I should have trusted my gut the moment we rolled into the empty
lot at Lake Echo just after 5:27 in the morning.
Only one other vehicle sat there, a dented silver station
wagon with every window fogged from the inside.
A crumpled missing hiker flyer was pressed against the
windshield. The ink bled so badly I could
read only two words. Last seen, Dom joked that the
car looked abandoned enough to film a zombie cold open.
But the joke didn't land. The air carried that brittle
Sierra chill that makes your teeth ache.
And somewhere in the Pines, a stellar's Jay let out a rusty
hinge of a call. We were three friends who had
backpacked together since college.
Dom, the loud botanist who never shut up about edible lichens,
Victor, the silent EMT who measured every calorie in every
footstep, and me, Kayla, the one who always lugged an absurd
amount of camera gear Because someday Nat Geo will come
calling at the trailhead kiosk. I went to sign us in only to
find the register book torn right down the spiral binding.
Someone had ripped the pages out after an entry dated April 18th.
The empty wires curled like ribs.
The climb toward Tamarack Lake was a slow switch back
procession through sugar Pines and fields of sun rotted snow
where the dirt faded under snow tongues.
Wind polished the ice until it looked like glass pulled over
Black Rock. About a mile up, we spotted a
single boot lodged in a drift. It was a left boot, Vibram sole,
heel lug missing like it had been chewed off.
Victor poked at it with a trekking pole.
Dom said. Probably a skier who shredded A
binding. Victor shrugged, but I saw the
crease flicker in his brow. We left the boot to the marmots.
Signal died before the second mile marker.
Not that it mattered. We were here to lose ourselves
in granite basins, fish the meltwater tarns and photograph
early wildflowers that hid in cracks like secrets.
By mid afternoon the trail spat us onto a slab overlooking Lake
Aloha. Still stitched with ice floes.
We found a flat ledge cupped by wind stunted white bark Pines.
Perfect real estate. Dom stamped out a platform in
the grainy snow and pitched his neon green tent.
Mine and Victor's went beside it, bright nylon kites against
pale stone. We cooked dinner in the orange
hush of alpenglow. Victor measured out dehydrated
risotto with a digital scale he swore was life saving.
I filmed the steam rising off the pot until the lens fogged,
then aimed the camera at the Violet stripes staining Pyramid
peak. Dom recited the Latin name for
some tiny purple flowers we'd stepped over Louisa pygmea and
claimed their petals tasted sweet enough to garnish oatmeal.
I told him to chew pine needles instead.
By 9, the world had gone ink black except for the Milky Way
draped like a bridge of salt. We bare packed all scented gear
into Victor's titanium canister and hung it in a snow gnarled
Thai tree well away from camp. My phone, spare battery and
drone were sealed inside too, nothing electronic to tempt the
cold, the wind keen to cross the granite, a clean blade of sound
that made the tents shiver. Sometime in the night.
My watch was zipped in the vestibule, so I can only guess
it was close to three in the morning.
I clawed up from sleep because I heard nylon whisper, not the
roar of a gust. This was different, softer,
intentional. Zip, pause, zip.
Then the faintest three note whistle notes falling in pitch.
I lay frozen, hand hovering over my headlamp, listening to my own
pulse banging in my ears. The sound died.
Wind filled the silence like water flooding back into a
footprint. Dawn came on, fast and metallic
the second the sun edged over the Ridge.
Dom barked my name, the comic tone gone.
His inner mesh door hung wide open, screen hooks dangling like
snapped fishing line, but the outer rain fly sat neatly re
zipped, pull cord tied in a tight Figure 8 sailor knot.
None of us knew how to tie that knot.
Victor inspected the zipper tracks.
No grit, no snag, no obvious wear, while Dom swore he closed
both doors before crawling into his bag.
He looked genuinely shaken, cheeks ashy in the pale light.
I hiked to the tie tree where we'd stashed the bear can.
The lid was still double latched, but when I peeled it
open, my phone lit up with a single alert.
One new video captured at precisely 3 in the morning.
My hands went slick as fish skin.
I tapped play. 30 seconds of footage filmed from maybe 6
inches outside our tent. The lens framed Victor in me,
faces slack in sleep sacks, condensation silvering the
walls. For half the clip.
Nothing happens, Just that close, intimate breathing you
never want recorded. Near the end, a shadow ghosts
across the screen, blotting the dim Starlight.
Then the camera tilts and darkness pours over the view
until it cuts. Dom cursed aloud.
Victor asked for the phone, watched twice, then wordlessly
pocketed it in a dry bag. None of us spoke.
For a long minute, the only sound was snowmelt trickling
between granite plates. Victor broke the spell by
crouching beside a slab and saying Guys look jammed.
Under the edge, like a Shim, was a tripod of sticks.
Birch twigs bark peeled, each limb no longer than a match.
Three figures bound with dried zedge stems, The smallest
snapped clean in half. He plucked it free, turned it in
gloved fingers. Dom exhaled A shaky laugh.
OK campers, either we just got punked real hard or we're
starring in the cheapest found footage flick ever.
But his eyes kept scanning the tree line, as if expecting a
punch line to step out. The wind picked up, driving
tatters of cloud across the lake.
I tasted metal on the air, like licking a battery.
My mind flipped through every rational explanation bored
through hikers, a rogue Ranger with a warped sense of humor.
But none fit the precision of the knot, the silence of the
zipper, or that intimate breath on the.
Video Victor said what we were all thinking.
We go deeper today. Put some miles between US and
whoever thinks this is funny. Ridge camps have line of sight
less cover. We packed in record time.
I did one last pan with the zoom lens, but the granite slopes
were empty. Just wind scoured rock and blue
sky so clean it looked erased. Before shouldering his pack,
Victor slipped the broken twig effigy into his shirt pocket for
evidence. Dom asked if he expected to hand
it to a sheriff. Victor didn't answer.
As we turned uphill, snow crust cracking under boots, I glanced
back at the Tarn. The surface was mirror still.
Our footprints trailed from camp like a dotted line, the only
human signatures for miles. Yet I could not shake the
feeling that another set walked there too, perfectly parallel,
just beyond the resolution of sight.
I adjusted my camera strap and followed the guys into the
granite maze. Chasing a horizon that suddenly
felt much farther away. By midday, the granite had
scraped every piece of small talk out of us.
We trudged up switchbacks carved in pale stone that reflected the
sun like a blade. Below, Lake Aloha glinted
through slots in the Cliff bands, ice floes drifting like
slow white sharks. Dom tried joking that the
exposed Ridge would make A5 bar cell tower, but his voice
sounded dry and brittle, as if even sarcasm had windburn.
We gained Scab Ridge a little after three in the afternoon.
It was less a Ridge and more a spine of broken shale, slanted
skyward like shattered crockery. No trees, no shelter, just low
Crumholtz Pines clawing along the seams.
The place looked as if it had been sandblasted for 1000 years,
and maybe it had. We dropped packs, boots
crunching over Gray flakes that chimed like plates.
Victor pulled our topo map from his hip pocket.
