Creaky Trees: A Collection of Dark Short Stories

By Lemi K.

Mysterious creatures in the woods, ghosts trapped in television sets, an asylum that harbors alien entities; this collection of nine short stories is sure to chill you to the bone and infect your dreams with nightmarish dread. (130 pages)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lemi K.
• Release date: Apr 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370377978

Book preview

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Liminal Space

Purgatorium

Polarized

The Transition

Platypus

The Devil’s Nanny

Ear To Ear

The Host

The Breadwinner

About The Author

INTRODUCTION

I seem to have a fixation with people finding weird stuff in the woods.

If there is a through-line with all of these stories, it’s that they usually center around a heavily wooded area where somebody comes across something bizarre.

I pondered on this for a while before I finally concluded what the reason for that is. I think it comes from my experiences as a teenager.

I grew up in a rural town, and used to go on nature walks in the forest all the time. It was the closest thing to fun I had. I would do this alone, completely unplugged. As I meandered about, I would find random things like a single shoe left behind, or a tiny hut made out of sticks. While neither of those things are inherently strange, I would find myself speculating about the possibilities, and my mind would inevitably go to dark places:

Who’s shoe is that? Why did they leave it behind? What happened to them? Are they dead? Who built that hut and why? Do they live out here? Is it their shoe? Or did they do something to the person to whom the shoe belongs? Should I be in these woods right now?

This is where I draw a lot of my inspiration from; these moments of curiosity and concern. I would begin questioning my findings in the forest and then I would begin asking, "What about this ? and, What if this happened? followed by, Then that would probably happen…" and on it would go until it became a narrative.

What about Creaky Trees? What does that phrase mean? Where does that title come from?

Years ago, I was making a short film with a buddy of mine, you guessed it, out in the woods, and we had stopped filming to take a break. We were sitting out in the woods, in silence, in the dead of fall, with winter on the horizon. All of the leaves had fallen, all of the birds had left and we were miles away from any busy street.

It was as quiet as quiet gets.

While sitting there, I noticed something that stuck with me: all of the tall, slender, leafless trees were swaying in the wind, and they were all emitting an eerie creaking sound. Without the noise of woodland creatures and rustling leaves, you could hear the age of these trees audibly.

I fell in love with that sound and implemented it into the film, even dubbing in the sound of creaking trees where they could not be heard.

Eventually, something occurred to me that I had never thought about before. The sound of these creaking trees can only be heard in the winter when everything has died. It dawned on me that in a post apocalyptic world in which most aspects of life had been wiped out, this sound would be heard around the world. It would be so evident and omnipresent that it would be deafening.

Once I realized that, creaking trees became as much a character in my stories as the protagonists were. Having my stories set in a dying forest where the only sounds are the voices of the characters and the creaking of those trees, tends to add an unsettling tone to entire piece; a sort of impending doom and a stark reminder of mortality.

The detail of creaking trees started as just that: a detail within a larger story. But I always thought the phrase Creaky Trees had a nice ring to it. It is a phrase I have had in my mind for a years. I even titled a paperback collection of screenplays I had written Creaky Trees: Six Films I will Never Make . It’s a phrase that has bounced around my head for a very long time, and took me a while before I finally found the perfect way to apply it. It wasn’t until I had written a handful of short, scary stories that an idea popped into my head:

What if these stories weren’t all singular? What if they all took place within the same universe?

Drawing inspiration from stories like Twin Peaks, Welcome To Night Vale , and Alan Wake , I thought it might be cool to not only set the stories in the same universe, but have them all take place in the same town. A town that harbors all things dark and sinister, as if haunted by some sort of malevolent force. Once I had decided this, I then of course had to come up with a name for the town. Something catchy. Something that embodies the tone and vibe of my stories. It took me quite a while before it dawned on me:

Why not just call it Creaky Trees?

With a detailed, living, breathing world to play in, the ideas almost started to write themselves. Not all of my stories take place in the town itself, but I’d like to think that each and every one of them shares roots with the town of Creaky Trees in some way, shape, or form.

I actually went through these stories and eliminated some sentences which directly address the creaking trees. Not with the intention of retconning them, but for your benefit. I didn’t want that detail to become redundant as you read through multiple stories. But now that I’ve told you that, I hope that as you read these tales, you’ll imagine the indistinguishable sound of creaky trees moaning in the wind.

LIMINAL SPACE

It was around 9:15pm that Adam received a call from Dan. It was his night off and he had been driving around smoking a cigar. Adam continuously threatened that he was going to stop answering calls from the precinct when he was off-duty, and yet every time a call came through, Adam found it hard to resist answering. He liked to think that it was his sense of duty that motivated him to do so, but the truth was, he was simply too anxious of a person to screen the call.

Admittedly, anxiety was perhaps not the best trait in a police officer, but in Adam’s defense, it would be hard for anyone to not be anxious when your mother was the Sheriff. Adam Wyatt was 23 and still lived at home, so his mother was his superior both in life, and at work. While this sometimes caused Adam to feel anxious about his job, he understood fully that things could be far worse. After all, there were countless police officers elsewhere whom had far better reasons to be anxious: getting stabbed or getting shot in the face, to name just a couple.

In the town of Creaky Trees, Michigan, Adam had very little to worry about. There were a lot of disappearances, sure, and even some animal attacks, but that was to be expected in a Northwoods town tucked away in the American Midwest. Those things just happen when people go hiking alone. But as for actual crime, there was little to none. On a bad night, Adam might have to chase down a teenager tagging a building, or break up a bar fight amongst the thirsty locals. But on 99% of the nights he worked, he found himself driving around aimlessly in silence, without a single call.

