Of the Trees
E. M. Fitch
To the beginning of all beautiful friendships.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
-The Stolen Child by W. B. Yeats
The deeper into the woods Cassie went, the more her best friend resembled a fairy-tale creature. Laney walked in front of her, the backpack she wore bulged out in the limited moonlight, and she looked, for the moment, like the grotesque silhouette of a skinny hunchback, her long hair swinging dark and loose past her shoulders. The friends shifted together through the trees, knowing the destination by heart.
The woods came alive at night. The lack of light drew things out, or perhaps it was only that the blackness accentuated the sounds. Claws scraped the dirt. Dry leaves flipped over. The mating calls of crickets and tree frogs echoed and pinged through the trees. Wings rustled through the air, followed by the inevitable swoop of a low flying creature. All barely noticeable in the day time, they screamed at night.
Nervous flutters took residence in Cassie’s gut. It was probably the darkness—the shadows—that hid the sources of the sounds. It made the animals braver, less apt to be seen, less prone to being caught. Bolder. The noises surrounded her, and it was possible that the feeling of being enclosed was what set her nerves on edge. She had walked through these woods at night before though. Tonight something else was bothering her, something undefinable.
The moon hung above the tree line, only half full. The luminescence struggled to push its way through the leaves that still clung to the trees, stamping wavering patches of silver on the forest floor. The moonlight was just enough, dim as it was, to allow Cassie to see the rocks and bramble, avoid the prickers, and step over the low hanging branches.
The girls’ intrusion into this place—the world of owls and bats and night creatures—was commonplace by now. The path they traveled had been stomped through so many times that the ferns stopped trying to grow back. A bare line through the trees, recognizable only to them, stretched from Cassie’s backyard to their destination.
Still, Cassie hated coming at night.
But, it was Laney’s birthday, September the fifth. She turned seventeen, and she had insisted.
“She only comes at night! I’m sure of it,” Laney had whined, begging her friend to come with her.
“Because a ghost cares if it’s day or night?” Cassie had shot back.
“You know why!” Laney said with a little stomp of her foot that got Cassie to sigh in resignation.
She did know why. Not that she believed any of it, of course. But she knew Laney’s version, the one she had researched and convinced herself was real.
It was over two hundred years ago that Lizzy Palmer went looking for her husband in a snowstorm. Legend said that Harold had been in town getting supplies when his wife was overcome with an awful, persistent feeling that he may never return. Crazed, she went out into the storm to look for him. Lizzy never found Harold; instead, she got caught in the blizzard, sucked into one of the boggy marshes that surrounded her home and the nearby cemetery. She had been pulled under the freezing, murky water, her screams muffled by the storm.
Some versions of the story had Harold finding her in time. People said he just stood there, watching his wife sink below the swampy muck, watching as her mouth was filled with mud and cold water. Some say that’s why she came back—to haunt him into insanity. Others say they have seen his ghostly lantern light, still out searching for the body of his lost wife.
Not that Cassie thought they would see anything. She and Laney hadn’t last week, nor the week before that. The girls had spent most of their summer sitting in the cemetery. Even after school started, Laney still hadn’t let it go. She was obsessed with the place—Gray Lady Cemetery. It had a real name, something registered in the town. Laney knew what it was, but everyone in school called it Gray Lady Cemetery because Lizzy Palmer, the Gray Lady, haunted it. She floated through, past her grave, in a blur of deathly gray. Supposedly.
Though on a night like tonight, the air hung with moisture, maybe Cassie and Laney did have a good shot at seeing something. Whatever misty occurrence happened to convince people that a ghost was hanging around, maybe the conditions were right for it tonight.
Their path ended abruptly at a small stone wall. The woods were riddled with them, old property markers from back before the entire area became protected. Most were crumbling and low to the ground, but this one was higher and in better condition. It formed a rough square, enclosing the graveyard. Three sides of it cut through the woods, but just to Cassie’s left, the stone wall butt up to a dirt road. The dirt of the road gleamed a cool silver, a ribbon winding its way through the night. She could see nothing else from that direction except a concentration of darkness—a hole of blackness punched through restless leaves. Cassie watched as Laney climbed over the wall, one foothold at a time, her backpack swaying.
The light was better in the small, square cemetery. A patch of sky, dark velvet with no stars, hung like a blank canvas above the swaying of the black trees that reached into it. The dry leaves rustled together on long limb branches. They fell in bursts as the wind rushed through, covering the top of the rock wall.
The grass in the cemetery was long and loose. It tickled the backs of Cassie’s knees. The town maintained the graveyard—at least occasionally. It wasn’t mowed; there were no neat rows of headstones or miniature flags poking from flower vases. There was only one intact headstone in the plot, the rest were crumbling limestone stubs, poking up through the dirt. Cassie stepped carefully, edging around the corners of pale stone that came tilting up through the earth. She knew from experience how easily those bits could catch her toes.