I should have trusted my gut. That's the thought that circles
my mind every time I replay that night.
If I had, maybe I wouldn't have set foot in those woods,
wouldn't have pitched my tent under trees that bent in
unnatural silence, wouldn't have woken up to find eyes watching
me from the tree line. But I was too stubborn, too
arrogant, and by the time I realized I wasn't alone, it was
already too late. I'd always been the type who
prided myself on roughing it. No campgrounds with clean
bathrooms or family friendly fire pits.
For me, I wanted isolation, the pure wilderness, the kind of
stillness where the only sound is the wind pushing through
needles overhead and the snap of your own firewood.
That October evening I parked my truck on the side of a service
Rd. that was so overgrown I almost missed it.
The map said it cut 5 miles into the forest before it dead ended,
and beyond that there was nothing but green swaths of
trees. No houses, no cabins, no trails.
That was exactly what I wanted. I slung my pack over my
shoulder, tighten the straps, and started walking.
The sun was already bleeding out of the sky, staining it orange,
then Violet. By the time I'd made camp beside
a dry Creek bed, Night had fallen thick and heavy, and the
cold had teeth. The forest was different here.
I'd hiked plenty of places where the woods hummed with life, owls
calling, insects buzzing, the occasional rustle of deer.
But here it was too quiet. My boots crunched on brittle
leaves and the sound seemed to fall flat, as though the air
itself swallowed it. I shrugged it off.
Isolation was what I'd come for, wasn't it?
I set up my tent, gathered enough wood for a fire, and
struck a match. Flames curled upward, throwing a
Halo of light that didn't seem to reach as far as it should
have. The trees stood tall and rigid
just beyond the glow, their trunks forming a dark wall.
I roasted a hot dog on a stick, washed it down with a swig of
cheap whiskey from my flask, and leaned back against a log.
The fire popped and hissed, embers snapping upward.
That was when I heard it, a sound that didn't belong.
At first I thought it was just branches shifting in the breeze,
but the air was still, not a leaf moved.
The noise was deliberate, slow, like footsteps pressing down on
the dry carpet of leaves just outside the fire's reach.
Crunch, pause, crunch. My head snapped toward the dark.
Nothing. Just trees and the smothering
black between them. Probably a deer.
I muttered aloud, trying to convince myself.
The sound of my own voice helped, though it came out
shakier than I'd like. But then it stopped completely,
and the silence that followed was worse than the noise itself.
I kept my eyes locked on that wall of trees until my vision
swam. After a while, the fire burned
lower and exhaustion pulled at me.
Finally, I told myself I was imagining things.
First night jitters. I crawled into the tent, zipped
the flap tight, and lay in my sleeping bag.
Sleep didn't come easy. Every time I closed my eyes, I
swore I heard faint movement outside, leaves shifting, twigs
snapping underweight. At one point I thought I even
heard something breathe long, low, almost matching my own.
But each time I sat up and listened, there was nothing.
At last, I drifted into a shallow, restless sleep.
I don't know what time it was when I woke again.
The fire had burned down to dull coals.
My tent was filled with icy darkness, the kind that presses
against your skin. What woke me wasn't a sound.
It was the feeling that prickle along the back of your neck when
you know you're being watched. My mouth went dry.
Slowly, carefully, I sat up and strained my ears There.
Something shifted outside. Not random forest noise.
A deliberate movement. I reached for the flashlight
beside my bag, clicked it on, and pointed it at the tent wall.
Shadows warped and stretched against the thin fabric, and
then I froze. A silhouette moved across the
nylon, a shape taller than any man, broad shouldered but
crooked, its head cocked at an unnatural angle.
It paused right outside the tent, as if listening.
I held my breath, gripping the flashlight so hard my hand
ached. Then, softly, too softly, I
heard it. A voice.
Hey, you awake? I nearly screamed, because the
voice wasn't right. It wasn't close enough to be a
whisper, but it wasn't distant either.
It was flat, hollow. And the worst part?
It was my own voice. Hey, you awake?
It repeated the intonation wrong, the cadence off, like
someone practicing human speech and almost getting it.
I bit down hard on my tongue to stop myself from answering.
The silhouette lingered for a moment longer, then it slowly
slid out of sight. I sat there rigid, every muscle
screaming, until the cold seeped through my clothes.
Hours might have passed before exhaustion forced me back down.
I didn't sleep, I just lay there, listening.
At dawn, the forest looked normal.
Blue sky through high branches, birds chirping, frost melting
into dew. For a moment I convinced myself
I dreamed it. Whiskey fueled paranoia, nothing
more. But when I stepped outside the
tent, I saw them. Footprints, Not boot prints, not
deer tracks. Bare human.
Long narrow feet pressed deep into the soil, circling my
campfire and leading off into the woods.
I swallowed hard. Who the hell walks barefoot in
the forest at night? I told myself I should pack up
and leave. Just go.
But something made me hesitate. Some stubbornness, some reckless
curiosity. Instead, I stayed.
The day passed uneventfully. I hiked, gathered more firewood,
tried to shake the unease. But the whole time I felt it.
The eyes from somewhere in the trees, always just beyond sight,
always waiting. That night, when the fire burned
low, I heard it again. The crunch of steps, the low,
deliberate breathing. And then a voice, this time not
mine. It was my brother's, except my
brother had been dead for two years.
Come on, man. It's said from the trees, the
sound garbled too deep, as though spoken through a broken
throat. It's me, don't be scared.
My chest tightened, every instinct screaming to run,
because I knew then, without a doubt, I wasn't alone in those
woods, and whatever was out there wasn't human.
I didn't sleep the second night. Not a wink.
I sat rigid in my tent, clutching the flashlight like a
weapon, waiting for the first Gray hints of dawn.
Every sound made my skin crawl. The groan of shifting wood, the
pop of cooling stones, the distant Creek of branches that
sounded too much like footsteps. And then there was the voice.
It came sometime after midnight, cutting through the silence like
a knife. Hey man, it's me.
My brother's voice. Clear, familiar, but wrong.
I froze, my heart hammering. You OK in there?
You look cold, come on out. I shut my eyes tight, biting the
inside of my cheek until I tasted blood.
He'd been gone two years. Two years since the accident,
and yet the cadence was spot on. The lazy drawl, the way he
dragged out certain words. I wanted to answer.
God, I wanted to believe it, but every instinct screamed that if
I so much as whispered back, I wouldn't live to regret it.
The voice circled my tent, slow, patient.
I found more wood for the fire, it said, I'll keep you warm.
There was a pause, then laughter.
My brother's laugh, except hollow, tinny, like a recording
on loop. It stuttered, stopped abruptly,
then repeated. Too loud.
I pressed my palms to my ears. Not real, I whispered.
Not real. But it was.
It was right outside. The laughter died, then silence.
I didn't breathe until the 1st smear of dawn lightened the
fabric of the tent. I stumbled out at Daybreak, my
nerves raw, my eyes gritty. I scanned the tree line,
expecting, dreading to see something standing there.
Nothing. Just endless trunks fading into
mist. But when I turned toward the
fire pit, I saw it. A stack of logs, freshly cut,
neatly piled right beside the blackened stones.
My stomach turned to ice. I hadn't gathered them.
Something had. I should have left then, should
have packed up and driven until the woods were nothing but a
smear in my rear view mirror. But fear has a strange way of
shackling you. It tells you to stay still, to
not draw attention, to wait until you're sure the danger has
passed. So I stayed.
The third day crawled by. The sun was weak, barely warming
the frostbitten ground. I kept busy, anything to
distract myself. Boiled water checked, gear
scribbled in my notebook. But always, always, I felt it,
that stare, like invisible fingers trailing down my spine.
Once I swore I saw movement, a pale shape between the trees,
gone when I blinked. Another time, I heard my name
whispered, low and breathy, my own voice by evening dread
pressed so heavy on me it was hard to breathe.
Still, I built the fire higher, ringed it with stones as though
flame alone could ward off what stalked me.
I sat with my hatchet in my lap, eyes glued to the dark.
It came again when the moon was high.
This time, it wasn't pretending to be my brother.
Help me. The voice was cracked, hoarse,
as though forced through broken lungs.
It came from just beyond the glow of the fire.
Please, I'm hurt. Something shuffled closer.
Leaves crunched, branches snapped.
I stood, hatchet raised, light swinging wildly.
A figure stepped into the fringe of the firelight.
For one wild, desperate second, I thought it really was a man, a
hiker, lost, injured. His arms hung at his sides, his
posture hunched. But then he moved closer, and I
saw his skin was too tight, stretched wrong over long limbs.
His face was pale, expression slack, eyes wide and glassy like
a doll's. His mouth hung open, jaw
unhinged. Too far.
Help me, He croaked again, but the words didn't match the
movement of his lips. I stumbled back, bile rising in
my throat. Stay away.
It tilted its head. Bird like.
Then it smiled. The smile was too wide, too full
of teeth. It stepped forward.
I swung the hatchet, not to hit it, just to keep it back.
The blade whistled through the air.
The thing jerked to a stop. It cocked its head again,
watching me, studying me. Then, in one swift, unnatural
lunge, it retreated back into the trees, swallowed by shadow.
The forest was silent again. I collapsed beside the fire,
shaking so hard my teeth rattled.
The next morning I found something waiting at the edge of
camp. A rabbit, dead, Its body flayed
open, skin peeled neatly back, organs missing.
Its glassy eyes stared at me, and its mouth had been pulled
into a grotesque smile, lip sliced to the cheek.
It was a gift, or a warning. Either way, it was meant for me.
By then, my resolve had cracked. I stuffed my gear back into my
pack, doused the fire, and bolted.
The forest seemed different in daylight.
Brighter, safer. I almost believed I'd make it.
But the tracks followed me. Everywhere I went, I saw them.
Bare human feet pressed into mud, into leaves.
Always alongside my trail, sometimes behind me, sometimes
ahead, like it was circling, hurting me.
By afternoon, I was lost. The map might as well have been
blank. Every direction looked the same.
Towering Pines, endless undergrowth, shadows crawling
long as the sun dipped low. That's when I heard it again, my
name, at first faint, then louder.
Hey, the voice called. Over here, it sounded exactly
like me. I broke into a run.
Branches whipped my face, thorns tore at my clothes.
The voice echoed between the trees, mocking, repeating my
words from nights before. Not real, stay away, not real.
Each phrase was my voice, thrown back at me, twisted and cruel.
Finally, I burst into a small clearing and stopped dead,
because there, across the space, stood me.
It was like looking into a broken mirror.
Same clothes, same face, but the details were wrong.
The shoulders were hunched too far forward, arms hanging slack
like they didn't belong to it. The grin split its face, ear to
ear, teeth too sharp, too many. It didn't move, just watched.
I raised the hatchet, hands trembling.
What do you want? It tilted its head.
Then it spoke. Hey, you awake?
The exact words it had used the first night in my voice.
Something inside me snapped. I screamed and charged.
The thing didn't flinch, but before I reached it, the shadows
closed in. It dissolved into the tree line
faster than anything. Human gone.
I was alone in the clearing, chest heaving, the echo of my
own scream hanging in the air. I didn't stop running after
that, didn't care where I went. Just ran until my lungs burned
and my legs shook. When I finally collapsed, night
was already falling. The cold seeped in fast.
I was too exhausted to make a fire, too scared to sleep.
I sat in the dark, clutching my hatchet, listening to the forest
breathe. Somewhere out there it was
waiting, and I knew it wouldn't stop until I broke.
I don't know how long I sat there in the dark.
Every second stretched like an hour.
Every sound felt sharp enough to cut.
My eyes burned from trying to Pierce the shadows, but all I
could see were endless trees. The silence wasn't empty
anymore. It waited.
Something was out there, just past the black wall of Pines,
listening, watching. I clutched the hatchet so hard
my knuckles cracked. My breath came shallow, ragged,
each inhale too loud in my own ears.
I told myself, if I survive until dawn, I'll find my way
out. I'll leave everything, just run.
But the night wasn't done with me.
It started with the snapping of a branch. close, too close.
My head jerked up, muscles coiled.
The sound had come from maybe 10 feet away.
Then another snap, circling behind me.
I turned, flashlight beam sweeping across bark and
shadows. Nothing.
The beam caught on something pale, a flash of white between
two trunks. My chest seized.
It was gone when I blinked. Then a whisper.
Not from one place, from everywhere.
Here, Come here, over here, I'm all in.
Different voices, my brothers, my own, strangers, men, women.
They overlapped, blended, growing faster, louder, until
the trees themselves seem to speak.
Hey, man. One voice barked in my ear, my
own voice too close. I spun and swung the hatchet.
It meant nothing but air. My scream echoed through the
forest. The whispers cut off, and the
silence that followed was worse. That was when I realized
something chilling. It wasn't just toying with me
anymore. It was hurting me.
Every sound came from the edge of the dark, pushing me one way.
Every glimpse of movement drove me forward.
Step by step, I was being guided.
Panic surged hot in my chest. I bolted in the opposite
direction, crashing through brush, the hatchet still in my
hand. The forest wasn't natural
anymore. Branches seemed to grab at me.
Roots caught my boots, brambles raked my skin.
Behind me came the sound of pursuit.
Not running, gliding, smooth, effortless.
I didn't look back. I don't know how long I ran
before I stumbled into another clearing.
I collapsed to my knees, chest heaving, vision swimming.
At first I thought I'd found salvation.
There was a structure, a cabin. It sat crooked in the clearing,
its roof sagging, windows dark, old, abandoned.
But to me, it was hope. 4 walls, a door, a barrier between me and
the thing in the trees. I scrambled to my feet and
rushed inside. The air reeked of mildew and
rot. Floorboards sagged under my
weight. But it was shelter.
I slammed the door shut, slid the rusted bolt and pressed my
back to it. Silence.
My ears rang with it, my heart pounding against my ribs.
I stayed there, clutching the hatchet, staring into the gloom.
Dust floated in the flashlight beam, cobwebs draped from beams.
Furniture lay broken, gnawed by time.
But for the first time in days, I felt safe.
Until I saw the walls. Scratches everywhere, deep
gouges carved into the wood, long and violent as though made
by claws. They covered every surface,
jagged lines Criss crossing and words scrawled and frantic,
uneven handwriting. Don't look at it, don't listen.
Not a voice. Run.
My stomach turned. This wasn't safety.
This was a grave. The first thud against the wall
nearly stopped my heart. Something hit the cabin from
outside, hard. The boards rattled, dust raining
down. Another thud on the other side.
Then the roof creaked as though weight pressed down.
I held my breath, eyes wide. The whispers came again, louder
now, right outside the thin walls.
