Beneath the Maple Tree by K. L. Patrick

It didn’t start how people said it would. There weren’t any flashes of light or an ominous feeling. No sense of drawing to the house. The house I bought was ordinary; Completely and totally ordinary. No rumors, nor was it known as the local spook house. It was a fixer-upper; it was normal as could be... Till it wasn’t.

The house had stood for more than a hundred years. A farmhouse without a farm. It sat about half a mile off Dusty Rock Road. It was in what the locals call a “holler”. Two immense oak trees framed the house. A vast, dead maple stood alone in a field about a hundred yards to the house’s right.

I moved into the house in early fall. The leaves were just changing color; the house was like something out of a Van Gogh painting; so bright and full of color. I drove my truck to the sound of the last of the birds chirping as I crunched down the driveway. I put the car into park, parallel to the front door. The house rose high above me. It stared at me with blank, long dead eyes, but nothing unusual. The house had a similar architecture to the Amityville horror house, but there was never any fear. It was normal. I approached the front door and went to turn the old crystalline doorknob, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Crap, the key...” I looked at my watch. It was a quarter past nine in the morning. The realtor wouldn’t be here till ten. I walked towards the back of the house. The porch had a missing handrail, and the window that looked into the kitchen was in pieces. Towards the brush, behind the house, was an old shed. The roof had caved in, but the door remained intact.

I opened the door, which squawked into the crisp fall air. I grimaced at the sound. Inside, it was pitch black. Almost darker than night, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was looking back at me. I quickly closed the door and made my way back to the front of the house just as John, my realtor, arrived. 

He was a thick man, with a huge red mustache, and slicked back hair to match. He approached me without saying a word, handed me my key, then turned to head back to his convertible.

“Hey, aren’t yah going to show me around?” I asked. 

He turned to look at me and smiled a big salesman smile. 

“Too busy, gotta go.” He said in his thick southern accent. He jumped in his car and sped away, slinging up gravel. I probably should’ve realized then he knew something I didn’t.

A few months passed, and I made the house my own. As I was renovating, I found gifts from previous occupants. Mainly in the walls, probably because of mice bringing them in, I figured. A rose petal, an old toy car, and, lastly, a box tucked between two beams in the kitchen ceiling. The box was filled to the brim with old photos. A chill cut through the house, despite the heat being on, and I shivered.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. That’s when it started, right? Wrong. The house remained normal. I sat the box aside and continued to do my work and didn’t pick the photos up again for another month or two. When I did, the images fascinated me. They were of a happy family. A mother, a father, a baby, and a young girl. Every photo was taken beneath the maple in the field. 

I stepped out into the fall air and made my way the one hundred feet to the maple. A chill pierced through the warmth of the day as I stood where they had stood. I touched the tree and closed my eyes. When I opened them, the world had turned black and white. Something tugged at my elbow. I suppressed a scream, not because I was scared, but because it was so weird. I blinked, and hoped color would return to the world, but it didn’t. Fog crept out of the grass, moving upward toward the sky. 

I have never seen that before.

 The fog took shape, and before I knew it, the family from the photo stood in front of me with their backs to me. Each of their heads turned one by one with a sickening creak so they were facing me. Father, mother, daughter, and last, the baby. They didn’t turn like an average person does. Their heads rotated a hundred and eighty degrees. Their cold eyes stabbed at me and the baby spoke with the voice of a ten-year-old boy. 

“Help.” He said.

 The universe flashed black, and the color slowly returned to the world around me.

 I fell.

 I awoke from my daze laid at the foot of the maple. I jumped to my feet and ran back to the house and into the kitchen, despite having been out for some time. 

The door slammed behind me as I walked in, and I jumped. Wind blew through the house, and it caught the photos. One by one, they flipped into the air. As they did, the baby and little girl grew while the parents aged. All the photos were taken in front of the maple tree. The wind stopped, and I looked at the last photo as it floated into my hand, and only saw the mother, father, and daughter. 

What happened to the son? 

Something scraped behind me, and when I turned around, the magnetic letters on the fridge were moving on their own. Until they spelled the word “flip” and stopped. I flipped the photo over. Taped to the back of the photo was a newspaper clipping from 1920 that read “Child missing.” It said he went out to play in the woods outside of his house and disappeared. A chill ran through me once more. Something grabbed me and gently pushed me back out of the kitchen door, towards the shed behind the house. The sun fell behind the mountains and there wasn’t much time left until dark.

I opened the door, and despite the darkness, I saw an old rusty shovel which I grabbed. The shovel was in my left hand as I walked toward the tree. Icy air encapsulated my right hand. Despite my shock from the feeling, I kept moving until I stood in the same spot from the photo. When I got there, the hand let go of mine, and I approached the tree. A tiny hand tugged at my arm, and a small voice whispered “here” in my ear after I stepped back a few feet.

Blindly, I dug. The deeper the hole got, the colder my body became, until I hit something that sounded like a rock. It was hard enough that it bent the tip of the shovel. I threw it away and dug with my hands till two empty eye sockets stared back up at me. I had punched a hole in a casket. The cold let go of me, and a single whisper came.

“Help.” 

I screamed and ran back to the house to call 911.

The police arrived and questioned me. I couldn’t explain to them why I dug there; I just knew I needed to. They exhumed the body and promised me they would give him a proper burial and try to learn his name. After they left, I went back to the house and entered the kitchen. Startled, I almost leaped out of my skin when a small boy appeared in the room. I recognized him immediately as the boy from the photos. He walked up to me and embraced me. 

Cold filled every pore of my body, but no malice. Just cold. He thanked me and slowly dissipated in my arms. I cried into the night as the icy air took over. He was gone; I knew he had left. His spirit left when he dissolved in my arms, but I still wanted to find his story. To find his relatives. Not just to bring closure, but to bring hope. The effect the spirit had on me will last till the day I die. To my last breath, he and the experience will never leave me.