Chapter 1: The Circle on the Lawn

Chapter 1: The Circle on the Lawn

The silence was the first thing you noticed.

Here, at the frayed edge of the village, the world seemed to run out of sound. The last sputtering streetlight was a hundred meters back, leaving Leo Janssen’s house an island in a sea of rural Belgian darkness. Beyond their small, manicured lawn, the great, black wall of Ardenwood forest began. It wasn’t a gentle wood of fairy tales; it was a dense, primeval tangle of pine and oak that swallowed light and sound with an ancient appetite. To Leo, it felt less like a forest and more like a sleeping giant, its deep, slow breaths the whisper of wind through its countless needles.

Tonight, a thick summer humidity pressed down, making the sheets on his bed feel like damp canvas. Leo tossed, turning for the tenth time. Sleep was a distant shore he couldn't seem to reach. He was fourteen, an age that felt like being stuck in a doorway—not quite a child, definitely not a man—and his mind fizzed with the pointless, looping anxieties of the day. A missed answer in math class, an awkward nod to a girl from the village, the unfinished charcoal drawing on his desk—a sketch of the very forest that now loomed outside his window.

He kicked the sheets away, sitting up. The moonlight, pale and thin, filtered through his window, casting the familiar shapes of his bedroom into monstrous silhouettes. His desk chair became a hunched figure. The wardrobe was a coffin standing on end. His gaze drifted to the window, to the blackness of Ardenwood. It was always there, a constant, silent observer.

That’s when he heard it.

It wasn't a noise, not really. It was the texture of a sound, a faint vibration on the edge of hearing, like the hushed murmur of a crowd heard from miles away. He froze, straining his ears. The house was still. His parents were asleep down the hall; his father’s snores were a familiar, comforting rumble that was conspicuously absent.

There it was again. A soft, sibilant whisper. Plural. Voices.

A cold prickle danced up his spine. Teenagers? Out from the village, looking for trouble? It was possible, but unlikely. No one came out this far. There was nothing here but his house and the forest. The whispering was rhythmic, a low, chanting cadence that rose and fell like a tide. It was wrong. It didn't have the boisterous energy of kids messing around. It felt… purposeful.

Desire, raw and urgent, seized him: the need to see, to put a name to the sound that was turning the familiar safety of his room into a cage. He slid out of bed, his bare feet silent on the cool wooden floor. The obstacle was his own hammering heart, a drumbeat of fear against his ribs. He crept towards the window, his lanky frame hunched, feeling like a spy in his own home. He parted the curtains just a fraction of an inch, his blue eyes wide.

And the world tilted on its axis.

His front lawn, bathed in the sickly moonlight, was not empty.

There were figures there. Seven of them. They stood in a perfect circle, their forms tall and unnaturally thin, draped in what looked like heavy, dark cloaks that absorbed the light. They were utterly still, heads bowed. He couldn't see faces, only the dark hoods that shadowed them. They weren't whispering. Their stillness was absolute. Yet the hushed, chanting sound persisted, seeming to emanate not from them, but from the very air around them.

Leo’s breath hitched in his throat. This wasn't a prank. Pranksters giggled. They vandalized. They didn't stand in silent, geometric precision on a stranger’s lawn in the dead of night. He watched, mesmerized and horrified, as one of the figures raised a long, spindly arm. It moved with a slow, deliberate grace that was profoundly inhuman. It gestured to the center of the circle, and the others mimicked the movement in perfect, unnerving synchrony. A ritual. They were performing a ritual.

The air in his room felt suddenly cold, stolen. The protective shell of his home, his world, shattered in that instant. These… things… were feet from his front door. The chanting in the air grew infinitesimally louder, a dry, rustling sound like a thousand autumn leaves skittering across pavement. It scraped at the inside of his skull, a language he couldn't understand but whose meaning was clear: this was not for you. You should not be seeing this.

Panic, cold and sharp, pierced through his paralysis. He needed to do something. Yell for his dad? Call the police? But his throat was locked tight, and the phone seemed a million miles away. His gaze darted around his room, desperate for a weapon, for a defense, for anything. It landed on the light switch next to his desk.

Light. Light banishes shadows. It was a primal, childish instinct. A flick of a switch to chase away the monsters under the bed.

It was a stupid idea. A dangerous idea. But it was an action, and right now, action was the only thing that could fight the encroaching terror. His hand, slick with sweat, moved as if of its own accord. He didn't decide to do it; it just happened. A turning point he couldn't take back.

Click.

The overhead bulb flooded his room with a stark, yellow glare, spilling a brilliant rectangle of light onto the lawn below.

The result was instantaneous. And it was worse than anything he could have imagined.

The whispering stopped. The air fell dead silent.

Every single figure in the circle snapped its head up. Not like a person turning, but like a puppet whose strings had been violently yanked. Seven cowled heads, in perfect, simultaneous motion, swiveled to stare directly at his window. Directly at him.

And he saw their eyes.

There was no white, no iris, no pupil. Just two points of cold, flat, obsidian black. They didn't reflect the light from his room; they drank it. They were voids, holes punched through the fabric of the world that looked back with an ancient, malevolent intelligence. The image was burned onto his retinas, a brand of pure terror. In their unblinking gaze, he felt a profound and personal violation, as if they had reached through the glass and into his soul, seeing every fear he had ever known. They knew he was there. They had known all along.

For a heartbeat that stretched into an eternity, he was pinned by their collective stare. Then, as one, they moved.

They didn't run. They didn't walk. They simply… retreated. They glided backwards, their dark forms seeming to fray at the edges, dissolving like smoke. With a speed that defied physics, they melted into the impenetrable darkness of the Ardenwood treeline. One moment they were there, a tableau of impossible horror on his lawn; the next, they were gone.

The lawn was empty. The moonlight shone on nothing but neatly cut grass and his mother's rose bushes.

Leo stumbled back from the window, his legs giving way. He landed hard on the floor, his back against his bed, gasping for air he couldn't seem to find. His room was bright, safe, normal. But the image of those cold, unblinking eyes was seared into his mind.

He stared at the window, at the empty space where they had been. The forest beyond was no longer a sleeping giant. It was awake. And it was watching.