I reached into my pocket for my phone, but before I could dial, the braver of the two took a hesitant step forward onto the creaking wooden porch boards. She didn’t ask for help. She didn’t cry for her mother.
Instead, she locked eyes with me and whispered a single phrase that made the blood freeze in my veins.
“You’re Olivia’s Ethan.” My lungs stopped working. The phone nearly slipped from my fingers. Nobody called me that. Only Olivia had called me that, usually when she was introducing me to her friends back in college. “How do you know that name?” I choked out, my voice suddenly thick with a bizarre mix of terror and grief.
“How do you know Olivia?” The little girl didn’t explain. She just turned away from the cabin door and started walking toward the dense, overgrown tree line at the edge of the meadow. She looked over her shoulder once, silently gesturing for me to follow.
She was heading straight for a thicket of thorns and old growth. I knew this property inside and out, or at least I thought I did. But as she pushed past a massive cluster of blackberry bushes, a narrow, barely-there trail revealed itself. It was a deeply concealed path that I had never seen in the ten years we owned the property.
“Wait!” I called out, stumbling over the uneven ground to catch up. “It’s getting dark, you can’t go in there!” But the girls didn’t stop. They moved with a practiced certainty, navigating the treacherous, root-choked path as if they had walked it a hundred times before.
I had no choice but to plunge into the woods after them. The twilight was fading fast, casting long, eerie shadows through the skeletal branches of the pine trees.
Briars snagged at my jeans and scratched my arms, but the twins slipped through the brush effortlessly.
We walked for what felt like twenty minutes, descending deeper into a ravine that bordered the edge of our property line. The air grew significantly colder down here, smelling of damp earth and decaying leaves. My heart was pounding frantically against my ribs. I had no flashlight, no cell service, and I was following two mysterious children who somehow knew my dead wife into the darkening woods.
Finally, the trail opened up into a small, recessed hollow that was completely invisible from the ridge above. Pressed against the side of a steep, rocky embankment was an old, rusted structure. It looked like an abandoned shipping container that had been partially buried into the earth and camouflaged with heavy layers of pine branches and dirt.
The braver twin walked right up to the heavy steel door. There was a thick industrial padlock securing it, but the little girl reached under the collar of her oversized shirt and pulled out a heavy brass key hanging from a dirty piece of twine.