Please help me. So cold.
Knocking, slow, deliberate. From the window frame, from the
door, from behind me. I pressed my back to the wall,
hatchet raised, my entire body trembling.
Then silence. A pause that stretched so long
it almost felt safe. And then, from directly behind
the wall, at my ear, let me in. In my brother's voice.
I screamed and stumbled away from the wall.
The cabin shuddered. Boards groaned.
Something heavy scraped across the roof.
I backed into the corner, my flashlight beam darting wildly.
The whispers rose into a cacophony, every voice I'd heard
in the woods overlapping, filling the cabin until it was
deafening. My own voice screamed back at
me, phrases I'd muttered in fear.
Not real, stay away, not real. I clamped my hands over my ears.
My vision blurred. My skull felt like it was
splitting. And then silence again.
The door creaked slowly, painfully slow.
The bolt slid back as though unseen hands pushed it.
I stumbled forward, hatchet raised, screaming.
No. The door stopped, hung half
open. Nothing stood there, just the
forest, dark and endless, But I knew it was waiting, watching.
I didn't last much longer in the cabin.
The weight of those scratches on the walls, the words of whoever
had come before me. They pressed too heavy.
I ran again, into the forest, into the dark.
I don't know where I went, didn't matter.
Every direction was the same, trees and shadows.
But the whispers followed, the laughter, and sometimes worse.
I'd catch glimpses in the beam of my light, limbs bending
backward, eyes glowing pale, mouths too wide, never fully
seen, just enough to remind me it was close, always close.
Eventually, exhaustion dragged me down.
I collapsed at the base of a pine, lungs burning, body
shaking. That was when I heard it.
Not a whisper, not a mimic. Footsteps as slow, heavy,
deliberate, coming straight toward me.
I aimed the flashlight, hands trembling, and for the first
time I saw it. It stood between the trees, half
in shadow, Tall, too tall. Its limbs were long and crooked,
joints bending wrong. Its skin was pale, stretched too
thin, veins black beneath its face.
God, its face shifted like wet clay.
One moment my brothers, then mine, then a stranger's.
Always smiling, always wrong. Its eyes glowed, faint and
animal like, reflecting the beam.
It didn't move, just watched me. I couldn't breathe, couldn't
think. Then, slowly, it lifted its
hand. Long, crooked fingers pointed at
me, and in my own voice it said, You can't leave.
I should have run the moment I saw it.
Instead, I froze. The thing stood there between
the Pines, taller than any man, its body warped and wrong, limbs
too long, joints bending like a spider's.
Its face rippled, flickering between mine.
My brothers, strangers I didn't know.
Always smiling, always wrong. You can't leave, it said again,
my own voice too clear, too hollow.
The hatchet shook in my hand. My flashlight beam wavered,
catching its pale skin. It stretched jaw.
It took one step closer. The ground seemed to groan
beneath it. I stumbled backwards, slamming
into the trunk of a pine. My throat was dry, my breath
shallow. Every instinct screamed that
running was useless, but staying meant death.
So I did the only thing I could. I fought.
With a ragged scream, I swung the hatchet.
The blade caught empty air as the creature darted back,
unnaturally fast, almost liquid in its retreat.
Then it laughed, my laugh shaky, desperate, hollow.
The sound echoed from every tree, bouncing around me until I
couldn't tell where it stood. I spun wildly, slashing its
shadows, my lungs heaving. Stop it, I screamed, my voice
cracking. The forest answered in perfect
unison. Dozens of voices, all mine, all
mocking. Stop it, stop it, stop it.
I dropped to my knees, clutching my head, the hatchet slipping
from numb fingers. The laughter cut off, and the
silence swallowed me. When I opened my eyes again, the
thing was gone. Or so I thought.
I staggered to my feet, clutching the hatchet, and ran.
Branches tore at my skin, roots tangled my boots.
But I didn't stop. I couldn't.
Somewhere in the distance, I swore I saw light.
A faint glow, pale and steady. Salvation.
I barreled toward it, lungs screaming, legs on fire.
The light grew stronger, warm, golden, like the beam of a
Lantern. My heart leapt.
Maybe a Ranger, a hiker, a way out.
I burst into a clearing and froze.
The Lantern sat in the dirt, alone, burning steady.
No one held it. The clearing was empty, silent,
and when I turned back, the trees had closed behind me,
trapped. Hey, a voice said.
I spun. The lantern's light flickered,
casting long shadows, and from those shadows it stepped
forward. The skinwalker.
But this time, it didn't wear my face.
It wore hers. My mother's.
Her eyes, her smile, her voice, soft and broken.
It's OK, honey, you're safe now. My chest collapsed, My grip
faltered. The hatchet nearly slipped.
No, I whispered. She stepped closer, arms
outstretched, her face flickering in and out of shape.
Yes, she said. You're so tired, just come with
me. Rest.
I wanted to, God I wanted to. But I saw it then, just for a
second, in the flicker of the Lantern, her eyes black, shining
animal. Not her, never her.
I screamed and swung the hatchet with everything left in me.
The blade sank deep into flesh. The thing shrieked.
Not my mother's voice, not mine, but something raw and inhuman.
The sound rattled the trees, shook the air, split my skull.
I yanked the hatchet free and swung again and again, screaming
with every strike. Its body convulsed, limbs
bending, face twisting between 1000 identities.
Blood, if that's what it was, poured black and thick.
Finally it staggered back, shrieking, and dissolved into
the shadows. Gone.
The Lantern winked out, and I was alone.
I don't remember how I made it out.
The next thing I knew, I was stumbling onto the dirt Rd.
where I'd parked my truck days before.
My clothes were shredded, my skin torn, my mind a blur.
The truck was still there, somehow.
I drove until the sun rose, until the forest was nothing but
a distant smear in the rearview mirror.
That was months ago. I haven't gone back.
I never will. But some nights when the world
is quiet, I hear it. My brother's voice, my own
voice. Hey, you awake?
And I know it's still out there waiting.
We spent a lot of weekends at my grandparents place outside
Tyler, TX just off a sandy County Road north of Hwy. 69 and
not far from Lake Tyler. Their house sat on concrete
blocks appear and beam place with loose skirting you could
slide aside to reach the crawl space.
It wasn't remote, but once the sun went down you could hear a
truck on 69 long before headlights showed.
I was 8 that fall. My brother was about 12, my
sister was 5 or 6. Our dog Lexie lived for those
trips. She'd pick up her leash with her
mouth and stand by the back steps, nails ticking on the
kitchen floor as soon as anyone touched her collar.
I had read a little bit of folklore by then in library
books. I thought it was interesting but
separate from real life. I was wrong.
The second night after dinner, my grandfather fixed the back
screen so it wouldn't slap and my grandmother took a couple
sheets off the clothesline that smelled like sun and soap.
The evening sounded normal. Crickets, 1 barred owl way out,
and the low hum from a window unit that cooled the living
room. Lexi paced the back steps with
the leash in her mouth, tail up. We said we were taking her for a
short loop down the service Rd. My grandmother said don't go
past the bend where the moon can't find you.
She said it while folding towels like a house rule, not a
warning. We nodded, rolled our eyes a
little and went anyway. We cut down the shell and sand
drive and turned left onto the rutted Rd. that ran parallel to
the highway, screened by Tall Lob Lolly and sweet Gum.
My brother carried a flashlight and kept it off to see the
stars. I had a rustling bag of dog
treats. My sister wore light up sneakers
that blinked red when she walked, which she loved and I
hated because it gave away our position.
The air was warm and still. You could smell resin, damp
leaves and a faint iron smell from where my grandfather had
sprayed well water earlier in the afternoon.
Lexi moved loose and happy, nose down where armadillos had
churned up the sand. We were about 20 minutes out
when everything went wrong at once.
The night sound didn't fade. It went to zero.
No crickets, no owl. Even the drone of the AC back at
the house felt thinner, like distance had changed.
The moonlight turned flat, not dim like a cloud crossed it,
just dull, as if a film was laid over our eyes.
Lexie stopped so hard the leash tugged my wrist.
Her tail dropped. A tremor ran down her sides.
She didn't bark or whine. She looked at one point ahead of
us and locked there. A deer shape stood just inside
the trees before the bend. At first that's what I thought
it was. Then the details landed one by
one. One antler bent the wrong way
with the tine mashed back toward the skull.
The coat didn't fit right, like it had been pulled on and
stretched. I could see ribs through hair,
not the way a thin deer looks, but like the structure
underneath had shifted. The breathing was wrong.
It wasn't fast. It was counted.
The chest rose and held for a beat, then fell in a timed drop.
The smell arrived last, sweet and rotten, the way a bag of
meat turns in a closed car on a warm day.
Its eyes were a flat yellow, not reflection.
The flashlight was still off. The color didn't move with us.
My brother said, very low, back up, slow.
My sister started to cry because Lexi wouldn't look away and
wouldn't move. I knew just enough from those
books to be stupid. I said the word.
I didn't say it loud. I said it clear.
In old Lushi, the thing didn't breathe for almost a full
second. Then it made a sound that
pretended to be a deer and failed.
It screeched, lifted to two feet with a jerky motion and a
shoulder set under the hide. With a hard click, the front
limb turned and became an arm that hung too long.
Teeth showed in a way that didn't match the head.
That was enough. My brother picked up my sister.
I scooped Lexi. We ran.
It paced us inside the trees and never stepped fully onto the
road. It wasn't crashing through
branches. The noise was a dry rasp, like
cloth dragging across bark. When we sprinted, it eased.
When we slowed, it closed. It kept us in a straight line
toward the open. I realized then it was hurting
us, and I realized it without wanting to.
When the house roofline came into view, the sound fell back
as if it hit a boundary. We hit the back steps and
shouldered the screen door so hard the latch bit the jam.
My grandmother was already in the hallway because she felt the
pressure change in the house. When the outer door opened, my
grandfather stood up from his chair without saying anything.
My grandmother asked, What did you see?
I tried to say the word and it stuck in my throat.
I wrote it on a narrow steno pad she kept by the phone.
She read it, then turned off the porch lights through the
deadbolt, hooked the little hasp on the crawl hatch at the back
steps and said, don't say it out loud.
Name's Carrie. The layout of the house mattered
that night. Peer and beam plank floors.
Event register in every room. Mismatched skirting around the
base, some panels loose. My grandfather set a hammer in
the umbrella stand by the front door to fix a nail in the
morning. He switched off the television
so the house's own sound sat clear.
My brother and sister and I shared a room.
Lexi lay across the doorway like a living stop, head up, eyes
fixed on the floor. The window unit cycled off the
house, settled the way old houses do.
Small ticks in wood, a fridge, motor coming on and off.
No one said a word. We listen to each other breathe
and tried to make it quiet. A little after 127, by the green
digits of the clock, we heard the first sound, a soft pass
along the skirting, like a flat hand on canvas.
Then the faint, careful shuffle of something sliding under the
house where the skirting was loose near the Hatch.
Sound changed when it moved from air to structure.
A joist took weight with a low wooden knock.
You could track it by the way the floor answered.
Scrape, pause, scrape, pause. It didn't wander.
It worked in a grid, like it knew to test and measure.
It came under our room. We heard tips of claws tick
between floorboards. 123 then a thin drag.
As if learning what made noise and what stayed quiet.
The vent register in our room popped once against the floor
and dropped back into place. Lexi didn't bark.
She showed teeth and held her breath so long she shook.
I slid a kitchen knife from under my pillow and held it with
both hands. The metal felt cold and wet from
my own palms. I didn't have any plan, but I
needed something that wasn't my hands.
While we heard it under us, another near identical shifting
passed beneath the living room, too fast for one body to move
between spots. Either there were two, or one
could move in a way that didn't match steps.
My grandmother stepped into the hall and bare feet and put a
hand on the wall. She didn't turn on a light, she
just stood and listened. My grandfather gave one plain
cough from the living room, a human sound that said people
lived here and were awake. The weight under us shifted
back, 2 slow scrapes and went still.
The worst moment came a few minutes later.
The floorboards by my sister's bed flexed a fraction and then
stopped. Air against my face changed,
like pressure on a tiny gap changed the flow.
It was the kind of change you feel on your eyelids when
someone opens a door on a windy day.
Not a breeze, just a difference. It felt like something pressed
an eye or nostrils against a crack and drew air from our
room. The knife handle clicked against
my tooth when I swallowed because my hand shook.
My grandfather coughed again. Somewhere under the kitchen,
something thin and hard, stick or claw, I couldn't tell,
Scraped between two boards under the vent, testing the seam.
Then nothing. 10 long minutes of nothing.
Normal house sounds crept back one by one.
The fridge relay. A night truck on 69, a dog
barking far off like in a different county.
We didn't sleep so much as run out of strength with our eyes
open. Morning light made the fear feel
stupid while it still sat there. The kitchen smelled like butter
and pepper. Nobody wanted to be the first to
bring it up. Lexi refused the back steps.
She whined and sat down at the threshold.
My grandfather got a flat bar and lifted the loose skirting at
the Hatch. He put a flashlight in and swept
the beam along the beams. In the sand the evidence was
plain. On one of the big beams, 5
gouges ran together in parallel, deep enough to curl bright
slivers of fresh wood. The spacing between lines was
wrong for any animal we knew. In the sand, there was a
straight line of heel and toe prints that looked human for the
first few steps, then lengthened and narrowed halfway along the
toes, split into pads by the last three.
The gate moved up onto the toes like a dog.
The line angled toward the trees and disappeared where needles
were thick. The sweet rot smell still hung
in a pocket under there, weaker but real, the way heavier air
pools in a low space. My grandfather measured the
distance between the gouges with a tape and wrote it down 2 1/2
to 2.6 inches between tracks. He took two quick Polaroids.
He washed his hands twice with dish soap, once with vinegar,
and opened the windows to let the house breathe.
We told our parents later that week.
They smiled it down. They said night makes shadows do
strange things, and that imagination adds to it.
They said coyotes with mange look odd.
They said tracks to form in soft sand.
We didn't argue because there was no point.
My grandmother didn't argue either.
She put the Polaroids in the steno page with the written word
in an envelope and tucked it into a cookbook on the high
shelf. My grandfather replaced the
mismatched skirting with tighter panels and screwed the hat shut
with a lock hasp. He sprinkled a line of clean
sand around the perimeter for ants, but it would also show any
new tracks. He kept the hammer by the front
door and never mentioned why they sold the house within two
months. The reason was downsizing to be
closer to us. Places like that go fast around
Tyler. On the last day, my grandmother
handed me the green steno pad and said if you have to write
that word again, write it small. We drove away with the old place
shrinking in the rear view. Ordinary trees in flat light ate
the view. We told ourselves distance would
be enough. Time passed.
