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And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,

Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad

My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,

Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay...

_________

Christopher Marlowe,Edward II, Act I, scene i

I.

Few places are as legend-haunted as the Pine Barrens - haunted_by _legends and legendarily haunted, to belabor the point, but few other ways can describe New Jersey's own pocket of Hell, this place primeval, a kingdom of the strange. The Jersey Devil dwells here, born of woman through a hideous sin, or so the story goes - as does the Green Man, the phantom of a poor friendless fellow with no face who trails the night - somewhere in the shadows are warmblooded reptilian abominations, who snatch and devour. People swear there are lights that float above the serenely infinite treeline that have no Earthly source, and not a few who live nearby have their own stories of grotesque symbols carved into bark, chicken bones arranged in peculiar circles, fires that burn hot in odd places but go out when you approach them - suicides that leave behind notes in languages they were not known to speak, lonesome ladies all in white, wandering, adrift, that fade into the shrouding branches come the first rays of dawn. And worst of all - people go missing all the time in the Pine Barrens. If that sounds a little too spooky - like the rest of the frankly unnatural things that go on about these parts - it is easy to remember that there is nothing supernatural about the grisly serial killers who stalked undetected by day and did their infandous crimes by night, or how the Mafia once dumped bodies out here, in the heady days of gargantuan Coupe de Villes that prowled the backroads with trunks stuffed with rats who said too much, or witnesses who knew too much - many of them never seen again, but their fate not hard to imagine. Something about this area seems to make the cruelty and the criminality of the human condition burst forth with a preternatural ferociousness, for long before these violent creatures were the Pine Robbers, true American highwaymen, and before them were the unlucky and the unwary settlers who learned quickly that this was not a healthy location to put down roots, or seek one's fortune, but who cut down the Natives anyway. The psychosphere of this place and all the terrible things done in it has lingered for centuries, and there is a feeling one gets as soon as one approaches the area - it is as though the Pine Barrens has allowed you to be here, a guest, and there is a certain behavior expected, on pain of...consequence. So, even for the skeptical, those who have never been to the Pine Barrens are unprepared for them - there is no way to make a newcomer know of the dire vastness of the forest, the endless, endless trees, the unbounded swallowing silence that encloses when you set foot, shoes and boots nearly sinking in the unwholesome mix of sand and soil beneath you, in the tiny spaces allowed for you - the stabbing needles, the redolence of resin and tar and sap that stay in the nostrils and set in the mouth, a taste you cannot wash out. The pine tree, evergreen, is an ancient symbol - now poorly understood in the shrunken minds of the willful, malignant ignorance of the Moderns - of hope amidst the dead of Winter: greenery, verdance, sumer is icumen in as the ancestors of this myth-beleaguered place once sang in clear voices under golden Britannic Suns around the Maypole...and so it is that sometimes in the Barrens one finds branches woven into enigmatic wreathes, as though to be worn about the brow, suggestive of the Druidic, the Brythonic, the mythically Celtic, the brain-bashed hallucinations that Americans think they see when the gray, cultureless mass they have made for themselves becomes too suffocating, and the forgotten millennia crushes them unexpectedly, like a leaned-on column in a ruined temple that suddenly gives way. But that is what the Pine Barrens do even to the sanest people - for these woods are so much like the woods of the childhood fairytale, so much like the bewildering selva oscura of Dante, one cannot help but catch that fever, feel that delirium. _ _ And people go missing all the time in the Pine Barrens. _ _ Some, days later, come back, miraculously, dehydrated and terrified, claiming they had been hopelessly lost for far longer than they were actually gone - still others will claim they just stepped off a beaten path and got turned around for an hour or two, but had not been seen or heard from in half a week. But both of them say the same thing - they hear music, distant music that they never truly place: a kind of piping drone, rhythmic and lilting, a melody that they all recognized but can never tell you where from, as though they heard it once, only once, when they were very young, in a memory they had long since suppressed. But such is the way of the Pine Barrens - pieces, fragments, but never a full picture, the kind of riddle that rewards those that ponder it by always being close to a solution that, maddeningly, reminds forever elusive...like the notes of that piping song the hikers hear, always on the tip of the tongue when they try to recall it, when they try sing it, but the melody eludes them, nameless, nameless always, as nameless as the individual trees that make up the ocean of pine sap they very nearly drowned in. _ _ Few things in this corner of New Jersey, this place of dementia and unease, have explanations, they happen just seldom enough to never attract authoritative bodies who would want to investigate and debunk - and this mystery, this unsettling un-reveal, is both half the horror and half the fun... ...but the wreathes, the pine-wreathes, woven by hand, hung on branches of more elder pines or laid carefully, reverently, on the stumps of still more ancient pines - the wreathes certainly do have an explanation. Someone made them - someone put them there. But who? People go missing all the time in the Pine Barrens.

II.

