The Lady of Willow Park

I arrived at Willow Park in the dead of night, the light of the quarter moon shining eerily over the usually peaceful estate. I descended the thin metal steps of the carriage and stepped onto the gravel walkway. Before me were dozens of willow trees on either side of the path, each overlooking a small, perfectly round pond, the water shallow and clear, all of it surrounded by high stone walls on either side. When I had last visited, Lord and Lady Morn's boys had run loudly and freely through these trees and had splashed in the ponds so that it had seemed as merry and safe as a nursery. In the shimmering light of the moon, it was cold and strange. I walked alone down the path, the crunch of gravel the only sound. As I walked, I realized that the grass had become overgrown, and the water from the ponds had grown stagnant and putrid, the dead smell hovering like mist in the moonlight. No one had bothered to take care of this place in a while - perhaps not for the month its master and heirs had been dead.
After several minutes of walking through the lonely, forgotten grounds, I approached the large manor house, built with the same stone as the high walls. The dozens of windows, usually spotless and gleaming in their neat rows, were all opaque with dust. As I climbed the sprawling steps, narrow and the gray stone ground smooth from the dozens of visitors who had once climbed them, I noticed the large pile of letters and paper-wrapped boxes that sat beside the great double oak doors. The pile was so tall that it and I stood at the same height, the packages and letters more rotted by rain and insects as they neared the bottom."Lorelai!" I kept beating on the door to no avail. When the skin of my hand had grown tender and bruised, I stopped. I looked down to the large crystal door knob, once gleaming and now tarnished and yellow in the moonlight. I turned it, and the heavy door swung open on a phantom wind. I coughed as a large puff of dust and moths rushed out to greet me. Inside was so dark one could barely see the round oak table in the middle of the foyer. It had not been covered, and the red bordered rug beneath it was filthy and moth-eaten.
"Lorelai?" No answer. Not a whisper, not a gasp of breath from the stagnant air. I took a single step into the house, dust crunching beneath my foot. I slowly made my way around the table and up the first few steps of the square, turning staircase, onto the first landing where it branched off into two other staircases on either side. The air was thick and suffocating, the only light from the moonlight trespassing through the front door. I gripped one side of the heavy drape covering the great window of the landing and tugged. I screamed as a flurry of bats burst from the folds and a shower of dust fell over me like a shroud. When the last of the beasts had fled through the still open front door, I stood from where I had crouched and looked up the now illuminated left staircase.
"Lorelai? Are you up there?" Silence. "I'm coming up!" I reached the top of the stairs, where a long hallway stretched to the other end of the house. There were several doors on either side, all shut except for one at the very end of the hallway on the left. That door was wide open, clear moonlight streaming out of it and into the hallway, offering light to the portraits lining the walls next to the doors. As I passed the once handsome paintings, I realized they had been mutilated. Someone had carved out the eyes of every subject, the faces hanging in ribbons above finely dressed torsos. As I grew nearer to the door, I saw the completely destroyed family portrait that hung at the end of the hallway, facing me. Lord Morn and the three young boys had been torn completely out of the painting. Lady Morn remained alone in the frame, surrounded by the frayed silhouettes of her family. My steps slowed. I stopped one step before I would've been able to see within, and then I heard it:

Weeping. Trying to calm the tremor in my hands, I took three slow steps, forward, left, forward. What I saw before me ripped the breath from my lungs.

Before me was a giant, animated weeping willow.

I stared in abject horror. A humanoid figure so large it took up nearly the entire drawing room knelt in the shimmering moonlight, a silk nightgown hanging off the emaciated body. Dark, heavily grooved bark stood in place of skin, mossy, stringy hair hanging around it in masses like the leaves of the willow trees beyond the great window. Roots had grown from the polished cherry floors into the legs and lower torso of the figure, small moths flitting around the moss that had grown in places. The figure's limbs were impossibly long and thin, some sort of fabric clutched in the brittle, twig like fingers resting in the figure's lap. The longer I stood before the creature, the more I noticed the aura of horrible sadness and grief that sat in the room like stagnant water. Noticed as it worked its way into my heart. Tears began pouring out of my own eyes.
"L-lorelai?" I managed to say my friend's name in a whisper as tight and constrained as the air in this house. I recognized the pale gold color of my friend's hair beneath the moss and matting that had overtaken it. Fighting the crushing sorrow, I took slow steps further into the room, in front of the creature. The grief nearly choked me now, or perhaps it was my own tears as I gently moved strands of leaf-like hair to peer into the creature's face.
Those were indeed Lorelai's high cheekbones in the emaciated wooden face. That was her cherry-shaped mouth twisted into an expression of such pain I nearly threw myself down in agony. Carved on either side of the long, narrow nose were narrow tracks in the wood, deep and unending as the tears that flowed steadily from the indents in the bark that had once been my friend's eyes. I looked down from the creature's large wooden face and into her lap, where the spindly fingers continued to clutch that strange fabric. I knelt before the creature, trying to get a better look at what the fabric was through my waterlogged gaze. I realized that it was the portraits of Lord Morn and his sons that had been ripped from the family painting, leaving Lorelai in her forced solitude in the golden frame. I wailed as the weight of Lorelai's loss, her grief and despair, hit me in full force. I clutched one of her wooden fingers as my body threatened to cave in on itself and I knelt with her on the dusty wooden floors, her unending torment swallowing us whole.