Del unearths an ancient statuette that awakens the dead in Woods Ferry.
Forgotten roads open the way. The narrator pulls the listener close to the fire, then sends the story toward neglected graveyards, overgrown trails, and an abandoned town nobody seems eager to visit. Woods Ferry sits past ordinary directions. A local voice lays out the route through Sunday Run, Cook's Creek, and Four Fingers Road with the calm tone of someone who knows exactly why people should stay away. The warning comes quietly. The town has been empty for as long as anyone remembers, which only makes the visitors want it more. Their curiosity starts in the dirt. A trowel hits earth, a bottle cap disappoints, and then something stranger begins to show. The object is not a harmless keepsake. It is a small old statuette, ugly enough that one person thinks it belongs underground. Naturally, it does not stay there. Someone takes it for cleaning and research, and the woods start feeling wrong in ways that are hard to laugh off. The trees bend oddly. Branches twist where they should not. A noise in the brush gets brushed aside as hunters, until the ground gives its own answer. Hands rise where no living person should be, and the easy banter breaks into panic. Heather wants proof, then movement. Something in the trees looks human only until it moves and its damaged body comes into view. Help no longer sounds safe. The figures are not ordinary people, and Woods Ferry seems ready to punish anyone who bothers its dead. The last warning lands plainly: waking what the town had already claimed was never a good idea.