We moved to a newer neighborhood on the South side of Tyler,
closer to schools and stores. We didn't bring up that night.
My brother, my sister and I made a rule without saying it out
loud. We didn't speak the name.
We called it that night and changed the subject.
We kept normal habits that weren't superstition so much as
procedure. Shut doors, check latches, bring
the dog in at dusk, keep tools where you can reach them in the
dark. None of it took effort.
After a while, it was just how we lived.
One humid August evening a few years later, the power flickered
after a storm and the yard went very quiet between waves of
cicadas. For one second, I caught a faint
trace of that sweet, rotten smell near the fence.
It passed fast, like a car's exhaust, drifting and gone.
I didn't say anything. I did the same three things we
always did. I shut the doors.
I checked the latches. I called the dog inside and kept
the lights low. Nothing followed.
The night chorus came back and filled in the spaces.
The smell didn't return. The next weekend, at my
grandmother's new kitchen table, she pulled down the old cookbook
and slid the envelope across to me.
Inside were the two Polaroids of the claw Marks and a small list
of numbers in my grandfather's careful block letters.
She added a note in blue ink. Names carry doors hold.
We looked at the photos together.
We didn't try to talk each other into or out of anything.
We just agreed on what we would do, if anything like it knocked
at our life again. I don't go back to that old road
after dark. I don't tell the story for
attention. I tell it because I learned a
set of rules that night and they work for me.
Don't speak it. Don't invite it.
Keep thresholds solid. Keep evidence when you have it.
When people ask online if things like this are real, I tell them
the truth. I have some things, don't care
if you believe them. The gouges were there.
The tracks changed shape. The air under the floor moved
when it breathed in. We shut the door and it stayed
shut. That's the end I wanted, and
that's the end we got. I still scan tree lines without
thinking. I still notice when a house goes
too quiet. It isn't drama, it's just how I
live now. I took a summer job at a camp so
I wouldn't have to go home. That's the plain truth.
I'm 20. My friend Trevor told me Camp
Dry Mesa was easy money. Kids hikes, pond duty, a few
campfires. The place sits off NM 117 near
Grants, NM, where the Black Rock fields of El Malpais run to the
horizon and cold air leaks out of holes in the ground like a
basement you can't seal. I figured I'd watch kids during
the day and sleep hard at night. I didn't go there looking for
anything strange. What happened felt practical in
the moment and ugly afterward. And I'm writing it down because
I keep seeing advice online that turned simple problems into
ghost stories. This wasn't a ghost.
It was something that uses our habits against us, and we
handled it like you handle a mean animal near a ranch.
Trevor and I rolled in two days before the campers.
We passed the El Malpais Ranger Station, took a caliche Spur Rd.
to a cattle gate and met the director, Marla.
She had that counselor energy that keeps things moving without
raising her voice. She walked us past Basalt Ridge,
3 long bunk houses on cinder blocks, then the South tank
pond, the archery berm and the trail to two legal viewpoints.
The camp used sandstone Bluffs overlook in the Lava Falls flow.
She was precise about boundaries.
The Park Service marked what was allowed and what wasn't.
Anything below grade without signage was off limits.
No arguments. That suited me fine.
My cabin assignment was Silver Badgers, ages 12 to 13.
Another first year named Noah got orange Coyotes 10:50 Our
porches face the same footpath. That first night after the pizza
and plastic egg orientation, I lay down on a thin mattress and
listen to wood settle. The night had that dry high
desert feel. Big empty sky, low shrubs, dust.
Around 1:00 in the morning a smell moved through the cabin
vents. Not strong at first, wet
creosote like the air after a sprinkle, then a copper Tang
under it and something like old cooking fat.
I got up, taped a blanket over the window because the overhead
security bulb was bouncing glare off the glass, and it made me
feel like there was a face there, and I went back to bed.
I sleep fine in new places. I didn't that night.
The second day we did staff training.
A senior counselor named Crispin and his partner Lila gave the
standard legend talk they do for kids about an outlaw who hid in
the tubes and punished rule Breakers.
It's theater to keep children from sneaking into lava holes.
Everyone laughed. Later, a small group of us hiked
Sandstone Bluffs Overlook so we could learn the route to lead.
On the way back, Noah pointed at a run of tracks and grit that
stopped me cold. You could see goat prints, well
defined, in the same path. They switched to bare feet.
The toes pointed the wrong way. The stride didn't change.
I wanted a normal explanation, so I said prank.
Noah shrugged. We walked on. 1/4 mile from
there, tucked under a flat stone, we found a cloven hoof
that looked cut clean and then placed.
No blood, just the copper smell. Again, we didn't bring it back.
We didn't tell anyone because new staff already ask enough
dumb questions. That night, something tapped
under the bunks. Not scratching, not a shuffle,
just a steady pop from the crawl space.
I checked the vent the next morning and found a string of
small goat knuckles tied like beads, looped through with a
strip of our camp T-shirts. I took it to Marla.
She didn't do the smile and distract thing people do with
spooky objects. She walked me to the maintenance
shed, opened a 5 gallon bucket of salt, dropped the bead string
inside and told me to get breakfast.
There was a box of orange cattle tags on the shelf and three dead
trail cameras without their cards.
She didn't explain any of that. She didn't need to.
I understood that she'd handled things like this before, and the
plan was to keep kids away from holes in the ground and not give
whatever it was easy reasons to climb the porch steps.
After lunch, Noah and I did a dry run to the rim above Big
skylight. We stayed on the legal side of
the monument signs and looked down into a wide shaft that
breathed cold air like a fan on low.
On the rim, somebody had stacked flat basalt discs into a ring.
It looked like the things teenagers build when they smoke
and want to leave a mark. Thoughtless art.
The center was clean, dustless, like a body lay there often
enough to make a print, and then was removed.
We didn't touch the ring. We agreed that when our kids
arrived, they weren't going anywhere near below grade
anything, and we'd meet in the mornings to compare notes.
The smell had started to show up just before midnight and just
before dawn, and it carried through the cabins like a
reminder the monsoon built. On day three.
Those quick cells stack over the Zunis and roll off the Ridge.
Trails change from powder to slick in minutes.
Electronics got banned after a kid on staff nearly lost his
phone between two slabs at Lava Falls during training, which
meant no easy proof hunting. We did paper head counts and
shouted checks. That limits the kind of story I
can tell, and I actually think it made us safer.
People do dumb things with cameras when they're scared.
Without them, you stand still and use your eyes.
Food bins by the pond began turning up, opened with lids set
aside. Raccoons make a mess.
This looked careful at the archery berm.
I found my own frayed shoelace tied in a bow around a prickly
pear pad, goat hair threaded through it.
I'd cut that lace jagged the day before.
The air went coppery again. Nothing you'd notice in a city,
but obvious on Black Rock where the only other smell is dust and
resin. Trevor was part of a group
sneaking near a shallow depression that pulled cold air
after sundown. I told him to knock it off.
He said he was moving contraband so he wouldn't get busted with
it in a cabin. Everyone rolls the dice a little
before campers show up. He went anyway.
Hours later, he fell asleep sitting up on our porch bench.
His boots were on the wrong feet.
The skin across his knuckles was scraped like he'd spent time
moving on hands and feet. He said he fell on the cinder
path. I believe the parts I could
verify and kept the rest to myself.
At dawn Noah and I walked to the big skylight rim.
The basalt discs had been restacked wider.
In the center lay a silver tarp bundle about the size of a hog
tied person. 2 fresh pinon poles were lashed underneath it like a
stretcher. We didn't open the tarp.
We picked it up together, carried it 100 yards to the
service Rd., set it down and covered it with a spare blanket.
Then we found Marla. We wanted an adult present for
the unwrapping, for a lot of reasons.
Legal, medical, moral. She brought 2 senior staff.
We cut the tarp. Inside lay a goat carcass, legs
folded tight, trust with new paracord.
The head was gone. The throat had been cut clean.
No insects around the meat. Somebody had tied strips of
counselor shirts in those same neat bows.
I recognized a strip of Trevor's tie dye.
The smell hit hard. Copper and old fat.
Marla didn't talk about coyotes or kids playing jokes.
She took a field notebook from her pocket, wrote down the date,
the spot and our names. She called it a warning
placement. Then she told us how we were
going to stop giving it chances. The plan wasn't magic.
It was ranch logic. We'd salt the ground around the
mouths that breathed onto our side of the property line, mark
perimeters with stakes and tape so no one crossed at night by
accident, and bait a far mouth past junction with Butcher offal
bought in grants to pull it away from cabins.
We'd keep the campers busy topside and leave below grade
areas to the Park Service. If we could get through the next
two weeks of storms, it would settle.
I asked if she wanted me to avoid a word.
She said don't say it where rock can carry it.
I said it anyway because I needed to feel like a grown man
for five seconds. Skinwalker.
She didn't blink. We moved a 40 LB bag of salt in
a painter's bucket. We laid a tight ring at the rim
where cold air came up. It felt stupid, and then it felt
like building a fence near Junction.
We set a second ring. While we did that, something
stepped out across the lava field.
It didn't rush. It was wrong.
Thin, long arms, bare legs caked Gray with dust, hair matted like
it had been burned and came back patchy.
It didn't talk, and I'm grateful for that.
It angled downwind as if it had done that same arc 1000 times.
When the copper smell thickened, I felt my stomach pull the way
it does when you walk into a butcher shop.
We didn't run. We kept our shoulders square,
backed out slow and returned to the lights at midnight.
The steps went past the cabins. You could feel the boards catch
the weight on the porch posts. It didn't try the stairs.
It walked and stopped and walked again, the way a person does
when he's checking windows for movement.
We stood with mag lights pointing at our own feet to keep
from blinding the kids inside, and we didn't wave them around
or shout challenges. Light made it bank its path.
That's all. 15 minutes later, the smell thinned.
I looked over at Noah. He nodded.
We checked the far line with binoculars from the fence.
The bait was gone. Hands, not hooves, had scuffed
the salt. A heavy drag.
Mark went away from camp. We'd pulled it where we wanted
at dawn. Lila hadn't slept in her bunk.
Crispin said she was with him earlier.
That told me nothing. Trevor stayed off to the side
like a dog that knows he's in trouble but hasn't worked out
why it matters. Marla said.
We were closing the loop now, before heat and lightning drove
everybody inside. We did not enter a named tube
that would have gotten us sighted by the Ranger and it
also would have put us at risk in a way we couldn't control on
the ranch lease. There was a shallow blowhole, an
opening in the basalt the size of a truck hood that reached a
side room near junction. Bright daylight hit the floor
and the drop was maybe 15 feet. The plan 2 down to up.
Noah and I would descend on a short rope with helmets to take
a quick look for a person in distress or signs of where they
went. Trevor and Crispin would belay
and hold positions at the rim. Marla would stay with the radio
at the road. Rules were simple, we stayed
within the daylight. We didn't step across any salt
and if the smell spiked we were out.
Inside was cold and quiet, the way a basement is quiet.
The air moved past my ears, steady, not pulsing.
On the floor against the wall lay a pinon pole with a clean
notch, a length of paracord in that same bow knot, and a strip
of Lila's bandana. Someone had dragged something on
a lattice. You could see the rails had
scraped basalt dust and left two clean lines that pointed to a
crawl no bigger than a kitchen window.
We didn't stick our heads in. We didn't even bend at the
waist. We hooked the lattice with a
loop of rope, kept our boots inside the salt arc we'd poured,
and pulled hard. Something on the other side
grabbed the far end and tried to hold it.
It let go when the lattice raked salt.
On the 3rd yank, it slid over the line and crashed into
daylight. Lila lay on it, bound at wrists
and ankles, gagged with a torn T-shirt strip.
Her forearms were gritted like somebody had dragged her across
sandpaper. Her eyes kept going to the
crawl. We didn't look where she looked.
We cut her loose and kept her on our side of the line.
We had to make it stop using that rote.
You can lock windows, but you really sleep only when you
change the door. Noah scrambled up the rope and
said a come along with a strap around a block on the rim.
I held the ballet and refilled the salt.
Trevor and Crispin levered a basalt slab that looked like a
good fit for the crawl mouth. The smell came up again, heavy
and close, a shape pressed just to the edge of light.
It stopped at the bright powder, like a dog at a hot stove.
On a three count they flipped the slab.
It slid, dropped and wedged flush across the opening.
Dust came up in a sheet. The air pushed hard past us and
then slowed. The copper hung and then eased.
No footsteps, no testing the new seal, just the ordinary sound of
air moving past rock. We hauled Lila up slow.
She could stand with help. We set cattle panels over the
blowhole wired to rebar. Marla called the county deputies
in a Park Service law enforcement Ranger.
We waited by the road in full sun, with salt rings at our feet
like flotation devices. Nobody cracked jokes when the
patrol trucks rolled in. We showed them what we had on
the surface. The salted rim lines on our side
of the property line, The drag marks.
The tarp bundle we hadn't moved since the morning.
The blocked blowhole. We didn't play expert.
The Ranger took photographs of footprints, noted the paracord,
the cattle panels, the goat parts, and wrote down human
interference with wildlife and illegal dumping.
It wasn't the whole story. It was enough to shut our
program down and bring in a formal sweep without turning it
into a circus for kids with YouTube channels.
Camp Dry Mesa closed that afternoon.
Parents were called. Buses came early.
Nobody went missing. Lila kept water down that night,
and most of her memory came back as fragments that match the
scratches on her arms and nothing else.
Trevor quit and left the state a week later.
He mailed me the braided hair charm he'd bought at a gas
station on the way in with a note.
Yours worked. Mine didn't.
I drove back to that same station and gave the kid behind
the counter the braid and cash for his trouble.
He didn't ask questions and I didn't offer any.
The Park Service put up more fencing around big skylights, so
you can still look down from the legal side but not stand right
on the rim. The ranch amended its lease
agreement to ban all night programs within a set distance
of any blowholes on their side. If you hike Sandstone Bluffs
Overlook today, you won't see anything special.
That's how it should be. On my last night before I left
New Mexico, I stood there with Noah as a small storm pushed
across the flats. The air smelled like wet rock
and resin. No copper, no fat.
We stacked 3 flat stones by the interpretive sign and walked
back to the truck. If you camp near El Malpais,
stay on signed trails. Respect the boundaries and don't
follow prints toward cold air after dark.
If you smell creosote and copper, ride in together.
Around midnight, stand on your porch with a light at your feet
and count to mourning. If someone you trust says to
salt the mouths, do it without making it dramatic.
