Chapter 480
The setting sun cast long, skeletal fingers of light across the dense Mexican woodland, painting the undergrowth in shades of bruised purple and dying gold. Isabella, a woman whose spirit for adventure had often led her astray, paused on the worn path, her breath catching on the cool evening air.
A distant shout, raw with panic, echoed through the trees. "Help!" The sound bounced off the ancient trunks and vanished as abruptly as it appeared, leaving an unsettling silence in its wake.
A shiver traced her spine. Isabella hesitated, glancing back at the way she'd come. Her reason said turn back but something else tugged her deeper.
"Hello?" she called out, her voice sounding small and frail. The forest responded only with the rustle of leaves.
She considered for a brief second how irrational and irresponsible it was to chase an unknown and faint scream into the dense forest as nightfall grew closer and closer.
The sound had seemed close, and the thought of someone in distress forced her forward. "Is anyone there?"
She pushed past a curtain of thorny vines, her eyes scanning the darkening woods. The trees closed in, the sky a mere memory through the dense canopy, an ambient dark settling in.
Another call, even more desperate than before, ripped through the woods. It sounded closer now.
"Help me!" the disembodied voice called. The tone, a grotesque imitation of desperation, now sent waves of anxiety and an ominous sensation through Isabella.
She started moving through the brush, her heart accelerating with each stride. The feeling was cold and clammy, like a serpent coiling around her chest.
She was aware how the darkness can warp both sound and her judgment. Her boots sunk into the mud with each step and the ambient eerie sound of nocturnal life and death began to pick up.
Isabella moved further into the dense vegetation, the air growing still, heavy with the scent of damp earth and decay. Twisting shadows danced on the forest floor and the sun now was a very very faded memory, darkness was upon the woods.
The shouting stopped entirely. Isabella, a sensible person by nature, finally began to feel the true fear, not some minor flutter, the fear that caused true adrenaline to pulse through the bloodstream.
Her hand trembled as she touched a gnarled tree trunk. "Hello?" she managed again, barely above a strained breath.
Her voice cracked this time. Her anxiety mounted as the realization washed over her: it wasn't some minor issue.
She felt that dread deep in her chest, as she tried to discern the location where the disembodied voice came from before. Was it really even close? It's was too late now.
The woods, devoid of the cries, seemed to be holding its breath. With growing urgency, she decided to return, turning on her heel but found no discernible path, not from the side she was walking, not from where she thought the path might have been.
It all looked the same. "This isn't right," she said out loud.
There was a peculiar sensation that the ground beneath her had shifted ever so slightly and that she did not make the full turn she thought she had, just 3-5 degrees from the wrong position.
She frantically turned around this time. This time fully around in place and her eyes, even in the diminished light, showed clear panic as she started to rush, not at the fastest pace she can go, but fast.
Panic gave her the strength to do more than walk quickly. She rushed blindly as the dark of the woods enveloped her.
There was nothing left now of even the minimal daylight to give guidance.
Over the next few weeks, local authorities received a steady stream of missing person reports. People entering the woods never returned, each case more troubling than the last.
The first was a young hiker who'd been tracking bird songs near sundown, then a photographer trying to capture the setting sun and then later in the days an experienced trail guide and 3 other local individuals, lured by faint shouts of "Help" always near the end of the day, near sundown.
Each person disappeared without a trace and as weeks began to stack the town grew desperate and frantic. Search parties, their flashlights piercing the oppressive darkness, found no evidence that anyone was even there before.
No tracks, no belongings, just an unsettling silence as a reward.
With mounting public concern, local officials erected barricades and signs along the perimeter of the woods, but they held little comfort and had almost a grim, macabre element to them with how useless they would surely prove to be.
It was only a temporary bandaid to an underlying illness in their land, and one everyone knew it but also did not know how to articulate this terrible reality, with so few words at their disposal to express it.
It wasn't enough for any level of comfort. Fear took over.
People whispered stories in hushed tones about the woods, calling them cursed, or worse, they made assumptions about deities, ancient and vengeful, that preyed upon the unwary at the end of each day.
No explanation, only the macabre assumption of their end of day walks, near dusk.
The barricades only stood to mark that final border. They knew that for any person that crossed there was no coming back.
Yet everyone still wondered if someone else, might still come back. The feeling of never-knowing kept most awake every night now, and nightmares haunted any that tried to forget.
