The Woods After Ten Years

Outside, tires hissed along the wet road. Beyond the houses, Pine Hollow Woods climbed the ridge in a dark wall of pine and bare branches. I could see the first line of trees from our kitchen window. I had spent ten years avoiding that view.

Now something inside it had remembered us.

“I’m going to look,” I said.

Mom’s head snapped up. “No.”

“I only mean the trailhead.”

“No, Mara.”

“You said the poster was near the woods.”

“I said the sheriff found one. I didn’t say you could go searching for more.”

“What if there are more clues?”

Her mouth tightened. “There haven’t been clues for ten years.”

The words struck harder than she meant them to. Lena had vanished when we were seven. One minute, the two of us had been building a fort beside the old fire road. The next, she was gone. Search teams had combed Pine Hollow for six days. Dogs had followed her scent to a creek and lost it there.

No body. No goodbye. No answer.

Mom had stopped saying Lena’s name after the first year.

I took my boots from beside the back door.

“Give me the poster.”

“You’re not going.”

“I’m not asking.”

“You think this is a game because you were a child when it happened.”

“I think someone put her face on our door.”

Mom grabbed my wrist. Her hand was cold.

“Pine Hollow is closed past the gate.”

“Since when?”

“Since the storm washed out the north road.”

“That was last spring.”

“And the creek is higher now.”

“I’ll stay near the edge.”

She looked at me for a long moment, as if measuring the distance between the girl who had lost Lena and the person standing in front of her.

Then she let go.

“Be back before dark.”

I pulled on my coat. “You just said no.”

“I’m saying if you’re going to ignore me, at least don’t make me call the sheriff after sunset.”

The rain had thinned to a mist by the time I reached the woods. Mud sucked at my boots along the gravel shoulder. The posted flyer was gone from our door, but I had taken a picture before Mom folded it. Lena’s face glowed on my phone screen, too bright against the gray afternoon.

At the edge of Pine Hollow, a new orange notice flapped from a fence post.

NO ENTRY. TRAIL UNSAFE.

The bottom half had been ripped away.

Behind it, the old trailhead crouched beneath dripping branches. The metal gate hung open, its chain looped around one post but not locked. Beyond the gate, pine needles covered the path in a slick red-brown carpet.

I called for Lena before I could stop myself.

The woods answered with a woodpecker’s hard tapping.

Then something cracked deeper inside.

I froze.

“Hello?”

A jay burst from the branches. Its wings slapped my hood as it flew over me.

I laughed once, shakily, and hated the sound.

The bootprint appeared ten yards past the gate.

It was fresh enough to hold water. A heavy tread, larger than mine, pressed into the mud beside the trail. Another print followed, then another, angling away from the old fire road and toward a stand of hemlocks.

There was no reason for anyone to walk that way. The trail ended at the creek.

I crouched beside the first print. The heel had a jagged crescent missing from its rubber sole.

Lena’s father had worn boots with a crescent-shaped tear. I remembered them from the summer he took us fishing, remembered how he had dragged one foot through the mud and called it a monster track.

I touched the print.

Cold water filled the grooves. The mud around it was still soft.

Someone had come through recently.

I stood and followed.

The path narrowed almost at once. Branches scraped my sleeves, shaking beads of water down my neck. Behind me, the gate faded between the trunks. The ordinary sounds of town disappeared - the traffic, the distant bark of a dog, the metallic clatter from the hardware store.

My phone lost service.

I checked the screen twice, though the empty bars did not change.

“Great,” I muttered.

The bootprints continued, each one precise and deep. Whoever made them had walked steadily, never slipping, even where the ground rose over roots and stone. I kept expecting to find a person ahead of me. A hunter. A trespasser. Somebody laughing at the prank.

Instead, the trail ended at a pine tree marked with a strip of green thread.

The thread hung from a low branch, darkened by rain.

I knew that color.

Lena had tied green thread around everything when we were children - her wrist, the fort door, the handle of my bike. She said green made places remember you.

I reached for it.

A whisper moved through the branches.

Not wind. Not exactly.

“Mara.”

I spun around.

The woods stood empty.

My breath clouded in front of me. Water ticked from branch to branch. Somewhere close, a limb creaked under weight.

“Who’s there?”

No answer.

