Riddle in the Tree's Heart

(2017, Excerpt)

He walked down the street with resounding footsteps, completely alone, for it was still early, and no one else was about. The sun had not even risen over the Eastern Mountains, and its light could barely be seen through the clouds in the lower part of the sky.

It was just like the day of the funeral. He walked down the same worn out roads, head bowed under the rolling gray front above him. And when he reached the dirt road, it began to rain. As if memory and reality were determined to worsen his memory of the day, the sky was even drearier, and the rain much colder, freezing as it landed around him.

By the time he reached the cemetery, his feet were cold and stiff from the icy water that had soaked through his shoes. His hand, too, covered in a slick layer of water he almost confused for ice, felt frozen and clammy around his cane. Trying to keep his face out of the weather, he pressed his chin firmly against his chest, eyes pointed at his toes. Every so often, he looked up briefly to see where he was walking, and to ensure he wouldn’t pass his family’s plot. About one hundred paces away from it, he glanced up. It was only for a brief second, but he could have sworn he saw a dark figure crouching over one of the headstones. The thing wore a black cloak. But for his family? Impossible, Denny was the last of his line. No one but he mourned that plot. Then his thoughts wandered to the night before. Perhaps it was the phantom, there to mock him once more in his loneliness and childlessness. She would look at him, saying nothing, but her eyes would ask him that piercing question, ‘Why are you so alone? It is no one’s fault but your own.’ But she was not real. It was only an illusion in his mind. If he glanced again, she would be gone.

He took ten steps, then fifteen, then twenty, trying to hold out as long as he could. Finally, when the tips of his shoes were no more than five meters away from the grave, he looked up. It was there, as real as anything he had ever beheld. The cloak was tattered and threadbare near the edges, but as black as moonless night. From it, a single arm extended whose hand was yellow-green. Denny, trembling to his core, reached out with his own shriveled hand, and touched the thing. It did not disappear, nor turn to wisps or lose its form. It was of flesh, or something comparable, for it jerked its back in fear, and in a split second, was fleeing for the woods again.