The rain in Havenwood didn't just fall; it wept. It had been weeping for three days straight, a relentless drizzle that blurred the edges of the old Victorian houses and turned the winding forest paths into slick, muddy traps. Sarah Jensen hated the rain, hated the way it mirrored the damp chill in her own life, and she especially hated the assignment that had brought her back to this forgotten corner of the Pacific Northwest.
She sat in the cramped office of the Havenwood Herald, the kind of small-town paper where the biggest story was usually Mrs. Gable's prize-winning zucchini. Her coffee was cold, her laptop screen glowed with the half-finished obituary of a man no one would remember, and the air conditioning hummed with an irritating rattle that had long since driven the editor, old Mr. Abernathy, to a permanent state of mild annoyance.
"You got a moment, Jensen?" Abernathy's voice was a gravelly rumble, cutting through the drone of the AC. He stood in the doorway, a crumpled newspaper clutched in his hand, his usually ruddy face pale.
Sarah sighed, pushing her spectacles up her nose. "For you, boss, always." She muted the local radio station, which had been playing a surprisingly upbeat bluegrass tune.
Abernathy shuffled in, dropping the paper onto her desk with a thud that echoed the weight of his news. "Forget the obit. We got something else." He pointed a trembling finger at the front page. It wasn't the Herald. It was the Seattle Times, flown in this morning, the headline stark and unforgiving: "HAVENWOOD HORROR: Local Man Found Mutilated."
Sarah felt a familiar prickle of dread, a sensation she'd tried to outrun since leaving this town ten years ago. "Mutilated?" she repeated, her voice flat. Havenwood didn't do mutilation. Havenwood did petty theft, fender benders, and occasional bar brawls.
"Yes. Peter Albright. You remember him? Ran the old general store on Main Street, before it went bust." Abernathy's eyes darted around the room as if the walls themselves were listening. "Found him early this morning, out by the old logging trail, near Miller's Creek. Torn apart, they're saying. Like... like an animal attack."
An animal attack in Havenwood wasn't entirely unheard of. Bears, cougars – the wilderness pressed in close. But "torn apart" carried a different connotation. It sounded too brutal, too… deliberate for a typical wild animal.
"The police are already swarming the area," Abernathy continued, his voice dropping to a near whisper. "Sheriff Brody's got a gag order on the details, but my cousin's a deputy. He said it was bad. Real bad. Not like anything they've seen."
Sarah felt a flicker of the old journalistic thrill, pushing past the dread. This was a story, a real one, far from zucchini contests. "What's the official word?"
"Animal attack," Abernathy scoffed, his gaze darkening. "That's what they want it to be. But the whispers are already starting, Jensen. The old ones. About the woods. About the full moon."
Sarah frowned. The full moon was... tonight. She hadn't even noticed. The constant cloud cover had made the sky a perpetual grey. "What whispers?"
Abernathy leaned in, his voice barely audible over the rattling AC. "They say… when the moon is full and the hunger stirs… something else comes out of the woods. Something old. Something that doesn't just kill. It hunts."
A shiver traced its way down Sarah's spine, a cold knot forming in her stomach. It was the same irrational fear she'd felt as a child, listening to hushed tales of shadowy figures and things that lurked just beyond the campfire's glow. She was a journalist, a cynic. She dealt in facts, not folklore. Yet, the unease in Abernathy's eyes was undeniably real.
"Go on," he urged, pushing the Seattle Times further across her desk. "Go talk to Brody. See what you can dig up. And for God's sake, be careful out there, Jensen. Havenwood… it's not as sleepy as it seems."
As Sarah gathered her notepad and recorder, a faint, almost imperceptible scent wafted into the small office from outside. It was a musky, earthy smell, tinged with something metallic and vaguely unsettling. It was the smell of the damp forest, yes, but also something primal, something that made the hairs on her arms stand on end. The whispers of Havenwood had just begun.