The Red Patch
by Chris Balow

The secluded road to my parent's house far out in the northern wilderness was always my favorite road to drive on. To me, my parent's house was the most beautiful place in the world. And the road which lead to it was something to look at. The road, which was made only of tawny, dusty gravel and the occasional patch of matted grass, was encircled by a forest of ancient trees. The trees were especially stunning in the autumn as they began to shift color and gleam in the sunset.

As a child I used to run freely about the forest near my parent's home and swim in the nearby lake. In those days, I went to school in a town about twenty miles from home. Waking up early in the morning so I could take the long car trip, yet still make it to school in time, wasn't easy on me or my parents. But they never even considered moving to a more urban setting. They, as well as I, had forever fallen in love with the forest and I will never forget that.

The house itself, was an average-sized residence made by my father's bare hands. The house was built long before my birth, and still stands solid to this day. My parents had told me that they had made sure to get the house erected before giving birth to me, they were people who always planned ahead.

*****

My parents had just died. A plane trip to Sri Lanka plummeted somewhere in the Arabian Sea due to a leak in the gas tank. They always loved adventure and nature. My parents traveled together all over the world ever since I was sent off to college. They always said that I was their first priority and adventure their second.

Now, I was driving my old pickup truck down the old gravel road which lead to my parents house. I planned on selling the house, having my own in the city and all, but for now I just wanted to live there for a month or two and just take things easy. The news of my parent's deaths had hit me hard, and a couple of months to gather myself seemed to be just what the doctor ordered.

But in the mean time, I was enjoying the scenery from my car's windshield. It was the beginning of fall and the leaves were changing color. All of the trees leaves would change color and fall, all but one tree I could easily think of.

The Red Patch, as I had been calling it ever since I was a small boy, was the most beautiful tree in the world, at least in my opinion. The Red Patch was a tree that had half regular green leaves, and the top half of the tree had red leaves. It was the brightest red I have ever seen, and it never changed color in the fall, nor did the red leaves fall out in the winter. Only the bottom half's green leaves went through the seasonal changes that most trees go through, the red leaves just lingered to their roots and true color. The DNR simply said that the Red Patch was just a flaw in the genetic makeup of the tree which gave it a different color, as for the enigma as to why the leaves of the Red Patch never fell out, the DNR couldn't explain. Nobody could explain it, but nobody really cared either. They just marveled at the tree's beauty and complimented to my parents on the tree.

The tree was especially beautiful in the fall when the Red Patch would stay red, while the bottom half of the tree's leaves would be orange or yellow, it was really something to see.

As my pickup rumbled along the gravel road kicking up dust and dirt, my thoughts endlessly turned to the Red Patch. I wondered what it would look like, how would I feel when I saw it, and I even wondered if it would still be red. I had seen the tree's red leaves survive winter after winter without losing color or falling out, but now it kept seeming harder to believe that it would still be the same.

In my childhood, I used to stay up late at night and just look into the Red Patch until I was too tired to hold my eyelids open. When I was fifteen, I had carved my name into the tree having some crazy idea that it made the tree and I one with each other. I don't know, maybe it worked, because keeping my mind off of those wonderfully red leaves kept on becoming harder and harder.

I turned off of the gravel road and onto the paved driveway leading to the house. A straight row of trees paralleled the long drive way giving me the sensation of riding through a tunnel in a freight train. And as my truck crept closer and closer to the house, the forestry of the area became denser and denser. The area in front of the garage where the driveway widened and the trees became less dense was always my favorite place. Right in front of the house the trees blocked out a fair amount of light, yet let in just the right amount so the temperature wasn't too warm in the day. And in the evening the trees would glimmer and shine as they allowed spots of sunlight to fall to the ground.

I parked the truck outside of the closed garage and stepped out onto the blacktop. I affirmatively scanned the house and its forest property. Far off to my left, I could see a small portion of the lake, and to my right was nothing but the captivating wilderness. I took a silent moment to admire the scenery before the Red Patch became my paramount thought once again. Before I knew what was coming over me, I was running vigorously toward the tree.

