THE THACKERY TREE

WRITTEN AND OWNED BY KRISTEN REID. IMAGES ARE NOT OWNED BY CREATOR.

Some things are too strange to contemplate for reality. Some things are entirely believable and need not be questioned. But then there are those things in between the two extremes that divide the mind into fiction and fact, and usually, those are the things that keep humanity on their toes, fearing the plausibility, and hiding from truth when it makes itself known. In 1868, Thackery, Georgia knew both sides of that coin of contemplation. In the unbelievable realities they had built their village upon, Thackery would learn their true nature.

The tree that stood tall in the middle of the Thackery was as old as the land itself. When white colonists had first arrived and taken everything, killed the people who had been born from the soil, and built their homes on top of those thieved hills, the remaining Native Americans watched silently without warning the new caretakers of what existed there. They never looked over at the hills on which Thackery had been pitched. They never fought the men and women there to take back that which had been stolen. It was a welcomed gift that they were not its self-proclaimed owners.

The Thackery Tree, as it had been named, made itself known very quickly to those settlers. It was hollow with an opening at the top of the trunk, but what was so strange about it was that it appeared to be burning internally like the devil might have used it as a tunnel to enter and exit the world. For those that dared to look down inside the tree, they couldn’t make out a bottom. It looked as if the inside of the tree kept going on and on without an end. Being too ominous and otherworldly for the settlers’ rational minds, the men in the village all worked together to try to remove the tree, but nothing could cut it. After many attempts at felling the tree, it was finally just left to burn up, but even still, it remained intact. Some believed it to be a sign from God that their land was blessed referring to Moses and the burning bush, and so the town built itself around the tree—keeping it in the heart of Thackery.

Over the years, the Thackery Tree became as much a part of the village as the very cobblestone paths. Those that regarded the tree as a blessing would leave offerings at its base. Children that feared the haunting warnings of the tree would dare one another to touch the aged bark to which none had the bravery to follow through on. Families would blame the tree for the peril that befell them, saying that the tree was not a blessing, but that it held an old, Native American, witch curse inside. The village priest used it as a means for his sermons on hell, claiming it was a reminder of a sinner’s end, to frighten his flock into believing his words. Any visitors that came to Thackery would leave when they learned of the Thackery Tree, whether out of true fear of what it held in its mystery or from the fear of an entire town of delusional people. Either way, visitors never deemed Thackery fit as a proper place to sleep for the night.

By the year of 1868, the small village of Thackery was swept up into a frenzied storm of dramatic rumors about Odell Harlow, the farmer on the edge of Thackery’s limits. The gangly, old man had come rushing into the general store with his eyes wide. Through his panicked pleas for help, he was able to gather a small group of men to follow him back to the farm. When the men got there, they heard a horrible commotion coming from the barn like demons themselves were inside chanting in growls and howls. The barn doors had been closed shut with a pitchfork placed through the handles to make sure they would remain that way.

“My hog, chickens, and dog are in there. They ain’t right. They’re mad. They keep coming after me, you see. Even the chickens,” Odell told them with sweat pouring off of him and his knees nearly shaking. The men joined together in a fit of laughter.

“Your hogs’re chasing ya, huh, Odell?” Amon, one of the men, had remarked with a snort. He then went over to the door and pulled the pitchfork out of the handles. Odell vehemently warned him against doing so, but the man only shoved him off and threw a grin back at his friends. As the barn doors opened slowly, the cries and growls inside stopped. Amon entered the barn with a smirk on his lips while Odell and the others watched silently. Once Amon was fully sheathed inside the dark shadows of the barn, forceful screams filled the area. Odell pulled out his pistol unsteadily and aimed it at the barn entrance. The men called for their friend, begging him to answer, yet none of them dared to go inside and pull him to safety. As the screams died down and silence fell upon the farm, Odell and the men all stood there, stock-still, awaiting some sort of resolution to the strange horror that was taking place. Odell fired off a shot inside the barn and with it brought a large spotted hog out into the open. Its face was bloodied, and it was chewing something in its mouth. As the animal looked over at the men, it took off in a shot, running directly towards them, squealing violently. The men kicked it away from them and finally killed it under the heavy brunt of their boots, but Odell began howling and scrambled back to his house when he turned his eyes to the barn entrance. The dogs and chickens emerged covered in blood just like the pig. The men worked together shooting the animals as they ran towards them in a frenzy. Once the animals had been done away with, the party left the farm unscathed though their minds suffered the brunt of madness from seeing Amon’s ripped apart corpse on the barn floor.

Thackery had made a mockery of Odell and the group of men after they told their stories of the rabid, man-eating farm animals. Odell and the men were quickly locked up for the death of Amon to appease the call of justice for such a gruesome death, though no one could understand how the men had gone about tearing Amon’s body apart as it had been.

