At the very edge of the estate, just before the trees, was an amateur physics laboratory.  In it, the man attempted to woo the tiniest divisions of matter.  With winks and nudges, chocolates and low-voiced endearments, he presented himself to individual molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles. "Sex with me...?" he suggested, bending close.  The tiniest blush of chest hair, moist and dark, curled through the unbuttoned upper portion of his lab coat.  Residues of fresh ejaculate, applied behind his ears, furnished a compelling cologne.

His successes, though infrequent, were incomparably pleasurable.  There was an exoticism, fueled by the distance between them; more, however, there was an almost incestuous similarity, stemming from the fact that he, too, was composed of matter.  It awoke a still darker excitement.  His final shudders were something cataclysmic, and he shrieked, in the madness of it, "I love!  I love!" 

Within these minute wombs, the man's seed created improbable distensions.  The placental sacs expanded, further, further, until they occupied orbitals that had never before been characterized.  At the bastards' births, there were violent nuclear fissions.  The infants, tumbling out, gave startled cries, consisting partly of color, partly of sound.

Wearing protective clothing, the man corralled these children into lead-lined bassinets.  He locked the hoods down tightly.  With the help of servants, he exported them to distant asylums.  Here, they occupied a vast warren of padded rooms.  Some tumbled wildly; others huddled tentatively against one another.  They extended their weird little limbs, which they clenched and released, clenched and released.  Some, restless, gouged balls of a bloody, glittering tissue from themselves, which they thudded wetly against the padded walls.  Others, more communal, used the gory blobs to construct complex games: a demented hopscotch, or manic basketball.  Their abdomens, half visible, churned perpetually.

In his estate laboratory, the man conducted additional experiments.  He seduced photons and gravitons through similar labor, generating a wholly new set of children, which were uniquely troublesome.  As with the other illegitimates, the man attempted at length to herd and export them.  He set cunning traps.  He wheedled.  He screamed.  The tykes eluded him however, concealing themselves in impossible places.  They skittered across the sky.  They dove beneath his feet or into cracks in the walls.  As they fled, they emitted a series of weird cackles, mocking and otherworldly.

These fugitive bastards stayed close, far too close.  Many took up residence in the mansion itself.  Wildly, like a race of cheeky poltergeists, they mediated a series of inexplicable occurrences, ranging from psychotic visions to property destruction.  They thumped noisily through corridors.  They infected the family with weird dreams.  His legal wife, whom they seemed to plague in particular, denounced them determinedly.  Her complaints were pitched just short of accusation.  The man shrugged stiffly, with pretended indifference, and said, "So it is." 

In fact, however, the bastards' presence disturbed him considerably.  His unease stemmed less from their violence and more from their proximity to his legal sons.  He was particularly concerned for the oldest, 12 and 13, at an age to be distracted by unwise curiosities.  He warned them repeatedly, "Stay away from the poltergeists!"  His voice shook with a preemptive fury; his gesticulations - No! No! No! - were berserkly emphatic. "They are your sisters..." he hissed.


On the border of the estate was the old forest.  It consisted of mixed stands of trees, mostly pine and oak.  A few were many centuries old; the others were younger.  The man was always aware of the forest.  It was a dream, a sick passion.  It was a racial obsession, thick in his blood.  Most of the time, he kept his eyes conscientiously averted from it, so that he might avoid acknowledging it.  He angled his head, intent upon other objects.

Sometimes, in weaker moments, he permitted himself to view the skyline.  His eyes lingered on the spaces between the trees, exciting a rush of awful heat.  He examined their edges, intricate and jagged, and his heart throbbed dangerously.  He did not, however, trust himself to view the trees themselves.  

The scents of the forest, loamy and quivering, were still more difficult to avoid.  On warm or windy days, they thudded against his brainstem.  Sometimes, he pinched his nostrils to suppress the idea of it; at other times, he used handkerchiefs imbued with alternate scents: his own fluids, perhaps, or those of his proper mistresses.

When he slept, there were additional reminders.  In his bed, he experienced racial dreams, which contained the memories of his ancestors.  They were intense and vivid, like personal recollection.  He dreamed of the estate as it had consisted in the beginning: untilled plain, bordered with a few adventitious saplings.  Each generation, the gentlemen of his family had further subdued it.  They had planted crops and initiated new construction projects.  At the same time, they had wooed the trees at the edge of the property.  Tenderly, they had loved them.  They had sculpted their interiors into receptive wombs, which had generated misshapen seeds, consisting of half-human fetuses.  These had matured to additional saplings; in a few generations more, they had become thickets.  These, fusing, had created an entire forest, which eventually enclosed the property.

In those trees were preserved the faces of his ancestors.  The same racial pride suffused them, and their trunks and branches contained the same blood.  They were ancient memorials, more permanent than statues.  They were living towers, more exquisite than goddesses.  However much these trees might disturb the man, he could not cut them down and he could not order their transplantation.  Could any man obliterate his own history?  Could any man desecrate the pillars of the earth?


In that forest, composing it, were the man's aunts and great-aunts, his sisters and great-great-great-aunts.  With most, in fact, the relationship was far closer and far more difficult to define.  There were trees that were both aunt and great-great-aunt, trees that were at once sister, great-aunt, and great-great-great-aunt, and every other attempted combination.  It was an ancient story, and an essential part of the forest's tradition.  Individual ancestors, half unwilling, had contributed their seed to lines to which their own fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, ad infinitum, had already contributed.

On calm, clear nights, there were also sounds: a rustling, much like voices.  "Come, Come," the trees beckoned.  Their tones consisted both of the wind-ruffled leaves that had allured his ancestors and of the very voices, part human, that had been inherited from these ancestors.  Their echoes diseased and enchanted him.

That desire, of course, did occasionally defeat him.  Infrequently, despising himself, he descended into the trees. They welcomed him with broad arms, part wood, part bone.  They caressed him in private ways, twigs against flesh.  They whispered, close to his ear, in voices that were shudderingly similar to that of his father, his grandfather, his own: "It has been too long."  Wild and sobbing, he ground himself into the bark, contributing new fluids to that horrifying and implacable history, written and rewritten upon itself.  Into that sick flesh, he deposited new daughters, consisting of yet another iteration of his family's great blood.