The Tree

An online recount of events by someone experiencing strange, terrible events.

The Tree: A short horror

 

     There are things you inherently know. That you understand in the core of your being. Pieces of knowledge untraceable in origin, perhaps hereditary in ages of evolution past; hereditary. Things you take for granted.
     The Earth revolves around the Sun, spinning. Producing day and night, the seasons.
     All that lives will eventually die. Dark is just the mere absence of light. Gravity.
     Then what if one day something unexplainable broke your preconceptions, your foundations of understanding. Took all you knew for certain and shattered them, tore them up, burnt them. Made you understand that what was once real, never was.
     What if one day, that thing saw you.

 

     I don’t know when it all started. How do you remember something that to your recollection, never happened? So I guess I’ll start from where I can remember.
     When I was young, I had nightmares. Can’t remember them either. My parents told me when I was older the real extent of them. I was prone to major night terrors. I would wake screaming, still somehow unconscious, sometimes even standing upright on my bed, sometimes around my bedroom. As they progressed I’d be found in stranger places. Throughout the house, outside in the yard, even once in the attic and several times underneath the house.
     No matter how they locked and secured my room at night, I would get out. Impossibly, as though I simply walked through the walls or door. It all kind of makes sense now, in hindsight.
     After a few years, the night terrors suddenly stopped. Vanished completely. My parents had it on good authority from a specialist that this was a perfectly natural development. I’m sure it was too, especially for someone who was actually experiencing night terrors, unlike me.

 

     What didn’t stop were the nightmares.
     Growing up I lived in the usual two-storey weather-boarded suburban household, like so many other thousands of families. We had a grassy back yard and a gated front lawn. There were a few garden beds that my mother kept watch over. Poppies and pink roses and the like.
     In the wide yard out the back of the house was a tree. To this day I can’t place what kind of tree, other than to say it was a towering gnarled black barked thing that never showed any signs of growth, in any season. It loomed out there, a great black skeleton clawing at the sky, right up against the side of the house.
     My bedroom bordered the rear of the house, and my window was right next to this arboreal monster. At night, during storms or when it was particularly windy, the long claw-like twigs of the uppermost branches would scrape and scratch at my window.
     In the nightmares, they were the grasping, clawing hands of some terrifying thing. Some creature borne of the night to come carry me away from safety, long fingers wrapping around my limbs, my face. Dragging me out of the window and down, into the dark. I’ll never forget that tree.
      Later when I was in high-school I came home to find men in high-viz jackets in our back yard, fretting over a saw-dust strewn stump. The sawdust was grey as ash.
     My parents had finally saved enough to get the tree removed, and apparently it was a good thing they did. The arborists that cut it down had told them it was many years’ dead, and posed a high risk of falling.
     Even with it gone, the nightmares didn’t stop. They didn’t go away until years later, when I moved out to attend University a couple cities over.

 

     Like many students my age I went flatting with friends. What few I had. We lived in a dingy old five-bedroomed single story house that was prone to mould. For a time things were good. I was studying for a sociology bachelor while my friends worked on their own various degrees. We stayed up late drinking and playing way too many videogames instead of studying. I was sleeping fine for the first time I could remember.
     One night we were having our usual gaming binge, and I went to the kitchen to fetch us more drinks from the fridge. The others were making a horrendous noise in the lounge but we didn’t care. We were having a good time.
     The kitchen was one of those with a long L-shaped counter space with a sink built in. There was a long window above it along the front of the house looking out over the lawn to the street outside where we lived in the student district.
     I was looking out the window, checking my reflection in the glare from the kitchen light, fixing my messy hair. I remember because I recall thinking it was in dire need of a cut.
     The power went out.
     Right outside the window, staring right back at me where my reflection had just been a moment before was a pitch-black figure. Silhouetted against a streetlight in the background. It was tall, humanoid, with a strangely elongated head. I had a sense that its arms were far too long for it to be a randomly passing by student pulling a prank.
     But I was transfixed. The void-dark face looked at me and I looked right back at it. I couldn’t make out any of its facial features but I knew our eyes were locked. I was paralyzed by sheer fear.
     The lights suddenly snapped back on in a blinding flash and the thing was gone, replaced by my reflection once again. I dove for the light switch and threw the kitchen into darkness once again. But it was too late. The thing, whatever it was, had vanished.

