Chapter 1 Prologue: The Cabin that shouldn't exist

The forest was dangerous.

Sarah knew this now, as she crashed through undergrowth that clawed at her skin like fingernails, her lungs burning with each ragged breath. Behind her, something moved, it was not running, not quite walking. It was Flowing like oil poured through the spaces between trees.

"Emma!" Her voice cracked, swallowed immediately by the oppressive silence that pressed against her eardrums. There were no birds and no wind. Just her heartbeat and the wet, rhythmic sound of….

Squelch. Squelch. Squelch.

Footsteps that shouldn't sound like that. Footsteps that sounded like meat pulled from bone.

Sarah's phone was gone. Had been gone since they found the cabin—that perfect, impossible cabin that looked exactly like the photo Emma had shown her, except the photo had been black and white and dated 1974, and the cabin had been warm, and the door was open, welcoming them inside.

They should have run then.

A scream erupted from somewhere behind her, high, piercing, abruptly cut short like someone had flipped a switch. Sarah's stomach lurched. "Emma? EMMA!"

Only the forest answered, and its answer was worse than silence.

It laughed.

Not human laughter. The sound of wind through a corpse's throat. The creak of branches forming words in a language that predated language. Sarah's legs nearly gave out, but terror was a better master than exhaustion. She ran harder, the branches whipping her face, drawing hot lines of blood across her cheeks.

The trees were wrong here. They were too tall and too twisted, their bark rippling like skin. In the moonlight, she could see dark hollows in their trunks, not knotholes, but sockets. Watching and weeping black sap that looked too much like tar, like oil, lik….

Her foot caught on something soft.

Sarah went down hard, her palms slamming into the forest floor, and for a moment she couldn't breathe, couldn't think, could only stare at what had tripped her.

An arm.

Just an arm, it was pale and feminine, torn off at the shoulder. The ragged end wasn't bleeding, it was empty, like something had hollowed it out from the inside, leaving only skin stretched over nothing. The fingers were still twitching, nails scraping at dead leaves, drawing patterns that might have been letters if Sarah looked too long.

She didn't look long.

She screamed and scrambled backward, and that's when she saw Emma.

What was left of Emma.

Her best friend hung from a tree fifteen feet away, suspended by something that wasn't rope. It looked like vines, but it was too pale, too articulated, too much like intestines braided together and looped around Emma's neck, her waist, her ankles. Emma's mouth hung open, jaw distended impossibly wide, and from between her lips spilled a cascade of black moths that dissolved into smoke before they could fly.

Her eyes were gone, and Emma moved.

Her head rotated on her broken neck with a sound like grinding gravel, and though she had no eyes, Sarah felt her friend's gaze land on her. Emma's mouth worked, the moths pouring out with each attempt at speech, until finally, horribly, words emerged:

"Why... did you... leave me?"

But it wasn't Emma's voice. It was every voice. The forest speaking through her corpse like a puppet, wearing her throat like an instrument.

Sarah ran.

She didn't remember standing. Didn't remember choosing a direction. Her body moved on pure animal instinct, crashing through the nightmare-dark woods while behind her, Emma's body followed her. It was no longer hanging, it was now crawling on all fours with it's legs and hands, joints bending backward, intestine-vines dragging through the dirt like a bride's grotesque train.

"Sarah... Sarah... come back..."

The trees grew denser, pressing in from all sides. Sarah's breath came in sobbing gasps. Her shirt was torn, blood sticky on her skin from a dozen scratches she couldn't remember receiving. The darkness was total now, suffocating, and she couldn't see more than a few feet ahead but she had to keep moving because the wet dragging sound was getting closer, closer….

The was when she saw a faint light. It was ahead. Sarah put on a final burst of speed, her lungs screaming, and burst through the treeline into blessed open space.

She collapsed against something solid and real, pressing her back to it,herhands splayed against rough wood. Her eyes adjusted and she realized…

This was the cabin.

No. She'd been running away from it, she knew she had, but here it was again, the door was open, it's interior was black. The cabin that shouldn't exist. The cabin that had started all of this.

But the dragging sound was right behind her now, coming through the trees, and Sarah didn't have a choice. She pressed herself flat against the cabin's exterior wall, praying to gods she'd stopped believing in, making herself small in the shadow of the structure.

The thing that had been Emma emerged from the treeline.

It moved like a spider now, all wrong angles and too many joints, Emma's blonde hair was dragging in the dirt behind her, her face was a ruined mess of black tears and that impossibly wide mouth. The moths had turned to maggots, dropping from her lips with soft plop plop plop sounds.

It paused in the center of the clearing, her head tilted and tilted, again and again, until was a full 180 degrees, her bones cracking like knuckles. Sniffing the air with lungs that shouldn't work.

Sarah's hand covered her mouth, trapping the whimper trying to escape.

The Emma-thing turned slowly, surveying the clearing. Then it smiled, and the smile split its face open, revealing nothing but darkness, the same absolute black of the cabin's interior, as if they were connected, as if they were the same.

"Found you," it whispered, and every tree in the clearing whispered it back: Found you found you found you….

Sarah bolted for the woods opposite, away from the cabin, away from Emma, away from…Something grabbed her from above.

The last thing Sarah saw was the cabin's roof, and the impossible thing that had been waiting there, something ancient with too many arms that ended in fingers like roots, like bones, like the branches of a tree.

She opened her mouth to scream.

The forest pulled her up.

And when her scream finally came, it sounded more like laughter.

The cabin's door swung shut with a satisfied click.

In the clearing, Emma's body collapsed into a pile of dead leaves and moths, empty and used.

By morning, even that would be gone, buried into the forest floor like it had never existed at all.

The only evidence that Sarah and Emma had ever been there was a single photograph, it's face-down in the dirt, it's corners already rot. If anyone had turned it over, they would have seen two girls smiling at the camera, standing in front of a cabin that shouldn't exist, dated three days from now.

But no one would find it.

Hollow Creek kept its secrets buried in roots and rot, waiting patiently for the next group of friends to find that perfect, impossible cabin.