The woods were quiet that morning—too quiet for Mike's liking.
He crouched low behind a patch of thorny shrubs, his hazel eyes scanning the tree line ahead. A breeze moved through the branches, but no birdsong followed. Even the usual rustle of squirrels and rabbits seemed absent. It was the kind of stillness that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand straight.
He didn't move. He didn't speak. He simply watched.
That's what Mike Flowers was good at—watching.
While his older brother Steve spent his mornings throwing rocks and stomping around like a half-blind bear, Mike preferred silence. Silence taught him things. Like how to follow the tracks of a deer through fallen leaves, or how to tell if a fox had passed by just by the smell of the wind. Today, the silence told him something else.
He was being watched.
A few feet ahead, a patch of moss looked slightly out of place. At first glance, it was just more green in a forest full of green. But something about it gnawed at him. It was too perfectly square. Too deliberately placed.
Mike reached for his bow—not the old, splintered hunting bow Harold had gifted him last spring—but a smaller one he'd carved himself from maple wood. He had no arrows with him; this wasn't meant to be a hunting trip. Just a quiet morning in the woods. But habit was hard to break.
A snap of a twig behind him made him whip around. Nothing. Just a crooked tree and a rotting log. Still, he waited. Counted the seconds. Ten… twenty…
Another snap. This time to his left.
Then, laughter.
Mike relaxed—but only slightly. He knew that laugh.
"Found you, runt!" Steve's voice rang out, cruel and gloating. A rock zipped past Mike's head and struck the tree behind him.
Mike didn't flinch. He was used to it.
"Didn't your little bird-brain come out here to hide? Come on, Mike—say something!"
Mike stood slowly, brushing pine needles from his knees. Steve was taller, broader, with a permanent smirk on his face and dirt under his fingernails that had probably been there for a year. At fifteen, he was too old for games—but tormenting Mike never seemed to get old.
"I'm not hiding," Mike said, finally. "I'm observing."
Steve snorted. "You and your fancy words. What're you watching, dirt?"
Mike didn't answer. There was no point. Steve never listened anyway.
Instead, he walked past him and started toward the path that would lead back to town.
"Hey, where you going?" Steve called after him. "Still scared of the cave, huh?"
Mike paused.
He hadn't told anyone about the cave. Not even Harold.
But Steve's tone suggested he was just being his usual taunting self. Still, a strange chill ran down Mike's spine as he walked away.
That night, Mike sat on the roof of the old barn behind his house, legs dangling over the side, journal open in his lap. He sketched what he'd seen—if it was anything at all. The moss patch. The perfectly square shape. The unnatural silence. At the top of the page, he wrote:
"Something is watching."
From the woods, far beyond the edge of the fields, an owl hooted once—low and drawn out.
And for the briefest of moments, the shadows beneath the trees moved when nothing should have been there.