 

     It turned out that one of my friends had blown a fuse in the house and then promptly thrown a breaker to re-connect the power. I told none of them what I had seen. They did comment afterwards that I became reclusive and refused to go out at night and I’m convinced that stemmed from my trepidation of going out into the dark. The few friends that I did confess to eventually just thought I’d been high, or that I was pulling a prank to scare them.
     Shortly after, the night terrors began again. My friends were tolerant and caring people, yet they couldn’t help but be considerably spooked when they found me outside screaming late at night.
     I moved back home for the summer break after my first year. Bad move. The nightmares about the tree came back. Night was a harrowing period of jerking slumber punctuated by visions of the thin human-like shadow thing climbing through my window on spindly twig-fingers.
     That’s when I wasn’t waking up in strange places.
     My parents helped but I could tell they were stressed to breaking. Without my problems, my father’s employing company was facing foreclosure and he and my mother were having marital problems. The sounds of them fighting didn’t keep me awake for long enough to keep the nightmares away.
     Every exhausted morning was made far worse by seeing their lined, stressed faces.

 

When the semester commenced again in the New Year, I moved back out into a student flat that I rented alone. I was over being a burden upon my friends and family, but I was determined not to let my messed up sleeping patterns rule my life.
     But as my classes progressed, strange things began to happen.
     I started to lose time. I would start awake in strange places with no recollection of having got there. The University library. Random bar bathrooms in town. Once I even blinked awake in the middle of the road in the city. Thankfully, it being 3am meant that there was no traffic.
     I began to see it again. The shadow-thing.
     It was in the corner of my eye when the sun began to go down. If I was late home he would be nearer, a dark form lurking just out of sight behind a tree or a building. I left all of the lights at home running every night, taking solace in the banishing glow that he didn’t seem to be able to penetrate.
     But I was becoming increasingly paranoid. I was convinced the shadow-man was real. I went to councillors, psychiatrists. They gave me buckets of medication, none of which worked.
     I was being stalked. I felt haunted. Hunted. Like prey.

 

     I did the only thing I could think of to help. I ran.
     I ran far and fast. I saved up a bunch of money from my part-time job at a fast-food restraint and I skipped town. I needed to get away from whatever the thing was that followed me.
     That was two weeks ago.
     The first days were mere bliss. I snatched sleep in buses and on trains, all of which were well-lit and moving. I didn’t dream at all, let alone have nightmares.
     There was no sign of the shadow. The thing seemed to be un-able to follow me over such great distances or at such a pace.
     But eventually I ran out of room to run. And out of money. I stopped in a small town and enquired at a farm on the outskirts that had a Help Wanted. Sign out the front. I figured I could slow down for at least a while, catch my breath so to speak. I sent my parents reassuring emails and text messages, telling them where I was and that I was alright.
     That I was just taking some time off study. I wonder if that’s how it found me.
     Last night, there were lights in the sky.
     Bright orange ovals rotating in formation around a central stationary one. The townsfolk went crazy. The younger kids whipped out their phones and started recording, but it was only visible for a minute at best. It whipped through the sky, then was gone. The older folks muttered about UFO’s and joked about green men.
     It’s only now as I write this that I wonder if there might be a connection.

 

     It’s 1:38 am. At least that’s what the clock in my motel room says. I’m still in the town, in a rented room, stranded by my lack of money �" the last of which went into this final night of stay. I guess it doesn’t matter anymore anyway.
     I’m writing this not as a recollection. Not as an explanation. I feel like by getting it out there, someone experiencing the same things I am might read it after I post it online.
    They might have a chance. This might be the warning they need; to get out. To stay moving.
     It’s not a story of what’s happened to me, though I suppose it is, of a sort.
     It’s a goodbye note.
     The clock now reads 1:40am. It’s the darkest I’ve ever seen outside. Luckily I’ve got this little desk lamp and the rooms light. Not that it matters.
     Outside, a tree’s upper twigs are scratching at the window noisily. It’s making it hard to concentrate, especially given the room I’m in is seven stories up.

Reviews

[Akash gaikwad]

Awesoooome !!!! How did you write this !!! I found it incredible .....damn ending is so sad.... Also I hope this is just fiction story!!!!! Your vocab of horror was on point ....I was able to imagine all the situation with the given details. Keep writing.

[AlphaGemini]

Thanks a lot dude!