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

they're whispering his name through this disappearing land,

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 blasting 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 difficult to find a soundtrack that makes retracing your dead sister's last 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, it still made the little 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, and it was just as black and twisted as it had looked in the twilight.

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

It wasn't until I saw it that I realised I had still been half-convinced that I had 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 like recklessness to risk it, so I pulled my car into the grassy verge and left it there. For reasons that I'm still unsure of, I grabbed my handbag from the passenger seat before exiting the vehicle. Maybe there was a part of me that knew, even then, that I wouldn't be 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 alarm bells that were ringing in my head.

Still, I approached the tree with caution, 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 black, I realised, it was dark. It seemed as though the sunlight couldn't reach it, somehow. I shrugged off another shiver, and fought off another urge to turn around and 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 for the same reason - with the exception of Seth, who I had just hated on sight. He had done nothing to assuage my initial impressions of him though. My knuckles were swollen from punching him, and I relished the throbbing pain in my hand. Part of me 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 sinister 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 that I should run from this place. I knew that if the tables were turned around, she wouldn't leave me now.

This tree felt important, and not just because it had been where she had met her end. I saw it every time I closed my eyes. It was seared into my brain. The first few times I had re-lived the dream, it felt like my mind was simply taunting me with the memory. After the third or fourth time, however, it had started to feel more like a clue from my subconscious. It had felt like a coded message that I didn't have the decryption key for. I knew, somehow, that I would find it here.

I started from the tree and worked outwards, examining the ground around it. There was no evidence that a crash had even happened. No tire marks on the road, because she hadn't been able to slam the brakes. The tree itself was undamaged. It looked like it had stood there for a thousand years, and would stand for a thousand more. It was odd, I thought. I had grown up only a few miles from here. I felt like I knew every rock, hill and tree in the area by heart, but I couldn't recall ever seeing this one before that night.

There was nothing to do out here. We had always had to make our own fun. Every strange landmark 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 that had flooded years before we were born. It looked like a natural lake until the summer months 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 had ever been more than a swimming hole.

There was Raven's Rock - a jutting cliff-edge hidden off the trail in the woods. You could only find it if you knew what you were looking for. It was unremarkable for most of the year, but if you went there during the springtime, the underside of the rock face was home to nesting ravens. If you stood on the edge of the cliff and clapped your hands together, the ravens would erupt from beneath your feet, and fly around you like clouds of black smoke.

Then there was the old, dilapidated viaduct. The bridge had collapsed decades ago, and only the vast pillars still stood. We called those 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 didn't belong here.

I studied it suspiciously, but as time marched on, I started to feel a little foolish. What did I expect to find? It was just a tree. A spooky, Burton-esque tree, but a tree all the same. There were no answers here, only more pain.

Hot tears of frustration coupled with grief pricked my eyes and I grunted in anger, turning away from it, but I couldn't leave just yet. I wanted to, God knows I wanted to get the Hell out of there, but something was making me stay. I lowered myself to the ground and sat, looking up at the snaking branches, waiting for an answer to fall out of the sky like the proverbial apple. Of course, nothing happened. I sat there for a few minutes longer and sighed, standing up and brushing myself off.

"There's nothing here." I whispered to myself, as I slowly turned to make my way back down the hill to my car. I stopped and, on an impulse, planted a light kiss on my fingertips and reached out to touch the tree. "I promise I won't stop looking, Em."

As soon as my hand came into contact with the scaly bark, I was thrown backwards, violently. I landed on my front with a thump on hard, mossy ground, winded from the impact. "What the fuck?" I tried to say, but I couldn't find my breath.

I turned around to look at the tree, but it was…gone. Or I was gone, because the place where the tree should have stood was occupied by a small, primitive-looking hut. The road was gone, the fields were gone. I was in the middle of a forest. And then I realised. It had happened. I had lost my mind. I thought I had felt it slipping a few times over the last week, but this was beyond anything I could have imagined. I flipped myself onto my back and perched myself up unsteadily on my elbows. A shadow moved over me and blocked out the sunlight and I squinted up at the figure of a woman looming over me. A woman that I recognised, quite impossibly.

"You…" It sounded like an accusation, though I had meant it more incredulously than accusingly.

"Mother!" She called to the hut, folding her arms. "We have a guest."

The ground lurched beneath me as my mind reached its limit, and I slumped back on the moss, letting go of consciousness…if that's what it was at all.