The fog pressed in like a living thing, thick as wool and humming low in her ears. Lark didn’t remember stepping off the porch, but she found herself standing on ground that felt spongy beneath her boots, each step making a squelch that echoed like a heartbeat. Or maybe it was her own.
The roots slithered across the forest floor like veins exposed beneath torn skin. They curled around the base of every tree and crept toward her toes with unnerving purpose. They weren’t just there anymore. They were moving. Slowly, subtly. Following her.
And the trees they had shifted. She was certain of it.
She turned back to the house, desperate to regain her bearings, but it was gone.
Not just obscured. Gone.
The porch, the walls, the looming roofline all had vanished into the mist as though swallowed whole. In its place stood only trees, dense and tall and still as sentinels. The fog behind her now had the weight of a sealed door. No path back. Only forward.
A branch snapped somewhere to her left.
She spun, flashlight quivering in her grip, and scanned the trees.
Nothing.
“Marcus?” she called, even though she knew whatever had spoken with his voice was no longer him. Not fully. Not really.
Still, the forest answered.
But it wasn’t words.
It was humming.
A low, guttural tone, like an enormous insect buzzing just beneath the surface of the earth. The sound made her teeth ache. And beneath it all, the whispering had returned more voices now, a chorus, overlapping and clawing over one another like rats in a box.
Lark walked.
She didn’t know why. She only knew she had to keep moving.
The fog parted in pockets, revealing glimpses of unnatural things. A child’s shoe caught in the crook of a root. A birdcage swinging from a tree limb with no bird inside, only a clump of hair. A fencepost driven into the ground at a crooked angle, etched with symbols that pulsed softly as she passed.
The trees began to change.
Their bark darkened. Knots bulged like tumors. Some of them had faces.
Not full ones no eyes, no mouths. But the suggestion of features beneath the grain. Foreheads. Cheeks. The hint of a chin here, a brow there. Some of them seemed to watch her pass.
Her breath caught when she came upon a clearing.
At the center was a tree unlike the others.
Massive. Gnarled. It towered over the forest, trunk thicker than a bus, with a hollow split down its center like a mouth torn open in a scream. The air around it buzzed with invisible energy, the hum vibrating against her ribcage.
The roots here were thickest. They curled around the base of the tree like worshipers prostrated before a god. They moved in tiny twitches, as if the tree were breathing through them.
And at the base of the hollow mouth stood Marcus.
Or what was left of him.
He wasn’t fully human anymore.
His arms had split down the middle, bark replacing skin. Moss clung to his neck and shoulders, and roots snaked from his spine into the dirt behind him. His eyes were completely black now no pupils, no whites just void.
But he smiled when he saw her.
And that smile was real.
“Lark,” he said, his voice richer than before, more grounded, as though the forest itself was speaking through him. “I knew you’d come.”
She couldn’t speak.
He held out a hand twiglike fingers gnarled and reaching. “It doesn’t hurt. Not like you think. It only hurts when you fight it.”
“What is this?” she asked, finally.
He took a step forward, and the roots behind him pulled with him, stretching like tendons.
“It’s memory,” he said. “All the forgotten things. All the buried things. This forest… this house… they were never haunted. They’re hungry. And we’re the offering.”
She shook her head. “No. No, I didn’t agree to this. We just came to record a podcast ”
“Because you were looking for truth,” he interrupted, tilting his head. “Something more real than what’s out there. You wanted to believe in something terrifying, something bigger than you. And now you’ve found it.”
The tree moaned.
That’s the only word for it. A low, sorrowful moan, as though it remembered pain and loss and rot all at once. The hollow split at its center pulsed. Something inside shifted.
Something alive.
Marcus stepped aside.
“You can go back,” he said. “But it won’t let you forget. Once you’ve heard the root-song… it’s always in you.”
Lark took a step back, but the ground behind her crumbled.
She fell.
Not far. Only a few feet.
But when she looked up, she realized she’d landed in a pit.
And the walls were not dirt.
They were faces.
Hundreds of them.
Pressed into the earth like clay impressions mouths open, eyes wide. Some screamed. Some whispered. Others just watched.
And their roots twisted together, forming a living tapestry that pulsed with an ancient rhythm.
Beneath… buried… become…
Lark scrambled out, gasping.
Marcus was watching her, face unreadable.
“You think this is a curse,” he said softly. “But it’s a return. To what we were before we named ourselves separate from the forest. Before we forgot the language of the soil. This place remembers. And it wants you to remember too.”
“I don’t want this,” she whispered.
He smiled sadly. “You already chose it. The second you stepped into that house, the roots tasted your memory. You don’t belong to the world you came from anymore.”
Something moved inside the tree.
A shape.
Tall.
Slender.
Covered in bark and moss, with too many limbs and no face.
It stepped forward, emerging from the hollow like a secret peeled from the dark.
And the forest went silent.
Marcus knelt.
So did the roots.
The thing raised one of its many arms and pointed at Lark.
Then it spoke not in a voice, but in a feeling that blossomed inside her head.
“We remember you.”
And Lark did remember.
Flashes.
A girl crying at the edge of these woods.
A voice whispering to her from the trees.
A promise.
A seed planted in her dreams.
And a door that never closed.
The forest hadn’t trapped her.
It had called her home.
