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August 3rd, 2023
It was supposed to be just another summer evening in Fairhollow, a small town tucked between pine-wrapped hills and fog-draped valleys.
The air was thick with cicada hum and the smell of sap and scorched asphalt. Teens laughed outside corner stores. Lawn sprinklers ticked on schedules. Parents whispered about taxes and politics, and someone, somewhere, grilled burgers in a backyard. In other words—normal.
But normal had an expiration date. And it was about to rot.
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August 5th, 2023
7:42 AM
The first scream didn't come from the forest—it came from the woman who found what the forest had vomited out.
Her name was Holly Wren. 54. Morning jogger. She called 911 gasping, her voice mangled by panic. The dispatcher barely made sense of her until she shrieked three words:
"His face's gone!"
Police reached the trail twenty minutes later. At the base of Hollow Pine Ridge, surrounded by broken branches and twitching flies, they found a body. Or what was left of it.
Male. Late twenties. Identified by his wallet as Bryan Keane, a local wildlife photographer.
No eyes. No jaw. No fingers. The rest looked chewed, but not by any animal in the region. His legs were twisted backwards, like something had yanked them and just… kept pulling.
They found his phone in his sock. Battery dead. No recent calls. Just static-filled voicemails.
The coroner quit a week later.
---
August 8th, 2023
9:11 PM
Another call came in. A man named Carter Ellison had gone missing two nights ago during a hiking trip near the same ridge. He'd told his girlfriend he was filming a vlog in the woods. Never came back.
Local authorities hesitated, but public pressure mounted.
A search party was organized.
Seven men.
Two dogs.
Three hours into the woods.
They never came out.
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August 9th, 2023
2:17 AM
A hiker, not part of the search party, stumbled across something in the underbrush near a clearing.
Not bodies.
Not gear.
Just a camera, wedged under a twisted root, caked in mud and blood. The lens cracked.
They took it to the sheriff's office. A tech cleaned it up and reviewed the files. Most were useless. Blurry. Out of focus. Shaky hands and panicked breathing.
But the last photo—
That one got leaked. Of course it did. And like all things online, it grew legs.
The photo showed something standing between the trees. Slouched. Wrong. Almost human but not. Its skin was fleshy, sagging in all the wrong places, mimicking the clothing of a man it likely devoured. Its face—no, its mask of a face—grinned like something wearing skin for fun.
Its eyes were dark static.
---
August 10th – August 16th, 2023
The days bled together like bad memories.
One body turned into three.
Three became seven.
Then sixty-four.
Each corpse was found deeper in the forest, closer to what the locals began calling the "Wound." No one could agree on what it was—a sinkhole, a fault line, a collapsed bunker. But animals avoided it. Phones died near it. Cameras shorted out. Even light seemed to dim when it passed through that stretch of trees.
Local authorities shut down all access. That didn't stop people from going in.
They just never came back.
Panic spread across town like mold on wet wood. News vans arrived. Then disappeared. No broadcast ever aired.
Fairhollow's mayor declared a state of emergency. Military vehicles rolled in that same afternoon, tires crushing pinecones and silence alike.
By August 17th, an elite containment team—specialized SWAT personnel, 200 of them—was deployed into Hollow Pine Ridge.
They were trained for chemical warfare, biological freak shows, and urban supernatural threats. Their armor looked more like sci-fi exosuits than riot gear—black plating, oxygen units, portable EM scanners, and advanced optic tech designed to cut through smoke, fog, and darkness.
They went in at 0600.
---
August 18th, 2023
0544 Hours – they came back.
Mostly.
No casualties. But forty of them had to be airlifted out with injuries ranging from third-degree burns, to deep puncture wounds, to cranial seizures. Several began foaming at the mouth upon re-entry into the town limits. One of them was found smashing his helmet against a wall, screaming, "Don't let it remember me!" until his vocal cords ruptured.
But they brought something with them.
Strapped down in a cryogenic box of reinforced carbon plating, surrounded by five inches of blessed lead, was a corpse. Humanoid. Around 8 feet tall. Skin stretched and blistered, its facial structure resembling something between a mannequin and a skinned deer skull. Its body was covered in flesh mimicking what looked like an old ranger's uniform, fused into its muscle.
Its mouth stretched past its jawline, rows of thin bone needles for teeth.
