The Weeping Dryad

It had been three weeks since the incident at the old mill, and I still couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching me from the treeline. My friend Marcus and his sister Lena had gotten tangled up with a strange girl named Ivy after school. She was quiet, pale, always wore black, and smelled faintly of damp earth and rotting leaves. They’d been discussing mythology for a project, and Ivy mentioned she was a ‘practitioner of the old ways.’ Marcus, ever the cynic, laughed and called it ‘LARPing for the mentally unstable.’ Ivy’s face went blank, and she said, ‘You shouldn’t mock what you don’t understand. My grandmother’s spirit will visit you tonight.’

Marcus dismissed it, but that night, he called me, his voice shaky. ‘Dude, something’s in my room. I saw a shape by my window, like a woman made of bark and moss, and it was crying. Not human crying, but like the sound of a tree groaning in the wind.’ I told him he was being dramatic, probably just a nightmare. But the next day, he had scratches on his arms, three parallel lines, like from a branch. Lena showed me her own scratches on her ankle, and she had dark circles under her eyes. ‘I keep hearing whispers in the walls,’ she said. ‘They sound like my name, but in a voice I’ve never heard.’

A week later, the incidents escalated. Marcus said his reflection in the mirror would lag behind his movements by a second. Lena found a small, desiccated bird on her pillow, its chest cavity hollowed out. I started sleeping with my lights on. Then, one night, Lena called me, sobbing. ‘It’s in my closet. I saw its face, all wrinkled and old, with leaves for hair. It’s whispering to me to open the door.’ I drove over immediately. When I arrived, the house was freezing, and the air smelled of wet soil. Lena was huddled in the corner of her room, pointing at the closet door. ‘It’s still there,’ she whispered. I grabbed a baseball bat and yanked the door open. Nothing. But the walls creaked, and I swear I heard a low, feminine chuckle.

I decided to confront Ivy the next day. I found her behind the mill, sitting on a mossy log, carving something into a piece of bark. She looked up, and her eyes were like polished stones. ‘You’ve come about Marcus and Lena,’ she said, not a question. ‘I warned him. But mocking the old ways has consequences.’ I asked her to lift the curse. She smiled, a slow, unsettling smile. ‘It’s not a curse. It’s a companion. A dryad, born from my grandmother’s resentment. She’ll follow your friends, feeding on their fear, until they acknowledge her. Until they thank her for her company.’ I demanded to know how to make it stop. She handed me a sprig of dried leaves. ‘Burn this at the base of an oak tree at midnight. But beware, the dryad might not be ready to leave. She gets attached.’

That night, I took the sprig to the huge oak at the center of the grove behind the mill. At exactly midnight, I lit it. The leaves burned with a green flame, and the tree groaned. I thought it was over. But the next morning, Marcus and Lena were gone. Their phones led to the grove, and we found their clothes neatly folded at the base of the oak. A note, written in a spidery hand on birch bark, read: ‘Thank you for your company. I’ve taken them home.’ I felt a cold wind, and the tree’s branches seemed to reach toward me. Now, whenever I walk past a tree, I hear a faint, weeping sound, and I know the dryad is still waiting for someone else to mock her. I haven’t slept in days. And last night, I saw a face in the bark of the maple outside my window, its mouth open in a silent scream.