The Trees Have Eyes

by Tobias Wade

  Sunlight streamed in from the window as Mary’s alarm rang out, waking her from her sleep. Stretching, Mary felt herself slowly coming to. Last night’s sleep had been wonderful. Thinking about it Mary realized she hadn’t heard Lily cry or scream all night. Maybe that was a good thing, she thought to herself. The doctor did say they can stop after a time, maybe Lily was one of the lucky ones for whom it stopped quickly. Deciding on letting Lily sleep in a bit more, Mary checked her phone and found a voicemail from Dr. Miller’s office confirming a two o’clock appointment that afternoon. Smiling, Mary made her way to the kitchen, turning on the coffee pot and sitting down to read while the coffee pot filled with that magical brew. Lily typically awoke to the smell of coffee; it was almost a given that her little bed rumpled curls would come bouncing down the hall in a whirl, jumping right into Mary’s lap, but today was different. She’s just exhausted, Mary thought to herself, returning to her long-neglected book. After two cups of coffee and five chapters Mary began to worry that Lily might be sick. She set down her book and brought her mug to the kitchen sink. Mary padded her way down the hallway to Lily’s room. The door stood open and the light coming in from the window shone in a long beam across the carpeted floor.

  “Baby girl,” Mary questioned, leaning in through the doorway. Looking around, Mary saw the same room she had left the night before. To the right was a pile of princess dolls and the large princess castle Lily had begged her for last Christmas. Looking left she noticed the bed rumpled, blankets piled high.

  “Are we hiding today, Lily,” Mary said teasingly. “I wonder where Lily could be?” she said, creeping over to the edge of the bed. Pulling back the covers, she found Lily’s pillows but no Lily. Clawing at the blankets frantically, she succeeded in making a mess as the blankets flew and landed all over the floor. Lily was not in bed. Mary frantically checked the closet, under the bed, the bathroom, her hall closet, her bedroom, and the kitchen and dining room. She was not there.

  “Lily!” she cried, running up and down the hall of the apartment building. People began to poke their heads out of their doors, drawn out by the spectacle of a mother looking for her lost daughter. Violet, the little old lady from 3E called the cops and made her way over to Mary who was sobbing hysterically.

  “Come here sweetheart,” she beckoned. Holding the woman, she guided her back to her apartment and sat her down on the couch. “The police are coming dear, let me get you nice hot cup of coffee.”

  Busing herself, Violet found a mug and filled it with the hot aromatic liquid. Bringing it over to Mary, the woman accepted the cup with a blank stare. The mug shook in her hands and she wrapped both hands around it to steady it.

  “Where is she?” Mary asked Violet, her eyes pleading for answers. Sitting next to the young woman, Violet just patted her back and rubbed her arm. “I don’t know dear, but the police should be here soon. They will help us sort this out and find little Lily.”

  A loud knock caused Mary to jump, coffee sloshing on to the carpet, but she didn’t seem to care. She set the mug on the floor and walked briskly over to the door. Two officers stood in the doorway. One stood at average height, had neatly trimmed hair and a baby face; the other was older, middle-aged with kind eyes and a bushy mustache. “Ma’am,” the older officer said. “We are here in regards to the missing child. Can we come in?” he asked, gesturing inside.

  “Yes, yes please” Mary responded, opening the door quickly and ushering them in. “Do you want coffee, water?” she asked, looking towards the kitchen.

  “No thank you ma'am,” the older officer answered. “I’m Officer Donald and this is Officer Strode. What can you tell us about this morning?” he asked. Mary began to tremble and tears rolled freely down her cheeks.

  “I, I don’t know. It was just a normal morning I mean, Lily hasn’t been doing well. Night terrors the doctor had said. I had an appointment with a psychologist scheduled this afternoon. She had been waking up screaming and crying for the past few nights, it was truly frightening. She said the shadow men wanted to take her, but I never found anyone in the house. I figured they might just be a part of the dreams. This morning though, she didn’t come out right away like she usually does but I figured she was just tired. It started to get later in the day so I went to go wake her up so we could get ready for the appointment with the psychologist. I thought she was playing a game when I walked in, but then she wasn’t anywhere to be found. Where could she be?” she asked. “You have to find her, she is all I have.”

