The Tree That Was Not There

• 4 minute read
• Ages 10-13
• Horror Stories for Kids

I cycled the same eleven kilometres to college and back for three years.

You learn a road doing that. Not the way a driver learns it, but properly: every rise, every place the surface changes, the exact spot where the wind hits you coming round the reservoir.

There were four trees on that road. I could have drawn them.

The fifth

One morning in my third year there were five.

It stood about halfway, on the left, between the two I thought of as the leaning one and the one with the shrine at its base. It was a big tree. A neem, fully grown, thirty or forty years old at least, with a proper root flare where the trunk went into the ground.

It had not been there the previous evening.

A tree that size does not arrive. I want to be clear that I understood this at the time and that it did not help.

What I did

I stopped and looked at it for about a minute and then I cycled on to college, because I had a class.

I looked at it again on the way back that evening and it was still there.

And the next morning it was gone, and there were four trees, and the ground where it had been was ordinary ground with grass on it and no disturbance of any kind.

I did not tell anybody, because there is no way to say it that does not sound the way it sounds.

Twice more

It came back twice more that year.

The second time was in October, and it was there for three days, and I cycled past it six times.

The third time was in January and it was there for one morning only.

And on that morning, for the first and only time, there was something under it.

What was under it

I did not stop. I want to be honest about that, because in every version of this story I have told since, I have wanted to have stopped, and I did not.

It was standing at the base of the trunk, in the shade, on the side away from the road, and I saw it for perhaps a second and a half as I went past at speed.

It was person-shaped and it was not doing anything. It was just standing there under a tree that was not there, on a road I had ridden four hundred times.

I did not look back and I did not slow down and I did not go past that spot again.

After

I changed my route the same day. It added twenty minutes and I did it for the rest of the year without once explaining why to anybody.

And I have thought about this a great deal in the years since, and what I keep arriving at is not the tree.

The tree appeared four times in one year and I got used to it. That is the part I find difficult now. By January it had stopped frightening me. I had begun to think of it as a strange thing about that road rather than as a warning.

And on the fourth time there was something under it.

Which makes me think the tree was never the event. It was the notice.