again until it now appeared like a large group of people had passed by. But they were all hers. Not a single footprint she could see belonged to any of the others. They must be there but are just covered by her prints she concluded. Lost between the lines she had left behind. She found it odd though and always meant to raise this with her team. But the matter was forgotten when she reached the excavation site. Perhaps deep down she considered it too trivial. What insight does it provide?
However, like a memory that refuses to be forgotten, it always resurfaced while she walked the path. This was most apparent at particular sections where her journeys were signposted by her footprints, multiplied over and over. How many Shoes have travelled this way, she asked herself dreamily?
Travelling was a fixture of her life. On reflection, the subjects of travelling and that of remembering her past had taken precedence over her daily routine. You could not have one without the other.
In the Perpetual Forest she found what it truly means to be lost in one’s thoughts. It was distilled here to an absolute. And the journey along the path heightened this awareness every time she took it. To be fair, since her arrival at the forest she had begun to understand how this notion had also applied to the previous life she had led.
Being lost in one’s thoughts is no different to plain old thinking. In that regard the life she had before, when she used to live in a city, was just as prone to getting lost. In fact, more so because she had found her city thoughts were often on the brink of becoming a jumbled mess and required constant tidying to keep them focused.
Here in the forest she still had distractions to contend with but unlike those in the city they were of a vastly different kind and had little impact on her daily routines. This was a revelation because she had not realised just how much stuff she encountered was purposely designed to bombard her waking thoughts with the precision of a scud missile. The outcome of this was that it felt like a large portion of her day had been spent blocking out as much of this transient ephemera, leaving her with just enough focus remaining to carry out her programmed schedule of work, eat, sleep, repeat.
The distractions she encountered in the forest were the complete antithesis of those she had to deal with in the city. For a start they did not intercept her with repetitive jolts to do this or consider that; neither did they prompt her to question herself or induce a sense of inadequacy if she chose to ignore them.
These distractions did not judge, or prompt her to constantly examine her potentiality in relation to the here and now. Instead of trying to shut out the present the forest allowed her thoughts to breath and roam freely unencumbered.
It had occurred that a large proportion of the underlying anxiety people felt, including herself, which simmered in the background, was due to an inability to accept yourself as you are.
She was beginning to understand that if those constant distractions to be or act a certain way could be removed then a lot of people might start to find their true aspirations and their own value systems to the benefit not just to themselves but to each other.
Unfortunately we are conditioned from birth to follow particular role models and rights of passage. But what makes a good role model? Who are the judges? What criteria do they base it on? She never understood why it was considered healthy to compare oneself in this way because it meant you were relinquishing yourself to a strict set of imposed ideals.
The forest reminded her of the grandness in nature, it sounded pompous, but it underlined how far removed this way of thinking had become. There is more than one set of ideals, more than one role model, more than one perspective and it took her travels along the path to fully comprehend this. She was a small part in a much bigger picture. Knowing this helped her relax, be herself, whatever that meant, and to explore.
Her previous life did not allow this. Finding a crossing and meeting the others changed everything. It also brought into stark focus how limited her preconceived notions were, yes that’s how she would describe it. A prescribed limit, a medication to inhibit, to sustain a controlled system to bestow a standard set of expectations to follow in order to fit in and be the character she thought she had to be.
Dogman, yes that odd man, the friend of Pages, but not hers; he had tried inducting her, like others before, into his theories on what was going on, and what the crossings meant. They offered routes, but according to Dogman the existence of the crossings contradicted all established laws of physics, to put it simply they were signs that of the artifice in nature. A light show where reality was a mere projection being watched somewhere. She laughed thinking he was mad, until finally she resigned herself to the belief that anyone who has travelled long enough will to some extent, begin to question everything they see.
Dogman had decided to go that bit further, tipping over into the zone clearly belonging to the far out bizarre category. To her, the person now known as Shoes, the crossings were just part of the same natural world phenomena she grew up with. They existed long before in people’s imaginations. When she was a child she would lose herself in a world of stories found in books and films. She saw all that wonder now as a mere shallow reflection upon the deep pool of unknowns still to be discovered. They made as much sense as you wished to see in them.
She believed interpreting a meaning was not the responsibility of any single individual. Instead she found the crossings promoted contemplation and certainly not conspiracies. Her inclination was that each crossing acted as a conduit for broadening awareness, promoting self discovery and ultimately leading to enlightenment for the lucky few who were able to use them.
Unfortunately none of this applied to Dogman. He was the prime example of how one’s theories can be tainted by their own prejudices. He couldn’t see the beauty, the precision of having finely balanced edges in perfect alignment between parallel worlds. Isn’t that worth rejoicing rather than rejecting she asked herself? The relationship between the various parts, as the forest constantly reminded her, from the many organisms and up though various species, they were all part of a chain, was it not therefore unsurprising to find that the crossings, further links forming yet more chains, existed as they do?
