There Is No Way Out. Andrew Zolt

day, she found a girl. Small, shivering, holding a stuffed bear.

      Charlotte couldn’t do it.

      She carried the child to the village and left her at someone’s doorstep. She didn’t look back.

      No one else crossed her path that night.

      At midnight, the tree trembled. Veins of blood streaked the leaves. The faces twisted in pain.

      Charlotte’s body began to wither. Her hair turned white. Her skin cracked. Pain and heat burned in her chest.

      Then she heard the voice again, from deep within the trunk: “You don’t get to choose. You kill – or you die. This is not a curse. It is a price. Life does not come from nothing. Only from death.”

      On the next full moon, she killed an old man.

      No feelings. No regret. Quick. Clean. As if she were simply paying off a debt.

      That night, she dreamed of the tree opening its bark. Inside sat something dark and trembling – with her face. Younger than the one she wore now.

      It looked at her and wept bloody tears.

      She woke up and went to the tree. Hugged its trunk. Pressed her forehead to the bark.

      “How much longer?” she whispered.

      The faces were silent.

      Only one voice, deep within, replied: “Until the next one comes.”

      Charlotte lived in silence. The silence between the heartbeats of those she killed. Between her own breaths. Between days. Between months.

      She didn’t feel time. Only the hunger of the tree. As if it were her own.

      Then one day, he appeared. His name was Dane. A wanderer. A writer. With ash-colored beard and kind eyes. He photographed abandoned places. Searched for lost meanings, for symbols, for the mystical.

      He saw her by the road, standing among wet pine trees in a long coat, her gaze distant.

      “You’re not from around here, are you?” he asked.

      “No one is from around here,” Charlotte replied.

      He smiled. Said it had been a long time since he met someone who looked inward, not just forward.

      He offered her coffee.

      She said yes.

      She didn’t know why she didn’t kill him that night.

      He stayed a couple of days. Then a week.

      They lived in an old abandoned house in the village. He patched the roof, lit fires in the hearth, read her poetry. He asked about her past, and she made up stories.

      Sometimes, she almost forgot about the tree. About what she had become. She wanted to forget. To start over.

      But when the moon turned full, the roots clawed their way from the earth. The faces on the tree twisted in hunger. Charlotte’s skin cracked. Her breath smelled of decay.

      She tried to hide it from Dane. But she couldn’t hide for long. The changes were too obvious.

      “Who are you?” he asked one day. “What’s happening to you?”

      She didn’t answer.

      He waited. He stayed.

      The next full moon, Charlotte didn’t kill anyone. She walked to the tree, ready to tell it: no more. She was prepared to die.

      The bark split, the roots pulsed, the faces screamed, the tree trembled.

      She didn’t know Dane had followed her. He saw everything.

      He found an axe in the house and headed towards the tree.

      Charlotte saw him – but didn’t stop him.

      He held her. Kissed her.

      “I’ll set you free,” he said.

      Then he turned to the tree and swung the axe. Once. Twice. Again.

      The tree howled. The faces began to fade.

      One final strike – and the tree fell.

      Its life drained, the bark cracked. The branches bled black smoke.

      And Charlotte… began to disappear. She didn’t fight it. She just held Dane’s hand.

      He didn’t know. Didn’t realize, that she and the tree were one. And when he finally understood – it was too late.

      Moments later, it was over.

      All that remained was the dead tree – and a silhouette of ash on the ground.

      That night the witch came. She held a human skull.

      From the fallen branches, she picked a single black seed, placed it inside the skull, and buried it in the earth.

      Snake Bertha smiled.

      The Night Choir

      It all began in late October, just as the leaves turned the color of dying flames.

      Every night, around three a.m., a strange sound drifted from the forest that stretched beyond the small town of Everfield, on the edge of Ash Fern National Park. It wasn’t the wind. It wasn’t animals. Not even the distant hum of trucks on the highway.

      It was singing. Children’s voices. Dozens of them.

      They sang lullabies in tones and shades unknown to the earthly world, as if the melodies had been born somewhere in the depths of the underworld. The singing was always soft. But everyone heard it – even the deaf. It could be felt through the body, like a vibration in the air. And once you heard it, you never forgot. The melody clung to your bones.

      At first, it was simply strange. Nothing more. No one, except the curious teenagers sneaking through the woods, made any effort to find the source of the singing.

      But then, one night, the choir spoke a name.

      “Deborah.”

      Quiet. Clear. As if spoken from the very earth itself.

      The next day, Deborah Klein, a 37-year-old librarian, died while tying her shoelaces. The doctors said it was a brain aneurysm. A tragic coincidence.

      The following night, the choir sang another name.

      “Matthew.”

      And twenty-four hours later, Matthew Finch, a former school bus driver, collapsed in the supermarket parking lot. Blood poured from his eyes.

      By the end of the week, the choir had sung four more names. And four more were dead.

      Young. Old. Healthy. Sick. It made no difference.

      The police didn’t know what to do. Neither did the mayor. Even the priest was silent.State authorities were called in. Scientists arrived, sound specialists, even a pair of paranormal investigators from New Mexico.

      They set up microphones all throughout the forest.

      Nothing. The recordings captured only silence.

      But the people could still hear the choir. And the choir kept singing names. And the people kept dying.

      The first to flee the town were those with enough money to buy a house elsewhere. They packed their suitcases, hurriedly loading their families into cars, never slowing down for a single stop sign, as if the devil himself were chasing them.

      One of them – Katherine Beale – heard her name after she had already reached her sister’s house in in Georgia. She died in the bathroom mirror, fingers digging into her throat, mouth frozen mid-scream.

      That’s when the townsfolk understood. It didn’t matter where you went. Everyone who had lived in Everfield was already marked. There was no escaping fate.

      Fear spread like mold. Unstoppable.

      The church held