M.A. Kleen

Please enjoy this horror short, part of a series experimenting with artificial intelligence. I fed a location, plot, characters, scenario, and mood into ChatGPT and asked it to craft a story, then used Stable Diffusion XL to create an illustration. How did it turn out? Well, you be the judge.

When a mysterious artifact is unearthed beneath an ancient oak in the quiet suburb of Meadowbrook, the residents are drawn into a terrifying web of dark secrets and supernatural forces that threaten to consume them all.

It was a crisp autumn evening when the town of Meadowbrook began to stir with something inexplicably eerie. The wind carried a chill that wasn’t quite natural, sending leaves spiraling down the neatly maintained streets of the quiet suburban neighborhood. John and Emily Anderson sat on their front porch at 123 Meadowbrook Lane, sipping coffee as their children, Sarah and Ethan, played in the front yard. The air felt thick, almost as though the town was holding its breath.

“Feels different tonight,” John murmured, his gaze sweeping over the quiet neighborhood. Emily nodded, her eyes drifting to the large oak tree in the center of the park across the street. The tree had always been there, an ancient sentinel watching over the neighborhood for as long as anyone could remember. Standing under the silvery glow of the setting sun, something about the tree seemed different. The shadows around it danced unnaturally as if the tree itself held secrets.

Across the subdivision, at 456 Oakwood Avenue, the Thompson family bustled around the house, their usual evening chaos filling the air. Michael Thompson was helping his youngest, Jacob, with his reading while Sarah ushered the older girls, Emma and Olivia, to finish their homework. They had plans to meet up with the Andersons later in the park, but Emma, always inquisitive, had been talking about something strange she’d found earlier that day.

“Dad, you know that old stone near the big oak tree? I swear I saw some kind of symbol on it,” Emma said, her voice a mixture of excitement and nervousness.

Michael chuckled. “Maybe it’s just your imagination, sweetie. The neighborhood has been here for decades. If there was anything strange, don’t you think someone would have noticed by now?”

But Emma persisted. “No, Dad, it wasn’t just a symbol. There was this… glow. Just for a second. And I felt like someone was watching me.”

Her words trailed off as her eyes flicked to the window, where the last rays of the sun dipped behind the towering oak tree in the park.

Later that evening, the park was buzzing with activity. The Andersons had arrived with Sarah and Ethan, and the Thompson children were chasing each other around the playground. Michael, John, and a few other fathers—Daniel Stevens, Benjamin Mitchell, and David Roberts—stood off to the side, talking casually about the upcoming neighborhood block party. The air was crisp, and the distant sound of crickets began to fill the cooling night.

It was when Ethan Anderson, a bright but quiet four-year-old, wandered toward the oak tree that things began to change. The boy, fascinated by the way the tree’s roots seemed to twist out of the earth like ancient fingers, noticed something sticking out from the base of the trunk—a small, gleaming stone, half-buried in the dirt. He knelt, brushing away the soil, and the moment his tiny fingers touched the object, a pulse of cold air swept through the park, silencing the crickets.

“Ethan!” Emily called out, but her voice seemed muffled, as if the very air had thickened. The boy stood, holding the small stone in his hand. It was perfectly smooth, almost unnaturally so, and etched with an unfamiliar symbol. A faint blue light flickered within it, like a trapped breath of wind.

John rushed over to his son, taking the stone from his hands. The moment he touched it, he felt something—a vibration, a whisper—so faint it could have been his imagination. But the look in Ethan’s eyes told him it wasn’t.

Word spread quickly. By the next day, nearly everyone in the neighborhood had heard about the strange stone found beneath the oak tree. The small, tight-knit community was abuzz with speculation. Michael and Sarah Thompson, always up for a mystery, began researching the town’s history, while John Anderson reached out to Daniel Stevens and David Roberts, who were also curious. Even the more skeptical neighbors, like Matthew Wilson and his wife Amanda, couldn’t help but wonder.

Days passed, and the stone, which had come to be known as the “Crescent Stone” due to the curved symbol etched into its surface, seemed to have an almost magnetic pull on the community. The more people investigated, the more odd occurrences started to happen around the neighborhood. Lights flickered unpredictably at night, strange noises echoed in the trees, and more than one resident reported hearing whispers carried on the wind.

