My sister died during a game of hide and seek. Eight years later, I still don't know what really happened.
There are five people who remember the night my sister died. The problem is, none of us remember it the same way.
For eight years I convinced myself that trauma was enough to explain that. People misremember things after something terrible happens. Memories blur. Details get crossed. Psychologists have written entire books about it.
But our memories are getting worse with time. They’re changing.
Last month, I asked Jonah what phase the moon had been that night. He stared at me for almost a minute before answering.
“There wasn’t one.”
I thought he was joking.
“There had to be. I remember it reflecting on the water.”
“There wasn’t.”
Then he asked me why I was smiling. I wasn’t.
That conversation finally convinced me to write this down before I forget anything else. Or before my memories change again.
My name is Ellie.
My sister, Willow, died eight years ago during a game of hide and seek in the woods behind our town. I think it started long before any of us realized we were playing.
My mom always used to say Willow was born to be a sister. I thought it was just something parents say because it sounds sweet. It wasn’t.
Willow was four years older than me. She taught me how to ride a bike without training wheels, how to whistle through a blade of grass, and how to spot deer before they spotted you. If I scraped my knee, she was already digging a band-aid out of her pocket before I started crying. She never forgot my birthday, even when she was old enough to pretend birthdays weren’t exciting anymore.
She never treated me like I was annoying. She wanted me around.
If she and her friends rode their bikes to the creek, I'd be wobbling behind them on my little blue bike. If they built a fort in the woods, there’d always be a place inside for me. Whenever she noticed I'd fallen behind, she’d stop, reach her hand back without even looking, and wait until I caught up.
That’s the image that comes back the most. Her hand reaching back. Waiting for mine. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why I keep dreaming about her. Because in every dream, she’s still waiting. I just never reach her.
We lived in a tiny community surrounded by forest. Calling it a town feels generous. One road led in, the same road led back out.
Everybody knew each other. Most families had lived there for generations. Mine had. So had Zeke’s. So had Bea’s.
There wasn’t much for kids to do besides wander the woods, fish in the creek, or bother each other. Mostly the last one. That’s probably why Willow ended up friends with Zeke. Even when I was ten years old, I knew he was trouble. Adults described him as “rough around the edges.” Kids used different words.
Zeke wasn’t the kind of bully who punched people. He liked finding out what scared you. Then he’d make everyone laugh about it until you wished he’d just punched you instead.
I never understood why Willow kept hanging around him. Looking back now, I don’t think she liked him very much. She just didn’t have many choices.
The only good thing Zeke ever did was introduce me to his cousin, Nora.
She was eleven and painfully awkward, all elbows and knees and oversized hoodies she’d almost certainly stolen from her older brother. She could spend an hour talking about frogs but could barely look strangers in the eye.
We became friends almost immediately. With Nora came Bea. Bea was the quietest person I’d ever met. She always looked like she was listening for something nobody else could hear.
It started a week after my tenth birthday. My parents had driven into the nearest city for dinner and wouldn’t be home until late. They always trusted Willow to watch me. The second their car disappeared down the road, she called her friends. By seven o’clock our living room was full.
There was Willow, Zeke, Nora, Bea, and Jonah.
Jonah was thirteen. If Willow had been the sister I wanted, Jonah was the brother I never had. He was the only person Zeke never seemed able to get under the skin of. Mostly because Jonah refused to play his games.
When Zeke made fun of someone, Jonah changed the subject. When Zeke wanted to scare me, Jonah sat beside me. When Zeke tried starting arguments, Jonah usually ended them with a shrug and a, “Whatever.”
Looking back, I think he spent most of that summer quietly making sure everyone else got home safe. He just couldn’t save Willow.
By sunset, we’d already gone through two bags of chips, almost a dozen cans of pop, and every board game in our house.
“I’m bored,” Zeke announced. Nobody answered. Then he smiled. “I know a game.”
Willow groaned dramatically. “Every time you say that, somebody gets hurt.”
“Not this one.”
“No?”
“It’s just hide and seek.”
Nora snorted. “Congratulations. You invented being six.”
“It’s not normal hide and seek,” Zeke replied, tossing a pop tab in his cousin’s direction.
“What makes it different?”
“You play it in the woods.”
