The Drowned Orchard

My name is Lena, and if you’ve ever seen the map of our town, you’d notice a strange gap in the middle of a dense patch of woods—a place called Hollow Pines. My parents bought a house there at the start of summer, a sprawling Victorian relic with a wraparound porch and a weathervane shaped like a twisting serpent. To reach it, you drive down a gravel road that splits the forest like a scar, past a faded sign that reads ‘Hollow Pines Estates—Where Nature Embraces You.’ The road ends in a cul-de-sac with six houses, ours being the third on the right. Behind our house, a sloped lawn gives way to a chain-link fence, then a thicket of blackberry brambles, and beyond that, an ancient apple orchard that has gone wild. The trees are gnarled, their branches twisted into shapes that look like clutching hands, and many of them lean heavily, as if trying to escape the soil. Beyond the orchard, the woods press in, dark and patient.

I’ve only been here for two weeks, and already three families have moved in and out. The realtor didn’t mention that. The first week, the neighbors on either side—both rented—packed up overnight. I saw the man from the right house, Mr. Albright, loading a pickup truck at 3 a.m., his face pale under the porch light. He didn’t speak; he just tossed boxes and drove off without a glance back. The family on the left, the Hendersons, left a note taped to our door: ‘This place isn’t safe. The orchard knows.’ My stepdad laughed, said they were just jumpy city folk. But I noticed he didn’t throw the note away. He kept it in his pocket, and sometimes I’d catch him touching it when he thought no one was looking.

The orchard is the heart of it. On the first evening, I walked to the fence and peered through the brambles. The trees were heavy with apples, but they were all the color of bruised plums, and the air smelled sweet and rotten at the same time. A breeze moved through them, and every branch seemed to creak in a different pitch, like a choir of strained voices. I heard a splash, or maybe a gurgle, from deeper in. My stepdad came out and called me in for dinner, and when I turned back, I saw a figure—a tall, thin silhouette—standing between two trees, perfectly still. It was evening, so I couldn’t make out features, but I felt it staring at me. When I blinked, it was gone.

That night, I dreamed of water. I was standing in the orchard, but the ground was flooded, ankle-deep, and the water was dark and cold. A child’s voice sang from the trees, a nursery rhyme I half-remembered: ‘One apple, two apples, three apples fall, four for the drowned, five for the crawl.’ I woke with my sheets soaked, not with sweat but with a viscous, slick moisture that smelled like river mud. My stepdad checked the roof, the pipes, found nothing. He chalked it up to my vivid imagination. But the next morning, I found a single apple on my windowsill, perfectly red and unbruised, resting on a bed of dead leaves. No tree was close enough to drop it there.

My mother started to see things too. She claimed she saw a woman in a white dress wandering the orchard at dusk, her hair hanging in wet ropes, her hands reaching for the fence. My stepdad dismissed it as a neighbor’s laundry line. But the Hendersons’ house had been empty for days, and no one else lived on that side. The day she saw it, she pulled me aside and whispered, ‘Lena, do you hear the water at night? Like it’s flowing underground?’ I did hear it—a constant, subtle rush, like a creek running beneath the soil. My stepdad said it was the irrigation system from the nearby farm, but the farm had been abandoned for a decade.

One afternoon, I decided to explore the orchard despite my stepdad’s warning to stay on our side. I found a gap in the fence where the brambles had been trampled. The ground was soft, almost spongy, and each step left a dark imprint that filled with water. The trees were older up close, their bark scarred and weeping sap that looked like black tears. In the center, the trees formed a rough circle, and in the middle of that circle was a well—an old stone well, covered in moss, with a wooden bucket rotted through. The water inside was black, and it reflected the sky perfectly, but as I leaned over, my own reflection stared back at me with a smile that was not mine. I stumbled back, and the ground gave way slightly, revealing a twisted root that looked like a hand, fingers splayed.