What caused me to run to the tree so exuberantly I will never know. All I can remember is the urge to see if the tree still had its red leaves at the top, I wanted to see if my name was still carved into the tree, I was even wondering if the tree was even there at all. All of those years growing up in this house with the tree standing stolidly outside my bedroom window were starting to seem like nothing but a dream. It was like the dream you woke up from in the morning fighting to relive yet you couldn't block out your brain's urge to begin the new day. As I ran, I found myself yearning for that world, for those moonlit nights as I gazed at the Red Patch from my bedroom window. Those years when I even used to climb the tree and talk to it, it had always been the perfect tree to climb and talk too. The tree had always been my special place where no one would bother me and I could sit alone, for hours.

I ran around the house and found the tree. At least I thought I had found it, when I looked in the exact spot where the tree had always been, the tree didn't seem itself. After a second I realized what the difference was, the tree's red leaves where green. The Red Patch was no longer red, the tree hadn't even started to change color yet. I ran to the tree and stood directly in front of it. My name was still carved in the trunk: JEFF. I felt somewhat relieved to see my name engraved in the tree as it had always been since I was fifteen, but I was still disappointed that the red leaves had gone green. Didn't the DNR say that it was a genetic flaw? If so, how could the genetic makeup of the tree just change over no more than twenty years. Peter Benish, the DNR man who had come over to the house some years back to unravel the mystery of the red leaves would have liked to hear about this. Remarkably I still remembered his number, and I figured I'd call to tell him that the leaves had gone green. Maybe he had already known, but I wanted to contact him anyway.

*****

"This is the DNR, Harold Grant speaking," the man on the phone said.

"Hello, by any chance could I talk to Peter Benish?" I asked.

"Oh, well he retired a few years ago. But I could give you his number if you
want to talk to him."

"Sure, that'd be fine."

It turned out that Peter Benish had retired five years ago and had moved to Florida with his wife. The man at the DNR office gave me the number and diligently bid me farewell. The number was ten digits and the long distant charges bothered me a little, but for some reason I felt that I had to call him about the Red Patch. I dialed the number and heard the voice of the old DNR man whom had ruled the tree as a genetic flaw.

"Hello?" said Peter.

"Hey Peter, it's Jeff," I said.

"Who?" Peter asked.

"Jeff, the kid who lived by the tree with red leaves," I said hoping to jog the man's memory.

"Oh, Jeffrey! I never thought I'd be talking to you! How old are you now? You must be at least forty, right?" the old man named Peter Benish exclaimed.

"Uh, thirty-five, good guess though," I corrected.

"Man!" the old man sounded almost hysterical. "Last time I saw you, you was only a little guy. Like eight years old, wow!"

"Yeah, it's the same old me," I said indifferently. "I was just calling you with a little news about the Red Patch." The words came out of my mouth as if I were speaking a foreign language. Nothing seemed to make sense anymore.

"You mean that tree, with the red leaves?"

"Yep, that's the one, except the red leaves aren't red anymore. They seemed to have changed" I heard a slight gasp of disbelieving from the other end of the line.

"That's impossible! The red leaves are a genetic flaw, DNA can't be changed just like that. There is no way the genes of a tree can be altered, it's impossible. Are you sure it's the same tree?"

"Positive. It even has my name carved in it from when I was a teenager."

"My God!" now Peter did sound like he was hysterical. "I just can't believe that it would do that. I'm sorry Jeffrey, if you called for an explanation, I honestly don't have one for you. I'm baffled!"

"I don't need an explanation, just thought I'd make your day by filling you in on the mystery."

"Well you surely made my day,"

"See ya, Peter," I said casually and set the receiver down. I didn't really expect the old man to know how the tree had changed color like that. The truth was, I didn't even think Peter knew how the leaves were red in the first place. His genetic flaw concept was beginning to seem to me like nothing more than an excuse for a question he couldn't answer.

Peter was a man who didn't like to be baffled, but him admitting it over the phone told me that he didn't have a good excuse for the Red Patch's mysterious color change. Oh well, the Red Patch seemed to me like a mystery that was best left unsolved. For now the Red Patch was just another tree in the woods.

Or was it?