The room went quiet, and Bea looked up immediately.
“No.”
Zeke raised an eyebrow at her. “No what?”
She shifted in her seat, avoiding his eyes. “Just no.”
“You don’t even know the rules.”
“I don’t need to.”
He laughed. “Scared already?”
“My grandma says not to play games in the woods after dark.” Bea was always going on about something her grandma had told her. Nora sighed deeply.
“Your grandma also says not to whistle after sunset.” She stated. Nora was never one to believe in all the superstitious talk of the elderly people in our community.
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
“Well, I don’t anymore.”
“Oh.”
Nobody spoke for a second.
“What changed?” Jonah asked, leaning forward. Bea hesitated.
“She said… There are games people made for each other.” She looked toward the dark windows. “And there are games that were never meant for people at all.”
Zeke barked out a laugh. “What a load of crap.”
“My grandma doesn’t joke about things like that.”
“Your grandma thinks mushrooms grow in circles because fairies danced around.”
“No,” Bea’s voice was barely above a whisper. “She thinks they grow like that to lure kids. Something is waiting for them.”
For the first time all evening, even Zeke looked uncomfortable. Only for a second. Then he grinned.
“My cousin taught me this game.”
“What cousin?” Willow asked.
“The one who used to live near Miller’s Crossing.”
“We’ve been in the same class since kindergarten.”
“So?”
“You’ve never mentioned him.”
Zeke shrugged. “I’ve got a lot of cousins.”
Willow studied him for a moment. It was a look I’d seen before. She didn’t believe him.
“If your cousin taught you,” Jonah asked, “what are the rules?”
Zeke leaned forward.
“You split into pairs.”
“So nobody gets lost?”
“Exactly.” He smiled. “When I whistle once, everybody turns off their flashlight.”
I frowned. “Our flashlights?”
“Yep.”
“What if we can’t see?”
“That’s the point.”
“When do we turn them back on?”
Zeke rolled his eyes before answering. “When I whistle again.”
“What if someone cheats?” Nora asked.
“They lose.”
“What happens if they lose?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“My cousin just said the consequences could be… severe."
Nora rolled her eyes. “Convenient.”
“It’s true.”
Bea stood up abruptly. “I’m going home.”
“You don’t have to play,” Willow said. “I don’t even think we should.”
“Come on,” Zeke groaned. “It’s hide and seek.”
“No,” Bea crossed her arms. “It’s something else.”
The room fell silent again. Then Zeke looked directly at me.
“Oh, I almost forgot.”
“Forgot what?” I asked.
“One last rule,” he smiled, “no crying.”
I frowned. “What?”
“If you cry…” He lowered his voice. “...something hears you.”
I felt my stomach twist. Then he laughed.
“I’m kidding.”
Willow smacked him on the arm. “You’re an idiot.”
“It was funny.”
“It wasn’t.” She crouched in front of me until we were eye level. “He’s lying.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.” She smiled. “If you don’t want to go, we won’t.”
I looked around the room. Nobody else was backing out. I didn’t want everyone to think I was a baby.
“I’ll go.”
Willow sighed. “I figured you’d say that.”
She stood and quietly walked over to Jonah. I only caught part of what she whispered.
“...keep an eye on Ellie?”
Jonah nodded. “I already planned to.”
Willow smiled. “Thank you.”
Eight years later, that’s the last normal conversation I remember having with my sister. An hour later, she was gone.
Zeke insisted on being the seeker. Nobody argued. Looking back, I don’t think it was because he was the loudest. I think we were all relieved not to be the one standing alone while everyone else disappeared into the trees.
He walked us to the edge of the woods behind town where the trail narrowed into darkness. During the day it was where kids built forts and adults cut through to the creek. At night it looked different. The trees leaned together overhead until the path became a tunnel.
Zeke dug six cheap flashlights out of an old backpack. “My cousin said everybody needs one.”
“You came prepared,” Nora muttered.
“I told you we were gonna play.”
He handed them out one by one. When he reached me, Willow took mine first. She clicked it on, frowned, and smacked the side with her palm until the beam stopped flickering.
“There.” She smiled and handed it back. “Don’t lose it.”
“I won’t.”
She looked like she wanted to say something else. Instead she ruffled my hair.
