THE APPALACHIAN MIMIC

 

Part One: The Silence of the Hollow

The grief was not a clean break, but a slow splintering, like frost fracturing a granite tombstone from within. Elias Thorne carried it with him, this internal fracture, into the deep green belly of the Appalachians. He had traded the cacophony of his old life—the din of a failing marriage, the shrill tinnitus of a career in ruins, the hollow echo of a child’s room left untouched—for a silence he imagined would be healing. The cabin, purchased sight-unseen with the last of his inheritance, was to be his chrysalis.

It was not a cabin in any romantic sense. It was a gaunt, two-room structure of grey, unpainted timber, hunched against the slope of a place called Black Root Hollow. The mountains here were not majestic; they were oppressive. They crowded the sky, a endless roll of deep blue and charcoal green that seemed to absorb light and sound with equal avarice. The air itself had weight and taste—a cool, sweet-rot scent of leaf mold, damp stone, and the faint, iron tang of a distant stream. It was the smell of things perpetually decaying into other things.

Elias’s days carved themselves into a desperate, silent ritual. He rose at dawn, when mist lay in the hollow like a sodden quilt, smothering the bases of the poplars and oaks. He drank bitter coffee from an enamel tin, the steam mingling with his breath in the chilly air. He would split wood, the thwock of the axe against seasoned oak a startling, almost violent punctuation in the stillness. The afternoons were for walking, or what he called walking. It was more a slow, deliberate penetration into the green gloom of the forest that pressed in on all sides.

The woods were never truly silent, he learned. But their sounds were those of absence. The creak of a massive, ancient hemlock, swaying in a wind he could not feel on the ground. The papery rustle of a copperhead sliding through a bed of last year’s leaves. The sporadic, heavy plop of a wet rhododendron leaf hitting the forest floor. But there were no birdsongs. He noted this on his third day, a realization that crept in like groundwater. No chickadees, no jays, no distant cry of a hawk. It was an avian vacuum, and the emptiness it left behind was filled with a listening quality, as if the trees themselves were holding their breath.

His only company was memory, and it was a treacherous companion. It brought him Claire’s laugh, which would now morph, mid-thought, into the final, exhausted sigh she’d given him on their doorstep. It brought him Liam’s small, sticky hand in his, which would dissolve into the chilling memory of the hospital’s plastic rails. In the city, he could outrun these ghosts with noise. Here, they sat with him at his rough-hewn table, their presence more substantial than the canned beans he ate for supper.

The first incident was so subtle he dismissed it as a trick of the mind, the product of isolation.

He was at the woodpile, shirt stuck to his back with a cold sweat, when he heard his mother call his name. Not his mother as she was at the end—frail and querulous—but her voice from his childhood, warm and liquid, the way she’d called him in from play. “Elias… time to come in.” It came from the west, down the hollow, woven into the faint breeze. He straightened up, a lump in his throat, his heart a painful drum. He stood for ten minutes, listening. There was only the sigh of the wind through a million leaves. A grief-induced auditory hallucination, he told himself. The mountain was just an echo chamber for his regrets.

The second was visual.

Returning from a walk at twilight, the world bathed in a bruise-purple light, he saw his own shadow stretched long and lean ahead of him by the lantern’s glow. But as he passed a particularly dense thicket of mountain laurel, his shadow’s arm—the one holding the axe—seemed to detach for a fraction of a second, its outline blooming into something else. Something with too many fingers, or perhaps tendrils, that gestured toward the thicket before snapping back into the familiar human silhouette. He stopped dead, blood freezing in his veins. He raised the lantern, its yellow light trembling. The laurel leaves were dark, waxy, and still. “You’re losing it, Thorne,” he whispered, the sound swallowed by the gathering dark.

Then came the night of the voices on the wind.

A storm had rolled in, not with violent thunder, but with a deep, basso pressure and a whispering rain. Elias lay in his cot, listening to the drops patter on the cedar-shingle roof. And then, beneath the rain, he heard them. Fragments of conversation, overlapping, impossible to source.

A snippet of Claire’s voice, angry: “—you never listen—”
A burst of Liam’s toddler giggle.
The gruff tone of his father, long dead: “—boy needs to toughen up—”
His own voice, from some forgotten argument: “—I can’t do this anymore—”

They swirled around the cabin, pressing at the windows, seeping under the door. Not loud, but intimate, as if the speakers were just on the other side of the logs. Elias pulled the rough wool blanket over his head, clamping his hands over his ears. He felt a primal terror, not of a thing, but of the violation. This deep, ancient silence had been scraped raw, and from the wound oozed the sound-track of his every failure.