Kenneth and Kevin Hayles were twins, born minutes apart and inseparable ever since. When they were both but wee toddlers they had invented their own language, as twins often do, and would babble to each other in unsettling cryptophasiac conversations of deep complexity, punctuated with delightful laughter - their pediatrician, baffled, would sometimes watch them, perplexed, for an hour or more, playing and talking together just as cute as can be, but with their organic vulgate all the while upholding an entire civilization unto themselves, that they alone understood, and that they alone belonged to. Eventually, and unsurprisingly, they attracted the attention of some linguists at Harvard, and somewhere in the archives of the Countway Library of Medicine to this day there are long taped sessions of the two boys playing games together: Kenneth would let out a strange three-note hoot, to which Kevin would say a quick stream of words, then they would switch up, repeating this, some kind of inscrutable ritual, back and forth, roaring with laughter - these adorable twins, who had a whole language nobody else could ever understand, with that sing-song melody, three notes each time that had some kind of ineffable significance. The only thing that could be deduced was this: Kenneth knew Kevin as Kayko, and Kevin knew Kenneth as Keento. As it happened, they were never told about any of this and had no memory of it - their parents were paid for the research and both the gathered data, and their secret tongue, remained forgotten as they got older. Even so, throughout their lives they maintained an adamantine, inseparable bond: unflaggingly loyal to each other, and to the family. For not all brothers are born for adversity - so it was Kenneth and Kevin. They were fraternal twins but clearly brothers, such one could immediately tell they were related by blood: they shared the furious hawk-like face with the serious, arresting expression on their faces; the same sandy-brown hair; the sturdy, athletic build; the soft dusting of hair that appeared on the tummy when they grew older; the hazel eyes with the odd aureate flecks that caught the sunlight, melting the hearts of girls that would catch their gaze. Kenneth was taller by an inch, maybe, but Kevin was the stouter - of the two, Kenneth was the more gregarious, the more apt to socialize, the more to be open and more complete with his feelings...whereas Kevin was the more thoughtful, the more brooding, the more observant. Kenneth's talents could have made him a politician, or a media star, and indeed his major at Rutgers was broadcast journalism - Kevin, on the other hand, had taken his perspicaciousness to pursue the flow of gold and silver and green, and become wealthy in high finance whenever he graduated from Wharton at Penn. When they grew older and hit puberty and should have hated each other as hormonal males too often do in the throes of their newfound masculinity, they still stayed closed - competitive, always, to see who could work out more, who could get bigger, run faster, play harder, but it was never malicious, they could never bear to hurt each other, they were there to see each other grow as well as grow up. They were present at each other's lunch table in junior high and high school, they sat together on the bus - daily, and on away games both. One could not speak of Kenneth without Kevin and vice-versa: they existed as one organism, one soul, humble as they were for their accomplishments they were ineffably proud, nonetheless, to be Hayles, brothers, the water of the uterine fortress thicker than any blood shed on the ground in scrimmage. More innocently, they were Jersey boys in the most traditional sense of the word: Summer outings to the Shore and camping trips to the Pine Barrens, where their father, a successful dentist, would build a campfire for them and roast marshmallows as he regaled them in his evocative baritone with tales of a headless Captain Kidd, the great pirate, still terrorizing the Pineys as he aimlessly searches for his lost treasure - scenes from picturesque innocence from the happiest of American youth. Together they could have conquered the world, together they could have been like the Barber brothers from Roanoke and one fated day even play each other in the Super Bowl - so it was that after high school they were both given football scholarships and, for the first time since they were in the womb together, they came apart, that they experienced being apart, that they were ripped from each other's presence and became, however uncomfortably, their own men. But this - as anything good, as anything real, as anything from an America which fades before the memories of those who experienced it painfully, evanescently - could not last. For Kenneth got the call first. Then Kevin, second - from someone else. Their parents had been killed, t-boned at an intersection by a drunk driver who, escaping karma on Earth but surely serving his time in Hell, had bashed his brains against the steering wheel and died at the scene. Kenneth and Kevin Hayles, in the matter of minutes, in the blinking of moments, had been made orphans - themselves, one to the other, now the only people they could truly ever depend on. Things moved fast - too fast. There is a stereotype about White people in the United States, diluted from the rich historical histrionics of the European landmass from whence they spread to rule the waves, about them being unable to cope with their feelings, their emotions, their grief or their anger: they have been robbed of their roots and their true identities, the real way to deal with profundity in life, in order to be part of the milquetoast moneyed classes in America. Yet it is a stereotype that, like all stereotypes, exists from a kernel of truth and reality: in the South there are still hog barbecues, and people over at the house - in the Appalachians there is staying up with the dead and putting coins on their eyes to help them stay shut, as it is in that wrenching threnody, T'was blind but now I see - in Italian-American communities there is the shrieking wail of the widow when comes the dusting of the coffin with the first soil of the grave, and in the small pockets of where the Bretons landed, across the Atlantic murmuring the enigmatic prayer that thy sea so great, my boat so small, there is the telling of poignant riddles... ...but in suburbia, where the suburbs meet utopia, there is nothing like those deep, plunging roots to hold the once-lofty position of White people onto anything but the quotidian, the day-to-day. There is no honor for ancestors, no preservation of their swords and stirrups and whatever else, no wish to be radiant in Columbian legacies. Kenneth and Kevin, despite the Cornish first names given to them by their parents that were only chosen for the way they sounded when they were called together, were of Hayles, stately and ancient, come to Fort Nassau on the Delaware River in 1627, fighting with General Washington against the Hessians and distant uncles perishing gloriously at Chancellorsville...but that was all forgotten, chosen to be forgotten, for it is a conscious decision to blend blindly into this bounty of blandness. But why would they remember, really? There was nothing to remember here - this was not haint-haunted Appalachia or Dixie with its raucous forebears or big-booted big-hatted Texas or even New England of the murky Yankee bloodlines - this was the South Jersey suburbs, fencing away with whitewashed pickets anything too untidy or too much of a burden on the mind beyond jobs and cars and groceries and school and bill and taxes. Here, indeed, you are somewhere and yet nowhere at the same time: this a place where culture and breeding and history dies writhing in the leprous lights of a Wal-Mart parking lot, where in the Odyssey of American existence the lotus of affluence is eaten to forget, forget, forget. So the Brothers Hayle did what they were pushed to in that faceless white mass, cultureless and trapped in expectations they did not fully understand: they waited in line at the funeral home and shook all the hands, accepted all the hugs, heard all the meaningless words, said back all the meaningless phrases, with what was left of their parents cremated and buried, together, in a single box - pine, harvested sustainably from a forestry operation at the edge of the Pine Barrens, beautifully polished and inlayed with gold, placed aneath a gravestone where they would sleep together forever. At the lawyer's office - tastefully paneled with varnish, it too may have been pine - the will was read to the two brothers, the two sons of Henry and Debbie Hayles, by a soft-spoken bald man with a folksy crucifix next to his law degree that Kenneth kept starting at, wondering if Kevin would do something similar, something to concentrate on so that he wouldn't have to comprehend how, at last, his parents were really, actually dead. But the document made clear that's what had happened, and so now Kenneth and Kevin were given the estate of Mr. Henry F. Hayles, DDS, half-and-half. The terms were these: their extended family were free to come by the house and claim whatever knickknacks and photos and mementos they thought they were owed but only with their sons' permission, and then, after that, their sons were encouraged to sell the house, with the proviso they split the money...there was no legacy-building, no continuation, no dynasty to perpetuate, it was as though all of the infinite unwisdom of the Baby Boomer generation had manifested itself in the myopic visions of Henry and Debbie Hayles to aggressively and gleefully fuck their children out of something more meaningful than just money for their kids to strike it out on their own with. Kenneth and Kevin Hayles absorbed the all the news with all the gravity of young men, barely past the age to legally drink, with full manhood suddenly foisted upon them. And so the next two days were yet still filled with more useless words, still more useless gestures. The house and its quarter-acre property that would soon pass from the Hayles family, who had proudly purchased it in 1977, teemed with people who did not really care about Kevin or Kenneth because, now that Henry and Debbie Hayles were dead, after this, there would never be any reason for the cousins, the aunts, the uncles, the co-workers, the hairdressers and fellow-parishioners or even the neighbors to even acknowledge them - this was New Jersey but it may as well have been Stepford, how fake, how irrelevant, how soulless. It took some time, too much time, but at last everyone was gone and the house was nearly empty - everyone, but Kenneth and Kevin. That day, it was already late, after dark, and Kenneth was sitting at their kitchen table, the one with the red checker tablecloth that had been there since they'd been in junior high - Kevin was nearby, standing at the kitchen doorway, his tie unloosened and askew at his neck as he stared off, somewhere, perhaps still overwhelmed from this ordeal by superficiality. The silence between the two of them was, at first, pleasant: so much of their afternoons like this for the past several days had been phonecalls, paperwork, people at the front door with cards or flowers or condolences, and their relatives had been over for now half a week too, taking what they wanted with the brothers' blessing to make the inevitable move to storage a little easier on them in the future. But the house was more than empty - it was hollow, their parents were gone, there was nobody living here anymore. Just them, the two of them, the brothers, Kenneth and Kevin Hayles, heirs - to nothing, really, nothing but themselves. It was a creeping realization that caught Kenneth suddenly as one must catch a breath after awakening - the sensation was almost the same, for it had been like he had been in a walking sleep ever since he was hit with the news, and all the opportunities for him to finally realize that his parents were dead - that he and his brother were alone - that the house was empty...they all passed him by, until now, finally, now, waking up, catching his breath. "Um," he said. "Um - hey." "Yeah?" his brother answered. "So - so what happens next?" "With what? Oh - you mean the house?" "Yeah." Kevin sighed, slumping up against the kitchen threshold. "Um - I've talked to a guy, real estate agent, got the ball rolling pretty quick." "You're always pretty thorough." It looked like his brother wanted to smile but then stopped himself. "Well - thanks..." He cleared his throat, folding his arms across his chest. "But - um - yeah, someone's interested in buying." "Holy shit, who? All of a sudden?" "Some couple from Atlantic City that wanted something quieter." "Oh, one of those, huh?" Ken rolled his eyes, sharing his brother's annoyance. "Yeah, yeah that's - what they told me. "But so soon, like - really soon." "I think it has something to do with subprime lending, but - whatever, it's not my money." "Huh." Kenneth slouched, frowning. "And this neighborhood's hot, Ken - they're gonna put a Starbucks down where Fat Tony's Exxon used to be." "He died, didn't he?" "Yeah and his daughter - you remember Alexa--" "Dated her for two weeks," Kenneth said with a mirthless sniff. Kevin half-chuckled back. "Uh - y-yeah, she um - moved to Colorado...Denver..." He frowned. "Lotta people selling their small businesses in this area, so yeah - it's a good market right now, you could make a pile if you knew what you're doing." "You'd know, Kev," Kenneth said. "You're the business guy." Kevin shrugged, deflecting the compliment. "Well - with any luck..." There was a long pause than Kenneth felt he needed to break: "Are you - are you okay selling mom and dad's house? Even with them--" He didn't finish his own sentence, lest by admitting his parents were actually dead, it would make it all the more realer, and he would feel all the more alone. "I--" It seemed like his brother had a ready answer, one that sounded a lot better in his head - his arms dropped to his sides and he fidgeted where he stood. "It - it's what they wanted to us to do, right?" "They just wanted us to move on," Kenneth added. "Just - just like that." "I'm not sure I really know how to feel, about that." "Me neither." Kevin sighed, tugged his tie completely off, stuffed it in his pocket. "I - I really--" Kenneth looked at him as he