They were in the back garden talking about the tree.
The man from the landscaping company was saying it should be removed as it was too close to the house for comfort and it was almost dead, anyway. The owner was not sure. His late wife had loved the thing. He said he would have to think about it. He was happy with the rest of the expert’s suggestions and it was agreed that his people would be there the following week to improve the look of the place. When the man had gone the owner stood looking at the tree and thinking about what she would have wanted, but maybe the man was right.
That night, he was lying in bed thinking about it. The tree was certainly close to the house because he could hear the thing scraping at the bedroom window, a sound he couldn’t remember hearing before. Maybe he was hearing it now because it was on his mind. He lay there, not being able to get to sleep with the constants scrapes and clicks. He listened for a while and became aware that there seemed to be some sort of repeated pattern to the sounds. The first thing he picked up on was the fact that a definite triple click was each time followed by a scrape. It was certainly repeated quite regularly. His mind went immediately to the letter ‘v’ in Morse code. He knew about the ‘v’, click, click, click, scrape; dot, dot, dot, dash… the notes from Beethoven’s fifth symphony. Surely not, he thought, but as he listened it became obvious that what he was hearing was without doubt a repeated sequence. The ‘v’ came around in the same spot within the cycle of sounds.
He was now sitting up giving the noises more attention. There were ‘e’s in there too. The most common letter in the alphabet. He could hear that being repeated over and over. They were just single clicks. Then he recognised the recurring ‘s’. Three distinct clicks. The ‘s’ from the SOS distress signal for Save Our Souls. That was about the limit of his knowledge regarding the code.
It was two in the morning when he got up. He used his computer to print off a copy of the Morse code. Now, back in his room, he listened carefully to the clicks and scrapes while he converted them to letters using the print out. He waited for the ‘v’ to come round, then noted down v, e, m, e, s, a, v, e, m, e, s, a, v… Bit by bit, the missive was coming together, and he quickly saw the words ‘save me’. Despite the fact that what he was experiencing couldn’t possibly happen, he actually slept very well that night. In the morning he made a phone call to advise the company of his decision to leave the tree standing when their work on his garden began the following week.
When the remodelling of the back garden was finished and a couple of weeks had passed, he noticed the odd tiny buds appearing here and there on the tips of the tree’s branches. Then, during the months that followed, the tree showed more and more leaves. It became something of a talking point when it became fully green. Several of his visitors would say that it was quite remarkable how it had come back to life. He would just nod proudly.
He never talked about the how of it.