Text"…he's a god, he's a man, he's a ghost, he's a guru,

  they're whispering his name through this disappearing nd,

  but hidden in his coat is a red right hand…"

  "That's quite enough of that." I muttered to myself, turning the radio off with a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold air bsting through the air-con. This road was unsettling enough without ominous background music.

  It only took a few seconds to realise that the silence was just as bad.

  It was hard to find a soundtrack that made retracing your dead sister's st steps any easier.

  Maybe ABBA, I thought, absently.

  I didn't have to drive for long before I saw it.

  Even with the afternoon sun still high in the sky and birds chirping overhead, it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. It looked like something that had been plucked straight from the set of a horror movie—just as bck and twisted as it had looked in the twilight.

  I wasn't sure why I was so surprised to see it. I'd already accepted the dream hadn't been a dream. The voicemail should've been confirmation enough.

  It wasn't until I saw the tree again that I realised I'd still been half-convinced I'd made the whole thing up.

  I stopped my car at the bottom of the hill and peered up at it through the windshield.

  I didn't expect the same thing to happen to me, but it just seemed reckless to risk it. So I pulled my car into the grassy verge and left it there. For reasons I still don't understand, I grabbed my handbag from the passenger seat before stepping out. Maybe part of me knew—even then—that I wasn't coming back.

  I almost turned around a few times as I made my way up the hill. But then I thought of Emily. And I kept walking, ignoring the arm bells screaming in my head.

  I approached the tree cautiously, half-expecting it to go all Whomping Willow on me. I stood in front of it, looking up at the bare, twisted branches.

  It was a sunny day, but the tree wasn't just bck—it was dark. The sunlight didn't seem to reach it at all.

  Even the birds had gone quiet. I should've taken the hint. Mum always said I was a bird. Maybe she meant the kind that flies into windows.

  I shrugged off another shiver and fought back the urge to run and never look back.

  I had always protected her. Even when we were kids. I had protected her right up until the moment she needed me most.

  I had probably made her life a little harder, at times. I didn't like any of her friends, because I remembered every time one of them had upset her. I didn't like any of her boyfriends either—especially Seth, who I had hated on sight. He had done nothing to assuage that first impression.

  My knuckles were swollen from punching him, and I relished the throbbing pain in my hand.

  I knew I should have felt bad for causing a scene at my sister's funeral, but I couldn't bring myself to regret hitting him. Weren't funerals supposed to be about catharsis, anyway?

  Punching that horrible little weasel had done more for me than a thousand therapy sessions ever could.

  I might not have been able to protect Emily from whatever force had driven her—quite literally—to her death. Finding out the truth was all I had left to offer.

  So it didn't matter how much my instincts screamed for me to run.

  I knew that if the tables were turned, she wouldn't leave me now.

  The tree felt important—not just because it was where she died. I saw it every time I closed my eyes. The first few times I'd relived the dream, I thought it was my mind tormenting me. But after the third or fourth time, it started to feel more like a clue. A coded message I didn't have the key to.

  And I knew—somehow—that I would find it here.

  I started from the base of the tree and worked outward, examining the ground.

  No tire marks on the road. No broken branches. No sign that a crash had ever happened.

  The tree itself looked untouched. Like it had stood there for a thousand years and would stand for a thousand more.

  Odd. I'd grown up just a few miles from here. I felt like I knew every rock, hill and tree in the area by heart, but I had no memory of this one before that night.

  There wasn't much to do out here growing up—we had always had to make our own fun. Every strange ndmark within a ten mile radius had been dutifully catalogued and named. If there wasn't an interesting story behind it, we made one up.

  There was The Quarry, which looked like a ke until summer came and the water-level dipped a few inches, just low enough that the tip of a crane was visible above the surface: the only sign that it was once something more.

  There was Raven's Rock, a jutting cliff-edge hidden off-trail in the woods. You could only find it if you knew what you were looking for. Most of the year it was unremarkable—but in spring, ravens nested on the underside of the rock face. If you stood on the edge of the cliff and cpped your hands together, the ravens would erupt from beneath your feet, and fly around you like clouds of bck smoke. Some years, there would be so many of them you would swear they filled the sky and turned day into night.

  Then there was the old viaduct. The bridge had colpsed decades ago, leaving only vast stone pilrs. We called them the Giant's Stepping Stones.

  If this tree had always been here, what was its name? What story had we given it? I knew the answer, and I was no longer phased by things that weren't possible.

  This tree had no name.

  This tree didn't belong here.

  I studied it suspiciously.

  But as time passed, I started to feel a little foolish. What did I expect to find? A fshing sign? A ghostly voice? A face in the bark like Grandmother Willow?

  The tree was just a tree.

  A spooky, Burton-esque tree, sure—but a tree all the same.

  There were no answers here. Only more pain.

  Hot tears stung my eyes, and I grunted in frustration and turned away.

  But I couldn't leave—not just yet. I wanted to. God knows I wanted to get the hell out of there. But something made me stay.

  I lowered myself to the ground and sat, looking up at the tangled branches, waiting for an answer to fall from the sky.

  Of course, nothing happened.

  I sat for a few minutes longer. Then sighed, stood, and brushed myself off.

  "There's nothing here." I whispered.

  I turned to go.

  Then stopped.

  On an impulse, I kissed my fingertips and reached out to touch the bark.

  "I promise I won't stop looking, Em."

  As soon as my hand came into contact with the bck wood, I was thrown backwards—violently.

  I nded hard on my front, mossy ground smming the breath from my lungs.

  "What the fuck?" I tried to say, but I couldn't find my breath.

  I craned my neck to look back at the tree—

  Only it wasn't there. And neither was the road. Or the field. Or my car.

  They were all gone.

  Or I was.

  In the tree's pce stood a small, primitive-looking hut.

  I was in the middle of a forest—denser and darker than any of the woods I'd pyed in growing up.

  And then I realised.

  It had happened.

  I'd lost my mind.

  I thought I'd felt it slipping a few times that week. But this? This was beyond anything I could have imagined.

  I flipped onto my back and propped myself up on my elbows.

  A shadow fell across me, blocking what little sunlight filtered through the canopy.

  I squinted up at the figure of a woman looming over me.

  A woman that I recognised.

  Impossibly.

  "You…"

  It sounded like an accusation, though I hadn't meant it that way.

  The woman turned her head and called toward the hut.

  "Mother! We have a guest."

  The ground lurched beneath me as my mind reached its limit.

  I slumped back on the moss, letting go of consciousness.

  If that's what it was at all.