Chapter 1: The Game That Never Ended

Chapter 1: The Game That Never Ended

The air of a Blackwood Creek summer night was thick enough to chew. Twenty years ago, it was the taste of humidity, honeysuckle, and the metallic tang of impending rain. For a twelve-year-old Leo Vance, it was the taste of freedom. Streetlights were a distant, hazy orange, surrendering to the absolute dark of the forest’s edge where he and his friends played. The woods didn’t just get dark; they swallowed sound, turning the familiar chirr of crickets into a muffled, watchful silence.

"Ready or not, here I come!" Sadie’s voice, thin and reedy, was the starting pistol for their nightly ritual.

Tonight, it was Marco Polo, a ridiculous game to play on land, especially here, but Billy had insisted. Billy was all wild energy and bad ideas, the kind of friend a quiet kid like Leo orbited around like a nervous moon.

"Marco!" Leo shouted into the looming trees, the word feeling small and inadequate. He squeezed his eyes shut, plunging himself into a voluntary blindness that was only a shade darker than the real thing.

"Polo!" Sadie giggled from somewhere to his left.

"Polo!" Billy bellowed from his right, much closer.

Leo grinned, spinning on his heel and lunging toward the sound. His hands met empty, sticky air. The game was simple: keep your eyes closed, follow the sound, and tag someone. But in the Blackwood Creek woods, the rules felt different. The shadows stretched like grasping fingers, and every rustle of leaves could be a friend or something else entirely.

"Marco!" Leo called again, stepping over a gnarled root that felt like a bony ankle under his worn sneakers.

A long moment of silence. The crickets seemed to have stopped altogether. A clammy prickle of unease traced its way up his spine. Maybe they were trying to trick him, to let him get hopelessly lost.

"Guys?" he said, his voice a little shaky. "Marco!"

A faint sound answered, but it wasn't the cheerful reply he expected.

"...po-lo."

It was a whisper, dry and cracked like autumn leaves. It came from deeper in the woods, far from where Sadie or Billy should have been. It wasn't their voice. It was hollow, wrong.

Curiosity, that fatal flaw of all twelve-year-old boys, won out over fear. Leo opened his eyes. The forest was a wall of impenetrable blackness, but he was sure of the direction. Taking a tentative step, he moved toward the sound, the game forgotten.

"Hello?" he called out, his voice hushed.

He pushed past a curtain of hanging moss and into a small, unnaturally quiet clearing. There, huddled at the base of an ancient oak, was a girl. She looked about his age, with a wild tangle of dark hair that had twigs and dirt woven into it. But that’s not what he saw first.

He saw the arm. Or rather, the lack of one. Her left sleeve was pinned up crudely at the shoulder. And then he saw her eyes. In the faint moonlight that filtered through the canopy, one was a startling, piercing blue, the other a brown so dark it was almost black.

She stared at him, not with fear, but with a feral, unnerving intensity.

"You're not supposed to be here," Leo stammered. "We're playing a game."

The girl shook her head slowly. "Not play." Her voice was the same dry whisper he’d heard. "Mother hears."

"Your mother?" Leo glanced around the empty clearing. "Is she here? Are you lost?"

The girl’s mismatched eyes widened, a flicker of genuine terror in them. "Always here. She's the woods." She hugged her single arm to her chest. "Long arms. So long. And... and no face."

A cold dread, heavy and indigestible, settled in Leo’s stomach. This was no game. The girl’s words painted a picture from a nightmare, a story told to scare children, but her fear was real. It was contagious.

"We should go," Leo said, his voice barely audible. "My friends are waiting."

SNAP.

The sound of a large branch breaking echoed through the clearing, impossibly loud in the dead silence. It came from right behind the oak tree. The girl flinched violently, scrambling to her feet with a speed that wasn't human. She looked at Leo, her face a mask of pure panic.

"Run," she hissed. "She's awake. She heard you."

Leo didn’t need to be told twice. He turned and bolted, adrenaline searing through his veins. He didn't scream. The fear was too deep, too absolute for a sound like that. He just ran, branches whipping at his face, his lungs burning. He could hear something behind him, a sound he couldn’t place—not footsteps, but a dry, slithering, dragging noise. The sound of old wood being pulled across the forest floor.

He burst out of the deeper woods, back toward the treeline where the game had begun. "Billy! Sadie!" he shrieked, his voice finally breaking free.

He risked a glance over his shoulder and saw nothing but writhing shadows. But then he felt it. A cold, vise-like grip on his right calf. It wasn't a hand. It was hard, rough like bark, and impossibly strong. Four sharp points dug into his flesh, a pain so sharp and cold it stole his breath. He screamed, kicking wildly, and the grip released as suddenly as it had seized him.

He scrambled forward, half-crawling, half-running, until he tumbled out of the treeline and into the muted glow of the distant streetlamp. He lay there, gasping, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.

Sadie was there, crying, her face pale with fright. "Leo! What happened? Where's Billy?"

Leo pushed himself up, his leg throbbing. He turned back to the woods. And he saw him. Billy was standing just inside the treeline, stock-still. He wasn't running. He was looking up, his face tilted towards the canopy, his mouth agape in a silent scream. Leo watched, paralyzed, as a long, pale, branch-like arm, impossibly thin and jointless, descended from the darkness above. It didn't snatch Billy. It simply touched his shoulder, and he was gone. Pulled up into the black leaves without a sound.

The woods fell silent again. Even the dragging sound was gone. There was only the sound of Sadie’s sobbing and the frantic, useless beating of Leo’s own heart.

---

Twenty years was a long time to run from a memory.

The sterile glow of a computer monitor was the only light in Leo Vance’s gray cubicle of a life. The monotonous click of his mouse was the only sound. Now thirty-two, his world had shrunk to the size of this screen, a remote data-entry job that demanded nothing from him but keystrokes. It was safe. It was quiet. There were no woods here.

He scrolled through a local news affiliate’s website, a morbid habit he’d developed, a way of checking on the town he’d sworn he’d never return to. Usually, it was bake sales and minor town council disputes.

But not tonight.

The headline hit him like a physical blow, knocking the air from his lungs.

BLACKWOOD CREEK GIRL, 8, MISSING. LAST SEEN NEAR HAWTHORNE WOODS.

His breath hitched. He clicked the link. The face of a smiling little girl with a missing front tooth, Lily Patterson, stared back at him. The article was sparse on details. She had been playing hide-and-seek with friends near the edge of the forest at dusk. She never came home.

Leo’s hand instinctively went to his right calf, hidden beneath his jeans. He could feel the familiar ridges of the scar tissue there, four parallel lines that sometimes ached with a phantom cold. Tonight, they were burning.

He stared at the picture of the missing girl, but his mind superimposed another face over hers—Billy’s, frozen in terror, looking up into the darkness.

A game. A missing child. The edge of the woods.

The game had never ended. It had just been waiting for a new player. And the dry, broken whisper from two decades ago echoed in the silent tomb of his apartment.

"...po-lo."