The Mute

The cabin was quiet, except for the snap of a dying fire and the clink of empty bottles swinging in the dark.

I was hunched beneath a heavy oak table, its legs thick and knotted like the trunks of old trees. My knees pressed against the floorboards as my breath sat tight inside my chest.

Outside, something moved.

The boards whined beneath a slow, deliberate weight. Each step landed after a long silence, as though whatever walked there had all the time in the world.

I had no idea what was moving through the cabin—whether it was human or something that wore the shape well enough to fool the dark.

But then a name entered my mind.

The Mute.

No voice had spoken, and no sound had broken the silence. Yet the name slid into my mind, cold and certain. I knew what to call it, but still didn’t know what it was.

Then the footsteps stopped.

For a moment, only the whispering fire in the hearth remained.

Suddenly, its head bent low, and I saw a face. No… I felt it.

It was bald and vaguely human, but wrong in ways my mind couldn’t make sense of. Its skin looked paper-thin, covered with crevices like mud dried too long under an unforgiving sun. Blood seeped slowly through those fractures, thick and slow like sap from a wounded tree.

Its eyes weren’t there, just two black hollows that pulled your gaze in like gravity.

I wanted to look away, but couldn’t.

We stared at one another, if you could call it staring- the moment dragged into something unbearable. The creature didn’t breathe, didn’t make a sound. Just those empty places where eyes should have been.

Then… Darkness… Silence.

When I woke up, I couldn’t move.

I tried to lift my arms, but nothing happened. I tried to scream, but no sound came. My body wasn’t sitting, standing, or even lying the way a body should.

I was spread on the floor, my arms and legs flattened and spread into shape. My skin felt tight and waxy, drawn over something rigid beneath.

I could see, but not through my eyes. My head had been mounted near the doorway, facing into the room, while the rest of me lay across the wooden boards.

I was a rug. A living trophy. The kind you see in hunting cabins. Except this time, the kill was me, and I hadn’t died.

People came and went. Boots stomped on me, heavy soles cracking the bones that hadn’t been removed. Every step was a sting of white-hot pain, every laugh a hammer against my soul.

I tried to cry, tried to blink, tried to tell them I was still there. But I had no voice, no one looked down, and no one noticed.

Days may have passed. Possibly even weeks. Time had become meaningless, measured only in footsteps and the occasional flicker of firelight.

Eventually, I stopped trying to scream. I watched as the world walked over me, forgetting I was ever a person.

And in the hush, when no one was there, I could feel The Mute’s gaze lingering—like it had never left. Like, somehow, I was still under that table.

Waiting.