Its eyes—still open—swirled with distorted black static.
That night, the lights in the entire eastern district of Fairhollow blinked out. Three hours later, they came back on.
All the lab techs analyzing the creature's body were found unconscious or missing.
And one message was burned into the wall of the containment room:
"IT'S STILL LISTENING."
---
August 18th, 2023
Fairhollow tried to breathe again.
The forest was quarantined. The roads were guarded. Rumors still swirled like gnats around a corpse, but life, as it tends to, crept back in. Kids returned to school. Shops reopened. People smiled again—nervously.
But then came the silence.
Not from the forest this time.
From the zoo.
Fairhollow's only zoo, Stonewell Conservatory, was quiet that morning. No roaring lions. No shrieking birds. No chittering monkeys. Just wind and an awful smell.
The zookeeper on duty, Leila Griggs, arrived at 6:32 AM. By 6:39 AM, she was outside the front gates, shaking, eyes wide, phone in hand, whispering over and over,
"They're gone. They're all gone."
Police arrived an hour later.
Every cage was open.
Every enclosure was empty.
No broken locks. No damaged gates. Just smears of blood across floors, walls, and fences—thick trails of it. Blood that didn't belong to any species on record. Some of it bubbled, never drying. Other patches pulsed slowly, like muscle. It coated the feeding stations, the walkways, even the ceiling of the main visitor center.
Security cameras?
Gone.
Not glitched. Not static.
Just… blank. Wiped clean.
No footage. No logs.
In the otter exhibit, one word was scratched into the glass, deep enough to leave white scars:
"STILL HUNGRY."
No animal bones were found. Not a single trace of fur. The elephant enclosure, one of the most secure places in the zoo, had blood spread in a spiral, forming the shape of a long, smiling mouth.
That same night, a child reported seeing a "tall shadow wearing a cheetah's face" staring into his bedroom window.
His family lived eleven blocks from the zoo.
---
---
August 19th, 2023
The government responded fast.
By midday, a team of thirteen agents—private black-ops under the Department of Paranormal Threat Assessment—was sent to Stonewell Zoo under strict orders: observe, document, survive.
They were armed with infrared sensors, tranquilizers, gas masks, silver-lined blades, high-powered rifles, and experimental sonar-pulse grenades—designed to destabilize invisible frequencies.
They set up camp in the aviary dome—a steel-reinforced greenhouse with a full 360° view of the zoo grounds. By 10:00 PM, all contact with them was restricted to a secure channel.
Everything was calm. Until 2:17 AM.
The cameras, once again, cut to black.
For 18 minutes, no transmission came through.
At 2:35 AM, screaming returned—faint at first, then explosive.
Command tried reaching them—no response.
It wasn't until 5:41 AM, right before sunrise, that one survivor stumbled out through the zoo gates, barefoot, limping, drenched in blood, and missing two fingers.
His name was Agent Collin Mears.
He didn't speak for hours. He just kept whispering something to himself.
When he finally talked, he couldn't stop shaking.
> "They weren't gone… they were waiting."
"The cages weren't empty. They were open from the inside."
"They still looked like animals. But their skin… peeled wrong."
"One of the lions had three jaws. Its eyes were sideways."
"The gorilla stood like a man. It spoke. Said my name."
"We shot them. It didn't help. Their blood sang when it hit the ground."
"We weren't watching the zoo… it was watching us."
He passed out mid-sentence, suffering from blood loss, exhaustion, and a severe mental break. His heart rate spiked every time someone said the word "zoo."
Before falling unconscious for the final time that day, he muttered one last thing:
> "They're not animals anymore. They're... listening through their eyes."
---
---
August 22nd, 2023
9:47 AM
The government tried to cover it up. They always do when something doesn't fit the narrative. After the zoo incident, where the strange creature was sighted tearing through cages and leaving behind shredded bodies, they locked down the area, sweeping it under a veil of secrecy. But there was something more they couldn't control.
Three days after the zoo event, something started happening at Fairhollow Elementary School. The kids had always been a little odd, but this... this was something different.
It began slowly. At first, it was a few of them, walking around with wide, vacant eyes. They moved as though they were in a daze, staring into space, like they could see something the rest of the world couldn't. Their teachers chalked it up to fatigue. Maybe too many late nights playing video games. But it was only a matter of time before the pattern emerged.
