The Dreaming Tree by Matthew Mather

Author:Matthew Mather
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2019-07-24T16:20:42+00:00

29

Rain drummed in waves of rising and falling sound off the hood of Roy’s old Chevy. The temperature held just above freezing, but this place was two degrees away from an ice storm.

The house across the street looked tired, its white paint peeling from the wooden siding. The roof sagged. Lichens grew in expanding amoeba-like patches over the shingles near the chimney and at the edges of the single dormer window. A porch spanned the front of the house, the latticework beneath it broken into fragments, the mortar of the brick columns at each end cracked and crumbling.

The grounds of the house were halfway to being reclaimed by the sparse forest of birches and fir trees leaning in around it. No one had mowed the lawn in the past season. The knee-deep yellowed grass of the yard grew chest-high around the concrete blocks supporting an old Pontiac Firebird. Someone had been in the process of sanding down the frame maybe a year ago, maybe two, but now it was a rusted shell.

A stolen dream.

When someone died, they didn’t lose just their lives; they also lost their family, their home, their kids, their everything.

The house had a single front door with a window to either side. Maybe four rooms in a square on the ground floor, two bedrooms upstairs in the attic. One entrance in the back. Roy had checked, walking around through the woods in the night. The nearest neighbor was three hundred feet up the road. Straight across was a boneyard of discarded implements from the small farm to the south.

A single streetlight stood near the front porch.

Roy had driven up here twice in two days, stopping last night in a light snowfall to watch the lights click off inside the house.

Tonight, he was parked in the junkyard across the street, staring for hours as the rain hammered down in a driving wind. He fumbled with a pack of cigarettes, took one out with his left hand and put it into his mouth, then clicked the lighter on and off before crumpling the unlit cigarette into the ashtray. He had never smoked in his life, but the urge pulled at him now—some part of the same irresistible force that brought him back to this hauntingly beautiful little house.

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