HOME | DD

Description
He found her, ear pressed against the cold dirt as if she could hear the roots of the pine tree that towered above her.  There was a soft breeze, wrestling deep green needles to the ground and whistling through her curly brown hair.  Tears rushed down her face, leaving dishwater trails that pooled above the moss.  She was whispering a name over and over:  "Darla, Darla, Darla," her voice rasping as if sandpaper had been scratched across her throat.
"Stell?" he asked, placing his hand on her shoulder.  She screamed so loud that it displaced birds from their perches among the trees, causing him to jerk backward in surprise.  Her eyes a starless sky, she looked up at him, unseeing.  "Stellar, it's me.  It's Lawson," he said, muscles tightened in concern.
Stellar shook her head, hard, fingers gouging out chunks of forest floor.  When she opened her eyes again, they were reverting to their natural shade of green, a spark of awareness budding within their depths.  "Law?" she groaned, pinching the bridge of her nose and smearing dirt and plant life about her face.  "Get me.  Away.  From the.  Trees."  Her words came out fragmented, in labored huffs of breath that pulled the offending trees into the vacuum of space.
Lawson grabbed her elbow, pulling her up to lean heavily against him.  He tried to move fast with her useless body dragging beside him, but it was worse than deadweight; it was as if she was resisting.  Confused and worried, Lawson pulled his friend to the safety of her backyard, overlooking a dense forest shadowed by oppressive rainclouds.
"Do you need some water?"  Lawson asked.  Stellar declined, pinching her eyes shut so tightly that tears leaked from the creases.  "What happened?"  Lawson's voice was a whisper, tragic and terrified.  When Stellar didn't answer, he put his hand on her shoulder, squeezing it slightly to try and drag out a reaction.  It started to rain, a slight trickle from the clouds that would soon turn into a pour.
"I—I don't remember."  Her face was a mask of horror, her shoulders heaving from the cold and the blank space where the memory should have been.  Stellar looked up at him pitifully.  "Lawson, I don't remember."
When Stellar McClair was 14—the same year she met Lawson—her parents moved to their little home by the forest.  Stellar loved the trees, spending hours at a time singing and dancing in the forest like Aurora from Sleeping Beauty.  A year later, upon exploring the forest in a bright green dress that matched her eyes, Stellar discovered her mother had been exploring, too.  Her mother's eyes were bulging when Stellar found her hanging from a tree, glazed like a Sunday doughnut as her body swayed helplessly back and forth.
Each of the 483 days since, Stellar had abhorred the trees, keeping a wide radius and glaring every chance she got.  The trees were at fault for the death of her mother, the forest falsely prosecuted for a woman's choices.  Lawson had been there to help her through it, had even been the one to suggest she go back to the forest last year, after she had had a little breathing room from her mother's death.  He was her best friend, and he was determined to do everything he could to fix her—or at least make her better than she was. She had listened to his advice, but Stellar never told him the product of her exploration into the dense woodland of her backyard.  She came out of the woods crying, dirt coating her feet and hands, caked around her fingernails like blood on a butcher's knife.
When Stellar hadn't responded, Lawson had been afraid to push her to tell him what happened last time.  But not this time; this time he would finally understand what monsters the forest held for his friend.  "Who's Darla?"  He asked with grim determination spread in every crease of his face.
Her eyes opened wide, pupils tiny pinpoints in the center of snowy orbs.  She fumbled her way to her hands and knees, pulling up chunks of lawn in her haste to stand.  "Darla," she rasped, clawing to her feet.  "I have to get her out."  The green in her eyes was so dark it was nearly black, an ancient, colorless movie.  Lawson squeezed her arms, pulling her to him.  She cried out, clawing at his hands to try and get away.  She screamed, "I have to get her out!"
"Stell, stop it!"  Lawson held her to him, but she fought him with all she had, dragging her way back to the forest.  He held her by the ankle as she struggled, their clothes muddy from the pounding rain.  "What are you doing?"
"I have to get her out!  I have to get Darla out!"  She collapsed against the muddy lawn, exhausted and shivering in the chilling September rain.  "You have to help me get her out, Lawson," she pleaded, eyes twitching back and forth, unable to focus on anything as the rain pounded onto her face and the lawn that was pressed beneath her body.  "She's trapped, she's trapped."  Lawson stared at her in awe, dumbfounded from seeing his friend act like this, rather than her usual calm and collected self.
A car pulled into the driveway at the other side of the house, breaks squelching on the wet pavement.  "Your dad's home, Stell," Lawson said, easing his vice-tight grip on her biceps.  "We need to go inside, get you cleaned up."  Stellar had gone still, just staring past his face up into the evening sky as the gray clouds turned to a smoky black.
"Stellar, come on," Lawson urged, but she just lied there, the shadows of the forest dancing around her body.
"You're really scaring me, Stell." Lawson's voice shook as he tried to pick her up, drag her, anything, but she was deadweight, too heavy to be carried back through the downpour.
Finally, Lawson relented.  "Stay here; I'm gonna go get your dad.  I'll be right back."  Stellar watched him leave, tracing his movements with her eyes:  the way his blond hair curled at the nape of his neck with the damp of the rain, the way his shoulders moved when he was in a hurry, the lines of muscles showing through his soaked gray t-shirt, the way she remembered his lips forming the word "Darla".
She had to get her out of the tree.  When she was in the forest, Stellar could hear Darla, choking on the roots and gagging on the soil and bark embedding itself in her mouth.  She had cried to Stellar for help, begged her to get her out of the tree so she could die for good this time, but the cloying taste of death and pine in the air had disoriented Stellar, preventing her from doing anything but crying and gasping the dead girl's name.
