The sun was setting faster than Emma had anticipated. What had started as a simple shortcut through Miller’s Woods was quickly becoming a nightmare as shadows stretched like grasping fingers across the forest floor. She’d grown up hearing her grandmother’s warnings about these woods, but at seventeen, she’d dismissed them as stories meant to frighten children. Now, as darkness crept in, those tales didn’t seem quite so foolish.

Her phone had died an hour ago, and the landmarks she thought she recognized kept shifting, morphing into unfamiliar shapes in the dying light. The old oak with the split trunk she’d passed three times now couldn’t possibly be the same tree, yet the distinctive lightning scar marked each one identically.

“Hello?” she called out, her voice thin and reedy in the thickening air. The woods seemed to absorb her words, swallowing them whole. The only response was the whisper of leaves overhead, though there was no wind to move them.

As darkness settled like a shroud, Emma noticed the silence. No crickets chirped, no owls called, no small creatures rustled in the underbrush. The forest held its breath, as if waiting. The air grew dense and sweet, carrying an odd metallic tang that reminded her of pennies.

A twig snapped behind her. Emma spun around, heart hammering against her ribs. Nothing. Just more trees, their bark looking increasingly like stretched skin in the failing light. She forced herself to keep walking, though each step felt wrong, as if the ground itself was shifting beneath her feet.

The first giggle stopped her cold. It sounded like a child, but wrong somehow – too hollow, too ancient. Another followed, then another, until the woods rang with invisible laughter that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

“This isn’t real,” Emma whispered, pressing her hands against her ears. “This isn’t happening.” But the laughter persisted, growing closer, taking on a wet, gurgling quality that made her stomach turn.

She began to run, branches whipping at her face, roots reaching up to snag her feet. The trees pressed closer, their trunks twisted into impossible shapes. Faces emerged from the bark – screaming, laughing, weeping faces that followed her movement with empty eyes.

Emma stumbled into a clearing and froze. In the center stood a circle of white birch trees, their pale bark glowing in the darkness. But it was what hung from their branches that made her blood run cold. Dozens of dirty, ancient ribbons fluttered without wind, each one tied in a perfect bow. She recognized them immediately – they were identical to the ribbon she’d worn in her hair as a child, the one she’d lost in these very woods fifteen years ago.

The giggling returned, closer now. Through tears, Emma watched as small, dark shapes emerged from behind the trees. They moved like children but weren’t children at all. Their limbs were too long, their movements too fluid, their faces too sharp in the darkness.

As they surrounded her, Emma noticed they were all wearing ribbons – her ribbons – in their stringy hair. One reached out with fingers like twisted twigs, touching her cheek with terrible gentleness.

“Welcome back,” it whispered in a voice like rustling leaves. “We’ve been waiting so long for you to return to our games.”

Emma screamed, but no sound escaped her throat. The last thing she saw before the darkness took her was her grandmother’s face, watching sadly from the bark of the nearest birch, mouthing the words she should have heeded: “The woods keep what they take.”

They found her ribbon the next morning, tied in a perfect bow around a birch branch. It was the only trace of Emma they ever discovered, though sometimes, on quiet nights, people say they can hear children’s laughter echoing through Miller’s Woods, and if you look carefully, you might see ribbons dancing in the branches, even when there isn’t any wind at all.