Marla always said the forest behind their cottage felt older than the rest of the world—older than the cracked asphalt roads, older than the rusting cars abandoned in overgrown lots. Her husband, Andrew, used to laugh at that, teasing her that the birches were barely older than he was. But when the storms came that autumn, ripping trees out by their roots and turning the ground to shifting muck, even Andrew admitted the woods felt… wrong.It was on the night of the third storm that they heard it. A crack—not thunder, not lightning, but something splitting open like canvas being torn by claws. The sound rolled across the forest floor in a long groan. Their cottage windows vibrated in their frames.
“What was that?” Marla whispered.
“Probably a tree coming down,” Andrew said, but his voice carried none of the confidence he tried to fake.
The lights flickered once, then again. Something buzzed in the air, like static from a broken speaker. When the lights finally steadied, the hum didn’t stop. It grew. It deepened. It crawled under their skin.
Marla stepped toward the back door, drawn by that low thrumming. Andrew grabbed her arm.
“No way. We stay inside until morning.” But she slipped free.
They stepped into the storm’s aftermath. The air smelled metallic, as if lightning had struck a thousand times in the same place. Mud sucked at their boots. Wind carried a faint, rhythmic vibration—like a heartbeat pulsing through the ground.
The forest clearing behind their cottage looked wrong. The trees leaned away from its centre, their branches twisted back as if recoiling in fear. In the middle of the clearing, suspended between two torn halves of the sky, hung a shimmering slit of white light. It bent the rain around it. It made the ground beneath it ripple like disturbed water.
“Andrew…” Marla whispered. “It’s like a… rip.”
The light flickered—once, twice—then expanded with a sound like a thousand bones snapping in unison. A gust of warm, humid air blasted through it, carrying an earthy, primal stench. Something alive.
A cry echoed from the other side. Deep. Guttural. Hungry.
Marla stumbled back. Andrew caught her, his own breath shaking.
“Close the door,” he whispered.
But the tear pulsed again. The air thickened. A shadow moved behind the light—massive, lumbering, its outline edged with jagged motion like teeth or spines. The creature let out a low rumble, the kind felt in the bones more than heard.
Andrew grabbed Marla’s hand. “Run.”
But the ground surged beneath them. Mud split open. Roots snapped. The tear widened, spilling a blinding light across the clearing.
There was no time to scream, no time to think. The world stretched, twisted, swallowed them in a violent pull.
When they hit the ground again, the air was hotter. Thicker. And the sound that greeted them was unmistakable:
A distant, booming roar—one the earth itself trembled to obey.
They were no longer behind their cottage.
They were elsewhere.
Elsewhen.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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