There were these strange, dark, unsettling collection of trees that lay just beyond the vicinity of my neighborhood, conveniently stationed behind my house.
Always damp, dark, and barren.
No matter what time of year, summer, winter, these trees... they looked like oversized twigs, possessed by some sort of unnatural force. For as long as I had been in this neighborhood, I had never seen them grow leaves or resemble a color that wasn't remotely black.
They stuck out like a sore thumb; ungodly in appearance and they gave off the feeling that they had been intentionally placed there by someone.
Tall,
unforgiving
singularities,
each one their own enigma.
And sometimes, when it rained, and the morning mist hung low in the dreary fall mornings, the trees emerged, stark, out of the grey, and their tips looked sharp enough to, god forbid, impale someone.
But that wasn't the case for everyone.
The trees had once been strong, powerful maples that towered over houses and rose proudly into the blue skies.
But they had been wrecked into oblivion,
diminished,
stripped of their leaves.
And now they stood miserably,
rotting,
leaning every so slightly to the left,
obtuse and off-putting,
waiting for a gust of wind to uproot them from the ground.
At least that was what Ms. Torrance said.
In a house at the end of the street, on the corner of Elm and Maple Street, there lives an elderly woman, always wearing her lavender sweater, a browning floral white gown, and golden-rimmed half-moon spectacles, that perpetually spent her time filling the heads of the kids in the town with these stories about a spirit that haunts these woods.
Legend has it that on Hallow's Eve, in a house that was built where my house now stood, a little girl and her family had lived peacefully, unnoticed, until the events that were to take place on one unfateful evening.
The elderly woman, Ms. Torrance, claimed that she always sensed something was off about that peculiar family.
The disturbing way in which her father would smile as his gaze trailed after his children, watching them play in the front yard while he sat on the porch, his raven-black hair blending into the shadows of their wooden patio.
And sometimes
His watchful stare would linger just a moment too long on the youngest of the three kids.
Rachel.
She took after him.
The jet-black, slick, pin-straight hair.
The unnerving glint in the green depths of her eyes.
It just didn't add up, she states.
And one night
Ms. Torrance had been knitting by her dining table, yet another decorative cloth she'd have to go through the trouble of finding a fitting location for it to reside for several years until it started collecting dust like the rest of her fabric concoctions, when she saw a flickering of an orange hue in the corner of her eye, followed by a muffled scream.
She pushed her chair back, a prolonged screech following in its wake as wood slid against wood, and peered through her window.
Much to her horror, she found that one of the houses had been set ablaze.
Rachel's house.
Her house was several houses down from that of Ms. Torrance's, but Ms. Torrance could have sworn that she saw, by the very edge of the forest that was now teeming with these ghastly trees, a little ball of flame had been trailing from the house and into the woods.
But the most intriguing part of this tale was that this sphere of fire resembled a... person.
A person that appeared to be trying to escape something.
The firefighters came too late.
Rachel's mother, her brother, her sister, and her dog were out of her burning abode safely.
But her father was nowhere to be found
And neither was she.
A few minutes after the firefighters had entered the house, in what would turn out to be a failed attempt to locate Rachel, her father came staggering, "coughing" as Ms. Torrance would always put in air quotes, bleary-eyed, as he cried,
"Monica," he struggled to wheeze. "Monica, I tried, I tried to find her. She just wasn't there."
And with that, a deafening wail filled the night air, as Rachel's mother fell to the ground, head thrown back, arms outstretched, and fingers curled in resentment, as tears streamed down her face.
The firefighters came to her, to find that the message they had to relay was to fall upon deaf ears, as the family had already pieced together that Rachel had been killed by the fire.
An investigation as to what initiated the fire and the mission to find Rachel's corpse ensued for the following few days.
The cause was never found
The corpse was never recovered
And the investigation was suspended.
But what was never explained
Was why the trees behind the fence of the house caught fire
When there wasn't a single scorch trail to be found, leading outside of the house.
The only explanation Ms. Torrance could come up with was that Rachel had been set ablaze by her own father, and chased into the woods, where she burned to death by her lonesome, and it was her scream that followed those mournful ones of her own mother that was separated from her by a fence and a forest lining.
The reason I never bought into it was because I was never around to witness these things Ms. Torrance claimed she observed, and that for a father to murder his daughter sounded downright ridiculous.
But the reason it was eerily accurate was because it tied together the fact that Rachel's corpse was never found, and it would explain how the trees caught on fire without the grass leading to them left untouched.
Sometimes at night I can hear painful moaning in the woods and I myself feel unsafe within the walls of my own house, knowing that someone died in this very spot that my house was built on once theirs had burned to ashes.
And sometimes, in the mornings that I get up early to get ready for school, I peer through the blinds of my curtains, and I see the small mischievous glint within the mesmerizingly green eyes of a small, ghostly pale girl, who sometimes comes to see me at the dead of night, just beyond the tips of the strange, dark, unsettling collection of trees that pierce starkly through the mist of the dreary autumnal dawns.