*****
After my call to Peter Benish, and about an hour of watching the TV, it was dark and I was more than ready to go drift off into dream world. Lately, I had been having recurrent dreams, every night in fact. The dreams started the night my parents died, yet it was before I knew they had died. The dreams, were always about the Red Patch, I dreamt that I was sitting up in the Red Patch, but I wasn't myself. I was someone

(something?)

other than myself. I was up in the tree with the red leaves surrounding me, it was always at night and I could see the ominous full moon standing wide in the star clustered sky. But the most noticeable trait of these dreams was the fact that I was surrounded by bats. The bats were small and brown, and they swarmed around the red leaves

(around me)

like bees searching for a ripe flower to gather honey from. In reality, I was strongly disgusted and a bit afraid of bats, even the small brown ones which were harmless. But in the dreams, I loved the bats, they comforted me, and loved me as I loved them. They flew around me and perched upside down beside me on the branches, and I felt like a bat myself. Only, I was the king bat, the biggest bat in the forest. The smaller bats worshiped me, and I took care of them, as if they were my children. I was not a father, didn't even have someone I could call a girlfriend, but the feeling of being a parent was unmistakable in the dream. I was not sure that the feeling was real, but it did seem real, frighteningly so.

And now, as I went to bed, I could feel the dream coming on. I felt it as if it were some impending destiny which awaited me wholly. I could feel myself slipping into the world of the Red Patch and the children bats.

*****

I knew this was a dream, but it just seemed too realistic to be fake. I was standing outside staring at the trunk of the Red Patch tree, I looked up at the tree and found that the leaves were red once again. I had control over my thoughts and actions in this dream, which had never happened before. In the other dreams, I had been nothing but an oblivious ghost watching the world through the lens of my eyes. But now, I was me, I was standing in front of the Red Patch tree and I could do what I pleased. I looked at the trunk and saw where my hunting knife had engraved my name into the tree, but my name wasn't there. Instead there were several words engraved in the tree, it was a message. FLY WITH US, it read. The message, if that was what it really was, didn't make sense to me. And yet, it did. Maybe I just didn't want to understand the message, I was frightened and lonely. Then the bats came.

The brigade of small brown bats crowded around me seeming to beckon me skyward. And at that moment I was no longer a human, but a bat, the king bat. I rose off the ground on thin, brown wings and was traveling over the trees with the bats in front, in back, and flying to the sides of me as if they were my winged posse. I guess that was when I found out what a ‘flying dream' was like, I had heard of them before but never knew what anybody was talking about. This was when I discovered the feeling of flying, the dream was so vivid that my consciousness was becoming more and more powerful. I looked at myself, and was astonished to see amazingly large brown wings protruding from my body. My torso was transformed in shape and I now had brown fur. My legs were skinny, bony, and furry.

I tried to talk, to speak to the bats, but my mouth only made a screeching noise. The bats seemed to respond to my screeches. A bat flew up to my side, looked me in the eyes, and screeched. Except it wasn't just a screech, but words. Or they seemed like words, because the single screech became immediately understandable.

"Land on the Red Patch with us," the bat said in his screeching language.

"Okay, I'll come," I responded. And saw the Red Patch far below.

That was when I awoke, when I opened my eyes the first thing I saw was the tree formally known as the Red Patch. I was looking out of the window of my old bedroom, I had fallen asleep downstairs on the couch and must have sleepwalked up into my old bedroom. The strange thing was, I was standing up, and could tell that I had spent a considerable amount of time sleeping that way.

I looked out of the closed window and looked at the tree, it was the only green tree in the entire yard. The rest were orange, yellow, and some had lost all of their leaves. But the Red Patch was still green as grass, and as I looked at the tree I felt strange about it. I had the feeling that it was watching me, and then the bats came.

At first there was just a brown blur that streaked across the window, then another brown thing smacked into the window, and another, and another, another. They were bats, no use denying it, and even though I had asserted to myself that I was no longer dreaming, that concept was hard to believe. The bats were just as I had dreamed and they were knocking on my door, actually my window.

I had the feeling that I should open the window, but wouldn't that let the bats in? I didn't want bats in my house, I mean my parents' house, or did I.

