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WERE NO TREE GOES

  There was once a place where no tree grew. A barren hill in California, man‑made and dead, crowned by a towering structure of iron and metal. Its corridors stretched long and narrow like the ribs of a beast.

It was an asylum.

 The town—whose name must remain unspoken for the sake of sanity—had been ravaged by a plague of madness. Children, adults, even infants fell victim to sudden, violent insanity: paranoia, hallucinations, schizophrenia of the worst kind. No one knew why.

The water was tested. The soil examined. The air studied. Nothing explained it.

Doctors and nurses worked tirelessly, but madness is contagious in its own way. One by one, the staff began to unravel. Nurses treated former doctors. Doctors treated former nurses. The cycle spiraled until no one could tell who was sane and who was merely pretending.

The county council ordered the town sealed off. The few unaffected residents were relocated to a single street, watched day and night by truant officers. The asylum remained full.

One night, Doctor Redford Wilson sat alone at his desk, reviewing the case of a 23‑year‑old patient whose mind had shattered like glass. The halls echoed with screams and whispers—sounds that crawled under the skin.

A buzzer went off. Room 666.

Wilson hurried down the hall. The corridor was silent, darker than it should have been. The buzzing continued, sharp and insistent. When he entered the room, he found the bed overturned, sheets scattered, medicine bottles shattered across the floor.

But no patient.

The buzzer button dangled from its wire. The hall behind him was silent. The board no longer buzzed.

Wilson felt a coldness settle in his bones. He tried to dismiss it—he was not insane, not yet—but the unease clung to him.

The next night, the buzzer returned. Nonstop. Shrill. Mocking.

He sought help. Nurses heard nothing. Orderlies heard nothing. Only Wilson heard the endless, maddening buzz.

 By Friday, at the thirteenth hour, the hall was lit only by a small lamp. The buzzing drilled into his skull. He tried to ignore it. He failed.

Then he saw it.

A white figure at the end of the hall.

 At first he thought it was a patient. Then he realized it wasn’t moving like a human. It hovered—slightly, subtly—its head tilted, its presence wrong.

 He stepped closer.

 It stepped forward.

  The figure was wrapped in a white cloak, its face hidden behind a chained iron mask. It growled, a sound too deep for any throat. Then it hissed, voice cracking like broken glass:

“YOU LET ME DIE, DOCTOR WILSON. YOU LET ME DIE. ME DIE. DIE. DIE.”

 It collapsed, convulsing, blood seeping from beneath the mask. Its screams were muffled, wet, inhuman.

Doctor Wilson began twitching and panicking at the massacre before him, until his vanish began to fade.

He was found hours later, raving, clawing at his own face. He became a patient, strapped to beds, tied to chairs, injected with sedatives until he could no longer speak.

  The madness in the town worsened. The government intervened. A new policy was enacted—Legal Murder—allowing doctors to execute patients deemed “beyond help.” It was a loophole, and soon the asylum emptied. The insanity faded only because the insane were gone.

 Doctor Wilson was among the executed.

 The cause of the madness was never discovered. No cure was ever found. And the hill where the asylum once stood remains barren—dead land, fed by the bodies buried beneath It and the fear of the “silent Madness” returning again remains strong among the few who lived through and remember the original madness.

 No tree grows there, no tree ever will grow there it is a land built and fertilized by death.

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