I use the word you're not supposed to use because I'm not
standing on that rock as I write, and because I know
someone will ask people like names.
The name doesn't change the work.
We didn't beat anything out there.
We made choices that kept kids alive.
We blocked a door and left the rest of the people who managed
that land for a living. That's a good ending.
It's the only kind I can live with.
I came down off US 191 just after the heat drained out of
the day, headlights taking the first low curve toward Comb
Ridge while the sky was stuck between orange and bruise
colored. If you know that country
blanding down to Bluff, you know how the land folds into itself.
Long sandstone waves, cottonwoods pulled tight around
the washes, and then that dark spine of rock running NS like a
mile long animal sleeping with its back out of the ground.
I wasn't there for sightseeing. I owed Mike a favor and favors
are a simple math I try to keep. He helped me move out of
Flagstaff when I couldn't afford a second trip, so I said yes
when he asked if I could meet him near Butler Wash and help
mark a fence line on an old permit he was trying to sort
out. I don't say this to be dramatic,
I'm not built for it. But I grew up with certain
stories in the background. My uncle worked construction
near Kayenta in the 90s and told me straight what not to do,
where not to wander, and what words not to throw around.
He didn't say those things with a grin.
He said them like a man who'd made a mistake once and learned
the shape of respect the hard way.
So when I use the word skinwalker here, I'm not
decorating anything. I'm saying the word for what we
both think it means. I'm saying it because I promised
myself I'd keep the story honest.
I found Mike's truck at a cattle guard off A2 track north of
Bluff. He had the bed down and a stack
of tea posts and a cooler. He was chewing sunflower seeds
the way he did when he was focused, counting the posts left
versus daylight, like he could spend both if he was careful.
We shook hands. He looked thinner than the last
time I'd seen him, more winded in the shoulders, if that makes
sense. You came, he said.
I didn't think you would. I said I would.
I told him. What's the job?
He pointed across the flats toward the first rise of Comb
Ridge. Owner says the old line got
stomped out. Wants fresh markers before a
survey crew comes. I've got tags and caps.
We just need to walk it, find the old holes and make it
visible. Couple of hours if we don't
dawdle. The air had that clean mineral
taste you get after a dry wind. Grasshoppers popping in the
bunch. Grass crickets starting.
We took packs and the first bundle of fiber flags and
stepped off the two track where a few cattle had torn up the
edges, following a faint memory of a fence line that had been
something once regular gaps where post should have been.
A rust stain in the dirt if you got down and looked.
We walked a grid. I flagged.
He set caps. The light got low and the Ridge
turned into a cut off of shadow. That was when I noticed the
prints. I call them prints because
that's what they were. They weren't shoe tracks or deer
sign. If you've walked enough country,
you build a file cabinet in your head.
Mule deer, elk, coyote, stray dog, someone's trail runner with
a Vibram pattern. This wasn't in my cabinet.
It was a single line at first, like something stepping
carefully, toes pointed forward. The front half was split like a
hoof, but the back ended in a heel that looked almost human.
Not in the theatrical way, not like someone pressed a Halloween
prop in the sand. Just wrong, like 2 ideas stuck
together. I called Mike over without
saying anything. He crouched, squinted, set his
hand next to it. He didn't touch it.
Elk, he said, which was a joke, and when I didn't laugh, he
didn't either. They go anywhere?
I asked. He stood and followed the line
with his eyes. The Prince angled parallel to
the old fence, cut, then crossed it at one of the spots where a
post should have stood. We walked the direction they
pointed. The ground turned from sand to a
crusted patch and then to grass, and I lost them, then found one
again in a softer pocket near a rabbit Burrow.
The front half. The cloven look was deeper than
the heel. We went quiet.
We didn't say it out loud, but our pace changed.
We didn't linger at the post spots anymore.
We moved. You get much traffic out here.
I asked to make a sound. Once a month a ranch hand comes
through, tourists stick to the highway and Butler Wash pull
outs. The owner doesn't like people
wandering on these spurs. Why call you now?
He nodded at the Ridge owner's kid.
Had a scare camping near a stock tank last week.
Said coyotes kept circling. They sounded like people
arguing. Don't look at me like that.
That's what he told the owner. They got spooked and left a mess
and now I'm the one who gets asked to clean it up and make
the line obvious again. We worked until the last of the
light burned flat. He said there was a windmill
tank 1/4 mile to the east where we could crash.
He had water in a camp stove and said it wasn't worth parking the
truck closer just to spook whatever grazed out here at
night. I agreed because the sky was
already showing stars and I didn't want to walk back to the
truck and drive a fresh set of tracks down into a place that
didn't want them. The windmill was the old kind,
with the tail fin riddled by two decades of holes.
The head creaked once for every stray puff of wind.
The tank was a dark plate and the frogs were loud.
We set our pads on the upwind side of the windbreak, built a
small burner flame for coffee, and didn't talk much.
I kept thinking about the Prince.
I kept thinking about the way they crossed that fence line,
like they understood lines and didn't care.
First sign at camp wasn't much. Something moved the grass on the
far side of the tank and made no sound.
No crickets stopped, no rabbit exploded out.
Just grass bent in a smooth path like a hand pressed it.
Then the windmill tail clicked and swung and made the same
sound twice in a row, like something had knocked it.
I told myself it was the wind. I tell myself simple stories
until I can't anymore. We finished coffee and turned
off the stove. No fire.
I never do a fire when I'm sleeping.
Light fires tell things where you are and how awake you are.
We lay back in our bags with our boots on and our headlamps
around our necks because I have learned not to waste time
reaching. When I closed my eyes, the creak
of the mill and the frog noise merged into a single sheet.
I drifted fast and then woke hard without a dream in between.
It was full dark. The stars were as bright as they
get in that part of Utah, and I could make out the silhouette of
the Ridge behind the blacker line of cottonwoods along the
wash. What woke me was my name.
I'll write that plane. It was my name, said clean and
wrong from the far side of the tank.
Not a shout, not a whisper. It was my name in the voice of
someone who had learned it by hearing it and wanted to try it
on. If you've ever heard your own
name from a stranger's mouth, someone who says it like a
question when they're not sure they found the right person,
that's what it was. It came once.
Then there was a pause, and then the frogs got too loud again,
like the sound had scared them late.
I kept still. I felt Mike's elbow nudge the
edge of my pad. He was awake.
He didn't sit up either. We waited.
The name didn't come again. Instead the windmill turned 1
slow notch and the tail flicked like something brushed it.
I rolled my head and looked at Mike.
He was already looking at me. His eyes were the only part that
moved. He mouthed You heard it.
And I nodded. I eased my hand into my pack,
the way you do when you learn to move slow and keep your fingers
working before your shoulders. I found the headlamp, then the
small flashlight I trust, then the folding knife I keep, not
because I believe it will solve anything, but because the act of
having it matters. We didn't turn the lights on.
We gave it time. I counted 30 breaths.
There was nothing but frogs in the mill, and the frogs were too
loud in the way noise gets loud to hide something else.
I don't know what rule I broke by clearing my throat, but the
moment I did, the frogs cut off like a switch.
The silence had shape. A footstep in grass, real
measured another. The sound walked along the rim
of the tank and stopped opposite us.
I could see the water shiver. That's how close it was.
I said we're not lost because that was the sentence that came
to me. I've used it before when coyotes
circle close and when a stray dog thinks it can test a
campsite. It tells a thing you are
oriented. It tells a person you're not a
mark. The stillness after was a held
breath that didn't return to the chest it left from.
Then it made a new mistake. It tried my name a second time,
a little nearer, and got the vowel wrong.
The wrongness is what scared me more than the boldness.
Like it was practicing, like it wanted to be better at it for
later. Mike said, steady as I've ever
heard him. You should go.
The water rippled toward us like something had leaned down to
drink, then stopped. Without the sound of a tongue or
a muzzle. The heel of my right hand
started to sweat where it pressed on the ground.
I know how coyotes move. I know their curiosity and their
bluff. This wasn't a coyote.
I'm not going to guess it shapes in the dark, but when a thing
holds its breath with you and tries your name on twice, you
don't have to see it to know you're past the normal edges of
the map. We didn't turn our lights on.
We lay there with our boots on and waited it out.
The frogs began again in pieces. A breeze pushed the veins and
the mill creaked once, twice. You can believe what you like
about what moved along the tanks far lip and then away into the
grass. I heard steps go light, like it
didn't want the grass to talk for it.
I heard them stop at the cottonwoods and then nothing.
When the sky finally thinned, I sat up and my back hurt like I'd
been bracing for an hour. Mike sat up at the same time.
Neither of us said good morning. We walked the far side of the
tank and looked for prints we wanted to find and didn't.
Grass doesn't keep a diary. The only mark was a single place
where something set weight near the tanks rim and dragged 2
fingernails across algae and iron.
I say fingernails because that's what it looked like. 2 narrow
tracks side by side, shallow, a few inches long and too clean
for a hoof or a paw. We packed in 10 minutes.
Coffee didn't come up. He said we'll finish the line
and be done. I didn't argue.
We walked farther E to stay away from the cottonwoods and curved
back to the faint fence cut that led toward the Ridge.
We worked methodically, because work gives your hands something
to do while your head unknots itself.
Half a mile on, the world decided to get smaller.
Out in that open you see distances the way you see time.
Nothing sneaks. But something had hung, a strip
of bright surveyors tape on a mesquita head, fresh and clean,
snapping just enough to catch a corner of your eye.
There hadn't been any tape on our way in the night before.
I know because my mind had been filing waypoints, the way you do
when you're deciding whether the truck is close enough to matter.
This tape was new, or it had waited for light to show us.
Mike walked to it. He didn't touch it.
There were hoof marks under the Bush, fresh.
A small herd had moved through after the breeze picked up.
That should have been ordinary. It wasn't, because the tape hung
at human eye level, and something about the knot was too
neat. We followed where it pointed.
Because that's what you do, even when you shouldn't.
You look at the things someone meant you to look at, because
not looking feels like confessing fear.
The flagged line let us off our fence, cut by 20 yards, then
fifty. We were still insight of our own
caps and tags, but farther than felt smart.
The ground here was sandy again, the sort that Prince want.
We found them without trying the same wrong hoof heel shapes,
deeper now, like whatever made them had put weight down harder.
The stride change too, longer for three steps, then short the
next two, like a person trying on different ways to walk.
I'm done with this, Mike said, and that was the first time I
heard the old tired edge in him. He bent to pull the tape free,
but stopped halfway, like something told him not to change
the scene. Leave it, I said.
Let's finish the posts we can and go.
You've got enough in to show the line.
The survey crew can have the rest.
He nodded. We backed out the way we came,
eyes on our own tags so we didn't drift.
It's funny how small 40 yards feels when you've been called by
name in the dark and then LED aside by a bright strip of
plastic and daylight. The Ridge looked closer than
before. The wash looked deeper.
The land itself had changed its volume without moving.
We didn't talk for the next hour.
We set caps. We took bearings.
We got it done at the Last Post we planned to place.
Mike stood and wiped his hands on his jeans and looked toward
the truck, though it was too far to see.
We can make the road in 20 minutes, he said.
Let's not cut across the wash, stick to the flat.
I agreed, and we turned back and the first thing I saw was a
print set squarely over our boot tracks from the morning.
Fresh, clean, the same wrong shape on top of ours, like it
had stepped where we'd stepped on purpose.
It wasn't there when we walked out.
It hadn't drifted in by wind. It was new.
I looked at Mike to make a joke and felt the joke die in my
throat. He wouldn't meet my eyes.
He was already scanning the open.
Not frantic, just careful. I realized then he'd seen this
before. Maybe not this exact shape, but
this feeling. The feeling of a thing that
knows where lines are and what names are and how far it is to
your truck. The feeling of being studied by
something that doesn't need to rush.
We didn't run. We didn't even speed up enough
to tell the story later, like we'd panicked.
We walked out steady, the sun clean on our necks, and every
100 feet I checked our back trail without turning my head,
using the corner of my eye the way I was taught when I was
young and wanted to see without giving away that I was looking.
I didn't see movement I didn't want to.
And when the cattle guard finally showed and the silver of
the truck mirror flashed between the sage, my shoulders dropped
an inch on their own. That mile between the Last Post
and the truck, that's where a person decides who they are.
You can look back, you can pretend you're curious, or you
can admit what the ground already told you and get in the
cab and go. We chose to go.
We didn't slam the doors. We didn't crank the engine hard.
We just put ourselves in steel and glass and rolled slow until
the two track met the County Road.
When the tires touched asphalt, I let out a breath I'd been
holding since the frogs cut off. I thought the day had decided
its shape. I thought we'd leave it there,
file it away in the cabinet where you keep the stories that
don't help anyone to repeat. I thought that until we hit the
first bend north and the voice that wasn't a voice came from
just outside my window at 40 mph and said my name a third time.
Closer, almost right. Like practice was paying off.
Hearing your name at highway speed does something simple to
you. It strips off the ideas you have
about noise and distance and leaves only the fact that
something kept pace with a moving truck long enough to
speak and then vanished when you looked.
I didn't jerk the wheel. I didn't brake.
I kept the truck straight because the last thing I wanted
was to give whatever was outside a reason to enjoy the wreck.
I handed it. Mike didn't ask if I heard it.
He reached over and thumbed the window switch up as if glass
mattered the sound it made. Ceiling felt small.
We didn't talk until the road bent again and the Ridge slid
behind a hill. The cab smelled like dust and
the warm metal you get when the sun has been on a dashboard
since morning. I watched the side mirror for
shape and saw only sky and my own shoulder.
We passed one of those county turnouts where grater sits
sometimes, and I took it without announcing.
Gravel knocked the undercarriage.
I put the truck in park and left the engine running.
Because engines are the 1 sound that keeps you honest out here.
You kill it and you find out fast what else wants to be the
loud thing. We should go into Blanding, I
said. Get a room, come back in
daylight and collect your posts and walk up to the clerk and say
what he asked. We heard our names near Butler
Wash and something paced the truck.
You're not wrong, I just don't think putting 4 walls around it
changes what it is. We could call the owner, tell
him the lines flagged enough, bill him and be done.
We will, he said, but not tonight.
I'm not driving the highway dark knowing whatever that is can
touch us at 40. I didn't like his logic because
it pulled us back toward the country we'd just left, but it
made the kind of sense a body makes when it picks the thread.
It knows. I pulled us back out to the
blacktop and turned S toward a windmill we could see from the
road, a different one from last night's.
The tank sat 50 yards off the shoulder, Cottonwood spaced out
like tired men at a long fence line.
