‘’Come back’’ a voice whispered convincingly.

‘’You need to’’ it went on.

‘’Come back where?’’ he replied.

Luke struggled to wake up. He was already snoozing in between a series of ineffective alarms. He needed to get up; school was starting. It sometimes felt like there was a force holding him beneath the blankets. But unfortunately, everyone feels that way. Not the best excuse to stay in bed.

Luke was a heavy sleeper. A heavy dreamer one might say, although he never really remembers them. Glimpses and shimmers, sure, but never enough to bore a friend with a monologue unasked for.

‘’Come back where’’ he muttered again. The whisper turned into inaudible rustling. It was fading away slowly, like every single song on the radio back in the 50s.

Eventually, what woke him wasn’t the sixth alarm screeching in his eardrums. That one had passed about a minute ago, again without success. It was the wind coming in from his bedside window. A heavy gust, not necessarily strong enough to blow him awake, but strong enough to make the much-needed noise to pull Luke out of dreamland. The wind wasn’t loud, but it did cause him to sit up straight. It was a sound all too familiar like a shuffle of air, like a whisper.

Luke opened his eyes wide and tried to grasp why this sound had frightened him, then reached for his phone to check the time.

‘’8:47! Fuck.’’

‘’Hurry up, you’re late! You can’t afford to miss yet another class, Miss Avery will not tolerate any more slip-ups!’’ he heard his mom call from downstairs.

Already dreading the day ahead, he finally got out of bed. Luke got dressed, sprinted towards the door, grabbed a plain slice of bread on his way out, and hopped on his bike.

Finally, at 9:05, he entered his classroom. His mom was right, Avery did not look happy at all. Then again, Luke couldn’t recall when she ever did. She scolded him for 2 minutes straight, including words like ‘tardy’ and ‘careless’ but they flew right past him. He was physically present, but mentally someplace else. Someplace else entirely. Every word she spoke sounded like a song in the gym whenever you forgot to bring headphones. They did not get through to Luke nor did they ever arrive in the first place.

She finished her big scolding speech with a cliché proverb.

‘’It might be the end of this semester, but you’re not out of the woods yet!’’

He wasn’t. Luke had trouble catching up on all of his assignments and had a few tests left open, but it wasn’t the intention of the sentence that finally caught his attention, it was one specific word. Woods. It sent a chill down his spine and immediately made him think of the whisper that woke him.

At the same time Miss Avery finished her speech, a gust of wind came blowing in. She finally stopped yelling to close the window, and Luke sat down.

Why did that word startle him so? He tried to remember his dream from this morning, but after a while figured it was no use. It never was. The eerie feeling his dreams left behind always stuck though, the memories never did.

Luke hadn’t been to the forest in ages. The last time he saw a big set of trees together was at the lake, and that couldn’t be called a forest. Hell, he couldn’t even recall the location of that lake, nor could he remember the reason for visiting. He didn’t have any reason to get upset about the woods, or trees for that matter but felt uneasy anyways.

‘’Just a bad start to a day that hasn’t even begun’’ he thought to himself and opened his book.

For the remainder of the day, he was stuck in his head with the morning that had gotten him into trouble in the first place. He couldn’t seem to think of anything else but the wind that woke him. Was it talking to him? Was he just that tired? ‘’Come back where?’’

After a long day of pondering his thoughts and pretending to participate in his classes, he went back home. As if the day wasn’t long enough already, he had to bike home up against the restless current of the wind. The way back usually took no longer than 15 minutes, but today Luke’s journey home lasted at least a solid half hour. Halfway through, the wind shifted. A sudden shift, but not an unwelcome one. He thought he heard someone calling him from afar and decided to ignore it when seeing no one there upon turning around.

‘’Fitting’’ he thought while finally entering his room, ‘’this terrible day started with unpleasant wind and ended just the same.’’ He fell onto his mattress like a heavy stone into a ripple-free lake.

Luke was so tired that he slept through his mom calling him to the table for dinner. After checking up on him, she knew immediately what kind of day he had had and let him sleep. She knew how much he needed it lately. He was restless.

Heavy dreaming often comes with sleep talking. This was also the case for Luke.

‘’Return. Come back. What tree? Follow what path?’’ She deciphered from his mumble and decided to ignore his usual sleep-rambling.

Being so tired that he was, Luke forgot to close his bedside window before falling asleep. Right before falling asleep, he heard a familiar whisper singing an overflowing lullaby. The lullaby ushered in his recurring dream; this time more vivid.