He did not sleep. At first grey light, he left the cabin, needing to see the world restored to simple, solid reality. The fog was thicker than usual, a milky exhalation from the earth that reduced the forest to ghostly outlines. The air was preternaturally still, the rain having ceased. And the silence was back, but it was different now. It was a held silence. A waiting silence.

He walked to the edge of the clearing where his property dissolved into the untamed wood. There, between the bole of a lightning-split oak and a moss-covered boulder, he saw it.

A figure.

It was the approximate height and shape of a man, but its surface was wrong. It looked as if it had been woven from the forest floor itself—from wet clay, from shredded bark, from the pale threads of fungal mycelium, and from something dark and glistening like rot. It was slumped, unfinished. But as Elias watched, paralyzed, it began to move.

Its head, a lump of mottled matter, lifted. Where a face should have been, the material swirled and puckered, features attempting to coalesce and melting away like wax over a flame. A mouth-gash opened, closed, opened again. And from it came a sound that shattered the last vestige of Elias’s sanity: a chaotic, wet choir of every voice he had heard on the wind, now blended into a single, desperate utterance.

It spoke with Claire’s tenderness, Liam’s confusion, his father’s disapproval, his own despair, all braided into a singular, soul-chilling sentence:

“We… are… so… cold… in… the… ground… Elias…”

Then the thing—the Mimic—took a shuddering step forward. The movement was all wrong, a jerky, puppet-like motion, as if it were learning the mechanics of tendons and joints as it went. And its face… it finally settled. The melting features slowed their churn, resolving into a terrible, familiar approximation. It was his own face, but softened, younger. It was Liam’s face, as it might have looked at five years old, but rendered in forest filth and inhabited by an ancient, hungry void. The eyes were the worst: deep pools of absolute black, without pupil or white, yet somehow focused on him with a terrifying, knowing intensity.

It reached out a limb that was neither arm nor branch, but a crude amalgamation of both. A sound escaped Elias’s throat, a whimper lost in the suffocating fog. The thing tilted its stolen, childish head, and from its mismatched mouth, it spoke again, this time in a perfect, flawless replication of his dead son’s voice, a voice he had fought for years to remember clearly and now would haunt him until his last breath:

“Daddy? Why did you leave me all alone?”

The world went white at the edges. Elias Thorne did not run. He simply broke. He fell backwards into the damp leaf litter, a silent scream locked in his chest, as the Mimic, wearing his son’s smile like a ill-fitting mask, took another step out of the trees and into his clearing.

Part Two: The Clay-Forged Son

Time became a syrupy, non-linear thing. The grey light, the fog, the abomination wearing his child’s smile—it all existed in a suspended, nightmare tableau. Elias’s mind, that fragile vessel already cracked by grief, finally split open. Rational thought didn't flee; it was devoured, replaced by a primal, trembling stasis. He was prey, frozen in the shadow of the predator.

The Mimic did not pounce. It studied.

Its head—that grotesque sculpture of damp earth, twigs, and something bluish like old meat—cocked to the side with a sound like wet leather stretching. The Liam-face was not a mask, but a grotesque impression, as if the creature had understood the concept of a child’s features from a single, grief-blurred memory and molded its substance to a vague, unsettling approximation. The black, pupil-less eyes drank in Elias’s prostrate form. They were not windows to a soul, but pits, sinkholes that seemed to pull the very light from the air around them.

It took another step. Its footfall made no sound on the mat of decaying leaves. The limb that had reached out now lowered, and the creature crouched, bringing its horrific visage level with Elias’s own. A smell washed over him—not the clean decay of the forest, but the cloying, sweet-thick odor of a freshly opened grave, of turned earth and corrupted marrow.

Its mouth, a too-wide rend in the clay-like flesh, moved again. But the voice that emerged was no longer the perfect, piercing replica of Liam’s. It was degraded, a warped phonograph record. It was Liam’s voice filtered through a mouthful of soil, layered with the gurgle of a subterranean stream and the dry rasp of beetle wings.

“Daddy… c-cold. The d-d-dark is… sticky.”

A sound finally tore from Elias’s throat—a choked, animal whimper. The reaction seemed to please the Mimic. A ripple passed through its form, a shiver of reconfiguration. The Liam-features softened, blurred, and bled away, reforming into another familiar set of lines: the sharper jaw, the narrower eyes, the perpetually disappointed set of the mouth. It was his father, Arthur Thorne, but seen through the fog of childhood fear. The voice that emerged was a gravelly boom, undercut by that same pervasive, wet corruption.

“Get up, boy. You lying there like a sack of meal. Is this what I raised?”

