Boyd froze. The silence that followed felt heavy, pressing against everyone's chest. No one spoke. They all just stared at the empty coffin — loose dirt, deep scratch marks, and nothing else. No Jim. No body. Nothing that made sense.
Dean's stomach twisted. His mind scrambled for an explanation.
'Could Sara have been wrong again?' he thought, glancing at her. Maybe stress, fear, and exhaustion had made her imagine it. But then he remembered the noise — that desperate, hollow banging from inside the box. Everyone had heard it. It couldn't have come from nowhere.
Sara's face was pale, her breathing uneven. "No…" she whispered, stepping closer to the grave. "He was here. I know he was." Her voice trembled, but her eyes were filled with certainty. "I felt him."
Donna muttered under her breath. "Then where the hell did he go?"
Just as everyone's trust in Sara was about to crumble, the air around the grave shifted — a sudden static hum that made the hairs on the back of everyone's neck stand up. The dirt inside the coffin rippled, like something was moving beneath it. Then, in a blink, a man's form appeared in the open box — lying flat, covered in grime, one arm reaching out weakly.
It was Jim.
His face was ghostly pale, streaked with dirt and sweat, eyes wide and wild with panic. His lips parted as he gasped for air, voice hoarse and broken.
"Hel—"
The word cut off midway as his body flickered — like a bad signal on a dying TV screen — and he vanished.
The suddenness of it made Kenny stumble back, nearly tripping over a loose shovel. Dean froze, his breath caught in his throat. Donna cursed under her breath, taking an involuntary step back, while Father Khatri whispered something that sounded like a prayer.
Sara's eyes widened in shock, her hands trembling at her sides. "Jim…?" she whispered, voice breaking.
Then — he appeared again.
Same position, same look of desperation — his fingers digging into the edge of the coffin, trying to pull himself up. "Help!" he shouted, but before the last sound left his lips, his body blinked out of existence once more, leaving nothing but empty air and swirling dust.
The crowd gasped as he reappeared again, only for a second — mouth open in a silent scream, his eyes rolling back before vanishing yet again.
Each reappearance came at the same interval like the last with no signs of stopping. One moment his arm reached toward Boyd; the next, it was gone. His face would flash into view — terrified, pleading — only to dissolve into the empty coffin like smoke.
Boyd reached toward the box, trying to grab Jim's hand during one of the brief flickers, but his fingers passed through thin air. A sharp jolt of static tingled across his skin, making him pull back instinctively.
Kenny stared, his voice trembling. "What the hell is happening to him?"
No one answered. All they could do was watch — helpless — as Jim kept reappearing and disappearing, his voice growing weaker each time. "Hel—… He—lp—me…"
Then, from behind the group, a quiet voice broke the terrified silence.
"I know that box...the wood," Victor said.
Everyone turned. He had been standing a few feet away the whole time, half-hidden behind an old headstone, his expression distant and oddly calm — as if what they were seeing wasn't shocking to him at all, just… familiar. His mismatched jacket hung loosely from his frame, a sketchbook clutched under one arm.
Donna blinked, startled. "Victor? What are you talking about?"
Victor stepped closer to the grave, his eyes locked on the wooden box. He tilted his head slightly, studying it the same way he'd look at one of his drawings — searching for patterns in the madness. "That box," he said slowly, pointing toward it with a shaky finger. "It's made from the same kind of wood as the hollow trees in the forest."
Donna frowned, his voice low and sharp. "What do you mean the same kind of wood?"
Victor's gaze flicked toward her, then back to the coffin. "You can tell by the way it smells. And the color. It's darker underneath — like it's been burned on the inside." He crouched near the edge of the grave, squinting at the grain of the wood where the shovel had splintered it.
Dean's mind spun. None of this made sense. The same kind of wood as the hollow trees? That couldn't be right.
He remembered in the show the boy had warned Victor not to cut those trees, said it would "make things worse."
And now here they were… standing over a coffin made of that same cursed wood.
'What the actual fuck is happening here' Dean thought, pulse pounding.
But he forced the thought aside. Now wasn't the time to unravel tree-magic logic — Jim was still flickering in and out of existence like a dying signal. They needed answers, not theories.
He turned toward Victor sharply. "Alright," Dean said, voice tight. "You said this thing's made from the same wood as the hollow trees. Do you know how to stop it? This… whatever-the-hell teleporting crap that's happening?"
Victor tilted his head, that same faraway look in his eyes. For a moment, he didn't respond — just crouched beside the grave, fingers tracing the grain of the wood. Finally, he whispered, "You don't stop it… You wait until it's done."
Dean almost wanted to kick his ass for being so cryptic but stopped himself. "That's not an option."
Before anyone could ask what Victor meant, a familiar voice broke the silence.
"Okay, wait, hold up."
They turned to see Jade striding toward them from the path — hands shoved in his jacket pockets, a look of exasperated curiosity plastered across his face.
Jade crouched next to the coffin, squinting as Jim's hand flickered in and out again.
He then sighed, muttering under his breath. "Great. So not only do the trees eat people, now they make furniture too." He gave the coffin a closer look but didn't touch it. "This isn't just teleportation. It's displacement. He's stuck between two fixed points — like he's half here, half somewhere else."
Boyd frowned. "You mean he's trapped between… locations?"
"Pretty much," Jade said. "Like when your phone tries to reconnect to Wi-Fi but keeps dropping the signal. He's caught mid-transfer." He looked up at Boyd. "And before you ask — yeah, it's bad. If we mess with it, we might make it worse."
Sara's voice wavered. "Worse? How?"
Jade hesitated. "He could… I don't know — get shredded between the two places. Like half of him here, half of him…" He gestured vaguely toward the woods. "Wherever the hell the trees spit people out."
Tom cursed quietly. "Then we have to stop the loop."
"Yeah, genius," Jade shot back, pacing a few steps as if trying to come up with some solution.
Father Khatri stepped forward, his calm voice breaking through the tension. "The wood channels something unnatural — like the trees themselves. If it cannot decide where to go, it needs balance."
Jade raised an eyebrow. "Balance? What are we talking, like a seance?"
"Not that," Khatri replied evenly. "It's not evil. It's lost. It doesn't know where it belongs."
Victor's head turned slightly at that, eyes widening. "The boy in white said that," he murmured. "When the forest loses balance, it takes what it can… to find it again."
Boyd's gaze hardened. "And you think Jim's what it took?"
Victor didn't answer, only stared into the grave. "Maybe it took him. Maybe it's trying to give him back."
Jade swore under his breath. "Okay, creepy forest wood, emotional ghosts, and quantum teleportation — fantastic." He knelt again, analyzing the way Jim's image flickered. "It's pulsing on a rhythm — every few seconds, same interval. That's a loop."
Dean crouched beside him. "So what breaks it?"
Jade thought for a second, tapping his fingers against his thigh. "If this really works like the trees, it's reacting to energy — electromagnetic, maybe even sound. The static we felt earlier? That's interference. It's drawing power from the air."
Boyd's voice was low. "So how do we cut that off?"
Jade smirked faintly. "You don't cut it off. You jam it."
Sara blinked. "Jam it?"
"Yeah," Jade said, looking up at her. "Like a radio signal. If it's caught between two points, we create enough noise to mess with its frequency — force it to settle here. It's either gonna stabilize him… or blow up in our faces. Fifty-fifty."
Donna folded her arms. "That's your solution?"
"Well, do you have any other idea?" Jade asked, standing.
***
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