Then froze. The pocket was empty.
His eyes met mine, wide and glassy.
I tore open my own lid pocket for the spare Sawyer squeeze
filter. The plastic tubing unrolled in a
neat ribbon. The filter body had been sliced
lengthwise with such precision that the thread still matched
up. Two halves of a shell inside the
hollow fiber membrane hung like wet spider silk.
Dom let out a slow exhale. This is someone's idea of a
joke, right? Please tell me this is a joke.
The wind whipped his words down slope like litter.
All we could do was set camp before the storm clouds piled
any higher. By 4:30, the barometer in
Victor's watch had nose dived. The sky looked bruised purple
over Pyramid Peak. We wedged tent stakes deep
between slabs and draped rock ghosts of granite over every guy
line. Dinner was raw tortillas and
jerky washed down with melt water.
We strained through a T-shirt. The missing filter weighed on
us. So did every gust.
Around six. The first thunderhead flowered
over the Crest, tossing a curtain of sleet across the
valley. The hiss sounded like static
from an untuned radio. We crawled into Dom's three
person tent because none of us wanted to spend a night alone
with the memory of that Figure 8 knot.
My camera sat on the vestibule floor, programmed for interval
shots every two minutes, just in case.
I doubted it would soothe anyone's nerves, but documenting
felt like the only agency I still had sometime after full
dark. Could have been nine.
Could have been midnight. The first stones clicked.
Three quick taps, sharp as glass marbles.
A pause. 3 slow taps, spaced like drip lines in a cave.
Another pause. Three more quick taps.
My brain translated the rhythm before fear did. dot dot dot
dash dash dash dot dot dot SOS, Dom whispered.
Kayla, please tell me that was runoff hitting talus.
But even runoff has randomness. This pattern was deliberate.
Glass clear. I flicked my headlamp to red
mode and unzipped the fly one inch.
The outside looked like the inside of a coffin.
Absolute black sleet whispering across rock.
The taps repeated. The cadence was closer, maybe 20
paces away on the wind. I caught a coppery Tang like old
pennies and ozone right before lightning strikes.
Victor's hand closed over my wrist.
Listen to the interval. He breathed.
It's shortening. He was right.
The pause between each volley shrank. 5 heartbeats, then 4,
then three. Whoever or whatever was sending
the more seemed to be walking between cycles, stepping closer
with every burst. On the next volley, my camera
shutter fired by itself. Three quick flashes lit the
vestibule cloth. When the screen went dark again,
I swore I saw a reflection. Something metallic, an edge
catching the light far too close to be.
Comforting, Dom muttered that if anyone was messing with us, he'd
pepper spray their teeth blue, but the bravado leaked from his
voice. We sat shoulder to shoulder,
breathing shallow. Then the wind shifted and for
half a second we heard something breathe back, wet, rasping, like
lungs full of gravel. Victor edged the zipper wider,
scanned a snow patch 6 yards away.
In the red glow, we found one print.
A boot. Vibram Soul, the heel lug
missing. I remembered the station wagon
flyer, the lonely boot in the snow bank earlier that morning,
the sheriff's e-mail blast last summer about a hiker who had
taken an ice axe to the shoulder near Heather Lake.
Nothing stolen, no motive, just all the gear slashed.
Beyond use, Dom reached outside, brushed sleet from the print
rim. The edges were crisp.
It had been laid down minutes ago.
Landing light toes canted inward as if the wearer placed weight
like a stalking cat. Lightning flashed over Pyramid
Peak, illuminating the keyhole past 3/4 of a mile to the east.
In that single strobe, we saw him, a figure in a Gray parka,
machete hanging like a steel limb, standing dead center in
the bottleneck. When the light died, silhouette
and all, the world went dark again.
My stomach dropped. The keyhole funneled every exit
trail westward. Granite walls on either side
soared enough to shear wind into a howl.
No way around without ropes or days of bushwhacking down
avalanche chutes. Thunder crunched, sleet shifted
to needlepoint, rain drumming the fly bleeding through seams.
We killed our headlamps, locked the zipper and huddled on foam
pads. Victor toggled his little ham
band radio, hoping for weather updates.
Static swallowed the band until a noise crawled through, wet
mouth breathing, each inhale sticking on the speaker cone.
Then, impossibly, a whisper. Probably a skier who shredded A
binding. My own words parroted back in a
Husky mimic of my voice. Dom's hand slapped the radio
off. We waited, ears straining, for
the next volley of taps, but none came.
The sender no longer needed Morse.
He knew we were awake. Outside, the storm flogged the
Ridge, tearing at guylines. Each snap of nylon sounded like
a footfall. I watched the curve of the tent
wall, expecting a blade to press against it.
Minutes crawled in single digits, then fused into hours.
At some point I dozed. But every time sleet changed
tone, I jerked back to consciousness, chasing phantom
clicks that might have been inside my own.
Skull right before dawn, the wind dropped so suddenly it felt
staged. Silence settled.
Thick as wool, the tent fabric glowed Gray with first light,
and for the briefest heartbeat I let myself think.
Maybe we imagined all of it. Then Victor whispered.
Do you smell iron? A metallic note filled the air,
Stronger than copper now. He unzipped the fly.
A hand span. The storm had dusted everything
in a sugarcoat of grapple, perfect for catching Prince
around our tent. Less than two yards out, a
single line of boot tracks arced in a flawless circle, each step
the same Vibram soul heel lug gone toe angled toward us.
The trail overlapped itself again and again, a tightening
noose. Where our own Prince should have
crossed yesterday's path, there was nothing, only the strangers,
as if he'd erased ours. In the exact center of the
circle sat a new twig sculpture. Three figures again, all
snapped. Dom backed into the tent,
muttering a prayer he half remembered from childhood.
Victor's face went the color of wet ash.
My pulse hammered in my throat hard enough to hear.
We did not eat breakfast. We packed in silence, every
zipper a gunshot on the Ridge when we shouldered packs, the
sun hissed behind a fresh wall of cloud.
The keyhole pass lay east, but none of us wanted to March under
that Gray parka Sentinel. Instead, we studied the map in
Victor's memory and chose the only alternative, a Class 4
gully locals call Hourglass, A drainage that drops 2000
vertical feet toward Echo Creek. It was a desperate idea, half
plan, half prayer, but it LED away from the circle and the
print and the broken dolls. As we cinched hip belts, I
checked my camera one last time. The auto shot sequence had
captured 3 images during the lightning.
In the first, a silver line glimpse near the tent, blade
sharp, curved like a machete edge.
In the second, that same reflective arc is closer, maybe
10 feet behind Victor's silhouette.
In the third, nothing but sleet and night and static.
I scrolled to the end. The last frame, time stamped 4
seconds after the series, showed the inside of a hood.
Bark colored cloth stitched like scales, a seam of bone beads
running down the crown. Just before the shutter closed,
the hood tilted, revealing teeth.
Far too many filed to points, smiling straight into the lens.
My breath stopped cold. I shut the camera, slid it deep
in the pack, and followed Victor and Dom into the broken white
dawn, toward the lip of Hourglass Gully, away from the
laughter that I swear echoed in the wind once and then was gone.
