"Jake!"
Damn! Just as I was getting to a good part. Oh well. Now Mom's going to give me a huge pile of chores, thought Jake. He put the book down, careful not to lose his page, and wearily answered his mother.
For some reason, Jake's vacations to the small cottage were always filled with chores. Most of them weren't hard or tiring, but sometimes he was given one that was. Usually they involved cutting or gathering wood, although once he had been given the task of moving beds to different rooms.
Jake looked out at the white wasteland littered with the small trees and bushes that his mom had cut earlier. He didn't know why, but he hated this useless destruction of plant life. His mom said she had done it so that they wouldn't block the view of the lake when they grew larger. He sighed, pressed "PLAY" on his walkman, and began gathering up the slashed flora and piling it under the balcony, the sound of his father's chainsaw barely making itself heard over the Faith No More tape.
Jake looked over towards where his father was cutting down a birch tree hanging over the frozen lake. Erosion had taken its toll on the shoreline, and the tree would have fallen into the water within a year or two. What had attracted his attention was the curses his dad shouted out when the chainsaw jammed. It had gotten stuck in the tree, and his father was loudly asking him to come over to help him.
"Okay, Jake, hold the chainsaw so that it won't fall onto the rocks when I drive this wedge in there. And keep it running". Jake did not feel confident about this. Not only that, but he seemed to be hearing a high keening sound, almost as if the tree was...screaming.
When the saw came free, Jake immediately lost control of it, and it bounced off the rocks up towards his face. Luckily, he managed to avoid the whirling chain, and was able to stab the emergency off switch before it did any damage. He did lose his balance, though, and landed hard on the ice. Because it was halfway through March, the ice was particularly thin at the edge of the lake, which resulted in him crashing through into a metre of freezing water. The thought that was foremost in his mind was not his near mutilation at the hands of the chainsaw, the cold, his parents or even the water, but the high-pitched whine that was coming from the tree.
His father quickly pulled him out, and told him to run back to the cottage to dry off and change. Deciding that it would be a good idea to do so, he began running to the small structure amid the few large trees.
As he neared the pile of slashed greenery, he began to slow down. "Woodpecker From Mars" was playing loud in his hears. He began to grow dizzy. The keening sound was all around him now, and seemed to be concentrated in the heap of dead trees. His vision was getting blurry. It was as if there were storm clouds in his mind, and he could not clear them. Things were getting dimmer, and the last thing he saw before losing conciousness was the pile of trees falling on top of him...
The coroner looked down at the two corpses before him. Both bodies had puncture wounds over their entire surface, even their eyes.
"Both bodies were found frozen at a cottage in the Burfon district with thousands of pine needles embedded where you see the punctures. Apparantly, they were on vacation with their son."
"Was he found?"
"No."