Officer Jim's philosophy on life, honed by ten years in a town where the most exciting call usually involved a misplaced garden gnome, was simple: bad coffee was a metaphor. It was the bitter, lukewarm baseline of existence. You drank it anyway, because the alternative was no coffee at all.
"This," he said, holding up his stained paper cup as he and his partner, Maria Garcia, idled in the cruiser, "tastes like the inside of a vacuum cleaner bag. A cheap vacuum."
Garcia, a woman who ran on green tea and serene contempt, didn't look up from her crossword. "You say that every day. Yet you drink it. Every day. Your commitment to disappointment is inspiring."
"It's not commitment. It's hope. Eternal, foolish hope that tomorrow, the gods of the precinct brewer will smile upon me." He took a sip, winced, and peered out at the quiet main street of Hollow's End. "Today is not that day. The case files, however, are eternally stimulating. Mrs. Henderson's missing tabby....again...and a 'suspicious person' loitering near the post office who turned out to be Old Man Peters waiting for his gout medication."
"The backbone of society," Garcia intoned, penciling in 'banal'.
The radio crackled. Dispatch, bored. "Unit Two, proceed to Hollow's End Elementary. Principal reports a… possible ceremonial theft. A trophy."
Jim stared at the radio. "Ceremonial theft. You hear that? That's the sound of my soul ascending from my body out of sheer boredom."
"Could be a cult," Garcia said, starting the car. "Town's got the vibe for it. All these pine trees and repressed trauma."
"If it's a cult, they're worshipping mediocrity. That trophy's for 'Teacher of the Year, 1998'. Plastic. Probably gives you lead poisoning if you look at it too long." Jim took another resigned gulp of coffee. "Let's go do our civic duty. Maybe we'll get lucky and the perpetrator will be a kindergartener with a good lawyer."
The trophy, in Tommy McReady's hands, felt simultaneously heavier and more ridiculous than he'd imagined. It was a cheap, gold-painted spire atop a fake marble base, absurdly grandiose for celebrating a year of teaching long division and supervising dodgeball. The late afternoon sun bled through the pines behind Hollow's End Elementary, painting the red brick in warm, lazy light.
"This is it," Mia Chen said, not with excitement, but with the flat finality of someone who'd committed to a bit and was now seeing it through to its inevitable, stupid conclusion. "The pinnacle of our criminal careers."
Beside the rusted swing set, the rest of the crew radiated varying degrees of regret. Jake and Lily, the twins, were engaged in a quiet, mutual shoving match, a substitute for admitting they were nervous. Danny Baker was meticulously checking the contents of his inhaler as if it might contain an escape plan. And Nora, the new girl, just watched the woods. She did that a lot, Tommy had noticed. As if the trees were more interesting than people. Maybe they were.
"It's not stealing," Tommy said, more to himself. "It's… relocation. For the sake of comedy."
"The comedy is you thinking this is funny," Lily muttered.
"You laughed at lunch," Tommy countered.
"At lunch, we weren't actually doing it. Theory is funnier than practice. Like… communism, or owning a boat."
Tommy ignored her. The dare had been his. The window to Mrs. Greene's first-floor classroom was open. The trophy sat on her desk, a beacon. It had seemed, in the abstract, like a perfect, victimless crime. A legendary story. Now, holding the physical object, he felt a low, nagging itch of wrongness. His dad's words about the trophy, and the year 1998, whispered in the back of his mind. The year the woods got hungry. Old town nonsense. The kind of story told to keep kids from building forts too deep in the trees.
"Coast is clear," Mia announced, peeking around the corner of the building. "Haggerty's car is gone. He's probably home, polishing his collection of educational bylaws."
"Let's just get it over with," Danny wheezed, though he hadn't moved.
With a deep breath that did nothing to settle his stomach, Tommy darted across the short expanse of blacktop. His sneakers sounded thunderously loud in the quiet. The window sill was cool. He hoisted himself up, one leg in, then the other, and he was in the quiet, chalk-dusted stillness of Mrs. Greene's room.
