Willowcreek; Within The Roots

Part Two ─ Black Birds and Trees

Albert's words had sparked an odd curiosity in Evie, one that had her searching the internet for anything on the house they were on their way to.

Charlie and Evie's dad renovated old, left for ruin houses and brought them back to life essentially. He was currently working on one called Willowcreek Manor in the middle of nowhere Connecticut. The town they'd just passed through, Havensville, was a small place with less than 500 residents.

This wasn't the first house he'd worked on, in fact, he and their uncle worked on houses up and down the East Coast for about two decades. Each old house had its own unique story, but nine times out of ten, the stories were just that. Stories. Over the years, the real histories were told but fables were mixed in and before long, there was no way to tell fact from fiction. As it had been for the other places they'd renovated, Willowcreek would no doubt be the same. 

Online, there wasn't a lot of helpful information, aside from a page on some forum entitled, 'Is Willowcreek Really Cursed?'. The page was littered with threads, all with attachments of unclear, blurry images of what was supposed to be the house. Most looked like they'd been taken from a distance. The quality was awful and made Evie squint her eyes in a bid to see them better. It only made her head hurt.

Moving further down the forum, she found a thread called 'Personal Experiences and Proof'. Skimming over the thread, Evie found certain words popping out at her, words like, 'haunted' and 'ghosts'. They were among stories, these personal experiences that people had had at the building and surrounding area. It baffled her why they were posting them online. The property was private and they were basically building a case for trespassing against themselves. She kept scrolling until she came to one fairly good image, still of low quality but it looked like the picture was taken from the front courtyard. She clicked on it, squinting slightly as her eyes spotted a figure on the staircase. It looked like a girl in a white dress, with long dark hair. Her first thought was that it was a fake, that it was definitely photoshopped but when she scrolled down to the comments attached, a short dispute between commenters struck her as interesting.

'Did anyone notice the ghost girl on the stairs? ' one asked, followed by another responding with, 'She's totally gotta be the girl who died there!', followed by, 'You mean one of 'them'. A whole bunch of people have died there! '. 

Evie furrowed her eyebrows, scrolling back up to the picture. She looked at it and zoomed in, her eyes widened slightly. Real or fake, there had been clearly a figure in the staircase. She'd seen her, the white dress and the long dark hair, reminiscent of the girl from those Japanese horror movies. She had been there. How could she have disappeared?

"Roll the window up," Charlie's voice startled Evie. Glancing over at him, she locked her phone. And instead of doing as he asked, she turned her whole body toward the cracked window and looked out at the trees lining the road.

Evie did her best to ignore Charlie the rest of the drive toward the manor house, admiring the foliage as they went. The trees were tall but bent at the top and the tips on either side met, creating the effect of a tunnel. A tunnel of trees. During the summer months, she could imagine they blotted out the sky with their luscious green leaves and pretty pink and white blossoms. Even now, in the fall, the burnt array of browns and oranges did the same job. Streaks of watery sun bled through small patches in the trees, and the pink and white blossoms were losing their petals. They rained down on the road whenever any little breeze hit them. Evie loved watching them float down on the wind, creating a trail behind the car. The dirt road stirred up dust and the petals were lost in dirty clouds. Her eyes drifted from the road behind the car to the trees, curiosity making her wonder what was on the other side of them.