The light that finally crept over Scab Ridge felt wrong, thin
and Gray like old dishwater. It was barely 4:30 in the
morning when I stepped outside and saw what the dawn had
painted around us. The circle of single boot prints
was tighter than I remembered, each heel less.
Vibram pressed into the dust with surgical precision.
All toes angled at our tent as if the Prince themselves were
leaning in to listen. Dead center sat the new twig
sculpture. Three figures each snapped at
the waist, splinters angling upward like broken ribs.
Victor lifted it with two fingers, slipped it into an
evidence bag. And whispered that if we
survived, he would mail it straight to the sheriff.
Dom just stared and muttered the same line over and over.
We were never supposed to be here.
The rational thing would have been to bolt for the keyhole
pass and hope the machete man in the Gray parka had frozen solid
overnight. But every exit trail ran through
that bottleneck, and the thought of marching beneath his watchful
silhouette made my gut royal. So we gambled on folklore
instead of footpaths, a Class 4 drainage locals call Hourglass
Gully, a 2000 foot slide of ice polished granite that angles S
toward Echo Creek. Victor recited the plan like a
triage checklist. Descend the gully, contour the
Creek, gain the service Rd. hitch a ride.
Simple. On paper, in real life, the top
of hourglass looked like the throat of a great stone
hourglass ready to swallow Whatever grains fell in.
The walls were streaked with verglas, wind had blown marble
sized hail into every ripple, and far below we could hear melt
water roaring like an engine. By the time we shouldered our
packs, the sun was no more than a pale bruise behind Storm.
Debris, the iron smell from the footprint circle clung to my
nostrils. Victor went first, planting his
ice axe and skittering sideways down the 1st 10 yards.
Dom followed, boots scraping sparks where crampons would have
been. I slipped last, camera swinging
across my chest, hands numb on trekking poles.
The moment we committed, the wind kicked up behind US1 long
exhale, almost like a sigh of satisfaction.
The descent became an exercise and controlled terror.
Every 20 feet the rock change texture smooth as porcelain,
then rough as shark skin, then back again.
We crab walked, chimneyed, slid on packs.
About 1/3 of the way down, Dom spotted something wedged in a
basin of blowing snow. He cursed and waved us over.
It was a shredded backpack, Forest Green nylon flayed like a
burst fruit. Inside we found a cracked
satellite messenger, a coil of paracord sliced in three clean
segments, and a laminated photo ID for Evan Torres, age 33, last
seen April 18th. The date hit me like a mallet.
That was the missing entry torn from the register.
Victor tucked the ID into his medical pouch.
None of us spoke, but the knowledge hung between us.
Someone had come this way first and never made it out.
We pressed on. Halfway down the hourglass, the
gully narrowed to a neck not much wider than a hallway.
Fresh scuffs lined the rock chips no bigger than
fingernails, the kind of blade might leave when scraped across.
Granite wind funneled through, moaning like a giant animal
every few minutes. Loose pebbles rattled down
behind us, then ahead, as if something paste the rim edges In
Sync with our descent. 300 feet above the apron, the gully
pinched again, forming a ledge the width of a kitchen table.
Before dropping sheer another 30 feet.
We pause to rig Dom's trekking pole to his bear spray canister,
duct taped into a crude spear. Victor stepped to the edge,
scouting rappel anchors. That's when a cascade of slate
hissed down the chute behind us, followed by a single deliberate
tap of stone against stone. I swung my camera up and fired a
burst, flashes strobing white across wet granite.
In the instant after the second flash, I saw him Gray park, a
hood up, machete held backward like a butcher knife, sliding
down the wall with impossible balance, eyes reflecting the
strobe like an animal caught in high beams.
Another flash and he was closer. Maybe 20 feet, face still hidden
by the bark stitched mask, but teeth glinting through the
slits. Too many teeth for any human
smile. Dom lunged, thrusting the spear
forward while triggering the spray.
A cloud of orange mist billowed across the ledge, and for a
heartbeat the figure vanished inside it.
The sound that crawled out of that vapor did not belong in a
human throat. Half laugh, half growl, wet and
jubilant, The machete came first, slicing air inches from
Dom's knuckles. Victor drove his shoulder into
the parka and the three of us lurched as one writhing mass the
ledge. Surrendered with a crack.
Rock sheared away beneath our boots, and all four of us
pitched over the lip. I caught a flash of bark mask.
Pale cheeks splotched with scabs, eyes wide with Glee as
the world flipped upside down. Then gravity took conversation
out of the equation. We fell 10 feet to a snow shelf.
The impact punched every breath from my lungs.
Victor landed beside me, ankle twisting with a snap like dry
kindling. Dom crashed farther down slope,
rolling until his pack wedged against a boulder.
The Gray parka slammed face first into the same boulder.
Edge bounced and skittered toward the run out, my camera
still firing stuttered frames of the fall.
Blur, snow blur. One flash froze the parka figure
mid tumble, mask half torn, revealing skin puckered with old
burns around feral gums. In the next frame, empty sleet
filled the view. The man was gone, either buried
in Alder thicket or swallowed by melt water roaring beneath the
snow bridge. Silence reclaimed the shoot,
except for Victor's hissed curses over his ankle.
We did not go looking for a corpse, if horror had taught us
anything. It was that a body that
disappears does so for a reason. The remaining descent blurred
into a mix of adrenaline and hypothermic focus.
We splinted Victor's ankle with trekking poles and tape, then
three legged our way to the base of Hourglass, where the granite
gave up and young Pines chewed at the sky.
Echo Creek foamed along the valley floor, and beyond it we
found the Maintenance Rd. a ragged thread of mud studded
with fallen limbs. We limped West, each step
another tiny proof of survival. Sometime around dusk, my watch
was cracked, but the light told the story.
We staggered into the Lake Echo trailhead, the same lot that it
felt so harmless 2 mornings ago. Weekend day hikers crowding the
kiosk turn their heads at the site. 3 mud cake strangers, 1
limping, all wild eyed. Someone called 911.
A search and rescue team arrived before full dark, bundled us in
blankets and listened while Victor laid out evidence like a
grim show and tell. Twig effigies, The phone video,
the broken filter, Evan Torres's ID.
The SAR sweep began that night. Two days later, they found a
cave carved beneath a granite overhang halfway between Scab
Ridge and the keyhole. Inside were dozens of twig
dolls, some hole, some broken pyramids of stolen gear and a
portable hard drive. Cataloguing night vision videos
of sleeping hikers dated from 2017 to 2025.
No body, no Gray parka, no machete.
Just a smell. Of rusted pennies and a
lingering sense that the owner might return any minute to
collect his trophies. We gave our statements, fielded
media calls and endured the sideways looks that people
reserved for storytellers whose tales sound too cinematic.
Dom's frostbitten selfie, snapped during the ledge fight,
went viral in 48 hours. The flash overexposed so badly
that the teeth in the background seemed to float in darkness.
Victor's ankle healed, though he swears he still feels pressure
on it when storms roll over the Sierra.
