#forest horror

I had to draw this scene from Don't Let The Forest In, by CG Drews 🍂🌲

*Image from The Story Graph*

My first book for Novella November! 😊

My review: I loved this little piece of Thomas’s POV. It gave some much needed context for Don’t Let The Forest In. Especially the groups friendship dynamic and just how much Thomas was in love with Andrew. And the fact that you could see all the hairline cracks that led to the terrible things in Don’t Let The Forest In. This was really great and is getting four out of five stars!

*if you’ve read Don’t Let The Forest In and want to read this short story, it’s available on the authors patreon as an ebook version or on their website under the blog section for free*

2025 Reading Challenges:

Gravity Falls was quiet in a way that made Dipper Pines nervous.

Not the normal quiet—no rustling trees, no distant hoot of an owl, no gnomes arguing in the bushes. This was the kind of silence that pressed against your ears and made your instincts scream that something was wrong.

Dipper adjusted his headlamp and glanced down at Journal #3. “According to this, whatever we’re dealing with only appears when it’s completely silent,” he whispered.

“Great,” Mabel said, tying a sweater around Waddles’ neck. “So it’s a monster that hates ambience. Rude.”

They were deep in the forest, following a trail of symbols carved into trees. Each mark looked like a door with three lines beside it.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Dipper stopped walking. “Mabel… do you hear that?”

Before she could answer, the sound came again—three sharp knocks, echoing from nowhere and everywhere at once.

Waddles squealed.

“So,” Mabel said carefully, “if I say ‘nope,’ can we all agree to run?”

The knocking came a third time, closer now. The air grew cold, and the trees seemed to lean inward. From between two trunks, something shifted—tall, thin, and not quite solid, like it was stitched together from shadows.

Dipper swallowed hard. “The journal says it feeds on curiosity.”

“Oh, buddy,” Mabel muttered. “We’re doomed.”

The creature raised a long, warped hand and knocked against the air itself. Three times.

Dipper forced himself to speak. “You won’t get anything from us.”

The thing tilted its head, confused. Then Mabel stepped forward, hands on her hips.

“Listen, Knocky McNightmare,” she said, “we’ve had a long week. We are not opening mysterious doors, portals, or emotional vulnerabilities tonight.”

The creature recoiled, the shadows flickering.

“It doesn’t know what to do with that,” Dipper realised. “It expects fear—or curiosity.”

Mabel grinned. “Then let’s give it something else.”

She pulled a glittery flashlight from her pocket and flicked it on. Pink light exploded across the clearing as she struck a dramatic pose. “WELCOME to the Midnight Talent Show!”

The creature shrieked—not in anger, but in pure confusion—and dissolved into mist, the knocking fading with it.

Silence returned. Normal silence.

Dipper stared. “You defeated a shadow entity… with confidence?”

Mabel shrugged. “Works on bullies too.”

Back at the Mystery Shack, Grunkle Stan barely looked up from the TV. “You kids find anything?”

Dipper wrote furiously in the journal. “Yeah. Turns out not everything that knocks deserves to be answered.”

Mabel smiled. “Especially at night.”

Do you like scary stories?

Not the kind with cheap jump scares and teenagers making terrible decisions in abandoned basements.

I mean the real ones.

The stories that feel older than they should. The ones that follow you home. The ones that make you stare a little too long into dark tree lines while driving at night.

The kind that make your hallway feel unfamiliar at 2AM.

Good.

You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.

Around here, we collect strange things: forgotten broadcasts, impossible places, creatures seen only for a moment between the trees.

And every now and then…

something answers back.

But now I’m curious, friends…

When the lights go out, what kind of stories find you?

Ghost stories? Small town legends? Creatures in the woods? Haunted radio signals... Or perhaps something cosmic staring back from the stars?

Tell me what keeps you awake at night.

It happened around the age of twelve.

Maybe thirteen. I stopped really caring about my birthday around then. My parents were terrible about waiting to give me presents, so the day was mostly just cake and hanging out. Not to say we were rich, my dad just worked hard and liked to provide.

