Of the Trees(61)



Cassie lunged, grabbing her friend by her arms. Laney didn’t grab her back. Her eyes stayed closed and her features relaxed. The ground seemed to tilt, and Laney’s arms were jerked from Cassie’s grasp; the moving, shifting soil pulling her deeper, rougher than quicksand and faster, too. The ground pulled at her with an insistent longing. There could have been a rotor under that tree, twisting and turning. Fresh, heavy dirt sprouted up all around them. Dark and moist, it stank of rot. The old topsoil, mixed with dried leaves and broken pine needles, disappeared in the pull of breaking ground.

Cassie screamed, hardening her grip on her friend and pulling uselessly. She may as well have been trying to rip her friend from set concrete. Laney was yanked back, pulled further into the muck, and Cassie fell forward, refusing to let her go, landing on her stomach, fully stretched on the shifting ground.

Roots surged again and this time wrapped Laney’s torso, pulling her to her chest into the soil. Fear seized Cassie’s throat, and she screamed, pulling at her friend’s arms until she saw blood bead where her fingernails pressed into bare skin. “Laney! Please!”

The smell of freshly dug dirt, of decay, stung in Cassie’s nostrils as the soil churned and roiled from below. She could feel the small roots springing up underneath her, finding purchase on her skin. She kicked and screamed and wriggled away, her hands never leaving Laney.

Laney looked up for the last time.

“I told you. You should have gone,” she whispered. And with a smile and a final sound of thunder, she was yanked under and swallowed by the earth.

Wrong.

Cassie came to her knees, raking her hands into the dirt. Her fingertips bled from where she was digging into the loose soil. Rocks bit into her skin, and she spasmed with fear when her hand wrapped around a root, causing her to skitter back on her heels.

Laney was gone.

Thoughts mingled with blind digging and panic. Cassie could see nothing but the dirt, the empty dirt. She rose to her feet, her hands shaking, staring at the spot her friend once stood.

It was their fault. It had to be. Somehow, they took her. They …

They what?

Cassie stumbled once as she turned. Then she ran.





“You have to tell them the truth,” her mother whispered. “Cassie, please, Laney could be in serious trouble.”

She was. But, Cassie couldn’t tell them again.

Cassie had gotten lost when she was running from the woods. Every root and rock seemed to spring up from the ground to catch her foot. Her shins were bruised and cut, her palms bloody. She came out on the road several miles from her house, not even realizing where she was. She was a mess. The tears had started, she didn’t know when, sometime when she was running, or maybe even when Laney had been sucked under, she couldn’t be sure. But when the trucker saw her and stopped, asked if she was okay, she had been sobbing. She told him about the tree, about her friend being taken, about how she needed the police. He had called for her, even waited until the flashing lights and the sirens lit up the quiet road with light and sound. He had given a statement, repeated what Cassie told him, even as Cassie was stammering through it again. It was hard to get it all out, hard to make sense of it.

It sounded crazy, she knew that. But it had happened! Just like she said. And seeing the officers’ faces as she retold it, hearing one steal away to the side to call for an ambulance, it sent her over the edge.

“I’m not lying!” she had screamed. “She’s in there, she’s in there!”

From the forest, she could hear the echo of a whispered laugh.

“Did she fall? Is she hurt?”

“I don’t know! The tree, it—”

“You should wait for the paramedics,” the officer had said, cutting her off. Cassie’s dirty fingers had raked through her hair, dirt and twigs cascading from her. She paced the road, the cops watching her silently. She had tried to calm herself when the ambulance arrived, wanting someone to hear her, but the police told her story first, eyebrows raised and whispering behind their hands.

Cassie tried again, shouting to be heard, but before she knew it, she was strapped to a stretcher, her wrists secured to the handles with cuffs lined in fleece. It made everything worse, the panic, the blinding panic. She pleaded for them to take them off, pulled at the cuffs until her wrists were red and her muscles burned. Her yelling was loud at first but then felt muted, her mouth opening but only a terrible crying coming out. She clenched her eyes shut because she could. She could control those muscles, not like the noise coming out of her mouth, that she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t slow her breathing down or catch her breath. The ambulance bounced over the road, going fast, faster than she thought necessary. Maybe the driver couldn’t take that awful crying. She could barely stand it herself. She opened her eyes in time to watch the roof of the ambulance tremble as the vehicle slammed to a stop, saw in jerky snapshots the ceiling slide from view and the sky, purple with bright spots of light, replace it before the blinding overhead lights of the emergency room forced her eyes closed again. A needle pierced her arm and the next time she opened her eyes, she was staring at a dim ceiling and the anxious faces of her parents.

Her stomach roiled, and bile flew up her throat. She went to sit up, knowing she was about to vomit but found her hands still locked down. She was able to just sit up enough to get sick over the side rail of her bed, her mother jumping out of the way just in time.

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