  Looking at the mother’s tear-stained face, Officer Donald’s face softened. “We will do our best to get your little girl back. Do you have a picture of her we can use and something of hers as well?” he asked.

  “Yeah, anything, anything you need,” Mary replied. She left Violet and the officers in the living room and returned a few moments later with a 4 by 6 photo and her daughter’s favorite blanket. Taking the items gently from Mary, Officer Donald nodded to Officer Strode, and the two turned to meet the rest of the team to start mobilizing the large canvass. Mary sat down next to Violet, large sobs wracking her body. The old woman held her close like one of her own children. Trying to provide what little comfort she could to the bereft young woman.

  Weeks had past and there was no word on Lily. Mary had been down at the police station every day since Lily had gone missing but they never had anything new to report. Mary had lost weight and the bags under her eyes grew dark, masking her beauty. She hadn’t been to the diner since it happened and had no idea if she was going to have a job to return to when this was all over. Mary had taken to sleeping in Lily’s bed each night, soaking in the smell of her daughter, hoping that when she awoke she would magically see her daughter there right next to her. Her bright eyes looking back into hers, a goofy smile spreading across her face.

  Mary opened her eyes and was greeted with the opposite wall of Lily’s room. Closing her eyes tightly, trying to stop the tears that never seemed to stop, she willed herself out of bed and made her way slowly to the kitchen. The phone rang and Mary’s heart leapt. “Hello,” she asked quickly.

  “Mary, it’s Tony. Are you coming in today? I don’t want to be a dick but we really need you. If you can’t make it in, we are gonna have to find someone else. You know we love you but we have a business to run. Shari’s been running on empty for the past few days,” Tony explained.

  Mary sighed, “I don’t know Tony. I don’t want to be gone if Lily shows up. Do what you have to do. I’m sorry.”

  “Ah, Mary I’m sorry. I get it. Maybe we’ll just get a part-timer. I really hope everything turns out okay. You know Shari and I are here for you if you need us, right?” Tony asked, his concern evident in his voice.

  “Thanks Tony, I’ll keep you updated,” Mary said, “Tell Shari I said hi.”

  “Will do, bye Mary,” Tony said ending the call. Mary spent the day cleaning the kitchen and trying to read. Officer Donald and Strode had been keeping her updated but their calls had become less and less frequent. Mary grabbed the phone and called the station; she had the number memorized by now.

  Both officers were out but she left a message asking for an update as soon as they were back from the field. Hanging up the phone, Mary sat down on the couch and put on Bambi. The movie played but she wasn’t really watching. In her mind she was imaging Lily: watching her daughter on the floor laying on her belly, feet swinging up in the air.

  The movie had ended but Mary still sat on the couch staring at the blank screen. Mary had no idea how long she had been sitting there but she finally got up and made her way to the bathroom. Looking out the window she found that it was dark outside. It was much later than she thought. How long had she been sitting there, she wondered to herself?

  Deciding she should just try to get some sleep, Mary made her way back to Lily’s room. Lying down on the small bed, Mary felt overwhelmed with grief. It had been weeks; would they ever find her? She didn’t want to lose hope but the doubts were t
hreatening to overtake her mind.

  Mary fell into a fitful sleep and awoke with a start. In front of her stood two tall dark shadows. They looked like large men but there were no significant characteristics. Her eyes darted back between the two figures and down their arms. Between them was a smaller shadow holding to the hands of the other two.

  “Mommy,” the little figure said. Mary didn’t hear anything else as her screams pierced the night.

