Do Not Play the Tree Trunk Game
The last time I ever saw my sister I was 12 years old. We lived in a pretty rural area. It was still close enough to civilization to be considered suburbs, but just far enough that our backyard wasn’t so much a backyard, but the edge of a massive forest.
My sister and I used to love coming home from school and running off into those woods. We’d go exploring, play dumb little adventure games, and would just generally mess around the way kids do.
I’ll never forget the day it happened. It was a late summer afternoon, and we were supposed to go out looking for salamanders in the stream that ran about a half mile from our house when my sister appeared hand in hand with another girl I’d never seen before.
“She’s our new neighbor!” My sister said, fighting to hold back her excitement as she always had. I didn’t remember seeing anyone with a moving truck anywhere near our house, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I introduced myself with a smile. The new girl was shy but suggested we play hide and seek when I asked what we should do.
“You should be the first to count!” I said. “It’s only fair, you’re new.”
The girl covered her eyes and I ran off to hide in my favorite spot, a thick bush next to our back porch. I watched as my sister scampered off behind a tree and stood, giggling so loudly that she gave away her position almost immediately. We played like that for about an hour, with my sister and the new girl swapping between hider and seeker since neither of them could find me.
“It’s your turn now!” My sister said to me after a while.
“You guys haven’t even found me once!” I said.
“Yeah, but it’s not fair, we both want to hide together!” The new girl said.
“Okay, fine,” I said, immediately closing my eyes and starting to count as loudly as I could. I remember feeling incredibly confident, knowing that I’d be able to find them in seconds. So I counted to sixty instead of thirty just to give them a better head start.
When I opened my eyes, they were gone.
“Ready or not, here I come!” I yelled. I ran over to a big willow with a little opening that I knew was my sister’s favorite place to hide. But she wasn’t behind the willow, and she wasn’t behind any of her usual spots either. I kept searching and searching and I couldn’t find either of them anywhere.
And suddenly I was feeling incredibly nervous as I searched, becoming increasingly desperate as every tree I looked behind, and every bush I searched inside came up empty. So I started yelling their names.
“Guys, where are you? This isn’t funny anymore!” I yelled over and over as I walked.
And finally, I found them. They weren’t hiding when I did, they were standing and laughing happily, distracted, in the middle of a clearing.
They weren’t alone.
A man was with them. Or at least I think it was a man. He was dressed in a top hat and three-piece suit. It was both elegant and playful in the most sinister way. I wish I knew how else to describe him, how else he looked like, but I couldn’t see his face. It was almost like he didn’t have one, like the top hat was somehow always covering his eyes in just the right way that it masked him completely except for an awful, unnatural smile.
“Come here listen!” My sister said when she finally noticed me.
“Oh, uhm… no, I think we should go home,” I started saying.
But then the man spoke. It was a happy, whimsical voice, both whispery and loud at the same time, both hugely inviting and massively threatening.
“No, stay! I’m teaching your sister the Tree Trunk Game!”
I took a step back. How did this man know she was my sister? I looked over at her and shook my head. But she just rolled her eyes and ignored me.
“I think dinner will probably be ready. Mom’s gonna be mad if we’re late,” I said almost desperately, hoping my sister would take a hint. But she only turned around to look at me, hands held together almost as if she was praying, and said:
“No, no! Just look at this super quick!”
“Yeah, watch this it's awesome!” Said the new girl.
And then the man spoke again.
“It’s simple! You find two trees like these,” he said, and he hopped over to a pair of gnarled trees that were rooted so closely together they might have almost been the same plant and formed a sort of V shape.
“And then you hip, and you hop from one side to the other,” he said leaning playfully against the tree. “And you say the words!”
“What words?” I asked, but the man had started jumping between the V, moving from one side to the other, and reciting what sounded like a poem.
“It’s time to play the tree trunk game, and though I’ll never be the same. I will not stop for all my luck, until I find I’ve gotten stuck.”
And one the final word, the man jumped one last time and promptly disappeared as if he’d gone through a door between the two trees.
I ran forward immediately, searching everywhere for the man. I looked through the trees. I even cautiously stuck my hand between them, but nothing happened.
“He’ll be back, watch!” Said my sister as she laughed.
“Here I am!” yelled the man from behind us. I turned around, terrified, and looked at the man wide-eyed. He smiled at me, then looked at my sister.
“Now you try!” He said.
“No!” I screamed, and immediately ran over to her and grabbed her arm. I could feel her fighting against me, I could feel her protesting, but I didn’t care. Whatever was happening was not normal. I looked around, searching for a way to get out.
“My mom will be worried. Dinner,” I said, then looked at the new girl. “You should come too.”
“I’m going to play the Tree Trunk Game,” she said.
“Stay and watch!” said the man “It’s fun!”
“No,” I said, and I pulled my sister’s arm hard and back towards our house. I walked away as fast as I could, getting as much distance between us and the clearing as I could. In a panic, I managed to just barely hear as the new girl recited the words herself.
“It’s time to play the Tree Trunk Game, and though I’ll never be the same, I will not stop for all my luck, until I find I’ve gotten stuck!”
My sister was clawing at my arm, and I finally let go when we could see our house behind some trees.
“Why would you do that?” She said, angry. “Now I’ll never get to play!”
“Because,” I said. “Don’t you remember you’re not supposed to talk to strangers? That guy was scary!”
“He wasn’t a stranger!”
“What?”
“Yeah! They’re brothers!”
I blinked, then shook my head, grabbed my sister’s shoulders, and held her tight.
“Listen,” I said. “I need you to promise me to never, ever, play that game. I don’t care if you think it’s fun.”
My sister sighed, “fine.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
I nodded, and we walked back into the house and got ready for dinner.
I don’t really know why I never mentioned the game to my parents that night. I guess I was naïve, or maybe I trusted that my sister would be sensible enough to listen to my warning. We ate dinner and didn’t say a word about the man in the hat or the game. My sister didn’t even mention the new neighbor girl. Then we sat around watching a little bit of TV before going upstairs.
Back then, my sister and I shared a room because my parent’s had been painting hers and doing some renovations on the house. They’d stuck a small bed next to mine where she slept. My room was small, but it had always been my favorite because it had huge windows that let you see all the stars and the woods around our house.
She wasn’t in her bed when I woke up that night. I can’t tell you how I knew, but I knew something was wrong almost immediately. Her shoes were gone, and the door to our room was wide open. I instantly jumped up, threw my shoes on, and looked out our window where I just barely managed to see below as her tiny figure disappeared into the shadows of the woods.
I didn’t think, I was too terrified. I ran down the stairs as fast as I could, doing my best not to wake my parents, managed to get out of the house into the cold night air, and ran after her between the trees. I could hear her in the distance, she was giggling, talking to someone excitedly. And then she started to say the words.
“It’s time to play the Tree Trunk Game, and though I’ll never be the same…”
“No!” I yelled as I ran through bushes and between trees. “Stop!”
“I will not stop for all my luck.”
I burst through the trees into the clearing just in time to see my sister and the man jumping between the trees.
“Until I find I’ve gotten stuck!”
And on that last word, the man looked up and I saw his eyes were a deep, unnatural yellow, and my sister saw me and gave me a giant smile and a half wave as she jumped through the tree and disappeared on the other side.