Chapter 5: The Girl Who Never Left

Chapter 5: The Girl Who Never Left

The whisper was not a memory. It was a physical presence, a puff of cold, dead air against his neck that made the fine hairs stand up. “...po-lo.”

Leo’s blood turned to ice. He didn’t scream. He didn’t run. The boy who had fled in terror twenty years ago was gone, burned away by two decades of guilt and regret. In his place was a man with nothing left to lose. He spun on his heel, flashlight held high like a weapon, its beam cutting a stark white slash through the suffocating darkness of the clearing.

The light found her.

She was crouched at the base of the ancient oak, just as he remembered, a wild creature caught in the glare. But this was not the ghost of a lost little girl. This was a woman, perhaps in her late twenties, her body wiry and taut like a starved wolf. Her hair was a tangled, matted nest of black, threaded with leaves and bits of moss. Her clothes were rags that seemed to have been stitched together from scraps of other, older clothes. But it was her face that stole his breath. Gaunt and feral, it was a face that had known nothing but shadow and fear.

And her eyes. They were the same. One, a piercing shard of ice blue. The other, a deep, earthy brown that seemed to hold the darkness of the forest floor within it. It was her. The ‘po-lo’ girl.

“You,” Leo breathed, his voice a choked rasp. The single word hung in the dead air between them.

She flinched at the sound of his voice, her mismatched eyes wide with a familiar, animalistic terror. She wasn’t looking at him, but past him, into the darkness he had just come from.

“Go,” she hissed, her voice the same dry, broken whisper, but with an edge of desperation now. “He hears. He feels. Mother is awake.”

Leo’s flashlight beam trembled, drifting down from her face. His gaze locked on her left shoulder. The sleeve of her ragged tunic was gone, and where her arm should have been, there was something else. It wasn't the clean, pinned-up sleeve of a child. It was a stump, but a living, grotesque one. From the scarred terminus of her shoulder, a cluster of thin, pale tendrils, like writhing roots, squirmed in the air. They moved with a slow, independent life, twisting and curling in the light like blind worms. The forest wasn't just her prison; it was a part of her.

A wave of nausea and pity washed over Leo. “What did it do to you?”

“Made me,” she said, her voice flat, emotionless. The tendrils on her shoulder recoiled slightly, as if from the memory of pain. “Stayed too long. Heard my name. Mother… she plants what she keeps.”

Leo’s mind reeled, trying to piece together the horrifying implications. This wasn't a fellow survivor. This was a relic, a trophy left behind by the monster. He held up the small, crudely carved wooden bird. “What is this? Did you leave this?”

She stared at the bird, and for a fleeting moment, a different emotion flickered in her haunted eyes. Something akin to sorrow. “For the new one,” she whispered. “A gift. So she will not be scared. At first.”

The cold dread in Leo’s stomach solidified into a leaden weight. “The new one? Lily Patterson?”

“The name is a seed,” she said, her gaze darting back toward the shadows. “Mother heard it. Heard them call for her. Now… she is hungry for it.” She looked back at Leo, her mismatched eyes finally focusing on him, truly seeing him for the first time. A flicker of recognition. “You ran,” she stated, not as an accusation, but as a simple fact. “The boy with the loud heart. She remembers you. She marked you.”

Leo’s hand instinctively went to his calf, where the scar pulsed with a dull, cold ache. “She took my friend. Billy.”

The girl shook her head slowly, a gesture of profound weariness. “Not take. Keep. There is a difference.”

“I don’t understand,” Leo pressed, stepping closer despite every instinct screaming at him to flee. Sadie’s warning echoed in his mind—If you look for it, it finds you. He had found it. “I thought you got away. I spent twenty years telling myself at least you got away.”

A sound that might have been a laugh, dry and mirthless as snapping twigs, escaped her lips. “Away?” she repeated, the word tasting alien in her mouth. “There is no away from here. This is Mother’s garden. She is the roots and the branches. I never left.”

The horrifying truth of it landed on him with the force of a physical blow. She had been here the whole time. A prisoner for twenty years, growing wild in the dark, her body warped and changed by the thing that claimed her. His fleeting encounter had been a lifetime of horror for her.

“Why?” he choked out. “Why keep you?”

“A voice,” she said, touching her throat with her one good hand. “A lure. My voice, it sounds like a child’s, from far away. Lost. Alone.” She looked at him, the full, crushing weight of her tragedy in her eyes. “She uses me to call them. To make them come closer. I am the game that never ends.”

Marco. Polo. The words slammed into him. The whisper he had followed into the woods that night… it had been her. A puppet, forced to sing a siren song for a faceless monster.

“And Lily?” he demanded, his voice shaking with a new, furious energy. “Is it using you to call her?”

“Not call,” the girl whispered, a new and sharper terror entering her voice. “Chosen. The garden needs… new seeds. New flowers.” Her gaze fell to the ground. “She wants a sibling for me.”

The word ‘sibling’ was the most obscene thing Leo had ever heard. This wasn't about malice or hunger as he understood them. It was about propagation. Conversion. The Root-Taker wasn't just killing children; it was collecting them, changing them, turning them into… this. More lures. More parts of itself.

A low, groaning sound, like the stressed wood of a great tree bending in a storm, echoed from deep within the forest. It was a sound that vibrated in the bones, in the teeth.

The girl’s entire body went rigid. The root-like tendrils on her shoulder stiffened, pointing in the direction of the sound.

“Too long,” she hissed, scrambling to her feet with that same unnerving, silent speed he remembered. “You stayed too long. Your heart is loud again. She hears it. She is coming home.”

Panic, cold and sharp, finally pierced through Leo’s resolve. The memory of that pale, impossibly long arm descending from the darkness flashed through his mind.

“Where is the girl? Lily!” he yelled, his voice cracking. “Where is she?”

The girl with mismatched eyes gave him one last look, a look of grim finality. “Deeper in,” she whispered, her voice barely audible over the growing groans from the woods. “In the heartwood. Where she makes us forget the sun.”

She turned and melted into the shadows on the far side of the clearing, vanishing as if she were nothing more than a trick of the light.

The groaning sound was closer now, accompanied by a dry, dragging, slithering noise. The sound of old wood being pulled across the forest floor.

The Root-Taker was coming. And Leo was standing in the heart of its garden. Alone.