No houses insight, no porch lights, the kind of place cattle
know and people ignore. We parked broadside to the tank,
so the cab faced it. I set the emergency brake and
angled the headlights on low. I don't like bathing myself in
light out of habit, but I dislike not seeing more.
Mike got out first and I followed.
The metal of the door felt hotter than the air.
Late heat still held the ground. Lantern.
He asked. I've got one in back.
I keep a small but decent propane Lantern for work sites.
Not bright enough to announce from a mile, steady enough to
draw a circle. You can manage.
I set it in the bed, lit it, and turn the valve until the mantels
glowed. The truck's bed put it above
knee height, light clearing the top of the grass and the tank
lip. We didn't climb up to sit with
it. We stood on the roadside of the
truck, doors open, the cab a fall back if the air turned
wrong again. I don't like saying the word
just to say it, but I need to say it here so you understand
the frame. The word skinwalker was in my
head and I kept it there, not on my tongue.
I thought about my uncle and the way he never told long stories,
only rules. He said don't whistle at night.
He said don't answer if a voice in the wrong place uses your
name. He said keep something iron on
you, because men like to keep objects between themselves and
fear. He never said iron mattered to
anything else. He said it mattered to us.
I slid my knife into my pocket and felt the weight like a
promise to stand up and not run. The windmill's head turned a
fingers worth and clicked. The tank water held a Gray skin.
Bugs skated somewhere down the wash.
A night bird made its flat two note call.
I could see the dust on my hood in the Lantern light, clean
little crescents where my fingers had touched earlier.
I said we're going to sit an hour.
If nothing happens, we take 163 to bluff and sleep there.
Deal. He said 10 minutes in.
The crickets came in layers, not the loud wall from last night.
This was the sound a place makes when it's testing whether you
belong. I kept my eyes on the strip of
dirt between the tank and the grass.
It's where anything coming out of the trees would have to cross
if it wanted to reach water without showing itself early.
I didn't try to see a shape among shapes.
That's how people talk themselves into running at the
wind. I watched for breaks in the
pattern where the grass didn't move with the rest, where a
shadow didn't keep the same edge as the lantern's hum changed.
What came first was a coyote that wasn't a coyote because it
didn't make a coyote's decisions.
It came out on the far side of the tank, head low, tail even
lower. The way desert coyotes come when
they've learned people won't share it stepped into the
lantern's edge and stopped. Normal coyotes keep moving even
if they circle. This one set its front feet,
then placed each back foot directly where the front had
been, not offset. I have seen careful dogs do that
on hot pavement. I haven't seen a coyote do it
like it was trying out a rule. It stood there a full 20
seconds, looking fixed at the hood ornament, like it had
learned busy work to keep still. Don't move, I said, even though
Mike hadn't moved. The animal turned its head slow
toward the Lantern, then toward us.
The eyes didn't flash the way you get with a headlamp.
They held the light steady, like the animal understood glare, and
set itself at the right angle. Its ears didn't rotate.
It let sound land on it, then it opened its mouth and made a
noise that started like a cough and ended like a man trying not
to laugh. I won't dress that up.
It made a bad version of a human sound and waited to see what we
did. We did nothing.
It closed its mouth and took two steps along the tank rim, almost
slipping on the Moss, then corrected mid slide without
water noise. Coyotes slip.
This didn't. It moved like a plan, correcting
itself. It stopped again, aligned with
our open doors. It was far enough we'd have to
shout to change anything. I didn't shout.
Don't say my name, I told myself in my head, like a man
rehearsing in a mirror. I didn't say Mike's either.
Whatever was watching us had learned one word and I wasn't
offering it a second. The coyote shape lifted its nose
and made a soft sound I have only ever heard when a Hunter's
dog gets the scent on a path and tells the handler without
barking. Then it did something that took
the last choice out of this being boredom or a tall story
I'm telling wrong. It set its right 4 foot down in
the dust inside the lantern's edge and the print it left
behind wasn't a round pad with claw marks.
It was the wrong split and heel shape from our fence line right
there on the smooth dirt where we could both see it.
I felt the air get smaller. I'm not going to make this
mystical, I mean the actual air you bring into your chest.
I took a shorter breath to make the same rise.
I said, clear and soft. You should go because I had
nothing better. It turned its head left and
opened its mouth in a way that read like a smile if you wanted
it to read that way. And then it stepped back out of
the ring of light and was not visible, and the night swallowed
the spot like it had always been empty.
We didn't chase shadows with the Lantern.
We held our ground. 5 minutes passed, maybe 10.
I tried not to check my watch because I didn't want to break
the line of my attention. When the crickets came back,
they did it in a normal way. Separate sources, separate
rhythms, no switch thrown. I took that as good news, then
reminded myself I had no measure for good.
Let's button up and drive to bluff.
Mike said. His voice wasn't shaking, it had
that small scrape in it that shows up when a person has spent
too long in a tone they don't use often.
He killed the Lantern. I shut the doors and locked them
without making a show of locking them.
We buckled like we were leaving a job site.
I put it in drive and rolled for the shoulder.
A shape moved parallel to the truck on the Cottonwood side, a
clean paste just outside the cone of the low beams.
I kept the speed slow, then faster, then slow again.
The shape held the same window position, like it wanted me to
keep noticing it. When I speed up to 30, it angled
away and vanished. I didn't wait for the voice when
it came anyway. I took it like weather my name
from the dark, closer to correct, still not right,
dragged across the last vowel like rolling it around in a
mouth that didn't have the right teeth.
We hit 163 and took it. EI chose Bluff over Blanding
because it was nearer and because out here you sometimes
pick the direction that points you toward a river.
Rivers are lines and Old Country respects.
The lights of town show small and honest gas station motel, a
metal dinosaur out front of a rock shop.
I pulled into the gravel lot behind the trading post because
the Main Street felt too much like a place someone would
expect us to choose if they knew we were trying to be around
people. The lot was empty except for a
road cruise flatbed with a compressor chained down and four
cones stacked at the tail. We sat with the engine idling
and the doors locked and the radio off.
The voice didn't come. Nothing paced the truck.
I felt foolish to be in a town lot and still afraid.
And then I decided embarrassment is a luxury.
Mike leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
A minute later, a door opened on the far side of the building and
a man stepped into the square of light with a paper cup and a
vest that had silver tape on it. He squinted into the lot and
took two steps toward us, then stopped at the edge of the light
like his boots weren't allowed to cross into the dark.
He raised the cup a little like a hello and said, you boys lost
like a man who keeps stock phrases for night work.
Mike rolled his window down to inches.
You working late patching a bus pad before school starts
tomorrow? He said you can park here, just
don't block the flatbed. You look wrung out.
Coyotes, I said, because it was easier to say and not completely
false. He made a face that wasn't quite
a smile. Coyotes don't make you sit in a
lit lot with the doors locked. I didn't answer.
He took a sip and set the cup on the wall behind him and kept his
feet in the building's glow, like someone had told him once,
and he listened. You hear anything?
Answers to you by name? Don't answer back, he said,
without looking at us. That's what my grandma said.
She wasn't the kind to talk, just to fill up space.
He didn't say the word I was keeping in my head, and I
respected him for that. He picked up his cup again.
If you're leaving, leave. If you're staying, stay in the
light. That's free advice.
We'll head to the motel. I said.
He nodded and didn't wish us a good night.
He just watched us go until our headlights swung out on the
street and touched the stop sign.
We took a room with two beds and a carpet that had once been
blue. I locked the door and set the
chain and put my pack on the floor between my bed and the
wall, like that meant something. The AC unit made a sound like a
train a mile off and then settled.
I kept the bathroom light on because there's a difference
between fear and superstition, and I wasn't wasting sleep
looking at a black square the door couldn't fix when I lay
down. I thought sleep would have to
fight for a spot. It didn't.
I fell into it hard and rose out of it just as fast at 2:13 AM
because someone knocked on the motel door with my knuckles.
Not just a copy of the rhythm a stranger would use, Three soft,
one after hotel style. It was the exact way I knock.
It takes living with yourself a long time to hear something
small and know it belongs to you.
I knew the knocks came again. Same timing, same pressure
behind the last tap. Like I do when I'm not sure
anyone heard me. Mike sat up, eyes wide and empty
with sleep. He didn't say my name.
He didn't even whisper. We stared at the door.
I made myself breathe, quiet and slow because the body wants to
start thrashing when it doesn't have work.
The peephole was there if we wanted it.
Neither of us stood to use it. The knock stopped.
A full minute passed. The AC clicked.
Someone outside the door tried my name through the seam near
the latch in the wrong, almost right voice.
Patient. As a person who believes they
live here, I waited it out and didn't gift it the sound back.
After a while, the hall carpet made no sound, and I knew that
meant it had learned more than my knock.
It had learned something about the way I wait.
We made it to morning. I say that flat because that's
how it happened. Night ended.
Light showed in the crack under the curtain.
A delivery truck did its backup beeps across the street, and I
let the sound all the way in. Like medicine.
We showered and didn't talk about leaving the light on.
We turned the key in and didn't mention the door chain.
We walked out to the truck and didn't find a mark on it that
explained any of it. That's worse in its own way.
Over coffee at the gas station, Mike opened the map app and put
his finger along the spine of Comb Ridge.
I have to pick up the posts, he said.
They're the owners. I'm not eating that cost.
We'll do it fast, I said. High Bench Rd. in and out.
He nodded. We keep elevation.
We see more that way. We bought extra water and a can
of fix a flat because fear makes you redundant.
I paid for two cheap whistles at the counter and threw them away
in the trash outside. Because some habits are for
daytime courage, not for nights like last night.
We headed back West with the sun doing its normal, honest job of
making objects be what they are. It felt like cheating to use
that as hope. I used it anyway.
On the way out of town, we passed the trading post lot.
The flatbed was gone. A clean square of lighter dust
showed where it had been. The spot where the man had stood
was still in shade. I didn't slow down to see if
there were prints. I already knew what the ones I
didn't want to see would look like.
We climbed to the bench road and followed the top of the Ridge S
truck, low tires touching the edge of old tracks and new.
We kept the valley to our left so the wash and the tags were
insight. You could see the windmills in
daylight like silver thumbtacks. We would drop down a spur near
the Last Post, load the caps and flags and climb back out.
The plan was good because it didn't ask us to believe the
world would behave. It asked us only to do 3 jobs
and leave before the spur where the bench narrows and the truck
has to choose which rock to run a tire over.
The cab filled with that quiet pressure again, the feeling of
being in a room that's too small for the air inside it.
The radio tried to pick up a station and failed.
Gravel popped under the tires. The Ridge gave us a full view of
our flagged line below, bright plastic squares where we left
them. And then one of them moved.
Not the tape. The cap on the Last Post lifted
clean and set itself down to feet to the right, without a
hand to do it. I saw it because I was looking
right at it. Mike saw it because he said flat
there and then didn't say anything else because there
wasn't anything useful. After that.
We stopped because stopping had become our language.
The truck idled. The caps didn't move again.
The wind did nothing. The sun did what it always does.
And then something. Tried the passenger door handle
once, quick, like a friend running up late.
The lock held. The handle returned to place.
Nothing stood there. I put the truck in park and told
myself the truth of my life in that second.
I could take my hand off the key and make this longer, or I could
turn it and take us into a plan we still had time to keep.
I kept my hand where it was. We had a job left and a line to
choose. We took the spur off the bench
because that was the job. The track dropped in loose
shelves where rain had carried rock from the Ridge, and the
Mesquite leaned in with that flattened look it gets from 100
mirrors. Brushing it on the way down, I
kept the truck in first, let it crawl, and watch the wash open
up ahead, where our bright caps and tags ran like a dotted line
through salt Bush and rabbit brush toward the cottonwoods.
The plan was simple. Park with the nose pointing
uphill, throw the caps and flags in the bed, don't wander, and
back out the same way. If you stack enough simple
plans, you can sometimes pass for smart.
We rolled to a stop 50 yards from the last cap.
The air down off the Ridge felt heavier, like a room that hasn't
been opened all summer. I set the brake, left the engine
running, and we both stepped out with our eyes already on the
ground for sign. We didn't want the soil here,
took prints clean when it wanted to.
Right away I saw our boot tracks from the day before, the shallow
triangles a person leaves when they're trying not to sink.
Overlaying them, same as before, were the wrong ones, split up,
front, heel behind, placed on top of our steps like a lesson.
The stride walked past the Last Post, across the open and angled
toward the cottonwoods where the wash cut deeper shade.
We're not following that, I said.
We're not. He agreed.
We're packing and leaving. We moved with the kind of care
that looks like calm if you film it with no sound.
I pulled the caps and coiled the tags, and he carried the bundle
while I scanned the edges. The wind was doing that light
left to right push that keeps bugs and dust moving but doesn't
carry a smell. I wanted a smell, any smell.
Coyotes, cows, mud. The absence of it told its own
story. At the second to last cap, a
strip of new survey tape hung on a tamarisk branch we hadn't
flagged. Bright, clean, tied with a neat
square knot. The tail ends were cut square
with a blade. They didn't have the torn edge.
The old roll leaves when you're moving.
It pointed not just in the sense that all tape points, but
pointed in the way someone marks a path on purpose for eyes like
ours. It LED toward the cottonwoods
and the cool gap where the wash turned.
I kept my hands at my sides. Leave it, Mike said, before I
could say it. We're not here for that.
We finished stripping the line back to what we promised the
owner bundle in the bed. I wanted to be wheels up
already, but the tape did what bait does even when you've
decided not to bite. It made me feel watched for how
I refused it. I gave the wash mouth a long
look without moving my head. The shadow in there had the same
ordinary shape as a dozen other mouths in a dozen other dry
creeks. Nothing stepped out of it that
didn't mean nothing used it. 2 minutes, I said I want to check
the trucks undercarriage. Then we go 2 minutes.
He repeated, not because he needed the number, but because
repeating makes a thing settle. I squatted at the front bumper
and looked for lines, leaks, anything that could be pulled
loose, and my brain did the unhelpful thing it does when
it's busy with tasks. It started listing objects that
could stop us from leaving. Valve stem caps, fuel lines, oil
pan bolts. And then it stopped listing on
its own because I saw a small Cairn of river stones stacked
under the passenger door like a gift. 5 flat pieces, three in a
base, 2 on top, laid crosswise, each rubbed clean of dust like
they'd been wet or handled with care.
We hadn't parked here yesterday. Those stones weren't from our
tires. They came from the wash, and
they hadn't been there when we stepped out.
I didn't call Mike over like a kid.
I stood slow and pointed with two fingers without saying his
name. He saw them and didn't swear or
make a face. He just looked to the wash again
and back to the stones and then to the passenger handle, like
the three made a triangle he could solve by noticing it.
