Page 1 of Ravaging Red
Chapter 1
The Woods Do Not Sleep
RED
The woods were never truly quiet.
Not in the way city people think the woods should sound. You know, the usual songs of birds chirping, leaves rustling in the wind, and the occasional cricket. But not in the Black Hollow Woods. They had a life of their own. At night, they pulsed. A steady, haunted rhythm that beat through the mossy undergrowth and stretched into the hollows of the trees. The woods never slept. They simply watched and waited for their next prey.
And I was foolish enough to walk straight into them.
Wrapped in my crimson cloak, the one my Nana stitched for me before her mind began to fray, I stepped off the gravel road and onto the winding path that led deep into the woods. I paused, staring into the darkness that lay ahead of me, and a shudder ran through me. The path seemed to wind into itself in a tangle of barren twigs, and in the center of that, a black hole.
The air shifted, instantly becoming cooler, and quieting, as though the the woods themselves were holding their breath. But I couldn’t let fear stop me. Not today.
Beneath my feet, the gravel gave way to wooden planks, slick with morning dew and softened by rain and moss. The boardwalk stretched ahead, a long forgotten trail that snaked through the trees, tempting you onto what was called the Witch’s Trail.
The trees were tall, ancient things. Their trunks gnarled and bent, and they leaned inward toward the path, they looked like old decrepit fingers reaching out to grab you. Moss clung to them in thick, velvet drapes, and pale green algae curled up their sides forming rune-like patterns. The canopy above was dense, a surreal umbrella of crooked branches that filtered the sunlight into shards of silvery mist, making the entire woods seem caught in a hush between worlds.
Every step I took echoed faintly along the planks, the rhythm swallowed quickly by the heavy stillness of the woods. I swore I could hear water in the distance. A soft, gurgling, the only form of life in this godforsaken place.
I shivered, wrapping the cloak tighter around me. There was something unearthly about this place. And I quickly came to realize that the path I was on didn’t just lead deeper into the woods, it led somewhere else entirely.
The hem of the cloak skimmed just above my boots, already damp from the wet morning dew. Every brush of fabric against my thighs was like a warning for me to rethink this. To slow down.
I wasn’t supposed to be out here.
That was the rule.
You are not to enter the woods after dark.
Everyone in town made sure their neighbor knew that the Hollow Woods were dangerous. Mothers whispered it into their children's ears with their bedtime prayers, and fathers made sure their daughters never neared the edge. And yet, here I was. Breaking the one rule everyone knew youdidn’tbreak.
But what choice did I have?
Mom was too upset to go herself. Nana had wandered off again, a full day gone now. This time, she'd left behind a note, scrawled in her shaky, looping handwriting that made little sense, but the meaning was clear enough:
The woods are calling. I hear him once again. I must go.
Him.
That word curled in my gut bringing with it a sinking feeling, and fear followed. The word encompassed something dark and ominous. But Nana always talked in riddles, especially these last few years. You never knew if what she was saying came from memory, or delusion.
The doctors called it Alzheimer's. I called it a curse.
As a teenager, I thought she’d lost her mind. All that muttering to shadows. All her strange rituals and murmured warnings, then there was her obsession with the hour before twilight. The way she’d touch her fingers to her lips when certain names were spoken, as if saying them aloud could summon something that was best left dormant. I told myself it was just superstition, her mind unraveling quietly in the dark. I would laugh it off back then. But now, at twenty-two, the laughter dried up. Because I feel things too.
Things that twist in my gut when the sun dips low and the hush falls too suddenly over the town. There’s a pull beneath the earth, a shift in the air when the wind forgets its direction. The sensation of something unseen brushing too close to my skin when I’m alone, leaving me wondering if I’m ever truly alone.
Sometimes things would tug at the edge of my reasoning, and they whispered in languages I never learned. The kind of things you don’t talk about in daylight. The kind of things thatpress against the walls of your room at night, listening. I whisper to the dark without knowing why, and sometimes…I think it answers.
I don’t speak of these things, not even to myself. There are things I’ve done lately that I won’t dare to name. Things my Nana warned me about when I was still too young to understand that belief and madness aren’t opposites. They're mirrors.
These unsaid things hunger, and they watch. They remember her, and somehow, they remember me.
Cursed things.
She used to warn me about them in her riddles, her eyes glassy and distant, as though she were remembering something too terrible to name. But maybe she wasn’t so crazy after all. Maybe the madness was just a different kind of truth.
