The Wailing Wood

The Wailing Wood

Marta had always been attuned to the world beyond. Growing up in a cramped apartment above her grandmother’s antique shop, she’d learned to read the room’s emotional residue—the lingering sorrow of a forgotten music box, the anxious static around a cracked mirror. Her grandmother called it ‘the sight,’ but Marta preferred to think of it as an allergy to the ordinary. That allergy intensified when she inherited the shop and, with it, a ramshackle cottage on the edge of a forest known as the Wailing Wood.

The locals had their reasons for the name: the wind that howled through the pine needles sounded like mournful cries, and the trees themselves seemed to lean toward any passerby, their branches like grasping fingers. Marta dismissed it as folklore, the kind of thing small towns invent to keep tourists out. She had bigger concerns—the shop’s debts, the crumbling roof, and the unsettling feeling that she was never truly alone inside the cottage.

It started with the clock in the hallway. It was a grandfather clock, its face cracked and its pendulum silent for decades. On her third night, at precisely 3:00 AM, it struck thirteen times. Marta jolted awake, her heart pounding. She lay still, listening. Then, from the direction of the living room, came the sound of something heavy being dragged across the wooden floor—slow, deliberate, like a body being pulled toward the fireplace.

She grabbed the flashlight from her nightstand and crept to the doorway. The living room was empty. The clock stood in its usual spot, but the pendulum was now swinging, back and forth, with a rhythmic click that matched her heartbeat. And then, from the old radio on the shelf—a relic she’d never plugged in—a voice crackled to life. It wasn’t a song, but a single repeated phrase, spoken in a low, guttural whisper: ‘You say farewell, I say return.’

Marta’s blood ran cold. She had no idea where the phrase came from, but it seemed to seep into her bones, like a memory that wasn’t hers. She stayed frozen until the first light of dawn filtered through the curtains, and the radio fell silent. But she knew something had changed. The air in the cottage felt thicker, heavier, as if a presence had settled into the walls.

Over the following weeks, the phenomena escalated. Lights flickered when she walked into a room. Doors opened by themselves, revealing empty closets and dark hallways. She found a single strand of coarse black hair on her pillow, though she lived alone. Her grandmother’s old mirror, tucked away in the attic, reflected a shadowy figure standing behind her—a figure that wasn’t there when she turned around.

She began to research her grandmother’s past. The locals, when pressed, spoke of a woman named Elspeth, who had lived in the cottage before the shop was built. Elspeth was a folk healer, someone who ‘walked between worlds.’ She vanished in 1978, and her body was never found. The forest, they said, took her. Some old-timers claimed she’d made a pact with something that dwelled in the Wailing Wood—a trade for power, a trade that went horribly wrong.

One evening, Marta found a hidden room behind the bookshelf in the cottage’s study. Inside, she discovered a journal written in a spidery hand, Elspeth’s name inscribed on the first page. The entries detailed rituals—offerings to ‘the Root that Breathes,’ a entity she believed lived deep in the forest. In the margins, she’d drawn symbols that made Marta’s eyes water. At the back of the diary were photographs, yellowed and cracked: Elspeth standing in a clearing, her mouth open in a silent scream, and behind her—a shape that was too tall, too thin, with branches sprouting from its shoulders.

Marta knew she should leave. But like a moth to a flame, she was drawn deeper. That night, she lit candles in the living room and sat with the diary, hoping to find a way to sever the connection she felt growing. At 3:00 AM, the radio blared to life, but this time it was not a voice—it was a sound, a howling that rose and fell like a woman wailing in the depths of the wood. The candles all blew out at once. The air turned ice-cold. And from the hallway, a figure began to emerge—a figure made of bark and shadow, with hollow eyes that fixed on Marta.

She wanted to run, but her legs were rooted to the floor. The figure shuffled toward her, and as it drew near, she saw its mouth was sewn shut with thorny vines. But somehow, she heard it speak—not through lips, but directly into her mind. ‘You let me in,’ it said. ‘Now I am home.’

Marta tried to scream, but no sound escaped. The figure reached out a hand made of twisted roots, and touched her forehead. In that moment, she saw everything—Elspeth’s final moments, the bargain she’d made with the Root that Breathes, and how she’d tried to trap the entity in the wood by binding herself to the cottage. But the binding had failed. The entity had waited, patient as the forest, for a new host. And Marta, with her sensitivity, her openness to the unseen, had been the key.

When dawn came, the cottage was silent. The radio was gone, the diary was gone, and the grandfather clock had toppled over, its face shattered. Marta sat in the living room, motionless, her own eyes now hollow and dark. She slowly rose, walked to the window, and stared out at the Wailing Wood. A faint smile curved her lips. Then she turned toward the phone, hesitated, and instead walked to the edge of the forest, where the trees leaned toward her. She whispered something—words not her own—and the wind carried them deep into the shadows.

And the wailing in the wood, beautiful and terrible, began anew.

From then on, the locals noticed a change at the edge of town. Sometimes, late at night, a figure would stand among the pines, still and patient. And if you listened closely, you’d hear a voice that wasn’t quite human, repeating a phrase—’I say hello, you say goodbye’—over and over, until you couldn’t tell if it was mocking, mourning, or summoning something that had already found its way out.