Chapter Seven
661 Words
Chapter Seven: The Teeth in the Trees
The forest was a different place by night.
Elena knew that now. It breathed. It moved. It watched.
The trees no longer felt still they bent slightly inward as if listening. The moon hung half-shrouded in clouds, casting slivers of light between twisted branches.
Lachlan led the way, wordless, with a lantern in one hand and a short silver blade strapped to his back. Elena followed, her breath fogging in the cold. The wooden box with the fang rested in her jacket pocket, its weight oddly comforting.
They were heading for Hollow Ridge.
“The thing that took your brother?” Lachlan said without turning. “It feeds near the Ridge. Always has. There’s something buried under those stones that keeps calling them back.”
“Like what?”
“No one knows. But I’ve seen it shift the earth like breath. Like it’s dreaming.”
They walked in silence until the trail narrowed into a rocky path, where pine needles carpeted the forest floor like a velvet shroud. Lachlan stopped beside a fallen log.
“We wait here,” he said. “They come before the coldest part of night. You’ll feel it.”
Elena crouched beside him. Her hands were sweating, even in the cold.
“How do I know it’s really one of them?”
“You’ll know.” Lachlan’s voice was flat. “The forest will go quiet. The smell will turn sweet. And your heart will beat so hard it feels like it’s trying to escape.”
Minutes passed. Or hours. Time bled together in the dark.
Then it happened.
The wind stopped.
The trees stopped swaying.
Even the insects went silent.
Elena’s skin prickled.
A faint smell rose in the air like spoiled honey. Sweet, sharp, and rotting underneath. Her heart kicked into high gear.
She turned to Lachlan. His eyes were wide, focused.
“It’s close,” he whispered.
She reached into her pocket and clutched the tooth.
And then just beyond the treeline she saw it.
Not clearly. Just the shape.
It moved like liquid shadow, weaving between trunks, low to the ground. It was fast too fast but it wasn’t running. It was circling.
Elena’s breath caught in her throat.
The creature stepped forward into a sliver of moonlight.
It had a human shape but twisted. The limbs were longer, fingers clawed, spine arched. Its face was gaunt, with no eyes, only sunken hollows where they should’ve been. And its mouth God, that mouth was filled with too many teeth, jagged and yellow, like glass broken on purpose.
But what froze her wasn’t the face.
It was the voice.
“Elena…” it whispered, in Mark’s voice again. “You found me…”
She took a step forward, despite herself.
Lachlan’s hand grabbed her shoulder like iron.
“Don’t. That’s not your brother.”
The thing crept closer, impossibly quiet.
Then it smiled.
Lachlan moved fast tossing a pouch of ash at the creature’s feet. The moment it hit, the ground erupted in a hiss of smoke and sparks. The creature screamed, reeling back into the trees.
Elena clutched her ears. The scream wasn’t just sound it was *inside* her, like nails across her bones.
When she looked up again, the thing was gone.
The forest was still.
Too still.
Lachlan knelt and touched the ground where the ash had landed.
Black scorch marks had burned into the earth.
“That was a skin-eater,” he said grimly. “One of the old ones. It remembers your brother. It’ll keep using him.”
Elena nodded, jaw clenched.
“I want to kill it.”
“You will,” Lachlan said. “But not tonight.”
He helped her to her feet, and they started back toward the cabin, the forest slowly exhaling behind them.
As they wa
lked, Elena looked back once more.
And in the dark, just beyond the trees, two hollows stared back.
- Writer