  Dustin Chisam

  The Devil’s Cauldron

  It goes without saying that your life can change on a dime. It may be for the best, but destiny barreling through your day like a freight train usually heralds a turn for the worst. But sometimes that train can hit you, and still leave you able to mill about in your boring, everyday life. All the same, afterwards your eyes are forever open to what you were once oblivious to, and though the change is entirely inside you, it seems that the world itself has turned inside-out. This happened to me at the most appropriate place.

  The falls were our county’s local secret. A 40-foot drop in a tributary seventeen miles off of the Platte River in Colorado. The pool lay in a perfect ring of stone with an opening which allowed it to continuing to flow. The dark grey of the stone around the pool, with the almost black stone behind the waterfall lent it an ambience that earned it the nickname “The Devil’s Cauldron.” To say nothing of the drooping tree branches that hung over the side of the fall, framing it in an almost macabre way. It was a popular hangout for teenagers to come drink or smoke. If a town troublemaker was unaccounted for, the adults expected them to be found here. But somehow, on Halloween of all days, we were the only ones here.

  We were all slugging back some local lager around a small campfire at the shore atop the falls. I’d driven from the university where I was attending my freshman year to visit my two oldest friends on Halloween. All things considered, we hadn’t been as scattered to the four winds like we’d feared as children. Kylie was attending a local community college, my school was only 45 minutes away, and Thorsten still lived in town. But there was a threat to our cohesiveness as a triad, and it was the tale he was regaling us with:

  “That old bitch said it was all me,” Thorsten growled. “Got a court date on the 15th—old man posted bail but said I’m on my own after that.”

  Can’t say I’m too surprised. He had a long list of screw-ups that had earned him the entire medley of offenses a juvie could rack up and still be walking free. Fighting, stealing, drinking, and snorting. Add all those up, and it didn’t look good for his trial. The judge was notoriously unforgiving for repeat offenders. The wild vandalism spree he’d been pinched for meant he’d probably be eating Thanksgiving dinner out of a divided cafeteria tray surrounded by glowering hard-timers. This impending separation had tinged everything about today with a melancholy I had expected to feel during graduation. And I knew it was because one of my best friends was slowly riding off into a sunset that foretold an ever-dimming future.

  “Well, fuck it,” Thorsten sighed. “Maybe I can serve it and walk out without my asshole wrecked.” I knew Kylie’s gratitude for the time, years ago, he’d kicked the ass of some kid who’d called her a dyke had worn thin after all of his problems, so she was glad at the obvious invitation to change the subject.

  “Can you believe I’ve never been here before?” she asked. “Everybody I know made at least one trip before they could even drive, because they had an older brother, sister, or cousin to take them.”

  “But no parents?” I asked. We all chuckled at this—no responsible parent would take their kids here. It was a bit of a hike on a poorly maintained trail. Not too dangerous in and of itself. But there was another reason all the local parents discouraged us from poking around the Cauldron too much. Hell, I had never even tried to climb up or down the roughly carved steps not ten feet away that led down to the pool below.

  “All the stories,” Kylie nodded. “You know how weird you feel when you talk to other kids in other towns and they have to explain to you how weird it is how superstitious the adults in this town are?”

  “I know all about that,” I agreed. “How many times did you see someone do the horns gesture to ward off the evil eye by the time you were ten?”

  “And it’s all thanks to this place lying right in their backyard,” Thorsten murmured. The campfire popped and crackled, but Thorsten’s eyes remained in shadow as its light danced across his face.

  The falls were gorgeous, of course. The tumbling water was soothing, and despite its forcefulness, not so loud that it threatened to overpower our conversation. I looked thirty feet down at the tree line that encircled the pool and flanked the stream it flowed into. Shining our flashlights on it, I had assumed it was the night time and power of suggestion that made it look like the darkest water I had ever seen.

  “Would people think this place looked spooky if it weren’t for all the stories about it?” I wondered aloud. “I mean, it’s really pretty.”

  “I’m the wrong person to ask. I think it’s pretty because it’s spooky,” Kylie chuckled. She wasn’t quite a Goth, but she loved all things dark and mysterious.

