Trembling With Fear 10/28/2018

The Horror Tree

“The wise are silent, the foolish speak, and the children are thus led astray” – Algernon Blackwood

 

“They say this is the only one like it in the world.” The man said to the boy.

The boy looked at it, there some distance ahead of them, then back at the man. The boy said, “but there’s lots of trees in the world? Even ones that look a little like that, I’ve seen them down by the creek.”

The man looked down from the crooked tree to the boy, “there are lots of boys in the world too. But you are the only you, are you not?”

The boy smirked, toying with the idea, then said, “I guess so, I’m no twin like the two down on Bittacy Street.”

“And are those twins not then each their own person? Their parents didn’t give them the same name, did they? They don’t each do exactly as the other does? Do you think they think the same thoughts?”

The boy looked back up towards the tree, it was bent and though he thought it looked like other trees it certainly had grown differently, then he looked at the man and shook his head. As he did, the boy didn’t notice the leaves and boughs of the tree shake and rustle despite there being not the slightest hint of wind.

The man scratched his beard, thick as the scrub and foliage around them, “so this tree is like no other.”

“But you haven’t seen all the trees in the world, have you?”, chirped the youngster, “so how do you know there’s no other one like it? There could be another me, somewhere in the big wide world, far away in another country, and maybe we’ll never see each other and then always think we the only one.”

The man looked at the boy sternly; his thick, caterpillar brows drew together. As he pursed his lips they disappeared beneath his bushy moustache. The boy watched him tug at his beard. This time the boy heard the creak and knock of wood. As he was about to turn his attention to the sounds from the tree up ahead, the man spoke in a tone that suggested it was best the boy give the man his full attention.

“This is the only one like it in the world. Perhaps you simply need to take a closer look.” He put a hairy, knuckled palm on the boy’s shoulder and urged him forward, closer to the tree. The man asked, “what do they call those trees by the creek? The trees you say look like this one?”

Feeling the forceful hand, the boy trudged forward, thinking to what he’d been told he answered, “willows I think…weeping willows.”

“And do they weep?”

“I don’t know what weep means.”

“It means to cry. Do these willows of yours by the creek cry?”

The boy felt the gnarled fingers squeeze tighter and their pinch insisted he take another step towards the tree that was like no other in all the world. He answered, hoping that the answer would lessen the man’s forceful grip, perhaps even slow their march, “no, they don’t cry…can…can this one?”

The man’s grip slackened, the points of his fingers still held the boy fast but they were no longer pushing into him, trying to burrow into his flesh and bones. The man said, “I’ve never seen it cry. But I suppose it can. It wouldn’t surprise me. I don’t think it’s had reason to cry for a long, long time.”

Trunk and branch creaked and sighed like abandoned stairs under the steps of a ghost. The boy felt like he no longer wanted to be led any closer, but the man’s grip and his steadfast gait told the boy he no longer had much of a choice.

The man continued, “you ever hear the tale of Old Man Willow?”

The boy shook his head. The man stopped. The boy was grateful. There was a rustle of leaves that sounded like a hiss.

“Hm, I’m surprised. I thought a boy who knew about weeping willows would have heard of the saddest, and angriest, willow of them all.”

Not wanting to go on, the boy asked the first question that came to mind, hoping it would keep him at bay from the strange tree ahead, “why was he sad and angry?”

The man shrugged his heavy shoulders, his long and matted hair shifted as he did, “for the same reason any tree gets sad and angry I suppose.”

Sensing that that was the end of the tale of Old Man Willow, and sensing that with the end of the tale he would be made to march closer to the tree that was unlike any other, the boy quickly asked, “is this tree, is it sad and angry?”

“I think it can be. Perhaps it was, back when it had a reason to weep.” With that, the man began forcing the boy forward once more and the boy tried in vain to drag his steps and dig his heels. But the man showed no notice of this, he only pushed the boy forward. A groan came from ahead and the boy felt as if many things just below the surface, beneath the undergrowth, things that were deep down in the soil, were urging him forward now too.

“Then it can’t be a weeping willow then!” The boy cried petulantly, feeling that he would soon start weeping.

“I never said it’s a weeping willow, nor a willow of any kind.”

The boy tried to break away but the man grabbed him tightly by the wrist. He looked up at the man’s face, at the bushy beard and hanging hair. In the mottled shadows of the forest, the boy thought the small patches of exposed flesh on the man’s cheek and nose looked like grey and aged barked. And his eyes were the pale green of sun-starved lichen.

The man did not seem angry at the boy’s attempt to break free, he only held him tightly. Again, there was the groan of old wood and the rustle of excited leaves.

“Well then what kind of tree is it huh? It can’t be so special if it doesn’t even have a name!”

“It does have a name”, the man said and dragged the boy forward.

They were close to the tree and the boy tried feebly to free himself again, this time it wasn’t only the man’s hand and gaze that held him. Dark roots slathered with peat and dirt rose and coiled about the boy’s ankle like rotten wooden worms.

The boy began to scream but a vine dropped from the shadowy boughs and wrapped itself about his throat, choking his cry. The vine felt slimy and cold, again more like a worm than any vegetation.

“It’s called a Blackwood”, said a voice that did not belong to the man.

The boy felt himself yanked upwards by more vines, and tugged downwards by wriggling roots and still the man pulled him closer to the massive trunk. Everything worked together against the boy, in a way that told his aching and stretching young frame it didn’t matter if he arrived at the trunk in one piece.

The boy’s vision was going hazy as he desperately struggled to breathe, through tears and the blur of strangulation he saw that from all the branches, that extended outwards from the tree like a spider’s web, hung the dark vines. It was as if they no longer wished to stay hidden in the draping of leaves. Those that weren’t interested in him were all fashioned into dangling nooses, as if someone long ago had planted gallows from the bloody seed of a hanged man’s heart.

The voice that wasn’t the man’s, or perhaps it was only what the Blackwood’s voice sounded like when it came from barely human lips that differentiated the two, spoke again, “but little boys who follow strangers and know about weeping willows, have a different name for me…they never speak it…they never can…but I hear it all the same…”

The voice paused. The vines pulled the boy up, tighter and tighter, the roots did the same but dragging him down into the mud and the man, still clutching the boy’s wrist, walked right into the ashen bark like he was the tree’s shadow, and the boy felt the flaking strips of wood begin to absorb him. To gnaw him.

As the splintered jaws slowly worked on the boy’s arm like toothless, mossy gums, the voice spoke again.

“Yes…that’s the name they use…The Horror Tree…”