Chapter 2: The Boy in the Trees

The Boy in the Trees

My body went rigid, training taking over where conscious thought failed. My breath hitched. My eyes were locked on the plain, white-painted closet door. The sound had been so sharp, so real, it had a physical texture. It wasn't a pipe banging or the building settling. I know the sounds of a building. I’ve spent hundreds of nights listening to them, cataloging them, differentiating the mundane from the threat. This was not mundane.

Panic, cold and sharp, tried to climb up my throat. I shoved it down with practiced discipline. Threat assessment. The knock came from inside. Who’s in the apartment? No one. Check the locks. The deadbolt on the main door is thrown, the chain is on. Windows are locked. Clear.

It’s the PTSD. It has to be. Auditory hallucinations. Dr. Evans warned me about them. Stress-induced sensory distortions. Writing about the Esther house was the stressor. The knock was the symptom. A simple, clinical explanation.

But it felt real.

My fists clenched, the knuckles straining against the skin. I forced myself to move, my boots making no sound on the cheap laminate floor. One step. Then another. My hand, slick with a sudden sweat, reached for the closet doorknob. I twisted it. Pulled.

The door swung open silently. A row of neatly hung shirts. A stack of folded jeans on the shelf. My old duffel bag on the floor. Nothing else. I reached in, my hands patting the empty space, feeling the cool drywall of the back wall. Nothing.

I slammed the door shut, the sound a paltry echo of the knock that had summoned it. It wasn't real. It couldn't have been.

My heart was still a frantic drum against my ribs. I needed a different anchor, a different kind of logic. Information. Data. If I could just find a rational thread online, a newspaper article about a gas leak, an obituary for the Esthers, something to ground the memory in fact, then I could deal with the phantom knocks.

I sat down at my laptop, the screen a sterile blue beacon in the dim room. My fingers flew over the keyboard.

“Esther family deaths Hogeye Texas”

The search engine churned. Results flooded the screen. An article about a bake sale in a town called Hog Wallow, Arkansas. A link to the Texas Department of Public Safety. A genealogical site with a listing for an Esther family in Dallas from 1920. Nothing about a massacre. Nothing about a man named Harland.

I refined the search. “Harland Esther murder Hogeye” … “Hogeye trailer park tragedy 1990s” … “Unsolved crimes Lincoln County Texas”.

Nothing. It was more than just a lack of information. It was a void. A small-town family murder-suicide, the kind of local gore that news outlets usually latch onto for weeks, should have left some digital footprint, no matter how faint. But there was nothing. It was as if it never happened.

A cold dread, entirely different from the closet-door panic, began to settle in my gut. This wasn't just a forgotten memory; it felt like an erased one.

Fine. I’d try a different angle.

“Derrick Hayes, Hogeye, Texas”

I searched his name with every variation I could think of. Birth year. School district. Nothing. No Facebook profile of a man in his late twenties with a reckless grin. No LinkedIn. No online footprint at all. It was possible, I guess. Some people stayed offline. But for there to be nothing—no mention in a school newsletter, no old high school sports roster, no trace he ever existed beyond my own fractured memory—felt wrong. It felt impossible.

Frustration boiled into anger. I slammed the laptop shut. The ghosts weren't just in my head. They were out there, actively hiding.

I grabbed the notebook again, the pen a weapon against the encroaching irrationality. Dr. Evans’ voice echoed in my head. Give the ghosts a shape on a page. There was more to that day. Something I’d been avoiding. The part after the knocks. After the running.

---

Entry 1, Continued.

We ran until our lungs burned and the stitch in my side felt like a knife. We didn’t stop until we reached the relative safety of the main park road, collapsing under the orange glow of a buzzing streetlamp. The cicadas were screaming their nightly chorus, a sound so loud it felt like it could swallow any other noise in the world. But it couldn't. I could still hear the echo of that third knock in my bones.

Derrick was gasping for air, his face pale in the chemical light. His bulletproof grin was gone. He just looked like a scared ten-year-old kid.

“Did you… did you see it?” he finally wheezed, not looking at me. He was staring back down the overgrown cul-de-sac, towards the darkness where the Esther trailer sat.

“See what?” I asked, my own voice trembling. “I didn’t see anything. I just heard it.”

“No,” he insisted, shaking his head. “When we ran out. At the edge of the woods. I saw someone. A boy.”

My memory of that moment has always been a blur of adrenaline and panic. But as I write this, forcing the details to the surface, the image sharpens. It’s like turning the focus ring on a camera. The background noise fades, and the picture becomes horrifyingly clear.

We both looked back. I’d always told myself we saw nothing, just the swaying pines and the deep, bottomless dark of the Texas woods. But that’s a lie.

Derrick was wrong. It wasn’t a boy.

It was standing just inside the treeline, perfectly still, where the light from the streetlamp couldn’t quite reach. It was tall. Taller than any man I’d ever seen. And thin, unnaturally so. Its limbs were like long, brittle sticks, and its body was a stark, pale slash against the darkness of the trees. It had no discernible features, its face a smudge of shadow, but I could feel its attention on us. It wasn’t hiding. It was watching. Patient. Ancient.

As we stared, paralyzed, one of its long arms moved. It bent in the middle, then again near what should have been the wrist, a jerky, insect-like motion. It raised a hand and, slowly, deliberately, waved. Not a friendly wave. A gesture of possession. Of farewell.

That’s what truly broke us. We scrambled to our feet and ran again, all the way to my trailer, where we locked the door and didn’t speak of it again.

---

My pen fell from my numb fingers, clattering onto the floor. My breathing was shallow. The image was so clear now, so vivid. The stick-like limbs. The impossible height. The chilling, deliberate wave. It wasn't a man. It wasn't a boy. It was a thing. The Knocker.

Just then, my phone buzzed on the table, a violent, jarring sound that made me jump. An unknown number. I almost ignored it, but some instinct made me answer.

“Hello?”

There was a crackle of static, then a voice I hadn't heard in years. A voice like gravel and stale cigarette smoke.

“Jordan? It’s your mother.”

We hadn't spoken since my discharge. Our conversations were always minefields of things unsaid. “Mom? How did you get this number?”

“A mother knows things,” she said, her voice strained, skipping the pleasantries. There was fear in it, a familiar, weathered terror I hadn't heard since I was a child hiding from my father's temper. “I heard you were stirring up old dust. Asking questions about Hogeye.”

The blood drained from my face. “What are you talking about? I haven’t talked to anyone.”

“Don’t lie to me, boy,” she hissed. “You know what I’m talking about. You were always a stubborn child. You and that Derrick.”

The mention of his name hit me like a physical blow. “Mom, what happened to him? To his family?”

There was a long pause, filled with the sound of her ragged breathing. When she spoke again, her voice was barely a whisper, a desperate plea.

“You listen to me. You leave it alone. You don’t go back there. Some things… some graves are best left undisturbed. You understand me, Jordan? You let them lie.”

Before I could ask another question, the line went dead.

I stood in the suffocating silence of my apartment, the dead phone pressed to my ear. The memory of the figure in the trees burned behind my eyes. The feeling of being watched was no longer a symptom. The knock was no longer a hallucination.

Someone knew I was digging. And they were scared.