Devil's Tree

John strolled through the ancient woodland, the sound of the pattering rain soothing his overworked mind, and the evening light glistening on the leaves that carpeted the ground. He was grateful for the chance to enjoy nature without having to think about it. He stopped for a moment and watched a robin forage in the leaf litter, throwing leaves aside with a flourish as it searched for beetles.

John had almost forgotten what it felt like to walk through countryside without a sweep net or an insect trap in hand. The life of an entomologist was rewarding but taxing, and a recent struggle to get a paper published had caused him significant stress. He never wanted to see another spreadsheet again, and as he walked he amused himself by pondering over how long he’d last as a forest-dwelling hermit, smiling a little at the notion. 

He checked his phone. It was 6pm, and probably best to head back to his B&B before it got dark; besides, the owner of the place would probably have a search party looking for him if he stayed much longer. 

“I don’t think you want to go there,” she had said to him when he spoke of his plans to visit the woodland. “Creeps me out”. She had outlined some folk beliefs surrounding a certain oak tree, supposedly planted by a notorious 18th-century occultist; but to a sensible scientific professional in his mid-thirties, this seemed absurd. John had been brought up in a strait-laced London family and had travelled to some of the most remote places in the world - the folklore of a tiny Cumbrian village seemed rather backward to him. 

Just before following the path back to the village, he pressed on a little more to the so-called “Devil’s Tree”. He saw nothing sinister in its appearance; lush moss covered the trunk, and plump mushrooms sprung forth from its base. It had the appearance of a life-giver, not a life-taker, and the large blue fly sitting on the mossy bark at eye-level, nonchalantly cleaning its face, added to that impression. 

John chuckled as he remembered the stories he’d read online earlier. There were a few niche Reddit threads that expanded on the stories the B&B owner had mentioned - stories of youths carving their names into this tree and being struck by disaster mere days later. There was nothing concrete, of course; none of them read any better than a GCSE creative writing exercise, and no one could provide any supporting news articles. Humans everywhere will make up the strangest stories to explain tragedies rather than simply look at the facts, and John was a rational man. 

He squinted at the blue fly, his scientific curiosity stepping in for a moment. In the fading light he had assumed it was one of the Calliphora species, but the wings didn’t look right. Blowflies were not his main area of expertise, but he was sure that this was something unusual. 

John removed his backpack with a fluid motion, his curiosity now getting the better of him. He deeply regretted not bringing his surveying equipment, and he searched for an alternative in his backpack.

The fly remained unfazed, tilting its head at John like an inquisitive puppy.

Eventually, John found an empty mini Pringles tub, left over from his lunch - it was far from ideal, but if he moved slowly, he knew he had a chance. With a quivering hand, John lowered the tub over the fly, the top of the tube finally making soft contact with the trunk. He brought the lid up with his other hand, and swiftly slid it between the tub and the tree as the fly buzzed desperately within. With the fly contained, John swiftly removed the tube from the tree, sending shards of mossy bark falling to the ground, and popped the lid shut. 

John got back to his accommodation an hour later, having picked up a meal from the local takeaway. He fielded the owner’s questions about where he had decided to walk that afternoon, and all but ran upstairs to his room. After shutting the door, he retrieved the Pringles tub, hearing the sounds of an extremely disgruntled fly from within, and took it to the freezer in his room. John never enjoyed killing flies, but in this case it was necessary for identification. 

He placed the tub in the freezer, ate his dinner while catching up on social media, and went to sleep. 

John awoke early the next morning with a rather fuzzy head. The Reddit horror stories must’ve got to him more than he’d thought; the memories of his dreams were fading, but he knew they’d involved leafy tendrils and freak accidents. John shook it off as a reaction to eating greasy food before bed, and decided to take a proper look at the fly now that it was dead. He found some pins and a tiny board in his bag from a past expedition, and excitedly retrieved the motionless fly from its cylindrical coffin in the freezer. John carefully slid the pin through the top of its thorax and into the board. 

Suddenly, a flurry of motion - the fly’s wings shook desperately, its head rolling from side to side and its legs flailing - John’s hand jolted with surprise, knocking the fly and board to the floor upside-down. The fly fruitlessly buzzed against the floor, attached firmly to the board, its movements becoming smaller and smaller until it lay almost still, one wing dislocated and its hind legs twitching intermittently. John crouched down, trembling slightly, and moved the fly back to the desk. He spent a few seconds collecting himself; he had always tried to make sure that any killing of specimens was done as humanely as possible. A night in the freezer should have been more than enough to kill it, and he was rather perplexed. The appliances were old though, and likely in desperate need of updating. John opened the freezer and stuck his hand in; he realised now that it didn’t feel any colder than the fridge. He sighed, and set to work using the identification keys he had on his phone. 