“Same teams as always?” Jonah asked.
Willow nodded. “I’ll stay with Ellie.”
“I know,” Jonah said.
Zeke rolled his eyes. “Can we play before we’re all old?”
Nobody laughed. Maybe that should have told us something. We split into pairs without really talking about it. Jonah stayed beside me. Nora drifted toward Bea. Willow ended up with Zeke.
At least… I remember Willow ending up with Zeke.
Eight years later, Jonah swears she never did. He says Willow grabbed his arm just before Zeke started counting. Nora remembers Willow walking off by herself. Bea insists there were never any pairs at all.
I don’t know who’s right anymore. I only know what I remember.
Zeke covered his eyes against the biggest oak near the trailhead.
“I’m counting to sixty!” His voice echoed farther than it should have.
Jonah nudged me. “C’mon.”
We slipped into the woods. At first it was almost fun.
The beam from my flashlight bounced over roots and moss-covered rocks. Crickets chirped all around us. Every now and then Jonah would point at a strange shaped stump or whisper that he’d spotted bigfoot just to make me smile.
I kept giggling, not because it was funny. Because that’s what ten year olds do when they’re trying not to be scared. Eventually we ducked behind a fallen maple whose roots had pulled a wall of dirt out of the ground.
“This’ll work,” Jonah said as he settled in.
“You think he’ll find us?”
“Probably.”
“Then why hide here?”
Jonah shrugged. “Because it’s the rules.”
We sat together. The forest seemed wrong. Quiet.
Somewhere in the distance Zeke reached sixty. Then came the whistle. One long note. I jumped. Jonah immediately clicked off his flashlight. I did the same.
Darkness swallowed us. Not ordinary darkness. The kind where you can still make out tree trunks and patches of sky. This was complete. I held my hand inches from my face and couldn’t see it.
“You okay?” Jonah whispered.
“I think so.”
“Don’t move.”
“I’m not.”
I listened. Leaves rustled. Something cracked far away. Then footsteps. Slow. Careful. Crunch, crunch, crunch. I leaned closer to Jonah.
“Is that Zeke?”
“I don’t know.”
The footsteps stopped. For a second I thought I heard breathing. Not beside me. Right in front of us. Then another whistle echoed through the woods. Short. Sharp. Jonah switched his flashlight back on.
“So that’s it?” I asked.
“I guess so.”
Later, Jonah told me he only remembered the lights being off for a few seconds. I thought we sat in darkness for ten minutes. Maybe longer.
When we walked back toward the trail, everyone else was already there. Everyone except Willow.
Zeke cupped his hands around his mouth. “Okay! You win!”
Nothing. Nora laughed.
“She’s committed.”
“Seriously!” Zeke shouted. “The game's over!”
Still nothing.
“Maybe she didn’t hear you,” I said.
“She should have.”
We waited. Another minute passed. Then another. Zeke’s grin slowly disappeared.
“Willow!” He yelled. The woods answered with silence. Jonah looked at the others.
“Split up.”
Nobody argued. We started calling her name as we walked.
“Willow!”
“Will!”
“Where are you?”
Every shout seemed to disappear into the trees. Then Bea stopped walking.
“Did you hear that?”
We all froze.
“Hear what?” Nora asked.
Bea looked upward.
“I thought…” Before she finished speaking, it came again.
A laugh. Just one. Bright. Familiar. Willow. It sounded exactly like she did whenever someone tripped over a root or lost a board game. Relief washed over me.
“There she is!” I started to turn toward the sound. Then stopped. Because it hadn’t come from ahead of us. It had come from above. High overhead.
Every flashlight swung into the branches. The leaves glowed white. Branches twisted together. Nothing.
“I heard it,” Jonah whispered.
“So did I,” Nora said, laughing nervously, “I heard her laugh.”
“No,” Bea said quietly. “She was crying.”
Zeke took a cautious step backward. “Willow?”
The branches creaked. Something moved. Not climbing. Just… changing position. For half a second my flashlight caught what looked like the bottom of a white sneaker balanced impossibly high in the canopy. I blinked and it was gone.
“I saw her!” I shouted.
“Where?”
“There! Up there!”
Jonah frowned. “There wasn’t anybody.”
“I saw-”
“There wasn’t.”
