The Relic in the Wood

The night Tracie Harp was born, the moon sat heavy and red over the small Virginia town. Her mother remembered the screams of owls in the woods, the broken glass that fell from the nursery window for no reason, and the sudden cold that blanketed the house like frost.

The woman who came later—long after the house went still, wasn’t there to give well wishes.

She wasn’t alive. Not really. Her name had been Edna Harp, a distant relative whispered about but never spoken of aloud. A witch who’d vanished from town records two centuries ago, burned but not destroyed. The history of this family went back longer than any living member could place a date on. A history with a vengeance.

On Halloween night, her spirit slipped through the crack between this world and the next. She drifted into the newborn’s room, her form sagging with rot and ash, eyes two dim embers of hunger. In her skeletal hand, she carried a relic: a small iron amulet bound with leather and bone, slick with old blood.

She knelt by the crib, pressed the relic beneath the mattress, and whispered an incantation so foul the air curdled. The wood of the crib absorbed it, drinking in the curse.

The baby shifted once, then stilled, her tiny lips curling—not into a cry, but a faint, eerie smile.

⸻

Years passed. The crib was eventually broken down, its wood repurposed into a bedframe for the growing girl. No one thought twice about it. But the relic remained embedded deep in the wood, its black roots stretching into the grain like veins.

And every Halloween, the whispers grew louder.

Tracie didn’t remember when her obsession with spooky things began. She only knew that skeletons, bats, and shadows made her feel warm inside, like family. While other kids feared the dark, Tracie welcomed it. When her friends dared each other to run past the graveyard, she lingered at the gates, listening, almost as though the dead spoke only to her.

Her parents dismissed it as a phase. But her grandmother once caught her humming a tune no child should know—a guttural, croaking chant. The old woman crossed herself and muttered, “That girl was born touched.”

⸻

The possession didn’t happen all at once.

For years, it brewed inside her like storm clouds on the horizon, growing heavier with each Halloween. Small things at first: shadows moving when she was still, mirrors fogging without heat, voices that slithered into her dreams.

But last Halloween, it finally took root.

She and Lori had been drinking, dressed up and reckless. Something trivial had started the fight—Lori mocking her obsession with death, calling her “creepy.” Tracie remembered the sudden rage, the way her vision blurred red. The next thing she knew, Lori was choking on her own blood, her neck snapped at an unnatural angle.

Tracie had stared at her friend’s body, but she hadn’t felt guilt. She’d felt relief.

Because in that moment, the whispers had turned into a voice. Clear. Commanding.

“Finally,” it said. “You are mine.”

⸻

Now, in the padded white room of Northern Virginia State, Tracie rocked back and forth on her cot, gnawing at her nails until they bled. She wasn’t alone in her head anymore. She never would be.

Her soul was in a constant state of struggle to hold on to some semblance of hope that this awful evil would let her go. She sometimes welcomed the medication so that she would be oblivious to her turmoil.

She looked up at the large metal door that sealed her room. Just as a tear started to fall from her eyes, she her the lock shift and open. A nurses aid stood there in all white with a clipboard. “You have a scheduled visit today Ms. Harp, let’s go.” “Is it my mom?” She thought and hoped to herself, but it wasn’t. When she bent the corner into the cold white visitor’s section, her heart dropped into her stomach. Sitting there with her eyes full of tears, it was Mrs.Devine…Lori’s mom.