You Keep Walking

The air inside the forest feels heavier now, pressing against your lungs with each breath. The faint glow from the mushroom circle pulses behind you like a heartbeat—slow, deliberate, patient. It hums in the periphery of your hearing, a whisper without words, coaxing, coaxing, coaxing. You take a single step away, and the sound grows thinner, as though it might vanish if you keep going.

Your feet sink into the loam with each stride, the ground damp and almost too soft, swallowing your boots down to the ankles before releasing them with a slow sucking sound. The smell of the place is rot and green life tangled together—wet bark, damp leaves, and the sweet-sour breath of decay. It clings to the inside of your nostrils, coating your tongue. The further you walk, the more it changes. There’s a metallic tang now, as though the air itself has been sharpened.

You glance back. The mushroom circle is smaller, dimmer, but still there—like an eye watching you from a great distance. The glow is steady now, no longer pulsing, and you imagine the little shapes inside it turning away from you in perfect, deliberate unison. The hair on your arms prickles. You keep walking.

The trees crowd closer together until the path becomes a thin ribbon of damp earth winding between their roots. Their trunks are so thick and old they look like they could have been here before the sky learned how to make rain. Every now and then, you see faces in the bark—some stretched long and mournful, others twisted in toothless screams. You tell yourself they’re just patterns in the wood. You don’t believe it.

Something crunches under your boot. You look down and see that the earth here is littered with bones—small ones, bird bones, maybe rodent, splintered and pitted with rot. Further along, you see something larger, long limbs curled in on themselves. The skull is smooth and long, more animal than human… but the teeth are wrong. Too many. Too sharp. You step around it, keeping your eyes ahead.

The deeper you go, the colder it gets. The damp no longer feels like the breath of life—it’s the chill of something that’s been underground too long. Moss drapes from the branches in ragged streamers, each one swaying in a wind you can’t feel.

Somewhere behind you, there’s movement. It’s faint, like someone stepping carefully through wet leaves. You freeze, listening. Nothing. Just the cold quiet.

You move faster now, pushing through curtains of moss and weaving between roots that twist up like claws. The air smells stronger here, that same metallic tang mingling with the scent of wet stone.

Then you see it—the road. Or at least what’s left of one. A strip of cracked asphalt runs between two ridges of earth, swallowed in places by creeping vines and the gnarled roots of trees. The black surface is slick with rainwater and rotting leaves, but it’s a direction. A promise.

You step onto it and instantly feel the difference. The ground is solid, unyielding, a far cry from the forest floor that seemed to shift and breathe beneath your feet. The sound of your steps is louder here, echoing faintly in the still air.

Something about that echo bothers you.

You keep moving, following the road as it curves gently left. The forest leans in from both sides, the branches above knitting so tightly together that only scraps of grey light make it through. Every now and then you think you hear it again—that slow, deliberate crunch of footsteps behind you. When you turn, the road is empty.

It’s not until you pass under a hanging arch of moss that you see it—something standing in the middle of the road ahead. Tall, thin, wrong.

Its arms hang almost to the ground, and its head is bent so far forward you can’t see its face. The skin—or what you think is skin—is pale and stretched tight over long bones. It doesn’t move, but the air around it feels disturbed, charged, like the moment before lightning strikes.

You stop. The thing tilts its head, just slightly, and you hear a sound—something between a sigh and the soft tearing of fabric.

There’s no going back.