Within a couple of days, a few rumors began to take shape about family cats that were beginning to act strangely and dogs that were seemingly more vicious than usual. The stories soon littered the village’s daily gossip and those that had originally been seen as outlandish were now being listened to with concern. Some talked about having to put down their dog because it had bitten someone out of the blue, or that the crows in the area had tried to peck at them as they walked outside. The rumors and stories kept growing but none of them took up residence in the minds of Thackery until Margaret Blythe.

Margaret had been walking to the garden in her backyard when her pet dog, Pepper, attacked her and began eating her alive. Margaret was a widow, living alone in her cottage, thus no one could come to her aid. After Pepper had had her fill of her owner and left, Margaret laid in the grass as hardly a human being anymore with so much of her eaten away. Crows overhead had descended upon the woman and attempted to take what was left for themselves. No one had learned of Margaret’s demise until someone saw Pepper covered in blood roaming the square around the Thackery Tree. After Pepper was put down, Margaret’s body was discovered—the crows still feasting on her.

It was after Margaret’s unfortunate death that the townspeople gathered in the meeting hall. Some called out for the killing of all animals in the entire village as others blamed the deaths on the curse of the Thackery Tree. The sensible leaders in the community ordered the killing of all livestock and household pets. No one was to leave their homes until it appeared to be safe to step outside again. When that would be or what that meant, no one truly knew. But it supplied a bit of false comfort for the hysteria taking place in the soul of Thackery for the time being.

Some of the townspeople left Thackery completely, hoping that it truly was just a town curse that would not be able to follow them while others stayed, obeying the rules put forth and locking themselves inside their homes. Each home had been thoroughly searched for animals by some of the men that volunteered and every last animal in sight had been disposed of, though some residents had been extremely clever in hiding their pets, believing that all of the violence was not something completely out of the ordinary, but simply a horrible strain of rabies that had only afflicted a handful of animals in the area.

After a few days, residents began peeking their heads out of their windows calling to one another about hearing an odd clicking noise outside. The normally empty square around the Thackery Tree quickly filled with stray dogs, foxes, coyotes, raccoons, and some feral cats that began marching around the tree together as the clicking continued on, almost as if the tree itself was calling the animals hither. The townspeople had no idea where all of the animals had come from, only assuming that they had meandered in from towns in the distance and the uninhabited land around them. When the clicking noise stopped during the day, the animals would wander aimlessly around the square as if awaiting some hidden cue.

A group of some of the undesirable Thackery residents spent their confined days aiming guns out of their windows and shooting down at the animals like fish in a barrel for macabre forms of entertainment to appease their boredom. By the time it reached the end of June, the numbers of the animals in the square had risen to nearly a hundred while dozens of crows circled overhead like vultures. Before the clicking noise would start for the day, all of the animals would nearly pile up on top of one another to frantically claw at the doors and windows of a few homes in the poor district. Everyone assumed that it was because the residents inside had died either from starvation and dehydration or the betrayal of their stowed away pet, and now the animals outside could smell their blood behind the doors. No one would leave the safety of their homes to go clean up the dead, so with each passing day, the entire square started to smell of rotting bodies.

On the second day of July, the first visitor since the lockdown rode into Thackery—a trader on a wagon to sell wares in each town he stopped in. He was a black man, which sharpened disdain in the hearts of the Thackery residents as soon as they saw him.

“Should we warn him?” a few quiet neighbors asked each other out of their windows.

“No,” others answered back.

The trader directed his horses through the streets until he came into the square. His eyes scanned the bizarre sea of viscous animals surrounding him before shooting his glance towards the windows of each home. He met the stagnant, distant eyes of the many inside but not a one saw him as anything other than a distraction for the hungry Thackery beasts.

Then the clicking started, and the residents shut their windows up tight.

The helpless man started shouting for the presence of human life amidst such horror to give him some semblance of peace or an answer. The animals began circling the wagon in time with one another as the man’s horses huffed and whinnied with a harshness that resembled a sharp carried slash of a violin string. He thought about hopping down and running as he held one, unassured foot above the animals, but they met his hopeful attempt with angry yipping and growls and gnashing their teeth. The trader started crying and imploring help—his reddened eyes trying to land on some form of mercy—but his pleas were only met with the shut windows of the town and a few onlookers who watched the entire thing eagerly like it was some spectacle to behold. The trader tried kicking the animals below him as he soothed his horses, trying to calm them enough to be able to move the wagon forward and out of the town, but even they became violent and hungry, nipping at the man whenever he tried to touch them.

“Please! I’m a person! I’m a person!” the man screamed to dead ears behind closed windows. “I’m a person!”