As for me, I posted the full account to the backpacking
horror subreddit, including links to the photos.
Most commenters screamed Arg, some yelled Sasquatch, a few
believed every word. Weeks later, a sheriff's deputy
emailed to say the case files for the Heather Lake assault and
three earlier disappearances were officially reopened.
But investigations move slow as glaciers, and glaciers melt
quicker than justice in the Backcountry.
I have not camped since. My gear lies in a plastic tote
zipper poles tied with Figure 8 knots.
I practiced so I would never forget the shape.
Some nights, when the wind threads through the eaves of my
apartment just right, I still hear stone tapping.
Stone. Three quick, 3 slow, three
quick, I tell myself. It is nothing.
If you ever walk into Desolation Wilderness early in the season,
remember this. Footprints can lie, silence can
be louder than screams, and the safest zipper is the one you
watch until dawn. Check every knot in your rain
fly. Someone else might have tied it
first. I always thought the Blue
Mountains sounded gentle, like a lullaby you could hike into, but
by the spring of 1997, I knew better.
They rise east of Pendleton like busted knuckles, all cedar
spines and basalt cliffs, and they hide enough silent acres to
swallow a man's name whole. That was the draw after the
breakup and the layoff in the last bar fight I will never
admit I started. I packed a rucksack, clipped
Jasper's leash to the belt loop of my jeans, and drove the
Forest Service Rd. until gravel turned to ruts and radio turned
to static. I counted 12 Creek crossings,
killed the engine, and watched dust settle in my headlights
like tired ghosts that could finally rest.
Jasper, half shepherd, half anything fast, bounded out
first, nose to damp air, tail sweeping the dark like a
metronome set to hope. I should have taken the hint
when his ears flattened the moment I shut the truck door.
Instead, I told myself he smelled an elk or a black tailed
deer and shouldered my canvas tent.
We walked South by headlamp, following a game trail that
never saw boots. Frost clung to the sword ferns.
Each step crunched beneath us with the soft tact of breaking
bones under blankets. Somewhere far below, a Creek
carried moonlight and snowmelt toward the Umatilla River.
I counted a dozen switchbacks, never numbers, just quiet
milestones in my mind to keep pace with the crunch of Jasper's
paws. And then we dropped into a flat
shoulder of land just wide enough for a fire ring and a
dream of comfort. The forest pressed in tight, but
the stars overhead were a promise worth believing.
The first three days blurred the way good moments do.
Morning coffee percolated over embers while Jasper stalked
chipmunks in the underbrush. I fished A nameless Creek cold
enough to stun my hands, threading bright brook trout
onto a Willow branch like stained glass prisms.
At dusk, I wrote in a spiral notebook about starting life
from page one again, as if you could just flip back through
yourself and find uncreased sheets.
When sleep came, it was the thick drooling kind you only
earn a mile above cell service. On the 4th evening, the woods
went still. I was coaxing a curl of cedar
bark into flame when Jasper froze halfway between firelight
and tree line, nose aimed at the Ridge.
No wind, no crickets, just a hush so complete my heartbeat
felt uncivil. I waited for a twig to snap or a
branch to sway. Nothing.
Then, from somewhere above the campsite, a whistle floated
down. 3 notes, low, lower than high, light as a child's dare,
blown into an empty bottle. Lost hiker.
I called, pretended my voice didn't quaver.
The whistle answered itself from the other side of the clearing,
the same 3 notes but thinner as those strained through teeth
that never learn to purse. Jasper growled, A rattling sound
I had never heard from him, and backed onto my cot.
I raked the fire higher, hoping the blaze would make the unseen
scene, but the shadows only danced harder.
Smoke drifted into the Pines. Sparks winked out against bark,
black as space, and whatever watched us stayed just beyond
the border, where sight turns to faith.
I told myself it was wind whistling through broken limbs.
The lie held until dawn, when Gray light bled through the
canopy. I found footprints circling the
tent, bipedal but wrong. No heel, just a wide pad and
four toes splayed like the bones of a hand pressed flat in mud.
Beside each set, claw marks scored, the earth shallow yet
deliberate, as though something sketched sigils While it paced.
I checked Jasper for injuries. None, but his gaze never left
the Ridge. Fog gathered quick, rolling in
off distant valleys to swallow the sky.
I slung the pack, intending to hike out, but Jasper planted
himself at the river crossing and refused to step onto the
stones. On the opposite bank, embedded
in a slick of silt, was another foot handprint pointing
upstream. Above it, 8 feet up a fur trunk,
a fresh gouge oozed SAP like a weeping eye.
I tried the rational path. Probably a black bear.
Black bears do not whistle. Maybe a prank hunter.
Hunters leave boot treads and beer cans, not symmetrical rings
of clawed hieroglyphs. By noon, the fog had knitted
itself into a ceiling. I knelt beside the Creek for
water, and the surface threw back my reflection.
Only it wasn't alone. Behind me, rippling with the
current, loomed a face stretched long jaw, slack eyes, 2 pits
that drank all light. The image shattered when a trout
kissed the surface, but the hollow in my chest stayed.
That night I banked a wall of stones around the fire and sat
with Jasper's head on my lap. Somewhere in the black timber,
the whistle sounded again. Same notes, but now an octave
lower, almost mournful. Jasper rose, hackles a Ridge of
wire. I unhooked my hatchet from the
pack and waited. Flames collapsed.
The forest exhaled mist across the campsite, smothering the
ember glow until only the Lantern remained.
Its Halo reached maybe 10 feet. Something stepped inside it,
Gray skinned long as hunger, elbows folding backward like a
mantis that remembered being a man.
It's grin cut ear to ear, cheeks split around, teeth narrow, and
many like shims hammered into rotting wood.
Where eyes should glint, there was only dull slate that
reflected nothing, not even fear.
Jasper leapt. The creatures legs hinged
sideways, dodging with a grace that mocked gravity.
It. Flicked one arm, hand claw and
Jasper tumbled, yelping but unbitten, as if the thing wanted
the chase, not the kill. I raised the hatchet.
The creature cocked its head, then whistled our three note
dirge at double speed. The sound hit my skull like.
Vertigo spinning the world off axis.
Firelight tilted. The air tasted of rust and old
coins. I blinked.
It was gone. The trees held only fog in the
bass drum of my heart. Jasper limped back to my side,
panting. The Lantern sputtered.
I dared to think it over. A rasp behind me sliced the
thought in half. Canvas tore from ground to peak.
One clean stroke down the tent wall.
The lantern's flame guttered, showing nothing but the flaps,
ragged edge curling inward like a peeled back wound.
Cold seeped through the slit, carrying the faint sweet reek of
rot blooming in spring. Then silence again, thicker than
before. I knelt beside Jasper, pressed
my palm to his racing chest, and waited for the next whistle, the
next step, the next impossible grin to lean through that open
seam. None came.
The dark simply watched, and that was how we learned the
forest can grin. I did not sleep until dawn
smeared A sickly yellow through the fog, and even then every
blink felt like falling, every creak of branch a breath against
my neck. By sunrise, I knew two things
for certain. The whistle would return.