“I’m telling you-”
“No one’s up there.”
Even now, that’s one of the things we can’t agree on. I remember seeing a shoe. Nora remembers a hand. Bea says she saw nothing at all. Zeke insists every branch was perfectly still.
The only thing all five of us remember… is that we heard her.
We kept searching. The deeper we went, the less familiar the woods became. The trail disappeared. The creek should have been somewhere to our left. Or maybe our right. I don’t know. At one point Jonah stopped.
“We’ve been walking downhill for a while.”
“No,” Nora said. “We’ve been climbing.”
Bea burst into tears. “We’re lost.”
“Will everybody just shut up and look?” Zeke snapped at all of us.
That’s when Nora’s flashlight flickered. She smacked it against her hand. The beam steadied. Then dimmed again. Mine did the same.
“Did Zeke give you a broken one too?” I asked. Nobody answered. One by one, every flashlight began fading. Not dying. Just… getting weaker.
The darkness between the trees seemed to drink the light before it could reach very far. Jonah changed the batteries in his. Nothing changed.
“It’s brand new,” he muttered.
The woods had become impossibly quiet. No crickets. No wind. No birds.
Just six children breathing.
Five.
Five children breathing.
I don’t remember who noticed it first. Maybe Bea. Maybe Jonah. There was someone lying beneath a cedar tree. At first I only saw the blue sleeve of a hoodie. Then her shoes. Then her hair.
For one impossible second I smiled. I thought Willow was asleep. She was curled on her side. One arm stretched out in front of her. Her hand was open. Waiting.
The flashlight slipped from my fingers. I started to run to her. Jonah grabbed me before I could get to her side.
“Ellie, don’t.” His voice broke as I struggled to get free. I looked past him. Really looked. Willow wasn’t breathing. Her eyes were open. She was staring into the trees.
I don’t remember screaming. Everyone else says I did. What I do remember… is crying. All of us were crying. Zeke dropped to his knees and threw up. Nora wrapped her arms around Bea. Jonah kept telling me to stop looking.
Somewhere, far off in the woods, another whistle drifted through the trees. Nobody moved. None of us turned toward it. None of us remembered hearing it until years later. That’s the strange thing about memory. Sometimes it doesn’t disappear. Sometimes it waits.
Eight years changes a town.
Kids become adults. The old grocery store becomes a pharmacy. The gas station finally replaces the flickering sign everyone joked about for years. Houses get new paint. Trees get cut down. New ones grow back.
People tell you time heals things. It doesn’t. Time just makes the past harder to explain.
The police questioned all of us separately after Willow died. They searched the woods for three days. They interviewed our parents. Volunteers combed every trail behind town looking for… something. I don’t know what. A reason, maybe.
They never found one.
The official report called it a tragic accident. Nobody could explain what kind of accident left no footprints around her body, not even her own. Or why all five of us described different routes through the woods.
For years, I tried not to think about any of it. Then Jonah told me there hadn’t been a moon. After that, I started making phone calls.
The first person who answered was Nora. She was home from university for the weekend. We met at the little diner on Main Street because neither of us wanted to sit in the other’s house pretending this was a normal conversation.
She looked almost exactly the same. Older, obviously. Taller. Her hoodie had been replaced by a university sweatshirt, and she’d traded frogs for plants - she spent a few minutes apologizing because she’d accidentally brought dirt under her fingernails. Some things don’t change.
“I know this is about Willow,” she said before either of us had ordered.
“You do?”
“You never call me first.”
I looked down at my coffee. “I talked to Jonah.”
Her expression changed. “Was it about the moon?”
I looked back up. “You too?”
She nodded slowly. “I thought he was messing with me.
“So did I.”
Neither of us spoke for a while. Finally I asked the question I’d been rehearsing for days.
“When we heard Willow…” I hesitated. “... what exactly did you hear?”
“Crying.” Nora answered immediately.
I blinked.
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?” She frowned.
“You laughed.”
“What?”
“You laughed and said you heard Willow laughing.”
Nora stared at me for several seconds.
“Ellie…”
“I remember.”
“No.” She shook her head. “I remember thinking she’d fallen and gotten hurt.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“It is.”
