When the disappearances first started, the citizens of Tucker, Ohio paid them little mind. There could have been as many as twenty, fifty, seventy disappearances before anyone noticed. After all, who cared about missing plants?

Could have been hungry deer. Could have been vandals. Whatever it was, people would wake up each day to find their gardens thinner. Once noticed, it grew vexing, but nobody ever expected it to reach the severity that it did. Soon half a garden would be gone with each passing night. Since Tucker was mostly a farming community, things like this could be devastating.

Deer they could have hunted, but they never found any, even in the forest. So it must have been something else. Vexation swelled to anger, and anger led to suspicion. At first they blamed the outsiders who occasionally passed through their town, but there weren’t many of them, and plants were disappearing from one end of the town to the other. So few people clearly couldn’t do this much damage. They then blamed the children, who had pulled pranks before, though nothing on as large a scale as this. But the children never admitted doing it, and people soon began to doubt them.

So who was left to blame?

Suspicion turned into astonishment when trees began to vanish. People in bed would hear only the sounds of the night--frogs, crickets, and owls--yet sometime while they were listening, the trees in their yards would be taken. There would be no remains, no sawdust, no branches, and no roots even. There would just be a grass clearing where there wasn’t one before.

People were perplexed, but didn’t become truly frightened until a kid sleeping in his tree house vanished along with the tree. The police did all they could, but nobody ever saw him again. People now grew exasperated over this mystery, and became obsessed with solving it. That is what led to almost a hundred people camping out around the oldest tree in the city, a mammoth elm. Nicknamed “Mel,” it had been immense when the city was first founded, and was even more so now. Its branches seemed to brush the clouds. On that night, dozens of campfires lit up the land around it. The next morning charred logs were all that remained of the hundred people who had spent the night there, and a few fallen leaves were all that remained of the elm tree.

The police had no more luck finding them than they had had with the missing child. A disaster this devastating almost destroyed the town. Half of its citizens left. The others watched as the forest grew thinner day by day. Then there was a fire that destroyed what remained of the forest. No one knew what had started it. Half of the remaining citizens left.

The charred skeletons of the trees stayed as they were. Nothing grew to replace them, no matter how many years past. It seemed that only one tree had survived, but it was a tree that nobody had ever seen before. Growing in the same place the elm tree had once stood, its bark was dark brown with black spots, and instead of large branches it had hundreds of thinner, scraggly ones. Thick leaves covered these branches, creating a column of dark green that rose one hundred feet. The leaves themselves were shaped like stars, and had enormous veins. Each fall they turned a deep red, pockmarked with yellow spots. When it rained, the fallen leaves would dissolve into brown sludge, that clung to boots like glue. People often talked about cutting it down, but nobody did.

Decades passed. The tree grew larger, and the citizens grew older. After some time had gone by, they tried to plant new gardens, but everywhere they dug they found a thick tangle of roots blocking their shovels. The roots themselves were fairly thin, but there were thousands of them. No matter how deep they dug, they couldn’t get past them. They grew all throughout the blackened forest too, and up every hill and down every valley, but they grew thickest around the one tree.

Anger, suspicion, and now hatred grew again, but it was directed not at a person but at a thing, at the one tree. It was the physical manifestation of the troubles that had plagued their town. Things all began to fall into place: the plants had vanished so there would be no competition for land, and the forest had burned to enrich the soil. Something had been weeding in their town, preparing the land for the arrival of its own seed.

Now that they thought they knew the truth, they didn’t know what to do. Only thirty or forty citizens remained in the town. Out of desperation, they all met one night around the one tree. They had brought along kerosene, and doused the entire base of the tree with it, but the wood wouldn’t catch on fire no matter how hot the chemicals burned. In the light of the fire, which was dying as quickly as the kerosene burnt away, each man began to pray silently.

The flames fizzled out.

Then, out of the night, came a blinding flash of light followed by a titanic blast of thunder, which rattled the windows of the deserted town.

Darkness fell again.

Each man was gone, vanished along with the rest. The one tree had fallen. It lay in many blackened pieces, that would soon rot. It had landed on several houses. Nobody was home. The town was dead. What would grow from the ruins was yet to be seen.