I miss that about him. He was the kind of man who’d pull double shifts just to make his wife and kid smile. I didn’t really understand why he was out so late back then.

I was on my bike. They’d bought it for me about a month earlier, and I was riding it down to a little lakeside community where a nice older man my mother knew let us play on his dock. People weren’t as worried about lawsuits back then, and I’d already learned how to swim.

The bike was shiny and red. Not the highest-end thing in the world, but perfect for my little solo adventures down country roads. I’d spent the hot summer day splashing in the shallows, collecting stray shells, rocks, and other waterlogged tokens of my time by the water when I noticed how low the sun was getting.

I didn’t have a smartphone back then. Cell phones existed, but they were expensive, and I’ll admit it, I didn’t really know how to read a watch. I just guessed the time by the sun. Thought it made me cool. Outdoorsy.

I pulled myself up the water-worn wooden blocks lining the edge of the lake near the docks, picked my bike up from where it lay in the grass (yeah, yeah, try using a kickstand on gravel), and walked it to the edge of the sleepy little community.

It was gated. Supposed to be, anyway. At some point it had been private, but once everyone started aging out and passing homes down to their grandkids, they stopped bothering to close the gate. I wasn’t going to complain. It meant access to the only real entertainment the place had, aside from walking the woods.

We were hours away from any real town. The small one we went to school in was still a forty-five-minute car ride. Real middle-of-nowhere type of place.

I didn’t really think about how dangerous that was back then.

Not until this incident.

After this, I stopped going out alone. Started staying indoors more.

I was maybe ten minutes into the ride when I heard a rustle in the treeline to my left. No big deal, probably a deer or a local dog. I glanced over casually, expecting to see something bolt.

The only thing around there that could really cause trouble was a wild pig, but they generally avoided people. At least back then. Nowadays, I hear they’re more aggressive.

Instead, all I saw was the brush settling. Like whatever had been moving froze when I turned my head.

Weird. But again, probably a dog, a bird, maybe a hare. The woods were always moving with something.

I kept pedaling at a leisurely pace.

But I kept hearing it.

A rustle to my left, keeping pace with me.

It was probably stupid, but I slowed down. I figured maybe a dog was following me and wanted attention. When I came to a stop, I heard the rustling continue for another second.

Whatever it was, it was close enough behind me that my sudden loss of momentum carried it forward.

Just enough for me to see a snippet of it.

A long tail. Brown hind legs.

Not a dog’s tail. Sleek and rounded. Brown fading to black. I recognized it from the movies. A small voice in the back of my head, calm, not panicked yet, went:

“Oh. A cougar.”

I don’t know why I was so nonchalant about it. It took a full minute for it to really sink in.

They weren’t supposed to be in the area. Hell, not even in the state. But my uncle always said they were out there. He lived about an hour away, and we’d heard them screaming at night that sound like a woman dying. It was all observation. Harmless.

They couldn’t get me when I was surrounded by adult men who loved guns more than beer.

But I wasn’t around adults.

I wasn’t around my uncle and his shotgun, or my dad and his revolver.

I was a kid maybe twenty or thirty feet from a predator that had probably already pegged me as something worth stalking.

I started to pedal.

In hindsight, that was probably stupid. There’s probably some study out there that says make yourself big, maintain eye contact, back away slowly. But you try being thirteen and alone near a mountain lion and tell me you’re thinking rationally.

Adrenaline’s a hell of a drug.

I was pedaling harder than I ever had before. My bike started to wobble as I hit my first downhill slope with too much speed.

I looked to my left and couldn’t see it, but I just knew it was there following me, waiting for me to mess up. Every time I looked ahead and realized how far I still was from home, the panic got worse.

When I looked back from the treeline to the road, I remembered the pothole.

Too late.

The front wheel sank in, and I went flying. I skidded hands-first down the road.