In fact… he only seemed to get calls on his nights off. He wondered why this might be. He pondered on it for a while and came to the simple conclusion that there definitely was a God and that this God had a personal vendetta with him.

It’s my night off, Dan, Adam called out to his phone, which was sitting in the cup-holder. He always had a bad habit of talking too loud on the phone. I’m not even in my cruiser.

This didn’t seem to phase Dan, who appeared to already have some follow-up lines in place should Adam say this. Do you have your gun on you? he asked.

I always have my gun on me, Adam said.

And are you wearing your deputy coat?

Adam remained silent, a resentful scowl powered by pure distaste spread across his face. He had been defeated. He knew it. And so did Dan.

Bet you’re wearing your deputy’s coat, said Dan’s voice through the cell phone speaker.

Fine. Yes. I am. But only because it’s the warmest coat I own.

Adam barely finished his sentence when Dan blurted out, Great! So you’ve got your gun and you’ve got your uniform… you’re basically ready for duty.

Adam groaned, Come on, man…

I know, I know. It’s your night off. But unfortunately we don’t have anyone else to send out, Adam. Dan spoke with a forced apologetic tone.

Isn’t my mom on duty tonight? Adam asked, half-questioning, half-certain.

Yeah. But she’s tied up at the moment. Men’s room toilet is leaking again.

Adam rolled his eyes. How many times do I have to tell her to just call a plumber?

Dan chuckled. Plumbers are too expensive. Her words.

It’s a fucking write-off! What the hell doesn’t she get!?

Adam instantly realize that he had screamed this into the phone with an excessive amount of anger and immediately felt embarrassed. He deliberately delivered his next words with a smooth calmness, so as to try and move past and brush over his unnecessary outburst:

So, what’s the problem?

Dan cleared his throat, Welfare check. We got a call from Violet Wilson tonight. Said there’s a ghost trapped in her TV and she wants it out.

Ha. That’s a new one, Adam said, shaking his head with a smile.

Dan let out a giggle, Good old Violet.

Yeah, ‘old’ being the operative word, Adam said before taking a long pause to think things over. Alright, well… I’m not too far from her house. Maybe ten minutes. I’ll head over there now.

Awesome. Thanks, Adam.

My pleasure, Adam said sarcastically before ending the call.

He exhaled angrily, irritated about being called in on his night off. But his anger quickly faded and was replaced by compassion. Adam actually quite enjoyed welfare checks, especially when it came to a town treasure like Violet Wilson. She and her husband Len had been some of the first people to plant roots in Creaky Trees back in the 1950s. Way back when the town was called Dogsnout.

Once an old logging town, Dogsnout had now exchanged one strange name for another and had become the tight-knit community of Creaky Trees. After the loggers had cleared out a large portion of the nearby woods, people started buying up plots of land. While there was still plenty of wood to be harvested, the loggers eventually moved on to someplace else after a mysterious blight had ravaged most of the plant life back in 1956. What remained was an eerie, almost haunted looking forest full of dead trees. Tall, thin, sprawling husks that waved in the wind, emanating a perpetual creaking sound. Hence where the town got its name. It was a bizarre and unsettling sound, one that chilled most visitors to the bone. Though, the inhabitants had grown quite accustomed to it. A creaking tree might be something to marvel at for the average person who might pass one while walking in the park, but for the townsfolk of Creaky Trees, there might as well have been no sound in all. In fact, there’s a common saying in town that notes: The only way a local would ever notice the creaking is if it suddenly stopped.

It took some time before Creaky Trees eventually became what it is today, what with settlers not quite arriving in droves so much as a slow trickle. But, as Father Creecher over at the local church always says: Every canyon starts with a trickle. And so, too, did Dogsnout. By the ‘70s, the town was given its new name by the small group of people that had settled there and by the mid ‘80s, Creaky Trees had become a real, bonafide small-town; fully equipped with a town hall, a police department (consisting of a whopping five and a half police officers), a small grocery store, and a single diner so dinky, so rundown, so ugly that you couldn’t help but love it, despite the extremely likely possibility of contracting food poisoning during any given visit.

The downtown itself was quite small, with the above-mentioned structures, along with a few shops and a church, being all that made up the town square. But as a whole, Creaky Trees was quite large. It extended for miles, and while most of the small population lived in homes near and around the downtown drag, there were hundreds of acres of woodlands that surrounded it. Technically, this land was Unincorporated Creaky Trees, but most referred to the area as Old Dogsnout, a nickname given by the more upstanding citizens of Creaky Trees in an attempt to distance themselves from the oddballs that lived in Old Dogsnout and the stigma that followed them. There weren’t a ton of people who lived there; mostly just stubborn, seedy, hillbilly families who had lived there for generations. Though, they pretty much kept to themselves. They rarely crossed over into Creaky Trees, and the people of Creaky Trees rarely crossed over into Old Dogsnout.

Violet and Len Wilson were, by many, considered to be amongst the founders of Creaky Trees. Supposedly, they had a say in choosing the town’s namesake, and are credited with building town hall back in the 1970s. Len was a carpenter and allegedly built the whole thing with his bare hands, while Violet took on designing and decorating the establishment. In fact, you can still see their handprints in the cement out front to this day.

The two appeared to live a happy life together. They never had any children (unless you count a handful of cats throughout the years) and so they only ever had each other. Most folks believe that when a couple has children, it