Chapter 8: The Woman at the Pond

Chapter 8: The Woman at the Pond

The ticking of the cooling engine was the only sound in the pre-dawn stillness. Alex sat frozen behind the wheel, his knuckles white on the steering wheel, the ghostly whisper of his childhood nickname, Lexi, still clinging to the air in the car. Outside, the world was washed in a palette of grey and deep blue. The sign for Millfield Elementary School stood sentinel at the edge of the parking lot, its cheerful painted mascot—a smiling beaver holding a book—peeling and faded, looking more like a leering ghoul in the dim light.

This was it. The red pin on the map. The place his own creation, held hostage by something ancient, had sent him.

He forced his trembling legs to move, pushing the car door open. The air that greeted him was cold and sharp, smelling of damp leaves and old rain—the scent of his childhood autumns. For a moment, a wave of nostalgia so powerful it was physically painful washed over him. He remembered games of tag on the empty playground, the metallic taste of the water from the drinking fountain, the comforting drone of the bell signaling the end of the school day. He remembered walking to the edge of these very woods with Leo, their hands full of peanut butter sandwiches, ready for an adventure.

The memory soured in his mouth. That world was gone, paved over with a new and terrible reality.

He walked across the cracked asphalt of the parking lot, his worn sneakers crunching on loose gravel. The woods loomed before him, a solid wall of black trunks and tangled branches. It didn't look like the friendly patch of forest he remembered. In the weak light, the entrance looked like a maw, a dark, gaping mouth ready to swallow him whole.

He hesitated at the treeline, the boundary between the dead, manicured world of the school grounds and the wild, breathing darkness beyond. This was the point of no return. Taking a ragged breath that did nothing to calm the frantic hummingbird of his heart, he stepped across the threshold.

The change was immediate and visceral. The faint pre-dawn breeze died, and the air became heavy, still, and unnaturally cold. The ambient sounds of the sleeping town vanished, replaced by a profound, oppressive silence that felt less like an absence of noise and more like a presence in itself. The familiar woods of his youth felt utterly alien, hostile. Every shadow seemed to writhe with unseen movement. The rustle of a leaf sounded like a whisper. The snap of a twig under his foot echoed like a gunshot.

He pushed deeper, following a path that was more memory than reality. The trail he and Leo had worn down over years of exploration was gone, reclaimed by thorny vines and thick undergrowth that snagged at his jeans. He felt a disorienting sense of being lost in his own backyard. The trees themselves seemed wrong; their branches twisted at unnatural angles, their bark was the color of old bruises, and they seemed to lean in toward the path, their leaves blocking out the already meager light. It felt like the woods were actively trying to disorient him, to turn him around and spit him back out.

But he had a landmark. An anchor point in this sea of corrupted nostalgia. The pond.

He followed the gentle downward slope of the land, the smell in the air changing. The clean scent of damp earth was being replaced by something else, something thick and stagnant. The smell of decay. Of life gone wrong.

He broke through a final curtain of grasping branches and stopped dead.

Miller’s Pond lay before him, but it was not the pond he remembered. The water, which had once been a murky but living green, was now a sheet of black, stagnant glass. A slick, iridescent film shimmered on its surface, catching the grey light like an oil slick. The air was thick with the hum of insects and the foul, sweet stench of rot. The banks were a mess of sucking mud and pale, sickly-looking fungi that clung to the roots of dead trees.

And on the far side of the pond, she was waiting.

The gaunt woman stood perfectly still at the water’s edge, her back to him. The same stringy hair, the same skeletal frame, the same rigid, unnatural posture. She was a black slash of wrongness against the dying landscape. For a long moment, she didn't move. Alex stood frozen, his breath caught in his throat. This was it. The ghost from his campus, the phantom from his car, was here. Real. Solid.

As if sensing his presence, she turned her head slowly, the movement accompanied by a faint, dry crackle. Her dark, cavernous eyes found his across the dead water. And then her mouth stretched into that familiar, horrifyingly wide smile. A wound of a smile, showing only pale, empty gums.

Alex felt a primal urge to run, to turn and flee back through the suffocating woods and never look back. But he was held in place by a terrible, morbid curiosity. He had to understand. He took a cautious step forward, his sneaker sinking into the soft mud.

That's when he noticed the movement. And the sound.

It was a soft, wet, rhythmic plopping. From her mouth.

His mind struggled to process what his eyes were seeing. Her mouth was agape, wider than humanly possible, and it was full. Stuffed. Something gelatinous and glistening was spilling from it, a thick, translucent mass that clung to her chin and dripped in heavy globs onto the ground at her feet.

He took another step closer, his stomach heaving. It was frogspawn.

Thousands upon thousands of tiny black eggs, suspended in a quivering, jelly-like matrix. It was a living, writhing mass, a bib of nascent, corrupted life that pulsed with a faint, internal rhythm. She was a vessel, a grotesque incubator, her body a stage for a hideous parody of birth. The sight was a violation of all natural law, a scene of such profound biological horror that Alex’s brain simply refused to accept it.

He must have made a sound, a choked gasp of revulsion, because her empty eyes narrowed. The focus shifted from a vacant stare to a look of sharp, possessive hatred. This was the disciple. The follower. And he was trespassing on her holy ground.

A sound tore from her throat. It wasn't a word or a scream. It was a long, low hiss, like air leaking from a punctured tire, full of ancient malice.

Then, with a speed that was utterly inhuman, she moved. She didn't run. She darted, a blur of motion that flowed through the undergrowth without disturbing a single branch. She scrambled away from the pond, her body bent low to the ground, moving with the fluid, unnatural grace of a spider. She plunged into the deepest, darkest part of the woods, the part Alex had always been afraid to enter as a child.

She was gone.

Alex stood alone, the image of her spawn-filled mouth seared into his mind. The air still stank of decay. The pond sat black and silent. He was left with a choice. He could retreat, back to the world of sanity, and try to forget the impossible thing he had just witnessed. Or he could follow the hissing, scuttling horror deeper into the maze.

He looked in the direction she had fled. He thought of The Watcher’s stolen hardware. He thought of Sarah's vacant eyes. He thought of the name—The Saint. The answers were in there. In the dark. With her.

His sanity was already a casualty of this war. All he had left was a desperate need to see it through to the end. He took a deep, shuddering breath of the foul air and began to walk, following the trail of the woman at the pond.