The shriek came first—a sound like tearing silk, woven from a thousand tiny voices. It closed the distance, insistent.
Clara ran. Her lungs burned. Her legs, heavy as stone, churned through the knee-deep leaves of the Benton Woods. The forest floor was a patchwork of rot and root, lit only by the sickly, pale half-light of a moon drowning in clouds.
She could hear them behind her. No, not just behind her. Among her.
A tattering whisper brushed against her left shoulder. *Whispers. They didn't walk. They didn't chase. They *clothed*. And then they unclothed. They ate.
When the first warmth touched her calf, a tug, gentle at first, like a playful dog.
“No—No, get off!”
She whirled, slapping at the air. But her hand passed through shadows. In the darkness, she caught a glimpse of them—a tapestry of movement. Not one creature, but a swarm. Moths? No, larger. The size of playing cards. Their wings were not shimmering dust, but a tapestry of gray wool, of cold suede, of the subtle, unsettling patterns of her grandfather’s tweed jacket, all stitched together and alive.
Her jogging pants. They were still holding the cuff.
In a second that stretched like hot taffy, she saw a clutch of them—a mottled, moving patch—latched onto the Lycra. Their edges, razor-sharp, began to **tear**. Not bite. **Splice**. The fabric rippled, reeled back, and vanished into a dozen puckered mouths.
Cold air hit her right shin. Then her left.
Panic, a clean, primal jolt, sent her stumbling forward again. She crashed into a birch tree, the bark scraping her forearms. The sound of their mandibles, a low, wet clicking, was a river behind her. *They did not relent.*
A dart of fire—the wing of a creature brushed her arm. Her skin *itched*, a deep, chemical bite. The fibers of her running jacket were being targeted. The seam at her shoulder gave way with a groan, a dozen more of them swarming the gap. She saw her reflection for a moment in the moonlit fabric of her own sleeve, a rippling shadow, and then the sleeve was gone, as if swallowed by the night.
They were smart. Ruthless. They went for the bits that mattered.
Her hair.
Not clothing, but a braid. One of them, the largest she had seen, a body as dark as old burgundy velvet, landed near her ear. She felt the drape of its wings. A hair band snapped. She felt a tug, a hard yank at her roots, a sharp tear, and then a sudden lightness.
She screamed.
Her discarded hair was already dissipated, woven into a dozen dark threads and consumed.
The forest was a breathing thing now. It leaned in. The path was gone. She didn't know north from south. She just knew she had to keep moving, keep the clothes on her body.
Then the earth ended.
It wasn't a steep drop, just a sudden gully filled with slick, dead mud. Her wet sneaker found no purchase. Her ankle twisted. With a cry that broke into a sob, she pitched forward, her hands striking the ground, sliding, scrabbling. She fell onto her stomach, the jagged edge of a rock ramming her ribs.
For a long, black moment, she lay still. She saw her hands, pressed into the detritus. Two frantic ticks of a watch in her head. *Get up. Get up. Get up.*
But then she felt it.
A pause in the noise. The clicking wind fell silent. The air grew thick, heavy, expectant.
They were upon her.
The moment she fell, they did not chase. They *seethed*. The soft loam around her began to writhe, not with earthworms, but with a slow, deliberate moving carpet of creatures, their bodies dry and papery against each other.
Her right leg. One of them, a pale, drab thing the color of a dead leaf, settled on her ankle. A second joined it. Their tiny, sawtooth mouths touched the white cotton of her sock.
*Riiiiip.*
The sock unfurled like a ribbon.
Then her jeans. A seam, the back waistband, gave a silent pop. The denim loosened. She *felt* the wash of cold dread hit the small of her back. Three, four, maybe ten of them were working at the fabric, chewing, reeling, swallowing. It was done not with ferocity, but with a methodical, predatory patience.
“No. Stop!” Her voice was a thin, broken thing. She tried to move. The fall, the twisted ankle, sent a shock of pain that paralyzed her.
Her shirt was next.
Nylon, cotton, no lines of defense.
They climbed. It was as if her whole body was being undressed from the outside in by a liquid, relentless wind. Her shirt gave a great heave across her ribs, the seams delaminating. She rolled, trying to crush them, but they just moved, re-forming, their numbers swelling.
A bubble of cold touched her thigh. The fabric there vanished. Another bubble, on her side. The elastic waistband of her training shorts snapped, the elastic fiber torn apart like a spiderweb. The shorts fell slack.
She squeezed her eyes shut. *My skin. My skin.* Their bodies were not on her flesh. Not yet. They only ate what was dead, what was woven.
Then the last of her shirt ripped down the middle. The sleeves disappeared. She was naked from the waist up now, gasping, shivering in the clinging, damp forest air. The brush of a wing against her stomach, a graze on her collarbone. They were *inspecting*.
The final act was the bra. A clip at her back gave a small, metallic sigh. The clasp slid open. The straps flew loose and were plucked, denatured, swallowed before they could even fall. The cups slid down her arms and dissolved into a cloud of thread and dust.
She was stripped. From neck to ankles. Only her faded, lacy running underwear remained.