And if Jasper and I stayed one more night beneath those tilting
Pines, the forest would finish what it had started.
I left the tent flayed, the fire pit cold and the journal pages
flapping in a breeze that carried 3 faint notes after US.
Low, lower, high, like a promise spoken in a tongue older than
birdsong. And still, somehow, the dog
wagged his tail, trusting that I would find the trail home.
Dawn arrived like a bruise, yellow and sick along the
horizon. I did not greet it.
I endured it, crouched by the gutted tent as Jasper knows the
ground. In frantic spirals.
The slash through the canvas still wept threads, and in its
shadow lay a new arrangement. Jasper's collar tags,
meticulously pried off in the night, now gleamed in three
perfect circles around the dead fire, each ring smaller than the
last, An artist's signature in metal and dread.
Packer perish, the Ranger Handbook would have said, if I'd
bothered to bring 1. So I packed, shoved stove,
blanket and half melted Lantern into my rucksack, left the torn
tent to the thing that wanted trophies.
Jasper whined when I cinched the straps over his shallow claw
wound, but he wagged anyway. Loyal to a fault.
We faced the eastern Ridge, its spine lost to fog as thick as
plaster dust, and stepped into the unknown.
The climb began gently enough, soft Duff under boots, cedar
boughs dripping last night's sorrow.
But within 10 minutes the trail narrowed to a knife edge of
shale, every footfall set, pebbles rattling into the abyss
on either side, their echoes swallowed long before they
struck bottom. Somewhere below, water rushed
unseen, a hush that felt like a held breath.
Behind us the whistle rose, same 3 notes, low, lower, high, but
now echoed by a second voice, half a beat late, like children
answering each other across a playground.
I imagine two of them, maybe 3, pacing just out of view, elbows
bending wrong as they mirrored my stumble for stumble.
Jasper stopped often to look back, hackles stiff, tail low
each time I urged him on, my throat too dry to swallow the
word go. At the ridges midpoint, a stand
of white bark Pines leaned E, their trunks scarred at waist
height. I brushed one with my palm and
found fresh gouges, saps still bleeding.
Another whistle, closer, jubilant.
Jasper and I pushed faster, stones skipping away beneath us.
My pack slapped my spine like a rebuke for staying this long.
Fog folded thicker as we dipped into a saddle between peaks.
Deadfall choked the slope. Winter killed lodge poles
stacked like a giant's game of pickup sticks.
We threaded the maze, ducking branches, hopping trunks slick
with lichen. Halfway through, a crack split
the morning. Not above behind ASAP.
Dry limb snapped free and tumbled, sending a cascade of
branches clattering in its wake. The avalanche struck us in a
blur of bark and pine dust. Jasper yelped as a limb pinned
his hind leg. I dropped the hatchet and
heaved, heart pounding in my temples.
Wood groaned. My forearms screamed.
One final surge in the trunk rolled aside.
Jasper limped free, shaking but alive, his flank ribboned with a
shallow red. I dare to glance uphill.
There, not 15 paces away, crouched the creature No2, their
limbs folded, insect thin heads cocked in eerie symmetry. 1
drummed its fingers on a fallen trunk.
Tap, tap, tap, curious, almost polite.
The other grinned so wide its cheeks tore, a new black gum
seeping like oil. When I swung the hatchet, they
melted backward into the mist, leaving only the whistle, now
taut with impatience. We emerged onto a burn scar from
the wildfire of 1993 acres of charred pillars reaching skyward
like beseeching arms. Here daylight felt stronger,
reflecting off ash and bone white snags.
The whistle faltered at the edge of this wasteland, the notes
warping as though the scorched air itself resisted the tune.
I cracked an emergency flare. Crimson fire spat sparks,
painting Jasper and me in bloody light.
The creatures hovered at the tree line, skin blistering where
the red glow touched. One hissed a wet tea kettle
screech and retreated behind a pillar of unburned fur.
The other lingered long enough for me to see its eyes, pale
discs swirling with something impossibly deep before it, too,
vanished. We threaded the graveyard of
trees at a jog, Jasper limping but determined.
The flare fizzed and popped, its brilliance shrinking fast.
My gut clenched at every sizzle. When the last ember died, the
whistle began anew, distant but persistent, riding the wind like
a bloodhound's Bay. The map in my mind said 1/2 mile
to an abandoned logging Rd. then another mile to the main track.
Every bend teased salvation. Arise a dip, a stand of Alder
that should have been the road but never was.
Behind us the forest came alive with pursuit, scratching trunks,
limbs snapping under 2 light feet.
Bark shrapnel peppered my shoulders.
At last, between 2 Moss clad boulders, gravel appeared, twin
ruts swallowed by weeds but unmistakable Rd.
I had no breath left to cheer. Jasper surged ahead, tongue
lolling and I followed, legs Jelly vision tunneling.
Headlights flared through the fog, an incandescent miracle.
A Forest Service pickup bounced into view, some Lone Ranger
running a seasonal survey. I waved both arms, wheezing.
Jasper barked once horse. The truck braked to a gravel
spitting halt in the rear view glare.
I saw them halt at the tree line, 3 silhouettes now, mouths
unhinging in a silent, perfect harmony.
Then, like smoke drawn back into a chimney, they folded into
shadow and were gone. The Ranger Ramirez badge number
I later memorized like a prayer, bundled Jasper into the cab and
peeled out so hard my stomach stayed behind.
We didn't slow until Pendleton's hospital lights replaced Pines
in the windows. Doctors stitched Jasper's flank,
wrapped my forearms and pumped fluids into a body that felt
borrowed. Search teams hiked in that
afternoon. They found the shredded tent,
the circles of tags, the Prince that looked like hands without
wrists. They photographed claw marks 8
feet up on SAP, bleeding furs. They found no boot tracks but
mine, no animal sign that matched by dusk, the report
read. Inconclusive but concerning.
I read never go back. I sit now in my apartment,
overlooking nothing, wild Jasper asleep at my feet, fresh collar
jingling with new tags that shine too brightly.
The old ones rest in a drawer. Three rings I will never
disturb. On the desk, my journal lies
open to its last line, written in a shaking hand that barely
looks like mine. If the mountains call again, let
someone else answer. Every so often, city wind
whistles through cracked window seals, 3 notes almost familiar,
but I close the pane before the final pitch can rise.
Jasper lifts his head, meets my eyes, and settles again with a
sigh that sounds too human. We made it out alive.
That will have to be enough. I set off before dawn on the 9th
of August 2024, chasing a fading Crescent moon up the switchbacks
of the Chalmiopsis. The air still carried a hint of
Pacific salt even this far inland, but every mile deeper
traded that brine for the phantom Tang of creosote ghost
smoke from the great Chetko Bar fire 8 summers ago.
Charcoal trunks of Douglas firs stood like cathedral pillars on
either side of the faint tread, their bark split and silvered.
I paused more than once just to listen, half convinced the
forest would groan if the wind shifted.