In the dream, Luke was standing in the middle of a field. He was feeling extremely anxious. Looking around warily and panicky, he mostly saw grass. Long fields of grass never seeming to end. At the center there was a tree, a single odd asymmetrical tree leaning slightly to the right. The sight of it was stunning, even though there was nothing special about it. In that moment, the tree seemed like the only thing he had to look at ever again. In the distance there was water. It appeared to be some kind of abnormally shaped lake. The visible roots of the tree itself also appeared wet.

Luke heard whispers calling out to him as he stood paralyzed, gazing at the center of the enormous field.

‘’Closer. Come. Step forward. Move. Approach. Reach.’’

The wind gave way to the voices. Just like the wind, the whispers were coming from all around. It felt like a thousand voices spoke softly in unison from all corners directly to him. The current of the wind, or the winds, blew toward the tree from every single direction. Like a circle of fans, each blowing into the center in an attempt to create a tornado. Luke tried to move, tried to reach the tree, tried to embrace the tree. Upon taking the first step, he awoke from his dream, gasping for air. Again, to the shivering welcome of a vocal breeze.

This time he held on to his dream. For the first time in years, he could recall what he had been through in the night. And not just tonight. It wasn’t the first time he had seen that tree; that was one thing he was sure of. He could remember for once, even if it was only a single natural object. A tree.

Another thing he was sure of was the tree’s existence. It spoke to him through his dreams, but after tonight, Luke was convinced that the tree was out there somewhere. It just had to be.

His dream residue was finally gone. Finally gone but replaced by an urge that’s even worse than an unknown pain. The urge to reach this tree.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

This morning, he hadn’t snoozed. He hadn’t slept in like the day before. He was wide awake. For once, he actually arrived on time. The current was as strong as yesterday, but this time in the form of a tailwind.

Miss Avery was surprised to see Luke like this; awake and focussed. What she didn’t know was that he was even more mentally absent than the day before. He was focused all right but focused on something else entirely: finding that forsaken tree.

He didn’t even bother to attend the rest of his classes. When Avery’s class ended, he headed straight out of school in search of his dream. Luke had no idea where to start looking, so he trusted his instincts and followed the current of the wind. Still in the same direction, away from his house. Far, far away he would come to find out.

‘’Closer. Come. Step forward. Move. Approach. Reach out.’’

The words kept echoing in his mind. This made him go even faster. He kept going straight for at least an hour until he realized the wind wasn’t in his back anymore but blowing from right to left. Luke took the first possible left turn and kept on straight until the wind told him otherwise. While actively ignoring phone calls from both his mother and school at 30 km/h, he covered quite a distance.

After 3 hours of inexplicably taking left and right turns, the wind finally came to a halt. Luke realized he was standing in front of a desolate nature reserve he vaguely recognized. Almost like déjà vu but instead of thinking he had been here before, he knew it. Déjà vu fades away, like the voice in his dream the day before. The familiarity with the place did not. He knew the place, remembered it, but from where?

‘’Come. Enter’’ The wind called out to Luke. He felt like he was going insane. Anyone hearing the story afterward would probably tell him that he was. That didn’t matter now. ‘’The tree. Only the tree mattered now.’’ He thought.

Upon entering the reserve, the wind began to rustle again, gently this time.

‘’Closer. Keep going. Almost there.’’

The tone of the voices was impatient. For a second, he thought he heard his own voice in between the choir of wind but decided to put that thought to rest.

The nature reserve mainly consisted of fields, fields with only a few groves and bushes sticking out, but mostly just grass. It was misty, and the sky was light Gray. The clouds seemed to be hanging low, within reaching distance even, but there was no way to tell.

There was no specific path, but Luke knew exactly where he needed to go. The wind guided him after all.

After walking for what felt like an eternity, Luke finally reached a lake. The time it took for him to get there was lost. He had no idea how long he had been walking. His sense of time had completely vanished. His phone battery was dead too, and his watch wasn’t working. The clock’s hand kept spinning at an abnormal speed. This made Luke feel sick. Whatever sense of reality he had the week before, all that was gone now.

The lake was shaped like a semicircle. The curved side of the lake was surrounded by a forest, stretching out into infinity starting precisely on either side of the lake’s flat edge. Like the forest was folded neatly in the middle, with the lake as its center point.

A pitch-black forest with no visible end to it. Not from the lake at least. The lake was as black as the forest itself, seemingly bottomless. The eeriness of it all terrified Luke, but he had to keep going. He had to.

The whispering of the wind continued. Now Luke was sure he heard his own voice in between the choir, overshadowing the rest.

‘’Enter. Swim. Dive. Come back.’’ The voices were saying.

‘’Dive?! What am I supposed to find?’’

