The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

The Chains Below
by Kathleen McCluskey

The old maps called them the “Hanging Woods.”

No one remembered why.

The name survived long after the meaning had rotted away, passed from one generation to the next like a word spoken in a foreign language that nobody understood anymore. Hunters avoided the place after dark. Loggers refused to cut its oldest trees. Even the wind seemed reluctant to cross the ridge once the sun sat.

Gideon Whitlock never believed any of it.

Folklore was simply fear preserved long enough to become tradition.

So when the Harvest Moon rose full over the Hanging Woods, he climbed the ridge alone.

The forest stood silent under the soft, white glow of the mist. Massive oaks twisted towards the heavens. Their black limbs wove across the moonlight until they seemed caught in a web of branches. The air smelled of wet bark and old stone. Not a single cricket sang.

Silence pressed against his ears until he became aware of another sound.

A soft groaning. It came from the trees.

The trunks trembled almost imperceptively. Bark cracked in long, dry sighs as though every tree in the forest exhaled together.

Another groan followed. Longer this time. Older.

Gideon placed his hand against the nearest trunk.

The bark was warm.

He jerked his hand back instinctively before forcing himself to touch it again. The rough grooves pressed into his palm, but beneath them he felt something impossible. The tree wasn’t simply warm from the heat of the day. It pulsed.

A slow, rhythmic vibration passed through the wood, so faint he almost convinced himself he imagined it. Then it came again. Not the steady beat of a heart but the drawn out strain of something under tremendous tension.

He pressed his ear against the tree. The sound wasn’t coming from the tree, it was traveling through it.

A deep metallic groan echoed through the wood, followed by a dull vibration that climbed the trunk and disappeared in the branches. Another answered somewhere deeper in the forest. Then another. Within minutes the entire mountain seemed alive with the same mournful resonance, as if every ancient oak shared a single burden.

Gideon stepped back, sweeping his flashlight across the nearest trees.

Every trunk bore the same scars. Long, spiraling ridges climbed from the roots to the highest branches, crossing over one another with impossible precision. They weren’t random patterns left by age or weather. They twisted together in thick bands that reminded him of braided steel cables.

A sharp crack split the silence somewhere deep in the forest. Gideon instinctively looked toward the sound, expecting to see the broken silhouette of an ancient limb crashing through the canopy. Nothing moved. The moon still hung behind the web of branches, washing the ridge in pale silver but the forest had become unnaturally still. Even the vibration beneath his hand ceased.

He stepped away from the trunk and swept his flashlight through the darkness. The beam found nothing except rows of old oaks disappearing into the night, each one scarred by the same spiral ridges that twisted from root to crown. Every trunk leaned ever so slightly inward, toward the center of the mountain as though the entire forest had spent centuries reaching a single unseen point.

Another crack echoed through the woods, louder this time. Followed by a deep shudder under Gideon’s boots. Dead leaves danced across the ground. The movement was subtle, but unmistakable. It hadn’t come from above.

It had come from below.

A memory surfaced from somewhere deep in his childhood.

His grandfather had once taken him into these very woods after a storm. They had come across an oak so enormous that Gideon couldn’t imagine a wind strong enough to uproot it. The old man had stared at the exposed root ball before quietly covering it with a canvas tarp.

The roots hadn’t spread outward through the soil the way every schoolbook had said they would. They had descended almost perfectly straight, twisting together into a thick column that disappeared into the darkness below like the cables of an immense elevator vanishing into a bottomless shaft.

When Gideon had asked his grandfather why they grew that way the old man had mumbled under his breath, “they aren’t searching for water.”

At the time the words had made no sense. Gideon thought the old man was telling more tall tales. Standing there beneath the moon, suddenly his words came into focus.

The ground trembled again.

This time a thin crack opened in the soil only a few feet from where he stood. It was no wider than a pencil, yet a current of warm air drifted from it carrying the smell of damp stone and something far older. It wasn’t the stench of decay. It was the stale breath of a place that had been sealed away for an age beyond memory.

The vibration returned with startling force. Every tree around him groaned.

It wasn’t the sound of wood rubbing against wood. It was deeper than that, resonating through the forest. Gideon realized he wasn’t hearing millions of trees, he was hearing millions of roots tightening at once.

He looked across the ridge and saw it happen. One of the oldest trees slowly tilted. Not from wind but from their roots giving way. The ancient prison was cracking.

More from Kathleen McCluskey:

The Long Fall: Book 1: The Inception of Horror

Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.

Available on Amazon!