THE GRISTLY OAK

Supernatural Stories | Apr 20, 2013 | 6 min read
8 Votes, average: 4 out of 5
If you take a left off Lafayette Avenue, onto Lee St., you will immediately come upon It on your right. It towers far above, and over, up from behind an eight-foot tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Not much further along the block, beside the railroad tracks, stands the once bustling Grimes gristmill. It is an enormous, decaying structure of brick and wood, built before the end of the 19th century. My mother says that my grandfather used to take loads of corn, from his fields, to this place for processing, before it closed in the 1950s. One can see that train tracks, now paved over, still lead right up into the building and no doubt held junction there in elder times.

It is recorded in Rowan County public documents that the Grimes family was notoriously alleged to be involved in organized crime. Though never fully convicted of such acts, a nefarious reputation began to precede and grow up around them to the extent that by the mid ‘30s business had completely dropped off. Most farmers took their harvest elsewhere, and it only remained open for the next two decades through force of habit.
The Grimes family was earnestly involved in real estate and owned that entire block as well as the next three in each direction. More than half a century later there are empty old garages, tottering houses, and burgeoning but impoverished minority neighborhoods in this district that once bustled with commerce. The whole district rises steadily in elevation from all directions and culminates in the hill-topped mill; and brooding lonely off from it, the ancient gray and gnarled titan.

I had stopped my car to view the tree in the day a few times; and often went that way while wending through town with the sole purpose of slowing to visually absorb its coarsely knobbed trunk and its impressive immensity. One Wednesday, I decided to have a much closer look. Parking my car beside the curb, I struggled with ungainly steps up the steeply eroded and acorn littered embankment that terminated in the tall barbed fence. There before me, almost within reach, upon the other side was the massive trunk of the Oak. It appeared more gray than brown; and I marveled at its knotty ruggedness. I wondered how old this arboreal relic must be and how panoramic and notable its vista might have been through centuries, had trees the eyes to see. Not only able to have glared a short mile and seen North Carolina's only Civil War prison; but probably even matured in time enough to have seen several blocks away, to where General Cornwallis had set up an artillery bombardment against Salisbury's American Revolutionaries. I was determined to touch this living giant of historic antiquity and made up my mind to return that very night and scale the formidable fencing.
All afternoon I paced anxiously around my home, mentally preparing for tossing the heavy cloak on the barbs and overtopping the cruel barrier separating me from gently laying hands upon a creature that might have sprung up before Raleigh's Roanoke colony was lost. Fitfully I waited on the snail-paced sun to set, and with impatient will I drove it down to dusk.

Parking down and around a wholly different block, behind one of the long abandoned garages, I proceeded briskly to my destination. I could see its o'er spreading branches as tendrils of darkness against the sickly purple city sky while still a ways off, well before the main tree came into view. I rounded the corner, cutting across someone's lawn in my haste; and then my eyes widened at the full monstrosity of the mighty Oak. Elephantine in its girth, its tall and twisting branches swaying in a breeze, its sylvan form surreal there in the moonlight's spectral rays.

I more than half considered turning back from my pursuit, so queerly large and imposing the benighted tree now seemed to me. Instead I chuckled at my imaginative and skittish spirit, climbed half the fence, tossed my cloak on the barbs, finished my still painfully manual ascent, and clambered down onto other side, half twisting my ankle as I did so. "Jesus!" I exclaimed at my near misfortune, and as I uttered the word a branch snapped overhead and I, leaping backwards landed squarely on my posterior upon the earthen berm. This is much too much excitement for my nerves, I thought, and made it a point now to move deliberately slower, lest I end up injured and decidedly caught for trespass.

For the first time, able to look upon the other side of the tree, I realized the ground tilted and took a slanted dive down there as on the public side, but deeper and with an odd undercut area. Curious to see its roots, I first made the point to accomplish my primary mission and turning to the very near and gnarly trunk, placed my hand ridiculously gently upon the deeply fissured bark of the behemoth. I snatched it back; and recoiled at once in horror! But wait!
Though my adrenaline surged and startled feet prepared for flight, I convinced myself that an unknown science must be at work here. Why was the bark not hard as cobbled stone as it appeared; but rather rubbery, like a tough sponge in texture? I thought about the cork oak tree of Iberia, at best some distant cousin, for cork oaks only lived two hundred years; and this tree's leaves and size marked it as a very aged willow oak, though its granular bark belied this.

Eking diagonally down the sloped ground, I reached the lower level, which was somewhat turned upon itself to form a large dark recess and served to shield the undercut area from the feeble rays of the nearest streetlamp and the daytime sun. I had no idea I would be exploring, and thoroughly denounced my lack of forethought at not bringing a flashlight. Still, the longer I stood here, the more I could faintly see into the hollow. Wishing to see the roots, I took a step into it and seemed to step into a very thick mealy soup. It flooded my worn shoes, and again I woefully and scornfully decried my ill conceptions.

Suddenly! my heart leapt, as something of a splash sounded further in… no WAY further in, inward and downward, as if this deepening coomb went well back and down into the Earth. Finally a flash of insight came; and I quickly patted my pockets, remembering I was carrying a butane lighter. As I rolled the steel over the flint, the sparks ignited gas, turned to fire, and brought a light within the cavernous void where sunbeams never reached.
Within the space of moments, (which seemed eternities for they might never leave my mind), too many dark secrets were revealed too quickly for a sensitive human psyche.

The police stopped me as I careened through lights and signs on my way home. They asked too many pointed questions of my haste, and why I was badly bleeding from multiple lacerations. I made the terrible mistake of telling them the truth, so I am now here in Broughton's mental hospital. They label me a paranoid schizophrenic, coherent in the day, but prone to nocturnal terrors of dendrophobia.
For a time I insisted a party of armed men investigate the site by day with strong spotlights; but the mild interest of the policemen and staff turned to laughs and sneers as I stammered out the rest. My testimony that human skeletons lay beneath the street in sunken piles, they half considered; but that gangrenous roots of a hoary Oak wrapped inside them, and plunged deeply into a charnel suet that pooled down into a sepulchral abyss, ruined all hope of the truth for them and turned their minds wholly to disgust at how a man could imagine such grotesquerie. My further assertion (that as I raced in a mad rout to overtop the barbed fence, I cast one more terrified glance upon the cartilaginous surface of Its grizzled trunk; and saw, starkly there, the contorted countenances of multitudes of victims' faces ingrained within), only served to confirm my madness.
Now I keep these ravings to myself; and in an ironic effort to escape my captors' cage, have even taken to planting little sapling trees.

~ On the hill by the rail, on the less used road,
Stands the old gristmill that my Grandpa knowed.
Rotting timbers, sagging floors, now rusting silos;
the mob ran it, during prohibition, so it goes.
Just half a block away, o'er an obscured quay,
an ancient grisly Oak spreads massive limbs and roots that cloak.
What silty secrets soak there? None may see (nor say).
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