Instinct, deeper than thought, flared. A lifetime of cowering before that tone, of straightening his spine under that judgment, sparked a neural pathway untouched by terror. Elias scrambled backwards, his hands and heels digging trenches in the loam, putting a precious three feet between him and the thing.

The Mimic wearing his father’s face did not pursue. It tilted its new head, and Elias saw a terrible intelligence at work in that liquid, reshaping flesh. It was learning. It was testing stimuli and response. His fear was data. His recoil was a valuable metric.

It changed again.

This transition was slower, more agonizingly intimate. The clay-flesh of its chest swelled and reshaped. The harsh lines of Arthur Thorne dissolved, flowing like wet sandstone into softer curves. A suggestion of a sweater Elias remembered, the color of faded lavender. Shoulder-length hair, grey-streaked, formed from skeins of fine, root-like filaments. The face became a mournful, loving map of wrinkles around the eyes—his mother, Eleanor, in the last year of her life, when cancer had made her a wraith but her voice remained a harbor.

The voice, when it came, was a masterpiece of cruel forgery. It was her whisper, frail and paper-thin, filled with a love so profound it had always been a weight.

“My Eli… you’re so far from home. This place… it’s in the stones. It remembers. Let it remember for you. It’s easier that way. Just… let go.”

The words were a psychic sedative. They echoed the secret desire he had nursed since arriving here: to simply cease, to let the green silence absorb him into its indifferent history. He felt his muscles loosen, the will to fight seeping out of him like blood from a wound. His breath hitched, not in a sob, but in a sigh of surrender.

The Mimic saw it. A tremor of what might have been triumph passed through its form. It extended its hand—now a delicate, painfully detailed replica of his mother’s, down to the wedding band and the prominent knuckles—palm up, in an offering. An invitation.

“Come with me,” it breathed, the sweet-rot smell now laced with the phantom scent of her lavender talcum powder. “The hollow is deep. The quiet is complete. You can sleep, Eli. No more dreams.”

Elias’s hand twitched in the leaves, halfway to rising to meet that spectral invitation. His vision blurred, fog and memory merging. He was ten years old, sick with fever, and her cool hand was on his brow. He wanted that. God, how he wanted that oblivion.

Then, a counter-memory, sharp and sudden as a splinter: Liam’s birth. The shocking, fierce grip of his son’s tiny, perfect hand around his index finger. A grip of life, of shocking, vibrant claim. Not a release, but a bond.

His eyes, glassy with submission, focused on the Mimic’s outstretched hand. Up close, the perfection fractured. The “skin” was a mosaic of moss spores and insect chitin. The fingernails were slivers of abalone shell, incongruous and wrong. The wedding band was a twisted circle of pale root.

It was a lie. A beautiful, heart-breaking, predatory lie.

A raw, guttural noise was ripped from Elias’s chest—not a scream, but a roar of negation. He did not take the hand. Instead, he lunged sideways, his own hand closing not around flesh, but around the cold, solid haft of the axe he had dropped. The movement was desperate, clumsy.

The Mimic recoiled. Not in fear, but in what seemed like startled curiosity. The Eleanor-face dissolved into a churning vortex of mud and fragmented matter. The overlapping voices returned, a tempest of stolen sounds:

“—why—don’t—love—Daddy—wait—come back—so cold—!”

It rose to its full height, its form losing specificity, becoming a shifting, unstable column of forest detritus and malign intent. It did not attack. It began to dissipate. Not vanishing, but unraveling. Its substance seemed to bleed backwards into the landscape—into the moss on the boulder, the fog clinging to the oak’s bark, the dark soil itself. Within seconds, it was gone, leaving only the impression of its presence: a deeper chill in the air, the overwhelming scent of turned earth, and a patch of leaf litter that looked subtly scoured, as if every insect, every fungus, every ounce of vitality had been sucked out.

Elias knelt, axe clutched to his chest, sobbing great, ragged gasps of air that burned his lungs. He had not won. He had simply refused an offer. The thing was not gone. It had returned to the medium from which it came. The mountain had flexed a muscle, and he had seen its teeth.

He stumbled back to the cabin, every shadow a pooling threat, every rustle a half-formed voice. He barred the door, though he knew the futility. The Mimic didn’t need doors. It was in the sigh of the wind, the pattern of the grain in his pine table, the memory of his own blood in his ears.

That night, as a cold moon silvered the hollow, the voices returned. They did not shout or wail. They whispered, just below the threshold of hearing, from the very walls of the cabin.

“We know your shape now, Elias…” came a chorus of murmurs, in a blend of all his ghosts. “We have your clay. We will make a better you. A you that belongs here. A quiet you.”