I kicked the top two pieces off with the side of my boot.
The sound was small. It bothered me that the action
felt petty, like a person swatting a family and pretending
the gesture meant more than it did.
Enough, he said. Up we go.
We climbed in and closed the doors.
The locks clicked, the engine read steady.
I checked the mirrors and then looked at the wash mouth one
more time because my body wanted to disrespect my own rules.
That's when I realized the tape on the tamarisk didn't only
point. It lined up with a second strip
50 feet in, just visible between two trunks and a third deep in
the cottonwoods beyond that, each at the same height, each
cut square. A run of markers set for someone
who needed help keeping a path at human eye level, a path that
didn't exist yesterday. I don't like turning my life
into a Riddle to be solved by something that isn't me.
But I also don't like walking away from a sign that says
plainly, I can put this where I want.
I backed the truck around in a tight arc, nose uphill, and we
started to climb the spur. We made 20 yards when the
steering went slack for a beat, like we'd run from dirt to ice.
I eased off the throttle and the tires chewed air, then bid
again. I didn't look at Mike.
He didn't look at me. In that one soft second, I had
the clear thought that something wanted us stopped right here,
right where the wash markers lined with the passenger window.
We kept momentum and topped the first shelf.
The road straightened and gave us another 100 yards of shallow
climb. The Ridge above looked plain and
close. The cab pressure eased a hair,
then just where the spur pinched between 2 sandstone shoulders,
the right front tire dipped too far in a rut that wasn't there.
On the way down, I felt the rim touch rock across a thin layer
of dirt. A bright metallic scrape under
the sound of gravel, and the truck yawed right a fraction.
I countered. Without overcorrecting, the Yaw
felt like a hand on the Fender. Keep it, Mike said, the way you
tell a horse to hold a line. We regained the crown with
inches to spare and after that the climb gave us back what
physics always gives if you don't panic bite, roll, bite
roll. Ridge on top The bench Rd. lay
in front of us like a plank. I didn't stop until we had two
truck lengths of flat and a clear run N then I did stop
because something you can't see trying your door handle on a
hillside buys itself another try if you're sloppy.
We got out together and walked the right front tire.
The side wall had a new scar then, fresh, too clean for a
desert rock, which I didn't like because it meant a sharp edge
had found us exactly where a person might get out to look
down into the wash. We stood there a minute, the
Ridge wind touched our shirts, and then quit.
The country below looked calm in that big lying way it has after
you've been rattled. Same trees, same tank.
The last two caps we'd left for the owner doing their hot little
blinks at the edge of the open. And then I saw movement in the
cottonwoods. Not an animal coming out.
Not a person. One of the tapes farther in
lifted and twisted a full turn against the still air, then
relaxed like a hand had let go. We're done, I said.
We're not solving this. We weren't going to, he said.
We drove N on the bench with both of us watching the mirrors
like we could buy a second by catching something forming.
The truck rattled the way old trucks do when they're telling
you they're fine as long as you don't ask for a Sprint.
I kept it at 15, then 20, then back to 15.
When the track got chewed. You could see far from up there,
across the Butler wash drainage and out to the flats that run to
191. And the distance did what I
needed for a mile or two. It made the last hour look small
and containable. Then the distance gave us
something we couldn't file as far away, 50 yards ahead, where
the bench narrowed again around a sandstone knob, someone had
built another Cairn right in the ruts.
Same 5 stones, same clean rub on the surfaces, topped with a
strip of bright tape tucked under the top rock so the tails
ran down opposite sides like a marker in a book.
The truck wasn't going around it without a scratch on the paint.
We rolled to a stop, nose close. I didn't put it in park right
away. I waited for the door handle to
jump on its own, for the window voice, for the heavy quiet.
Nothing came on the cue I'd set up in my head.
The wind blew normal. A family touched the side mirror
and retreated. I shut the truck off because
keeping it running felt like I was giving something too much
credit. That was stupid.
I turned it back on for me. I'll move it, Mike said.
No. I said, and I heard the hard
clip in my own voice. We both move it, doors open, no
names. We stepped out with the engine
idling and the doors swung. The stones weren't heavy, they
were just positioned like a person who knows hands, knows
how to make small work matter. We took the stack apart piece by
piece and laid it on the bench edge.
I didn't like that it felt like we were cleaning up after
someone who expected us to. It made me feel like I would get
a grade when I was done. Back in the cab I rolled forward
and that's when my eyes caught the print at the base of the
knob, half in dust, half on rock.
The front was the split I'd already learned the back, the
human heel, and then behind that one step back.
The heel was gone and a round pad with four small ovals for
claws had started. Like a change had been mid
stride when the ground switched the two shapes overlapped by a
finger's width. I have seen 2 animals step in
the same place, a second apart. This wasn't that.
This looked like one thing deciding how to be.
I didn't point it out, I didn't need both our heads full of the
same image. I rolled forward and the truck
was happy to go forward and for a few minutes we had simple good
work. Steer around slick rock, pick
the tire lines, keep the valley on the left and the exposure on
the right. A Raven passed at our hood
height and made two wing beats and slid away.
I like that bird more than I should have.
We cut back toward the highway by a two track that meets 191 N
of the turn off to the Butler Wash ruin pull outs.
Civilization in this part of the map is just the habit of travel
dust, tire edges, a sign that's been shot twice and replaced
once. I could see the long line of
blacktop down the slope and the shimmer off it in the little low
mirage that hangs over heat in the middle of the day, it looked
like the easiest thing in the world to rejoin other people.
200 yards from the cattle guard that would drop us to county
maintenance, we passed a rock art panel I'd never noticed.
It sat back from the road, 10 yards on a vertical face where
weather had cleaned desert varnish into a dark canvas.
Figures, humans, animals, pecked in a lighter shade.
I don't pretend to be a scholar. I don't touch panels.
I keep my distance and my voice down.
But even from the driver's seat, I could see one thing that made
my fingers go cold. A fresh pile of small stones
stacked under the lowest figure, just like the Cairns in our
path, and a folded strip of bright tape set under the top
piece like a tongue. The panel itself had no new
marks, I could see. Whoever did this knew enough not
to touch what they couldn't put back.
They only set their little offering below, like they were
leaving a note for anyone who knew where to look.
Keep going, Mike said flat. Don't stop.
Don't even slow down. Don't give it a chance to put
you on your feet. I kept speed steady and let the
cattle guard knock the tires and watched for any grab at the
doors just because my brain wanted to rehearse it.
Nothing tried us. The highway showed and ran
straight North and South the way a promise runs.
Plain, unambiguous, full of work it can and can't do for you.
We turned S because Bluff was closer and because we still had
to put bodies in a place with walls before sundown that we
controlled. The day had turned hard.
Bright, the kind that gives you sharp edges on every object, but
not a lot of mercy. We didn't talk until the
speedometer settled and the engine note evened out.
You see the panel? I asked finally.
I saw the stones, He said. That was enough.
We made town and ate at the counter of the place that does
burgers and green chili and pie. The waitress was the kind of
person who knows when to leave a man and his food alone and when
to ask if he wants more water. We ate like men just back from a
job that paid but didn't feel like pay.
Neither of us ordered pie. The waitress asked if we wanted
a box. We said no in the same non
voice. What now?
I asked, folding the bill into the check sleeve.
I call the owner and tell him the line is marked enough to
find, he said. I tell him we staged caps for
his survey crew at the top. He stopped because we hadn't
staged anything. We'd hauled it all out.
I tell him the truth that matters, the rest he can hear if
he wants to or not at all. And after that we leave.
He said we don't pick the Ridge again.
We don't test what it can or can't do 2 days in a row.
We leave. It was the best plan on the
table and the only one I could stand behind without lying.
We paid, stepped into the bright and made for the motel to grab
the gear we'd left. The room smelled like cleaners
and night sweat. The door chain fell soft in my
hand. No new marks in the carpet near
the threshold. No taps on the door to say we've
been graded for choosing sunlight.
We were 20 minutes from pointing the hood at the San Juan and
then the long ribbon of 160 when the day made one last
adjustment. The phone on Mike's dash lit
with a call from a number with the owner's area code.
He tapped speaker with a knuckle.
You get it done? The owner asked by way of Hello.
Enough to guide your crew. Mike said.
Caps and tags retrieved, lines visible where it matters.
You didn't leave caps on the last run?
The owner asked, confused. My guy just drove out to check
and said someone's been putting them back up since this morning.
Says the last half mile, looks freshly marked all the way to
the wash. We looked at each other.
Neither of us smiled. I pictured the bright plastic
we'd pulled and coiled now standing up out there like we'd
never touched them, pointing into the cottonwoods in a new,
neat line. We didn't do that, Mike said.
There was a short quiet on the line, and then the owner did
what a practical man does when he hears something that doesn't
fit. He ignored it.
Fine, surveys out tomorrow. Send me your hours.
We're leaving town, Mike said. We won't be around to answer
questions. Didn't ask you to be, the owner
said, and hung up, already living in a different story than
the one we were still inside. I put the truck in gear.
We pulled onto 191 and headed for the bridge, where the river
cuts a green line through the red and the highway makes a
promise again. I told myself that leaving is a
kind of respect, too. I told myself that if a thing
wants you to follow tape into cottonwoods, the strongest thing
you can do is say no and make that no stick all the way to the
county line. We held that resolve until the
sun sat low and the ridgeline behind us went the color of old
iron and the road shoulder began to show dust tracks that weren't
ours, keeping pace just at the edge of view.
That's how it started again. Quiet, patient, no tricks, just
a pace beside us that didn't burn out.
And somewhere between Bluff and Mexican Hat, where the highway
goes lonely and the radio finds nothing to argue with.
The window, dark next to me, leaned in with the shape of my
name a fourth time, nearly right now, almost like a person I
hadn't met had practiced it in front of a mirror.
I didn't answer, I didn't look. We drove into the shadow of the
next bluff and came out the other side, still moving, and
that had to be enough for that mile of Rd.
Past Mexican Hat, the highway turns into long, honest miles
where your thoughts get louder than the tires.
The thing pacing us didn't crowd the glass or knock the door.
It worked like a shadow does when it knows you're checking
the mirror. Kept the same place at the edge
of peripheral vision. Let the center of the lane stay
clean. Didn't waste a trick.
I don't scare easy, but I respect technique.
This was technique. I put the map in my head on the
dash. S meant monument, valley, and
more empty in the spaces between the lights.
E meant Shiprock and a long commit.
West would eventually give us 95 in a way out, but a bigger climb
between here and there. N on 261 meant the Moki Dugway
switchbacks carved out of the face of Cedar Mesa. 3 miles of
dirt and gravity, no guardrails, plenty of sky.
I wanted sky. Sky meant lines of sight and not
much for something to hide behind.
We're taking the Dugway, I said. People die on that road, Mike
said, Not arguing, just stating a fact.
People also live on it, I said. And up top at Muley Point will
have horizon in every direction. Maybe service, he nodded once.
We cut right onto 261. The first miles are plain 2
lane, and then the sign warns you in three different ways.
What's coming? Steep grades, sharp curves,
unpaved. The Cliff face shows the road
like a ribbon stapled to rock. I downshifted and let the truck
feel heavy, the way it's supposed to feel.
I've climbed it before, in daylight, with tourists cycling
down in bright jerseys. This was late day.
Only one other set of lights appeared behind us far back
then, turned off toward Valley of the Gods and left us alone
with the wind and the drop. Halfway up the cab pressure
returned. Not the hush of a motel hallway
and not the frog silence from the tank.
More like a hand on your shoulder to see what you do with
it. The outside air was moving, the
dust off our own tires snaked away, but the feeling was inside
the truck with us, and I didn't like that because it meant sky
and distance weren't a cure, only a stage.
I kept eyes on the uphill edge, not the void.
You don't stare into the drop on Moki, you treat it like weather.
The switch back stacked above us into clean geometry and then
lost shape when you got near. In one of the hairpins, a line
of small rocks sat across the inner track, 6 or 7 palm sized
pieces placed nose to tail. It wasn't a rock fall, the
spacing was too neat. I eased to a stop short of them.
Doors locked by habit, engines still running because I wasn't
giving away the one voice in the cab I controlled.
We stared at the line. The wind touched the side
mirrors and quit. Below us, the desert ran out to
the buttes like a map laid naked on a table.
I put it in park. We moved them together.
I said doors open, we don't say names.
We stepped out, gravel under boots, brake lights warming the
rock. We kicked the line wide with the
sides of our soles and didn't turn our backs to open space.
Back in the cab, I put it into drive and cleared the nose
through the gap we'd made. I told myself that was just a
test of how obedient we were to small instructions.
We'd failed the test by not stepping into the pattern.
It's set. I liked failing that test.
On the next ramp, the voice came.
Not at the window, not intimate, carried by the wind from below,
like someone standing 2 switchbacks down and the empty
air had perfect lungs. It said my name almost right
again, no hurry, and then tried Mike's.
It wasn't a copy of my cadence this time.
It was Mike's voice, done back to him from outside, like
someone had recorded him and was practicing the shapes.
I felt him stiff and next to me without moving.
Don't let it inside, I said. Can it already be inside?
He asked. Soft.
It doesn't get a say, I said. And I kept climbing because the
road only goes one way and it's up at the last big turn where
the switchbacks give you a wide shelf before topping out.
The truck hiccuped. Not a full stall, A hiccup.
Power dropping 1/2 beat the way fuel starved engines remind you
they're in the math. My eyes went to the gauges out
of reflex. Temps were fine, pressure was
fine. The alternator needle was where
it should be. The hiccup came again, like
someone flicked a finger against the fuel line to see if we
noticed. I put us on the shelf and
stopped with the nose pointed at sky.
Parking brake on neutral. I didn't shut the engine down.
I popped my door and stepped out.
Hood release already pulled. Because sometimes you say with
your body what you're going to do, so the rest of you will
follow. The wind up there tastes like
the ocean without the water. It came clean across the top of
the Mesa and leaned on my shirt. I lifted the hood.
Everything was what it was. No chewed lines, no fresh leak.
The sound of the engine looked like it sounded steady and not
sorry. I closed the hood and turned to
get back in. Four small pebbles sat on the
center of the hood, now in a straight row, dry and clean, as
if a hand had set them while I was looking away for a breath.
I hadn't heard them touch. I didn't reach to knock them
off. I didn't hand the moment anymore
ritual than it already had. From the passenger side, I heard
the gentle plastic rattle of a door handle, trying once, quick,
the way a friend does when he wants you to hurry up in a
parking lot. I walked around the front, the
wind flattening my shirt, and saw nothing in the glass but my
own reflection and the bright mess of the world behind me.