hesitated to finish: "I didn't want to do this, Ken." Kenneth's eyebrows went up. "You didn't?" Kevin shook his head, a quick motion. "No - no I didn't." "What're you trying to say?" "Whattya think I'm trying to say?" "That you - didn't want to leave mom and dad's house to anyone else but us." Kevin - the thoughtful one, the one who internalized everything where Kenneth externalized everything, who could only admit his feelings when they were about to eat him alive, the one who suffered unduly through the doubts that Kenneth would always try to dispel - did not his answer his brother, not directly anyway: "We hafta--" He stopped, he swallowed hard. "We hafta grow up sometime, alright?" Kenneth rolled his eyes: "You really believe that?" He stood, he came close as he dared to his brother, and with his presence beckoned his head to come up and look him in the eyes. Several seconds passed, the two of them, just like this, before Kevin swallowed back something in his throat: "No," he murmured - but then he backed away and, with one last parting glance at his brother, revealing nothing, exited the kitchen. "But what's done is done," he went on, a nonchalance to hide whatever it was he was really feeling. "Should get a nice windfall, anyway." Kenneth felt his stomach drop at the very notion. "Always after the bottom-line, I guess..." He sat back down for some seconds before he rose to also leave the kitchen. "That what they teach you in that fancy business school? Pretty soon you'll have your own skyscraper - like Trump - cept it'll say Hayles." As he came into the living room he saw that Kevin had stopped before the empty TV-stand that once held their father's plasma screen they had, just that day, sold to a neighbor - his face seemed like it was struggling with a flicker of pain, and now Kenneth's stomach dropped harder, knowing he had crossed a line by trying to lighten the mood. Kevin stared him down. "I told you I didn't want to do this, Ken..." "I'm--" Kenneth's voice dipped some. "I'm sorry, it was a joke--" "It wasn't funny." Kenneth raised his arms. "We can buy another place--" "Not this place," Kevin cut him off. "Not where we grew up, not where - we spent our whole lives--" He shook his head, obviously frustrated. "What - what was the point of even living here if Mom and Dad just wanted to give it all up after they were gone? Like - like what the fuck?" Kenneth opened his mouth, but then closed it - finally he shrugged. "I don't - I dunno." "I looked over some of dad's - papers," Kevin went on. "He--" Now came another hard swallow, like a grief-stricken lump was forming and had to be quickly banished. "Um - h-he was gonna retire, right?" "Right," Kenneth said, pacing closer. "He was gonna sell the house anyway - house and his practice, too - they were gonna buy a fucking m-motorhome--" His voice faltered again, and Kenneth closed the distance between them to give him a hug...a moment passed before Kevin nudged him away, clearing his throat. "They were gonna buy a motorhome," Kevin repeated. "Just sell the house they fucking paid for and raised kids and cats in and leave us with nothing, so they could go do what they wanted in their--" He sneered. "Golden years." "Cats," Kenneth said back. "Right - Mittens, Boots, and Glove are all--" "They gotta little tiny thing fenced off for them out back - if you remember, the will stipulated it was the - the only thing on the property that couldn't be disturbed." An awkward moment of respectful silence passed before Kevin let out a tremendous sigh - a whole day passing out as a single breath...he made a motion to leave, turning around, before Kenneth stopped him with a hand on the shoulder. "Kev, listen, I - I don't know what Mom and Dad were thinking, or - I guess not thinking - but - you - hafta know, this isn't your fault." "What isn't?" It was Kenneth's turn to sigh. "What you're probably feeling right now." Now he rubbed his brother's shoulder. "You were just doing what was - what they asked of you, you said so yourself." Kevin stared at the carpet - replaced only a few years ago, Swiss Coffee, stain-resistant, wall-to-wall - for what seemed like a long time. "Then - why doesn't it feel that way?" He muttered. "If there's blame to go around - start with me..." Before Kenneth could retort he gently pushed the hand that had been on his shoulder away and turned all the way around: "I'm - listen, dude, I'm tired - this was the longest day of my life, and - and I'm gonna go to bed." "That's, uh--" Kenneth forced himself to nod in agreement. "Yeah! That's a good idea." "I'll see you upstairs," Kevin said, the same murmur, pacing away. Kenneth watched him walk toward the stairs until he abruptly stopped on the landing, making a jerking motion, a back-and-forth grinding with the soles of his feet - finally he turned around, his face at once stricken but, Kenneth could tell, trying to hide it anyhow: "You - um - wait a minute - do you even wanna sleep upstairs? In our old room--" The thought had not completely formed for Kenneth the entire time he had been here - there was some vague idea that, yes, they would have to sleep in their old room, or at least get a hotel...or something. But now that Kevin had asked it, he could answer: "No," he blurted. "N-no, I - I really don't" "Yeah me - uh - me neither." "We could sleep down here - sofa's still there." He pointed to it. "Aunt Margaret won't be taking it til the day after tomorrow, and - I could sleep on the floor." "You'd do that?" Kenneth smiled. "Yeah, Kev, I would - you deserve it, you - should get the couch." Now Kevin smiled, weakly, back. "Thanks..." "There's some sheets in the closet - I was gonna take em with me--" "I know, I know where they are," Kevin replied, on his way to retrieve them. "Of course you would," Kenneth said. Their beds made for the night, dossing down as best they could in what should have been their ancestral home but which, now, they were mere visitors, exiles in their own land, the two of them lay awake for some moments even after Kevin turned off the light, and they sat together in darkness. It was Kevin that broke the silence first: "Hey, Ken - you awake?" "Yeah?" "Yeah." "Can't sleep, huh?" Another sigh - all Kevin seemed to do was sigh. "Yeah. I just - don't know what to do." "What do you mean?" "After this - after--" He condensed weeks of trauma into a single, collapsed phrase: "All this - the house - the furniture..." Kenneth frowned. "It'll all be gone soon." "And we will be too," Kevin said. "The only things left will be - the cats." He paused, then added, wryly: "And they didn't have a choice in the matter..." Yet another awkward silence passed - there were too many of these between them now, Kenneth felt, too many times that he had wanted to scream into the voids between words, feelings, and thoughts that blanked out in between the two of them and bring them back out of being tired, sick, and sad. "We still have each other," he said, in conscious defiance of what he was feeling, and the ass-backward plans of their parents. "I know," Kevin answered. "I know we do." The small reassurance was all Kenneth needed - a sudden spark came to him, and he pressed forth: "So - then - I have an idea - okay?" "I'm listening." "Why don't we go camping - like we used to, out in the Pineys." "You and me?" "Yeah! Just--" He sighed. "Just to get away--" He pointed around himself, at the ghosts of their childhood, their parents, the barren spots where innumerable people had taken whatever wasn't nailed down. "Be a family." Kevin answered, slowly, carefully, as though aware of the weight of his own words: "If - the house - our house - if it isn't special, wasn't special - to Mom and Dad - then we really would only have the Barrens." He looked back to his brother. "It was - out there - the camping, being with Dad and then sometimes - uh, Mom would be there too - that was mattered." He paused, and even in the dark Kenneth could see that he was smiling. "I think - I think that's a damn good idea, Ken." "Oh, shit, you really think so?" "Yeah - yeah I do." Another silence - Kenneth shuffled back to a more comfortable position on the floor. "So - tomorrow, we'll head out?" "Yeah, absolutely - like I said..." Feeling that maybe, suddenly, he had belabored the point, Kenneth nodded to himself and then, curling into his pillow, called out: "I, uh - I love you, Kev." "I know, Ken...I know." The night passed dreamlessly, with only a weak waning crescent amidst the clouds - somewhere, bittersweet memories must have stirred even as they were unremembered by the slumbering subconscious minds of the two brothers...like how lovely the sky used to be in this area before the creeping light pollution blotted out more and more of the stars in the suburban sky and turned the sable velvet color a cooler violet, and how the dandelions that were never allowed in the lifetime of Henry Hayles were starting to reappear in the yard and bloom, with their whispered recollections of playful cats that once stirred their predecessor's golden flowers. Morning came, and the Brothers Hayle packed what was necessary for their camping adventure and loaded into Kenneth's Blazer - enough for a two days, maybe three...their start was late because neither one of them really wanted to leave their house, both knowing that it would probably be the last real time that they would spend in it. When they finally set off, they first stopped at a McDonald's near their old high school where they used to hang out with friends who, like them, had dispersed to other places, but they made little conversation, and indeed the lingering tension from last night seemed to have gotten worse. As the miles stretched before them and they drove on to the campsite, Kenneth kept his eyes on the road, but his jaw kept tightening with each furtive glance he would make to his brother, whose face was pressed against the window in some introspective fascination - the Summer afternoon was starting to pass to a dusk, that dimmed, slowly, delicately, around their car, the occasional buzz of a cicada or a katydid whizzing past their open windows...every once in awhile he would glance at his brother, scrolling through something on his phone distractedly, maybe trying not to think about the situation he, they, were now in. He couldn't stand this. Things had never been this awkward between them, not ever their entire lives, and while before it seemed like they were slowly drifting apart, the feeling had become a hurtling orbit whirling away from each other, as brothers, that clocked him hard with unrelenting anxiety. Mile after mile, he wondered if this trip would make any kind of difference. They came to the same campsite they had always used, year after year - Kevin was more than a little surprised it was still available that time of the season. It had always been rather more remote than the rest, affording near-total privacy if they needed it. With only small talk between them, the brothers retrieved their sandwiches from the bear-proof cooler - Kenneth brought the campfire to life while Kevin retrieved the marshmallows, roasted on the metal skewers that their Dad had taken such good care of, one of the few things that let him acknowledge the existence of his dead brother, Tony, the boys' uncle, who he otherwise never mentioned for reasons they never understood. They sat opposite each other, the campfire between them, on the ground. Many times - he started to lose count, because he was counting, he was counting how many times he could try - Kenneth wanted to start in telling the story of Captain Kidd and his headless wraith, out here still looking for treasure...each time, every time, letting it die on his breath, instead watching Kevin drowsily peer into the firelight. Finally he found he could break the silence - if not the tension: "How - how you liking it out here?" "It's nice," Kev answered. "Like old times, right?" Kevin shrugged. "Marshmallows were a nice touch, I guess." "Right - right." Now his brother yawned, stretching. "Sorry I'm not, uh - saying much, I'm really tired." "Long day - long - week, huh?" "Something like that." "Wanna do some hiking tomorrow?" "Sure." Kenneth lingered on his own words yet again - he knew Kevin was bothered, and bothered deeply, maybe just as bothered as he was - but it was that unfamiliar awkwardness that kept him from saying anything more. He gave up - this conversation, this evening, this idea that coming out here could somehow magically make everything okay, or even try to heal the suppurating wound that they both knew had been ripped in what should have been the invulnerable connection between them. He rose from the ground and pointed to Kevin's tonight. "Alright, Kev - why don't you get some sleep." Kevin, too, arose from where he was sitting, nodding in agreement. "Yeah - yeah we better..." In their separate tents, the rustling of sleeping bags and the movement of fabric, Kenneth felt something he never though he would associated with his brother - heartache. Maybe tomorrow would be better - maybe it would be worse. But he shut his eyes, he shook his head - and he called out: "Night, Bro." "Yeah, night." Midnight passed, and so did the realization that Kenneth, that Kevin, as children, were both alone, and both orphans - there was some muted tones of some owl somewhere, there was the endless wheeze of the insects patiently chanting their own names, but beyond these, the sounds of a temperate Summer's evening, there was a silence, sufficient unto itself, that did not need to be named, the silence of existence, the meaninglessness that preceded and proceeded life itself. They were alone, Kenneth understood - what his brother said hit him, the words sinking in with the full, horrible darkness that they contained...dark as the indigo sky above them, the crawling infinity between each and every star. What did it mean? Would he and Kevin not be close anymore? Was this it - going their separate ways, growing up? Was Kevin right? Gotta grow up sometime - but like this? The sound of the night-insects lulled him, lulled him gently, to a fitful sleep - but a seed of longing, a small sharp pain that he had never felt before because it contained within it things he had refused to consider all his life, had been planted. And there, sleeping in the forest, amidst other trees which had all started the same way - the seed began to sprout.

