The first time Clara heard the voices, she thought it was the wind. A hiss through the cracks in her bedroom window, something faint and slippery. "Clara," it said. But when she pressed her ear to the glass, there was only silence.
Her little sister, Lila, found it funny. "You're hearing things again," she'd teased, twirling a strand of greasy hair around her finger. Their mother hadn't washed it in weeks. Not since the accident. Not since Dad left the porch light on, and the thing in the woods followed it home.
Clara's fingers trembled as she scrubbed the blood from Lila's sheets each morning. The doctors said it was night terrors, that Lila's nails tore into her own arms while she slept. But Clara knew better. The whispers had started the night they found Dad's boots at the edge of the woods, laces knotted like veins.
"It's under the bed," Lila murmured one night, her voice splintered. Clara laughed, brittle and too loud. "Don't be stupid." But when she knelt to check, the floorboards breathed. Warm. Wet. Like a throat.
By the third week, Lila stopped speaking. She'd sit at the dinner table, tracing the scars on her wrists with a butter knife, her eyes black pits. Mom never noticed. She just stared at Dad's empty chair, her lips moving to a hymn only she could hear.
The last night, Clara woke to screaming. Not Lila's—something older, hungrier. She stumbled into her sister's room, the air thick with copper and rot. Lila's bed was empty. The window yawned open, moonlight pooling on the floor.
And there, in the center of the room, lay Lila's nightgown. Empty. Collapsed.
Clara reached for it, her throat tightening—until she felt the weight inside. Not fabric. Not flesh. Something shifted, slithering against her palms. She dropped the gown, and a hundred teeth clattered to the floor. Tiny, needle-thin. Human.
The whispers erupted then, crawling up her legs, her spine, her skull. "You let her go," they hissed. "Now we'll keep you both."
Clara ran. She didn't grab her shoes. Didn't wake Mom. She followed the trail of blood—Lila's?—into the woods, where the trees leaned too close, their bark split into smiles.
At the clearing, she found Lila. Or what was left. Her sister stood barefoot in the dirt, head tilted back, mouth stretched wide. Something moved inside her. A shadow, ribbed and pulsing, peeling her skin like parchment.
"Clara," Lila gurgled, her voice not her own. "You shouldn't have looked."
When the police came, they found Clara curled in the roots of an oak, her fingernails buried in her ears. Mom told them it was grief. The townsfolk blamed wolves.
But deep in the woods, if you press your ear to the earth, you can still hear them. The whispers. The chewing.
And the faint, wet sound of something learning to speak.