‘’Enter. Swim. Dive. Find out. Tree. Come back.’’

Without further hesitation, Luke dove into the lake. With no specific aim in mind, he swam deeper and deeper into the abyss of pitch-blackness. After 40 seconds of swimming, he was running out of breath. Luke started to panic; he was at least 10 meters deep.

He now saw a strange hole forming in the depths beneath him. The hole formed in the water like a wobbly bubble of soap. He figured the hole in the water was closer than the surface and decided to take a leap of faith.

He was almost completely out of breath when approaching the hole. When he felt like he could almost reach it, the hole disappeared in front of him, like a mirage in the desert. Luke looked up at the surface, tried to make one final effort, let out a muffled underwater scream, and started passing out. All the power drained from his body like the air from his lungs.

‘’I’m sinking, what a terrible way to go. Was my last deed motivated by psychosis? Did it mean anything at all?’’

The sensation of sinking made him give up. But he wasn’t sinking, he was ascending. Miraculously floating upwards. Luke realized this and reached for the surface. He gave all he could give and broke the surface barrier at last. He gathered all his strength to swim back to the shoreline. When he finally reached it, he went on to lay on his back, immediately falling into a deep slumber without checking his surroundings first.

An hour later he awoke, again to the choir of the wind. Had it been an hour? Luke wasn’t sure. Time worked differently here, that he was sure of.

He was laying at the curved end of the semicircle lake. The same end that was surrounded by pitch-black woods before. He looked around and to his surprise saw no trees at all. None surrounding the lake at least. Luke looked up at the sky, now suddenly very clear. It was the brightest blue he had ever seen, but the sun was nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, everything was illuminated. The grass was the greenest of green, and the lake wasn’t pitch black anymore, but crystal clear. Still bottomless, however. The shape of land might have been the same, but Luke knew he was someplace else entirely.

The only tree he did see was standing in the center of endless fields of grass, grotesque like the Empire State in the Great Plains. A single odd asymmetrical tree leaning slightly to the right. It stood about 2,5 kilometers away, but the distance felt like a short stroll. It was finally within reach. All the dreams he tried to remember over the past years came back to him now. They all took place at the same location. How could he not have realized earlier; it was so obvious.

When approaching the tree, Luke felt uneasy. The sense of Déjà vu grew stronger. Only 100 meters away from the tree now; he could see a puddle surrounding it entirely. The puddle was the same ‘color’ as the lake he dove into earlier that day: pitch-black. To Luke, that dive felt like an eternity ago.

Now within 30 meters of the tree, he heard the voices again, this time clearer than ever. He was sure he recognized his own voice now, and more frequently and loudly than before as well. The rustling of the wind grew louder, and so did the voices. He decided it was time; he had to enter now. 

Luke entered the surrounding puddle. The water came up to his knees. The bottom of the puddle felt slippery and soft like he was walking on a pile of rotten flesh, but he paid no attention to that now. He was so close. As he was getting closer to the tree, the skies began to darken with a blanket of dim clouds.

Luke was in reaching distance now. He looked possessed, hell, he was possessed. Possessed by the damned tree he could now finally touch.

Luke reached out; he touched the tree. At last. Instantly at the first moment of contact, he fell into a trance. A dream-like state. Except this time, it wasn’t fragments of a dream, it was over a thousand dreams playing all at once. All in the same location, only different paths, and different points of view to them. He tried to let go of the tree but couldn’t. It was like he was part of it now.

The clouds were as dark as they come. Luke heard thunder rumbling now, he knew the end was near. He looked down at his feet to realize the puddle had cleared up at the same rate the sky had darkened.

Beyond his comprehension, he saw in horror that his previous speculation of what he was standing on was correct. The puddle surrounding the tree was filled with corpses, piling up from underneath. Trembling in shock he took a closer look at the bodies.

These were not just any corpses, they all looked like him. Like different versions of himself. One looked old enough to be his dad, while the other looked not much older than he was now. One body overweight, the other anorexic, and so on. Luke thought he saw even a few kid-sized bodies, but it was hard to tell. For each body was in a different state of deterioration.

The whispers of the wind turned into shouts, and the shouts into screaming. He was now fully aware that the voices were all variants of his own. Everything around him morphed into darkness. Shocked out of his paralysis, he could finally let go of the tree. However, it was already far too late. The rumbling in the sky had transformed into ear-deafening thunder. Luke looked up and saw a blinding crash of light.

Lightning had struck the tree. The powerful electric current was directed straight into the puddle, and Luke dropped down dead. The boy had come all this way, only to become part of the cadaver pile surrounding the tree.

In the end, Luke joined the choir which led to his destruction.