III.

Some hours later, Kenneth heard it. His sleep had been dreamless, interrupted by vague shapes, shadows that moved across the darkened breadth of his shut eyelids, stress-visions from these weeks of uncertainty - but as he heard it, he opened his eyes, slowly, to meet the dark of the inside of his tent. He rose, gingerly, until he was sitting up - second by second, it grew louder. Music. It was...three, yes, three notes, one low, one high, one in between the two - over and over and over, a high, melody, as though someone was breathing out a tune in perfect time without stopping. One - two - three. Again, and again, and again. He blinked several times, trying to gauge if this was real, or if this was some kind of spare detail adjacent to a waking dream. No - he was awake, he decided, and this was definitely real. But where was this - music - coming from? He jerked his head as he realized the direction: his brother's tent. Carefully he crept, around the campfire, pacing as quietly as he could so that he would not wake his brother, or bring attention to their camp any more than the strange noises that he was tracking. What time was it? He'd left his phone back in his tent - it was dark, still, deep away from the pre-dawn, and the Milky Way sparkled dimly overhead, the constellations high in their vaulted grandeur. But Kenneth's eyes were on the closing distance between himself, and his brother's tent - and as he came closer and closer, the sound, the music, became clearer and clearer. The door to Kevin's tent was open - had he forgotten to close it? Hadn't Kenneth heard it zip up before they went to bed? But now it was - open, the flap limp and useless. Kenneth hesitated - yes, this was definitely where the music was coming from, the music that, that he realized, he had heard before, somewhere, like a song one hears in a dream that remains only for the first blissful seconds of being awake. He shook his head, trying to clear it - and thrust his head into his brother's tent. By the firelight, Kenneth could see, to his amazement, that it was Kevin himself who was making the sounds - the music, the piping melody. _ _ His mouth was agape as though as he had been snoring, and at first that's what Kenneth thought his brother was doing - he was breathing heavy, sucking in air, and as he was dreaming, the three-note sequence seemed to be squeezed by some irresistible inner impulse, out of his throat, to be sung. _ _ And then and there, Kenneth - finally recognized the tune. It was the notes that they would sing to each other as children, before they learned how to speak English, before the language that they had between them was colonized from the outside and obliterated into little more than fleeting subconscious memory - and it was_this_ memory that consumed him, that made Kenneth feel physically ill with nostalgia, erupting like a cold mountain reborn as the ancient volcano it once was. He retreated backward, suddenly unsteady on his feet, like he was drunk, like the memories his brain was trying to process had overloaded his body and had shook him into a dangerous toxidrome - his head hurt, his heart raced, he burst into a cold sweat with every pour exploding out pyretically at once...he tore at what little clothes he had been wearing, he was desperate to take them off, he wanted to be naked, he hated them, like a straitjacket he had been forced into. Now he collapsed to the ground, a groan building in his throat - naked, on all fours, panting, the heat inside him only barely given relief by the removal of his shirt and his shorts... ...all the while, the three notes, over, and over, and over again, in his ears where there were no sound, in his heart where there was no more room. He crawled back over to his brother's tent, he put his ear to the fabric, he held his breath to quiet his lungs and listen. But it was gone. Kevin had stopped making that noise in his sleep... ...yet Kenneth could still hear it. He stood up, he backed away again, he came away to the campfire, naked and dazed, and he stared, out, out into the screen of trees. Even though Kevin had stopped, the music had grown to consume his brain, infecting his body as a newfound grippe, such that he heard it, musically, though there was no sound like it coming to his ears. The deep night was mild and fine and there were crickets and faint owls in the distance and coming to Kenneth's bare flesh was a drowsy nightbreeze that floated from nowhere in the long, languorous cool that was a welcome refresh from the heat of the day - but as he stared at the trees, he did not like what he saw...or what he thought he saw. The forest was swallowingly deep - dark, darker then dark, chillingly, freezingly, in the Summertime swelter there were shadows that crawled around its radiant obscurity - it spewed forth mind-bending visions, sarcastic answers to demands for logic and sanity...the fantasy of a tenebrousness just out of sight beyond suburbia, the suburbia their parents wanted to depart as soon as they departed the world, but this was a fantasy made real and a world where nothing made sense, where Captain Kidd stalked in headless rage, the Jersey Devil leapt from tree to tree, hitchhiking ghosts still begged for a ride back home. Who was there - who was there that whole time, in their bunk bed back at the house that their parents made clear was only transitory, though it held that illimitable treasury of memories? Kevin was. Kevin was there. And - there he was, now, there he slept, now, without the febrile widdendream Kenneth had been driven into, the piping music with its tones at once dulcet and dooming. Kevin was right there, because Kevin was always there. And then, on his lips was a name - the true name, the name he remembered that Kevin always had, all their lives, effervescent from the Halcyonic dreams of their childhood: "Keento..." A murmur, hard against his teeth, a shudder of blood directed by fragile genetics, flesh wrapped around a soul that he, Kenneth, Kayko, and Kevin, Keento, had once shared in the womb - pulled from Nothingness and Oblivion fully-formed to dwell in this nightmare-thresher of existence, with nothing but each other, brother-human, human-brother, to believe in. But there was nothing - human - about this. How he knew this, how he knew this wasn't natural, but preternatural, supernatural, like the rest of the horrid old stories that wax horrific in the smaragdine voids of the Pine Barrens, he couldn't actually be sure...only that he knew, exactly, what kind of folktale he, and his brother, had interloped into. The mere thought of his brother plunged him into a roaring inferno of homosexual desire, something he had never known, before, something he could have comprehended intellectually, before, but never actually felt, before - his penis throbbed to life, harder, harder, now his hands were on it, stroking it, teasing this new need that was burning a hole in his brain, the physical cupidity for his brother's sexual beauty, yes, but something else - something stronger... ...that loyalty, the love that he had for his brother, the desire to shelter and guard him away from the tragedy of their circumstance, not just now but for all time, it filled his heart, poured into every chamber such that it would burst, exploding afire out of chest in seizing pyrotechnics of love, pure and euphoric and all-consuming - he would marry him, yes, they would exchange rings and tell the whole world, this man, his brother, Kevin Hayles, who shared his name and shared his blood and now and for eternity they would share everything, all things, yes, true love's kiss forever... He gritted his teeth to quiet his inexorable orgasm, to try and silence what his addled brain commanded him to feel, but he could not - now he fell to his knees, both hands sliding up and down his throbbing cockflesh, faster, faster, it didn't take long for the end to arrive, he felt his cock straighten and swell and his mouth fell open in a single exclamation of rapture... Kenneth came - hard. But the oblivion of his release was altogether short-lived: he felt something, something strange, on his hands, running down his shaft, out of his cock, too thick, not runny enough to spurt to the ground, but clumping squishily at his cockhead and trailing into his hands as more and more of it built up - that was his cum. He opened his eyes - he looked down. By the campfire-light he could see it: congealed all around his hands was some sort of transparent amber muck, that caught the firelight and glimmered in it, shimmered in it, thick and slimy on his cock and in his hands, sticky in his fingers, the last fresh gobs of it belched out by his painfully open urethra. And it reeked - strangely, noisomely, overpoweringly, it assailed his nostrils so that he could smell nothing else - of pine. Kenneth's reaction should well have been one of abject horror - but he felt nothing, even in the ebb of his sexual desire and the homosexual hook around his heart, painful and new, for his brother, he felt nothing for this, this total aberration his body had just undergone. His eyes drifted up, up to the stars, the limitlessness of the Milky Way and the Summer constellations, hands still on his cock, his mind devoid of thought - only the smell of the pine that his semen was newly-perfumed with, the hollowness without having the affirmation of being truly coupled, married, to his brother, creeping in intensity to become dangerously close to an obsession...and the pipes, the three notes of the pipes, over and over, again and again, throbbing in his brain, pulsating like his lovesick heart, palpitating, uncomfortably, like the veins in his still-erect, slime-covered penis. A stirring, an awkward shuffling from inside Kevin's tent snapped him back to what now passed for reality - his eyes creaked in their sockets, as he watched his brother emerge, slowly, cautiously, his hand going from one direction of the campground to the other... ...and Kenneth's heart sang as he saw him, soared into a euphoria that lit up his entire existence as surely as the starry asterisms above him illumed the very sky itself - by the firelight Kevin apparently could not fully see him or see what he was doing, but he did not care, and the love that he felt for him turned, boiled, into a perversely sexual need. Kenneth let go of his cock - buoyed by the raging blood still inside it, it bobbed, up, and down, as though showing off its swollen state, bloated enough that it was as big as it had ever been in his life. Then, in a single motion, he slapped his torso, sliding down to his stomach in a seductive display, valorizing the hero's build that college football had toned even harder from his high school days as a warrior on the gridiron, slathering the syrupy cum, reeking of pinewood and sap, wherever his arms and hands, so sticky already, touched flesh. What was he doing? What was driving him to do this? To gaze at his own brother, so lascivious, so much longing, to stare him down and signal, transmit, his desire this way - this primal, homosexual need he had never felt before, ever, forever close as he had been with his brother, so intimate and complete this male closeness he so raged, now, to demolish and absorb in one complete dream of liquescent love? He did not understand it but he did not wish to understand it - he wanted him, Kevin, his brother, more than life itself, in this moment above everything that lived and breathed and suffered and died and carried on eldritchly here in the Pine Barrens, where he could be naked, and so his brother, as the very day they were both born. Neither of them moved - neither of them could hear the night-insects or the owls or the crackle of the fire, so deafening, one to the other, was the blood that pulsed in their ears, the sexual tension so keen and so brutal. Kevin moved closer to his brother, his eyes - sensitive as they were, always observing and recording the world - seeming sad, abashed, as though he no longer knew what to feel. "You're awake." "I'm awake," Kenneth affirmed. Closer - closer - until his brother stood directly before him, his sad eyes down, staring at Kenneth's chest...into his heart. "I came - out here because - I - s-smelled you..." He blinked, hard, as though barely realizing what he was actually saying. "Y-you smell really good..." It was a whisper that died in the tense silence that now befell the two of them. Kenneth felt his face go hot, a pounding blush like a sudden onset fever that made his brow burn, which inverted his heart with - an intense warped sense_of an emotion, like that something someone feels in a dream, something that he recognized immediately but without having ever actually experienced before. His hands lost their stiff posture and relaxed, they swayed by his side, they came up again, resting along the back of his brother's head. "I - smell - really good?" he said, as though by saying it he could make sense of it, he could accept it, he could take pride in it. He felt his brother inhale - _deep in the ridge between his pecs, moving upward, tickling him, his chest hair bristling like blades of grass in a meadow against a breeze. "Smells like - you - smells like - I never - wanna leave..." Kevin's voice was plaintive, faint, it scarcely rose above the wheeze of the crickets and the katydids - but barely had the words reached Kenneth's ears when he felt his chest tighten, and a surge of exquisite endorphins shoot through his whole body. His hand came down, they met his brother's, their fingers intertwined. "I don't - wanna leave," he repeated, his voice cracking, inhaling again, taking in the scent of his brother, leaning back, now his eyes at the ground but distant, losing focus, until they seemed not to be looking at anything at all. "You won't," Kenneth breathed into his ear, firm in a new resolve. "But I - but I left--" "You came back, and you don't have to leave ever again." "But I can't, I c-can't--" "Why?"