More and more bats flew up and smacked against the window, looking out of the window I could see that the Red Patch was full of them, little brown bats just as they were in my dream. They didn't appear to be screeching, just banging against the window and then perching on the branches of the Red Patch.

I stuck my fingers under the edge of the window and began to levitate it from the window sill. As the window opened, I found myself getting the flying feeling again. It started somewhere in my head, and then I felt as though I were flying. I tried to shake the feeling off as best I could and continued lifting the window.

The night breeze felt good on my skin as it gusted in from the ajar window, about eight of the brown bats flew up and landed on the window sill. They looked up at me intelligently and I smiled, the smile just appeared. I couldn't control my face, but I could feel my affinity for the bats swell up within me. The largest bat jumped off of his spot on the window sill and landed on my shoulder. I turned my head to look at it as it did the same, it looked at me pleasantly for a moment, then screeched lightly before flying through the open window.

The rest of the bat clan followed its lead, and not long after there were no more bats.

At least that night.

*****

I woke up the next morning much earlier than I had wanted. But once I wake up, I can never get back to sleep. After the incident when I woke up in my old bedroom with bats (just like the ones in the dreams) flying around outside of the window, I had clumsily walked down the stairs and slept the remainder of the night on the couch. I went into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and tried to clear what was left of my mind.

Sitting at the kitchen table sipping a cup of nice coffee, my mind drifted to the festivities of the previous night. The night seemed so far away from now and even the rest of time, like a vague yet strangely memorable dream from years long past. I remembered the bats, violently smacking against the closed window until I opened it. I just couldn't understand why I had opened the window. I remembered the ghostlike eyes of the bats fixated on me as they sat perched on the branches of the Red Patch. And the bat whom had landed on my shoulder when I opened the window for it, then abruptly flying away with the others as if they had never been there.

I finished my coffee, took a shower, and headed down to the lake to do some fishing. It was a nice lake, I had been fishing it since I was a small boy and it seemed just as much like home as the house did.

I went down to the shore of the lake and sat on my favorite rock and cast out. The serene surroundings of the lake was just what I needed to get my troubled mind off of the bats, and the Red Patch. My mind turned to other subjects, such as the price I would ask for the house and how long I would stay before selling it. I didn't even have the vaguest clue how long I wanted to stay, I just figured that it would be until I was ready to leave. But I was beginning to think that could be a while. There were just so many memories, and not all of them involving the Red Patch.

I returned from the fishing journey having caught a couple of crappies and nothing more. The fishing took up the entire day, and upon returning at about eight o'clock, I felt a great deal better. I didn't think that there would be any dreams or anything having to do with the bats and Red Patch tonight. I ruled the strange dreams and waking up in my old bedroom as nothing more than stress brought on by my parent's recent deaths. I ate chicken soup for dinner and watched another hour of TV before retiring for the day.

That was when things took an odd twist.

*****

Semi-conscious in my dream, I felt dauntingly cold. The well heated house in which I had fallen asleep on the couch within had now become chilled and almost freezing. I felt wind blow over my face and body like an unholy ghost, I felt the as if I were standing on a hard surface colder than the wind that blew over it. My feet were bare, and despite my state of sleep, I knew I was no longer inside the house. But on the outside, for the sleepwalking of the past night had just gotten more serious.

The realization of being outside was evident, but the knowledge that came after I opened my eyes awakening from absorbed slumber was simply appalling.

I was standing before the almighty Red Patch, almighty as it now seemed to be. The tree was enormous, as if it had grown twenty or thirty feet. I was awake, had sleepwalked from the inside of the house and ended up standing here in front of the tree, and now came to the conclusion that I was more confused than I had ever been in my life.

I wanted to leave the abnormal night as it had already become, nothing more than a case of sleepwalking. But the feeling that the Red Patch had somehow become alive and watching my every movement and perhaps passing judgement would not subside. I looked up at the unbelievable heights of the tree and a new fear had sunken in.