I still have the scar on my knee. Road rash. Tore my jeans and shirt. My palms looked like they’d been hit with a gravel-filled cheese grater.

It hurt. Bad.

As a kid, you don’t really know the difference between pain that’s bad and pain that’s bad. I pulled myself into a kneeling position, briefly forgetting where I was as I tried to get my bearings.

Then I heard the brush moving again.

All thoughts of broken bones vanished.

I should’ve turned around and grabbed my bike.

But I ran.

I ran into the treeline opposite the rustling.

I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t know what the cougar was thinking either.

Maybe it was playing. Cats play with their food, right?

I moved through the brush, not caring about the blackberry bushes tearing into my exposed leg. I stumbled into a clearing torn up by what looked like wild hogs, thick muddy divots, upturned earth.

I only stopped when I found an old shed. Or maybe a tiny house. The window was busted. The roof was half-collapsed. But to me, it was a miracle.

The door hung open, crooked on its hinges.

I grabbed the door by its edge and yanked it behind me, panicking. My fingers jammed into the empty hole where the doorknob used to be, and I pulled.

Thank God the old door seemed to suck into the frame.

I leaned back, throwing my weight into it, fingers digging into the rotten wood as I waited.

Like the cat would grab the door. Like it would try to open it.

I heard crashing through the woods. Leaves shuffling. Branches snapping.

Then a hard thump against the doorframe.

Then the soft pad of something heavy.

Close enough that I could hear breathing slow, controlled, and once, just once, a low sound that might’ve been a growl. Or maybe just air forced through something too big to be quiet.

Something was circling.

Something was deciding what to do.

There was no way I’d just outrun it.

My hand started to slip. Sweat soaked the wood. I tightened my grip until it hurt.

That’s when I heard it.

I still don’t know what it was.

A loud crack. Or maybe a crunch. Like someone snapping a tree trunk in half. Then a half-second of rustling.

And nothing.

I held my breath, waiting for something else.

Another sound. Another attempt at the door.

Nothing.

I don’t know how long it was before I let myself breathe again. Every time I thought about opening that door, all I could imagine was a large brown cat forcing its way inside.

I didn’t dare open it.

Not until my fingers went numb and my stomach ached.

Not until I heard nothing but crickets.

I didn’t leave all at once. I cracked the door and peered out.

It was a full moon, bright enough to see. The woods looked clear.

The walk back to the road was almost worse than the run. Every snapped twig made me flinch, waiting for something to leap out of the dark.

But nothing did.

I limped back to my bike. The adrenaline had long worn off, replaced by a deep ache in my arms and a dull throb in my leg.

Eventually, headlights found me.

My dad’s old yellow headlights. His beat-up red work truck. I’d wanted the bike to match.

He pulled over fast, hazards flashing. The door flew open.

“WHERE THE HELL HAVE Y-”

He stopped when he saw me.

That night was spent with my mom cleaning cuts and bruises while my usually stoic dad stomped around, getting his hunting gear together and talking about trying to find the thing while my mom tried to talk him out of it.

It was only later we noticed something strange.

All my cuts were above the knee.

But the soles of my shoes were soaked with blood.

Weeks passed. No sign of the cougar.

We went back to the shed, armed and ready. My mom relented when my uncle said he’d come. We found blood spatter, mostly around one tree about ten feet away, smeared with old, dried blood. My dad took that as proof it was still hunting nearby.

There was an animal attack. Supposedly the cougar. Jack. the guy who ran the gas station and burger joint, was mauled.

After that, local dogs started vanishing.

The wild pigs, though, seemed to be doing fine. Bigger wallows showed up. More of them.

No livestock ever went missing.

If anything, the number of snakes and coyotes dropped.

I’m bringing this up because I came back.

Came back to visit the lake.

The fry cook at the steak joint by the water was attacked last night.

It’s been over fifteen years.

Don’t mind me, just cutting through the woods to get to public school. Thank God there’s this giant-ass sign here, lol.

Read the full DemiMon comic on WEBTOON →