"I have to go - af-after tonight--" "Where are you gonna go?" "Nowhere!" Kevin burst out. "I don't have anywhere_to go_--" "Yes you do--" "I sold our home!" "Stop--" "I sold our home," he repeated. "Now we - we don't have anywhere to go back to!" "No, no you didn't." "Wha - what?" "You didn't sell our home..." Kevin - Keento - his head went from the ground to the sky, the swimming peridot that his eyes became briefly reflected all the diamondiferous stars, unsure, afraid, but then they met his brother's, then they locked, together. Kenneth drew near his brother, nearer - until their lips were a spare inch apart. "You - and me - when we're together - wherever we are--" He kissed him - the first time they had kissed, the first time they had ever experienced something homosexual, the undomesticated purity of love between man and man - gently, their lips meeting briefly to give his brother but the first taste of something they would have for an oncoming eternity. "We - are home." They kissed again - slower this time, deeper this time, their mouths and tongues slurping and licking, wet and dripping with lust, the newfound desire between them burning each other so hot and bright the very campfire beside them could not hope to compete. It was perfect - they, were perfect. What Kevin had said was true, that they had nowhere to go - yet Kenneth was right, also, how they, alone, together, were always home, what the Pine Barrens had ultimately made one flesh let no man cleave in twain. As they kissed, as they tasted each other for the first time, as they transcended the meager connection of sibling-love to experience the ferocious, terrifying mutual adoration of two men, two creatures, Kenneth felt something, a tingling, a fullness, begin to buzz underneath his nipples. The pressure in his breast grew until it was painful in an exquisitely pleasurable way - he pressed down on it and out from his tit it erupted, what had been building inside him: a milky sap, woodsy, piney, deliciously aromatic and sticky, the smell of the forest that had swallowed them, and was starting to change them...different from his newly changed semen, with its honeyed, melliferous texture, but succulently whitish-gold, what bleeds from the pine mixed with the broken stem of the dandelion. Kevin sniffed at it, snuffing along the sensitive flesh enough that it tightened and stiffened and trickled out yet more of the sap, before licking it, gently, to hear his brother groan in sudden, electric pleasure. And then - as a kid to his nanny, as a foal to his mare - he latched his mouth to his brother's nipple, instinctual, primal, without directive but with a sudden crackling cry of painful need. There he suckled, his warm mouth coaxing out the delectable, nutritious sap. The poignant intimacy of being able to feed his brother - the sensation of his nipple sucked and massaged like this, the fullness and flow of the sap, the milk he was producing, just for him, just for Kevin - charged through Kenneth's brain, overtaking mere human words and reducing him to a pure, mind-erasing pleasure...he groaned aloud, for the second time that night his gritted teeth parted to let loose a still louder noise, indeed to bellow - deep, masculine, twisting in his throat and chest, a bleat that uneased the sandy soil and frightened the leering owls that alighted in a skyborne frenzy. At the sound, his brother withdrew, his mouth full and drooling of the sap-like cum that he desperately tried to swallow even as his stomach belched back with overindulgence - he clearly loved it, and it was clearly delectable to him, he clearly needed it, and yet he had to stop, yet he had to yield...because something new was happening. He watched his brother reach down and take his cock into his hands, pulling the foreskin back and forth in careful, hypnotic masturbation - with each stroke, each motion of both hands, a loose fold of pink skin began to extend, up his stomach, the rosy flesh darkening with the texture of leathered hide. At the same time, the skin of his penis began to hyperpigment, and from the base it thickened, each second that passed making it bulge swell, bloat, the process was doubtless pleasurable but seemed as ugly as much as it was necessary, inch by inch for Kevin's cock to obtain its evolution and thus its rulership over the forest, less human and more and more horse. Now Kevin began to thrust his hips in time to his own

