Childhood memories fade with time on the loose sands of the mind, and can distort themselves into twisted, fragmentary reflections of what might once have been considered truth. I expect - and perhaps hope - that to be true of those I now have which relate to the Jezebel tree. The holiday house was a vast, leaning half-wreck-half-sanctuary that we visited twice a year, in the Jurassic cleft of the country: wind-rushed and vibrant. For anywhere between four days and two weeks we would run riot, myself and my three siblings, in the lofted spaces and boundless green expanses that stretched in each and every direction. But the Jezebel tree stood apart. It was ornate, as though chiselled from an even greater block of solid wood, and vast. It would become the centrepiece for most games; being hidden behind or circled in a breathless escape from pursuit. There was a rope-swing for two or three summers, clasping to one of the lower, prodding limbs, but that eventually subsided at the hands of nature’s inevitability, and now is just a limp thread: downward and suggestive.
I can’t recall who noticed what became known as the doorway first. It was a sliver that ran from the ground up about two feet into the wooded base, as though, as we speculated at length at the time, it had been struck by lightning or the victim of a short, sharp earthquake (not that there was any supporting evidence for either). Within a week it had expanded to a hand’s width. It was months later, by which time the doorway had been long forgotten, that we saw it had become over two feet wide: an entrance.
There wasn’t much nudging, cajoling, or instigating, there was too much eagerness to explore somewhere new.
Beyond the entrance there were stairs, or rather roots, layered on top of one another, slick from a brief rail-fall, but tight and overlapping, generous for child-feet to clamber excitedly down in a crisp spiral towards darkness. But not only darkness. There was a hum of light - vague and growing with each step that we made down and down - which seemed to beckon us. There was a threadbare acceptance that this was beyond the rational, lilting flatly over into the obscure and obscene, but we moved on regardless, such was our childish hunger for the strange and the wonderful.
There were walls around us of moss and wood and packed dirt, and from them clung sconces with candles that were lit and flickering in the nascent breeze that had followed us down. We were silent, furtive, huddling and eyes darting, but remaining within quick grasp of one another. Perhaps father’s madness has found each of us at precisely the same moment, or perhaps a branch had fallen from the Jezebel tree and knocked me into a dream world, I recall wondering. But the eyes of my siblings were enough to declare all of this as very real and spectacularly wonderful.
We faced a subterranean corridor, and a whistling sound rattled through it and towards us. We paused, but then we carried on; there was only one outcome, one possibility, and we would follow it to its end. A few steps in and the whistling defined itself as a music. It was wistful and soft, wandering in a minor key, briefly playful and then terribly morose. I can still hear the sound but have never been quite able to relay the precise melody. It has remained firmly on the periphery of my consciousness, nails dug into skull to remain without.
The corridor narrowed and then we found ourselves in a vast hall. This was - by rough deduction - directly beneath the house. The roof was a high dome, and the walls were covered in a patchwork of roots and randomly placed sconces with more candles that made the walls seems to broil with an impatient movement: tentacular and smothering. The far end of the hall was a shimmering mirage, and we eased ourselves toward it in nervous, glancing hesitance. And there emerged from the half-gloom of candle smoke and impoverished light four doors.
Each door was short, about my height at the time, and a deep red. Above them was written in flowing golden tree root - an earthen cursive - “one each” and we knew, without a word spoken, that we must each choose one door: here we were to separate. We fanned out and aligned with the door closest (mine the furthest left). There were silent nods and slow gestures of agreement and then we each disappeared into our relative unknown.
I recall the cold within the room. The cold of unseen spirits, loose floorboards, and a crisp, white blanketing. I shivered and moved inside, suddenly fearful now to be alone in this gloomy unknown. There was one candle on the far wall of the small room, and I approached it. Beneath the sconce were four separate openings in the wall - about the size of a shoebox - and, running from top to bottom, each housed a thread. The red strings emerged from a hole at the bottom and disappeared into a hole at the top, they were taut and one sang as I plucked it. On a short platform that jutted from the wall, were a shining pair of shears. They seemed almost liquid silver in the whispering candlelight. There were no instructions, but the implication was clear: a choice to be made. Time seemed an irrelevance as I thought and considered. It was too abstract to have any tangible meaning, and just to hear the twang of a snapping thread moved me to collect the cold, shining metal instrument. But then which? Which should be cut? The one on the left, to match the door I entered, or one of the others? There would be no alignment of room and thread number, would there? It seemed absurd, too measured and precise. But I hadn’t allowed myself to consider that none of this was sensible, or rational. We were outside of any previously lived reality and the alignment was very much something that should have been considered.
I cut the third thread, counting from left to right. The string sounded a pung that was pleasant but brief as both ends disappeared. The other three strings remained rigid and unmoved. I exhaled and returned the shears to the platform, before turning and leaving into a new life.
Two siblings emerged at the same time, blinking and confused. A shift had occurred that was unspoken but collectively understood: there were only three of us. Always. There had only been three of us to start with, to enter this cavern, to enter these doors. There was one too many doors! We hesitated, glanced, hovered, and then left.
It is only now, on my deathbed, that I can recall these events in their entirety. Perhaps now, closer to death, my own thread is fraying and close to the deep pung that will cast me into the shadows, perhaps now I can feel the remnants of what happened on that day beneath the house and the Jezebel tree. The tree that died soon after, and when wrenched from the ground, revealing nothing but dirt and worms beneath it.
I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if my own thread had been cut on that day. Or if the others chose the same thread to cut as mine. Or if any of my other siblings cut anything at all. That is the toughest thought: that I were the only one to make a cut of anything, and thus the remover of that person. It is queer that I can’t even recall their name.