He sat in the dark, his back against the door, the axe across his knees. He was no longer a man seeking solace. He was a cornered animal in a cage of ancient, hungry stone. And outside, the profound silence of the hollow was breaking down, learning to speak in the stolen tones of his ruined life.

Part Three: The Silent Mirror

The voices in the walls were not an assault; they were a digestion. A soft, persistent susurration of half-heard confessions, laughter, and arguments—the audio sediment of his life—seeped from the chinking between the logs. Elias pressed his hands to his ears, but the sound was not external. It pulsed in time with his frantic heartbeat, a parasitic rhythm. The axe haft, slick with his sweat, was the only proof of a reality outside his own crumbling mind.

Dawn came not with light, but with a deepening of the cabin’s internal gloom. A verdant shadow began to stain the wood from the outside in. Peering through a crack in the shutter, Elias’s breath caught. The forest was no longer at a polite distance. Overnight, finger-thick ropes of wild grapevine had latched onto the roof, curling over the eaves with purposeful, muscular growth. Moss, a vibrant and sickly chartreuse, spread across the north wall like a rising tide, its advance visible to the naked eye. The mountain laurel pressed its leathery leaves against the window glass, not swaying in a wind, but pushing. The cabin was being ingested.

And standing at the edge of the clearing, just where the tree line dissolved into formless mist, was a figure.

It was him.

It wore his worn flannel shirt, his mud-stained trousers, his own slumped posture of despair. The detail was photorealistic, a fidelity the previous mimics had lacked. This was no clay-and-rot approximation. This was a sculptor’s final, masterful draft. Only the face remained slightly unfixed, the features sliding in a slow, viscous melt between his own and those of his father, his son, his wife—a panoply of his grief, finally unifying into a single, dread entity. Its eyes were still pools of abyssal black.

It held an axe. A perfect copy of his own.

“You are loud,” the thing spoke, and its voice was Elias’s own baritone, stripped of warmth, echoing as if from the bottom of a well. “You scrape and cry and split the silence. I will be quieter. I will be… appropriate.”

Elias’s paralysis shattered into a frenzy of survival. He would not die in this green tomb. He slammed open the cabin door, axe raised, a scream of pure defiance tearing from his throat. He charged across the clearing, a primal, linear attack against a non-linear foe.

The Mimic did not move. It watched him come, its head tilting with that same terrifying curiosity.

Three strides from impact, Elias’s foot plunged through the forest floor. Not into a hole, but into the earth itself, which had become soft and porous as sponge. He fell forward, the axe flying from his grip. The ground did not feel like soil; it felt like cold, viscous pulp. He tried to pull his leg free, but the loam gripped him with a thousand tiny, fibrous tendrils—root hairs fine as capillaries, threading through his jeans, biting into his skin. The forest floor was awake.

The Mimic-Elias walked forward, its steps making no impression on the same hungry earth. It stopped beside him, looking down. Its face finally settled, locking into a flawless, serene replica of Elias Thorne. Only the eyes remained wrong—windows onto a starless, ancient night.

“You fight the becoming,” it said, kneeling. Its hand, cool and smooth as river stone, touched Elias’s forehead. A memory flashed, not his own: an endless, dark contentment, the slow dance of stone under pressure, the patient growth of roots over millennia. It was the mountain’s memory. It was offered as a gift.

“Let me carry your noise. Your pain. Your self,” the Mimic whispered with his mouth. It is a weary thing to be a man.

Elias thrashed, but the earth was at his chest now, a gentle, inexorable pull. He felt a terrible, seductive pull to obey, to let his consciousness bleed into the vast, silent mind of the hills. To become part of the background hum of decay and regrowth. It would be so easy.

Then the Mimic did something definitive. It reached for the fallen axe. As its fingers closed around the haft, the wood bloomed. Fresh, green shoots erupted from the grain, leaves unfurling in seconds. The metal head rusted into a brittle, orange crust before his eyes. The tool was being reclaimed, transformed from an instrument of cleavage into an artifact of the forest.

In that moment, Elias understood the true horror. The Mimic wasn’t just going to kill him. It was going to replace him. It would walk out of these mountains wearing his face, a quieter, better-fitting version, empty of the tumultuous history that made him him. And he… he would become nothing. Not a ghost, not a memory. He would be unmade, his essence used as raw material for this thing, his existence erased from the inside out.

“No!” he snarled, the last vestige of his identity condensing into the word.