stroking, faster, yet faster, the desire that Kenneth could see in his brother did not have limit and neither did the growth of his cock, larger, bigger - Kenneth growled something in lust, his mouth open and his tongue unfurling in serpent in new desire just watching it - this increasingly gargantuan, dangling, sagging, flopping, as a loose piece of meat, barbaric in its needs even as it was elegantly equine in planned design. It was as though, poor boy, unfortunate little prince who did not understand what he was yet heir to and certainly not what the very forest itself was grooming him to be - it was as though he could not deal with it, it was as though he was unprepared for it, and now his brother came before him, now he knelt, he would never let his husband suffer, he would use his own body to submit to, and comfort him. So - Kenneth nudged his brother's hands back to let him continue masturbating, as much as he needed, and put all he could of the growing penis with the flattening head and the fattening medial ring into his mouth. Kevin grunted appreciatively, grabbing and pulling onto his brother's head with only a free hand an affection he could not express, so obviously deep was he in the swimming depths of his own lust. He stomped his feet, once, twice, again, again, an imperious cadence, a martial rhythm - all at once, the rest of that below his waist changed as well: the hairs on his legs strengthening, thickening, curling, bursting forth with every soil-flattening galumph such that his legs became carpeted with woolen hair. At the same time his toenails turned smooth, hard, a horn-like covering growing to fuse his toes together with each beat upon the unworthy ground, the shape of his fused tarsals curving, stretching, bending, reinforced by the strength and immortality of wood as though carved by an unseen artisan of Elfhame, huge, overbearingly powerful. The ministrations at his cock accelerated, and with the sensation of what was happening in his legs, the dutiful sucking of his brother, his husband, Kevin could not contain the last orgasm as a human, but the first paroxysm as a woodwose, any longer: Kenneth had only spare seconds to look up and see his brother's ears rapidly grow into large, upright, sylvan things, blossoming with fluffy fur, at nearly the very same time two massive, majestic horns come bloodily erumpent out of Kevin's skull - huge, devilishly caprine things that, so as his new hooves, looked like they were the product of a master craftstman of woodworking, white pine that shimmered in the moonlight and the half-glow of the campfire, accompanied by a sound that rattled his brother's very ribcage: the bleat-bellow of some ancient aurochs that ripped through the very branches and trees above them. Spare seconds to see, or to understand - because Kevin's new phallus' cocktip swelled dramatically, such that Kenneth almost panicked as he felt it pushing his lips open, his mouth now servile to the hot equine flesh - scorching hot, musk-laden semen shot out of Kevin like a cannon, imperfectly mutated from still-human testicles...and Kenneth, his brother, his husband, swallowed it, every slimy drop, obediently, without question, the last remnants of his brother's humanity disappearing into Kenneth's hungry gullet. Just as Kenneth's maternal breast-sap had been marvelously mutagenic for Kevin, so now was Kevin's paternal, masculine seed the same for Kenneth - as it splattered along the inside of his mouth, as he gulped down, as it thickened just enough to bloat in his gut and undo some of the sculpted tone of his hairy tummy, a migraine now overtook Kenneth, as it must have overtaken his brother moments earlier but without the benefit of a numbing orgasm...a dull pain began to throb between his eyes, growing, rapidly, overtaking the space where his mind met his sight, until he see could no more. But then - stars filled his vision, old stars, stars from more than two decades ago, the reliable, cheerful starlight of childhood that blots out the darkness, illuming the infinite dark to make the violet skyglow of the cosmic uterus. And - effortlessly, but with a scream that welled in Kenneth's throat and that was shouted heavenward, the cry of growth, centuries of dendrochronology compressed into one jocund moment of transmogrification - he who was blind could now see, the veil was lifted, from his forehead burst forth, in bloody baptism, perfectly formed, sturdy, woody, horns...smaller than his brother's, not nearly the crown that he possessed, but impressive all the same. His ears, like Kevin's, became pointed and abloom with soft, downy fur, an admixture of deer and human - his coccyx grew just enough for him to have a fleshy tail burst from him, rapidly healing and then, too, rapidly furred with something like the bubbly-soft, fluffy vair of a squirrel, but shortened and at the ready, again like that of a fine Virginia buck...what his brother must have grown also, though he had not seen it. In this moment - the headache eased, the pain in his rear quickly forgotten, and so could the cloak be withdrawn - Kenneth was cleansed of his human condition, he was given roots because he was now, like his brother, a tree himself, a dryad, a woodwose, belonging exquisitely to his new home of a forest, the Pine Barrens, in the rarified environs that their distant, forgotten ancestors, with the heaving bosom of an unconquered continent before them, had called New Jersey. And he knew his name - his real name, his true name, the name he always had - just as he knew the name his brother had always had, too, the names they had given each other, their first sign of love that eclipsed all over loves. There was no Kenneth ever again - there was not to be a Kevin any longer - for Kenneth was now, as he always had been, Keento, in all ways as Kevin had been Kayko. And though Keento's mind was nearing completion his body was not done, and now he winced, a sharp pain gripping the insides of his feet, fading to dull cramp, first the left foot and then the right - he looked down in his dazedness to find that his toenails were lengthening, darkening in color, coming forth into a solid, gangly, hardening mass...he let forth a shout, leaning down as his toes completed their merge into a great woody shape, rounded, but powerful. Another pain, this time an intense jolt, ran up the back of Keento's legs, and another yell tore from him as he felt the very structure of his feet_begin to morph - once again, first the left foot and then the right, both of them elongated, shifting so that the heels went upward, and the merged wooden thing his toes had become went downward, twisting them just slightly outward. And then, to crown it all, a thousand, a million pores in his skin, all to up his waist, bloomed and blossomed with smooth, satiny fur. Gone was any semblance of human locomotion, vanished was any similarity to how a human might walk, or even be, below the waist - now he was a true silenus, now he was a true satyr, the perfect _woodwose to dwell with his brother in the Pine Barrens, standing as he did, on two enormous, powerful hooves which looked as they had been whittled from the most ancient and invincible pines. Now it was his turn to experience the endowment of his new, evolved form: already aroused, already euphoric, his testicles swelled to the size of ripe lemons, coated with new, coriaceous flesh...a breath later, he felt the veins in his cock surge with raging force, bloating the crisscrossed cardiac pathways so that they bulged, obscenely and grotesquely, from his very flesh - it was more than an erection, far more, far more painful and far more pleasurable, for it was a true sensation of growth, a forcible stretching, a deliberate pulling and tugging that his very blood was pushing through, so that his penis, even as it grew and lengthened and thickened, began to drop and droop, downward, a great new appendage of raw sexual flesh. Yet even as he felt his new cock become greater in size and mass, he felt it becoming still heavier, brought down in its potential might by the mean spirit of gravity - he was moaning now, his brother watching him in the same rapt attention as he had given him before, too lost in the sexual daze to realize that the head, once rounded, was becoming deformed, as though his shaft was pushing the corona upwards to a flat, fat flare...with spare pumps of heartsblood, a series of veins around the middle of his girth became a medial ring, and a ready pouch, thickening to a fine leathery texture, grew out of his abdomen. Then it was complete: his own equine phallus. Keento stumbled about, fresh, syrupy, inhuman pre now freely oozing from his horsey cockslit, belching out in massive drops with each faulty step...his vision, and what was left of his sense, slowly returned, with just enough time to realize that, large as he was, magnificent as he was, his brother's own penis was far larger, even stronger, designed for some greater purpose than his own... ...but he scarcely had time to think or consider, for, as though waiting patiently for this new change to settle on his brother's body, Kayko came back to him, and Keento felt his own brother's horns, fully formed, wooden, unbending, glide across his abdomen, up, until his mouth blindly found his nipple, clamping his lips to it, suckling and nursing so that he could drink a steady, viscous flow of the sylvan liquid he, Kenneth,Keento, now freely made. What a young hungry thing - Keento only minutes older in the womb but infinitely older now to his brother Kayko in these strange forms the siblings had evolved into and would keep forever, for he would be motherly, mild and gently, protecting in maternal mercy his motherless brother, gladly and lovingly assuming the role to give them both something they desperately needed. And as Kayko drank from him - as his brother gained the nutrients he needed back that he had spent so generously with his coming out - Keento was once again transported with such joy as he could not express in mere words so he dispensed with mere words altogether. He sang. He sang the three notes: first, the way they had as children, then altering the melody, mixing it up, no words, only shapenotes that no human throat could make, a sacred canticle for the Pine Barrens and the happy days of their far-off youth, all that time spent inseparable - this song, their song, the song that would live forever, for they had lived forever in the womb as one and now, though once parted, they were back again... ...by what malignancy had they come to these strange, sylvan mutations? Was it something lurking in their own blood - four centuries in the making, hidden, perhaps purposely, especially in these sanitized decades of Stepfordian living? Or was it something else - the sinister influence of the Pine Barrens themselves, emanations of supernatural radioactivity that twist and deform? Could it have been that the nihilistic trauma of being landless, rootless, heritageless, with no past to claim and therefore no future to look forward to, coupled with the cruel grief of orphanhood, that warped the brains of these boys, these men, these beasts, to turn their bodies into something truly Earthly and truly connected to where they were, and where they spent their happiest days? The simple answer, if the cryptid-infested, mystery-drenched sweven that was North America would ever give up her strangest secrets - was that it was all of them, not so strange if one understands that there are yet still stranger things hidden throughout the world...but strongest of all, that which was needed most even if the rest were already absolutely required, was the love between the two of them, Kenneth and Kevin, Keento and Kayko, who, having nobody else in the world, merged as one to become something transcendent to Man: a darkly radiant suicide to And yet the very word - love - was paltry, weak, flaccid...love could not encompass this joining of souls, love, mortally defined, could not be the strongest of these engines for the superlative warping of flesh from Man to Animal. English, their former language, had no real word for it because no real word existed for it, but they would make one - just as they made their own ingenious glossolalia before, so too would they recover it, remember it, and make it again.

