Chapter Four
895 Words
Chapter Four: Blood on the Gravel
By the time Elena made it back to the house, dusk had already drained the color from the sky. She slammed the door behind her and locked it top latch, deadbolt, chain. It wouldn’t stop something like that, but it made her feel better. Her heart was still racing. She stood with her back to the door, fingers pressed to the wood as she tried to steady her breathing.
What she saw in the woods wasn’t just an animal.
It moved too precisely.
It had looked her in the eye.
Elena dropped her keys on the table and went straight for the closet. Her father’s old hunting gear was still there, covered in dust and cobwebs. She found what she needed his flashlight, a flare gun, and the knife he kept sharpened even when he hadn’t hunted in years. There was also an old journal tucked between a box of shells and a folded map. She didn’t remember seeing it before.
She sat at the kitchen table, flicking the light on, and opened the journal.
The handwriting was unmistakably her father’s sharp, clean, deliberate. The first page was dated July 7, 1995. The summer before her brother disappeared.
“Saw it again last night. Not sure if it saw me. Same shape. Same damn eyes. Something’s living out there, and it’s not an animal. I don’t care what the sheriff says.”
Elena flipped through the entries. Most were short, scattered, sometimes weeks apart. Mentions of dead livestock. Howls that weren’t coyotes. Lights moving through the forest in the middle of the night. Names she recognized local families who’d left town suddenly, quietly.
“Woke up to scratches on the front door. Like it was testing me. Like it *knows*.”
“Told Mark to stop going into the woods. He’s not listening. Too much like his mother brave to a fault.”
She stopped there, hand resting on the edge of the page.
Mark. Her brother.
The next entry was dated four days before he vanished.
“Something’s going to happen. I can feel it. I’ve been marked. Maybe we all have. I can’t protect them much longer.”
The last entry was written in a rushed scrawl, smeared in places like it had been written while his hands were shaking.
“It’s not hunting. It’s choosing.”
Elena stared at the words for a long time. Then she closed the journal, stood up, and walked to the sink. Her reflection in the window stared back at her, pale and shaken, hair still tangled from her run through the woods.
She didn’t sleep that night. She sat in the living room with the knife on the table and the journal in her lap, the lights off, listening.
The wind howled just before midnight.
But beneath it, something else soft, low, like a snarl from far away.
The next morning, she drove into town. The diner was half-full, the usual crowd sipping coffee and pretending not to notice her. Ashwood folks had long memories. A Ward showing up after ten years with questions wasn’t exactly something they welcomed.
She sat at the counter. Maggie, the owner and longtime waitress, brought over a cup of coffee without a word. Her eyes lingered on Elena, though. Like she knew something but wouldn’t say it out loud.
“Thanks,” Elena murmured.
Maggie nodded once, then moved away to refill someone’s mug.
Elena’s gaze shifted to the sheriff’s SUV parked outside. Cade stepped in a moment later, eyes scanning the room until they landed on her. He walked over without asking, slid into the seat next to hers.
“I went to the treehouse,” she said, not bothering with small talk.
He didn’t look surprised. Just tired.
“I figured you might.”
“I saw it, Cade. Whatever it is it’s real. It walked upright. It watched me.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he spoke.
“You need to leave, Elena.”
She blinked. “What?”
“Get in your truck, drive out, don’t look back. Let us deal with it.”
“You think I can just walk away from this? My brother”
“Your brother’s gone,” Cade said, voice low but firm. “We never found him because there was nothing left to find.”
Her hands curled into fists in her lap.
“You knew,” she said quietly. “All these years, you knew something else happened.”
“I suspected. That’s not the same.”
“Why protect it?”
“I’m not protecting it. I’m protecting this town. If word gets out if the wrong people find out what’s in those woods this place becomes a hunting ground.”
He stood, tossed a few bills on the counter.
“You don’t owe your father anything. He made his choices. You still have a chance to make yours.”
As he left, Maggie returned, setting a plate of toast beside Elena’s untouched coffee.
“Elena,” she said softly, glancing at the door. “Don’t listen to Cade. Not all of us have forgotten what happened.”
Elena looked up, startled. “You believe me?”
Maggie gav
e a faint nod. “Come by the diner tonight. After we close. I have something you need to see.”
- Writer