Two hours later, John gave up, frustrated but very intrigued. It was certainly a member of the Muscidae, but he could not even pinpoint the genus. This certainly did not appear to be a fly recorded in Europe before, let alone Britain. He took some photos using his phone and hand lens and emailed them to a colleague in London who specialised in Muscidae, before setting off for the day. 

That evening, after a thoroughly enjoyable day of gazing upon South Cumbria’s finest vistas, John returned to his room, exhausted but feeling thoroughly refreshed. After tentatively checking that the fly on his desk had not somehow come back to life while he was out, he settled down with a bottle of beer in front of an action thriller. John rarely drank alone, but hey - this was a holiday. 

The ancient TV had a faint background droning noise which was slightly distracting and warranted the use of subtitles, but as John made his way through his third bottle, and Jason Statham punched his fifteenth villain into submission, he stopped really noticing this. 

About three quarters of the way through the film, John was struggling to keep his eyes open. The day of intense hiking was taking its toll, and he drifted into a nap on the weathered armchair, the background hum of the TV boring into his head like a woodworm.

In his sleeping brain, the noise took shape into the buzzing of a hundred blue flies on the low ceiling, their faces staring intently down towards him. He sat upright and watched the walls slowly merge into a vast, swirling mass of moss-covered roots, the creaking of wood piercing through the hum of the flies. 

Slowly, from their midst crawled a behemoth of a fly, the size of a Rottweiler; its expressionless face looked John up and down, and its dripping mouthparts extended towards him like the trunk of an elephant. John tried to move away and found he couldn’t. He looked down at himself and saw with a gasp that he, like the roots that surrounded him, was covered in a lurid green blanket of moss; ashy tendrils of candlesnuff fungus burst its way through his stomach as squirming maggots, like huge, fleshy grains of rice, emerged through his skin beneath them…

John jolted awake, his torso burning with pain. He noticed with horror that he had torn open his shirt, his fingernails leaving red welts in his skin. The buzzing from his dream continued - the 1980s horror now showing on the TV was almost drowned out by it. He reached for the remote and pawed at the buttons, to no avail. Werewolf victims screamed on screen, their wails barely penetrating the noise from the faulty speaker. John shoved the desk aside and switched the TV off at the plug. 

The silence gave blissful relief, and he collapsed back onto the chair. He stood up a few minutes later, legs shaking, and noticed the pinned fly on the desk seemed to have rotated. John was sure that he’d left it facing the wall, but its lifeless eyes now pointed straight at him. 

“Let’s stay rational about this,” John muttered to himself. 

He hypothesised that moving the desk had slid the mounted fly round 180 degrees; there was no need to believe that supernatural forces were at play here. He drank some water, washed his face and went to bed. His mind was racing, but after twenty minutes his exhausted body collapsed into shallow sleep, punctuated by the faint thrumming of imagined flies. 

The next morning, the room and the fly were exactly as they had been the night before, John noticed with relief. He chuckled at how little alcohol it had taken for his brain to start conjuring up supernatural horrors, and texted some friends about it - he was a notorious lightweight, and the lighthearted ribbing he received from his friends made him feel a little more connected to the real world. 

After the exertion of the previous day, John decided to go for a gentler hike. He knew there was a good-sized forest about three miles away from the village, in a direction he hadn’t explored yet, and thought that a visit might help assuage some of the unrest that had crept into his mind. It was a mild day, and John enjoyed his stroll through the village, soon finding himself at a gate opening onto expansive grassland.

Suddenly, a low buzzing startled him as he reached out to the latch, but he sighed with relief upon realising it was just a bee lazily flying past. 

He walked across the grassy plain, watching as hoverflies enjoyed the wildflowers, and greenbottles weaved their way through the air above the path. But today, the humming of their wings seemed amplified, bordering on oppressive. John’s head felt heavy with the constant droning. He shrugged it off as a side effect of his mild hangover, although he’d done fieldwork with a hangover before and it had never felt like this. 

John caved, and pulled a cigarette from the front of his bag. He’d struggled with a smoking habit much of his life, and although he had generally kept it under control in recent years, the discomfort was getting too much to bear. He lit it and kept walking, feeling comforted by the familiarity and noticing as he walked that the fog around his brain seemed to clear a little.

