The Whisper Tree

Break Ups

Ralph Watters: I can never get my family back. They're gone. I watched the light leave their eyes. I...I...(starts to cry)....

Lawyer: Mr. Watters, your family's death, while tragic, is not because of my client's book.

Ralph Watters: (yelling) They know what happens when people see the tree! They know the danger and promoted it! There is so much blood on your hands! How do you sleep at night?

Lawyer: (yelling) Sir, that passage hasn't appeared in print since the early 1900s, and the Higgins publishing company has taken all necessary and legal steps to prevent that information from being available to the public. You sought out the book. You made the trip. You believed in the story. If anyone is responsible for their death, it's not my client.

Ralph Watters: (sobbing) I watched...them die! The voices told me it might happen, and I didn't listen.

Judge: Let's take a ten-minute recess and let cooler heads prevail.

- Court Transcript, Watters v. Higgins Publishing Company

We pushed through, each of us hearing whispers as we walked. Sometimes they were about fires and lying; sometimes, they were some random non-sequitur from out of left field. I heard different voices, men and women, discussing any number of things in a bunch of other languages. I heard English, Spanish, French, and German.

But I also heard other languages that sounded foreign to my ears. Older tongues that may have been dead, but I didn't know enough to know any better. The closer we got to the rock, the more the words buzzed around us like flies, completely covering the natural sounds of the hike.

I ducked under a low-hanging tree branch, and that's when I spotted a pair of eyes staring back at me. I stumbled back out of fear but then realized what I had seen – Face In Rock. "Holy shit," I said out loud. I must've been more vocal than I thought because my words cut through the haze of whispers and hit Joe's ear.

"Is that it?"

"If it's not, it'd be a weird fucking coincidence," I said.

The whispers ceased as soon as we stood in front of the rock. We were again ensconced in the buzz of nature and nature only. The rock did, in fact, look like a face. While the rest of the features were rough-hewn, the eyes were as clear as day. They stared right through you as if they saw what you were made of.

I didn't blink.

Joe walked up to me and shook his head. "That thing gives me the heebie-jeebies," he said.

"The eyes looked carved, but the rest of the face doesn't. Just boring old erosion."

"Maybe some inspired sculptor took it upon themselves to gussy it up?"

"Who says 'gussy'?"

"Shut up," he said with a sharper edge than I had expected.

"Sorry," I said.

"No, I'm sorry. That came out harsher than I meant. My bad."

"It's fine," I said. I looked down at the ground of the rock and looked to the left. There was no trail. But to the right....

"It's open," I whispered. "The trail, look. It's on the right side."

"Holy shit," he said, excited.

Sure enough, there was a small, well-worn path to the immediate right of the rock. The branches of the nearby trees looked like someone was holding them open for us to walk through. My heart started pounding like a Tito Puente timbale song.