the death tree

Mary stopped dead in her tracks. She drew in a sharp breath and held it like a security blanket. The country sky was clear tonight, as it often was, thousands of stars visible to the naked eye, like diamonds in a jeweller’s store window, and a hunter’s moon bleeding its orange light on all things that were not yet the prisoner of shadows. And in the middle of this serene scene, standing like a gift from Satan himself, was the tree.
Mary let her breath escape her as silently and as cautiously as her body would allow. Although she hated this place and tried to avoid it, tonight she could not, having been at the neighbours’ watching their children. The tree had been dead for years and now had no more bark on it, which made it shine in the horrific moonlight. Its branches, looking like wooden tentacles, emanated from the thick trunk reaching into the sky as if to grab on to individual stars and drag them down to the mouth-shaped hole in the middle of the trunk itself. It was a monster, large and ugly but no one had ever had the nerve to cut it down. It was, after all, also a cemetery.
Mary could not look at this tree without feeling grief. She remembered her 13th birthday, in the summer, climbing the tree with her little brother. They had started climbing trees together shortly after Davie learned to walk and was their way of bonding. But on this particular day, Davie had gone too far up and reached a fragile branch. It made a dry cracking noise as it let her brother fall. It was not a big fall, but he went down head first at a bad angle, and his neck snapped just like the branch had. At her mother’s insistence, they buried him at the foot of the tree to keep him close to the home. Mary did not climb it after that.
But that was not the end. No, that had just been the beginning. Her mother spent her days crying in the bedroom, and her father took out his rage on both of them. Her father, the drunken bastard, beat his wife before the tragedy, but after, his focus shifted on Mary. Now it was her turn. She was punished daily for the accidental death of her brother, sometimes with a belt, other times with a wrench. Other times still with his dick. Mary’s mother was too busy grieving to notice the change in her daughter’s attitude. The abuse went on for three years and would have continued if her father had kept his sins locked up in the safety of their home. But he hadn’t. One Friday night, Mary’s father left the house drunk and belligerent, and tried to rape a neighbour’s daughter. He was too drunk though, and could not keep her quiet. The noise alarmed the girl’s father who chased him out to the field, beat him with a piece of firewood and then hanged him from the tree. The next day they buried him beneath it.
All of this flashed inside Mary’s head, as fast as lightning. As she stood there, fighting back tears, she heard someone call her name. Was it the neighbours? She looked around, but no one was to be seen. Then, she caught a glimpse of something by the tree. “Mary! Mary help me, I’m scared!” There, standing at the foot of the wooden demon was her brother! “Davie!” she cried out. “Help me Mary, I’m scared” he repeated. She knew that what she was witnessing could not be real. She had seen her brother’s corpse go into the ground. Yet there was a part of her that yearned to believe, and so she walked towards her brother, bound in the spell of the moment. “Hang on, I’m almost there” She reassured him. When she got to the first bumpy root of the tree she stopped. Her brother was smiling. “Mary! I’m so glad you came, I love you!” Something changed in his voice when he said that. I love you...so...much.” Davies voice dropped by about two octaves. His smile was no longer one of happiness but one of pure evil. “No,” mumbled Mary through her tears, “it can’t be”. She watched in terror as her brother transformed into her father. “I love you so much little girl. So much that I am going to FUCK you!” As he said this, two branches wrapped around Mary’s neck and started to squeeze. She fought against the supernatural aggressor with all her might. Finally, she snapped one of the branches, to which her father, or perhaps the tree itself, let out a blood curdling scream.
She ran home and waited till the first light of dawn. Then she grabbed her chainsaw and headed out the door. Mary cut down the tree and burnt it all right there in the field. While she worked she thought she heard screams coming from the wood, which gave her a grim satisfaction. Her demons would no longer plague her. When everything had burnt down, she salted the area to make sure nothing would ever grow here again. No trees, bushes or anything else. This place would remain scarred forever, just like Mary.