The Wild Fall by Katherine Silva

Author:Katherine Silva [Silva, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: dark, fall, forest, ghost, haunted, horror, oblivion, soul-eating, supernatural, wild, wolves, woods
Publisher: Katherine Silva
Published: 2023-08-03T04:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

Liz

I spent the night in the living room, keeping the fire going long after everyone had gone to sleep. I’d tried to lose consciousness for a long while, tossing and turning in my bed for hours before realizing it was never going to come. The fire had nearly burned down by the time I got downstairs to the living room. I took my time, moved as slowly as I could bear, in part because I didn’t want to wake anyone and also because of what Evie had told us earlier. Something else was out there hunting, something that was more terrifying than the wolves.

While I had tried to forget the things I’d seen inside the Monolith in the Woods ten years ago, the images came screaming back to me in shotgun blasts of black and white. The twisted tunnels that took me deeper and deeper into the earth, the cells with the twisted, malformed prisoners and the faceless one that had attacked me as I’d escaped... They had been caged there for a reason.

Hank had seen them, too. He’d had told me about what had happened to him a month before I came to the White Mountains for my refuge all those years ago. Back when he used to be a forest ranger, he’d been sent into the mountains on a mission to find a group of lost hikers. It had been Halloween night and he’d hated to go, unable to spend the time with Evie.

On the exposed ridge, he’d encountered gruesome bodies, their figures twisted, faces cracked open at each orifice, bodies turned silvery and frozen. A wolf had done that to them. He hadn’t known what they were at the time, didn’t know he had encountered the first of what the Woods would wreak upon the world.

Worse, those bodies had vanished with the coming sun the next morning.

While we hadn’t encountered any, we heard stories of sightings, things that were not wolves that had attacked settlements and camps. Things that were inhuman, silver, with contorted and grotesque limbs. Soulless things.

Was that what Evie had seen?

Some masochistic part of my personality longed to glance outside if only for a moment to glimpse one in the dark, slinking between the trees, a whisper in the shadows. Our new home, a place I had wanted to feel safer in, was no longer the picture of luck. The closed shutters on the windows were a reminder of the danger lurking outside. The sound of the wind howling as the trees shook was an ominous reminder of the inbound colder weather. The house felt smaller somehow, less like a home and more like a prison. A feeling I thought I’d left behind at the cabin in Middlehitch, at the school in Cardend. It was never going to feel safe, not until something was done in the Woods to turn things around.

I sat in front of the fire, pulled the grating away to throw a couple more logs on. I prodded at them with the poker then used the bellows until a flame leapt to life somewhere in the back.

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