Chapter 2: The Eyes in the Bark

Chapter 2: The Eyes in the Bark

My phone was a liar, but it was the only friend I had left. The screen glowed with a comforting, clinical light, a tiny beacon of order in a world that had come unglued. The blue dot representing me pulsed confidently on the bright line of the Northwood Loop Trail. According to its flawless satellite data, I was standing exactly where I should be. My eyes, however, told a different story. They screamed that I was in a stranger’s nightmare.

The path behind me remained a solid wall of dark, tangled pines, a living barricade that had simply grown into existence. Ahead, the impossible grove of ancient maples stood where Jasper Creek had flowed for centuries. My logical mind, the part of me that organized spreadsheets and predicted data trends, was fighting a losing war against the primal terror blooming in my chest. Hallucination? A sudden, stress-induced psychotic break? The thoughts were flimsy shields. My mind felt sharp, my senses painfully clear. This was real.

My desire, a desperate, clawing need, was to make the world make sense again. To find the real trail. To prove the data on my phone was correct and my eyes were the liars.

Clinging to that sliver of technological faith, I took a step forward. And another. I pushed through the ferns of the non-existent creek bed, my boots sinking into soil that should have been submerged under rushing water. The oppressive silence I’d first noticed was now a physical presence. It muffled the snap of twigs under my feet, stole the sound of my own ragged breathing. The air was thick, still, and cold. The feeling of being watched intensified with every step, a thousand invisible needles pricking my skin.

The GPS urged me forward. For fifty yards, I trudged through this alien landscape, my phone held out like a talisman. The dense canopy of the wrong trees blotted out the sky, plunging the world into a perpetual, gloomy twilight. Then, the darkness ahead gave way to a strange, pale light.

I stumbled out of the trees and stopped dead, my breath catching in my throat.

Before me was a clearing. It was a perfect circle, perhaps a hundred feet in diameter, carpeted in a low, unnaturally uniform grass that looked more like a putting green than a wild meadow. The ring of trees surrounding it was just as precise, their trunks forming a near-perfect circumference, a coliseum of bark and leaves. Nature doesn't work in perfect circles. My mind, the part that lived and breathed in patterns, recoiled. This wasn't a natural feature. It was a wound. A deliberate, geometric statement in the heart of the chaotic woods. It was a trap.

My phone beeped softly. The blue line of the trail on the screen ran directly through the center of this impossible arena. My goal was to cross it and find the path on the other side. My obstacle was every screaming instinct telling me not to take another step.

For a moment, I was paralyzed. Turning back was impossible. Staying here felt like waiting for a predator to strike. The only way was forward. With a dry swallow that did nothing to wet my throat, I stepped out of the shadow of the trees and onto the manicured grass of the clearing.

The moment my foot touched the strange turf, the feeling of being watched became an overwhelming, suffocating certainty. The air grew heavy, charged with a silent, waiting energy. And the shadows turned on me.

They had been ordinary shadows before, cast by the ring of sentinel trees. But now, as I stood exposed in the center of the clearing, they began to shift. Not with the movement of the sun—there was no sun—but with their own volition. They elongated, stretching across the pale green grass like inky black fingers. They pointed at me, accusingly. One shadow, then another, then all of them, a circle of silent, dark spears aimed at my heart.

Panic seized me, raw and absolute. I squeezed my phone so tightly the plastic creaked. It's just the light, my analytical mind pleaded. An optical illusion. Your brain is misinterpreting the data.

But it wasn't an illusion. It was a display. A deliberate act of intimidation.

I tore my eyes from the menacing shadows on the ground and forced myself to look up at the trees themselves, searching for the source of this profound malevolence. They were mostly oaks and maples, ancient and gnarled, their bark thick with moss and deep with fissures. At first, I saw nothing unusual.

Then I saw the first one.

It was a knot in the bark of a massive oak, a whorl in the wood grain. I had seen thousands of them on my hikes. But this one… this one was different. Two deep-set holes sat above a twisted line that looked unnervingly like a mouth, gaping in a silent scream. It was a face. A caricature, yes, something my brain could dismiss as pareidolia, the mind’s trick of seeing patterns where none exist.

I shook my head, trying to clear the image, to force the pattern back into randomness. I looked away, to the next tree.

There was another one.

This one was clearer. The lines of the bark formed a long, sorrowful face, the grain drooping like melting wax. Its eyes were hollows of shadow, and they were staring directly at me.

My heart felt like it was trying to beat its way out of my ribcage. I frantically scanned the clearing, my gaze jumping from tree to tree in the silent ring. And I saw them. Everywhere. On every trunk.

They weren't random patterns. They were faces. Hundreds of them, embedded in the wood, looking out from their prisons of bark. Some were contorted in agony, mouths stretched in eternal, soundless shrieks. Others were placid, their expressions unnervingly blank, like death masks. Some were just eyes, pairs of dark knots that followed my every move. Young faces, old faces, male, female—a silent, watching congregation.

The forest wasn't just a place. It was a graveyard. And the tombstones were watching me. The oppressive silence finally made a terrible, soul-crushing sense. It wasn't empty. It was full. Full of the silent screams of everyone else who had stumbled into this trap.

I stood frozen in the center of the clearing, the target of a thousand wooden eyes, the focal point of a nightmare that was just beginning to show me its true face. The hunt hadn't even started. This was just the greeting.