They had repeatedly appeared in so many cultures, in the myths and tales passed on, their origins preceding long before the advent of writing.
The notion of doorways transporting people to other realms was one of those staple themes. How many such themes appeared in recorded fables or were scribed onto the illuminated pages of manuscripts; tucked within faded scrolled parchments, and stashed in the vaults for passing philosophers, theologians and academics to discover? Apart from all this though, her overriding sense was that the crossings made her feel like a child. They had reintroduced that feeling she had as a child. The world offered endless possibilities for her to explore, like a book with its pages open. A big old beautiful book filled with far away places for her to see. This feeling had never truly been lost, even into adulthood, but it had been blunted, worn down by the accumulation of years navigating her way through daily routines and distractions.
She was relieved to have left all that baggage far behind hanging on some platform where no doubt a rusty sign, labelled with her old name, was swinging in the wind, still waiting for that long overdue train to arrive. The train everyone is waiting for, the one marked with its destination on the front, in bright neon letters, with the word: Future.
Without her baggage and travelling light, she found the crossings, left the station and neither wanted nor wished to look for her future anymore, now that was true liberation. And she could have so easily missed it, still be stood at her station, baggage in tow, had it not been for the discovery of an old glass phial, labelled in latin onto faded paper, wrapped in tissue, and tucked at the back of a storage draw. A bird skated across her sights. She recognised that she probably had another kilometre to walk, not long now and she’d begin to smell lunch cooking. A stew of ingredients brought though yesterday, carried by hand from a market stall existing in a beam of dappled forest light. The universe was a strange place but it somehow conspired in this regard to provide a readily supply of food for her and her co-travellers. Without this piece of serendipity, their survival chances would have been slashed to negligible if not barely sufficient to keep them motivated enough and maintain the excavation. If the universe provided food it also chose her, an individual practically tailor made with relevant skills, to make a crossing and carry out the excavation of the plant. If she didn’t know better, she would almost be tempted in thinking there had been some divine intervention along the way. This link, like all the others she had crossed, was to her home, a cottage in a small town placed within the county of Cornwall. Ancient lore taught that Merlin lived nearby, or was trapped in a subterranean cavern, still awaiting for a spell to set him free. It felt appropriate having a base, one that had a sorcerer no less, considering what she got up to at weekends. Cornwall and the surrounding counties of Devon and Somerset had a fair few crossings folded into their country lanes; there were the world famous lay line and stone circles although several had now become gentrified and swallowed by urban expansion. Poor old Stonehenge was out of commission, overrun and impossible to use, except on the equinox of course. Then there were the lost crossings she would stumble across.
The oddest being in the town of Milborne Port, where a new housing development had been built, much to the chagrin of the locals. Placed onto a few hectares of fields, previously used by grazing cows; a sign outside this new estate was labelled “The Crossing”, presumably to honour its historic site as a route used by Devonshire cattle, and not because, to her amusement, it had a pan dimensional gateway, stuck alongside number nine’s privet hedge. There were the obvious advantages of being a traveller; but there were also disadvantages, like seeing, what she opted to call, The Transfer People and their ilk.
Now it can be argued that as most people cannot see the crossings then it would be presumed they would not detect The Transfer People, but from her observations she decided that they can; or detect their presence anyway. For the Transfer People were known by another universally recognised name. These folk were incorrectly diagnosed as being phantoms of the dead, ghosts if you will. But they were nothing of the kind. Unlike wandering spirits of the departed, who she believed don’t exist anyway, the Transfer People were just regular individuals going about their business. Living, breathing men and women, who had ventured near to a crossing, causing their light to seep through, like water dripping from a hole in a bucket.
To her childhood imagination their general faded look reminded her of those transfers, given away in packets of breakfast cereal. Often these included a set of illustrated characters you could apply by rubbing a penny over each to stick to an illustrated backdrop. These scenes were on the back of the cereal box, but the temptation was to stick them into books as well. They were semi-transparent cut outs a lot like how the transfer people appeared. The problem with transfers though, they never really looked as if they belonged to the scene you stuck them to, either they were out of proportion from their surroundings, too crooked, or missing an arm or head when it was torn off during the process of sticking it down. The disadvantage here, Transfer People can have legs, arms, heads, you name it, missing too, and for a child this can be, to put it mildly, alarming and in her case left her with a few years of self therapy to understand that she along with everyone is potentially a Transfer person to somebody else. The first one she remembered occurred when she was six years old.