The Marrow

Walden Pond, Massachusetts, 1845. Smarting from the rejection of his marriage proposal to socialite ELLEN SEWALL, HENRY undertakes a grand experiment to move into his isolated, self-built cabin to find enlightenment by "living simply" with the flora and fauna. While fishing one evening in the moonlight, his transcendental communing with the stars rips open a gateway between worlds, manifesting a bizarre and violent, FACELESS HUMANOID. Suddenly back in the woods and preternaturally strong, Henry stalks and murders a neighboring family of farmers. HENRY jolts awake, having never left the fishing boat -- shaken in utter disbelief about his own involvement in the attack. To his dismay, he discovers that he's now tethered to the roots of a newly-formed, massive ARBOREAL PARASITE. It juts through the floorboards of the boat to loom overhead like some cosmic, tree god-monster. He is equally dumbfounded to see the alien culprit, THE DOPPELGANGER THOREAU, on the shore. Connected psychically, he sees through its eyes as it dumps the corpse of one of the farmers into the pond, then stares back at himself trapped by the tree in the little boat in the middle of the lake. Held captive by the tree parasite, Henry's desperate attempts to escape only meet with repeated failure, leaving him to document his investigation in his journal. He studies "his" life from afar, trying to ascertain Doppel-Thoreau's motives. Oddly, Henry discovers that the creature writes within the cabin about the serenity of Walden Pond. Henry learns that he is able to symbiotically influence what they write together. These efforts at diplomacy lead to Doppel-Thoreau tossing those pages unceremoniously into the fireplace. As weeks turn into months, abandoned and having the natural world he loves turned into a living hell, Henry begins to slide into a hallucinatory madness. After being beaten and battered by the elements, Henry's boat is visited by the Doppel-Thoreau creature. It observes Henry like a captured specimen, then saps the life essence from him through the Arboreal Parasite -- the alien fluids via the root structure intermixing between them. Doppel-Thoreau torments Henry further, shapeshifting into twisted versions of others Henry lost, including his brother who died a horrible seizing death from tetanus. In this horrific isolation, Henry struggles to hold onto any sense of self whatsoever. All the while, Doppel-Thoreau delivers more and more corpses into Walden Pond... The stakes rise as DOPPEL-THOREAU discovers the nearby town and courts Henry's lost love: Ellen. Its true objective is revealed when during a book talk for Henry, DOPPEL-THOREAU uses Henry's own written words against him, imploring the community to "return to the woods" where newly-spawned seedlings of the Arboreal Parasite await... Can Henry free himself and warn those he loves in time? In his haggard, broken state, will anyone even believe him over his cunning, sophisticated doppelganger? What lies in the depths of Walden Pond? Is Doppel-Thoreau even real? Finally, is Thoreau's famous treatise on the power of nature, WALDEN, in fact a dire warning and disguised account of some historic, untold battle between mankind and an otherworldly cosmic horror that was spawned from the stars? THE MARROW is a minimalist thriller with adventure elements in the vein of 127 HOURS meets THE LIGHTHOUSE.