It was supposed to be a normal camping trip with your new significant other, but it's not like you could help your curiosity when you saw the plume of smoke emerge from between the treetops. Promising your lover to return before midnight, you took off from your site. Could someone truly be living that deep into a forest that desolate? You were sure you didn't see the smoke before coming so close to the center of the woods. After half an hour of trekking, there, in the clearing, stood a rickety old hut.
The heavy wooden door creaked open and you stepped in. Your eyes took a while to get used to the darkness, which almost seemed to flow out of the space within. Dust all over the floor, cobwebs running across the rafters... The place looked long abandoned, yet in the corner there was a lit cooking range, with a boiling cauldron over it. You felt compelled to walk over and peek inside to see what's cooking, but then kind of wish you hadn't.
The odor of the thick, green, slimy substance in the cast iron pot made you dizzy. Quickly pulling your head away to escape the stench, you ended up bumping your head into a shelf right above. A single vial fell down and broke, emptying its green contents into the cauldron. The resulting mixture bubbled up violently, so you took a few steps back and put your hands up to brace yourself...
BOOM!!!The dim space instantly filled up with a thick fog and came alight with jingling sparkles of all colors, the bang knocking you back onto your rear. You ended up breathing in a hefty amount of the rancid substance, coughing back up as much of it as you could. "W-WHAT..?" -a faint wail came out from behind a wall while the dust settled.
An old woman dressed in rags and covered in cankers hurried into the room through a doorway you hadn't noticed before, slapped the sides of her head in frustration, and cursed: "Oh, you insolent little..!" The look on her face clearly told that you're in big trouble.
The grandma realized which particular piece of equipment you sabotaged and became even more furious: "DO YOU REALIZE WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!?" -The hag screamed with a wavering, shrill tone, and stomped her foot- "It's too late to save you now. Begone with you, fool!" She traced some symbol in the air in front of her with one of her crooked fingers, and before you got a chance to protest, your head felt like it's about to burst open... Then you passed out onto the moldy floor.
You struggled in your sleeping bag as you woke up, and pulled your hands out to unzip it, quickly sitting up to properly come to your senses. "Whuh..? What's wrong?" -your partner asked, waking up to your struggling. Figures: It was a nightmare. Or at least you hope it was. You made a promise to yourself to never go camping in those particular woods ever again. You told your lover that you merely had a bad dream, and the both of you had a nightly snack to lighten the mood.
The next morning, you could swear you heard a cackle coming from somewhere deep within the forest just as you were about to leave the area...
A week has passed since then.
The trip now being but a curious memory, you're coming home from work, about halfway between the bus stop and your place. You occasionally glance at the full moon behind you, which has arisen unusually early in the evening, casting tall shadows in front of you. Looks somehow very foreboding.
You catch a whiff of an oddly familiar, bestial smell, and then stop dead in your tracks, a sharp pain hitting you out of nowhere. It feels like you've been stabbed in the back, but there's not a soul around you. You look at your hands, which seem... Very different. Like something is growing on them.
Then the pain subsides and turns into a powerful trembling that takes over your whole body, and fearing you might be about to vomit or something, you go behind some bushes to avoid causing a scene in case someone walks by. You wonder what's happening to you just long enough for the spasms to worsen to the point at which you're on the ground, convulsing. Terror is all you can feel, even though you aren't in much pain at all.
Your body twists and deforms until it assumes a shape which feels disturbingly unfamiliar to you. You feel like screaming, but your vocal cords are out of commission, until they have finally reformed enough for you to let out some sort of noise, but instead of a human's yell, out comes a...