The kids started drawing. All of them. Over and over again. What was strange, though, was the subject. They were drawing the same thing. A man in a fedora and trench coat.
His face was an unnatural shade of red, disfigured in ways that made it look like he had been burned—or worse. He grinned, a twisted, almost mocking smile, the kind that made your skin crawl.
And yet, instead of fear, the children seemed to hold a bizarre comfort in these drawings. They spoke of him like an old friend, a protector even, calling him "Red-Face." It was as if this horrific figure didn't terrify them at all. In fact, they believed he was watching over them, offering them some kind of twisted safety.
The authorities tried to intervene. They searched the school—every classroom, hallway, and even the janitor's closet. They couldn't find him, of course. There was no sign of Red-Face anywhere, not in the building, nor in the footage from the security cameras.
The school tried to clamp down on it, sending out notices to parents, banning any talk of Red-Face. But it didn't matter. The children wouldn't stop. They didn't fear him. They didn't listen when told to forget about him. They were convinced—utterly convinced—that Red-Face wasn't a threat. He was their protector.
---
August 29th, 2023
10:15 AM
It had been a week since the schoolchildren had started to act strange—since the drawings and the whispers of Red-Face. Then, in the blink of an eye, they were gone.
One morning, the halls of Fairhollow Elementary stood eerily quiet. The sound of children's voices and footsteps, usually so constant and persistent, had evaporated like mist. Teachers arrived to find their classrooms untouched, save for the bags, lunchboxes, and notebooks left behind, scattered across desks as if the children had just… vanished.
There were no signs of struggle, no evidence of force. The classrooms were pristine. The whiteboards were wiped clean. The lockers were closed. It was as if every single one of the children had simply walked away.
The only sign that something out of the ordinary had occurred was the note left behind, sitting neatly on the principal's desk:
To those still looking,
Do not fear. The children are safe, and they are where they belong—far from harm, far from your reach. The world they were living in was too small for them. They have found their true home now. I will watch over them, protect them, guide them.
You will not understand, and I do not need you to. You never did.
I promise to return them when the time is right. When the world is ready.
Until then, remember this: Not all things are meant to be understood. Some things are just... meant to be.
Signed,
Red-Face
---
August 30th, 2023 (3:06 PM)
A sense of dread hung thick in the air as the search for the children continued. Parents were frantically trying to piece together any clue that might explain the sudden disappearance. The streets buzzed with frantic voices, their concern for the missing children turning into panic. The local authorities, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the situation, had no answers, and the whispers of an unknown horror grew louder.
That night, as fear took root in every home, a decision was made. A covert operation was put into motion. A team was dispatched to install surveillance cameras in the school, determined to gather evidence or find some trace of the children that had vanished without a trace. They took up a position several blocks away, hidden from view, with eyes glued to the monitors, waiting for any sign of life. Tension coursed through the team as they set up their operation, knowing this might be the key to unlocking the mystery.
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August 31st, 2023
The next day, the surveillance footage would deliver a chilling revelation. When the cameras came online and the night unfolded before their eyes, the team was left shaken. The footage showed the mutated zoo animals—the grotesque creatures that had terrorized the town—raiding the school. They prowled through the halls, sniffing and searching, but there was no sign of the children. The creatures searched for an hour before giving up and leaving.
The footage raised unsettling questions. Why had the animals come to the school? And why had they left without the children? Had Red-Face kept his promise to care for them? Some of the team members, who had doubted the existence of Red-Face, now found themselves uncertain, believing that something far more complicated was at play. The unsettling thought settled into their minds: maybe, just maybe, Red-Face was telling the truth.
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September 1st, 2023 (6:00 AM)
The breakthrough came the next morning. A passerby—an ordinary woman simply out for a walk—spotted a strange sight. She was on her way to the store when she saw the children. All of them, without exception, were playing together in the school playground, laughing and running as if nothing had ever happened. The once-terrified children were now joyously reunited, as if the horrors they had endured never touched them.
The woman was startled, unsure of what she was seeing, but she reported the sighting to the authorities.
Moments later, parents rushed to the scene, their hopes and fears mixed in a whirlwind of confusion. SWAT teams were dispatched immediately, arriving within five minutes, but by the time they reached the playground, the children were already surrounded by their parents, their faces beaming with unnatural joy. The children looked well-fed, well-cared for, and completely at ease. They had no trace of fear, no sign of the trauma that should have been there after days of being missing.