People go missing all the time in the Pine Barrens - but how many people go missing into them, to find a new home...or a new form? They were twins and they were brothers and they would remain twins and brothers forever, no longer limited by the puny mortal lifespan - but it was becoming very apparent that, just as they were as humans, they would be made differently as woodwoses, as they had no culture as humans before, surely now they would found a new one by themselves...as they had no family or dynasty before surely they would found a new one by themselves. For, if there was only the tired quotidian American nowhere that would await them, nothing from the past to guide or even the present to hint - then here, here in this space, they would make their own culture, they would make their own civilization, with all the queer forestal things performed with reverence to ensure that the Earth, the stars, the trees, the spirits, all to one could be recognized and thanked. Kayko withdrew from Keento's breast, his eyes glazed with emotion - swallowing back one last gulp of sap, he threw his arms around his brother, and joined, with his faltering voice, in the lonesome symphony that the two of them would write, together, for the rest of their happy lives. They stopped - the music faded into the night. Staring at each other, one to the other, their faces met for a kiss, but a short one, electrified by their mutual affection, by their new and immediate needs as lovers, husbands...brothers. Keento winked at Kayko, grinning, hopping away - he flipped around, bending over, exposing his new equine rear. He beckoned him, shaking his head, flicking his new, fluffy cervine ears - Kayko smiled back, grunting once again, flaring his nostrils with a fiery, libidinous need, fluttering his ears, stamping his hoof.

This would be their foreplay, their delightful tomfoolery, before more important ceremonies betweenst them took place. Kayko knelt before his brother's hole and, without any more prompting, began to lick, then massage it, with his tongue...it was, to his striking delight, deliciously rounded and leathery -- superbly equine, inviting and ready. Keento let out a breathy gasp of shock, then pleasure, his cervine ears twitching madly, as he felt his brother's tongue ooze into his asshole, slurping out to capture the taint, and then back again, Kayko's abilities natural and immediate and needless of instruction, his horseprick slimy and flopping with arousal in response to each every one of Keento's shivers, his heavy panting, his broken moans that almost sounded like his brother's name. But even this ecstasy could not last - something else was due to happen, some new change to complete. Kayko grunted into Keento's ear in something like pain, a tiny trickle of sap peeking through the latter's nipples, and as both brothers looked down to watch, Keento turning around to put his arms around him as it happened, Kayko's scrotum, both testicles bloated where they hung, with each pulse of blood getting bigger, bigger still, the veins swelling obscenely across the naked flesh - the sensation must have been too much for Kayko, who gripped his brother hard, arms tight around his chest, whimpering into his ear. But his brother said nothing back - he was fascinated by what he was seeing, this new mutation: he knelt to cup the swelling balls in his hand - only a few seconds passed and he could not hold them, grown too large already, the size of healthy grapefruits, pulsing, trembling, self-evident with incredibly fertile, virile power. And then, with another whimper, the skin of the new, handsome set of fertile orbs Kayko possessed burst forth, every pore, with a fine pelt of downy fur, becoming scraggly and woolen, soft to the touch but of an obviously tough, durable fiber that would serve to protect these new, sensitive testicles. Keento beheld them, his brother-husband's balls, having slipped out of his hand and his fingers, thrusting his face into the crevice of Kayko's stronger, furrier, more bestial legs - he inhaled Kayko's new smell, the elder pine of antediluvian trees with the animal scent of the livid beast that he had become...it was intoxicating, it was gorgeous and it was heady, all the more because it was him, his brother, his mate-for-life, it filled his nostrils as it filled his being. He heard Kayko pant and he withdrew some to see his brother's scrotum, again - magnificently large, nothing human about them, they had become astonishingly theriomorphic, so obviously superior to anything, man or animal, in the whole of the Pine Barrens...Keento's tongue fell out of his mouth, his breaths heavy, choked with desire, wanting nothing more than to submit to them, his brother's genitals, packed as they were with such limitless generative power: the power to end their misery as terminarchs, as pathetic, poor orphans...and begin a family together all over again. He could not help it: gently, he opened his mouth to slurp his brother's testicles, first with his lips, then his tongue, then his entire maw...the sensation of the woolen fur and the tough hide they were made of in his mouth making him shiver and let out a closed-mouth moan, his tits tingling with a fresh slow-drip of sap - Kayko's own hyperventilations of sensation gave him a different kind of pleasure, the knowledge that he was able to please his brother like this and do something so simple to bring him thrilling joy.

