Rain hammered the clearing now, fat drops pounding mud into their ankles. The braid girl didn't flinch when the pale shape uncoiled at the stump's edge — she only squeezed Rafi's wrist until her fingernails cut skin.
They should have run. He knew that. But there was no path back; the hush had folded the trees shut behind them. Even if they ran, they'd only loop and loop until their lungs rotted out and they sank to their knees like roots themselves.
The pale thing rose — or maybe stretched — or maybe birthed itself from the soil that had been nursing it since the first story was whispered in camp. It had no eyes but it looked at them. It had no mouth but it breathed him in.
Rafi felt his chest invert, ribs rattling like hollow bird bones. He wasn't sure if the braid girl screamed or if he did, or if the forest swallowed even that sound before it dared touch the night air.
The shape slithered closer, dragging soil in a wake that smoked under the rain. It smelled like pond scum, like old blood, like the counselor's hospital bandage — all wrong, all true.
Rafi's legs buckled. The braid girl hauled him upright, but her own knees dipped in the sucking mud. They clung to each other like saplings leaning into a gale.
He tried to see the trees beyond the clearing — to focus on a pine, a branch, a way out. But the hush crawled over his eyes like frost on glass. Each blink brought him deeper: roots splitting rock, worms chewing marrow, bones drifting in wet tunnels under the clearing's floor.
The braid girl's braid floated behind her in the rain, lifted by a wind that blew only inside this circle.
She grabbed his cheeks, pressed her cracked lips to his forehead. One last warmth before they were nothing but soil.
The pale shape lunged.
Mud swallowed his shins first, then his hips, then his ribs. Cold, cold, colder than the river in spring, colder than the hospital's metal bed. The braid girl's fingernails carved bloody half-moons into his wrist but her grip slipped.
When his mouth dipped under, he tasted dirt thick as soup, but under that — salt. Tears. Maybe hers, maybe his.
They sank. The clearing bulged like a lung, exhaled rain, inhaled them.
No more forest above. No more storm. Only tunnels of wet dark ribbed with roots and veins, pulsing with the hush that no longer needed to pretend to be a ghost story.
Rafi's last thought before the soil closed his ears: they had never left.