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September 1st, 2023 (Later that day)
As the parents gathered their children, anxious and eager to reunite, the authorities began their interrogation. The children's stories were puzzling, to say the least. They spoke of Mr. Red-Face, calling him "Mr." out of respect. He had cared for them, fed them, and even taught them lessons they had missed in school. They seemed utterly unconcerned with the strangeness of their experience, describing their time with Red-Face as a pleasant one. They recalled how he treated them well, like a teacher and a caretaker, and how he taught them things they would need for the future.
The children spoke of Red-Face with a certain fondness, and their calmness only made the situation more disturbing. How could they speak of a creature with such monstrous features—who had been known to leave grotesque scenes in his wake—with such ease and comfort? They mentioned how Mr. Red-Face wasn't like other monsters they had been told about. He didn't harm them. He didn't make them afraid. Instead, he cared for them in a way that didn't seem to match the expectations of his horrific appearance.
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September 4th, 2023
As the days passed, the townspeople and officials alike were left with lingering questions. Who was Red-Face? What kind of creature was he? Was he truly the monster they had feared? Or had something about him been misinterpreted? Why had he chosen to help the children, despite his terrifying form?
The mystery surrounding Red-Face only deepened. Some began to wonder if he was a figure of myth and folklore, someone or something that had taken on a life of its own in the shadows. Others began to question whether the children had truly been in danger at all. Could Red-Face have been watching over them, protecting them in a twisted but genuine way?
But the most unsettling thought of all was this: if Red-Face was a creature capable of both terror and care, of monstrous violence and tender protection, then who could say what else he might do? What other monsters, both horrific and kind, lurked in the shadows? And were they truly monsters, or were they misunderstood beings, like Red-Face?
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September 11th, 2023
A week after the strange disappearance and the unexpected return of the children, everything took a sharp turn for the worse. The town that had only just begun to recover from the unsettling events now faced an all-out assault.
At 8:06 AM, the first signs of trouble emerged. Monsters, unlike any the town had ever seen, began to emerge from the shadows, their forms twisted and surreal—straight out of an analog-horror nightmare. The creatures, their bodies contorted and strange, had an unnatural aura about them, appearing as if they were ripped from the fabric of reality itself. They were grotesque in their appearance, their forms shifting and undulating in ways that defied all logic. They were silent at first, but then chaos struck.
These abominations massacred everything in their path, tearing through buildings, streets, and everything they could reach. They ranged in different shapes and sizes, some towering over the townsfolk, others barely visible but just as deadly. The town's defenses were caught completely off-guard, and panic spread like wildfire as the horrifying creatures wreaked havoc.
A battle quickly ensued. The specialized team—the last line of defense—rushed into the fray, guns blazing, determined to hold the monsters back. But no matter how hard they fought, the creatures overwhelmed them with an otherworldly ferocity. For every blow struck, the monsters seemed to grow stronger, faster, more relentless.
8:26 AM
Just 20 minutes after the attack began, the town's leaders made the decision to evacuate. The people flooded the streets, scrambling to escape the devastation. It was a scene of pure terror, with people running for their lives, not knowing if they would ever see their homes again. The monsters, however, continued their relentless march, showing no signs of stopping.
Through what could only be described as divine intervention, the casualties were mercifully low. The SWAT soldiers, brave and resolute in their duty, gave their lives to protect the civilians, holding back the creatures long enough for the evacuation to take place. They fought valiantly, knowing they were sacrificing themselves for the greater good, and by doing so, ensured that no civilian lives were lost in the initial assault.
But even as the town began to empty out, the monsters did not cease.
They didn't stop to rest or regroup—they simply moved on. Their attack didn't end in Hollow Pine Ridge. They tore through the town, their grisly work done, and proceeded to neighboring towns, spreading fear and chaos in their wake.
And there, amidst the destruction, a quiet realization dawned: It had all started here, in Hollow Pine Ridge—the place where the first body was found. What began with one horrific encounter had led to this cataclysmic moment. But who or what had sent these creatures? Why now? The questions remained, unanswered as the monsters moved further into the world.
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End Of Chapter 1