It smelled of pencil shavings and the faint, sweet perfume she wore. The trophy was there, gleaming dully. He picked it up. It was lighter than he expected. His own reflection in the plastic was warped, wide-eyed. For a second, he stood there, a thief in a temple of multiplication tables. Then he passed the trophy back out to Mia and climbed out, feeling strangely solemn.
"Behold," he whispered, holding it aloft. "The spoils."
Jake snorted. "Spoils of what? Winning the 'Most Likely to End Up in Community Service' award?"
"Shut up. Now we bury it. At the Rot Tree. So it's… mythic."
A collective groan, but they were committed. They collected the two shovels they'd hidden in the bushes and trudged toward the tree line, leaving the school behind. Nora fell into step at the very back, a silent, watchful shadow.
The woods in October had a particular smell. Pine needles, damp earth, and the faint, clean rot of fallen leaves. The playful atmosphere from the schoolyard began to bleed away, replaced by the quiet absorption of the forest. Sunlight filtered down in dusty shafts. It was peaceful. Or it should have been.
"Why the Rot Tree, specifically?" Danny asked, picking his way over a root. "It's the furthest. And it's creepy."
"Because it's the furthest and it's creepy," Tommy said. "That's the point. No one will ever look there."
"No one with a functional sense of self-preservation," Mia added.
The Rot Tree was an old oak, its trunk split long ago by lightning. The wound had never healed; instead, it oozed a black, tarlike sap that hardened into grotesque, shiny formations. The ground around it was bare, carpeted in a layer of brown, crumbly leaves. The air was cooler here.
"This tree looks like it has a disease," Lily stated.
"It's cursed," Jake said, with dramatic relish. "Dad says a witch's heart is buried under it. Or maybe her cat. He was pretty drunk."
They started digging. The shovels made a soft chunk-thud in the soft loam. It was hard work. The playful energy was gone, replaced by a focused, almost ritualistic diligence. Tommy's earlier misgivings faded into the simple, physical labor of it.
Nora didn't dig. She stood a few yards away, her head tilted.
"You gonna help, or are you on quality control?" Tommy asked, pausing to wipe his brow.
"Do you hear that?" she asked. Her voice was calm, curious.
They stopped. Listened. The wind in the high branches. A distant bird. And then, underneath it, a faint, steady thrum. It wasn't a sound you heard with your ears, not exactly. It was a vibration you felt in your teeth, in the bones of your feet.
"What is that?" Danny whispered.
"Probably a generator. Or the water table," Mia said, but she'd stopped digging.
"It's coming from below," Nora said, not looking at them, looking at the ground between the roots of the old tree.
Tommy's shovel bit down again. Clang.
The vibration stopped.
Everyone froze.
"Rock," Jake said, too quickly.
Tommy carefully scraped the dirt away. Not rock. Something smooth and curved. Pale. He exposed more of it. A dome. A familiar shape, but wrong.
It was a skull.
A human skull, stained the color of old tea. Its teeth were not right. They'd been filed, each one sharpened to a nasty, jagged point. And driven directly into the center of its forehead was a long, thick iron nail, rusted a deep burnt red.
The world went very still. The playful creepiness of the Rot Tree vanished, replaced by a cold, factual horror. This was not a story. This was a thing in the ground.
"Oh," said Lily, the sound small and flat.
Danny made a hiccuping sound and fumbled for his inhaler.
Tommy, driven by a horrified, inexorable curiosity, crouched down. He shouldn't. He knew he shouldn't. But the nail… why? The teeth… what for?
"Don't touch it," Nora said. Her voice held no fear, only a kind of urgent certainty.
He reached out. His finger hovered an inch from the cold, pitted bone of the forehead.
The earth beside the skull erupted.
A skeletal hand, bleached white and impossibly articulate, shot out. But it was wrong. The bones were too long. And there were six fingers, each ending in a sharp, dirt-packed point. It didn't flail. It moved with a terrible, deliberate speed. It clamped around Tommy's outstretched wrist.
The cold was instantaneous and shocking, a deep, marrow-freezing chill that locked his joints. He didn't scream at first. He just stared, dumbfounded, at the bones encircling his arm, at the six fingers squeezing tighter.