Ominous red leaves nearly occupied half of the tree's leaves. It was the Red Patch again, as it had been when I was a boy. When my parents had been alive, when I had carved my name into the trunk, when life made sense. The upper half of the tree's leaves were now the stunning bright red I had grown accustomed to seeing them as. The frightening thing was that they were changing too, the green leaves were beginning to change colors before my eyes. A process which normally happens in autumn over a period of weeks, was now happening fast enough for me to see. The sea of red leaves expanded as the green leaves became new members of the Red Patch. And then I noticed something even more extraordinary than the erasable leaves, but not by much.

I looked at the thick, husky brown trunk of the tree to find that my name was no longer carved into it. Instead, a new formation of letters were skillfully crafted into the bark of the tree with a message on it. It read: FLY WITH US. The message from the dream. I looked at the message with mistrust, it didn't hold any reasoning in my mind. Who was us? I was certainly the only one at the house and I had never flown or even ridden in a plane in my life, so who would want me to fly with them? I looked up once again at the Red Patch and the answer was there sitting in the tree.

The small brown bats from my dreams and last night were there, sitting in the Red Patch as if it were their secret meeting place. They sat perched among various branches gazing down upon me, seeming to beckon me to climb the tree. Was it just my imagination? Or did they really want me to fly with them? The prospect of the idea was completely farcical, but I climbed the tree to the Red Patch regardless.

*****

I sat on the highest branch I could get to that would still hold my weight. I was now sitting in the Red Patch. Though the light was dim, I could see the shining red leaves of the Red Patch as clear as the summer days as a child. This was the tree I was used to, it was red as it had always been and it was that moment that I felt more home than I had ever been in my life. With the bats roosted on the branches beside me, I was at the premium of comfort.

When I began to think about it, the situation was quite ludicrous. Here I was, a grown man, sitting in a tree at God knows how late at night with a group of nocturnal bats looking on to me as if I were their leader. But when I didn't think about it and just went with my instincts, the situation seemed more normal than anything had ever seen. The situation was odd though, no denying that.

A bat, which I couldn't help thinking was the same one which had landed on my hand the night before, softly screeched causing the others to start doing the same. It was like a chorus of a song the small bats had cleverly composed, but it seemed more than just a song. It seemed like a form of communion, in which the bats could partake in excluding me.

The bat which had started the chorus, now let out a much more boisterous screech summoning the rest of them to fly off of their roosts. They all flew up and sat suspended in the air looking at me. Their black eyes bored into me and I could not help but understand what they were trying to get me to hear. There was something they wanted to tell me, but couldn't use vocal chords as I do. I understood though.

Fly with us.

They were saying it, thinking it. And the only think to do was to fly with them.

The flying sensation from the dreams became reality just then.

*****

An old man sat in the lonely woods near the house of the recently deceased parents of Jeff. He was on one of his hunting trips; yes, it was that time of year again. And as he sat alone in the twilight next to his campfire ready for a night's sleep in his sleeping bag, he felt a chill crawl up his spine. He felt another presence about in the area. Then he felt several of whatever he was feeling.

He set down his plate of baked beans and listened intently to the sleeping wilderness and indeed heard something. Screeching, it was definitely the sound of screeching. He was a seasoned man of the woods and could easily tell the screeches were coming from . . . bats. And a great many of them, he figured with the vast number of screeches he heard.

But one screech, one very loud screech, rang out through the night sky and gripped the old hunter's senses. It was the screech of a bat who is in charge, and that brought him to look up at the sky and see the truth.

The first thing the old man saw was what he knew had to be the largest bat on the planet. The huge bat was at least six feet in length with monstrous wings spreading out twelve or thirteen feet. The man couldn't believe what he was witnessing; this bat was impossible.

And all around the gigantic bat were nearly fifty small brown bats which were average sized for their species and common in the area. They flew with the big bat. The old man saw plainly that the big bat was the same species of bat as the smaller ones. He looked up in awe as the big bat glanced down on him.

Those eyes, those incredibly black eyes of the big bat looked into the old man's own eyes. And the old man saw something in those eyes, something that he had never seen in another bats eyes ever before. Those eyes, they seemed fantastically human. Yes, that was it. The big bat seemed almost human.

The big bat and the rest of them flew off with great speed over the old man's head and disappeared from sight. The man knew he wasn't crazy, and he hadn't hallucinated. That was one big bat.

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