I am, by trade and temperament, a patient wildlife photographer.
Solo trek suit me. No chatter, no compromising shot
angles, no apologies when I linger for that one perfect
frame. The Perseid meteor shower was
forecast to peak in two nights, and the barren granite saddle
above the blackened basin would give me a panorama of unpolluted
sky. I carried A mirrorless body with
a fast prime, a carbon fiber tripod and a shotgun mic, plus
the unromantic gear of anyone who plans to survive alone.
Bare canister, 2 days of food, an in reach beacon, laminated
Backcountry permit, and the rigid schedule of satellite
check ins my family insisted on. By late afternoon the trail
flattened onto a bench strewn with fire bleached bones of
madrone. The artfully ugly snags framed a
view N that stretched on a clear day all the way to the hump of
Vulcan Peak. Smoke blue haze dulled the
horizon, but the air at my altitude was crystalline.
I scouted a granite slab the size of a tennis court, checked
for widow makers above, and dropped my pack on a patch of
fire Moss, soft as felt home for the night.
As the sun bled behind the ridgeline, I pitched the
ultralight tent, staked guy lines between desiccated roots,
and laid out the tripod facing north.
Northeast, the saddle fell away into a basin that fire had
stripped to bedrock. In Dusk's Violet wash, it looked
less like Earth than the scarred skin of some planet too close to
its star. Perfect.
I set the camera to capture 1 long exposure every 5 seconds
from 9 in the evening until dawn.
Shutter priority at 3 seconds, ISO just high enough to coax
faint Starlight. The mic would grab ambient
forest sounds, a throw in for a multimedia Commission if the
shots turned out marketable. With gear humming, I cooked a
pouch of pasta, watch daylight fade to charcoal, then crawled
into the tent with the flapping mesh door facing the basin.
Whenever meteors scratched white across the sky, I grinned like a
kid and whispered the imagined headline.
Ash and Starlight Perseids returned to fire country.
Hours blurred in that trance where consciousness hovers
between wakefulness and R.E.M. At some dim point, maybe one in
the morning, I woke to the camera's shutter ticking like a
metronome. I rolled onto an elbow, unzipped
the door, and squinted. A soft orange glow pulsed on the
far Ridge, exactly where the burn scar crested half a mile
away. Not campfire orange, more like
the afterimage left when you stare at the sun.
Too long, but richer, throbbing once every second.
Flare, fade, flare, fade, lightning, but no Thunder.
Lens flare. Impossible.
The camera pointed north and nothing bright occupied that
quadrant. I told myself the LCD might be
feeding me artifacts, so I pulled a fresh frame onto the
screen. There it was, a round ember
blot, dead center on the horizon.
I scrolled back. Another scrolled forward,
another, each In Sync. Heartbeat regular.
A line of sweat chilled along my spine.
I sat outside with the micro headphones cupped over my beanie
and listened beneath the soft hiss of nighttime forest.
I heard it. A faint thump.
Thump, offset by a half second from my own pulse, as if the
earth itself were echoing me with a slight mocking delay.
Rationality resurfaced, probably a camper's Lantern flickering
behind scrub. My permit didn't guarantee
solitude. Despite the remoteness, a
handful of meteor chasers might sneak in last minute.
I crawled back inside, zip the Fly, and told my adrenaline to
stand down. But each time the glow
brightened, the floor of the tent seemed to tighten under my
sleeping pad, as though the granite itself were breathing.
I lay awake counting pulses until they merged with my
heartbeat, and sleep finally swallowed the difference.
Dawn unveiled the basin in the cold palette of polished ash and
dagger greystone. My camera battery was still
chewing through its last interval, so I heated coffee,
reviewed thumbnails and tried not to dwell on what daylight
would surely reduce to nothing. Instead, the frame stared back
with stubborn clarity. In sequence after sequence.
The orange flare bloomed on the Ridge, every fifth shot
steadfast timing that mocked chance.
I pinched zoomed, expecting pixelation to dissolve the
anomaly. Yet the light retained a crisp
Halo, as though focused through a lens I had not set.
Curiosity overruled caution. I tore down camp in 15 minutes,
slung my day pack and plotted A beeline to the Ridge using map
and compass. The route dipped through an old
slide choked with manzanita, then rose along the ghost spine
of a dozer line bulldozed during the 2017 fire.
Black dust clung to my calves like soot.
Morning cloak butterflies erupted from brittle shrubs at
each step, silent except for the rattling of their wings.
Half an hour later, I gained the Ridge and found nothing where
the glow had danced. No campsite, no Lantern, just a
shallow circle in the volcanic grit 4 yards across, its
interior etched by bare footprints no larger than a
grade schooler's. Each print showed only the ball
and toe, never the heel, and they spiraled inward clockwise,
tightening until they ended in a single print at dead center.
I reached down. The ash was warm, as though the
prints retained body heat. I crouched, pulled my field
thermometer from a hip pocket, and pressed the probe into the
central print. The readout climbed to 97°F and
held steady, matching my own core temperature.
The surrounding ground read 17°. Cooler.
Pulse drummed in my ears fresh. Somebody messing around, but who
moves barefoot through pulverized glassy ash.
A scrap of paper lay curled at the circles midpoint.
I eased it free with tweezers. Old photographer's habit.
It was no scrap. It was a Polaroid.
The image showed a meteor streaking across a star soaked
sky over a Ridge unmistakably similar to the one beneath my
boots. Black ink time stamped the lower
border. August 11, 2024, 2:15 Two nights
from now. My breath fogged despite the
rising temperature. A gust ruffled the Polaroid and
on instinct I flipped it over. Blank.
No smudge, no note. I slipped it into a zip lock,
then stood in the hush that only freshly awakened dread can
carve. Any sane plan demanded retreat
to the trailhead. Yet the photographer in me,
foolishly in love with evidence, decided that one more night
might uncover who or what had choreographed light, print and
heartbeat. I rationalized if someone was
out here faking supernatural bread crumbs, exposing them
would be a public service. If not, well, unexplained
phenomena sell prints. So I recorded new GPS
coordinates, marked the circle with a Cairn of three fist sized
stones, and began scouting a perch near the Ridge for
tonight's shoot. Clouds were already building
over the coastal range. Thunderheads would add drama, I
told myself. The real reason was simpler.
I needed to stare that Ridge down until it confessed.
I spent the afternoon gathering deadfall for a modest fire,
strictly contained, legal under current restrictions, but
psychologically essential. Flames fend off more than cold.
They cast certainty in a place where shadows riot.
While I snapped branches, I replayed a memory from the
Ranger station. 2 days earlier, an elderly trail volunteer had
leaned on the counter while I filled out permit paperwork and
said watch out for heart lights and the burn scars.
Folks say they throb in time with your ticker, try to pull
you home. She'd laughed at her own
folklore, and I had grinned politely.
Now, with the Polaroids timestamp burning a hole in my
pocket, the joke felt like prophecy.
By twilight, I had a new camp stamped into the ridge's
abrasive crust, tripod staked firm, lens pointed exactly where
last night's orb had flared. I set the shutter interval
again, 5 seconds all night, and clipped the in reach to the
center pole of my tent. I even typed a cheerful preset
to my sister. All settled for night two.