We sat there looking at each other. Neither of us sounded uncertain. That scared me more than if one of us had admitted we couldn’t remember. Because we both could. Perfectly. Just not the same thing.
I left the diner with more questions than I’d arrived with. Jonah was next.
He still lived in town, in the little white house his parents had owned since before we were born. A pickup truck sat in the driveway with a toolbox in the back. He answered the door wearing grease stained jeans and looked surprised to see me.
“Hey, Ellie.”
“Can I come in?”
He stepped aside without asking why. Some habits never changed. His kitchen looked almost exactly like I remembered, except everything seemed smaller. Childhood has a way of making ordinary places feel enormous.
“I talked to Nora,” I said. He leaned against the counter.
“How’d that go?”
“She remembers Willow crying.”
Jonah closed his eyes. “I figured.”
“You knew?”
“She told me last year.”
“And?”
“And I told her she was wrong.”
Neither of us smiled. I took a folded map out of my backpack. I’d printed it that morning from the county website.
“I want you to show me where we walked.”
He studied it for a moment before tracing a finger through the woods.
“We went in here.”
“That’s not where the trail starts.”
“It was then.”
“It wasn’t.”
He frowned. “It was.”
I pointed to the creek. “We crossed here, at the creek.”
Jonah looked at me like I’d spoken another language.
“There isn’t a creek.”
I laughed. Not because it was funny. Because he had to be joking.
“Jonah.”
“What?”
“We used to catch frogs there.”
“No, we didn’t.”
“Yes, we did.”
“There has never been water there.”
I stared at him. The moon. The laughter. Now the creek. Three memories. Three impossibilities. Three things we couldn’t all be right about.
Before I left, I asked him one more question.
“When we found Willow…” He looked away. “Who found her first?”
“You did.”
“Nora thinks Bea did.”
Jonah was quiet for a long time. Finally he said, “I don’t remember anymore.”
It took me three days to work up the nerve to visit Zeke. He lived in a trailer behind his dad’s shop. I found him there sitting on an overturned milk crate with a half full bottle of whisky resting beside his boot. It was barely noon.
He looked up when he heard my car door close. For a second, something crossed his face. Surprise, maybe. Or resignation.
“Ellie.”
I didn’t answer. He stood, picked up the bottle, stared at it for a moment, then set it on the workbench without taking another drink.
“I wondered how long it’d take.”
“To blame you to your face?”
He didn’t flinch. “Yeah.”
“Eight years,” I said. “You got eight years.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He looked away.
“Every day.”
I laughed bitterly. “You know what the worst part is?”
“Ellie-”
“No. You don’t get to interrupt me.” My voice was louder than I’d meant it to be. “She trusted you. She trusted you when you said it was just a game.”
He closed his eyes. Silence.
“I was ten years old, Zeke.”
He swallowed. “I know.”
“No, you don’t. Because I spent eight years wondering if my sister would still be alive if you’d just kept your mouth shut.”
For a long time, he said nothing. Finally, barely above a whisper: “I’ve wondered the same thing.”
I looked at the whisky on the workbench.
“Is this how you forget?”
He gave a tired smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “It doesn’t work.”
“Good.” The word came out harsher than I’d intended. We stood there listening to the sounds of the shop.
Finally I asked him to tell me about his cousin. He frowned.
“What cousin?”
“The one who taught you the game.”
For a second I thought he’d finally tell me who his cousin was. Instead he looked genuinely confused.
“I…” His voice faltered. “I can’t remember.”
“You told us about him.”
“I know I did.”
“You said he lived near Miller’s Crossing.”
“I remember saying that.”
“So who was he?”
Zeke pressed both hands against the workbench.
“I don’t know.” He looked frightened. Not guilty. Frightened. “I used to know.”
His eyes met mine.
“I swear I used to know.”
I took a slow step toward him, placing a palm on his shoulder. I’m not sure why I felt the need to comfort him. This didn’t feel like the Zeke I remembered.
“Ellie… I don’t think he was my cousin,” he swallowed, “I think I just… said that.”
“Why would you lie about that?” I asked, frowning.
There was a long pause before he answered.
“I don’t remember.”
Bea called me two nights later. Her voice was shaking.
“I found something.”
“What?”
“It’s about your sister. You need to see this.”
I got in my car immediately.
