Disclaimer:
While not very explicit, this story fits best in the genre of horror. There is no happy ending, and some folks might not like stories that get a little dark. I get it. I've been trying to write a romance, but stuff like this keeps coming out instead 😪. So if you’re not interested in reading this, that’s perfectly fine, and now is a good time to stop 👍. But if you continue, that’s on you. ALSO, maybe don't read this if you've got trypophobia...😇
Home was the trees, the forest floor, the pack. Home was the safety of the familiar, and few things were as appealing to Hre-ée as that. Which was why, when she first learned of the exciting discovery just a short walk away from the camp, she felt not even the slightest bit of curiosity.
“You have to come with me this time!” screeched Ree-ooh-hee. “Nobody has ever seen anything like it! It's… I can't possibly tell you—you just have to come and see for yourself!”
Hre-ée had endured some version of this request every day for almost a week, but what finally broke through her unshakable contentment was not the lure of the unknown, but the plea from her friend.
“Please. It might be gone tomorrow for all we know. Just this once—will you come along?”
Sure, life was simple, and that was good. But why did she always say no to everything? Was it too much to let her truest and best friend finally show her this amazing find? Just this once, perhaps. So she set out on the two-hour trek to see the River Cave.
The River Cave was neither a river nor a cave. But there were not many words yet, and her friend had done the best she could with what she had. Whatever it was, it was twenty times Hre-ée’s length from side to side and five times her length from top to bottom. It reflected light like the surface of a river and had an entrance like a cave, which explained the name.
Ree-ooh-hee gestured excitedly and ran inside, but Hre-ée hung back. Whatever the River Cave was, it was wrong. Not the same wrong as the pond with the three-eyed toads and the gases that made your skin burn under your fur, but definitely close. Ree-ooh-hee popped back out and, noticing her friend’s reluctance, all but dragged her inside.
The inside of the River Cave was even less comforting. The ground was soft, but not like grass—not like anything she had seen in her short life. It was storm-cloud gray and grew in short, densely packed tufts—not blades. Ree-ooh-hee tugged at it, but it stayed put. Definitely not grass. This was bad…
Ree-ooh-hee pulled her further in, and the foreboding that had been simmering lightly near the entrance suddenly boiled over.
“We should go. Now.” Hre-ée hooted softly, as near to a whisper as she could make.
Ree-ooh-hee seemed confused as she surveyed the dimly lit space. “It wasn’t like this before,” she murmured, gesturing at the wall full of holes. “There were beautiful shiny stones where all those empty spaces are now. That’s what I really wanted you to see.”
Hre-ée couldn’t tear her eyes away from the wall of holes. Massive holes of slightly different sizes, clustered closely together—not a single perfect circle among them. Her breathing quickened as every cell in her body screamed that she was in terrible danger, yet her legs refused to move.
Ree-ooh-hee looked around, oblivious to her friend’s distress, and finally reached an arm into the wall.
Two screams exploded in that moment, and Hre-ée instantly regained control of her body. She dropped to all fours for greater speed and fled.
She could not outrun the memory, however—of the thing that hadn't left the inner wall of the River Cave at all. Of how, in the blink of an eye, it had reduced Ree-ooh-hee to a pulpy mess on the strange, not-grass floor.
She ran home, collapsing with exhaustion upon her return. She couldn’t explain what had happened to the others, but they understood enough. The head male uprooted the entire camp and moved them as far as possible from the River Cave without jeopardizing access to water and food.
There was no such thing as comfort to her from that day forward. She lived only long enough to birth the twins she hadn’t realized she had been carrying that day.
They never heard the full story from her or anyone else, but they didn’t have to. It was a part of them.
They never strayed from the beaten path for any reason.
They kept to themselves as much as could be excused in a pack.
And they felt the intense wrongness deep inside them any time they saw clusters of holes.
The End
