Adrenaline surged through me, my heart pounding like a war drum. I didn’t stop running until I burst from the edge of the woods, collapsing near Mrs. Gable’s overgrown rosebushes. Thorns tugged at my jeans, but even their scratchy thrum felt safer than the memory of those eyes. Glowing. Red. Watching.


Still gasping, I staggered to my feet and made for the one familiar place in the deepening dusk: the general store. Its warped boards and leaning sign had stood for decades. The bell above the door gave a weary chime as I entered, releasing the scent of stale candy and timeworn dust.


Old Man Fitzwilliam looked up from behind the counter. His face was etched with lines like an old map one that led nowhere good.


“Sarah?” he said, voice rough and low. “What happened to you, child?”


I tried to explain. The eyes. The growl. The cabin. My voice cracked under the weight of it all. My story came out in bursts half breathless panic, half terrified confession. I told him about Emily, about the backpack, about the sense that something in the woods wanted us to forget her.


He listened without blinking. Only the slow tick of the grandfather clock filled the silence when I finished.


“The Whispers,” he murmured at last. “They’ve been restless lately.”


The Whispers. I’d heard that word before in overheard scraps of conversation, always followed by nervous glances or someone changing the subject. No one ever explained what they were.


“What are they?” I whispered.


He exhaled like someone unlocking a long-sealed door. “Old stories,” he said. “Tales passed down since before Hollow Creek had a name. The woods are older than the town, you know. They feed on what’s lost. What’s afraid.”


His voice dropped lower, edged in warning. “Emily’s disappearance... this one’s different. You stirred something that doesn’t like to be noticed.”


He told me stories low and slow, like ancient prayers turned sour. People who’d vanished without a sound. Sightings of red eyes flickering between trees. Voices that didn’t belong to anyone living.


“The woods whisper to some,” he said, “especially those who carry grief. They lure you deeper. Make you forget why you’re afraid until it’s too late.”


I shivered.


“There was a well,” he continued. “Long buried. They say it’s a gate, a breach between here and someplace older. The symbols carved into the trees. They’re not just for show. Some glow. Some hum. Some... change.”


He shared what the town refused to put in writing: of nights when everything fell silent, the air thick like wet cloth. People went missing on those nights. Always those who wandered too far from the light.


His voice faltered only once when he spoke of those who came back. Changed. Wide-eyed. Hollow. Like the woods had taken something vital and left the rest behind.


Then his gaze shifted to the window, as if expecting the trees to press their faces to the glass.


“Some things never die,” he said, “so long as we keep feeding them.”


He mentioned something strange: a luminous mushroom that only grew in the deepest parts of the forest They looked like tiny lanterns carved from moonlight bioluminescent fungi nestled in the underbrush, their glow slow and rhythmic, like a heartbeat. The ground around them steamed faintly, and the silence nearby deepened, as if the forest itself was holding its breath. They appeared near disappearances. People said they were drawn to suffering, to the moment right before fear turned to surrender. That faint light I saw in the cabin... maybe it wasn’t a lantern after all.


Finally, he spoke of a hidden path the - Echo’s End. Almost no one had seen it, and even fewer came back. He leaned in and warned me not to go looking. “Let the sheriff handle it,” he said. “That way lies ruin.


But I think he knew from the look on my face that I wasn’t going to listen.


The bell above the door jingled behind me as I stepped back into the cold night. Hollow Creek lay draped in silence, the kind that pressed on your lungs. The homes crouched along the road, their darkened windows like sealed mouths unwilling to speak.


And the woods waited.


The branches bent toward the path like arms eager to pull me in. Each step stirred a low rustle the forest shifting, alive. Shadows stretched long and lean, their edges flickering like firelight, forming shapes I didn’t dare name.


My chest tightened. The fear was thick now damp and metallic in my mouth. The kind that makes your body scream to run, even when you’ve nowhere safe to go.


I pressed forward.


The whispers returned. Faint at first like leaves brushing each other in confusion. Then louder. Closer. They weren’t words, not really, but I understood them all the same. They hissed of surrender. Of secrets kept in the soil.


And then, through the trees: light.


Faint. Pulsing. Blue.


The mushrooms.


They lined a path I hadn’t seen before, winding deep into the heart of the woods.


The Whisper’s Path.


My breath hitched.


Emily was out there. Somewhere past that light. And I was going to bring her back.


Even if something else came back with me.