Bea lived with her grandmother in a weathered farmhouse just outside town. The attic ladder was already pulled down when I arrived.
“I was cleaning,” she said quietly. “I almost threw the box away.”
She gestured to a box on the floor. I crouched beside it and lifted a notebook out. It was really three notebooks tied together with faded twine. Inside were newspaper clippings. Funeral cards. Church bulletins. Handwritten letters. Black and white photographs.
None of them mentioned Willow. Not at first.
The oldest clipping was dated 1949.
LOCAL BOY FOUND DEAD AFTER NIGHT WALK
The article itself was ordinary. The handwriting underneath wasn’t.
He wasn’t alone. Four children came back. None agreed what happened.
The next clipping was from 1968.
THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL MISSING.
Beneath it:
Her friends kept hearing her whistle after she disappeared.
Another.
A boy.
Twin sisters.
A twelve year old named Evan.
Each clipping had the same cramped handwriting beneath it. Sometimes only a sentence. Sometimes an entire page.
Different memories.
No footprints.
Flashlights stopped working.
Never the same story twice.
I turned page after page. The dates stretched back farther than my grandparents had been alive.
“Your grandma collected all these?”
Bea nodded.
“Not collected,” a voice answered from the doorway. “Remembered.”
Her grandmother stood there holding a cup of tea. She looked smaller than I remembered. Not weak. Just… worn.
“You’ve been expecting me,” I said.
“I was hoping I’d never see you.” She smiled sadly. I didn’t know how to answer that. She walked over and gently rested one hand on the notebook.
“I recognized it the night your sister died.”
“The game?”
She nodded. “I prayed I was wrong.”
“You’ve seen it before.”
“I played it.”
The room fell silent. Bea looked down.
“You never told me that.”
“I wanted very badly to never have this talk.”
I swallowed.
“What happened?”
She was quiet for so long I thought she hadn’t heard me. Finally she spoke.
“There were six of us.”
My stomach tightened. “Just like us.”
She nodded.
“One never came home.”
I looked at the notebook.
“So this has been happening…”
“... for longer than anyone remembers.” She finished before I could.
“Do you know what it is?”
“No.”
“Who made it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then what do you know?”
She looked directly at me.
“I know the rules people pass down aren’t traditions. They’re apologies.”
I frowned.
“For what?”
“Forgetting.”
She opened the notebook to the first page. I hadn’t noticed the writing there before. The ink had faded almost to nothing.
If you are reading this, trust these pages before you trust your memory.
The next page had been crossed out. Then written again. Then crossed out again. Whole paragraphs had been scratched through until the paper nearly tore.
“I kept changing it,” she whispered.
“Why?”
“Because every few years…” She touched one of the crossed out lines. “... I’d remember it differently.”
A cold feeling settled in my chest.
“You mean your memories changed too.”
“They still do.”
She turned to the final page. The handwriting was shakier than anywhere else in the notebook. Only two sentences had been written.
Today I remembered who taught us the game.
The line beneath it had been gouged away so violently that light shone through the paper. Underneath, written in a different pen years later, was one final sentence.
I forgot again.
Nobody spoke. Outside, the evening wind stirred the trees beyond the farmhouse. For the first time since I’d started asking questions, I understood something.
Not what happened to Willow. Not what waited in those woods. Something much worse. Whatever had killed my sister wasn’t just taking children. It was taking the truth.
And every year that passed, it took a little more.
I didn’t remember driving home. That was the first thing I noticed. Just the road stretching out in front of me, headlights cutting through empty stretches of highway like nothing had ever existed beyond it. No thoughts. No transition. No sense of leaving Bea’s farmhouse.
Only the feeling that something had been placed back inside my head after being taken out.
The notebook sat on the passenger seat beside me. Still open. Still pinned on the final page.
Today I remembered who taught us the game.
I hadn’t written anything like that.
I pulled the car into my driveway without turning off the engine right away. My house looked exactly the same as it always had. Warm porch light. Slightly crooked mailbox. The kind of ordinary that was supposed to mean safe.
My hand stayed on the key.
For a while, I just listened. Wind moving through trees behind the property line. A distant dog barking. The low him of insects settling into the evening. Nothing else.