I should have gone back. The sensible part of me pictured Mom waiting by the kitchen window, arms folded, ready to say I told you so. But the green thread was tied in a double knot, and beneath it someone had carved a small mark into the bark.

A crooked triangle crossed by one line.

Lena and I had used it as our secret sign. We scratched it into the fort wall, our notebooks, the underside of the porch rail. It meant safe here.

The mark was pale and raw.

The cut had been made recently.

I pulled my knife from my pocket and sliced the thread free. It stuck to my wet glove like a strand of hair.

A rustle sounded behind me.

This time, the footsteps were not mine.

I ran.

Branches whipped my face. My boots skidded on the slope, and I grabbed a sapling to keep from falling. Behind me, something moved between the trees with a slow, heavy rhythm.

Not running.

Following.

I reached the old fire road and stopped so fast my shoulder struck a trunk. The road lay empty in both directions. The gate was somewhere behind me, hidden by the rain.

A low whistle drifted through the woods.

Three notes.

Lena’s signal.

I turned toward the sound.

The bootprints crossed the road and disappeared into a narrow break between the trees. No trail showed beyond it. No mark on the county maps. Just a passage where the undergrowth had been pressed flat, as if something had been walking there for years.

Another whistle came from inside.

I stepped through.

The ground dropped sharply. I slid down a bank, catching myself against wet stones, and landed beside a creek swollen with brown water. It roared over the rocks, carrying branches and torn leaves toward the valley.

Across the creek stood an abandoned ranger shed.

I had never seen it before.

Its windows were boarded. The door hung open. A rusted sign leaned against the wall, half buried in mud.

RANGER STATION 4

The bootprints stopped at the water’s edge.

I stared at the current. The shed waited on the opposite bank, dark beneath the trees.

My phone buzzed.

For one wild second, I thought it was a call.

The screen showed a photograph.

I had not opened the camera. I had not taken it.

The image was blurred by rain, but I could make out a clearing, a ring of stones, and a blue sleeping bag beside a dead fire.

Lena’s campsite.

The same one from the last photograph in the police file.

A new message appeared beneath it.

COME ALONE.

I dropped the phone.

It struck a rock and vanished into the creek.

“Mara!”

The voice came from the shed.

Lena’s voice.

I stepped into the water before I could think. The current slammed against my knees, cold enough to steal the strength from my legs. I reached for a branch, missed, and went down hard.

The creek dragged me sideways.

My hand closed around something solid.

Not a branch.

A metal railing, half submerged beneath the surface. I clung to it until my boots found the stones again. The water battered my thighs, then my waist. My coat grew heavy. Pain flashed through my shoulder.

Across the creek, the shed door swung wider.

Inside, a faint orange glow trembled against the walls.

Fire.

No one had been here in years.

I pulled myself forward, inch by inch, gripping the railing until the current released me onto the far bank. I crawled through the mud, coughing water, and lay there while the creek thundered beside me.

My phone floated past on the surface.

I grabbed for it.

The current carried it away, then turned strangely against itself. The device spun in a slow circle near the bank and drifted back.

The screen lit beneath the water.

The photograph had changed.

Now it showed the shed.

And in the dark window behind me stood a girl with a green thread tied around her wrist.

I jerked around.

The window was boarded shut.

I snatched the phone from the creek. The screen went black.

A sound came from inside the shed - a soft scrape, like charcoal dragged across wood.

I pushed through the doorway.

The air inside was warmer than outside. Ash floated through the beam of my flashlight. A small iron stove glowed in the corner, though no fire burned inside it.

On the floor, someone had drawn a map in charcoal.

The lines matched the creek, the fire road, the old trail. A red X marked the clearing from the photograph.

Beside it, in crooked block letters, were two words.

LENA’S WAY.

The ash beneath my fingers was warm.

I backed toward the door.

Something scratched the wall behind me.

Not outside.

Inside the shed.

I turned.

The charcoal map had gained a new line. A thin black path crawled from the marked clearing across the paper, through the trees, and stopped at a circle drawn near the northern ridge.

Under the circle, Lena’s secret triangle had been carved into the floorboards.

Below it, fresh letters appeared in the dust.

MARA, DON’T COME ALONE.

I stared until the words blurred.

Then, from somewhere beyond the creek, Lena whistled three notes again.

This time, another whistle answered from inside the shed.

End of chapter one. 25 more chapters in the full book.