There have always been rumors about the land that stretched out behind the old house on the hill. First, people said there were bears or mountain lions. Children who strayed a little too far from their homes in the small town heard the low grumbling or the screams and ran back to the dirt road as fast as their legs could take them. If any cats wandered off, they would often disappear and never be seen again, and everyone knew they had to be tough to survive out there. No one would ever go looking for them beyond the pine trees that carpeted the ground with their soft needles.

The old house had always been empty, standing against the horizon with the windows boarded over, the walls echoing with forgotten voices. Construction crews pulled up every so often to repair the roof, but they could never say who had hired them. When the woman with long dark hair and bright green eyes pulled up and opened the front door, no one in town could talk about anything else for days. She told the postmaster her name was Brooke when she opened her P.O. box.

Brooke didn’t go into town too much except for the obligatory trips to the supermarket. She didn’t go to church or have lunch in the diner on Sundays, and anyone who tried knocking on the door to welcome her never found her home. Brooke’s car stayed in the driveway through the winter, and she planted flowers in the bloom of hope in the spring. People slowly got used to her, and she just became another part of the landscape.

But something had changed about that place. The tall trees out back started to have a different feel to them. It was almost like a giant sigh had released the tension once tangled in the Juniper branches. Rumors of parties around bonfires out in the wild started to make the rounds in high school.

The soft ground no longer hinted at something sinister, but at pathways traveled on by small creatures. Wildflowers bloomed in the summer, and patches of grass sprung up where they had never grown before. Soon, families were having picnics out in the untamed air, and lovers haunted strange new beds under the cover of the dark, forgiving sky.

The diner slowly emptied of clients and closed, and the pastor moved on to find some other town with a congregation that wasn’t steadily shrinking. The townspeople didn’t seem to even notice the changes as they all sank into a deep infatuation with the very thing that had once terrified them. There was a deep longing to explore the hidden places that no one had ever set foot in, and now everyone could only talk about the raw beauty to the wilderness. No one knew which family went first, but they all followed the siren call of something just beyond their reach.

They hammered planks over their windows and locked their doors as they found themselves unable to tear themselves away from the endless maze of the forest. They survived on what they could gather and learned how to hunt for food. They scattered all across the nooks and crannies, avoiding everyone they had known from their old lives as if they were embarrassed by the way they used to live.

Brooke was the last one to go, walking out the back door one evening. No one ever saw her again in their wild new home. She vanished just as quickly as she had come, like a soft gust of tired wind.