Rebecca's Maze

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. Decades had passed by since Rebecca Johnson had lived there. She had inherited the dilapidated four walls and a roof from her father when he died. Rebecca had a dream of restoring the small structure, maybe adding on to it.

Over the course of the 1980's Rebecca saved up money and bought enough lumber to add two rooms a bit smaller than the original. The new rooms were set on either side of the cabin and acted as bedrooms. Rebecca was able to also build a brick fireplace into the first building. She took great pride in her property.

As the years passed she met and fell in love with her supplier of wood. He started off sweet, understanding and forgiving, but after a few years he changed to controlling, stubborn and selfish. He fell in love with someone else and left her. She moved into the cabin full time after the break up.

After a few years of living there full time, Rebecca turned the cabin into a wooden sanctuary. Every single thing she wanted to carve, burn, build and erect now filled the property. Her, slightly over an acre of, land was a maze made out of these fantasies. At the center was a four poster bed made out of living trees. With an intense love for the nature she had brought into her house Rebecca started to find her web searches leaning towards white magic spells involving the natural spirits.

Rebecca sold her wooden creations to live, and even traded a magnificent deer with a huge ornate set of antlers for a few books on different spells. She focused all of her energy on creating a human body out of two living trees. She carved and intertwined the two trees to create one physical body. Once she succeeded she loaded the tree man onto a dolly and pulled him out of the maze.

It was the middle of the night, she had a tree man in the back of her car, a box in the trunk with her spellbooks and various ingredients. She drove to a nearby grove of hickory trees and unloaded the tree man, the box and set up the fire. She then burned the bundle of twigs and several small bags that made up the ingredients. The bright moonlight lit grove dimmed before the trees furthest from the tree man focused the light before shriveling and sinking into the ground. The next row lit up and repeated the process.

More than ten rows separated the now moving tree man and the current shriveling line of tree energy. With each row of tree energy added to the next the brightness of the light increased. Every few rows the light doubled in brightness. The last three rows of trees appeared to be completely white and shot bright white beams into the night sky.

When the natural light broke through the blinded veil that flooded Rebecca's eyes the tree man, carved and intertwined, was moving independently. Rebecca assumed the tree could see from the carved eyes, despite the only thing able to articulate being its arms and hands. She also assumed she was correctly guessing what he wanted.

The leaf free man, with decorative planters for shoes, walked to the back of the car and climbed inside. Driving back to her maze of, mostly dead, wood Rebecca talked the entire trip. She tried to explain who she was it was and her intentions with the spirit of the grove. She once again assumed the tree man could hear and understand her.

After parking at the entrance to the labyrinth of polished carvings of random things, the tree man followed her through to the four poster bed made out of four separate trees. The tree man shattered the planters and crawled onto the earthen bed. He laid down and stretched out on the dirt, his four limbs reaching the other living trees. Rebecca stood there waiting for the lights to start, but they never came. After waiting for her tree man to move, she decided to join him on the bed. After cuddling up to the hard wood it didn't take long for her exhausted body to give in and she fell asleep.

When she woke up her tree man was kneeling at her feet. Rebecca blushed and then tried to open her legs. Something stopped her and that is when she first felt the straps on her legs, arms and torso. She panicked only after looking around and seeing her man had set up a fire, set up rocks in a specific pattern all over the bed and was just about to burn a bag of black material.

"No!" Rebecca cried out.

The light on the walls danced from the fire, but soon the shadow of the flame appeared halfway up the wall; mimicking the dance of an octopus. Rebecca's word turned to an all out scream when the light focused into a ball, the size of a large grapefruit, over the torso of the pale woman's flesh. The grapefruit turned into a basketball before the consolidation was done. It then slowly sank into Rebecca's stomach. Her skin began to boil and peel before turning black. The ball penetrated the flesh and she quickly passed out.

Rebecca woke up one last time before the natural spirits took her soul. She could feel her feet, but lost feeling around mid thigh. Out of her stomach a small sapling was growing quickly into a large hickory tree. The roof popped off when the treetop grew large enough, the canopy replacing the fast deteriorating roof. Rebecca's last living moment consisted of her using a spell to light the candle in the window.