The same thing had happened to Stellar's mom; if someone dies too close to the trees, they'll be sucked inside—pulled down by vines, roots, and branches—and their spirits won't be able to escape unless someone rescues them.
Stellar hadn't gotten there in time to save her mom.  She was too late, and her mother's spirit was lodged too deeply in the tree by the time she started digging to break free.  Upon finding Darla in the same situation, Stellar swore not to fail this girl like she had her mom.
Mind still dizzy from the mixing chemicals of life and death, Stellar stumbled back to the hated trees behind her house, tracing her fingers along every trunk she came into contact with in a rush to get to Darla before Lawson dragged her away.  The rain was pounding through the trees, sending needles scattering over the forest floor and drilling holes into any chunk of ground that wasn't supported by rock.  Stellar fought her way forward, barely able to see through the rain and her bleary haze of determination.
The trunk of the tree was thicker than average, stuffed full with the spirit of Darla, bulging where she attempted to fight her way out.  Stellar's vision blackened suddenly as she hit a wall of viscous death, a smell like moldy cheese and a taste like rotten meat penetrating her senses and sending her sprawling to the ground.
"Help me," Darla's voice whispered desperately, compelling her to dig deeper, deeper.  "Save me.  Set me free," Darla urged, and Stellar complied.
An icepick of pain shot through her head as her hands sunk into the soil, Darla's presence guiding her long fingers directly to the roots of the tree, where the unlucky dead were shackled.  "Dig deeper, Stellar," Darla whispered.  "Get me out before it's too late."
Stellar felt a pressure on her shoulders—a gentle tugging—but she ignored it.  She pulled a long chunk of root out of the ground, her fingernails breaking with the effort, and flung it behind her.  A faint sensation of sound hit Stellar through the buzzing words of Darla, as if someone on the other side of the curtain that separated life and death was trying to speak to her, but she was so close.  She could almost feel Darla's bony fingers clenching hers.  Just inches to go and she would be able to pull her through the roots.
Their fingertips touched, the feather-light stroke of a carefully wielded paintbrush, and just as Stellar was leaning forward to grasp Darla and pull her free, she was yanked harshly away from the haze.
"Stell, Stell, Stell, oh, god, Stellar, what are you doing?"  As her vision cleared, Stellar recognized Lawson shaking her shoulders, pulling her away from the tree.
She could feel Darla calling to her beneath the dirt, tickling the bottoms of her feet, but it was faint now.  Stellar couldn't tell if the water oozing down her cheeks was from rain or tears, but she didn't wipe it away.  "No!" she screamed.  She could feel Darla fading already, her spirit solidifying within the tree, merging bone and soul and roots and bark until it was unrecognizable as ever being anything more than human.
"Let me go!" Stellar shrieked, her voice cracking from the intensity of her scream.  She flailed her arms wildly, ripping them away from Lawson's suddenly hesitant grasp.  She jumped for Darla, knowing that one more pull would set her free.  She didn't get there, though.  Inches from completing her rescue mission, Lawson grabbed her around the waist and pulled her away, flinging her over his shoulder and taking her back to the house.  She kicked, screamed, clawed, bit, did anything she could to get away, but Lawson was too strong.
The closer to the house they got, the farther away Darla's voice was.  Her voice turned woodsy and tragic, less human and more nymph as the distance increased.  Stellar gave up fighting as tears streamed down her face.  The battle was over, and Darla had lost.  Stellar, the girl's only reinforcement, had failed to come in time, just like she had for her own mother.
Every time that she looked at the trees, Stellar would always remember another death she had ruined, another soul she hadn't helped move on.  And it didn't matter that Lawson's arms were around her, that her dad was helping her into the house as he placed a towel around her shivering, awkward shoulders.  It didn't matter that the sun was coming out, breaking through the clouds and shining down on the world, burning the rain into a drizzle, then a light mist.  It didn't matter that, forever trapped within the tree, Darla wouldn't remember the pain and torment she had experienced when she struggled to break her way out of the wooden bars that had surrounded her.  None of that mattered to Stellar now.  None of it.  She had failed.

With Stellar tucked safely in bed, her dad asleep on a chair in the corner, Lawson opened up her jade green laptop and typed in the password that Stellar had entrusted him with months ago.  He opened the internet browser, intent on searching for Darla, but a picture of the forest behind Stellar's house stopped him.  Stellar's internet home page was the local news, and the headline above the picture caught Lawson's eye:  Girl Lost in Treasure Forest.  He scanned the article, noting that the girl had gone missing the day before.  Suddenly, Lawson's stomach twisted as a sentence rammed into him with an almost physical force, as if it had been set in concrete and heaved off the page.  He closed the laptop, placing his hands—clawed from Stellar's interminable fight—over his eyes in disbelief.  He remembered, when Stellar's mom died, the way Stell avoided the forest like a plague afterward.  Could it be that the forest didn't just remind Stellar of her mother's death, but something else?  His torn flesh stung as acidic tears slid over his cheeks, but he just sat there, waiting.  Waiting for something he couldn't even describe.

Yesterday, out on a picnic in Treasure Forest with her parents, 17-year-old Darla Elton went missing.  The police refuse to reveal more information, but her clothes were found a few hours later, covered in blood.