Surprisingly, Tick felt the pain sliding away, feeling better by the second. Pushing against the ground, he got his feet under him and stood up. Though sore, he no longer felt the pinpricks and bruises he’d suffered from just moments earlier. It was as if someone had injected him with two shots of morphine.

“Dude, what happened?” Paul said through a groan, stretching his arms out before him.

Tick stepped over to Sofia, who seemed to be regaining her strength as well. She rolled onto her back, blinked up at Tick, then held up an arm; Tick helped her to her feet.

“Is that guy still your favorite teacher?” she asked, brushing leaves off her clothes. “He’s a real joy to be around, that’s for sure.”

“I . . . I don’t know what—” Tick stopped in mid-sentence, staring at something over Sofia’s shoulder. He squinted to see through the dim twilight, then squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. “What the heck is that?”

“What?” Sofia and Paul asked in unison, turning to look in the same direction as Tick.

Without answering, Tick walked toward the oddity that loomed over them just a few dozen feet away.

“Whoa,” he heard Paul say from behind him.

Deeper into the forest, several trees had melted into a twisting, gnarled, monstrous-looking mass of wood that was as tall and thick as a house. Several other trees had been lifted out of the ground, their roots sticking out like naked fingers, clods of dirt swaying back and forth. Tick could only stare, disbelieving his own eyes. It looked like some giant magician had grabbed dozens of trees, transformed them into liquid wood, and then smashed them together, twisting and squeezing all of it into a deformed, hideous shape.

Sofia gasped, then pointed to a section of the wood-blob near the ground. “Is that what I think it is? Oh!” She covered her face with her hands and turned around, her body visibly shuddering.

“What?” Paul asked, stepping closer to take a look. Tick joined him, and immediately saw the source of her disgust.

Somehow twisted into the wood was the body of a deer. Three legs poked out of the main trunk; its face was half-sunk into the wood, the one visible eye somehow displaying the fear it must have felt at the last second before death.

“That’s downright creepy,” Paul whispered.

~

By the time they reached Tick’s house, almost all of the intense pain they’d felt had disappeared, leaving only a weary soreness. Tick, like Paul and Sofia, had hardly said a word on the walk back, trying to figure out which had been more disturbing—the agonizing pain or the deformed super-tree with the dead deer sticking out of it.

“Could this day have been any weirder?” Paul asked as they walked up the porch steps to Tick’s house.

“Maybe if we’d grown bunny ears,” Sofia replied.

Paul let out a bitter laugh.