As he kept his eyes on the windows surrounding the square, kicking at the violent animals, he lost his balance on the wagon and fell forward onto the cobblestone street below.

The square was loud with the exit of life and the vile eating of beasts. And when it was over, the townspeople opened their windows again and breathed in the air that held a hint of death in its breeze. Some felt the need to vomit. Some sighed with contentment. But all of Thackery, together, was connected in the turning of an eye and carrying on in their lives without the fear of it happening to them.

The animals stayed distracted on their new meal for a bit of time, allowing the town leaders to send out their servants for food, even though the mayor and his equals had been the ones with the wealth to stock up on general store goods before Thackery was shut down while everyone else was forced to survive on whatever canned goods they had stored or by roasting the rats that had found their way inside their doors looking for blood. One of the mayor’s servants carrying an armful of food had caught the attention of a couple of dogs who had finished their turn on the trader, and the servant was quickly taken into their bellies. The mayor complained about the lack of eggs in his breakfast the next morning.

The lockdown of Thackery was rounding the bend on its fourth week. Neighbors began calling to each other to see if they were still alive. Some would not answer back, and the animals would scratch insistently at their doors, answering the question of the fate of the person inside. More and more rats had squeezed their way inside homes which added a new fear to the residents each time the clicking started. If starvation didn’t kill, the rats would surely try.

There were days when a person became so ravished with fits of paranoia, the exhaustion of being trapped inside, or the unending hunger that they would run straight out into the horde of animals. The sounds of life being ripped to shreds echoed in the square more and more each day as people began to find the idea of death more appealing than being stuck inside and left to the devices of stagnation.

The Thackery Tree seemed to burn brighter. The clicking became an alarm of dread in each soul of Thackery. The animals no longer resembled dogs, foxes, coyotes, or cats but demons that had crawled straight from hell, or the Thackery Tree itself. The people prayed for stray visitors—fresh bait to allow a quick run outside to the garden for food—but no one passed over Thackery’s borders. It was as if they were in their own dimension away from the world, living a never-ending horror.

At the end of July, the people had all but become bloodthirsty like Roman emperors wishing to throw their fellow townspeople down into the hungry pit as if it was their personal coliseum filled with lions just to appease the black vileness living inside their own souls. At the start of August, those that remained were no longer humans.

There was an orphan boy of Thackery that everyone lovingly called Little Danny. He had never belonged to anyone, his mother having died in childbirth, but the town had taken care of him as if he was the collective child of Thackery. The stores would clothe and feed him, the elderly would watch him and tell him stories, and everyone took turns giving Little Danny a bed at night. When the lockdown had first started weeks prior, Little Danny had been nowhere to be found. The town had begrudgingly sealed their doors shut without him, assuming that the worst had already happened to the boy. But on that first day of August, a woman looked out her window and caught sight of the little, blonde toddler’s head bobbing up and down heading towards the square.

Little Danny walked amidst the animals with no fear, jumping playfully at all of them with a stick and rubbing a couple of dogs’ ears as he made his way to the Thackery Tree. The town watched in horror as his bare feet stepped in time with the animals, but no one shouted for help, because they knew that help did not exist among them.

As the boy rounded the corner and came upon the burning tree, the clicking started and the animals began growling low and violently—their eyes black and their mouths foaming. Little Danny brushed his messy hair from his forehead and watched as his furry friends began circling him, but the boy only took their strange formation as a game and began laughing and clapping in time with the loud clicking.

“Danny!” an old woman finally shouted from a window, “Run!”

Little Danny shot his blue eyes up at the woman—his once innocent expression twisted into a grimace of muddled panic. The creatures pricked up their ears at the sound. The townspeople all scowled at the old woman for drawing attention away from the boy.

Little Danny slowly held his hands together in front of himself as he rocked back and forth in place, unsure of what to do. He looked around at the townspeople in the windows that were silently watching him and the animals, a cry on his lips, as he wanted to light upon at least one of them that might help him as they always had before. The animals all joined in on disjointed yips and cries as they continued their march around Little Danny. The boy held out one hand to them.

“You’re my friends. You’re my friends, please.”

A snap of a moment and the beasts descended upon the boy. The soundless square was brutally torn apart by hungry growls and a few cries of terror from the townspeople that watched. Some kept their eyes down as if to shield their sinful complicity from their minds, but some kept their eyes steady on the dreadful scene. Tufts of dark fur flew around the stained, cobblestone square. Within a minute, the animals began to leave the area, and the crows flew down and took what had been left behind.

The residents of Thackery closed their windows once the clicking had stopped. And the Thackery Tree stood tall and bright in the square, as it always had—a silent spectator of humanity.