Then I exhaled and turned the engine off. The silence that followed was immediate. Too immediate. Like the world had been waiting for it.
I got out of the car and walked up the front steps slowly, still holding the notebook. Inside, the house was dark except for the kitchen light I always left on out of habit. I didn’t remember turning it on that morning. I checked anyway. Empty sink. Mail on the counter. My coat still hanging where I’d left it. Normal. That word felt wrong in my mouth now.
I set the notebook down on the table and stood there for a moment, staring at it like it might change if I looked long enough.
Then I heard it.
A whistle.
One long note.
Somewhere behind the house.
I froze so completely I forgot how to breathe.
It wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. It carried the same way it had in the woods eight years ago. Like distance didn’t matter, like space was only something it chose to respect when it felt like it.
My first thought wasn’t no.
It was that’s not possible.
Because there were no woods behind my house. Just a narrow strip of yard, then a fence, then the road, then the town lights. Still, I moved before I decided to. Slowly, I walked to the back door.
The whistle didn’t come again. But it didn’t need to. The air itself felt… attentive. Like something had finally noticed I was listening. I stepped outside.
The yard was dim, washed in the weak orange glow of the porch light behind me. Everything beyond it dissolved quickly into darkness that felt thicker than it should have been. The fence at the back of the property was still there. Except it didn’t look like a boundary anymore. It looked like something waiting to be crossed. I walked toward it anyway.
Each step felt like a mistake I was already too far into to undo. Halfway across the yard, I stopped. Because I realized something I hadn’t noticed before. The trees beyond the fence weren’t the same. They were older. Denser. Wrong in a way I couldn’t explain without sounding insane, even to myself.
And then I saw it. A flashlight. Just one. Swaying faintly between the trunks. My throat tightened.
“Hello?” I called. My voice came out smaller than I expected. No answer. The flashlight dipped slightly, like whoever held it had looked down. Then it went out.
Silence rushed in immediately afterward, as if the light had been the only thing holding the world in place. I reached the fence. My hand rested on the wood. It was colder than it should have been. On the other side, the woods didn’t move. They waited. Then, a sound behind me.
Not footsteps. Not branches. A breath. Right beside my ear. I turned. Nothing was there. But the fence was gone. Or maybe it had never been.
The trees were suddenly closer than they had been a second ago, surrounding me in a way that didn’t feel like distance closing. It felt like recognition. And then, softly, almost kindly, another whistle.
This time, I knew it wasn’t coming from somewhere ahead. It was coming from everywhere at once. Like the forest itself was remembering how the game worked. My flashlight was in my hand before I realized I’d grabbed it. I didn’t remember bringing it outside. My thumb hovered over the switch.
For a moment, I just stood there. Listening. Waiting. Trying to decide if turning it on would help. Or if it would mean I had already agreed to something I didn’t understand. Behind me, somewhere far back in the direction of my house, I thought I heard my name.
“Ellie.”
Just once. Jonah’s voice, maybe. Or Willow’s. I didn’t turn around.
I turned on the flashlight. The beam cut into the trees immediately. Too sharp. Too clean. For a fraction of a second, I saw movement in the light. Figures between the trunks, not stepping forward, not retreating, just occupying spaces like they had always been there and I had only just learned how to notice them.
One of them lifted an arm. Not waving. Pointing. Deeper into the woods. The whistle came again. Shorter this time. Not a call. An instruction.
My feet moved before I decided they would. One step. Then another. Behind me, the house disappeared completely. Not fading. Not getting smaller. Just… no longer part of the same idea of space.
The trees closed in around me, but not in a hurry. There was no chase. No urgency. Only continuation. Like something that had been paused eight years ago and had finally been allowed to resume.
As I walked, I tried to remember Willow’s face exactly as it had been. I could. I think. But even that certainty didn’t feel stable anymore. Like holding something underwater and trusting it would stay the same shape when I peered at it from above.
The flashlight flickered once. Then steadied. Far ahead, between the trees, I saw something pale on the ground. Curled on its side. Waiting. My pace slowed. My breathing didn’t.
The whistle didn’t come again. It didn’t need to. Because now I understood something I didn’t want to understand. The game had never ended. It had only been waiting for someone who still remembered how to play.
I don’t think I ever left the woods.