At first, it was all chalked up to overactive imaginations. But things quickly escalated when seven-year-old Chloe Mitchell, daughter of Benjamin and Olivia Mitchell, wandered into the park late one evening. She had heard her parents talking about the Crescent Stone and was curious. She snuck out of the house with her flashlight, intending only to take a quick look.

Chloe never spoke about what happened that night in the park, but when her parents found her, she was standing at the base of the oak tree, her eyes wide and unblinking, staring at the ground. In her hand, she held a handful of dirt, clutching it so tightly that her fingers bled from the pressure of her nails digging into her palms. Her lips moved, but the words she whispered made no sense. “The others… they’re waiting,” she kept saying.

By now, the entire neighborhood was gripped by a collective unease. Daniel and Laura Stevens, who had never been particularly superstitious, began to notice strange symbols etched into the stones lining their driveway, eerily similar to the one on the Crescent Stone. At first, they thought it was just vandalism, but no matter how hard Daniel scrubbed the stones, the symbols would reappear the next day.

John and Emily Anderson couldn’t sleep. Every night, their dreams were filled with shadowy figures moving through the trees, whispering in a language they didn’t understand. It was as if something was calling to them, beckoning them deeper into the mystery of the Crescent Stone.

The turning point came when David and Jennifer Roberts, who had no children but were close with the other families, discovered something even more disturbing. While going through old town records, David found a reference to the land on which the neighborhood now stood. Long before the suburb existed, the land had been considered sacred by the indigenous people. They had believed that an ancient relic—something called the “Crescent Stone”—was buried deep within the earth, holding immense power.

But the records also warned that the stone was not a blessing, but a curse.

It was said that those who disturbed the stone would awaken the spirits bound to it—spirits that had long since been forgotten, trapped beneath the earth for centuries. These spirits, once freed, would seek to reclaim what was theirs, dragging the living into the darkness.

Fear gripped the town. One by one, the residents began to experience strange and terrifying events. Olivia Thompson, the nine-year-old daughter of Michael and Sarah, woke up one night to find her bedroom window wide open, despite having locked it before bed. Standing outside, just beyond the glow of the streetlights, was a figure. Its face was obscured, but its eyes—dark and hollow—stared directly at her. The next morning, her parents found the same symbols from the Crescent Stone drawn in chalk around her bed.

In another part of the neighborhood, James and Sophia Campbell began hearing faint laughter in their home at night. Their daughter, Emily, claimed to have an imaginary friend who told her stories about the “others” living in the forest. But when asked who her friend was, she could only describe him as “the man with the black eyes.”

The final straw came when the Mitchells’ youngest son, Liam, vanished one evening while playing outside. They found him hours later, deep in the woods behind the park, standing in front of the same oak tree where the Crescent Stone had been found. His eyes were vacant, and he couldn’t remember how he got there. But he kept repeating a single phrase: “It’s coming. The darkness is coming.”

The residents of Meadowbrook had no choice but to come together. They gathered in the park one evening, standing beneath the looming oak tree, their breath visible in the cold air. Michael Thompson held the Crescent Stone in his hand, its eerie glow casting long shadows across the ground.

“We need to put it back,” he said, his voice trembling. “Whatever this is… it needs to go back.”

But as they prepared to bury the stone, the ground beneath them began to tremble. The tree’s roots seemed to writhe, twisting and coiling like serpents. The air grew thick with a suffocating presence, and the whispers—those haunting whispers—grew louder.

“We waited too long,” John Anderson muttered, his face pale.

A deafening crack echoed through the park as the oak tree split open, revealing a gaping maw of darkness beneath its roots. From the depths, a figure began to emerge—its body twisted and malformed, its eyes glowing with an unnatural light. It was ancient, older than the town, older than the land itself. The spirits bound to the Crescent Stone had been freed.

Screams filled the night as the figure reached out toward the gathered crowd, its touch like ice, pulling them into the darkness. One by one, they felt their minds unravel, memories slipping away as the spirits claimed their souls. The light from the Crescent Stone flickered once, twice, and then went out.

In the morning, the park was empty. The oak tree stood tall, its bark unbroken, its roots undisturbed. The residents of Meadowbrook were gone—vanished without a trace.

All that remained was the Crescent Stone, half-buried in the earth, waiting for the next soul to find it.