Mike stared straight ahead. He didn't look at me or the
handle, he said, eyes forward. It asked for my daughter by
name. You didn't give it anything
back, I said. I didn't say a thing.
He swallowed. It sounded like her, only it
didn't. I don't like explaining that
sentence to myself. Don't get ready to roll if I
tell you I dropped the hood. The four pebbles slid a fraction
with the metal thump and then sat like they'd been glued
there. I got in, we buckled.
I put it in first and let the engine pull us the last 100
yards past the carved sign that says you're done with the
dugway. The asphalt came back under the
tires like another country's rules.
Up on Cedar Mesa, the light tilts different.
The junipers sit spaced like old men.
If the world is going to be normal again, it usually chooses
here to start. It didn't.
We took the spur to Muley Point because I wanted the horizon out
there. The San Juan cuts its tight
loops and the cliffs fall away in steps that make your stomach
right. New laws.
I parked at the last pull out, not at the edge, back by the low
rock windbreak someone stacked A decade ago for their tent.
No other vehicles, no voices but ours.
If we wanted them. The plan was simple, put air
between US and the Ridge, ring the truck with what we trusted,
light movement, common sense, and make a run after sundown if
we had to, using the dark like cover instead of letting it use
us. I hate bad plans dressed up with
bravery. This wasn't that.
This was pacing the work we had left and refusing to offer the
thing inside timing. I set the Lantern in the bed
again and left it cold for now. We had an hour of light.
We walked a slow circle 50 feet out, picking up what the last
campers had left. A rusted tent stake, 2 bottle
caps, a flake of chert sharp enough to open skin.
We tossed the trash in the bed and left the chert where it had
been. I'm not superstitious about
rocks. I just try not to move.
What's older than my problems? The phone found a bar. 1 bar is
enough to text. I typed the obvious to a friend
who doesn't ask why when I send short sentences at muley point.
Weird out since Butler wash. If we go quiet tonight, call me
at 7:00 AM. If I don't pick up, call Highway
Patrol in Blanding and give them this pin.
I hit send and the little bubble sat a beat then left.
No reply. I didn't want one.
I just wanted the habit of leaving a trail that wasn't made
of plastic tape tied at eye height.
We sat in the cab with the doors open and watch the light even
out. The wind kept honest.
A Raven came up from the cliffs and hung on the updraft like a
kite someone forgot to reel in. I like that again.
The normal things kept being normal.
That's the last place you check for trouble because you want it
so bad. The first odd was small.
A new Cairn, 5 flat stone style on the low windbreak top rock
turned at a slight angle like a compass arrow.
It hadn't been there when we walked our circle.
It pointed at the truck. I don't know who it was for us,
the thing, or whatever rules the thing keeps, but I broke it with
the back of my hand and scattered the pieces in a way
that didn't look dramatic or ceremonial, just undone.
The second odd wasn't odd at all, if you like coincidences. 2
hikers, headlamps lit up on the far lip 300 yards away, bobbing
as they picked their steps toward a Subaru I hadn't seen
pull in. They talked low, got in,
started, drove off. Tail lights, red dots that went
steady and then we're gone. It helped to see other people
leave without anything tugging at their bumper.
It didn't help enough. Sundown made the big drop to the
river go purple for a minute and then black with edges.
I lit the Lantern to a low, steady white and closed the
doors. We locked them without looking
at the buttons. I set the truck in a position I
could roll start if the battery chose that hiccup again.
Nose just a hair downhill, enough that neutral would give
me a glide to pop the clutch if I had to.
You don't get to call this paranoid if you've heard your
name correct itself three times in one day.
We kept our voices factual. We drank water because men
forget. We made a short list out loud of
what we'd do if A happened and what we'd refuse to do if B did.
We agreed we wouldn't answer the door knock if it came again in
any voice. We agreed not to give directions
or repeat each other's names. We agreed we'd take 95 W, then
191 N, then find a town with more people than reasons to
stay. We didn't say what we'd do if it
followed anyway. If it was going to, we were
already inside that version of the story.
Full dark at Muley Point is where a person relearns the size
of things in a way that doesn't comfort the horizon lines out so
far. You can mistake it for a
promise. It isn't.
It just gives you more room for the thing to move where you
can't. The Lantern circle turned into
our small country and we stayed inside it because a line is a
line even when it's made by light.
The knock came at 941 PMI looked at the dash because I wanted to
know and because knowing makes the memory later sit in one
place. Three soft knocks on Mike's
side, same rhythm as the motel door, same skin level sound that
says a handmade it, not claws or wood.
We didn't move. 5 minutes passed and I heard the tiny scrape of
fingernails or something pretending to be drawn.
Slow down the paint from the window seal to the mid door,
then stop. The Lantern hissed and held.
When the voice came it didn't bother with my name.
It used his again, even closer to true.
And then it added a word. I hadn't heard it try open.
Not a plea, not a shout, the flat suggestion you use on a dog
that knows a command. Mike's jaw worked once he
breathed out slow. I said no, not to the window but
to him, and he nodded. Because that's who we are.
The handle ticked once, returned to place, ticked again, a little
impatient now and then stopped like whatever was out there
remembered another trick it wanted to practice later.
At ten O 6, the engine did its half stall again.
I felt it in the wheel more than heard it.
I turned the headlights off one Click to save what I could
without giving us away as a target of our own fear.
The Lantern gave enough to keep the glass from turning into a
mirror we'd search for faces in. At 10 O 9, the engine quit
altogether. No chug, no cough, just a gone
sound. The dash stayed live.
Battery wasn't dead. Something had decided it wanted
to see if we'd step into the dark to fix what we couldn't
see. Neutral, I said on my count, if
it rolls, I'll drop to 2nd and pop it.
Count, he said. I killed the Lantern to make the
stars explode and to give us the drop if we had to move.
The knight hit the cab like water.
The temperature didn't change, just our claim to it.
I let the brake go and the truck eased.
Gravel crunched. We rolled 3 feet, 610.
I dropped the shifter into second and let the clutch up.
The engine caught first. Try that clean bark you get when
a machine still wants to be on your side.
I turned the Lantern back up just enough to own the circle
again. I wanted to laugh and didn't.
You don't laugh at luck when you still need it.
We sat another 40 minutes. Because pride will get you
killed and patience is free. Nothing.
Tried the doors again. No footsteps went around the
bed. The pebbles on the hood were
gone when I finally checked. A small fact I don't have a
drawer for. At 10:53 we picked our run.
No heroics, no testing, just out to 95, left to 191 N to
Blanding. And then we keep driving until
fatigue makes more mistakes than staying put.
Wood we pulled away from the edge and back through the
junipers. The first mile off Muley Point
always looks the same, even when you want it to change.
Dust Rd. low brush and the rear view a square of darker dark.
The voice didn't come with us on the speakers or from the bed or
out of the vents. I want to say it stayed behind
on the lip to watch and practice new words on other people.
That's not honest. The honest version is we didn't
hear it that mile. That's what I have that in the
print we found on the center of the windshield in the morning.
One wide arc of clean in the dust, shaped like the front half
of a split hoof, dragged an inch downward and away, as if
something taller than the cab had leaned in at some point in
the night and then decided to let us go for reasons that don't
belong to us. We weren't at morning yet.
We still had the run to the highway, and we still had to
decide if we were making a stand or making an exit.
We chose exit, and when the road to 95 came up like a rule
someone else wrote and we slid onto it without missing a beat,
I understood something I don't love admitting.
Sometimes surviving is just a series of decisions you make not
to be interesting. We drove.
We didn't stop to see if the Cairns had followed.
We didn't answer when the night leaned in near Fry Canyon and
shaped our names one more time like it was practicing for
someone easier. We kept the cab warm and the
glass steady and the truck between the lines until the 1st
weak orange showed Far East and made me believe we'd stolen one
hour back. Frye Canyon to Hanksville is the
kind of stretch where a person learns what their steering wheel
feels like at every position. Long, empty, honest.
The truck's hum steadied me. We'd outlasted the Dugway and
Muley Point. The plan was simple.
Now 95 W to 191 N, then a bigger town with mornings that start
before trouble wakes up. The sky got that thin pre dawn
band, not enough to see by. Just enough to remind you that
the shape of the world is still under there. 5 miles past the
Fry Canyon crossing, the right front tire let go.
Not a blowout, a sag pressure leaving fast like someone had
pulled a plug. The truck settled on that corner
and started to drift right. I kept it straight, eased speed
down and got us onto a wide gravel turn out that looked like
Rd. crews had used it once. I stopped where we could see
both ways. A long time before headlights
would surprise us. The dash tire light took its
time to admit what the body already knew.
We looked at each other because this was the exact moment we've
been pacing for. No dramatics, just the job.
I swung my door open, crouched, and put my palm on the side
wall. Warm, soft enough to deform
under a thumb. The scar we'd noticed on the
Bench Rd. had become a slit. No debris in the tread, nothing
stuck. A clean mean opening too sharp
for rock. Unless the rock took a file to
itself, it didn't matter. It was flat now. 2 minute
change. I said no names, keep eyes out,
no talking to anything that talks back. 2 minutes.
He said we'd practice this rhythm for years on bad roads.
I got the Jack under the lower control arm and started
cranking. He pulled the spare, loosened
lugs while the weight was still down, then lifted the wheel off
as soon as the rubber cleared gravel.
The air held normal. The horizon stayed empty.
My heart made noise like work, not fear.
The spare went on, lugs finger tight, then wrench, star pattern
drop retorque. 90 seconds, maybe 100.
I spun the dead tire to check the inside sidewall.
The slit ran clean, like a careful cut from heel to arch,
not jagged. I didn't show it to him.
He didn't need a picture to go with the fact we were throwing
the Jack back in when something moved in the culvert 30 yards
off the dry concrete kind with a square mouth under the turn out
and a rusted guardrail above. It wasn't a person standing up
or an animal hopping out. It was a change in light inside
the culvert, like someone had stepped just far enough toward
the mouth for dawn to catch a cheekbone.
The sound the air made changed with it, a small pressure
adjustment, like opening a fridge and feeling the room
shift. I stood without straightening
all the way. Mike did the same.
It was a reflex from the last 24 hours.
Finish the task, own the weight of it, then look.
A voice came from the culvert mouth.
Not mine this time, not Mike's. It used a tone that would have
worked on most people, a Border Patrol kind of calm.
You boys all set. Clean pronunciation, no accent
you'd spot. If it had asked us for
registration and proof of insurance, I would have handed
them through the window on muscle memory.
We're good, I said, Even roadside change.
Good to hear, it said. And the 2 words rode wrong on
each other, like the speaker had learned the phrase and glued the
pieces together. You should check your other
front looks low. Our gauge says it's fine.
I said I didn't have the gauge out, I didn't have to.
I heard Mike shift 1 shoe on gravel in a way that told me he
wanted to stand between me and the culvert and was choosing not
to copy. The voice said that was new, a
radio word from a mouth in a drain.
I watched the darkness inside the square for a shoulder, a
sleeve, a hint of movement, the knot quite dawn through poor
angles. All I got was the feeling that
the culvert had depth long enough for a man to stand
upright a ways back without crouching.
I hadn't seen a culvert like that here.
We're rolling, I said. Appreciate the concern.
I walked to my door and got in. He did the same.
Door locks fell under our thumbs.
The truck settled back into itself.
I put it in gear and eased us out.
The culvert said, friendly as you please.
Hey Mike, don't forget the cooler in the bed.
And that was the point where names weren't an accident.
It wasn't guessing. It had learned the truck, our
rhythm, what we carried and who we were in it.
I kept my eyes on the road and the mirror on the culvert mouth
and in that small glass, the dark shape at the edge didn't
resolve into a head or a hat. It resolved into a gap that
wasn't there when we pulled in and was again when we left, like
a mouth that preferred to be a mouth.
We're not stopping again. I said.
We're not, he said. We made 3 miles.
The spare held. The engine note stayed clean.
The dawn got traction. That's when a pickup eased up
behind us. No lights.
A white work truck with an amber beacon on the roof and a
magnetic county square on the door, the kind of sign you can
print if you own a printer. It followed without crowding.
I speed to 60. It did too.
I slowed to 45. So did it.
I moved right to let it pass. It held back like a polite
driver who doesn't want to spray you with gravel.
Don't brake, Mike said, which I wouldn't have anyway.
The truck pulled even with us, inch by inch, staying in our
blind spot longer than a driver with places to be would.
I didn't glance at it full on. I kept the corner of my eye
there. When it finally eased forward
enough that I could see the passenger window, the glass was
up and the cab looked empty. No driver silhouette, no hands
on the wheel. It might have been the angle and
the early light. It might have been that there
wasn't anything seated where eyes should be.
The bed was clean. No tool boxes, no ladder rack.
Just a white box with a sticker you could peel off and put on
something else. It floated ahead another car
length and then tucked back in front of us and set a speed.
We didn't choose. We kept it.
I don't care how brave you are, you don't tailgate a blank.
A mile later, it slowed and signaled to a service pull out
that wasn't on the map. I knew that stretch.
There's a scenic turn out farther W here.
There's nothing but sage in the wind structures that keep snow
from drifting. The white truck glided into a
gap that didn't exist the last time I'd been out here and
stopped with its tailgate toward us.
The amber beacon flashed twice without the spinning hardware
turning. I kept going.
It didn't follow. I checked the mirror until the
road crested and lost it. Next town, we fuel, we don't
linger, I said. He put the map away.
Monticello's the first honest stop.
We can reach it without talking to the morning.
We didn't make Monticello before the last trick.
It came simple as a stop sign. A construction flagger on 191 N
of Blanding, where the shoulder drops and the crews set cones
when they trim trees. An orange vest.
A stop paddle. A white hard hat with scuffs.
He held the sign up high and stepped out like a man who
trusts the law more than he trusts the people obeying it.
Behind him, a skid steer idled with no operator in the seat.
Cones ran the lane for 100 yards and then just ended.
No crew trucks, no spools of caution tape, no human clutter.
Just the neat minimum a brain needs to see to accept a story.
I stopped 10 feet short of the paddle window up doors locked.
He walked over slowly. No swagger, just the I'm at work
gate of a person who's got 10 hours of this ahead of him.
He leaned down to the passenger window and tapped once, the way
workers do, to ask for a crack of air.
I didn't give it. I watched his chin through the
glass. It was the wrong kind of clean,
like a mannequin that had rolled in dust to pass as a man.
He didn't fog the glass when he breathed.
Maybe the seal was better than I thought.