Days turned into nights and the weeks slowly accumulated into months as Isabella, somewhere deep within that dark, tangled expanse, did not feel time. Time had no bearing.
Her mind, though exhausted from both anxiety and genuine effort to find an exit was still sharp. The sounds of the woods were now a constant.
Her sense of dread remained high. A constant sense of being observed was her grim companion as time slipped by.
This wasn't what her mind initially calculated when she thought about walking in this forest, no casual adventure anymore but an outright terror that her body now endured each day, now, each endless night.
She hadn't seen a human soul for who knew how long. Days just kept stacking onto one another with a repetitive nature, each more bleak than the last, yet it gave a strange sensation of normalcy even amid this abject terror.
It's just another day, is what she constantly reminded herself each and every day, even as she drifted off for rest. Rest. That was what she truly needed.
A genuine respite.
As she navigated the perpetual twilight, her feet began to bleed from her walking for so long. Each of her joints creaked in the same way her tired mind screamed, for an escape from this place.
Her water was long gone, but a strange, almost metallic aftertaste was ever-present when she tried to gather what she could to help calm her growing thirst. All it ever did was taste worse, each try another terrible reminder that her end, could be imminent and swift.
A strange, subtle humming sound was also something that she picked up along with all the noises in the dark, yet she dared not make out what it meant to the forest as the noise intensified in volume when she moved away from that space but diminished as she drew near, making any exploration feel much more unsafe and terrifying to do so.
One day, or night—for it was hard to tell now—Isabella noticed the strange anomaly. Amid the tangle of trees, the darkness itself seemed to part, creating an oval doorway made not of matter but a vacuum of the blackest nothingness she had ever witnessed in her life, this time.
No light at all. It looked akin to what she would think was the absence of light altogether.
This time the subtle hum resonated intensely all throughout her skull. Each vibration hurt as the black abyss almost pulled her inward, the air feeling thick with the terrible possibility she was now face to face with.
She had gone too deep, deeper than any should have and this might just be it. It just might.
The weight of the situation sank deep into the very marrow of her bones and the knowledge of all her failed attempts. Her body started to feel heavy and there was nothing she could do.
The dread and the sadness at all her errors sank so deep within her bones it now acted as physical weight itself.
Compelled by some unknown force, or possibly sheer, maddening desperation for any respite from this living terror, Isabella stepped forward, her hand outstretched. The darkness felt neither warm nor cold, just...empty.
When she looked around for what may be there it became clear, she felt a slight pulling as her body stepped inside but it stopped and she saw something with horror. What her eyes saw filled every fiber of her very being, everything she had was pulled right out, sucked right through the invisible barrier of complete blackness.
She now felt weightless but now not from relief but absolute shock. There was no relief at all.
The black void before her shifted and now before her stood her own corpse. Still and peaceful yet she felt nothing akin to any peace.
Before the true reality sank deep into her broken heart, she noticed a few things about the still version of herself. Her hair and her clothes, they weren't how they were a moment before.
No, it was at the time when she entered this terrible place, near the edge of sundown on that fated day. She was never meant to come here, she reasoned.
In front of her was that final marker and she, had foolishly went deep past it and it resulted in her not getting home, or rather ever being able to.
Her heart sunk and now she understood the subtle hum. They did not die in this terrible place but rather were re-arranged and broken, their forms now made into that horrible black nothing, something that is never supposed to see the light, or experience it's lack either, like this void here, they become part of a collective, re-arranged just beyond the veil to continue this endless task for whatever had made this place their abode, the beings who are now going to turn her own remains into a vessel of evil to bring more foolish travelers so she may have more terrible companions here.
No help for her.
Tears swelled up but did not drip as the void continued to consume all that she was to be turned into an unrecognizable new version of herself and Isabella. In this terrible moment, in that single heartbeat, she realized that not even she will have an end but now continue for a never ending night, to be the lure, the disembodied voice of another and that it's cruel joke she was forced to take part of, she would never escape.
This realization sent a wave of unimaginable sorrow and terror all throughout, but she could not react, just to take her fate and to become it, not her own version anymore but as the void and it's awful creations required her. As Isabella's eyes dimmed in terror the other form of herself just merely looked at this version, its new replacement, as that black abyss swallowed Isabella for good, never to see, or hear again.
She is gone and another version has taken its place for this terrible work. It's work is never over. It simply just continues until nothing.