The creatures paused.
It was a preternatural stillness. She held her breath. They were humming, a low, sated drone.
Then the largest one, the one the color of burgundy velvet, landed on her ribcage. Its wings fluttered. Its head cocked.
The lace.
One thread was pulled. The elastic drew taut. The sound was a tiny, terrible scream.
She didn’t see them finish. She only *felt* the absence—the last string against her hip, the brief friction of tearing elastic along the line of her thigh. Then it was gone.
They left.
Not a single creature remained. The silence was thick, like a backhand across the face.
Clara lay naked on the dead leaves of the forest floor. The moon, free of its cloud, shone a stark, white beam directly onto her body. She was pale, exposed, a creature of bone and vulnerability wholly divorced from the armor of the world.
When she tried to stand, the cold air pressed into every inch of her, a chilling second skin. The mud, the moss, the sharp edges of stones—she felt them all acutely, as if her nerves had been flayed.
She had heard of them. The Clothes Eaters. A legend shared by hikers in hushed whispers. Panic stories. Nightmares dressed as fables. Now, the rubble of her dignity was scattered around her—a tuft of cotton here, a scrap of a sneaker’s tongue there.
Her nakedness was a wound.
She wrapped her arms across her breasts. Her legs screamed. The cold bit at her ears, her toes, her most secret parts. The woods were no longer just a path.
Thirty feet to her left, a branch snapped.
Her head jerked. A deer? A person? Or another cloak of wings, coming to eat something else she hadn’t even known she owned—her very courage, her selfhood.
She whimpered and backed against a tree, the bark harsh against her spine. She drew her knees up. Her teeth chattered.
Her clothes were gone. Thin cotton. Synthetic fibers. Socks. Sneakers.
But what had really been stolen?
She remembered the first siren on the first night she ran. The coat she had bought fresh from the department store. Her father’s wool scarf. The special dress from the anniversary. She remembered the feel of a safety blanket, not fleece, but love. It was all flayed.
There *was* a function to clothing beyond warmth. It held the shape of the self. It hid the soft, haunted animal within.
Now, the animal was all that remained.
The cold was setting in with a sob. The temperature was dropping. The moon grew brighter, crueler. Clara knew she had to move.
She forced herself to stand. One foot, then the other. The mud squished against her bare heel, the moss was a wet spackle on her hip. Her hands were raw from holding branches.
She took a step. Her knees shook. The woods opened around her.
She was going to die.
No. *Maybe not.*
A structure existed in her memory. An old caretaker’s cabin. Half a mile further down the trail, but only if the animals hadn’t taken it too. It had blankets, *ropes*, shirts on hooks—things *woven* and solid. Things the Clothes Eaters had deemed expendable in the path. Perhaps they had full bellies now.
She stumbled onward, stepping over a root. Her ankles caught, bare. Her scalp where her braid had been was cold and raw. The low, sharp branches lashed at her body, drawing beads of blood on her skin like dew. She hugged shadows. She padded, barely audible.
A mile passed. The trail met granite. She pawed at the rocks.
She could hear a dripping sound. Water. Stream? A snake? An entity?
What if they were *here* again? Their hum was silent, but they could wrap around a branch unnoticed, looking just like leaves that weren't leaves, just like shadows sewn from electric light.
Something moved on the pine at the corner of her eye. A lick of dull color.
She stopped. Her heart thudded against her ribs, audible, stark.
It was a man.
No. A figure. An old man wearing a patched canvas jacket. He was standing near a white birch, his eyes wide, fixed on her. His mouth hung open. He held a small flashlight, the beam limp, pointing at the ground.
He saw her.
Full frontal nudity, mud-and-blood-smeared, eyes sunken, clutching at her own skin, whispering.
Their gazes locked.
She wanted to scream for help, to beg, to ask for his jacket, his boots, his sweatpants. But her throat squeezed shut, filled with the shredded ghost of her own dignity. She was less than human now. She was something organic, reduced.
The man’s eyes bulged. He backed away, a step. “The… the Clothes Eaters got ya,” he breathed. It was not a question.
She nodded, a single jerk of her head.
He turned and ran.
It was not to get help, she understood immediately. He ran from her. He ran because she was what the woods produced—a naked, frightened thing. A horror story wrapped in skin.
And in the terror of that understanding, Clara realized she had two options.
Curling into the fetal position was one.
This was the real thing the Clothes Eaters had taken. Not just the sweater, the denim. They had taken her membership in the community of the clothed. She was no longer a person. She was a nearly-dead animal.
Blinking, she turned away from the running lights. She looked toward the cabin she could almost feel to the north.
She walked on. She used pine boughs as shields. She broke low-hanging branches and covered herself the best she could. The cold gnawed on her skin like a wolf.
There were other creatures in the woods now. She was a faint heat signature. She was a clear scent.
The moon fell behind the trees again. The woods turned to ink.
And still she walked.
Naked.
Alone.
She had begun to hum, without realizing it. A low note from her chest, shaking with cold. It was not a prayer. It was a cloak of air, of sound.
It was the last layer she owned.
And she would not let them take it.