Saw strange glow. Probably campers will
photograph. Love you.
I omitted the footprints when darkness sealed the basin.
I brewed a second cup of coffee and waited beside the camera,
headlamp off, trusting red light from my watch face for
orientation. Crickets kept a tentative chorus
in the new growth downslope, and somewhere far off a mountain
quail whistled its haunting wit. Woo.
For a moment the world was only pine resin, Starlight and the
hum of lithium batteries. Then the glow feathered across
the Ridge Crest. One slow pulse, warm as blood,
exactly one second long. My watch ticked.
The light faded. Another pulse bloomed.
My heart answered with a jump. I forced myself to breathe
evenly, rolled a knuckle against the tripod grip to keep from
jerking the camera off target. The mic meter on my monitor
fluttered with each beat, and with the third flare I felt the
granite slab shiver under my boots so faintly it could have
been imagination, except the water in my canteen danced tiny
ripples. I shot for an hour before the
clouds marched in thick and hid the stars.
When drizzle began, I sealed the weather hood around the camera
and retreated inside the tent. Pulse after pulse painted the
mesh door orange, softer now through mist.
My eyelids drooped, the metronome glow lulling me into a
truce where fear and fascination balanced on a razor's edge.
Tomorrow, I promised myself, I would hike out, camera card
full, mystery solved or not. But as the darkness flickered
and my heartbeat fell into step with that distant, unseen lamp,
the vow felt less like a decision and more like someone
else's suggestion whispered through my own skull.
Sleep took me in a slow spiral, and the last sight before the
dream edge slipped up was an ember Halo atop the Ridge,
pulsing like a vast beacon. Flare, fade, flare, fade, One
beat after my heart. I woke on the Ridge at first
light, ribs aching from dreams of running in circles that never
closed. The basin below steamed where a
dawn drizzle met sun warmed ash and the world smelled like damp
charcoal and struck Flint. I should have stuffed my gear
and headed for the trailhead. Instead.
I traced the spiral of barefoot prints once more, now wind
scuffed but still discernible, and convinced myself a closer
vantage would unravel the trick. By mid morning I had shouldered
the pack again, circling the burn scar until I found a
knuckled spur of volcanic rock that thrust above the
surrounding skeleton forest like the prow of a ship.
From its Crest, the twin ridgelines flanked a narrow
Gulch, an echo chamber made for sound that mattered because last
night's pulses had not only glowed, they had thumped and the
earth had answered. If the Ridge hid machinery, some
prankster subwoofer rig or a rogue prospector's generator,
this perch would catch the vibration.
Setting camp here felt like renting a room.
Inside a Thunder clap. I levelled the tripod on the
exposed slab, staked the tent in a gravel nook, then spent the
afternoon pretending to journal while really timing my own
heartbeat against the memory of that glow cloud.
Anvils piled over the coast, dragging veils of virga that
never hit the ridges, but the air thickened with the scent of
ozone, as though a giant match kept striking just out of sight.
At sunset, the forest fell abruptly silent.
No crickets, no Creek of charred limbs in the wind.
Even the distant Creek in Devil's Staircase Slot Canyon
hushed water swallowed by its own stone throat.
I knew, objectively, that silence and burned landscapes
can last minutes, maybe hours. But this quiet felt curated and
absence swept clean for something to speak.
I powered up the camera. The intervalometer blinked.
Ready. 5 second exposures all night.
I clipped a fresh battery pack, double checked the lens cap off
to the shotgun mic. I added a set of over ear
monitors, 1 cup on, one off, so I could track both the
electronic hiss and the living dark. 9:00 slid by, then. 10.
The Meteors were shy behind gauzy cirrus, yet the sensor
drank enough Starlight to paint their faint scratches on the
screen. I sipped lukewarm coffee and
tried to ignore my wristwatch pulse reading. 68 climbing at
1042. The first orange bloom crowned
the opposite. Ridge.
One slow inhale, long, then black.
A single Pebble rattled from the spur, rolled to my boot and
settled as though it had completed its appointed task.
A second pulse, granite under me, flexed, not quake violent,
but the subtle bow of a timpani skin.
When struck, my heartbeat hit 73 and the watch vibrated, A mild
tachycardia alert. I had never tripped before.
I whispered into the mic, partly for the record and partly to
prove my voice still worked. Time stamp 2243, Pulse 2 Feel
ground resonance. The recording meter fluttered,
but on the open ear, the forest swallowed my words before they
traveled a yard. The pulses quickened 1 every
seven heartbeats, then five. Each flare sent rings of
heatless light rippling across the Gulch, outlining the scorch
snags like X-rays. In the afterglow I saw my own
shadow projected on the ash. And beside it, a smaller
silhouette, frozen in mid hop, Toes dug, heel raised, as though
my echo had birthed a child and left it to balance.
I pivoted, light headed, and the shadow vanished.
Before logic could recalibrate, the monitor's audio trace
spiked, a double knock identical to the sound you make rapping
knuckles on cedar, but broadcast from everywhere at once.
Headphones crackled, and a voice slid through the static like a
razor through cloth. F36.
He follows the flash, male breathless, syllables clipped by
panic. Adrenaline iced my limbs.
I thumbed the radio band switch, certain the mic had bled into my
headphones. Except my mic fed a closed
circuit with no transmitter. The message repeated, garbled
coordinates embedded between bursts of static.
I scribbled them in the margins of my journal, then cross
checked with the map. The digits matched my location
within the width of a camp shovel.
A date header followed the call sign.
August 11th, 199134 years gone. The next pulse washed the Ridge,
and in its strobe I saw the footprints again, not in the
basin, but ringing my tripod as if they had hopped there.
While my eyes were elsewhere. They were larger now, the size
of my own boots, yet bare arches, deep toes splayed.
My watch alarm shrilled. Heart rate 87 and climbing.
I killed it with a shaking thumb in the headphones.
The unknown Ranger gasped. One final line.
Stop him. Stop him before the channel
collapsed into white hiss. Flash.
The camera shutter fired of its own accord.
High speed burst. I had disabled 6 frames, 7-8.
Each strobe bled into the night, painting ghosts on my retinas.
On the 9th flash, I yanked the battery, yet the shutter clacked
once more, empty power be dammed, and the flash tube spat
light hotter than magnesium, scorching my sleeve.
When darkness snapped back, a figure stood 12 steps away at
the Ridge Brink child. Tall or crouched or merely
unfinished, it flickered like bad film.
Edges jump, cutting. No face, no clothes, just ember
glow radiating from within the silhouette like coal through
gauze. I couldn't run, couldn't
photograph, so I spoke, absurdly polite, asking what it wanted.
My voice shook the way tree limbs clatter in Highwind.
The figure tilted, listening or mocking, and hopped forward on
one foot. The ground pulsed beneath its
landing, heartbeat for heartbeat with mine.
For the first time in years, I prayed, mundane and desperate.
