The adrenaline had begun to fade, leaving behind a raw, trembling exhaustion. The memory of those eyes glowing like coals in a nightmare clung to me like a second skin. I couldn’t stay here, not in this choking silence, with the scent of damp earth and something else... something sharp and metallic hanging in the air like an unspoken threat.


But I couldn’t leave either.


Emily’s fate, and now my own, felt tethered to this cabin like thread knotted in shadow.


I forced myself upright. My legs shook. My hands were slick with sweat or sap clinging with an almost unnatural tackiness. The creature hadn’t returned, but the silence was heavier than ever. I gripped my flashlight tighter and stepped cautiously into the dark.


The cabin was smaller than it had first seemed barely more than four walls, a crumbled hearth, and a caved-in ceiling revealing glimpses of starless sky. The air was dense with decay. Damp wood. Rotting leaves. That sickly copper tang that scraped the back of my throat.


I swept the light across the room.


There was no furniture, only ruins: matted straw where a bed once lay, and a cracked wooden box nearly hidden beneath debris. My heart pounded as I knelt to open it. The lid groaned, damp and swollen with age, and inside, nestled in a bed of decomposed shavings, lay a tarnished silver locket.


I lifted it gently.


Its surface was etched with a scene too intricate for something so old. A winding forest path, leading to a small cabin nearly identical to the one I stood in, with trees that writhed like they were in pain. Fog clung to the engraving like breath on glass, and among it stood two indistinct figures half-formed, ghostlike.


I opened it.


Inside, two girls stared out at me from a faded photograph. Smiling. Holding hands. Their faces blurred by time but strikingly similar sisters, maybe. Or something else. Their dresses bore a floral pattern I recognized instantly.


It matched Emily’s missing bookbag.


A cold shiver cut through my chest.


This wasn’t coincidence.


I gently returned the locket to its place, every instinct screaming that I’d touched something important something deeply connected to whatever gripped this forest.


My flashlight flickered across the warped floorboards and caught on something.


A leather-bound journal, hidden beneath a loose plank.


The cover cracked under my fingertips. Inside, the pages remained intact, yellowed and curling but legible. Ink faded but firm. The handwriting was elegant, almost delicate, written in a script that trembled more with fear than age.


The entries began innocently enough: musings about isolation, the woods, the weather.


But then they turned.


She described whispers in the night. Glowing eyes at the edge of lantern light. Figures glimpsed between trees never clear, but always wrong. Each entry etched deeper into her growing terror. She wrote of feeling watched. Of dreams too vivid to be dreams. Of something drawing her further into the forest, no matter how desperately she tried to resist.


She mentioned experiments botanicals, infusions, rituals. Half medicinal, half occult. Some ingredients I recognized. Others… they might as well have been names of gods.


The final entries descended into madness.


Her pen faltered. The script splintered into jagged bursts of ink rushed thoughts, fragmented prayers, cries for help. She described a presence in the cabin. She said it had eyes. That it spoke not with words, but with silence that moved like a shadow through her skull.


Then, halfway through a sentence, the journal stopped.


No farewell. No conclusion. Just a drop of dried ink and a blank page.


I closed the book with shaking hands.


The locket. The journal. The eyes. The growls. The woods.


It was all connected.


Emily wasn’t the first. But I was determined she wouldn’t be the next.


This cabin wasn’t just a remnant of the past it was something alive. A node in the forest’s sickness. And now it had seen me.


I took one last breath of the cabin’s rotting air and stepped into the night.


I didn’t know what was coming.