The silence was the loudest thing in the room.
No siren. Not at 3 a.m., not even a whisper of it.
For the last few nights, that sound had been our grim lighthouse—our signal that something otherworldly was shifting. Its absence now was worse. The siren, for all its terror, had become a constant. And now the forest was quiet.
Too quiet.
I lay in bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling fan above me, its slow rotation cutting the air like a pendulum. I couldn't sleep—not because of fear, not anymore. It was anticipation now. Dread with form. The absence of the siren wasn't relief; it was strategy.
The forest was watching us back.
---
We gathered at breakfast without speaking. Bobby was the first to break the silence.
"No siren," he muttered, stirring his coffee.
Ambrose raised an eyebrow. "Well, maybe she took the night off. Even eldritch horrors need PTO."
Jacob didn't laugh. "Something's wrong. It's… changing tactics."
I couldn't stop thinking about what the old man had said weeks ago: "The forest doesn't open until you're ready."
Maybe we were. Maybe we weren't.
But the forest had decided.
---
We returned to the Circle after lunch. The node shimmered faintly like it had before, the air around it charged with static energy. Bobby had rigged up a new device—something between a thermal reader and a stopwatch.
He called it "The Tether."
"It's a pulse scanner tied to our timeline," he explained, clipping it to Ambrose's wrist. "The idea is if he enters the node and experiences any time dilation, we'll see the lag on the external counter."
Jacob crossed his arms. "And what if it breaks? Or if he breaks?"
"I'm not made of glass, Jacob," Ambrose replied, grinning. "Also, if I meet another me in there, I'm demanding a refund on personality variety."
Despite the jokes, he was nervous. I could tell by the way his fingers trembled.
"Just five minutes," I said. "In and out."
Ambrose nodded, adjusted the flashlight on his belt, and stepped forward. The Circle shimmered. And he vanished.
Bobby's device ticked.
1 minute… 2… 3…
Five minutes passed.
Bobby frowned. "Still no signal from his watch."
Jacob stepped forward, agitated. "Call him."
I did. No signal.
We waited.
Then—ten minutes later—the shimmer flickered.
Ambrose stumbled out, eyes wide, breathing hard.
"Guys. That place… it's not like before. It's stable. Too stable."
He handed Bobby the device. The external counter said fifteen minutes. The internal timer showed two hours.
Time was folding.
---
We returned to the cottage and debriefed. Bobby scribbled formulas on the whiteboard he'd set up beside the fireplace.
"I think the node's acting as a dimensional router—like a traffic hub for timelines. It's not just bleeding into our world anymore. It's anchoring itself. Stabilizing."
Jacob paced behind the couch. "So it's a gate. But a gate to what?"
"Not sure," Bobby said. "But the markings we saw yesterday? They've expanded. Almost like it's mapping something."
Ambrose sat back with a blanket, still shaken. "I've already seen what happens when we drift too far apart," he murmured. "I don't want a rerun."
Jacob glanced at him, then at us. For a moment, his voice softened.
"I just don't want to lose any of you to this place."
We fell into silence again.
---
That evening, we returned to the Circle. The carvings had grown—etched deeper, spreading like roots across the forest floor.
Bobby knelt down, tracing one of them. "Look at this pattern… it's Fibonacci. But distorted."
"Means it's intelligent," Jacob said grimly.
Ambrose squinted into the shimmer. "Did anyone else just… see something move in there?"
I stepped closer. "Like what?"
"Not sure. A shadow. Could've been a bird. Could've been… me."
Then Bobby's scanner flickered.
For a second, every reading vanished. Blank screen.
Then it surged with data again.
"That's… not supposed to happen," he muttered.
The air buzzed for a moment, like a thousand tiny wings fluttered at once.
And that's when the shimmer parted.
Someone stepped through.
A woman.
She wasn't frantic or lost. She wasn't confused. She walked out like she'd taken this path before.
Long coat. Backpack. Boots coated in dry dust from a place we hadn't seen yet.
She looked up at us, calm as dusk.
"My name is Evelyn," she said. "And I didn't find the node. It found me."