Flashback:
The night swallowed the village whole.
The air itself tasted wrong, thick, metallic, as if it remembered blood.
Mr. Renner tightened his coat around himself as he stumbled through the crooked trees. Every branch seemed to reach for him, scratching at his clothes, whispering obscenities in a language older than words.
He should have listened.
He should have stayed with the others.
But pride and guilt drove him forward.
Three students were gone.
Mark. Anna. Lucas.
And he had failed them.
He had thought he could fix it, but he didn't understand he couldn't.
Not here.
When he saw the cabin broken, crooked, and alive with a pulsing darkness , something inside him screamed to turn back.
But his feet moved forward.
He tried to stop. He begged his own body to freeze. But he was no longer in control.
Something else guided him now.
The closer he came, the colder it grew. His breath froze in the air, spiraling away into the blackness.
Then he heard them.
Voices.
Low at first, almost beautiful like a hymn on the wind.
Then clearer chanting.
No, hammering.
Building.
Repeating.
Renner wanted to run. Every instinct inside him howled at him to flee.
But his feet were no longer his.
He stepped through the shattered threshold of the cabin.
Darkness. Complete.
He squinted and there they were.
Figures. Circling. Chanting. Hammering nails into something on the floor something human-sized.
Their faces blurred and melted like wax.
And as the chanting grew louder, they turned toward him, dozens of mouths moving at once:
"One more. One more. One more."
He turned to leave but the door was gone. Only endless blackness behind him.
And then a voice.
At first, it was Anna's voice, sweet and pleading.
"Mr. Renner, help us…"
Then it fractured twisting into a chorus of different voices.
Some familiar.
Some ancient.
"Stay. Stay. Stay."
The floorboards opened beneath his feet.
He fell.
The cabin swallowed him whole.
But before the darkness took him, a memory flickered
A small cruelty he'd committed without thought.
Before the trip, Mr. Renner had mocked the villagers' warnings to their faces, laughing about the "stupid old myths" and stepping onto land they had begged him to avoid, land once soaked in the blood of the innocent.
His mockery had reawakened something old, something vengeful.
And now he belonged to it.
His soul twisted, distorted one more voice chanting in the endless dark.
The cabin had claimed him.
Meanwhile, back at the inn, Mia sat stiffly on the edge of her bed, sleep never found her, the whispered warnings of her parents running through her mind like a second heartbeat.
They had always known this day would come.
They had tried to keep her away. Tried to keep her safe.
But fate is a slow, certain thing. And blood always calls blood.
In the end, they could not stop her.
Only prepare her.
Their voices came back to her now, in the dark:
"If the cabin calls your name… don't answer."
"If you hear knocking, don't open."
"If they come in your friend's skin don't look at their eyes."
"If it asks you what you want most run."
"And never, ever follow the voice that sounds like me."
"Never disrespect the woods."
"Never step inside unless you are ready to become a part of it."
She pressed her hands over her ears. But the memories kept speaking.
Her parents had even taught her the song the cursed lullaby, older than the village itself.
A song born from horror.
The cabin had been born not from magic, but blood
from a night of fear and betrayal that the village had buried, but the land had not.
Years ago, a family, the Aldermans came to the village during a cruel winter.
Healers. Kind. Strange in their ways, but never cruel.
The villagers embraced them at first.
Then hardship struck a blight in the fields, a fever in the children.
Someone needed to be blamed.
So they turned on the Aldermans.
In a blind frenzy, they dragged the family to their small cabin at the woods' edge and locked them inside.
Some said it was supposed to scare them into leaving.
Others said the villagers planned to let the cold and hunger drive them out.
But that night, a fire started no one knew who lit it.
The mother and father perished, but the child, the boy lived long enough to curse the village.
No spells. No hexes.
Just pure, broken grief.
"If you forget us," he screamed through the flames, "then let the land forget you."
The boy burned alive.
And the cabin never died.
It remained. A scar. A wound in the world that never closed.
It seeped into the trees, the ground, the very air.
It waited.
It learned the names of the villagers' descendants.
And when the bloodlines returned, it called them home.
And so the rules were passed down:
"If the cabin calls your name… don't answer."
"If you hear knocking, don't open."
"If they come in your friend's skin don't look at their eyes."
"If it asks you what you want most run."
"No matter what you hear, never follow the voice that sounds like someone you love."
"Never disrespect the woods."
"Never step inside unless you are ready to become a part of it."
Mia clutched the necklace her parents had given her , a simple thread of iron, old and dull and she prayed.
Please… let me come back.
Because tomorrow, they would walk into the woods.
And tomorrow, the cabin would open its jaws again.
Waiting.