A Scream You Can’t Unhear

The first time I heard it, I thought it was an animal.

A sharp, ragged shriek split the midnight air, slicing through the damp fog that clung to our farmhouse like rotting skin. It was too long, too layered to be a fox’s cry, too human to belong to anything with fur.

It came from the woods.

The woods everyone in town whispered about, the ones my grandmother swore were "rooted in something older than God." I had laughed at her words—until that night.

The scream didn’t fade.

It wavered, like a mouth torn between breath and terror, and underneath it was something worse—a low, trembling hum, as if the earth itself was groaning.

My little sister, Mary, sat up in her bed across the room. Her hair was tangled in her face, her eyes huge and glassy.

"You heard it too," she whispered.

I didn’t answer.

The house felt wrong. The boards under my bare feet were colder than the air, as though something had been sucking the warmth from them for hours. Outside, the fog moved in strange currents, like the breath of something enormous waiting beyond sight.

The second scream came as I reached the front door.

It was closer—inside the tree line now. The kind of sound that makes your bones tighten and your stomach knot. Mary clutched my arm hard enough to hurt.

"We should wake Mom," she said.

But Mom had been gone for two days. She’d walked into those same woods after the dog vanished and hadn’t come back.

I grabbed the lantern. Its weak flame quivered against the glass, casting trembling shadows along the porch. Every creak of the wood seemed too loud, too sharp, as if the night was listening.

We stepped into the fog.

The smell hit first—a coppery, wet stench, like rainwater that had sat in rusted metal for years. The trees loomed ahead, their trunks warped and swollen like old scars. Bark peeled away in strips, revealing pulsing red beneath, as though the trees were made of raw flesh.

Another scream ripped the night open.

This time, I knew it was no animal.

It was a voice—a woman’s voice—but stretched, broken, distorted into something not entirely human.

Mary froze. "It’s her," she said. "It’s Mom."

I wanted to tell her she was wrong. But the sound had her pitch. Her tone. It was the kind of detail you couldn’t forget, no matter how much you wanted to.

We moved deeper into the trees.

The fog thickened until the beam of the lantern only reached a few feet. Shapes swayed in the mist—tall, thin figures with joints bending the wrong way, their movements stuttering like broken marionettes. Their heads turned toward us, but I saw no eyes, only wet cavities that seemed to breathe.

Then I saw her.

Mom stood in a small clearing, her nightgown clinging to her skin, her arms hanging limp at her sides. Her mouth was open—too open, stretching impossibly wide as the scream poured out of her.

But it wasn’t just coming from her.

The air around her mouth shimmered, warping, as if the scream itself had form. I saw black threads twisting out from her throat, sinking into the ground, into the trees, into the fog.

Mary ran to her.

"Mary—don’t!" I shouted, but my voice was swallowed by the scream. My words vanished before they left my lips, eaten by the air.

Mary touched her, and the scream surged, a tidal wave of sound that made my vision blur and my ears feel wet. I realized the scream wasn’t just noise—it was inside me, rattling my teeth, crawling into the folds of my brain.

Mom’s eyes snapped to mine.

They were empty. Hollow. Not even white—just black pits, darker than the night. Her jaw moved, and I heard it—not with my ears, but inside my skull:

"It’s hungry."

The ground split beneath her feet. Something pale and slick pushed its way up—fingers first, impossibly long, skin stretched thin over twitching tendons. The thing’s head followed, eyeless, with a mouth that opened sideways, lined with rows of teeth like broken glass.

It breathed in the scream.

And in that moment, the forest bent toward it, the fog curling like worshippers. Every branch, every twisted trunk seemed to lean closer.

Mary turned to me, but her face was wrong. Her mouth was still moving in sync with Mom’s, both pouring out the endless, shattering scream. Black threads coiled from her lips too, dragging toward the thing’s open maw.

I tried to run. The forest wouldn’t let me.

The trees closed in, their branches knitting together. My legs felt heavy, pulled down by something in the soil—something moving beneath my skin.

The scream was growing.

It wasn’t a sound anymore—it was everything. It pressed against my eyes, my thoughts, my heartbeat. I knew that if I let it in completely, I’d never be able to stop. I’d be another mouth for it, another voice in its endless choir.

I don’t remember falling.

I woke hours later at the forest’s edge, the fog gone, the morning cold and gray. The house was silent. Mary was gone. Mom was gone.

But the scream stayed.

It hums in my teeth when I try to sleep, shivers in my bones when I’m alone, whispering at the edges of hearing. Sometimes it’s faint, almost gentle—like it’s waiting.

And sometimes, at night, it swells again.

When it does, I see them—Mary and Mom—standing just inside the tree line, their mouths open wide, the black threads writhing.

And I know one night soon, I’ll go back into those woods.

Because once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.

You can only follow it.