Everyone Who Came Back Wrong

I knew something was off with Tomasz before he finished climbing through the window.
He moved the same way he always did — that slightly hunched roll of the shoulders, the way he favored his left knee on the drop down to the fire escape landing. But when he straightened and looked at me, his eyes held a half-second delay, like a translation happening just beneath the surface. Like whatever was looking out through them had to check a reference before deciding what expression to make.
That was three hours after we’d pulled him out of Veltham Wood.
The others were still in Ekene’s apartment, waiting. None of us wanted to say the word yet. None of us wanted to admit what we’d seen in those trees.
—
It started, as these things tend to, with Simisola’s brother.
Davide had gone into Veltham Wood on a Tuesday evening in early October, the way he did every week. He ran the trail that cut along the eastern edge of the park, past the old groundskeeper’s shed, and out at the Colwick Street gate. Forty minutes, door to door. He’d done it a hundred times.
He came back in thirty-five.
Simisola called me first because she didn’t know who else to call. She’d noticed it immediately — the way Davide sat at the kitchen table and didn’t reach for his phone, the way he answered her questions in complete, careful sentences when normally he’d grunt and gesture. The way he called her by her full name, Simisola, when he’d called her Simi since they were children.
“He’s not wrong enough for anyone to believe me,” she said on the phone. Her voice was steady in that particular way that means a person is holding themselves together by main force. “He’s just… adjacent. Do you understand? Like a word that sounds right but means something slightly different.”
I understood. I’d grown up hearing stories about Veltham Wood.
The four of us who met at Ekene’s apartment that night — me, Ekene, Tomasz, and Guadalupe — had all grown up in the streets that ringed the wood. We’d heard the stories from grandmothers and uncles and the older kids who’d dared each other to sleep inside the tree line. Veltham Wood sat in the middle of the city like a splinter the city had grown around, forty acres of old-growth oak and ash hemmed in by rail lines and apartment blocks and a retail park that had been half-empty since 2009. The city had tried to develop it three times. Three times the planning had stalled, the contractors had backed out, the funding had evaporated. The wood remained.
And the wood, sometimes, returned people.
Not always. Not predictably. But the stories shared a shape: someone goes in, someone comes back a little faster than expected, and the someone who returns is almost the original person. Almost.
“We go in and we find whatever’s still in there,” Simisola said. She’d arrived last, still in her work clothes, her braids pinned up under a wool hat. “Davide is sleeping now. He went to bed at nine-fifteen, which he has never done in his life. We have a few hours.”
“Find what, exactly?” Guadalupe asked. She was sitting on the kitchen counter, arms folded, her dark eyes moving between all of us. She was the most skeptical person I knew, which was precisely why I wanted her there. Skeptics notice things believers explain away.
“The real one,” Simisola said. “The one it kept.”
Tomasz had said nothing yet. He was standing by the window looking out at the amber wash of city light above the tree line three blocks east. He’d known Davide since secondary school. When he finally turned around, his jaw was set in that particular way that meant he’d already decided.
“We go in pairs,” he said. “We don’t separate. And we don’t run.”

0 likes

About the Author

Morwenna Hexweaver — Morwenna knows 77 spells that must never be spoken aloud. Her spellbook, the “Hex Codex,” is alive and constantly rewrites itself.

— Morwenna Hexweaver

Full author profile

Categories: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy

Tags: 10min stories, atmospheric horror, city magic, dark forest, doppelganger, fantasy, friendship, short story, supernatural, urban fantasy

August 2, 2026

10min-stories