That evening, I told my stepdad about the well. He went out with a flashlight, and when he returned, his face was ashen. He didn’t say anything, but he locked all the doors and windows, and I heard him on the phone, whispering to someone about ‘the orchard’s history.’ I eavesdropped through the keyhole. He said, ‘The old records say there was a girl who drowned in that well a hundred years ago. They sealed it, but the trees are growing around it now, like they’re holding it together.’ He paused, then said, ‘Lena saw something. She said there was a face in the water. It was mine.’

I didn’t sleep that night. I lay in bed, listening to the sound of water dripping, and eventually a rhythmic splash, as if someone was lowering a bucket into the well and raising it over and over. I pulled the covers over my head, but the sound grew louder, more urgent, and then it became a sort of scratching, at my window. I peeked out. A figure was standing there, pressed against the glass—a girl, maybe ten years old, with pale skin and dark, soaking hair. Her eyes were empty, and her mouth moved silently, forming the words of the rhyme from my dream. She held up a single apple, and as I watched, it began to bleed from its stem, dark drops running down her arm.

I screamed, and the figure vanished. My parents ran in, but when they looked outside, there was nothing. My stepdad insisted it was a deer, a trick of the light. But my mother was shaking. She said, ‘It’s her. She’s trying to get out.’ When I asked who, she said, ‘The one who drowned. Her name was Abigail.’ The name felt familiar, like an echo from the dream.

The next day, the realtor showed up, unannounced, with a potential buyer for the house next door. He looked nervous, and he kept glancing at the orchard. My stepdad confronted him: ‘Why do people keep leaving? What is the story with this place?’ The realtor hesitated, then said, ‘There was a family that lived here in the 1920s. Their daughter, Abigail, went missing. They found her in the well, but they never found her body. They said the well was bottomless—that it connected to an underground river. Ever since, people report seeing her, hearing her. But the weird thing is, she only appears to the ones who stay the longest. She wants them to join her.’ He looked at me, and added, ‘She wants children, I think. It’s always children who see her first.’

That night, I saw her again, in my room. She sat at the foot of my bed, dripping water onto the floor, which pooled and then seemed to soak upward into the wooden boards. She didn’t speak aloud; she mouthed words, and I heard them in my head: ‘The orchard is thirsty. It drinks the rain, but it wants more. I was the last one to fall, but you can be the next. I can show you the way.’ She reached out her hand, and I saw that it was covered in black soil, and her fingers were like tree roots, twisted and gnarled. I screamed until my parents burst in, and she was gone, but the water stain remained on my bedspread, shaped like a handprint.

My stepdad finally agreed to move. He said he’d heard enough. But as we packed, my mother stood at the window, staring at the orchard. She said, ‘She’s not going to let us leave. She’s been watching us all along.’ That’s when we noticed the trees had moved—the ones at the edge of the orchard were closer to the house than they had been a day ago, as if they were slowly encroaching. The brambles were thicker, and the fence was bowed in places. And there, on our front door, was a fresh scratch mark, as if something sharp had dragged across the wood.

We left in the middle of the night, as the Albrights had done. We packed the car with what we could and drove off without stopping. But as we turned onto the gravel road, I looked back in the rearview mirror. The house was dark, but in the orchard, among the gnarled trees, I saw a cluster of figures—tall and thin, like the one I’d seen that first evening. They stood in a row, watching us go. And one of them, the smallest, waved at me with a slow, deliberate motion, holding an apple. Then the road curved, and they were gone.

It’s been a month now. We moved to the city, into a sterile apartment building with no trees, no orchards, no water. But every night, I hear the sound of a well being drawn, the creak of a bucket, the splash of water. Last night, I found an apple on my kitchen counter, though no one had bought apples. It was red and perfect, and under it was a note in a child’s handwriting: ‘I found you.’ I didn’t sleep. I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again. The orchard isn’t just in Hollow Pines. It’s in me now, and it’s waiting for me to return.