Maybe he didn't breathe. He lifted the paddle, spun it in
his hands, and when it faced us again, both sides said stop.
He was trying to be funny, or he didn't know.
The other side should say slow. He pointed with the edge of the
sign toward a spot he wanted us to pull into.
There was no spot, just brush and a shallow drainage cut.
He made the gesture again, like the confusion was ours.
The sun cleared a little more of the horizon and lit his ear
edges. They didn't look right.
Ears have soft curves. These looked notched, like
someone had copied the shape from memory and got bored one
inch from finished. We're done playing, I said.
I put it in gear and rolled forward at one mile an hour
until the bumper touched the paddle's edge.
He didn't step back. He raised his free hand like he
meant to press his palm to the hood.
The fingers didn't look like fingers anymore.
They looked like long, narrow, wrong joints wrapped in skin
that had learned the idea of knuckles and hadn't landed it.
I kept creeping. The sign bumped, tilted, and
slipped from his grip. When it hit the ground, it
didn't clatter. It fell like it was made of
felt. He leaned in, so close to the
glass that if he'd been a man, I could have counted pores.
He opened his mouth. The shape inside wasn't a
tongue. It was too long, pale pieces
that ended before the place a throat should be.
He tried my name and it finally came out close enough to be
mine. He tried Mike's and got that
right too. Then he said not loud at all.
Take me like a person at a bar closing time who's done asking
politely. I don't pretend I know what that
meant in its rules. In mine, it meant we were out of
minutes to be careful. I turned the wheel into him and
rolled the truck over his boot. There was no crunch.
There was the sound of weed stems dragging under a skid
plate. He didn't fall.
He stepped sideways without stepping, like he'd been picked
and set down. He rapped his knuckles on the
glass, small, precise, annoyed. The sound went through me.
I hit the horn long and hard, a sound that doesn't ask anything
back. The long, flat noise cracked the
quiet open. A ranch dog 1/4 mile off
answered once. The figure stepped back like a
man who'd remembered an appointment.
The holes in the hard hat didn't line up anymore.
The vest stripes didn't sit straight.
He took two backward steps, not smooth, not sure, and then
turned and walked into the brush at a speed that didn't match the
distance he covered. He was gone by the time I killed
the horn. The paddle lay face down.
Both sides still said stop. I drove.
We didn't talk for 5 minutes. When we did, it was only to say
what we already knew. This wasn't going to tire out or
make a big show. It was going to keep setting
small tests until we set one of our own.
If we kept waiting for it to pick our spots, we would end up
on foot, answering to a window voice we couldn't outlast.
So we made a plan that wasn't brave or smart, just ours.
We'd pick the ground on purpose. We'd use a place that put rules
back in our hands. Open, hard, packed with lines we
could hold and a fall back we could reach without guessing.
We'd make our own markers and our own timing and leave a thing
behind. That wasn't a game it had
started. That's how we ended up turning
off 191 onto a County Road east of Blanding that runs straight
between two fence lines to an old airstrip used now for crop
dusters and small charters. Flat asphalt, A windsock chain
link with a gate you can park in front of without trespassing.
No houses against the fence, enough horizon to see a dog
coming for a minute before the dog saw you, we pulled into the
gravel apron short of the gate and killed the engine on our
terms. We set the Lantern in the bed,
unlit. We took the bright caps and tags
we'd hauled all over this country and laid them in a
straight line 20 feet out from the truck.
Every six feet 40 markers running parallel to the fence
like a runway center line. At the end, we stacked the river
stones we kept from the last Cairn in a low cross on the
asphalt seam. Not because we believed in
symbols, but because this whole thing had been a conversation in
objects and we were tired of letting one voice place all of
them. We agreed on 2 rules.
One, we don't step past our own line unless a person in a marked
normal car pulls in and uses our names the way people do with the
history behind it. 2, We leave the second we see the line count
change without a hand to do it. Sun edged up, light flattened
the brush. The wind sock moved once and
then hung. We waited with the doors open
and our feet on the thresholds. 2 Magpies found the fence and
complained at each other. A Cessna far off made a light
sewing machine drone and went the direction of Moab.
We listened for footsteps and got only the kind the day makes
when it starts. Small clicks in the sheet metal,
a smell of warming dust. At 7 O 3:00 AM, my phone buzzed
with the reply my friend sent. Late but good enough.
Got your 7:00 AM check. You good?
I texted back. We're OK leaving soon, and I let
the simple lie stand as a promise I meant to make true.
We held until 7:10. Then one of the caps at the far
end of our line lifted 2 inches and set itself down 6 inches to
the left. Need as a chess move.
No wind, no bugs, no hand. It was the cleanest sign we were
going to get that our rules had been read and signed.
We didn't speak to the air. We didn't write a message in
stones. We got in.
Doors shut, locks fell, engine turned, and we rolled out with
the marker still on the ground like a receipt.
On the way to Monticello, the voice tried one last shape at
the window. My name and then his.
Accurate now and then, a word that wasn't English, short and
hard edged, the kind of syllable you could break a tooth on.
It didn't land anywhere in me because it didn't belong to me.
I let it pass like a truck in the oncoming lane, big and loud
and not mine to carry. We reached town with the sun
making shadows where shadows should be.
We fueled. We bought a new spare.
We used a pay hose to wash dust off the windshield.
And that's when we saw it. The single clean arc in the
grime from last night, pressed at the top center of the glass.
2 narrow tracks, side by side, down to where the wiper couldn't
reach, ending just above the hood line.
Not a hand, not claws. The shape a cloven front could
make if it leaned and slid an inch and then let you go.
We didn't pose with it. We didn't take pictures.
We wiped the rest of the dust so the arc didn't look like a
trophy. Then we pointed north and West
toward towns where people mow lawns and forget to bring in the
trash cans and wave out of habit.
We weren't done with the story, but we'd pick the last chapter's
place and pace. The rest would be daylight, and
daylight has its own rules, even if it can't fix anything old.
We left Monticello northbound because N felt like an answer.
Gas in the tank, A new spare ratcheted down.
Coffee hot enough to burn if my hand slipped.
Sun on the hood made the truck look like a truck again instead
of a container for mistakes, I kept the speed just under the
limit and stacked small. Good choices, signals early lane
discipline, no sudden moves. As if the highway was grading me
and I wanted to pass. The first clean mile came
between Monticello and LaSalle Junction.
Ordinary shoulder, ordinary fence lines, fields that had
been cut weeks ago. The cab stayed the size it's
supposed to be. No pressure on the windows, no
voice shaping itself to fit us. I didn't trust it, and I didn't
talk about it. Mike dozed in 10 minutes.
Slices, The kind where your jaw slackens and then you catch
yourself. Each time he woke, he glanced at
the glass, then the side mirror, then the windshield, and only
then at me. It wasn't dramatic.
It was inventory. South of Moab, we fueled again,
even though we didn't need to. Habit, and because I wanted to
stand in daylight with people stepping around me asking for
receipts and lottery tickets, The cashier did the morning
chatter that belongs to her. How's your day so far?
And I told the plain truth better now.
We didn't linger. We didn't look for meaning in
the way the automatic door dragged a second on the bottom
track like something heavy had stood there overnight.
We just left. North of Crescent Junction we
cut W for Green River, rolled past the melon stands, then up
through the blank miles that make a person decide what
stories to keep. I kept the important ones short.
We didn't answer when our names were called.
We didn't follow tape into cottonwoods.
We set our own line at the end. Everything else I filed under.
Not helpful. It's a drawer I've got more of
as I get older. Price Schofield Turn off Spanish
Fork Canyon, with its tidy angles and signs that tell you
what's next and are right every time traffic thickened and then
turned into the normal noise of a state that goes to work on a
weekday, that was its own kind of blessing.
We were two men in a truck with dust on the floor mats and a new
spare wearing in the rear and that single arc on the
windshield. We'd washed once and then
decided not to wash again until we were home past Provo.
I called the owner because you don't ghost a job, even when the
job tried to ghost you. I told him the line was marked
and the caps were in his possession by way of his survey
crew, whether he meant to put them there or not.
He said his guy had found everything he needed and chalk
the neat new rose up to somebody with time on their hands.
He asked if we'd seen kids out there.
I told him there were prints I couldn't explain in a windmill
tank I didn't care to sleep beside.
Again, he laughed like he thought I meant the frogs.
He paid the invoice within the hour.
On paper, it was the cleanest job we'd had all month.
We didn't say skinwalker to him. I won't ask that word to do work
it didn't agree to when we said yes to a fence line.
The word says a specific thing to specific people, and I'm not
one of them. I use the word to be honest with
you because you asked and because my uncle's rules still
have their shape in me, but I don't use it to make a story
bigger than its weight. What we dealt with out there,
learned our names, copied our knocks, wore a coyote wrong, and
tried to get a hand on a truck door at 40.
That's enough without dressing it in something I don't own.
We split at the belt route. Mike pointed W for 2L in the
yard where he keeps his gear. I headed north for home.
We shook hands at a red light like we were just changing lanes
because men like us save the long goodbyes for funerals and
doors we won't open. He said call me when you've
slept. I said text me the second you're
in your driveway. He said I will.
That's what we had at home. I parked on the curb instead of
the driveway, left the truck facing the street and sat in the
cab until the AC in the house cycled, a sound I know through
two walls and a door. I carried my pack in by the
straps and set it down without letting it thump.
I showered until the water ran cold and then I stood there for
a count of 30. I don't know who that was for me
the day or something listening for proof.
I still did normal things the way normal people do.
I dried off and put on clean clothes, the kind with wear
marks at the cuffs. And then I slept in the
afternoon because sleep belongs to whoever takes it.
I woke to my own door knock, not the same pattern as the motel.
My neighbor 2 houses down dropping off a mis delivered
package with my name on it. I let him hand it to me.
He joked about porch pirates. I laughed like people do at that
joke, even though both of us hate the whole idea.
I set the box on the table and stood in the quiet that comes
after a house remembers you. Nothing in it made the wrong
sound. I went out to the curb and
looked at the windshield arc and told myself I'd wash the whole
truck tomorrow. Not because I believe the mark
meant something. Because I believe in not letting
the day before decide what I do today.
The next week, normal kept showing up on time.
I ate, I worked, I didn't whistle after dark.
Twice walking out of a grocery store in a hardware store,
somebody across the lot said a name loud to a friend and my
shoulders tensed before my brain caught up that it wasn't mine
that faded. That's what nerves do when you
feed them decent food and don't test them every hour for a
while. Sleep came at odd angles.
Not nightmares, just pauses. I'd wake at 2:13 AM because that
was the time in the motel when the knock learned my rhythm.
I'd lie there, listening to the kind of quiet a neighborhood
makes when it's doing you a favor.
No frogs, no mill, no voice. I didn't answer anybody, even in
my head. After a month, my body quit
waking me. Then.
People overstate the permanent part of this kind of thing.
Bodies want to heal if you let them.
I saw Mike twice that first month and a handful of times
after. First time was his yard
returning, a post driver he'd left in my truck bed and didn't
want back anymore. He'd replaced it without saying
that out loud. We drank coffee outside the
shop, concrete warm from the morning.
He said his daughter had started waking up asking if the dog
needed to go out, and then she'd stand at the backslider with her
hand on the glass like she was waiting for someone to knock
from the yard. They don't have a dog.
He fixed it by moving bedtime earlier and reading until she
conked out heavy. Sometimes solutions are that
small. Not everything has to be an
exorcism. Second time we met at a diner
off the Interstate, he looked better.
I did too if I'm honest. We talked about other jobs.
We didn't go back S that season. There's a difference between
avoiding a place because you're scared and choosing not to give
a thing a second try at your expense.
We chose the second thing, he said.
You think it's tied to land or to us?
I said. We left it places that weren't
allowed to come home with me. That was enough answer for two
men who already knew the rest. One piece of cost.
I'll write here because it belongs to the story and because
I can't cut it out just to make us look clean.
Three weeks after, at my place, I found a small neat stack of
river stones on the back. Step 4 not 5, and the top one
had a piece of bright plastic pinched under it.
Not survey tape, packaging ribbon from the mis delivered
box my neighbor had dropped off cut square.
I didn't open the slider. I stood on the inside and looked
for a long time. Then I called Mike and said it
either came here or a person thought they were hilarious.
He said either way, don't step out into the joke.
I swept the stones into a dustpan from inside with the
long handle and dumped them into the kitchen trash.
I took the trash out at noon, not dusk.
Nothing knocked that night. Nothing since.
You can say coincidence. If that makes the world sit
better for you, I won't argue. I'm not keeping a Ledger to
convince anybody. I know what I heard, what we
saw, and what kept its voice just wrong enough to stand out.
I also know we set terms near that airstrip that held.
We walked away on our own clock. We didn't give up names or steps
we couldn't afford. In my math, that's a win.
Here's the line I won't cross again, and you can call it
superstition or protocol. It doesn't matter.
I won't sleep at stock tanks between bluff and blanding.
I won't answer if a voice in an empty place uses my name better
the second time than the first. I won't follow tape I didn't
tie, even if it's the same brand I use.
I won't let someone I care about stand at a door after dark when
a knock sounds like mine. I won't let a friend work that
Ridge alone. Not because men are weak alone,
but because some parts of the map are just honest about what
they ask from you and the debt comes due faster if you don't
split it. If you're looking for one neat
ending, there isn't 1. The survey got done, the owner
paid. The post stands straighter than
they need to in a country that eats straight lines.
The windmills still creak because wind does what it wants.
Coyotes still test camps because coyotes are good at their jobs.
Somewhere down there a line of bright tape probably flutters in
cottonwoods where there isn't a marked trail.
I'm not going to check. That's not running, that's
respect. A month after I drove S on 191
for a different job and passed the Butler wash turn offs
without slowing. The Ridge looked like it always
looks. Sleeping animal back shadow
pooled in its long seams, light clean on its top.
A Raven crossed the road ahead of me, two wing beats and a
slide. I took that as normal, not a
sign. Signs are for people who need
them. I had rules now and they were
quiet. When people ask.
I don't tell this one at campfires.
I don't say skinwalker to get the room to lean in.
I keep the story here in a place where someone asked for the
whole of it in straight words. If you wanted a lesson.
I've only got the ones my uncle gave me and one we added on an
airstrip at dawn. Don't answer when the wrong
mouth uses your name. Don't follow what wants you
under trees you didn't choose. And if a thing tests you with
objects, set your own line and keep it without apology.
That last one is the only part I'd call bravery.
The rest is just living long enough to know which miles to
drive past and which jobs to accept.
And when a friend you owe says he needs a hand, make sure the
hand you give him knows how to hold a door shut when the knock
is perfect.