He stopped fighting the pull of the earth. Instead, he embraced it. He focused not on escaping the ground, but on pouring himself into it—not to surrender, but to taint the offering. He thought of his love for Liam, not as a clean sorrow, but as a jagged, screaming wound. He recalled Claire’s anger, hot and justified. He summoned his own failures, his petty envies, his acidic regrets—the beautiful, ugly, chaotic noise of a lived life. He pushed it all out, a psychic vomit, into the receptive soil that was trying to consume him.

The forest recoiled.

The tendrils gripping him flinched. The moss on the cabin wall darkened, as if sickened. The Mimic above him staggered back a step, its perfect face flickering. A crack appeared in its cheek, oozing not blood, but a clear, sap-like fluid.

“Stop,” it commanded, its voice for the first time holding a note of discord, a scrape of static. “That is… dissonance. It does not belong.

Elias laughed, a raw, broken sound. “It’s me! And you can’t hold it, can you? You want the shape, but you can’t handle the sound!”

With the entity distracted, the earth’s grip loosened just enough. Elias tore himself free with a sound of ripping cloth and skin. He was raw, bleeding, but fueled by a new and terrible understanding. He couldn’t kill it with an axe. He could only corrupt its perfect theft.

He didn’t run for the tree line. He ran at the Mimic.

It raised the sprouting, rusted axe, but its movement was confused, its poise broken by the influx of chaotic emotion. Elias barreled into it. The impact was not with flesh, but with something cool and dense, like packed clay wrapped in bark. He wrapped his arms around it, not to fight, but to merge.

He pressed his face against its neck and remembered, with furious, vivid intensity. Not the curated, mournful memories it had stolen, but the unbearable ones: The stomach-churning panic of a missed mortgage payment. The searing shame of a public lie. The deafening silence in the car after the funeral. The ugly, snot-filled reality of human grief.

The Mimic thrashed. It was changing again, melting, unable to hold this new, toxic influx of data. Its form bubbled and swelled, features erupting and collapsing—a child’s eye here, a woman’s mouth there, a chorus of stolen voices shrieking in disharmony. It was overloading.

“TAKE IT BACK!” it screamed in a hundred fractured tones.

“It’s yours,” Elias gasped, his own consciousness beginning to fray at the edges, bleeding into the maelstrom. “You wanted my shape. Take all of it.”

The creature began to unravel in earnest. It didn’t retreat into the trees. It burst. A shockwave of damp leaves, dark soil, shattered twigs, and psychic feedback exploded outwards, knocking Elias to the ground.

When the air cleared, the doppelganger was gone. The clearing was a mess of scattered forest litter. The cabin sagged, vines now throttling its frame, moss shrouding it completely. It was no longer a human dwelling.

But the victory was ashes. Elias lay on his back, gasping. He felt… thin. Translucent. The world’s colors were muted, its sounds distant, as if a pane of thick glass now separated him from reality. He looked at his own hands. The scratches from the roots were there, but they looked like old marks, memories of wounds. He felt no pain. He felt… quiet.

He struggled to his feet. His body moved, but the will behind it felt borrowed, reflexive. A profound emptiness yawned inside him where his terror, his grief, his love—his self—had been. He had forced the Mimic to take it all, and in doing so, he had hollowed himself out.

He stumbled past the ruined cabin, down the overgrown path toward the county road. He had to get out. He had to see another human face.

He broke through the final line of trees onto the gravel road. The sky was a pale, indifferent grey. A hundred yards away, a deputy’s cruiser was idling, and a man in a tan uniform was talking to an older couple in a pickup truck—neighbors, perhaps, who had finally grown concerned.

The deputy saw him. He held up a hand, said something to the couple, and began walking toward Elias, his expression one of cautious relief.

Elias opened his mouth to call out, to scream for help, to explain the horror in the hollow.

What emerged from his throat was a dry, rustling whisper, the sound of wind through dead leaves. No words. Just… air.

He tried again. Nothing.

The deputy was closer now, his face shifting to concern. “Elias Thorne? Lord, man, are you alright? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Elias looked past the deputy, at his own reflection in the cruiser’s window. The man who looked back was pale, hollow-eyed, familiar yet eerily calm. A quiet man. An appropriate man.

And inside, where his thoughts should have been racing, there was only a deep, resonant silence, the silence of stones, and roots, and things that wait. He had not escaped the hollow. He had become its final, perfect product. He met the deputy’s gaze, and with a gentle, placid smile that did not touch his new, empty eyes, he gave a slow, deliberate nod.

Behind him, deep in the throat of Black Root Hollow, the wind sighed through the trees, carrying no voices, no echoes of pain—only a clean, complete, and absolute quiet. The mountain had finished its work. It had made a copy that would do. And the original? The original was now part of the silence, a fossil of feeling in the ancient, patient stone, forever screaming without a sound.

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