Then the pain came, sharp and bright, and the scream tore out of him.
Chaosis a slow-building thing. Mia shouted. The twins stumbled back. Danny dropped his inhaler with a pathetic clatter. They were all yelling, a discordant chorus of "Oh god!" and "What is that?!" and "Pull him!"
Nora didn't shout. She moved. She stepped forward, her eyes on the hole, not on Tommy's terrified face. She scooped up a handful of the dark, loose soil...the soil that had been humming moments before...and threw it, not at the hand, but into the open, dark eye sockets of the skull.
"This ground is not yours," she said, clear and firm.
The skeletal fingers twitched. The cold grip faltered, just for a second. It was enough. Tommy wrenched his arm back with a cry, falling onto his backside, scrambling away like a crab. His wrist was mottled an ugly purple-black, the shape of the six-fingered grip already bruising into his skin.
Silence, again. Heavy and waiting.
The hand retracted, slipping back into the hole, dragging the grotesque skull down with it. Dirt trickled after it, as if the earth was swallowing its own secret.
For five long heartbeats, nothing happened. There was just the hole, and their ragged breathing.
Then the ground around the base of the Rot Tree began to shift. Not an explosion, but a slow, relentless heaving, like something was turning over in its sleep. Patches of earth bulged, collapsed, and bulged again. One by one, skeletal forms began to emerge, pushing up through the soil as if swimming upward through thick water. They were all wrong
...too tall, joints knobby and reversed, and each one had that same six-fingered hand. The last to rise was the one with the nail in its skull. It stood a head taller than the others. It turned its head, the rusted nail catching a sliver of fading light. It had no eyes, but Tommy felt its attention lock onto him.
A sound came from it, not a voice, but the grating of stone on stone, formed into a word that was more vibration than speech.
"SIX…"
Nora was already moving. "We need to go. Now."
They ran. But it wasn't the frantic, blind sprint of pure panic Tommy had imagined in scary stories. It was a clumsy, desperate lope through the gathering gloom, spurred by a deep, primal understanding that they had stirred something that wanted to be still. He clutched his throbbing wrist to his chest. The cold was still in there, spreading. Behind them, there was no crash of pursuit, only a steady, relentless crunch-crunch-crunch of feet on dry leaves, getting slowly, patiently closer.
They broke from the trees, stumbling onto the paved road by the school, gasping in the open air. The streetlights flickered on with a faint buzz. They turned, huddled together, and looked back.
The woods were dark and still. Nothing emerged.
"What," Danny panted, "was that?"
"Trouble," Mia said, her practical voice shaky. "That was trouble."
Tommy looked down at his wrist. The blackened skin was already swelling. How could he explain this? The trophy, forgotten, lay in the grass at the wood's edge.
The sound of a slow-approaching car made them all jump. A familiar police cruiser rounded the corner, its headlights cutting through the twilight. It rolled to a stop beside them. The window rolled down, revealing Officer Jim, his expression shifting from casual to professionally concerned in an instant. Garcia was already eyeing the tree line.
"Evening, folks," Jim said, his gaze taking in their dirty clothes, their pale faces, the way they huddled together. His eyes lingered on Tommy's wrist. "You kids okay? We got a call about some… activity at the school." He glanced past them, into the dark mouth of the woods. "Everything alright out here?"
Tommy opened his mouth. The lie, the alibi, the story about falling from the swings...it all died in his throat. Behind Officer Jim, at the very edge of the trees where the streetlight didn't reach, a shadow detached itself. It was the shape of a girl, her posture strange, one arm held at an awkward angle. As they watched, she raised that hand in a slow, deliberate wave. Not with five fingers.
With six.
Nora let out a soft, knowing breath beside him. "Jane," she murmured, a name given to the darkness.
Tommy looked from the shadow to the officer's waiting face, to the proof of the impossible throbbing in his arm. The cozy, boring world of Hollow's End had just cracked open, and something cold was seeping out.
"No, sir," Tommy heard himself say, his voice strangely calm. "I don't think everything is alright at all."