Warning: This episode contains traumatizing scenes. If you're sensitive to graphic or disturbing content, you may want to skip this chapter.
They said Lela was taken away. That she was relocated. That her parents wanted a better life for her somewhere far away.
But the truth was simpler-and far more terrifying.
Lela disappeared without a trace.
One moment, she stood with Mia outside the cabin, her voice calm but cold, her eyes locked on something invisible. The next day, she was gone. Her house stood silent, untouched. Her room-still full of clothes, toys, and half-opened books-felt frozen in time.
The villagers whispered, of course. They always did.
"She wandered too close to it."
"She spoke to something she shouldn't have."
"No one just leaves like that."
But none of them said anything out loud, not to Lela's parents.
They were never the same.
Mrs. Callen, once the village's soft-spoken baker, began screaming in her sleep. Her husband, Mr. Callen, took to staring at the cabin from across the fields for hours, murmuring to himself-sometimes speaking in a voice that was not his own.
Then, the tragedy.
It started with the scent-burning hair, charred meat-sweeping through the village like a storm. Neighbors rushed to the Callen home just in time to see the front door swing open on its own.
What they found inside was the kind of nightmare no one ever forgets.
Mr. Callen lay on the floor, his body twisted and broken in ways bones should never bend, as if something had wrung him out like a wet rag. His eyes were gone-just hollow, black pits staring at the ceiling.
Mrs. Callen was... worse.
She had scrawled symbols across the walls in her own blood, her fingers worn to the bone. The words made no sense, but they hummed with something ancient, something hungry. She had carved one word into the floor over and over with her fingernails before dying:
THEY'RE COMING.
The village went silent after that.
Funerals were held. But no one attended. No one spoke to the press. And soon, even the whispers died.
But not for everyone.
Mai's parents had always been cautious, but after the Callens' deaths, fear ruled their every breath. Mai had once stood near the cabin too-years ago, when she was little. She'd said something strange that day. Something about "seeing them."
Her parents never forgot.
They watched her closely. Locked the doors twice at night. Salted the windows. Burned incense. Whispers passed between them when they thought Mai wasn't listening. Words like protection and curse.
And when the air around the village began to feel heavier-like it was holding its breath-they knew it was only a matter of time.
They made the decision quickly.
They packed what they could under cover of night. Left behind everything that didn't fit in the car.
And just before dawn, the family vanished down the winding forest road without looking back.
Only one thing remained in their house: a note scrawled in shaky handwriting, taped to the fridge.
It read:
"It's watching the children now. We're not waiting to be next."