Eventually, he reached the forest. It appeared inviting enough; the sparse canopy let through most of the sunlight, and the path was flanked by spongy, mossy banks that looked like something out of a children’s book. But after his dream, John’s skin crawled at the sight of the moss; he imagined it twisting and curling, enveloping the path in its clutches…

John shook his head. He was being ridiculous. He’d just had a couple of bad dreams and knew that this level of paranoia was ludicrous. He pressed on, soaking in the birdsong and the rustling of the leaves, and began to forget his unease as he watched a butterfly dance in the air above the path. 

But then his ears were hit with an overwhelming buzzing, as if the trees themselves were creating the sound. The air fizzed with its intensity. He pressed on, hands over his ears, certain that there must be some rational explanation. Hoverflies can be loud, and perhaps his oversensitive brain was exaggerating the volume. He had a hangover and just needed to rest, that’s all. He hadn’t slept enough, and there was still underlying stress from his job exacerbating everything. He just needed to rest… 

The moss looked so inviting as the dappled light played on it, and John’s head felt so heavy… Just a few moments, and he’d be fine…

John awoke to near-darkness, his face pressed against the moss. The ground beneath was deceptively hard and unforgiving, and his head felt like it was in a vice. The buzzing continued, louder than before, and he groaned, his parched throat desperate for water. John reached for his bag behind him and found nothing. Now panicking, he hauled himself to his feet, searching the ground in all directions. His bag was nowhere to be seen. 

Perhaps it had been stolen, he thought. 

But as his tired eyes scanned the surroundings, something seemed off. He could see no path, and the widely-spaced trees he’d seen earlier now seemed densely packed. His hand searched his pocket, finding to his great relief that his phone was still there. But relief quickly turned to fear as he noticed that the battery had died. It would be impossible to see in an hour or so, and his lighter would be of little use as a torch. 

As the din in his head continued to grow, John ran. He didn’t know which direction he was going in; he just knew that he was having some sort of breakdown and needed to return to civilisation. Brambles scratched at his arms and legs, blood beading from the wounds, and his vision blurred as the noise around him continued to mount in fervour. He put his hands over his ears again, but the sound penetrated his head still. The trees seemed to warp and bend, their cracked bark shimmering like water in the twilight, and John tried to ignore it until he tripped forward down a small bank. As his hands broke his fall, he lurched in horror as the ground moved under his fingers. It was teeming with millions of flies, their blue bodies glinting as their wings shimmered in a roaring barrage of noise. 

John hauled himself to his feet, eyes darting around like a hunted deer, and searched desperately for any possible break in the trees, which he now saw were covered in the same blanket of flies as the ground. 

  And then, blurred but unmistakable, he saw it, a few feet in front of him. It was impossible, and yet, there it stood. The Devil’s Tree. 

  There was no way he could be here again. He had fallen asleep in a forest miles away; he’d have to have travelled for hours to get back to this spot. He slapped his face, hoping to open his eyes in the bed of his B&B room. Yet he remained here, in this forest of nightmares, flies covering every visible inch. 

With his ears feeling like they were filled with red-hot coals, John staggered forwards. He knew he was about to black out from the pain, and felt fury at the endless flies that stared at him through the gloom, mocking him with their coordinated torrent of sound. He lashed out at one of the trees, but the flies were too fast for him; a space appeared around his fist and it was as if they were never there. 

He could not stand it any longer - he grabbed a twig from a low-hanging branch and snapped it in two, before forcing the jagged ends into his ears. A wail escaped his lips as he felt a sharp, sudden pain and an almost immediate release, warmth trickling from his ruptured eardrums. The wails of the forest were now a low murmur, and his head felt suddenly clear. He laughed, a crazed, inhuman sound, and stumbled the last few steps towards the tree. Almost without thought, he pulled the lighter from his pocket, lit it, and put it to the thick moss that coated the trunk. 

The whole thing went up in flames almost immediately. Flies dive-bombed John’s face as if in protest, filling his nose and mouth with bristles and vibrating wings, almost suffocating him as he used his renewed adrenaline to sprint through the wood. He saw lights, pushing him on even more, slapping at his face and coughing up the flies that tried to claw their way down his throat. 

  And then, he was out. He turned back briefly, watching the plume of smoke rise into the air from the cursed tree, and ran across the fields to the village, an elated giggle of hysteria bubbling up inside him. It was night-time now; John had no idea how long he’d been gone but the street was empty, and he saw no one at the desk of the B&B as he barrelled past. He unlocked his room and collapsed unconscious onto the bed, falling into a deep, dreamless sleep as a few last drops of blood trickled down his splayed-out arm onto the frayed carpet. 

On the desk, the pinned fly’s abdomen gave a brief twitch and split apart, a small pile of writhing white maggots landing on the board. One by one, they made their way to the edge of the desk, fell to the floor, and inched their way across the room.