The trees were giants, their shoulders hunched against a sky the colour of wet slate. For everyone else, the Pacific Northwest air was crisp with the scent of pine and decay, a natural cathedral. For Leo, it was just cold, and every rustle in the undergrowth was an echo of the laughter that had been chasing him for weeks.
"Dude, you're gonna love this spot," Jake said, his voice cutting through the thick silence. He forged ahead, his backpack jangling with a bag of chips and other, less legal, provisions. "Total privacy. No one for miles."
"Famous last words," Chloe murmured from behind Leo, her tone dry as the leaves underfoot. She was their compass, their planner. Her phone, though useless for calls out here, was meticulously tracking their route. "Just remember, 'no one for miles' also means no one to hear you scream."
"Optimist," Jake shot back with a grin.
At the front, Mark glanced over his shoulder, his eyes finding Leo's. A silent question hung between them: You okay? Leo looked away, focusing on the root-veined path. Mark was the group's anchor, the one who'd organized this trip as a distraction. Leo could still feel the ghost of Mark's hand on his shoulder from yesterday. "Forget about them, man. They're nothing." Easy for him to say. Mark, who moved through the world with an easy confidence Leo could only mimic on his best days.
The humiliation was a fresh, private bruise he kept poking. The image was burned onto the back of his eyelids: Troy's smug face, the crowd of onlookers, the feeling of his own voice dying in his throat as the joke landed at his expense. The powerlessness. It was a poison in his blood, and no amount of deep, forest air seemed to dilute it.
"Hey, wait up," Chloe called out. She'd stopped, her head tilted. "Do you guys hear that?"
They all paused. Leo listened. The wind. A distant bird. The blood pounding in his own ears.
"Hear what?" Jake asked.
"Exactly," she said, her brow furrowed. "Nothing. It just got really quiet."
She was right. The forest's constant, low-level chatter had ceased. The hairs on Leo's arms prickled. Mark's expression shifted from concern to caution.
"Let's just check it out and turn back," Mark suggested, his voice low.
They pushed through a final curtain of ferns and stopped dead.
The glade was a perfect, unnatural circle, as if punched out of the forest by a giant's fist. The ground was bare, dark earth, devoid of even moss. In the center stood a single, crumbling wall of sandstone, ancient and out of place. And growing straight through the heart of the ruin was a tree.
It was wrong.
Its trunk was a twisted coil of black, heartwood that looked less like bark and more like petrified muscle. Its few leaves were a deep, bruised purple, unnaturally still in the breeze that whispered at the edge of the clearing. It bore one piece of fruit: a single, heavy orb that hung like a heart, pulsing with a faint, golden light. The air was thick and sweet, cloying, like rotting honey.
A deep, primal unease settled over the group.
"What... is that?" Jake whispered, all traces of his earlier humour gone.
"We should go," Chloe said, her voice firm. "Now."
But Leo couldn't move. The tree was a focal point for the static in his head. The shame, the anger, the vivid memory of Troy's laughing face—it all surged to the surface, loud and screaming. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat of pain. He needed... something. A way to hit back. To make the feeling stop.
His feet carried him forward without his permission.
"Leo?" Mark's voice was distant, fuzzy.
The world narrowed to the tree. The sweet smell filled his lungs, dizzying. A sharp, flint-like stone lay at the base of the wall. His fingers closed around it. The images in his mind sharpened: a swing. An impact. A satisfying crack that would silence the laughter for good.
He wasn't carving. He was exorcising.
He scraped and hacked at a low, protruding limb of the black tree, lost in a trance. The wood was impossibly hard, but it yielded to him, shaving away in dark, fragrant curls as if it were waiting for this. He was aware of his friends' voices, calls of alarm that seemed to come from the end of a long tunnel.
Scrape. Chip. Hack.
A shape formed in his hands. Long. Heavy. Perfectly balanced. A smooth, brutal cylinder tapering to a handle that fit his grip as if it had been molded there.
A baseball bat.
The moment the final curl of wood fell away, the entire tree shuddered. The pulsing fruit withered, blackened, and fell to dust. The purple leaves crumbled. The mighty trunk, every inch of that ancient, wrong wood, dissolved into a pile of black, ashen powder right before their eyes. In five seconds, all that remained was the ruined wall, the dark soil, and the bat in Leo's hands.
Silence.
Leo blinked, the red haze receding from his vision. He looked down at what he held. It was beautiful in a terrifying way, the wood dark and dense, still warm from his hands.
"What did you do?" Chloe's voice was a horrified whisper.
Revulsion and guilt curdled in Leo's stomach. He'd destroyed something ancient. Something... special. "I don't know," he mumbled, his voice hoarse.
He wanted to be rid of it. He drew his arm back and hurled the bat deep into the ferns at the edge of the clearing. It vanished with a rustle.
"Let's get out of here," Mark said, his face pale. He put a hand on Leo's shoulder, pulling him gently away.
They walked, a silent, shaken procession. No one spoke. After about fifty yards down the path, Jake let out a nervous laugh. "Well, that was seriously fu—"
Thump.
The sound was soft, definitive.
They all turned.
Lying across the path, as if it had been waiting for them, was the bat.
Leo's blood ran cold. He stared at it, then back the way they'd come. It was impossible.
"No way," Jake breathed.
Heart hammering, Leo picked it up. He ran back into the clearing, spun around, and threw it again with all his might, sending it end-over-end into the deepest thicket he could find. He ran back to the others, breathless.
They waited. One minute. Two.
Nothing.
A collective sigh of relief. They turned to go.
Thump.
There it was. Again. Lying placidly on the moss behind them.
This time, Leo didn't pick it up. He just stared at the dark, polished wood, a dread colder than the mountain air seeping into his bones. It wasn't just a bat he had made.
It was a part of him now. And it was coming home.