Everyone Who Came Back Wrong

She went to him. The rest of us stood in a loose perimeter, watching the dark between the trees. Nothing moved. But I had the persistent sense of being assessed — of something in the wood taking a long, careful measure of each of us and deciding, for now, that we weren’t worth the effort.
Davide said he’d felt a pull, deep in the trail, like a sound he couldn’t quite locate. He’d followed it off the path without fully deciding to, and then he’d been here, sitting against this tree, with no sense of how much time had passed. He hadn’t been frightened. That was the detail that unsettled me most — the wood had kept him calm while it made its copy.
Getting out was easier than getting in, which felt like another mechanism. The wood let you leave once it had what it wanted. Or once it had decided you weren’t what it was looking for.
The Davide-thing was gone when we passed back through that stretch of trees. Just gone, between one step and the next, with nothing to mark where it had stood.
—
Which brings me back to Tomasz on the fire escape, climbing through Ekene’s window with that half-second delay behind his eyes.
We’d made it out. All five of us, Davide included. I’d counted. I’d watched. I’d been so focused on Davide — on whether the man walking beside Simisola was really him, on the small tests she kept running, asking him things only he would know — that I hadn’t been watching Tomasz closely enough.
He’d been at the rear again. And somewhere between the tree line and Colwick Street, in those last fifty feet of dark beneath the canopy, the wood had made its trade.
The thing in the apartment looked at me and smiled with Tomasz’s mouth.
“I’m fine,” it said. “You’re looking at me like something’s wrong.”
Ekene appeared in the doorway behind it. He’d seen it too — I could tell from the careful neutrality of his face, the way he was holding himself very still.
Guadalupe was already on her feet.
And then Simisola, still holding her real brother by the arm, said: “Tomasz. What did you say to me in the wood, when Ekene was trying to hold you back?”
The thing with Tomasz’s face processed this. The delay was fractionally longer than it should have been.
“I don’t remember,” it said.
“Tomasz would remember,” she said. “He remembers everything. He’s been remembering every mistake he’s ever made since he was twelve years old. It’s his defining characteristic and his worst quality and he knows it.”
Something moved across the thing’s face then — not anger, not panic, but something that looked almost like disappointment. As though it had hoped to be convincing for longer.
It went to the window. Not rushing, not fleeing — just withdrawing, with a kind of patient dignity, back out onto the fire escape and down into the dark between the buildings.
We went back in before dawn. All four of us, this time without Davide, who was in no state to return, and with the explicit understanding that we were not going further in than the first tree line. We called for Tomasz at the edge of the wood, taking turns, our voices flat and strange in that pressurized quiet.
He came out on his own.
He was sitting on the exposed root of a birch just inside the tree line, forearms on his knees, looking at his hands. He’d been there for a while, I think. He looked up when he heard us, and his face did all the things a face should do — the flicker of relief, the embarrassment underneath it, the careful reconstruction of composure that was so specifically, unmistakably him.
“I heard it,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t real. I heard it anyway.” He paused. “Is that what it’s like? What it’s like to want something badly enough that you follow it into the dark without deciding to?”
None of us answered right away. The wood was quiet around us, the old oaks standing in their patient rows, the sweet-rot smell drifting on a cold predawn breeze.
It was Guadalupe who finally said: “Yes. That’s exactly what it’s like.”

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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

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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