And now it was time - now the two husbands must consummate the marriage they willingly and passionately came into, together. Keento was already kneeling, but now he was trembling, his mouth coming out of his brother's crotch and his newly fur-covered knees crouching so that his hooves could dig into the ground, lowering his hindquarters to his brother's level...then, his new instincts taking root and sprouting in his nerves as choking ivy crawls up the bark of a mighty tree, he crawled into the dirt, turning around, flicking up the tail he had grown, and letting it quiver in the air - this was an invitation for his brother to make love to him in their new, improved shape, and to his shock he now felt his hole dilate, opening up for this, novel abilities for his rectal muscles to possess, a new mutation he did not anticipate but welcomed, all the same.

Kayko himself needed no prompting - his blood fiery hot such that it threatened to smolder his very flesh like an ember in the campfires of their youth, let out a sound from his throat like a trumpeting bleat: he dove at his brother, desperate to mate, to seal this consanguinean marriage compact between them, theirs and only theirs. His equine phallus slid effortlessly into his brother's hole, widened by an awaiting, savage instinct, warm and wet and ready - with the sensation, Keento felt both nipples swim with pressure and then erupt with release as the sap he lactated blasted unto the forest floor, his whole body singing in the moment with a dissociative sexual euphoria...he could not think, he could only feel, Kayko's great new equine cock that throbbed and swelled with masculinity, virility, a wanton need that would never be sated, but always desired, always craved. Keento's own penis bobbled about in the night air, unsheathed and spurting long, honeyed strands of pine-scented pre that flew out in arches timed to the powerful, rhythmic thrusts of his brother's unexpected sexual dominance - as Kayko increased his speed, the moist warmth of Keento's inner chamber building his newfound desire to consummate their union, it slapped against his hard athlete's stomach, sticking in the youthful happy trail of hair, bouncing back down, again and again, an animal rhythm for these who had found their inner beasts. He heard his brother groan, a strange, masculine noise not quite a bleat like his own, but not quite the whinny of a colt - it was a call of something new, something profound, some deep pull to the abhuman, a beckoning back from the failed world of humans to the benighted destiny of this forest, these woods...it was such a magical noise, that he repeated, again, then again, louder, Keento could feel his brother embracing the beast inside him, unable to resist, until at last his shaft swelled from hilt to tip, and he flared. It was a hot, flushing geyser - an unyielding cannonade of liquid that blasted into Keento's bowels. There was so much of it - so much seed, a fertility that laughably outmatched anything that a human could muster, for only the form of liminal beast as Kayko had been gifted with could produce this: the hard swell of cockflesh in sweaty, sap-drenched coitus with his brother-mate whose ecstatic screams of feral joy joined his own roaring, masculine bellows. Keento could feel the sperm swimming inside him, the victorious fecundity of his brother, his lover, his mate - he could feel it and as he felt it he felt pride, so elatedly gladdened that the only thing he truly loved in the world had achieved so much and so quickly, a bliss that made his anus open up still yet more, greedily impaling himself on his brother so that his hole could swallow yet more of the bountiful semen - thick sap-like semen entered Keento and swam there, fertilizing him, letting yet stranger, yet newer mutations chain-react inside his belly, and Keento's strong, ligneous hooves dug deep into the soil to get yet better footing, his tits bloated rapidly to ooze out still more sap, reeking of the pine tree itself, as his hole slurped messily onto Kayko's flaring phallus. Only a forest creature could be so endlessly fertile, to have his testicles pump fervently for the pleasure of his husband, for only a forest creature could know the intimacies of being married to one's own brother, and to seed him as a groomsman to his bridegroom - their primal, chest-deep cries reaching the tops of the very ancient pines themselves Kayko and Keetno announced the founding of a new house, a new dynasty, and the cessation of their human existence, all at once, all in one night. The brothers groaned out their conjugal ritual unto the night wind, timed to rhythmically sexual thrusts. Finally, one last pulse emanated from Kayko's mighty phallus - one last spurt to remind Keento of the new power that Kayko had been gifted, the fertilization that would start their lives totally anew in their abhuman forms to suit them at their task...Kayko pulled back, grunting, drooling, his mouth having been open in animal noises of sexual conquest, his magnificent cock slurping out of his brother's hole messily, stickily, slick with the fertile sap-cum. Keento cried out in disappointment and fresh upset, a vertiginous lassitude powerfully overtaking him, making him dizzy and weak - he felt Kayko reach for him, grabbing him, so that before he fell to the ground, he was caught, safe...in his brother's arms. Gradually, slowly, Keento's vision returned - he felt his hole, with his brother's viscid seed still intact inside, warming his belly, fertilizing him - he blinked, to the screen of the forest, his capacity for human language transcended and gone but his understanding of what he now beheld more complete than yet before: this was home, this would be forever...and he smiled a deranged and delirious smile at feeling so secure with his beloved. But now Keento gently pushed his brother's hold away, so that he come down to the pine needle-strewn forest floor beneath them - turning around, now sitting, moving to adjust for his new tail, he looked up at Kayko, whom he had grown up knowing as Kevin but deep in his soul knew eternally as Kayko. And Kayko looked down at him -Keento, but deep in his own soul known eternally as Kenneth. Keento beheld Kakyo - and, by firelight, by starlight, he was beautiful, he was perfect, there was no male in this world that could sate the need in his heart...this masterpiece of a creature who had known all his life, his husband, his brother. His horns, biologically part of him but seemingly crafted, as were his horns, from the finest Pinus rigida of their new home, stood triumphant above his head - his ears sylvan and furred, like his legs, like his genitals, with the woolen hair of an animal - his cock, a horse-like masterpiece of maleness, alive in Keento's hands as he stroked it lovingly...his brother's penis, new and limitlessly better, was heavy, weighted in his hands, this fresh equine flesh of pagan fertility, this masterful thyrsus that would ensure, solitarily, the meeting of, and the perpetuation, of their bloodline, together. Its raw fleshly power would ensure that, though foundlings_they were now in the Pine Barrens, no longer would they be _endlings together. He was so proud of what his sibling had become - what they had become, together...and as he rose, as he stood as an equal before his brother, his husband, his eternal lover that nothing in this or any other universe, he felt along his stomach, feeling his brother's seed stick and take hold and begin to form something else inside it, something that they had made, also, together. Perhaps it was that they were married, ah, but the ceremony was not yet complete - Keento took Kayko by the hand and they came to one of the pines that overlooked the campsite where the fire still burnt and their human attachments still lay - they stumbled together, laughing happily as they got used to their new hooves and new legs. At one particular pine - any would have done, but Keento remembered it as always having been there, even when they were children and still human but always bonded, somehow - Keento stopped, and with his free hand grabbed a branch, snapping it off and releasing Kayko so that he could fashion it, with utmost care, and using an instinct he would never understand but never actually need to, into... ...a wreath. Gingerly, with a happy smile and a surge of joy that brought tears to his eyes such that the gold flecks in them, that matched his brother's, threw off astral sparks as they caught the campfire's dying embers, he placed it on his husband's head. "Kayko," he whispered. Now his brother, with a profound nod, did the same - a snapped branch, a quick and dexterous movement of his hands, and soon he had his own wreath, which he, in turn, place on his husband's head as well. "Keento," he said back, choking back a happy laugh. Together they hummed the sacred melody between them, the three notes together - over and over and over, until they came together to embrace. These horned and hooved humanoids, woodwoses, Jersey creatures by accident of birth but deliberate in their elevation to something wilder and weirder - they kissed. This would be their nemeton, here would be their wedding chapel, here the handfasting was now complete, with these wreathes they would them wedst, matched with bristling pine needles to crown them as nobility when their horns crowned them as abhuman already - with their brows so wrapped they would be like unto the Greenmen their ancestors saw peering at them from the sacred groves...for, like the circle of the pine-wreathes Kayko and Keento made for each other this way, nothing ever truly begins, but neither does anything ever truly end, what has been shall always be, no matter how much something long ago was forgotten. The dawn would approach and the sky would go indigo, cornflower, then the blue of the eggs of the robins, friends of Man, whose chirping heralds the changing of seasons already passed - now it was truly Beltane, Summer, the aching aestival days of the Solstice, there would be other birds and other little creatures, there would be joy in this kingdom for the first in however many overly long æons. And another chapter would be written in the impossible chronicle of the New Jersey Pine Barrens - where so many strange things happen, and too often where people will vanish, but where two brothers, against the world and against life, found each other.