Please stop. The figures glow, dim to a
cinder, then guttered out when my vision adjusted.
The Ridge was empty, yet the footprints remained, now adult
sized, encircling the tripod in a perfect ring.
I packed by headlamp, sweating despite the cooling night,
glancing over a shoulder that seemed to pulse independent of
my body. The camera I left locked on the
slab. The lens had fused to its mount
in that last impossible flash. Only the SD card mattered, and I
slipped it into a waterproof pouch against my sternum, where
it ticked with a warmth that matched my racing pulse.
Inside the tent I lay fully clothed, boots on, bear spray in
hand. The glow did not return, but
every few minutes the basin exhaled a hush so total I heard
my blood in my ears, followed by a double knock from nowhere,
like knuckles wrapping cedar. Talk, talk, my heart answered
involuntary, then slowed under a foreign rhythm not my own.
Toward dawn, exhaustion smothered fear.
In the last sliver of dreamless dark, I counted the knocks,
sifting through the ridges. They came in pairs, 32 sets,
then silence, as though some unseen auditor had tallied a
Ledger and found the sum acceptable.
When the first Gray light lifted the treetops, I swore I would
abandoned the wilderness, mystery be damned.
But outside the trail, S lay erased by spiraling footprints
that led only deeper into the burn, and my compass needle spun
like a coin deciding which of us it would betray.
First grey light seeped through the tent fabric like weak tea
through muslin. I sat up, stiff jointed, and
listened. No wind, no birds, no drip of
night rain off the vestibule, just my own pulse echoing in the
hush. I unzipped the fly, expecting to
meet the scent of wet ash. Instead, I tasted copper, as
though the basin had pumped a fresh lungful of blood into the.
Air. I broke camp in silence.
Stakes slid from the gravel without protest.
Even the zipper on the tent bag moved as if greased.
With every task. I rehearsed the route home, down
the bulldozer Line E, across the Slide S to the trailhead.
Yet the map in my head felt as flimsy as the Polaroid in my
pocket. By the time I cinched the last
strap on the pack, the sun had cleared the coastal Ridge,
painting the basin with cold gold.
I set a bearing due South and marched.
The ash swallowed my footprints the moment they formed, but I
forced a steady pace, counting breaths to drown the memory of
those nighttime knocks. 100 paces. 203 charred trunks slid
past like prison bars. The compass needle jittered,
then spun a lazy circle before settling exactly opposite the
direction I walked. I ignored it. 300 paces more.
A granite crease in the hillside promised new terrain, maybe an
escape from the burn scars spell.
I crested the fold and stepped into the very Ridge circle I had
fled before dawn. Shock froze me mid stride.
The spiral of Prince remained, but now each track matched the
size of a tractor tire, the toe marks cleaving deep.
The ash at their centers glowed faintly, as though embers slept
beneath. I backed away, heart hammering,
and chose a different bearing, E this time.
I trudged until sweat soaked my collarbones.
When a clearing opened, I quickened with relief until the
clearing resolved into the same circle, the same impossible
tracks waiting like an ambush. The forest, it seemed, had
folded in on itself. Panic nipped the edges of
reason. I sank to my knees outside the
spiral and pressed gloved fingers into the ash.
Warm again, warmer than before, almost feverish.
The Prince pulsed a soft rise and fall I could feel through
the ground. My watch vibrated with a heart
rate alert 95 climbing. I yanked it off and flung it
away. It landed inside the circle,
right at the tightest coil of the spiral, where a single
depression still smouldered like the pupil of a vast eye.
Something gleamed beneath the dust, a Sheen too smooth for
volcanic grit. I brushed the ash aside.
Glass. No, a sheet of Obsidian so
flawless it mirrored the sky. The slab was shaped like an
anatomically correct heart, valves and chambers etched in
micro veins of fire fused quartz, and it was beating.
Slowly, deliberately. Each throb pushed a puff of warm
air through the ash. As though the Ridge exhaled.
A childhood memory burst open, a fever dream from age 9, orange
lights hopping across my bedroom wall, pulsing to my panicked
pulse. I had forgotten that night until
this instant, but now it returned clear as yesterday, and
I understood. The thing in the Ridge did not
merely echo heartbeats. It collected them.
It archived the rhythms of anyone foolish enough to answer
its call, imprinting their lives into cooled lava until the
person themselves spiraled away. I staggered back, mind blazing
with exit strategies. The camera, every flare, every
flash. It had wanted that light, a
beacon to hitch itself to. Or perhaps a trade.
I unzipped the top pocket, feeling the SD cards faint
warmth against my chest, and fumble out the mirrorless body.
I had salvage. The housing sat warped and dead,
but the flash capacitor might still carry charge.
I have what you want, I croaked, voice raw with ash.
Take it and let me go. No reply came, only the slow
drum of stone. Heart in dust, I jammed the
battery back into the camera, thumbed the power switch.
Nothing. Desperate, I smacked the body
against my palm. An angry red LED flickered.
I spun the mode dial to full manual, cranked flash
compensation to maximum, and pointed the lens straight into
the spiral center. I pressed the shutter.
Light exploded. White hot, star clean, more sun
than strobe. The air trembled like a plucked
string. In the blinding instant I saw
hundreds of footprints overlapping mine, small to
colossal, weaving a tapestry of vanished Wanderers at the
epicenter. The Obsidian heart splintered,
shards hovering mid pulse before collapsing into powder.
The flash died, leaving after images of amber spirals
corkscrewing upward into a sky that now felt much too low.
Silence clamped down, absolute and final.
Then the compass in my breast pocket chimed some low budget
navigation feature I had never used, and the needle locked S
with the confidence it had not shown since yesterday.
The forest noise returned in a rush, Jays squabbling, wind
scraping snags, the distant rush of Devil's Staircase Creek.
I did not look back. I followed the compass, sliding
on loose scree, snagging pack straps on charred limbs, lungs
burning but glorious with panic. The burn scar receded, replaced
by living fur and huckleberry, and at last I glimpsed the
trailhead sign through dust streaked lenses.
My car sat alone, windshield powdered in pale ash, carried by
the night storm. Across the glass, someone had
traced 2 words with a fingertip. Frame 32.
My hands shook as I dug out the SD card and jammed it into the
camera's slot. The body stayed lifeless, so I
used a pen knife to pry the card free again, wrapped it in a
bandana, and drove until cell service returned.
In a motel room near Gold Beach, I loaded the card into a laptop.
Corrupted files, black thumbnails until image 32
opened. Without hesitation.
It showed me a sleep on the granite slab, first night, face
slack, eyelids glowing with inner light.
Over my chest hovered A faint orange Halo, the shape of a
small human foot poised on the ball, heel raised, ready to hop.
The timestamp read August 9, 2024, 1:59, a full minute before
I ever set foot on the trail. I typed up everything you have
just read because stories want witnesses the way ridges want
heartbeats. If you hike the Chalmiopsis
during the Perseids, carry no camera, trust no compass that
spins, and above all, ignore anything that pulses in time
with your blood. Some circles, once entered, keep
turning long after your feet are gone.