Chapter 1: The Game We Played

Chapter 1: The Game We Played

The scent of boiled hot dogs and cheap fluorescent lighting was the smell of Alex Miller’s failure. He sat at the scratched Formica table in his childhood kitchen, a place he’d sworn thirty years ago he would never return to, and watched his daughter draw. The old house groaned around them, settling its bones in the autumn chill that seeped in from the surrounding woods of Blackwood Creek.

Lily, his eight-year-old, was the only spot of color in the drab, wood-paneled room. Her tongue was poked out in concentration, her brow furrowed as she guided a waxy blue crayon across a sheet of paper. She was drawing a bird, its wings a vibrant, impossible rainbow. For a moment, watching the effortless scratch of wax on paper, Alex felt the knot in his chest loosen by a fraction. Maybe this could work. Maybe returning to the town that had broken him was the only way to piece himself back together. A new start. A quiet life.

“Daddy,” Lily said, not looking up from her masterpiece. “Can I have a feather?”

Alex’s breath hitched. A cold dread, familiar as his own heartbeat, trickled down his spine. “A feather? What for, sweetie?” He kept his voice level, a practiced calm he used to mask the constant, humming anxiety that was his new normal.

“For the game,” she said, finally looking up. Her eyes were his, but they held a light he’d lost long ago. “My new friend taught me. Her name’s Ruth.”

The name struck him like a physical blow. Ruth. The air in the room grew thick and heavy, tasting of damp earth and pine needles. The hum of the refrigerator faded into a dull roar in his ears. The crayon Lily held was no longer blue; it was the faded red of a girl’s jacket against the dying light of a forest floor.

“It’s called Foxfeather,” Lily continued, oblivious to the storm breaking inside him. “You get a pretty stone, and a pinecone, and a feather. You put them in a circle and say the rhyme. Then you close your eyes, and the Fox takes one. Whoever’s thing gets taken has to go find the Fox’s treasure!”

Her voice was distant, an echo across three decades of buried terror. Alex wasn’t in the kitchen anymore.

---

The air was cold, biting at his ten-year-old cheeks. The sun was a bleeding wound on the horizon, its last rays struggling to pierce the dense canopy of the Blackwood pines. He and Ruth, his sister, were crouched in a clearing the old folks called Huldra’s Rest. It was a place where the trees grew in a perfect circle, and the ground was a soft carpet of moss that seemed to swallow all sound.

“Hurry up, Alex,” Ruth hissed, her voice a mix of excitement and impatience. She was twelve, and fearless. She placed her own offering in their hastily made circle of twigs: a river stone so smooth it felt like glass.

Alex hesitated, his own item—a perfect pinecone, its scales tightly closed—feeling heavy and wrong in his clammy hand. “I don’t like it, Ruthie. It’s getting dark. Mom said to be home before the streetlights came on.”

“Don’t be such a baby,” she scoffed, nudging him with her elbow. “It’s just a game.” She dropped her prize into the circle, a brilliant blue jay feather she’d found by the creek. It lay stark and vibrant against the dark earth. Their three items sat in a small, pathetic triangle: his pinecone, her stone, her feather.

This was Foxfeather. A game passed down through generations of Blackwood Creek kids, played only in the whispers of the playground, never where parents could hear. Find your tokens. Make the circle. Say the rhyme.

Ruth grabbed his hand, her grip surprisingly strong. “Together, now.” She began the chant, her clear voice cutting through the oppressive silence.

“Pinecone, feather, river stone, Leave your gift for the Fox alone. Close your eyes and count to ten, Come to find your prize again.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, the words a sour taste in his mouth. The forest felt… awake. He could feel the weight of unseen eyes pressing in from the deepening shadows between the trees. He counted, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.

“…nine… ten!”

They opened their eyes. The clearing was bathed in the eerie twilight of dusk. And in the center of their circle, Ruth’s smooth river stone was gone.

A triumphant grin split her face. “See! I get to find the treasure! The Fox chose me!”

The rules were simple. The person whose token was taken had to walk the path to Blackwood Creek, alone, and retrieve the “feather”—a token left by the Fox. But looking into the swallowing darkness of the woods, a primal fear seized Alex. This felt different. Wrong.

“No,” he whispered, his voice trembling. “Ruth, let’s just go home. Please. We can play tomorrow.”

Her face hardened. “You’re just scared. You’re always scared. I’m not a baby like you.” She turned her back on him, her red jacket a final, defiant splash of color against the gloom, and took a step towards the path.

Something inside him snapped. The fear curdled into a childish, desperate anger. “Fine! Go then! I’m going home to Mom!”

He turned and ran, not looking back. He didn’t want to be a coward, but the feeling of being hunted was too strong. Twigs and roots snagged at his ankles as he scrambled through the undergrowth, the sound of his own ragged breathing loud in his ears. He told himself he was going to get their mother. He told himself he was doing the right thing.

He’d made it fifty yards, maybe less, when the sound reached him.

It wasn’t a twig snapping. It was thicker, heavier. The sound of a large bone breaking. It was followed by a single, piercing scream—Ruth’s scream—but it was choked off, swallowed by the forest as if it had never been.

He stopped, frozen. Every horror story, every whispered warning from the town’s old-timers, crashed down on him. He forced himself to turn, to look back toward the clearing.

And he saw it.

It was framed between two ancient oaks, a silhouette against the last vestiges of light. It was tall, impossibly tall and thin, its limbs bending at angles that were deeply, fundamentally wrong. Long, matted hair hung like a filthy curtain, obscuring its face. As it moved, dragging something small and red behind it, Alex saw it. From beneath the fall of hair, a single, gnarled tail, thick and covered in coarse fur like a cow’s, dragged across the forest floor, leaving a shallow trench in the moss.

The thing paused, and its head tilted as if listening. From the shadows of its face, two points of malevolent, golden light ignited, fixing on him. They weren’t eyes. They were embers from a cold, hungry fire.

He didn’t scream. The sound was trapped in his throat, a solid block of ice. He just stood there, a ten-year-old boy paralyzed by a sight his mind refused to process, as the monster from the town’s darkest nursery rhymes dragged his sister into the eternal dark of the trees.

They found him an hour later, huddled at the edge of the woods, catatonic. They searched for weeks. All they ever found of Ruth was her blue jay feather, lying pristine in the center of the broken circle of twigs.

---

“Daddy? Daddy, you’re hurting me.”

The voice was small, frightened. Alex blinked, the kitchen swimming back into focus. He looked down. His hand was clamped around Lily’s arm, his fingers digging into her soft flesh. His knuckles were white. The blue crayon lay snapped in two on the table.

Lily’s face was pale, her lower lip trembling as she looked up at him. The innocent excitement was gone, replaced by a fear that was a mirror of his own. She wasn’t afraid of a monster. She was afraid of him.

The realization was a punch to the gut. He let go of her arm as if it were burning hot, stumbling back a step. The guilt of thirty years ago crashed into the terror of the present, creating a perfect, suffocating storm.

It was starting again. The game. The name. The woods.

He looked at his daughter, his beautiful, innocent daughter, who had just unknowingly invited an ancient hunger into their lives. He opened his mouth, but all that came out was a dry, ragged rasp.

“No,” he finally managed, the single word choked with a horror she couldn’t possibly understand. He leaned forward, his hands flat on the table, his voice dropping to a low, intense whisper that made her flinch.

“You will not see that girl again. You will not say that name. And you will never, ever, play that game.”