November 3, 2025
10:00 PM CDT

The sun had dipped below the horizon, casting the farmhouse into shadow as Lucy hurried to finish her chores. The fall air had turned chilly, biting at her skin as she walked across the yard, the crunch of dry leaves beneath her boots a welcome sound in the evening stillness.

But there was one task she always dreaded—the root cellar.

The cellar was located at the back of the house, hidden beneath the sagging porch. Her father had always warned her to stay away from it, especially at night. “It’s not safe,” he would say, his voice always low and strained when the subject came up. But that had been before he fell ill, before her mother had died, and before the creeping dread had settled over the farmhouse like a shadow.

Now, with the house falling silent each evening, the root cellar seemed to hum with an energy of its own, as though something lived beneath the wooden steps. Something that had been waiting for a long time.

Tonight, Lucy’s father had asked her to fetch some potatoes from the cellar. He was too weak to make the trip himself, and Lucy could hardly say no. The evening had grown colder, and a thick fog had begun to roll in from the forest, swallowing the world outside in an eerie, gray haze.

As she descended the wooden steps into the cellar, the air grew colder still, the stone walls pressing in on her from all sides. Her lantern flickered, casting fleeting shadows that danced across the jars of preserved vegetables and old wooden shelves. The faint smell of earth and rot filled her nose as she reached for the sack of potatoes, her fingers brushing against the cool, damp earth beneath them.

But as her hand closed around the sack, something shifted in the corner of the cellar. The lantern flickered, and for a moment, the light revealed the shape of a woman standing in the farthest corner, her long, tangled hair draped over her face. Her clothes were dark and ragged, as if they had not been washed in years.

Lucy froze. Her heart pounded in her chest as she slowly backed away, but the woman remained unmoving, her face hidden beneath the dark veil of hair.

“W-Who are you?” Lucy’s voice trembled as she spoke. “What do you want?”

The woman’s head tilted slightly, and Lucy could hear the faintest rasp of breath from behind the hair. Her feet felt as though they were glued to the floor, her legs too weak to carry her away. She could not look away, as though the woman’s presence had rooted her to the spot.

“The root cellar has always been mine,” the woman whispered, her voice low and gravelly, as if she had not spoken in ages. “I am the keeper of what grows beneath. And now, you’re part of the harvest.”

Lucy’s breath caught in her throat. Something in the woman’s voice was not right—it was not the voice of someone alive. She backed away, but the cellar seemed to stretch longer, the walls moving with every step. The ground beneath her feet seemed to pulse, as if it were alive. The woman’s dark eyes flicked up toward her, her face now half-lit in the dim lantern light.

“The roots… they grow deeper than you know,” the woman hissed. “They take everything. They take those who belong to the land.”

The cellar door slammed shut with a deafening crack, locking Lucy inside. The woman’s hand shot out, grabbing her wrist with a strength that shouldn’t have been possible. The skin felt like ice beneath her fingers, the touch sending a chill so cold it numbed her to the bone.

With a twisted grin, the woman whispered, “You are the last root to be harvested.”

Lucy screamed, her voice lost in the depths of the earth as the ground opened beneath her, swallowing her whole. The roots beneath the cellar were alive now, curling around her legs, pulling her down into the dark, waiting earth below.

And in the distance, deep in the cellar’s shadows, the woman’s voice whispered, “The harvest never ends.”