Day 757

At some point people stopped needing to make houses from the surrounding woods and around that time the woods began to make houses from themselves instead. Their trunks became widespread with large leaf-filled gaps in place of windows, doors and their branches twined together to make a roof.

The nearby forests are filled with trees like this and with no rules in place around them realtors have begun placing value on the entire area. They butchered most of the area to install running water and plumbing first. While they waited for the trees to heal up again they named and numbered the newly grown streets and placed adverts for occupants. Just a trial run at first, a few hundred families to see how the space works, if it needs watering like a regular plant, is it sustainable and profitable, etcetera.

It was bad right from the start. No amount of pruning, weed killer or glass stopped the leaves from growing back over the window and doors meaning that anyone wanting to leave had to hack their way out every morning and night. The more vulnerable community members were trapped frequently and pulled out of the trial before the end of the first week.

Those that hung around for longer discovered yet more problems. The interior of the trees was surprisingly delicate, the slightest brush too hard and the soft bark would tear, attracting swarms of insects in a matter of minutes. It made wallpapering, hanging photos and most furniture utterly impossible without welcoming infestation.

Another oddity of these new homes was that local wildlife seemed to be able to come in and out of them freely. former residents claimed that they just passed through the leaf doors like they were nothing while the people there had to struggle against every inch of plant-growth.

What pushed the last few residents to leave wasn't the insects, wasn't waking up to wild deer leaning over their prone forms and wasn't the leaves. It was the utter silence that came when everybody else had left. No birdsong, no wind, not even the echo of their own footsteps. Everything sounded muffled except the cracking of tree branches.

It would always start from far away and draw closer, culminating in what sounded like a raging bonfire only to fade away again. From what the reports said, it happened in a circular pattern that moved from one resident to another like something was patrolling the area. They never saw anything unusual though some claimed that the houses around them had rotated or switched entirely.

The project shut down two months after it began and the forest was left to its own devices once more. New houses keep appearing and the older ones continue to grow, gradually becoming living mansions that nobody can stand to live in. The cracking sounds haven't stopped either, they still roam about the area and have started to be heard approaching the nearby neighbourhoods.