  “Some of ‘em are pretty… intense,” Thorsten replied. As he gazed into the fire, I saw the good cheer he’d tried so hard to keep up falter, as the future reminded him of its relentless approach.

  “Why don’t you tell us a few,” I hurriedly suggested. And if he told me one I’d heard before, I knew I would keep my mouth shut. But it turned out I had never heard any of the stories he told. “First story I ever heard about this place was the ‘Cries of the Broken Babe.’” He took a swig of his beer before continuing. “Chick has a hard pregnancy. Doesn’t even have a midwife. I don’t remember if this was the turn of the century, probably no later than WWII. Anyways, her husband dies in a freak accident—something he was fixing squished him flat. Now, he was the controlling type, and kept her inside all the time. She didn’t have any friends to help with the birth—maybe she was too scared to go out at this point. So she pops the baby out by herself, and lo and behold, it’s stillborn. It might have been days, or maybe even hours before she staggers her way here, and stands at the top of the falls. She screams to heaven above or hell below—she don’t care, she’ll take help from whoever’s listening—and tosses her baby into the water.

  “It was alive. But the fall had broken it. Kind of like those dogs with swimmer’s syndrome. It cried, it bled, the whole time you could tell by looking at it that it shouldn’t be alive. But nothing she did could end its pain, so she returned to the Cauldron, this time taking her and the baby under the water, and never coming back up. But you can still hear them both. The baby, crying in an agony that never ends, and the woman, for everything she’d lost. Some people even said they’ve heard crying from the pool—I mean, not just hanging in the air, but right out of the water like a goddamn speaker. Might be a baby. Might be a grown woman. There’re a few who say they’ve heard both, in an eternal duet of agony.”

  We mulled that over for a long time, the small fire crackling as we finished our beers. A huge POP startled us out of our musings, prompting me to say the first thing that came to mind.

  “Might be bullshit,” I finally said, thought I was thinking More like definitely bullshit. “But still pretty goddamn spooky.”

  “Another one that’s a little less crazy,” Thorsten continued. “There was this religious group heading west, trying to find a place to settle out in California. Somehow they found this place. Well, the leader decides this’d be a great place to baptize a few new converts they’d made along the way. So he wades on in, and does the whole rigmarole with the first few. Then comes the two twin boys. They ask if he can dunk them both at once. This leader says ‘Why not?’ So he gets a big ‘ol meaty paw on each head, and pushes them under. And a second later, he’s freaking out. He starts frantically splashing and hitting at the water—because he lost them as soon as they went under. The second they disappear into that black water
, it’s water that’s all he’s holding.

  “The whole entire flock starts panicking, and they all jump in, swinging and splashing the same as him. But there’s no sign of the two boys. The group got out of town, post fucking haste.

  “Funny thing is—this leader became known as a faith healer afterwards. He never stood in a pulpit again, but he’d come up during other services and lay the hands on anyone desperate enough. And once in a while—it worked. But he started to drink. He’d get in fights and lash out at people. One night he screams that he’s a fraud, and that it’s all from the forces of darkness. Then he up and vanishes for months. When he turns up again, it’s right here in town. Nobody ever saw him. But he left a note on the front door of the sheriff’s office, saying he’d returned to drown himself in the Cauldron, and that they should hurry up and pull him out before some poor kid finds him face down. But they never found him here, or downstream. Or anywhere else, ever again.

  “Last one I know, I sort of believe. There was a rough couple of years—a long drought almost dried up the falls to a trickle. This was about a hundred years ago, and supposedly the mayor of our town waded into what was left of the Cauldron and slit his wrists. Same thing as the preacher—he left a suicide note in his office, and when they found it and went looking, they didn’t find a body. Of course, the night before they found the note, the skies just burst open, and it rains for three days straight. Maybe his body just got washed away because the Cauldron got filled up again and hasn’t dropped since.”