The Woman in the Woods

By Philip Madden

The cottage crouched among the pines,

roof bowed like a penitent,

ivy choking stone until the walls

seemed to wheeze beneath their weight.

The path was no path,

only a wound of mud and moss,

slick with rain,

leading us deeper into silence.

Megan laid her hand upon the wall,

as though stone might answer her.

“It smells the same,” she whispered.

“Like rot?” I asked.

Her eyes, dark as wet bark,

found mine.

“Like earth.”

And the forest seemed to lean closer.

Inside, the rooms were dim with waiting.

Furniture cloaked in dust,

the hearth a black mouth,

walls breathing damp timber and mildew.

“This was his refuge,” Megan said,

her fingers brushing the scar of a table.

“He thought the land fed him.”

I laughed—too sharp,

too loud.

The house swallowed it whole.

That night I dreamed:

branches clawed the windows,

a woman stood barefoot in the trees,

her hair tangled with roots,

her smile thin as a knife.

I woke with her taste

already on my tongue.

Days thickened into shadow.

Megan dug through her father’s journals:

sketches of roots like twisted hands,

flowers opening into mouths,

faces half-buried in bark.

I tried to write,

but my pen was mute—

until she came.

At dusk she stepped from the forest,

barefoot, clad in linen damp with fog.

Her eyes were the color of soil after rain,

where worms writhe unseen.

Her smile unrolled slow as rot.

“The land grows what you plant,” she said,

her nails black with earth.

And I could not look away.

That night her name found me:

Lilly.

She kissed with lips of sap and iron.

Roots coiled my ankles,

dragging me down,

and I yielded like a body to the grave.

When I woke,

my notebook was full of words—

pages alive with a voice

that was not my own.

The house soured.

Fruit collapsed in bowls overnight,

vines wormed through plaster,

the air thickened with mold.

Megan screamed in the shower,

water spilling red as blood.

By the time I touched it,

it was clear again.

“It was blood,” she whispered.

I had no answer.

Her father’s journals confessed:

She comes when the garden hungers.

She whispers what I cannot find.

But her gift curdles.

Each season grows darker.

She asks nothing—

until she does.

And everywhere, her face—

drawn in graphite and dread.

Always Lilly.

Always half-tree, half-woman,

mouth wide with a cry

no page could hold.

Megan’s voice was fierce.

“Tell me about her.”

And I, a fool,

confessed:

“She feels real.”

Megan turned to stone.

“She will kill us both.”

That night, laughter rang in the forest.

My laughter, but not mine.

I followed, dream-sick.

Megan followed too.

And in the clearing—

only Lilly.

Skin bark,

hair branches,

eyes pits of soil.

“Hello, Megan,” she said.

The ground split,

roots coiling upward.

Megan screamed,

then silence.

Only earth.

At dawn I woke alone.

Her side of the bed cold.

The notebook open,

its last line written:

She refused. The roots took her.

My hands shook.

My nails were rimmed with dirt.

The seasons devoured each other.

The garden swallowed the cottage whole.

Black flowers sagged with poison,

fruit rotted on the stem.

I hardly noticed.

I wrote.

And wrote.

And wrote.

The pen a vein.

The page a mouth.

What I fed it was endless.

On the last night,

I stood at the treeline,

manuscript trembling in my hands.

Behind me the cottage

was a carcass of ivy and ash.

From the forest she came—

Megan, Lilly,

both and neither.

Her eyes were hollows of earth,

her smile a wound split wide.

The manuscript slipped.

Pages scattered like brittle leaves.

The forest inhaled,

long and deep,

as though it had been waiting.

And I—

I was written.