At first he thought it was the wind moving through leaves. But there was no wind. The branches above him were still, and the sound kept coming, low and steady, like people murmuring in another room. He stopped walking and listened. The sound stopped too, then started again the moment he took another step, like it was scary stories about the woods come to life around him, except this wasn’t a story he was telling anyone. This was happening.
“Hello?” he said.
Nothing answered. Just the whispering, closer now, coming from every direction at once.
Daniel had come out here to find the old logging road that was supposed to cut back toward the highway. He’d taken this trail before, years ago, with his brother. That was the only reason he’d thought it was safe to come alone. He remembered his brother laughing at him once, right around this same stretch of woods, saying the trees looked like they were leaning in to listen. Daniel had laughed too, back then. He didn’t feel like laughing now.
He checked his phone. No signal. He put it back in his pocket and kept walking, faster now, telling himself the sound was birds, or a stream somewhere he couldn’t see, or his own breathing playing tricks on him.
The whispering got louder.
He stopped again, and this time he pressed his hand against the trunk of the nearest tree, not sure why, maybe just to prove to himself it was ordinary wood. The bark was rough and cold. Then the whispering seemed to come from directly under his palm, vibrating slightly, like something breathing on the other side of the trunk.
He pulled his hand back fast.
“This isn’t funny,” he said out loud, even though he knew there was nobody around to hear him say it, and even though nothing about this felt funny at all.
He decided the smart thing to do was turn around and go back the way he came. He turned, and the trail behind him looked wrong. Not blocked, not different in any obvious way, just wrong, like it had shifted slightly while he wasn’t looking. He told himself trails always look different walking the other direction. He’d heard people say that before. He started walking anyway, back the way he thought he’d come.
After ten minutes he didn’t recognize anything.
The whispering had turned into something closer to words now, though he couldn’t make out what they were saying. It sounded like more than one voice, overlapping, none of them loud, all of them close. He picked up his pace and his foot caught on a root that he was almost sure hadn’t been there a second before. He went down hard, scraping his hand on the ground, and when he looked up, a low branch had swung down in front of his face, blocking the path forward.
He shoved it aside. It didn’t want to move. He had to grab it with both hands and force it out of the way, and the whole time the whispering kept going, steady, unbothered, like it wasn’t even about him.
“Move,” he said to the branch, which was a stupid thing to say to a tree, and he knew it was stupid even as he said it.
He got past it and kept walking, and that was when he noticed the trees were closer together than they should have been. He didn’t remember them growing this dense on the way in. He turned sideways to fit between two trunks and felt bark scrape against his jacket, and for one second he was sure, completely sure, that the trunk on his left had pressed against him on purpose.
He shouted then, not words, just noise, and shoved himself forward through the gap.
On the other side the woods opened up again, wider, easier to walk through, and the whispering dropped to almost nothing, just a faint murmur behind him. He didn’t look back. He kept moving, checking his phone every few minutes even though there was still no signal, telling himself the road couldn’t be far now, that he’d recognize something soon, a fence, a fallen sign, anything.
The trees around him were quiet now, only quiet, and somehow that felt worse than the whispering had.
